Doc Nagel, looking like he's about to do something purely evil to his cat, Lance. (He changed his mind.) (No, really; actually he was just cooking.)THE SPAGETTI WESTERN OF ONLINE JOURNALS!
THE BLOG SIDE OF THE MOON: September 17th: That Doesn't Have To Mean Anything, It's Just Beautiful
So I decided to pass my time, after quasi-eulogizing Rick Wright in the other other operation, by listening to the Pink Floyd Album Meddle.
Which is not completely inapropriate, it's just a very odd choice, as Meddle is a PF album which is all about the guitars. Not to say that Rick didn't do some of his very best work there, which undoubtedly he did. One of my favorite bits in the entirety of the Floyd's catalogue, in point of fact, is the piano solo outre` to "San Tropez." (This should stand as proof positive that, unique among Floyd fans, I am not a stoner.) It's just that . . . Well, best to explain it this way: my first instinct was to put on Dark Side of the Moon, but every Pink Floyd/Rick Wright fan on the face of the earth either has done, is doing, or is going to do that, depending on time zones, news cycles, and individual degrees of consciousness, at some point in time.
DUCK, IT'S A BLOG!: July 31st: Things That Are Not Right
Well!!! I have not been back here in quite a long time.
In fact, in point of fact, I had considered not coming back here at all, ever again. This was based on the behaviours of some of my fellow erstwhile bloggers, who shall remain nameless, who have flagged in their bloggly duties over the last half a year or so. (Especially the ones who previously bemoaned the absence of recent bloggers, then faded away themselves for months at a time.) But what the hell? Why be judgemental? Life is too short.
So here's a list of things, recent things, that just are not right.
In a recent blog-blog entry (as opposed to this here fake blog you may or may not be reading, you know who you are), my pal, Doc Nagel, one of the funniest people I have ever known, confesses that he does not tell jokes. And it's true. The entire time I have known him, I do not recall him ever having told a single self-contained, organized joke. The closest I think he's ever got, in my memory, is an appropriated punchline.*
A random sampling of guitars available at Music123.com (want the URL?) reveals the following things that simply are not right:
Danelectro, in their corporational dipshit wisdom, has gotten around to issuing yet another "classic" edition, this one purported to be the "Dano 63." But what it is is the 63 Silvertone (with the lipstick case pickups) fitted with a Danelectro style headpiece. The 63 Silvertone had a standard trapezoidal headstock with the tuners bizarrely arranged along the upper edge of the stock. Which was clearly wrong, but issuing a corrected version just isn't right.
Seagull Guitars, which for years famously issued virtually all their guitars with a matte-finish coating which was supposed to be the secret to being able to offer superior all-wood guitars at entry-level prices, has gone to a slick "micro-coat" (thin layer of plastic laquer, I forget what they call the damned stuff), with the result that they can now offer a model known as the "Seagull The Original S-6." Just not right.
Brian May Brian May "Brian May Model" guitars. I could be wrong. I have not actually seen one of these things yet, but a) May first collaborated with and then disowned Guild over the issue of replicating his original hand-made guitar, and 2. The first model released by Brian May Guitars(as I heard it) was a doped-down single-pickup model priced at two C's for beginner player. So, not right, not right.
*An old New York pufter, a fairy of the first water, producer of Broadway plays, beloved in the community, rich, patron of the arts and supporter of orphans and orphanages of all denominations, took ill at the ripe old age of 96, and on his deathbed, sensing his demise was imminent, asked his bloved companion of over sixty years "Have my remains cremated, and scatter my ashes over Manhattan in a way that no one will ever forget!" Dedicated to his old lover, the companion had the remains cremated. He then spent several days reading up on old armaments, and finding places to purchase black powder and fuses.
Then early one morning, on the edge of dawn, he snuck down to the Battery, where he had located a de-commisioned cannon that he figured he could jury-rig into firing. He spent an hour tinkering with the thing before loading it with powder, a cartridge containing the ashes of his beloved, and inserting a fuse into the now cleared fuse-hole.
As he finished the last preparation, a cop spotted him. Suspicious of the activities, the cop called out to him. Seeing the cop, the old fruit doubled the speed of his activities. The cop saw the flare of a match and started running towards the scene, arriving just as the cannon went off with a FOOSH!
Gazing heavenward after the blazing projectile, the cop wondered "What in the name o' God is that?"The elderly queer removed his hat, tears in his yes, gestured towards the shell and declared "HEEEEE'S A GRAND OLD FAG, HE'S A HIGH-FLYIN' FAG!"
As other peace officers began arriving on the scene, the cop removed his own hat and placed it over his heart, singing, quietly, "May auld aquaintance be forgot-- KEEP YOUR EYE ON THAT GRAND OLD FAAAAAG!!!"
Life is long. Enjoy a good joke now and then.
IT'S ALWAYS BLOGGEST BEFORE THE DAWN: December 12th: "So I said, 'If you think that one's ugly, you should see it's mother!'"
So I guess I haven't been too bad about updating this thing, along with the real blog, all things considered. Especially since I have reached the following conclusions about the nature of the blogosphere:
--The vast majority of those who start blogging stop blogging after a relatively short period of time. Many of those who stop start again, but then they stop again.
--The majority of those who update their blogs regularly lead chaotic, dramatic lives, either due to illness, domestic drama(s), or (often) delusions, either of granduer or disaster.
--It is the considered opinion of many bloggers that many other bloggers are liars. This opinion is reinforced if the allegedly lying blogger in question is particularly popular.
--VERY often the blogs that are updated with the most vigor are either a) indufferably long winded, b) utterly mediocre, or c) regarding physical maladies that after a few paragraphs one finds oneself completely unable to continue because my GOD I don't want to know ANYTHING MORE ABOUT THIS PERSON'S AAAAAAHHHHHHHUUUUUUGHGHGHGHG!!!!
In other words, as goes life, so goes the blogosphere. Ah, Bloggertlby! Ah, Society!
BLOGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS: October 8th: A Simple Note on Forgiveness
SO recently, I've taken to listening to the middle portion of the David Bowie compilation:
Young Americans
Fame
Golden Years
"Heroes"
Ashes to Ashes
Fashion
Under Pressure (w/Queen)
(then I skip Let's Dance)
China Girl
The flaw in this prcatice is that the versions of "Young Americans" and "Heroes" on the compilation are the "radio versions." Which is to say that "Young Americans" is missing that weirdo guitar break/bridge bit before the last, ranting verse/chorus combo, and "Heroes" is actually light by two whole verses. So today I decided I ought to remind myself what the album versions sound like. (I have both albums, obviously.) So I put them on in reverse order, first "Heroes" and then "Young Americans" (purely by accident; the "Heroes" disc was in the player before I realized I had switched them). I got done with both tunes, and sent the Wifey the following message via IM:
Gad.
Davie Bowie could go around starting barfights, and I'd forgive him.
Whereupon the Wifey sent me one of those lauging animated emoticons that always reminds me of the scene in Independence Day where they fire the nuclear warhead into the belly of the alien mothership.
YO, HO, BLOG THE MAN DOWN: August 14th: Sometimes, up is Down
A fierce non-debate* erupted between my pal Doc Nagel and Ad Age's maven Bob Garfield some time back, regarding how much Wendy's owner Dave Thomas's appearance in Wendy's commercials affected the brand. Garfield was wrong: he thought Thomas gave the brand a steadfast, homey feel. Doc Nagel thought his wooden acting and stilted delivery probably had little effect on whether or not the brain-dead and/or functionally illiterate patrons of Wendy's would continue to order their middling-quality fast food. (I may be overstating that. I didn't bother to go back and check.)
A relatively short time later, Dave Thomas died, and Bob Garfield proclaimed that his presence as the voice and public face of Wendy's would be sorely missed.
And, goddammit people, Bob was right.
The new campaign, which is clearly along the lines of the most recent art-school advertising-industry trends, involves putting a cartoon wig on people who "get it," as opposed to the rest of the people in the world, who, according to these ads, have no idea what this "food" stuff is supposed to taste like, or even really what it's for. A couple of the spots are actually kinda funny. Everybody's standing out in the woods, kicking trees. The one guy suddenly aquires a wig and starts wondering why he's doing this, just because everybody else is. Testing the burger in the wind tunnel, seeing how fast it will go, never mind that they have no idea what it tastes like. These must be hilarious to people who think Wendy's sells health food.
But the other thay I went to a Wendy's, partly because-- you'll love this-- it was right next door to the liquor store. Mainly because it was late in the day, I was hungry for lunch, and I had been craving a burger. Now, anyone who reads this blog very much at all knows a burger can be a very important thing to me. And the cowbell of the Wendy's ads, the crappy fake wig notwithstanding, is that their burgers are made of fresh meat, never frozen. So I had been kinda curious to see if their product was any different or better than it had been.
I ordered a single all the way, with cheese. The patty was mangled. One corner of it was missing. In a squared off way, like it had been mechanically separated from another patty while in a near-frozen state. The thing was slapped together. It was over-condimented. The lettuce leaf was both too large and the wrong shape for the sandwich. The tomato slice was mealy and watery, to the point that it almost completely overwhelmed the taste of the burger. In the center of the mess there was a stack of no fewer than six--SIX!!!-- pickle slices.
Back in the 70's, when Burger King was touting it's superior customer service as the real reason to patronize their outlets-- I guess because it couldn't be because of the food-- they had a jingle, which was mercilessly and endlessly parodied by school children of the era, the most succinct of which went something like this:
Fuck the pickle, fuck the lettuce,
Fuck off, lady, you upset us
All we ask is that you let us
Throw-it-a-way!!!
So, this is all by preamble, or introduction, to explain precisely what I mean when I say: Fuck Wendy's. It ain't health food, it ain't even a very good burger, and it doesn't make me a fucking IDIOT for eating ANY OTHER FUCKING KIND OF FAST FOOD. Oh, and I just saw another of the new spots. What's the fucking red wig guy doing playing a fucking digereedoo in a fucking freezer? Is that supposed to fucking mean he's FUCKING SMART!?! Fucking fuckers.
*Given that Doc Nagel and Garfield-- the ad guy, not the cartoon cat-- never met, and only talked about these things in the solipsistic, vacuum-enveloped manner in which all advertising critiques must, by nature, occur, what went on could only be described as a non-debate. It's okay if you don't think that term means anything. I don't know that I think it means anything either.
PS: And, and, AND, Wendy's is also responsible for nearly ruining David Hasselhoff's international reputation!!! Had missy chosen to bring him almost ANYTHING besides a Wendy's Double, a sandwich so badly constructed that it is unsafe at any speed, Hoff would not have come off as the incoherent, incapacitated rummy the world saw. So far from not conforming to the UST, the Wendy's Double doesn't even meet most local building codes.
PPS: Fuck Wendy's.
THE CURVATURE OF THE BLOGGOSPHERE: July 20th: More UST: The Einstein
So, as is almost exhaustively reported on The Real Blog, I went out for lunch today. The sampling was something I had contempated before, a specialty at the Midtown-- oh, see the other damned blog if you want that explained-- which it describes as Hawaiian-style marinated london broil on a croissant. The last time, I let the Hawaiian style part of the description put me off (for that can mean many, and often unpleasantly imaginative, things), opting instead for the known quantity of the mushroom Swiss burger, ordered my way (no lettuce, tomato, or onion, extra cheese). But seeing as I was on my own for lunch this day, I threw caution to the wind and cash at the waitress.
What came on the plate (or, technically, in the basket) was half-inch-thick strips of carved flank steak, fairly rare, arranged to fit the contours of a large, flaky crescent. At first glance, noting tendrils of the beef sticking oddly out one end of the sandwich, I could tell this was one vehicle whose structural integrity was not to be trusted. And, indded, the thing fell apart after each bite (actually during each bite) and had to be re-assembled before each subsequent bite. Eventually I ended up using the knife-and-fork cleanup method.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold The Einstein.
(I was going to call it a Relativity Sandwich, but I think that name applies more to those celophane-packaged bus station sandwiches, which don't seem to exist at any particular point in space-time.)
The Einstein is the name given to those sandwiches which should work, but don't. The marinade (which was lovely, by the way) should bring the London broil together with the croissant beautifully, and the croissant should make an ideal delivery system for the beef, but the goddamned thing just kept falling apart. (And the continual dissasembilng-and-reassembling meant the components cooled off faster than they might have, as well, so the diminishement of taste-heat was more palpable.) The way the Einstein comes about can be explained (naturally) using the expression E=MC2.
1. Edibility=MeatxCrust(squared). Which is to say: mutliply your meat by the square of your bread, and you have a good sandwich. In this equation the "squaring" does not refer strictly to the amount of meat, but also to the substantiality of the meat. So whereas there was not an unreasonably large amount of meat on the sandwich, there was an unreasonable amount to expect the crust to handle. (This is not, I repeat, not, the same formula being the "meat-ball" phenomenon, wherein the meat is simply all piled in the middle of the sandwich, thus making the vehicle structurally unsound. "Meat-balled" sandwiches, simply put, are designed by busy assholes who can't be bothered.)
2. Edibility=MeatxCondiments(squared). This doesn't apply to, say, the corned beef on rye, but rather to those over-meated sandwiches where the theory seems to be that condiments are meant to slightly flavor the sandwich. This leads to such things as the gigantic club sandwich with a single leaf of arugala for greens, a razor-this slice of tomato for flavor and coloring, and mustard and mayonaisse in such a thin film you could screen them at Sundance. A variance on this is:
3: Energy=MassxSpecial Sauce(squared). This is the formula that leads to the Big Mac. Enough said.*
These creatures work out on paper, in theory, as descriptions of how sandwiches might behave in our universe, but when it comes to how they work as actual FDD's (Food Deliver Devices), we must remember that Einstein, no matter how much we may love him, was wrong.~
*I like the occasional Big Mac, but the fact of the matter is that the thing was designed to be something that could be slammed together by brain-dead troglodytes, which is how McDonald's imagined the kinds of workers they could put out the jack to hire throughout the ages, and the fact remains that, as easy as it looks (and sounds), anyone who's ever ordered more than one can tell you, it is easy, amazingly easy, to screw up. I have had them delivered to me looking as if they were put togther during a timed contest by blindfolded workers hanging by shackles attatched to their left ankles, and once the thing is delivered to you, you CAN NOT dissasemble and reassemble it. (Successfully.)
~About Relativity. About everything else he was pretty much right.
BLOGGIFIED: June 13th: A Mad Scheme
So this is a non-blog entry prompted (inspired?) by a bloggity-blog-blog entry. Which would explain itself were you to read it, or so I would hope. But if you read this, you surely already know, from reading the real blog, that I have been working (great typo: workling, which I will use in a minute) on a poem about the nearly-defunct, always nearly ressurected, Phoenix-like mall where I work upon occasion. Today, after coming up with an opening gambit, which I posted in situ on the real blog, I decided it was time to air the work in progress, which any and all can feel free to criticise, praise, conflate or ignore. So, without further adue or delay, the workling (told ya):
THE ULTIMATE PRICE
Freedom Mall is a defunct shopping center on the West side of Charlotte, NC.
Jim Williams is a defunct writer in a bunker by the airport.To stride these halls is to defy defeat.
This is Here, the place I am,
This place I shouldn�t be.
Here on the Boulevard of Broken Toys,
Surrounded by the best wishes of the greatest generation
Out to put in The Big Fix, the one
That would Cure All Ills.
Anywhere else I might be
Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy
Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.
Here I�m just a white boy
On the wrong side of the tracks.
Here amongst the discount stores established
As relief for the poor, the tidy little houses
Built to ensure even footing for all
Even in this hulking, empty mall,
Where only sneaker stores and soda stands,
Nail spas and wig shops
Can live.
What does it all mean?
I can dig the layout and the outlay,
The shape of the mall that was supposed
To guarantee prosperity, the standard issue Voodoo
If You Build It, They Will Come,
The lasting impression left by everyone
Who ever invested their hearts and bond issues
In this jinxed landscape. I know I am here, but why?
Write what you know, the man said.
I got nothin�.
I had a job once
Guarding an un-built coliseum
Patrolling a scraped-clean moonscape
That died absurdly into a summer-green treeline.
I joked that my job was to make sure
No one stole the stadium.
It was a good enough joke, and funny at the time.
But it was also wrong.
This is what the theft of place feels like.
This is what the theft of place feels like.
Awake, awake unto me
Ye somnabulists, raise your eyes to meet mine, to say
Hello, to say fare the well,
For I declare that there is, indeed
World enough and time
To speak, to say
Hello; How is your world today?
My world is bold and blue and bright and sun-lit
Over tumbled stones and flea-bitten storefronts
The mangy curs of rotten commerce.
World enough and time for us, my friend
To exchange well wishes in this fractured world
O beautiful for damaged cars
And flowing waves of gray
Busted asphalt in this beaten landscape
Surrounding this face-fallen whore of Kapital and commerce
This freak-faced clown
Lain down drunk in the gutter
Amongst the remants and ruins
Of all the best intentions.
I swear there is world enough and time,
Hope and aspiration
For, at least, a smile and a nod.
Frreedom, O, Freedom,
The games, the games
Go on.
It's still a bit disjointed-- the Wifey's quip, which she didn't mean stinglingly, was "Is this supposed to be two different poems?"-- so clearly I need to work on some transition bits and some descriptives. But it's a work in progress. It's all progress.
ALWAYS DARKEST BEFORE THE BLOG: June 5th; One Should Always Have Coffee Before One Blogs.
So on reflection, the previous entry doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, largely, I figure, because it was done very early on a weekend morning-- hence, the lack of date, which I only noticed when I came over to put this entry up.
Which is to be comprised of the following observations on the blogosphere (which, like Harry Shearer's Le Show Dome, is actually not a sphere, but while the Le Show dome is actually trapezoidal in shape, the blogosphere is oblong).
(They're not, but, just as I assume Harry likes the word "trapezoidal," I enjoy the word "oblong.")
Very well: blogosphere.
First: it used to be said that the people who had the least to say blog the most. This doesn't seem to be the case. The people who have the least to say tend to lapse and go underground for months on end, or to work for journalism outlets (thus, as everyone knows, they are NOT legit bloggers). The ones with the most to say tend to have the most interesting lives. (Mostly in the sense of the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times.") They have the most to say, it seems to me, because they are constantly overcoming adversity. (As well as, allow me to lift a bit from ol' Larry Ferlinghetti, constantly risking absurdity.) Also, these people tend to live rather full, rich lives, despite their sometimes bland surroundings and mundane making-a-living jobs (and sometimes jobs that would, technically, require that they go anonymous.)
Tee hee. The gag there is that each letter in the word "these" is a link to an individual blog, so not to dis-include The Wifey, Doc Nagel, The Hippie-Chippie,, or the jerk, not to mention any body else in my 'sphere who might fit the description above.
The other observation I am going to make-- yeah, yeah, the whole point of this entry was the gag above. Have you not been paying attention again?-- is that I did not, as I feared I would, get pulled in to a never-ending whirlpool of reading and linking and linking and reading other people's blogs. I surf quite a bit, but my usual reaction is to read three to five entries of any given blog and reach the conclusion that it bores the hell out of me, which, frankly, most blogs do. (If you were not linked to above, don't jump to the conclusion that I have lumped you into this category. You may simply be someone who I do not "know" well enough to link to, or whose "privacy" I am respecting, or whom I cannot claim to both frequently read AND comment upon. So don't go flying off the handle and send me a bunchy of angry e-mails.) And that probably shouldn't be taken as condemantory as it sounds. It's just that alot of blogs don't entertain me, or are mundanely written, or spend soooooooooooo much time setting up their situations that sssnnnnnrrrrrkkkk. Also, there are others that I do not link to because the author has painful or embarassing situations going on, especially those involving divorcing and moving to a strange new place, and I simply don't have a great handle on what is permissable or ethical or what have you in that kind of situation.
Of course, one might say I could say just the same kind of thing about my pictures-and-persiflage style of blogging, but, frankly, if I were to come across a picture of a brand new pair of Asics Tigers (as you will find in the second-to-most-recent entry of the Blog Blog), I'd be instantly riveted. Of course, you might say I could say the same thing about THIS thing, which I often claim I use for those topics I would be hesitant or loathe to bring up in the blog blog, and which is just as often about trivial esoterica becoming metaphorically huge, but I think, given how often I write about the UST, and, consequently, deli, I have to conclude that, were I not the one writing it, I would probably become a HUGE fan. (Were I ever to find it.) (Seriously, I will answer to Deli as if it were my name. Ex: PASSERBY: " . . . deli . . . " ME: "Yes?")
Well. Ahem. Hrrm. At least I got the date in the right place this time.
OUT OF THE BLUE AND INTO THE BLOG: Neil Young Has Nothing To Do With This Entry
So it's half past six in the morning, and I have been up for an hour. More, actually, but I'm only counting the hour since that's how long I have been aware of the time. I usually don't get up this early. It has caused me to reflect.
Most of the time when I wake up early and can't go back to sleep, there's a reason. The first anniversary of the death of a loved one has been popular. The first and second anniversary of September 11th brought me out of the ether early. The day before new jobs started. The few times we have had children staying in our household. (Although those awakenings were Wifey-punctuated, as she has discovered that she is unable to sleep with children in the house, thus, no children planned for said house.)
Today we have planned: the purchase of a vintage Fuji road bike, a cameo appearance at the company picnic, and a late-ish lunch out somewhere. Nothing momentous ever happened to me on June 2nd, that I can think of. I went to bed at the usual time last night and slept well, so my early rising is due neither to an abundance of sleep nor a dearth. I'm just up.
So I'm up.
Standard propriety suggests that I ought to follow Doc Nagel's lead by saying something about the nature of blogging, or, more specifically, what I intend or mean by the entries I leave in this electronic matrix, so fleeting, so impermanenant, so flimsy and un-protected, unlike paper, destined to dissapear into thin air at any moment, so imprersonal and improper, so unlike the lost art of pen-and-paper correspondence, so vulgar and impolite.
Screw that.
THIS IS THE BLOG THAT NEVER ENDS: March 11th: Wonder How I Never Got Around To Doing That One, Although In Point Of Fact, Eventually This File Will Get Bloated And I May Have To Start A New One, So This Blog Would, In Fact, Technically, Come To An End
I don't actually have anything substantive to say. I just wanted to use that title/subtitle. I thought it up in the shower one day last week.
WITH A FACE LIKE THAT, YA GOT NOTHING TO BLOG ABOUT: February 6th: Some News Is Just Too Weird
So I can't remember the last time I vowed I was going to keep this blog up AND do the Blogger blog as well. But clearly I have let the thing lapse. Not the longest I have ever seen-- and I'll bet you've heard THAT before!-- but close to it. Four and a half, five months, depending on how you count it? Anyways. It's been a busy Fall/Winter, what with various writing projects, more seasonal work back in October, the holidays, my wife's newfound penchant for biking on the weekends, about which more in a moment, and whatnot. But I felt I had an obligation to post this here. I know no one is paying attention, but it's not intended as an educational initiative. It just makes me feel better, that's all. Some stories are just too weird, and it would just feel wrong not to have posted it somewhere. NASA is weird. Institutionally. I ever mention I used to want to be an astronaut? Then I met some NASA people. Um. Yeah! Lock me in a capusle with these nutjobs and shoot me into space!
Anyways, the biking. A few months back, my wife bought a Trek aluminium framed mountain bike so she could go biking with a friend of here. So the routine has been for us to meet my Dad someplace, and then she's gone biking (either alone or with the friend), my Dad and I take the dog for a hike. It's been working out pretty well. This past weekend, I bought a Trek myself, a little more of a road bike than a mountain bike, but defintely not a racer, and we took a little ride ont he second coldest day of the year while I was in the process of coming dowen with some brand of stamach rot. So I didn't enjoy the ride, on top of which, I am incapable of riding a touring bike, so I wore myself out pretty quickly. But we shall see how things go.
NOBLOGGY LAYIN' AWAKE BUT ME: October 14th: Where The Hell Is Everybody?
I had thought I might have abandoned this thing, since I haven't made an entry in a little over two months, but it turns out I haven't. Now, it's not like anyone reads it, and in fact that's ain't the point, Leroy.* The last four times or so I got feedback on it, at least a year ago, maybe more, the source of the comments seemed . . suspect. 'nuff said about that.
So I got out on the web this morning (Yes-- after breakfast!) and confirmed something I had begun to suspect. Blogging is not for the weak of heart. A great number of the bloggers who had been so prolific over the summer seem to have fallen by the wayside. Some have not written since June or July. Some seem to have completely lost heart. Others, however, are going as strong as ever, going to some odd lengths to keep the blog going, up to and including posting on old and untrustworthy machines. And one of my closer web aquaintances, who shall remain nameless, has chosen to go anonymous due to a recent job change.
It's hard to know what conclusions to draw from all this. I guess part of it is the whole fad thing: human beings sometimes do things because they think it makes them look cooler and more attractive, and sometimes the only reason things appear to have such a function is that everybody else is doing it. But the really odd thing is that the first few posts of my anonymous friend have had a kind of trepidatious tone to them, the tremulous voice of a ghost, trying to breathlessly tell herself that she's not really there.
Or perhaps it's just me.
So this is, I guess, the revival post. Odd, that. Perhaps I should think of it as a prelude to the post that was going to go here, but I am not quite ready to write, comparing my technique of hill coasting to big wave riding
*That's an alusion to McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. I may have the character name wrong.
BLOGSPHEMY: August 10th: UST Miami
There used to be an old saw that Subway trotted out now and then, that their (usually) skinny, pimply, post-pubescent high school workers, boasting a whopping hour and a half of training (I'm guessing) were "Sandwich Artists." This was by way of saying that they had been given a specific order in which to apply the composite components in any given sandwich. It's not a Unified Sandwich Theory, by any stretch of the imagination, but so far as a kind of fast-food ethos goes, it beats the crap out of anything offered by any of ther other chains. (I'm lovin' it.) And it works, too. It allows them to employ workers of almost any level of training, expertise or dedication, and still reliably churn out a decent product. (And as far as I know, they're all still referred to by Subway Inc as "Artists," but I haven't heard the term trotted out in quite some time. Not that that means anything, it's not like I'm a stockholder or corporate captain or anything.)
The handling that lead me to abandon Subway the one time was so sloppy as to be insulting. I put it up to the change in the prepping of the bread, but looking back on it, I knew then (but wouldn't admit, God bless the humaitarian in me) that the kid had just slopped the stuff in without regard, so that when I went to eat it, the guts of the sub slorped out uncontrollably. I mean, I wasn't expecting the kid to be a bona fide disciple of the UST, but he didn't even seem capable of following basic instructions. Insert Tab A into goddamned Slot B, kiddo. Geeze!
The ladies who work in the Subway in my neighborhood really are sandwich artists, as far as the Subway definition of the term might apply. They are (and these are meant to be kind appelations, thank you) Country Lady, Mamacita, and Latonka. They all three have their peculiarities, as far as the assemblage of sandwiches go, but recently they settled into niches, so the Country Lady does the Main Assembly (bread, meat, cheese), Latonka does the dressing (salad & condiments, wrapping), and Mamacita seals the deal (chips, drink, cashing up), which works out fine. They switch around from time to time, but the majority of the time, that's the arrangement. So I know, more or less, what to expect.
I also have them charmed, since I always make a point of getting at least a smile, if not a laugh, out of each of them, every visit. Today it backfired in a way. Country Lady, whom I have suddenly decided to start calling Dolly, had passed the chassis, motor & drivetrain over to Latonka. Latonka's main peculiarity is that she never puts the mayo and mustard on the sub in the same place twice, so I had been planning on trying to see if I could get her to put the mustard and mayo on before the rest of the stuff. The first time I tried this, she put the stuff on the meat & cheese side of the sandwich, when, according to the UST, the condiments cleeearly belong on the bread, not the meat. This time I blurted out the M&M requirement a little late; she already had the lettuce down. Rather than stop and apply it there, she just kept on going, applying the salad to one side, then the other, component to component (lettuce on the left, peppers on the right, cucumber on the left, pickles on the right, and so on), and finally applying the double shots of mustard and mayo right smack in the middle of the salad, in the heart of the condiment layer, right where it shouldn't go. The result was that the mustard and mayo, in the process of wrapping, were squished throughout the condiment layer, producing a dressing that permeated each and every bite of the sub.
Genius!
And, speaking of genius, I have taken to reading Overheard in New York, a quasi-blog-thing that my wife has linked to her blog, on a semi-regular basis, for a number of reasons (not the least of which is to gauge how much New York has changed from Old New York, which transmogification I find to be fascinating, if subtly horrfying), and I came across this:
Tourist, kneeling in front of a giant stone head: Help me, Olmec! Where is the Shrine of the Silver Monkey!?
--Museum of Natural History
Firstly, I'd like to think that I am this kind of tourist. In fact, I know I am. In museums, I am generally less demonstrative, typically saving my witicisms for asides to my compadres, which is why I enjoy going
THAAAAAAAR SHE BLOGS! July 27th: Nothing To Do With My Wife's Blog
Or anything else for that matter. I just couldn't think of a new blog gag.
In fact, the only real reason I'm doing this entry is that I promised one of my blogfriends I would share some pics from my California trip, and I wanted to post a few here first. Because I'm obstinate, that's why.
Doc Nagel, looking like he's about to do something purely evil to his cat, Lance. (He changed his mind.) (No, really; actually he was just cooking.)
The Doc getting into Eddie Jetta, the new car that the Doc and Lauren and I rode all over the great state of California. He thought for a long time about this. The other car, the Neon, was pretty much played out. This Jetta is of the generation that merged the performance and comfort features, so it's a really nice touring sedan that will stand up and roar when needed.
A shot of one teensy, tiny scrap of the coastal area of Big Sur. Doesn't look real, does it?
The Doc and Lauren oggling the teensy tiny scrap of the coastal area of Big Sur.
Either I uploaded this pic twice or I just managed to take pictures of the same teensy, tiny scrap of the coastal are of Big Sur twice. Which is not something you could necessarily rule out.
There'll be more later, in theory. This was all an exercise intended to force me to finally (I mean the trip was OVER A MONTH AGO) go transfer the pics from the Wifey's computer photo lab progam over to my side of the PC, and make an effort to put them up SOMEWHERE.)
BLOGGING A DEAD HORSE: July 17th: Asshole Want A Pizza?
Back in the ancient days of the 2000 presidential bid, while Al Gore was starting to hone his image and message, the Doc stumbled across a phrase that has come up in parlance many times since then. The Doc noticed the change in Gore, and, failing to put his finger on what, precisely, was different about the man, surmised that he was honing his "asshole persona." Now, although it turned out not to be specifically true in the long run-- Al Gore is a creep, not an asshole, and any asshole persona he might put on will be be as obvious as a cheap suit at a regatta-- it turns out to be a very good summation of the chief actors in today's political theater, here as elsewhere. In order to hold public office you must either be an asshole or assume and asshole persona.
What brings all this up-- you're probably wondering by now-- is a couple of different pizza commercial campaigns. First, of course, the DiGiorno ads, which have always been demeaning and have mostly leaned towards the mean spirited. The latest ads try to turn the whole "It's Not Delivery, It's DiGiorno" slogan on it's head, with a combination of male chauvanism, a subtle hint at spousal abuse, and throws in a twist that reinforces the whole Men Are Pigs theory, which we all always love to see, along with a ringing endorsement that we pigs get what we deserve in the long run, in this case, wet, soggy pizza and a shot in the bazoo with the lawn sprinkler. Genius!
Then there's the Domino's ads, which, well, frankly the less said about Domino's, the better. A corporation that made it's fortunes hawking sub-standard pizza to college students, using the added hook that it might even be free if it didn't get there fast enough, then turning around and handing over major campaign contributions to right-wing anti-education assholes (or, at least, personas) . . . Well, what more could you say? Of course they assume that their major demographic consists of assholes who are inordinately fond of cruelty humor. And of course, they shoot themselves in the foot eventually. My favorite of theirs lately has a manager trying to rally his troops for the one night a week they are guaranteed to earn their entry-level pay. The punch line is supposed to be that the troops are all too busy working to give the manager a "Hoo-Ahh," leaving one lowly customer the obligation, which said customer carries out in a sheepish and unsure manner. My wife is fond of my observation that, read peoperly, what's actually going on here is the staff is overworked, pissed off and petulant. "The slave driver makes me slave in this galley hell, and now he wants me to act like I enjoy it? Well, frankly, to quote Mamet, fuck the fucking fucker." The other ads make out like we should all be on a first-name buddy-buddy basis with our deliver guys because they offer us so much variety. Which, oddly, is also the basis of at least two gay pornos I know of. Huh. I wonder who's in charge of hiring the adwriters for Domino's?
But the ones that have been getting to me lately are the Pizza Hut ads. We used to order Pizza Hut alot. I mean face it, they make a fine product. And they're the only ones to ever really crack the stuffed-crust code, something of which the Wifey is truely fond. Over the course of the last coupla years, though, we have been going to a local place called Tony's. It's an incongrous little joint stuffed into the end of a strip center out on the in-law's side of town, but they serve up real, honest-to-God New York style pizza, and the Wifey gets a sausage calzone there that is absolutely ethereal. So I'm not as upset about the Pizza Hut spots as I might have been. But they're just . . . What is it? DO they just figure that assholes spend more money? Or do they figure pizza is natural asshole food? (To any of you who just got an image, I apologize.) These spots all but insist in bold letters that the best way to enjoy pizza is to decieve your loved ones or yourself, or, if possible, both. Be sneaky. Be manipulative. But, whatever you do, do not, under any circumstances, be truthful. Pizza is a guilty pleasure, and the guiltier, the better. Ahem. Allow me to quote Mamet again . . .
JUST ANOTHER BLOG IN THE WALL: May 31st: And Yet More
Today's lunch turned out to be a Subway again, this time because I had gone on a writing jag and I really wasn't in the mood to wrestle with makings. I just wanted someone to make a sandwich and hand it to me. So I went to Subway.
Without going to great lengths, the result was . . . well, "questionable" is the wrong word, although that's the word that draws me. It violated three basic tenets of the UST.* It was overstuffed (too many fillings) the salad ended up plopped on top of the meat (not the sandwich maker's intention, result of packing after assembly), and the condiments, in this case mustard and mayo, were distributed along a clumpy line, resulting in a concentration where one would want, more proplerly, a schmear. The end result was that the toppings eventually fell off the top of the sandwich, so I had a meat sandwich with a mixed salad on the side.
It was still pretty good.
*The Wifey has observed that any reader not intimately familiar with my previous screeds might benefit from the following explanation: "UST" stands for "Unified Sandwich Theory."
INSERT TAB A INTO BLOG B: May 30th: More Sandwiches
There is a tenet of the UST that holds that the meat goes on the bottom and the salad goes on the top. Although this appears to be more a matter of myth than science, it does make some sense from a pure constructionist point of view. The meat, after all, is what the sandwich is traditionally "of"-- eg, a Corned Beef on Rye, a Ham Sandwich, a Hamburger, etc. Additionally, in most situations, the meat offers a better building base than the salad. But I appear to have come across the exception to the rule* today.
For a while here I have been making the odd sandwich substituting a rather thick and creamy Caesar salad dressing where I might have otherwise used mayonaisse. The dressing had proved unhelpfully thick as a dressing, and so makes a viable sandwich condiment, and also a couple of times I managed to avoid breaking a Cardinal-- no mayo with pastrami-- with little or no guilt on my conscience. And not too long after I started using the stuff, Caesar sandwiches started shgowing up on the menu at a couple of the local joints, but I don't put any stock in that, not like they're following my lead. But today the project was a roast beef on rye with provalone and mixed greens, and it presented something of a dillema.
The greens in use are from a bag of prepped greens, which we tend to do because a full head of anything will wilt before it gets all used in our fridge. So the question was how to get them to adhere in a coherent layer, providing consistent taste and consistency. Solution 1: use the Caesar as a bonding agent, since it goes so well with the greens anyways. Solution 2: build the sandwich upside down.
Normally, the process would go thusly: bread, condiments (mustard on one slice, dressing on the other-- and mustard always goes on the bottom, but that's more a stylistic choice than anything else), meat, cheese, salad, top. (Savories-- olives, tapenade, whatever-- would go above the salad before the top slice.) This called for a little tact and nuance, the gentle hand of le artist du sandwich. I applied the Caesar to one slice, and the dijon to the other, then proceeded to build a salad on the Caesared slice. Once I had a substantial layer, which would compress nicely under the rest of the elements, I applied a layer of provalone cheese. The combination of the cheese and the dressing holds the salad in place; then a layer of roast beef was applied to the mustard-sided rye, and boom-- this is applied to the cheese. Voila! Upside-down roast beef Caesar sandwich on rye with provalone. Of course, I did turn it over before cutting and consuming it. While it's fine to break taboos, it is important to be true to our constructionist roots: the harder to control elements, in the end, belong on top, where they can be monitored and manipulated. Tradition is fine, and aesthetics are important, but sooner or later it all comes down to utility. In the fine words of Frost: Provide! Provide!
*Corollary: the cheese goes on top as well. More than being simply myth, this is doctrinal, although the origins, more than being murky, are extremely problematic. The fact that cheese melts down seems to account for the doctrine's sticking power, but the tracing back leads to a point where the facts seem not only to not exist, but to have been destroyed.
ACCENTUATE THE BLOGGITIVE: March 12th: The New York Annex
So this morning, whilst in the coffeeing-newsing-waking-up process, I turned on my copy of Leslie Buckingham's album Out of the Cradle. The thing had come to the fourth cut when I decided it was time to go shower, since the Wifey had finished her morning workout and was going to make her breakfast. I paused the disc and made for the shower. Upon emerging, after dressing, I hit the play button, and the disc resumed, starting at the fourth cut, a little dirge called "All My Sorrows."
"What the hell is this?" the Wifey inquired.
"This," quothe 'imself, "is Lindsay Buckingham's Out of the Cradle. You don't like it?"
"No," sayeth the Wifey.
Now, my formal interpretation is that she doesn't like the fourth cut on the album (fifth track, fourth cut, sticklers), and that she hasn't yet condemned Lindsay. This is my story, and I am sticking to it. It's true that Lindsay is something of an aquired taste, and it is also true that Lindsay is something more appreciated by guitarists than non-guitarists, and it is further true that this kind of thing belongs on the Kottke Category-- she knows it's pretty music, but she doesn't reeeeeeally get Kottke, which puts her in league with the 88% of the rest of the people on the planet-- but I am cashing in one denial chip. If she were to hear the rest of the album-- she never will, but if she were to say, ACCIDENTALLY have the rest of the thing just, sort of, FALL into her ears-- she'd like it.
I went off to brush my teeth, and she turned the CD off. After she went to shower, I turned it back on. It reminded me very much of an incident during the New York trip. At one point, whilst we were waiting around the hotel room, I stumbled onto Terrence Malick's film The Thin Red Line which is a looooooong, elegant, contemplative war film. While the others observed that it was a wholly intolerable experience, I proclaimed that I wanted to watch the damned thing, because I had sat through it all the way through once before. (This is alot like reading the collected works of e.e. cummings all at once. Or eating a pound of cotton candy.) Every time I left the room, Chris turned the TV off. I went to brush my teeth, Chris turned off the TV. I went to the lobby to check on something, Chris turned the TV off. I bent down to tie my shoelaces, Chris turned the TV off. (OK, it wasn't quite that severe, but not far from it.) After a while, it was time to resume our collective traipse around the city, and I went to turn the TV off.
Chris said "Is this over?"
Frowning at the television set, contemplating the set-piece in progress, I said "Oh, who the hell knows?"
TRUE IN BLOG AND WHITE: March 2nd: I Smell Varmint Poon-Tang
I may not keep up this blog after this. I may. I haven't decided. It's not that the Blogger(TM) space makes it irrelevant, or that I don't (occasionally) have enough material for both spaces. It's just that the Geocities File Manager now takes three clicks to open, one of which exists wholely and solely to encourage me to use more of the Geocities bells-and-whistles file management tools which, in my experience, exist wholely and solely to make the process of file management more cumbersome and, therefore, I suppose, according to the Geocities people, satisfying.
Anyways.
Then I might keep it, because there are some subjects that I just feel are more easily approached in a space like this. Like air fresheners. I have found myself watching air freshener commercials with a combination of reckless abandon and horrified mesmerization, because the same thing keeps occurring to me every time I see one of the things:
What in the hell are these people eating?
I mean, the one guy has to keep the dog's tail wagging to fan the stuff around, that one insane lady has to keep the exercycle cranked up to MAch 1 in order to circulate the anti-stink, then there's that one house where they have fresheners in every room to suit "the rhythm of the house," whatever in the hell that's sup[posed to mean. And then there are (apparently) people who have to have machines to shuffle the scents to create what can only be called "smell-scapes," people who wait with bated and, I guess, stinky) breath for the next puf of the automated atomized smell-squirter, unable to live in trust of an anti-stinker that refuses to provide visible evidence that it's not broken down and gonna fail to perfume the air. What the hell? Are they subsisting on a diet of moldy bread and dead fish? Are they bathing with lard instead of soap? Do they live adjacent to the county dump? A rendering factory? The chicken plant?
Yeah. If I do keep this up, it'll be because of things like this. See, 'cause where I want a space to place the question, I really don't want to encourage a discussion. Had I blogged this in the Blogger(TM) space, I would no doubt have encouraged a vigorous and broad-ranging discussion, and knowing the Blogosphere and it's denizens as I do . . . Iiiiiiiiii'm really not sure I want to be around for that, much less responsible for it.
ONE OF THESE THINGS JUST DOESN'T B-LOG: February 17th: Relevance, Your Honor
I have recently regained my affection for Subway.
Some time back they went from slicing a wedge out of the bread to slicing the bread laterally, and I had two experiences in a row where the fillings fell out of the sandwich, which is something that just pisses me off. I mean, I really hate it. So I stopped going to Subway, which was regretable, since it has always been a reliable source of sustenance, but trivial, since there are plenty of other sources. To boot, for whatever reason, we just never ended up going to the local Subway, which is very literally right around the corner, so it wasn't what I would call an inconvenience.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I caught an ad for their latest "featured" sandwich, which was a "Buffalo style" chicken sandwich. Unlike about 98% of the sandwiches they "feature," this looked like it might be good. So I jumped into the car, ran around the corner, and grabbed a sandwich for lunch. It was good. It was good on several levels, not least of which was the fact that the chickie who made the sandwich for me executed the tuck-and-roll manuever prefectly. (That tecnique by which the sandwich is compacted into a tightly packed roll, for ease of handling and consumption.) It was so good, in fact, that I went back for another one the following weekend, this time with the Wifey in tow. It was good. But it was also no BMT.
Let me say, at this juncture, that I do not now, nor have I ever, had any idea what BMT stands for. But it is what I order at Subway. I am not meaning to imply that the BMT is a superior sandwich, which it is, but just that it is my favorite. Most of the rest of the fare I have adjudged adequate, with the single and soul exception of the meatball sub. I had one, once, on the way back from climbing Mount Laconte, and it was hugely dissappointing. The sauce was too sweet, the meatballs were grainy, and there wasn't enough cheese on it. At least it was hot, which is what I was after, but . . .
Anyways, so I been going to Subway, alot, over the last few weeks. (Except during the NYC trip, of course.) And so I been getting a six-inch BMT for lunch, on average, three times a week. (I can eat a foot-long, but, odd as it might seem, the six and the footlong seem to have the same kind of effect on my appetite for the most part.) So today, after driving about the countryside for a few hours, I decided to hit the Subway for a sandwich about twenty of three. I figured they'd be slow, since it was mid-afternoon, but there were a few people ahead of me. One guy, about three customers up from me, ordered the meatball. And then he asked for toppings. I mean, lots. Lettuce, tomato, black olives, green peppers, basically everything except jalapenos. I was going to insiste that he got mayo and mustard on it, but that would be a lie. He did get oil and vinegar on it, though.
"Huh," I thought to myself, "that's just wrong." And it didn't have anything to do with a UST, either. I just don't think that the combination of meatball, tomato sauce and cheese goes with the rest of the stuff. I was all ready to say something, biding my time as the guy reached the end of the line, requested chips and a drink, paid up, and left, when the kid next to me put in his order. For a meatball. Toppings? Lettuce, tomato . . .
He didn't go as far as the other guy. But he did ask for pickles.
No, he didn't. That's a dirty lie.
So I got up to the line, ordered my BMT, toppings (everything but jalepenos, plus mustard, mayo, oil & vinegar, salt & pepper), got a cherry Coke, and a bag of chips.
Barbeque Flavored Baked Lays. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
BLING A BLOG OF BLIXPENCE: January 25th: We Have A Winner
SO I finally took a stack of discs to the Record Exchange, for a substantial store credit, and made a "purchase" which has, so far, sustained my 75% record. I got a copy of the Yes album Tormato, which is one of the last albums they made before the best incarnation of the band brok up (and after Steve White had replaced Bill Bruford on drums), and it is known, almost universally, amongst their fans as "Not their best work." But it was the first Yes album I ever bought, at the original (Charlotte) Record Exchange, back in high school days, and besides, it was three bucks. So that was a known quantity. I also picked up a used Pat Metheny Group CD, which I did at my own peril, as I have had extremely mixed results with Pat Metheny Products (A Subsidiary of Pat Metheny, Inc). And I got a brand new copy of the new disc Illinoise, the work of one Sufjan Stevens. Because it's been getting good reviews from otherwise seemingly rational people. If nothing else, I must concede that the compilation, at least through the fourth track, does indeed present quite the ill noise. And plenty of it. It's the Sam's club of monotonous, pretentious, whiny noise that goes nowhere.
Just so we're clear on this: I didn't like it.
The Metheny Group album, entitled Letters From Home, I think I quite like. Although I will have to keep it away from the Wifey. Some years back, while visiting a record shop in Berkeley, I picked up a copy of a Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays album I had had in college, As Falls Witchita, So Falls Wichita Falls. I quite liked it. In fact, it came with the album American Garage (I seem to think they were packaged together, one of those cheesy two-great-albums-for-the-price-of-one deals), and after a short while I noticed I was listening to Wichita alot and American Garage almost not at all. From which phenomena I concluded that I liked the latter and did not like the former. QED, really.
So when I found it in Berkeleleley, I had to buy it. Really. It was a no brainer. (It was also, like, a buck ninety-eight.) I got it back here by way of a piece of Polish Luggage (a paper shopping back) in which I transported other ill-gottens from the Promised Land, and within a few days found time to play it, on a Saturday morning, for the Wifey. About two-thirds of the way through, she expressed her dismay: "Oh my God! Can we turn off this new age CRAP!" (I'm paraphrasing.)
It turned out that this sounded, to her ears, like new-age elevator muzac. I tried to explain why I like it, but it fell on (ahem) deaf ears, so to speak. I even fell back on the notion that this album was a guitarist's album, which, really, it's not. Eventually (five minutes later) I concluded that we agree on enough music that I could put this in a growing (and still relatively small) collection of Music for When the Wifey is Not Around.
Pick a random point between then and now. At one point, I got wind of the on going snit between Pat Metheny and fans of Kenny G over something Pat had said. He had said, specifically, that what Kenny G does is not music. Now, I can't argue too much with that, as I consider what Kenny G does to be a sales job or a promotional activity, as opposed to a creative art form. But he was just being so goddamned serious about it. And I understand why, it's his job, he is an artist, and in a way he has a stake in what people think music is. But he was being rude about it, too, so it wasn't hard to just kind of conclude that Path Metheny saw an opportuinity to act like an ass, concluded that he was superiorly equipped for the job, and ran with it.
A couple of years later I ran across a brand newe Pat Metheny album on the internet somewhere, with some kind of intriguing title (Low or Base or something of that nature), and listened to a few samples before flipping over to a review to confirm my suspicions: Yep, Pat had got hisself ahold of a baritone guitar, and was fooling around with it, and figured we alllllllll needed to hear the results. After sampling three or four cuts, I muttered "Schmuck!" and closed the file. There wasn't anything there for me.
But this is good, this one's a keeper.
RAISE THE BLOGS OF ALL NATIONS: January 14th: Strange Relations
Call it fate. Call it kismet. Call it karma.
This morning I got a request for an online shopping review of juststrings.com, which is where I buy strings for my 12 string guitars (all 3 of them). On a whim, I decided to look up prices on Augustine Black Lable classical guitar strings. (Which I buy at a local music store, both because they are slightly cheaper there and because I feel like I ought to patronize a local store, even if it is part of a (small) chain.) But before I got there I decided to look up something I remembered from my days fixing and tuning guitars at the pawn shops around here as a teenager, and I found out that they do, in fact, still make and sell La Bella Classical Folksinger Ball End Black Nylon Trebles/Golden Alloy Wound Basses guitar strings.
You have no idea what those are. I would have no idea what those are, except that one of the pawn shops I worked on guitars at had a case of three dozen sets that were just short of mouldering, and which I used, subsequently, to string a dozen or so mediocre instruments that sounded twice as good as they deserved to with the La Bella strings. (And one very rare Hernandez that sounded like pure crap with them.) (Very strange strings indeed.)
And that brought to mind scenes from two of my very favorite bad movies, "Americathon" and "The Big Bus." My favorite scene in "Americathon" is the one in which they insist that Nike Corp will become dominant in the marketplace by selling clown shoes. It was funny at the time, but it is even funnier now, since Nike corp now sells, almost exclusively, clown shoes.
I have two favorites from "The Big Bus," one is a line and the other is a scene preceded by a line. "Look out! He's got a loaded Saint Christopher's Medal!" And: "Raise the Flags of All Nations!" (At which point they raise the Flags of All Nations, along the roofline of the Big Bus, in order to cause aerodynamic friction to slow the bus.)
No idea why all that came to mind.
BLOG, BLOG, BLOG: January 9th: Of Course I've Used That Gag Title Before, What Do You CareSo the next entry on the non-blog was going to be about how I ought to confining my efforts to the non-blog, rather than using the Blogger blog, which is, of course, the official blog, in light of my failure to blog on a daily basis, which many if not most bloggers do, and also my failure to use the blog to detail every minute aspect of my life, which a) most bloggers do, and b) without which details, most bloggers simply do not know what to do with me, and so leave comments which are somewhat stilted and often seem to miss the point of the blog entry the commentes were made on, which is all by way of saying that I simply do not seem to fit in to the blogging community very well. (This was amplified by reading a blog this morning in which the author detailed visiting relative on Christmas day after midnight Mass, including the amused reaction to the second set of relatives being amusingly grumpy and grouchy when the author and his clan showed up on their doorstep at what must have been one in the morning. I just don't fit in.) And then I had a random thought that lead me to this other erstewhile blogger who seems to have tossed in the towel entirely. Which, to be fair, y'know, he's a busy guy, and his last shout out to the masses apparently lefta rotten taste in his mouth, so this is not a criticism, just and observation.
So I'm not gonna blog about that. I will go on Blogger later and blog about something else, and then I'll surf around the bloogosphere until I get bored. (Then I'll go and see what people posted fro last week's Half Nekkid Thursday, which is the real reason people blog. We all know it in our hearts.
IDEAS ON THE AUCTION BLOG: January 4th, 2006: Random Thoughts on a Sick Day
So I finally got around to sucumbing to the virus that has been going around the various branches of the family, with the result that I have accomplished nothing of the last two days besides watching Neil Young's concert film Rust Never Sleeps, tuning all 3 of my 12 string guitars, andf listening to two-- 2!!!-- of the thirteen discs I got for Christmas from the Wifey and Doc Nagel, reading movie reviews, blogs, and other stuff, and a quickie correspondent with a blogger on whose blog I left a comment. And updating my Blogger profile, something I have been meaning to do for a month now.) Random thoughts:
--I have always preferred the Fender Stratocaster over the Gibson Les Paul, but not for any reason I can figure. The things I appreciate about the Les Paul-- the composite ply body, the use of access points for electronics, the tilted pick guard and the function of the pick guard support, the bar bridge-and-tailpiece-- are very clearly engineered and utilitarian, while the things I like about the Strat-- the flowing headpiece, the body shape, the thru-body stringing-- have little or nothing to do with the performance of the instrument. (The thru-body stringing actually is more difficult to manage than the bar-and-tailpiece.) My own electric is neither: it's a Washburn I picked up for cheap because the Wifey likes purple. (I love it anyways.)
--The only time I can possibly eat Underwood products is while I am sick. This past weekend I picked up two cans of their "roast beef" spread, which is alot like first generation NASA space food. But it did the trick: I spread it on somebread and snarfed it down. It was salty and creamy and that's about it, and my body needs protein with which to fight off the virus attacking it. It's not alot like eating cat food of white bread, it is exactly like eating cat food on white bread.
--I must have subconsciously known I was getting sick this past weekend, since I bought several things I only eat when sick. The afforementioned spread, Spagettios with meatballs, and Beanie Weenie. (I wondered why I felt myself tugged towards the Gatorade shelves. Too bad I didn't buy any of that.)
--I also ordered guitar strings, but I don't reserve that as an illness related ativity. (And no, they haven't come yet. I was tuning the guitars because I felt like I ought to tune them all before I re-string any of them. Don't ask.)
--I should own more Stravinsky. I just should.
--Any beneficial effects I got from taking a hot shower four hours ago have completely worn off. And yesterday, I found out that Nyquil will make me nauseous without actually mitigating any of the cold symptoms, making it less likely that I will sleep rather than more likely.
--Suicide bombers: Idiots or Assholes? DIscuss.
--Why do they call them the runs when one of the cheif things you cannot do when you have them is run? (Not that we should go to calling them the grimmace-and-shuffles.)
--Yeah, but I don't want to know I have them, either.
--If a cat and a half can eat a rat and a half in a day in a half, how long with it take train B to reach Pittsburgh?
See? Utterly useless. Certainlyt you can find something better to do with your time. Even on the internet.
EVERYBODY'S BLOGGING AT ME: December 28th: Where I'm Blogging From
Can't blog. Eating.
Well, not right now. But for the last week I've been eating everything that's been set before me, whether intentionally or not, up to and including two completely different grades of hamburger-- a Wendy's double with cheese and everything, and the classic Cheeseburger Deluxe at the Gitmo, which is the sort of thing Buffett was singing about in "Cheeseburger in Paradise." In fact, we are just about to head out to Mariachi's, the neighborhood Mexican joint, for Mexican Buffet. This time, it's personal.
But the real reason I'm blogging here is that I couldn't get Blogger to open up a fresh page. It finally opened the page while I was writing this, but, like I said, Mexican Buffet.
THINGS YOU JUST CAN'T BLOGGING BELIEVE: December 20th: It's Good to Be da King
I have maintained that my president is a dumbass. But of late I have had to deal more and more often with an echo from the past, when people kept saying "He means well, he sincerely believes he's doing the right thing."
Bullshit.
The President never believes he's doing the right thing, or even telling the truth. You can tell, since he can't even bother to wipe that goddamned smirk off his face. Which bothered me more and more over the last couple of days, when the president said (variously and in tandem) that a) he authorized a war based on faulty intelligence, and it was wrong, and 2. he authorized the use of otherwise illegal* wiretaps to snoop on people calling other countries (who MIGHT be Al Quaeda~) in order to get intelligence (presumably faulty). And you know what scares me the most?
No smirk.
Do the math.
It brings to mind the great George Carlin routine from the album A Place For My Stuff, wherein he creates a mock game show "Asshole, Jackoff, Scumbag." As do so many Carlin bits, it starts off sounding like a rant, but in the end, asserts, rather convincingly, that any jerk-off who gets access to the halls of power turns assuredly into an asshole, unless he gets elected, in which case he becomes a scumbag. That's probably not funny unless you've heard the routine, so go buy the album. Not that George needs the money. It's just right. It's called giving back.
*He said, and I kid you not, that it's ok to break the law since we're at war. The Dems countered, I kid you not, that terrorism isn't a state, so we're not at war, when they chould have pointed out that the War Powers act doesn't, specifically, give the President or his minions express permission to screw around.
*I should have saic "Play grab-ass with the Bill or Rights," but I would hate to have to explain what that meant, as fun a phrase as it is.
~Who might be the only guy tapped, and if so, that'd be fine by me. After all, as my pal Doc Nagel has said, the terrorist may have won, as it's a virtual statistical impossibility that there isn't a Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes mailer out there somewhere that proclaims "Mr. Al Quaeda, YOU MAY ALREADY BE A WINNER!!!
BLOG OF REVELATIONS: December 12th: Revelation
Can't blog. Shopping.
Except to say that I had a sudden revelation that I have no idea what to do with: My Steely Dan collection, which I took great pride in restoring without creating any duplications, is incomplete. I have the first seven and the last two-- which makes sense to you if you are are well grounded in Dandom, and matters not at all if you are not-- but that leaves one obvious, glaring, belching ommission: The theme song to the movie FM, which is arguably their finest work. And I am not at all sure how to rectify it. Many years ago I had a copy of the original soundtrack, which I remember as being a bit jarring and jumbled, as well as having a couple of less than stellar rock songs that clearly were the result of contractual obligations, so that isn't the answer. And a greatest hits package would create glaring redundancies, in addition to wrecking the aesthetic I was originally aiming for, which was a kind of misguided notion that there was a purity in the originals that was best appreciated in toto rather than chopped up and jumbled or pressed into chronological order out of context of the original collections. Which is a long winded way of saying it's my own damned fault and I have no right to bitch.
WATERBLOGGED: December 5th: The Holiday Season
So the holidays are upon us, which here in Charlotte means two things for absolute certain: rain and retail. Of course, the retail aspect is not unique to us, but, and this is the salient point, my getting dragged deeply and irrevocably into it is a bit more of a singular phenomenon. Given my deep and abiding impulse to separate myself from the herd, as it were, I tend to avoid such cattle-crush type situations as occurs at retail outlets during the holday seasons, but the past two weekends found me knee deep in the herd, and even stranger still, at the brand new mall up north of town, which the Wifey and I swore we would avoid until some of the newness had worn off it.
And, truth be told, it wasn't as bad as it might have been. There was an absolute dearth of Plastic Princesses, those all-too-hip glam girls decked out in the latest man bait fashions with dead eyes that tell you they reckognize no other plane of existence than the one they personally occupy, and by the second visit on the Thanksgiving weekend-- yes, we went twice-- the WalMart crowd had migrated, one assumes, back to WalMart. On our visit there yesterday, the crowds had thinned back down to the hard-core, the people who will very likely keep the mall alive: the retail denizens of the upper Charlotte area. Which is to say: money isn't everything, but in this day and age it is most things. It doesn't make the world go 'round so much as it helps to fill the gaps.
Which is almost as uncomfortable for me to accept as it is to get my mouth around the phrase Canada Goose.
I have been maintaining, the last few years, that the name of the bird is Canadian Goose, Canadian Geese if gaggled, and have resisted the pronouncements by others that Canada Goose is not only correct, but also more elegant. Bullshit. Canada Goose is clunky and unnatural. Canadian Goose is more meliflous, and anyone who doesn't think so, in my humble opinion, can get bent. So, this morning, in the course of things, I looked up this handy little article at Wikipedia, which proves conclusively that I am both wrong and right. According to this document, Canada Geese is proper, Canadian Geese is colloquial in the US. So it is the case that, some ten years ago, folks in the local media down here began looking around and saying Ohhhhhhhh. So it's CANADA Geese, is it? Well, we can't let people start thinking that we're dumb hicks of Southerners who don't know nothing, can we? We better start making sure people start calling 'em CANADA Geese, no matter how stupid and ugly that sounds!!!
I take these things too seriously at times.
Especially on days like this. It's cold, it's raining, it's not going to stop raining all day long, and if I'm very lucky it will be clear enough by midday tomorrow to go running about in the Miata, but the temps won't be out of the fourties until Wednesday, so I will have to wait to go running about with the top down, as it even says in the owner's manual that the top ought not to be operated when the temp is below fifty. For me, that means the temp has to be at least-- at least-- 51 degrees to go running about with the top down.
Yeah. I'm spoiled.
OPEN WIDE AND SAY BLOG: November 21st: One More Reason to Hate California
So I took good measure to cheer myself on a gray, grainy Monday when I was pretty sure I wouldn't even have any fun running around in my neat little Miata (Nomi hates the rain). I baked up a couple of fresh bread rolls and sliced up an Asian pear, as threatened in the official blog blog. And don't get me wrong, it's good stuff-- the pear emphasises the nuttiness of the bread, the bread enhances the sweetness of the pear-- it's just not good enough.
Last stop out in California, I went with the Doc and his paramour to a farmer's market, which in this case meant a veg stand run by the neighboring farm. Amongst the wonderful things there, were Asian pears, which I encouraged Lauren to buy because I had seen them at our Harris Teeter back here in Charlotte but had yet to try them. We ate the pears as part of a cheese-and-bread smorgasbord contrived at the end of a long day when nobody wanted to put forth the effort to cook, and they were wonderful with brie and better with stilton. Yum yum yum.
So this is the second Asian pear I have had since coming back, and I have to say, although good, it's nothing like the pears I ate in California. Not as sweet, not as pungent, not as silky, and the flesh is decidedly more grainy than the California subjects'. The first time I put it down to ripeness, but the difference is clear and simple: California. It's not as vast a difference than in, say plums. I no longer eat plums in North Carolina. I simply cannot. There is absolutley no comparison to the plums in California, and that counts stuff from the farmers' markets here too. The plums I had out there, in season, were ethereally good, sweet, juicy, soft, yeilding flesh, wwwaaahhhhhhhh. Plums here, by comparison, are stones. Last summer there was a yeild of white cherries out here, which I didn't buy because the first bunches I saw were at Wal-Mart, enough to make anyone suspicious. More turned up at the Harris Teeter later on, but I didn't manage to coerce myself into buying them because I couldn't overcome the conviction that they would be sour rocks compared to the ones I had had in California, in July, from a farm in the San Joaquin Valley.
So I will still eat the Asian pears, even out here, even though they are not as good as the ones in California. But I do gotta go back to California. In the summertime. I ain't a addict, but I'd kill a man for another hit.
BAD DAY AT BLOG ROCK: November 17th: A Quick Revelation Of Little Import
In an earlier entry in this blog I misquoted a lyric from the Beach Boys song "Little Deuce Coupe." I had it down as "The's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored/She'll do a hundren forty in fifth gear floored." According to a couple of different sources, the lyric is actually "She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored/She'll do a hundred and forty with the top end floored." Which, as so many Brian Wilson lyrics do, makes almost, but not quite, no sense at all. " . . . with the top end floored" pairs two terms that do not, I think, belong together. "Top end," as far as I know, refers to the upper ranges of RPM, not the upper ranges of the gear box. "Top end floored" would be, at best, redundant: floored would be the process by which the engine RPM's reach the top end.
So what I guess I'm saying here is that I ought not to feel bad for having mis-quoted Brian, but that's a lie. I felt kind of bad about doing it when I did it, but it didn't bother me enough to look it up. On the other hand, I knew there was something wrong, since "She'll do a hundred forty in fourth gear floored" didn't sound right-- "hundred forty" and "fourth" being redundancies that would have stood out-- and the song was written in an era when fifth gear was an anomolie only found in certain cars, and, from what I understand, there wasn't a gearbox available on the Deuce that would take a fifth gear.
So I guess my dillemma is who was more wrong, me or Brian, although I think it's clear that I put more thought and research into my misquote that Brian put into his lyric. It's my academic training: if you're gonna quote a bullshit lyric, you'd better goddamned well get it right!"
I SEE A RED DOOR AND I WANT IT PAINTED BLOG: November 15th: Grim Revelations on a Bleak Morning
So I haven't been blogging so much lately, either here or over at the other blog. Sorry. Been busy arranging activities surrounding my birthday, which was yesterday, all of which I could have blogged about had I not been too busy to blog. Suffice it to say I've been doing alot of walking, and I'm probably better fed than I have been for any given week in my entire life. The highlights were dinner at Mert's Heart & Soul, a gourmet soul food joint in downtown Charlotte, with my folks, my brother, and his adopted daughter Kaliope (and, of course, the Wifey), and lunch yesterday at Mariachi's. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to describe the fare at Mert's, especially since we all got different stuff, but it was all yummy, and we all grabbed bites off eachother's plates. Mariachi's, on the other hand, I can sum up nicely: Mexican buffet. 'nuff said.
So I emerged this morning on the far side of my 40th birthday, marvelling a bit that I managed to navigate the occasion without sinking into a funk. I mean, after all, I'm 40, I'm unemployed, and I got no career path. In America, according to much of what I read, I should be depressed. Right?
Nah. I mean, think of it this way: if I were back doing what I was doing, working as a construction reporter, would the world notice? What kind of a difference would I be making? And I don't get the sense of personal satisfaction out of advancement that other peoiple do. I mean, I liked it when I moved up, but when I did it was almost as if by osmosis-- I moved up out of internal preassure, because I had outgrown the position I had been in, not because I had any burning desire to advance. And then, of course, what had frustrated me most over the course of the last week was that I had been having too much fun to sit down and write, and hey, guess what? Day after my birthday, I got no obligations . . . I got time to sit down and write! Yay!
I had better set this next part up very carefully. Two lyrics have been running through my head for the past week or so. One, of course, is massively a propos, the other more incidental. So the first one is from Paul Simon's "Have a Good Time:"
Yesterday, it was my birthday
I hung one more year on the line
I should be depressed, my life's a mess
But I'm havin' a good time.
Now, the song has long been one of my favorites, in spite of the fact that I never quite believed Paul was actually having such a good time. And it was a pretty good set of lines to have going through my head, since every time it did I found myself going "Huh. Hey, y'know what? My life's not a mess." The other line is from the chorus of a Beatles song:
I'm a loooooooo-sah
And I'm not who I appear to be
I could say that it's been going through my head beacuse I'm not a loser, and I'm exactly who I appear to be, but the fact is that it's been going through my head because it appears on Beatles for Sale, which is not one of the half-dozen albums I ordered from Barnes & Nobles last week, and is, in fact, one of three or four discs I meant to order but didn't on the occasion of my birthday. It makes me happy that I still have discs to order. Don't ask me why. I would think it would make me happier that there are discs on the way.
None of which has any relation to the title above. After having morning coffee while watching A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, I showered, dressed, and took a fast spin out to a somewhat nearby Food Lion for a couple of things, on the grounds that I ought to get out and drive the Miata with the top down before the rain starts. (Which put another lyric in my head, this one from Tom Waits, " . . . and played billiards with a midget until the raiiiiiiin stopped.") I got back (that lyric is from the song "Shore Leave," by the way) I got back and sat in to read a whacko John Krackauer book about the Mormons and listen to my 3 disc collection of the Guess Who, when, for whatever reason, I was suddenly compelled to crack open my copy of Ferlinghetti's volume Who Are We Now and re-read, for the trillionth time, the poem "Dissidents, Big Sur," which has always bugged me, since it is a really great title, but the poem itself, one of these revelation-at-a-moment-of-disturbance pieces, could easily have been served by a simpler title. "Dissidents, Big Sur" he really ought to have saved for something bigger. One of these days, I'm gonna steal it, use it for a piece of my own. Which, I'm pretty sure, would piss Larry off to no end, if he ever noticed.
But here's where the grim revelation comes in: the next step was to look him up on Amazon and see if that biography of him that was supposedly underway back when I was in grad school, what, 15 years ago, ever got written, which lead to the revelation that Ferlinghetti has been getting increasingly self-involved over the years, which explains why the bio was never written. And this is the guy I adopted the basis for my own poetics from. Ech.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE BLOG: November 3rd: A Quick PS After The Yours Truly
PART of what I meant to say in yesterday's installment, I think, is clear: I choose not to believe the reports of our worldwide BTK camps because it has been my experience that such reports are generally bullshit. The heavier subtext, I'm afraid, might not have been as clear: I choose not to believe such bullshit because I honestly hope it's not true. Because when our guys start pulling shit like that, they are no longer The Good Guys. And it bothers me that they might not understand that.
THE GOOD, THE BLOG, AND THE UGLY: November 2nd: The Lies They Tell Us
OR maybe it should be "The Lies They Tell US."
Does it strike anyone else as odd that,. while this whole Valerie Plame thing is stuck in the congressional craw, a story like this would come out? (For anyone visiting after the news story comes down off the wire, it claims that the CIA is operating secret interrogation/torture/execution camps around the world that we, the people, are supposed to know nothing about. When that guy out in Kansas did that kind of thing, people got really upset.
Perhaps I should be clearer here: when I say "anyone else," I don't mean anyone else besides me. It doesn't strike me as odd, because I have a pretty clear idea of how the people in American Espionage operate, and out there in the cloak & dagger world, surely there's some idiot who thought the timing was "neato." Additionally, it doesn't strike me as odd because I know, in my heart, that if it got leaked it's most likely a God Damned Lie.
Because that's how those people operate: just give the people enough information to make them think that behind the scenes great, bloody, horrific, yet very necessary work is being done for the greater good of the world and to protect the well-being of the American People. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! He had to break that poor bastard's knees! You'd understand if you only knew the truth.
And thoseof us who are horrified by the notion that our government would take up the task of secret torture are not even the targets of this information. Nosir. You'd think that, the liberal press being what it is, the target audience for such a report would those who would want to to make it stop. No no. The point of leaking the info is to garner the ever popular and completely American asshole vote. Those people that want to think we're out there torturing, maiming and killing towel-heads, the ones who had the picture of Lindy Englund set as their screen saver, the ones who circulate bogus George Carlin quotes, THOSE schmucks are the real target audience. As Jon Stewart would say, He-he-he.
I could be wrong, but that's me belief: The CIA couldn't find it's asshole with both hands, and they occasionally have to leak something or make something up so it looks like they're doing something effective or conducive. They lead us into this war every bit as eagerly and willingly (and, I think, dishonestly) as our President did, and they have spent the last two years and change trying to lay it on our doorstep in a flaming paper bag.
This is an example of them trying to run around and ring the back doorbell before the we realize what we've just stomped out.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
HOW NOT TO WRITE A POEM: October 26th: Notes from the Federal Egg Answering Room
Some time ago I signed up for the Barnes & Nobles newsletter thingy, I think after buying discs or reading an album review, so once or twice (sometimes thrice) during a week I will get a brightly colored page detailing all of the new books I don't want to read. Nick Sparks, for instance, has a new book out which I will not read on the strengthy of the fact that (a) his first book was a hodge-podge of borrowed dialogue and warmed-over "literature" plotlines (this according to the first reviews I read of The Replacements, before critics started proclaiming him as the second coming of Christ), and (b)that whole Operah* thing. Not that I's a fan or Operah*, mind you. But I get very suspicious when authors talk of not cheapening their works. Hell, even whores have labor unions.
Another is a work by Anne Rice, detailing the young life of Christ, which is a damned shame in its way. It is a project I thought I might take on one day, but one that I knew I would only be able to take on if I had become a writer of note, and would have done tongue firmly in cheek. But Rice never dopes anything straight: she's doing this as an affirmation of her return to the Catholic church, and the briefest descriptions of the work have lead me to believe that the only words to describe what she's done here are "sheer blashphemy." Not that I'm suprised: her vampire books were always cribbed from the sleaziest of Pulp Noir and crafted to appeal to those adolescent minds of all ages who were tittilatingly attracted to the notion that sex, death, and evil were cute and fun, and that the ennui of being undead could be shook out occasionally with a bloody, sex-filled rampage, all of which was justifyable since the undead would go back to being terminally bored* for another millenia or so after the book was over. But the real reason I don't read Ann rice is that every time I do, I find myself saddled with a very, very uncomfortable thought:
Thank God Stan Rice is dead.
It's a very strange thing for me to think. The man had gifts. He did good, for the most part.But every third poem of his creeps me out. He was involved in this whole life-equals-death thing that only made sense (to him, it seems) if he ate something rotten. Or, failing that, shit. In addition to this being bad behavior to advocate, it is, I think, part of what turns people off about poetry. There are three basic schools of American poetry these days, none of which I ascribe to: first, the Shit is Good school (all bad things are really reflections of humanity, so we can all be junkies and drunks and fuck up otherwise satisfying relationships and call it art); the Romantic school (everything I feel is a poetic experience, regardless of how mundane), which doubles for the New Imagist Movement (sling in a image every third or fourth line, no matter how ludicrous or unnecessary); and the Furriners school (anything written in a language other than english is terrif, no matter how obtuse or deliberately vague). Stan bridged the first and second schools. But my real revulsion for the man's work came about during my abortive bid for a Master's degree in English.
During my second year, I got to teach sections of Intro to Lit, which was a blast. We were slung brand new copies of a brand new anthology, edited by a department PhD, who also happened to be my mentor. Since every bad experience I'd ever had with litertaure in school involved being force fed something I didn't want to read, I decided to roll the dice.
Take the anthology home, I said; find something you like, bring it in next session, and we'll talk about it. It took about a week, but eventually people started bringing in short stories and poems to discuss from the anthology, and occasionally from outside it. Of course, we did end up dissecting a rap lyric or two, but other than that, there were no real ill results.
Being a fair-minded gent, of course, I didn't except myself: I sat down with the anthology until I came up with a couple of things I, too, liked in it, and to make it completely fair I limited myself to things I hadn't seen before. One of them was Stan Rice's bit "Metaphysical Shock while Watching a TV Cartoon." I thought it was a neat little observational piece about the ways in which we daily fail to gauge the real and separate it from the surreal. (And it is.) So I brought it in, read it, asked for commentary, of which there was suprisingly little, and we put it to bed with the conclusion that it was a neat little obvservational piece about how we sometimes fail to gauge the real and separate it from the surreal. After class one of the kids approched me, one of three who had attended the same high school, had been members of the intellectual mafia there, and thus were digging in to my class with gusto beyond their ken, which I loved and encouraged.
"I got a problem," he said.
"Shoot," I said. I always had an ear for my kids.
He paused, embarassed, and said "I can't read Stan Rice's poetry."
I let that take a second to sink in, and said "Oh." What he was saying, I knew immediately, was that he couldn't read a poem, even this one, by Stan Rice, since it would be poisoned by the knowledge that it was a poem by Stan Rice. Which, on reflection, shouldn't have suprised me too much, since I had it on good authority that some of the most horrific stuff in Ann Rice's books were the excerpts of Stan's poetry she occasionally interjected, but I had always assumed that was stuff he meant to throw away anyways. So I said to the kid, "Don't sweat it, it happens. If you can't dig the guy's stuff, you can't, and that's all there is to that." (Although no one is excused from liking my stuff, obviously.) I went on to say that I had my problem poets, and the way I dealt with that was doing a paper or a study on them in order to convince myself that it wasn't all bad, and it seemed to work pretty well.
The kid gave me a half-double-take and a disgusted grimmace in the same movement, which is a neat trick if you can do it, and said "Have you ever read the rest of Stan Rice's stuff?"
I gave him a curious look and said "No. Why?"
He stuck out his tongue and said "Blech!" (Or "Yuck!" I forget which.)
So I dutifully went out and found a bunch of Stan Rice stuff, which turned out to be something of a trick in itself, and it all seemed to be filled with rather bad advice on how to live life richly, consisting largely of the rather bad advice "Eat shit and die." So I went back into class the next session and immediately apologized to the kid, recounting the encounter and its results for the rest of the class, and giving them an out: anything brought in that really put them off, they could be excused from discussing. They agreed, but, to their credit, none of them took the out.
So, when it comes to Ann's works, I simply avert my eyes. In the first place, I know, instinctively, that I'm not missing anything, at least not anything new. In the second place, if I ever fear that I am missing something new, I can have my wife read it and confirm that I'm not missing anything new. In the third place, I can almost always wait for the movie, although maybe not in this case. But finally, irevoccably, I have to avert my eyes because long ago I convinced myself that Stan wrote at least one good poem, and I am hanging on to that for the sake of my belief that there is still good art in the world. And also to keep from repeating the rotten way I felt when I read that Stan died from brain cancer deep in the winter of 2002 and immediately said to myself, "Well, thank God for that." Immediately and deeply ashamed of myself, I grabbed the anthology off the shelf and thumbed in to "Metaphysical Shock," trying to convince myself that this was the real stuff, not all the self-flaggelatory junk on his web site advising people that the best course of action was to eat shit and die.
So that's the real reason I can't read Ann Rice. Call it a metaphysical shock while reading a bullet review.
*It's a pun.
BLOG DENSITY: October 18th: She's Vaunted and She's Vetted and She's Flogged and Scored
I came up with that little catalogue, best if sung to the Beach Boys' "Little Deuce Coupe," as I thought to myself, returning from the kitchen with a cup of hot peppermint tea, that I ought to go read Alton Brown's vaunted blog. Simply cause I hadn't checked it since he had the picture of 'imself wearng the Waffler outfit-- if you don't get that, skip it, it'd take too much time and effort to explain-- but before I got any further, I found myself wondering: What do I mean here by "vaunted?" Am I really prepared to say that Alton's blog is "vaunted?" And if so, it what sense of the word?
Maybe, I thought further, I mean "vetted?" Alton Brown's vetted blog? Again, in what sense of the word?
So I found myself walking back to the office, singing "He's vaunted and he's vetted and he's flogged and scored . . . " And that's as far as I got, since I couldn't really make "He'll do a hundred forty in fifth gear floored" make any sense in the context. And then my wife IM'd to say she was done with her bone density test, with good results.
SHEEEEEE's vaunted and she's vetted and she's flogged and scored . . .
Of course, it doesn't really describe the Wife's sitch. As she said, it's just an X-ray. Just a scan. It would more aptly describe my sister's experience, growing up as an asthmatic in the 70's, when they very often would do tests that my Dad would describe thusly:
"This test will show us if X is happening. If X is happening, there's nothing we can do about it. But this test will tell us if X is bad, and that way we will know if X will kill you in six months."
He may have been exaggerating, he probably was, but it did seem like a pretty apt description of the sort of things they were doing to asthma patients in those days. Having watched her go through alot of that stuff back then makes me aware of how lucky kids who have asthma are these days. Albutrin might make them feel yucky, but it ain't nothing compared to what a jab of cortisone could do you.
Of course, these aren't the most pleasant memories, but I intend to drown them out by humming a Beach Boys tune, which has now gotten stuck in my head.
("She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored/She'll do a hundred forty in fifth gear floored . . . ")
A CHIP OFFA THE OLD BLOG: October 14th: I shoulda saved that title for the other blog
So today I re-visted one of my new favorite places and discovered a brand new favorite place, by way of celebrating an unexpected windfall.The windfall was a new air filter for the Miata. I took it in for an oil change (at about 5000 miles, which is sooner than I would have done with about any other car) and the guys at the Jiffy Lube in our neighborhood, as always, found something to replace. It was the factory filter, and it was clearly a bit on the gamey side, and the replacement was only 18 bucks, so I said what the hell? Sure; replace it. I also took the synthetic oil option, and never mind how that was. But the upside is that the thing is now running like a top. I mean, slick and shiny. So I took a spin out into the countryside.
Killian Farm Road is a windy two-lane through rolling farm country which, so far, has yet to be suburbified. I ran it twice yesterday, so today it was a pure pleasure. I knew all the curves, and aside from an SUV that pulled off early on (lost, turning around) and a couple of pickups that came the opposing way, I had the road to myself. So I could throw all the tricks at it-- gearing down into the curve, accelerating through, tracing a line through a series of curves, pulling G's, the whole bit. Great fun.
Old Higway 27 is a deserted piece of road not far away in Catawba County, linking Lucia Riverbend Road outside Stanley with some of the spidery little sideroads in Mount Holly. Since it was the first run, it wasn't as wild and fun as the trip over Killian Farm Road, since I had to plot out lines through unfamiliar curves, but it was still pretty sweet.
And it was agreat day for it, too: blue skies, puffy white clouds, bright green countryside after a week's worth of rain, temp in the upper 70's, just great. But it brought forth a dillema I have been wrestling with for a few years now: I am thinking about starting a writing project, a combination of memoir and social history, or maybe I should call it social exploration, on the American driving experience. Fortunately, the key to events transpiring-- a reason to write such a thing, someone to write it for-- remain absent. But the real question remains: can it be done? Would it be, to use the oft used phrase, like dancing about architecture? Part of the reason I haven't given up on it is that I have the prefect title: Describing A Curve. (Beautiful, isn't it?) But that's just it. Can it be done? Can I describe what it feels like to pick that perfect line and sweep though a curb, holding the machine out to the limits of it's performance, testing the limits of my own consciousness, that place where thought and effort and sensation come almost to the point of overwhelming each other, stumbling over each other like Keystone Kops, or better yet, the feeling of coming out on the other side, hitting the accelerator and screaming off up the straightaway?
Sooner or later, I'll try it. I might fail, but I cannot not try. Fail I shall, if fail I must.
AT BLOGGERHEADS: October 10th: Edam & Green Tea
Why is it that ER was such a compelling show (most of the time) but virtually everything the actors in it went on to do was a steaming pile of offal? Just asking . . .
Anyways, ER is just today's background noise while I work at assembling the material for the new site, which is turning out to be a little more mystifying than I thought it would be since I am fairly unfamiliar with the medium I'm working in, which is DreamWeaver. It works fine, but I have probably created a folder that I stuck under a virtual rock and I am confused about what naming conventions I should be following, if any. Suffice it to say that I am electing to curtail my Walpoling activities until the Wifey comes home, so she can pat me on the head and reassure me that there's not a big bad monster in the .htm file.
So, in the interim, I am having a late breakfast of cheese, bread, and fruit.
Lately the trend in the gourmet world has been to insist that all this blather about wines "going" or "clashing" with foods is all bushwah. Red with beouf? White with chicken? BUSHWAH! Drink whatver the hell kind of wine you like! It's all good!*
Which, in itself, is bushwah. Wines do go with some foods better than others, and to deny it is, I think, to suggest that one is a brain dead mouth breather with a sandpaper tongue. Not that I support the whole red/white division that the Foodistas (HAH!) wanted to impose on all of us way back then. But one of my favorite games to play is Match the Wine, especially with cheeses. Today's experiement, however, doesn't involve wine. Why am I teasing you? Don't I know you read the title to this entry? Do I think that you're a zombie with a brain like a sieve who probably forgot the last three words they read while drizzling a thread of drool on the keyboard? Probably, but I never said it in so many words, so far as you know, at least.
As I cast about for sustenance, I settled on a pear that was rapidly going south on the counter top, a freshly baked bread roll (one of those take-n-bake things from the grocery store, which is cheating, but what the hell), and a chunk of edam, one of my favorite cheeses, all along side a mug of green & peppermint tea. It's a pretty funky combo; using the fruit-cheese-bread-liquid method, I have had the following result: the pear is at that point where it's a sweet as it'll get before it rots; the edam all but stomps on it, sweeping out the sweet and leaving just a floral hint at the bottom of the pallette,~ the bread is crunchy and yielding and nutty, and the green/peppermint tea swirls the whole thing up itno a frenzy. Huzzah!
I was gonna write some about one of my favorite combos, stilton & stout, which many people who have seen me taking it have shaken their heads at, but the dog wants to go out, I should go check to see if the mailman's been by, and I have other writing to do, possibly including another entry in the other blog.
*This has largely been due to the explosion of foodie whores over the last decade and a half, who have used the red/white rules to make some egregious pairings of wines they've never tasted with food they don't understand, prompting people to conclude that they can drink whatever the hell kind of wine they like. Foodistas are nothing if not adaptive.
~PUN!!! Of course, my favorite food related pun is also a sight gag, which is to hold up two items, usually in the grocery store, and say "Edam? Gouda!" (Eat 'em? GOOD-O!) (Blame my Dad. He started it.)
LOVE LIFT US UP WHERE WE BLOG: October 6th: So I'll Be Blogging(R)
So, in anticipation of launching a real web site, which I will do sometime in the near future, watch this space for updates, I have decided to join the Bloggosphere, on the grounds that . . . Well, I don't really know why. Maybe because it'll look better on the new site, and the dedicated amaturishness of this blog will seem less appropriate. I intend to maintain both blogs, but we'll see how that goes. (I'm also supposedly working on two different novels while all this is going on. I think of funny things to do.) But I figure that edven if I am going to be writing two blogs at once, I ought to have somehting to say besides that I am going to be writing two blogs at once, so I will make the observation that it's wonderful weather for eating beef stew.
The weather is lousy, cold and gray with a pissing rain, the kind that seems like it'll go on forever. Not that I'm compolaining, because the storm that's driving it is out East, and it's giving them hell out there. After spending the morning hunched over the computer, reading crap on the internet and drinking coffee, I took a minute to let the dog out and get the mail and the paper. The mail was nothing but junk, and the paper was a sodden log, so after the dog took the time for a pee that should last her all day-- she'a a smart dog, and she hates the rain-- we retreated indoors, and my first official act for the afternoon was to turn on the oven. A brief internal debate ensued over whether to have a pizza or stew, the stew party prevailed. So I'm going to bake a fresh bread roll, put on the stew to cook, doctor is up with pepper, sea salt and chili powder, then bring it back here and chow down while I divide my time between watching a Jimmy Stewart movie and watching it rain.
BLOG, MISTER TAMBOURINE MAN: October 4th: Your Results May Vary
Got a post card from Sam Ashe. Remember Sam?
Those $100 12 string "Carlo Robelli" guitars they were trying to sell? The card proclaims "GET A GORGEOUS BLACK CARLO ROBELLI 12 STRING ACOUSTIC GUITAR FREE! with any purchase of $499 or more."
I may or may not have mentioned them in this space before. Sam Ashe is the music superstore that replaced the Mars music superstore after it crapped out here in Charlotte. The theory is basically the same as any other crappy superstore: triple the volume, halve the quality, and stick a few high-end, hand-made instruments around just for laughs. Sam Ashe has the advantage over Mars in that I was able to buy some basic parts for a Stratocaster there. But, of course, the clerk I bought them from had no idea what I needed, why I needed them, where they went or what they were for. (It wasn't the clerk's fault; the people who hired him, I'd lay fair money, wouldn't know a potentiometer from a diode anyways.) Their in-house brand of guitar is the "Carlo Robelli." If Carlo is an actual person, I'll eat his crotch. (No I won't.) I went to the actual trouble of playing one of their $200 12-strings once, and it wasn't half bad. Then I saw the $100 (actually $99.99, of course) models, and, of course, I had to try that. With the result that yeesh.
It might not be true, it might not be the case, but I am choosing to believe that they couldn't get even the stupidest mooks to believe that it was a good idea to buy their crappy sounding $100 guitars, even if they were cool looking black 12 strings.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
BLOGS, AND THE BLOGGING BLOGGERS WHO BLOG THEM: September 29th: The Al Franken Show
So Al Franken has another book out, purportedly-- according to the "From the Publisher" blurb on the Barnes & Noble e-mail alert!-- skewering the Bush administration. Now, I'd be the last to suggest that the Admin doesn't need skewering, but, frankenly, Al's just not the man for the job.
I read, and quite enjoyed, Rush Limbaugh is an Idiot and other observations. And I have some fond memories of some of Franken's work on SNL, and on Bill Maher's old show on Comedy Central before he ruined it (long before he went to HBO and really started stinkin' up the joint). But I couldn't bring myself to purchase Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I was considering it when I caught (courtesy of Doc Nagel) a clip of Franken reading a passage of it in front of Bill O'Rielly, and O'Reilly responding. Now, O'Really's response was typical: dully barbed, stupid and vitriolic, pointless and outraged, everything Fox hired him for! But the distubring thing wasn't O'Riley's response, or even his presence. The problem was Franken's smug, slug-like delivery, and his even toadier response to O'Raelie's response. I mean, it was like he was proud that he shot that fish in the barrel! And I knew at that moment what I had suspected for some time: the man is done.
There comes a point in any gadfly's life when they have to ask the question: What's more important, the inflation of my own ego or the deflation of others? If the former, then the gadfly's career is done. There were signs beforehand, but the confrontation with O'RaaaaallyIdo was the last stroke. Ego trumps vision every time, and Franken had clearly succumbed.
They run footage of his radio show on one of the cable channels, I forget which one, I think one of the Showtime channels, and once or twice I have tried to watch. But it's just too much work. Franken's approach seems to be to explain to his audience, as one would to a three-year-old, why he's so much smarter than everyone else and how wrong the Admin is. It's the wrong approach. The right approach, as demonstrated on occasion by Jon Stewart and Harry Shearer is just to let 'em keep on taking rope and quietly observe while they twist in the wind. Taking pot shots at O'Rhiley only makes Franken look as stupidly vitriolic as O'Rielly himself, which, Frankenly, accomplishes nothing.
AS USEFUL AS TITS ON A BLOG: September 21st: You're Just Jealous You Didn't Think Of It First; Irrellevant Advices
So the Doc and I, in somewhat atypical fashion, have gotten almost nowhere with the Unified Sandwich Theory. We have put together bits and pieces in fits and starts, but there's been nothing compelling or particularly "together"about what we've come up with so far. The only comparable theoretical construct, which the Doc has been completely uninvolved with, has been my exploration of the metaphysics of M*A*S*H-- the TV show, not the movie, and certainly not that book crap-- which I was planning on calling "The Metaphysics of M*A*S*H." The main things it had going for it was a bithin' title and the pithy observation that M*A*S*H does not take place during the Korean conflict, which it attempts to depict, or the Viet Nam war, which it was designed to critique, but rather it takes place on a moral plane which is specifically constructed so that Hawkeye is always right. The rest has been rubbish, and really, what should I expect to be able to glean from a frickin' TV show, after all?"
But the trouble we're having with the UST is more . . . well troubling. I mean, after all, we're both gourmands, on top of being gourmets (which is to say we're gluttons for the good stuff), and both excellent sandwich makers, and we're both fans of Douglas Adams, for Christ's sake, who has done more to artistically further the importance of sandwich making than any other writer in history. (Except maybe Hemingway.) But-- and here comes TV again-- recently the problem was illuminated by the one, the only, the inimitable Alton Brown. In a couple of his shows he approaches using the term UST, although he never quite has, and in these shows he has approached a UST, although, again, as near as I can tell, he never quite has. Some basic parts of his philosophy are quite right and perfect, things like "crusty bread for hearty fillings, softer bread for mushy fillings" (or whatever it was he said). But other things don't hold up, especially when he implied that the condiment layer on the bread should act as a "membrane."
No.
Or, well, maybe. Depending on the application, I could see that. But, dammit man, I use mustard because it tastes like mustard! And I don't mean to be dogmatic about it, but I honestly believe that the reason to use condiments is because of the way they taste, and any appreciation they might give to the physics of the sandwich is purely coincidental. (I could be wrong. I can be wrong. I've been wrong before.)
I was thinking about this yesterday as I was making a sandwich for lunch. I had obtained a package of Oscar Mayer shaved smoked ham, mainly because there was a coupon for a buck off a package on the bottle of Grey Poupon I was buying, and I had obtained a bottle of Ceasar dressing to go with some mixed greens I had picked up. It suddenly dawned on me that the dressing and the greens would go nicely with the ham, Swiss cheese, rye bread, and dijon mustard. So I did.
As I was putting the thing together, it occured to me that making a sandwich is alot like batting in baseball: if you think too much about it, you'll screw it up. (This occurred to me while arranging the greens on the lower slice of bread on top of a layer of Ceasar dressing.) It also ocurred to me that batting is like golf: anyone you go to in order to improve your skills is inevitably going to make you think too much about what you're doing.
Which brings me to the movie "LA Confidential." (Because I say it does. Shhh.) I was watching this film while eating my sandwich (see?), and it occurred to me to look up the source material, which is something I had been thinking about for a long time now. Since I am a sucker for the film, which I can watch, and have watched, serially, I have always assumed there was something fundamentally wrong with it. Some time back, it dawned on me that most likely the source material is bullshit. Most of the time, if there is something fundamentally wrong with a film, it's in the source material. (Duh.) So I looked the book up at Amazon and read the first few pages. It didn't take much. The source material is bullshit.
Which makes the movie that much more amazing. It reminds me of a discussion Doc Nagel and I had while I was out visiting last month. It's a well accepted (and, I think, true) piece of apocrypha* that the role of Dr. Venkman and Lewis the Accountant in "Ghostbusters" were specifically written for John Beluishi and John Candy, respectively. Chris' concern was: How in the hell would that have worked? The answer is: it would have been a completely different movie. Bill Murray and Rick Moranis took over the roles and made them their own. The same sort of thing happens in "LA Confidential." The actors take the thing over, and make the it their own. More than that, there's a certain comradery involved: this is an actor's movie, and the respect the actors all seemed to have for each other makes the character's relationships tick. Even Kim Basinger, who has done precious little else in her career that stands up as well, turned in one hell of a performance here, and I have to think that it has to have been because of the company she was keeping.
I could make an allegory between sandwich making, the UST, and ensemble acting here, but there's just one thing stopping me: I'm not insane.
*Never actually heard it from an accredited source.
EASIER THAN FALLING OFF A BLOG, PART DEAUX: September 16th: Desperate Measures
There's lotsa news today. Katrina, the cleanup, Ophelia, Iraq-- which, by the way, has officially become a long, slow bloodbath-- the lottery coming to NC, but there is one bit of news I am having a hard time grappling with.
Let me lay out a couple of things first: I am a liberal in the classic sense, and I know I've said this before, but I don't want to be tarred by "traditional liberal" brushes: I think welfare is poison, I think public housing sucks, but I also think we find insulting things to foist on the poor, who, like it or not, are still citizens of our fine country. Things like government cheese. And, having been poor myself, and thus having lived amongst them, I do not have what you would call a "soft spot" for the poor as a whole: most of the people who cannot find the wherewithall to better their station in life more or less deserve what they get. Which is not to say that the rich are de facto intelligent. I've known alot of rich people, too, and most of them were idiots. Lucky idiots, idiots with the right connections, but idiots nonetheless.
Anyways. My point here is basically this: I do not have a "liberal" leaning against the rich, and the poor are not necessarily to be excused for the mean conditions in which they live. But we do think of some very strange things to do to the poor in the name of protecting and serving. Like shutting off their access to money sources.
If you didn't go so far as to read the story, basically it says that the NC Attorney General has forced Advance America, a paycheck lender, to stop doing business in North Carolina. Finally. He's been working on it for some time. And Advance America has been dodging it for some time. When the AG tried to get them for usury, they changed the wording of their contracts with the borrowers. When we made it against the law to do that kind of trading in NC, they hooked up with banks in the Midwest, so that they weren't actually lending money, just acting as a lender's agent. So don't get me wrong, I don't have any sympathy for either the AG or Advance-- the AG is a politician, and the people at Advance are craphounds who think it's smart to bleed poor people dry (the standard rate of interest is 20%, and more on that line in a moment)-- but here's the thing: now that the AG has finally hounded Advance enough to make them proclaim that they will stop doing business in NC-- they're shutting down all the stores, boom, just like that (although, of course, they will keep collecting money from the lendees)-- we're left with a group of people who now have nowhere else to go if they need a loan.
Now, here's my point: the practice of payday lending is rotten and should be stopped as it is currently conducted. I mean, sure, it is the equivalent of getting a cash advance on a credit card with an interest rate of 20% or better, except that the accumulation and method of collection are more agressive (from what I've been told, and I've never actually had to use the service). But it is mean spirited to turn to people who have no alternative-- the banks won't lend to them for lack of promise on return, and very often if they have credit cards they don't have them for very long-- and offer them credit on the very worst terms against their very means of subsistence. It just is. And if the AG really had the welfare of the poor in mind-- and I'm not saying he didn't, but he's a politician, so he gets 0% leeway from me-- he might have tried to find a way to make the practice more fair. If there were a way to make payday lending legal, and just chomp the rate of accumulation down to something more fair, or perhaps place limits on the terms of accumulation that would keep the payback from becoming onerous, I might be all for payday lending. But, of course, the state tried that, and the lenders found lots and lots of ways around the caps. Now, as far as I can tell, the state has pretty basically said "We are right and you are stupid, and we're going to take your candy now because we are right and you are stupid." And the people at Advance said "FINE!" and licked their candy and shoved it in the dirt.
And now people who had no other alternative will have no alternative. This is America, for crying out loud. We sure as hell should be able to do better than this.
THE BLOG TO END ALL BLOGS: September 15th: I Really Shouldn't Have Said That
People will think I'm giving up on blogging, if I use that title, or else that I'm declaring all out blog war, which I'm not.
I am lodging a complaint, though. This whole business of hijacking the blogosphere has finally gone way too goddamned far. If my hometown paper is finally in on the game, then the game should, I think, be called on account of dumb. Their latest attempt has been in the form of creating a blog-- not to say creating a blogger-- to publicize the opening of the newest mall in the area. Ah. Very enlightening. According to her first three posts, it's a fucking mall.
I was going to include the all-important link to her blog, but I have decided not to. I don't want to. I don't feel like it.
THE STRUGGLE ON THE BLOGGLING PLAIN: Semptember 11th: The Meaning of Life
Big day for us. Yep. Biiiiiiiig day. Or at least that's what they keep telling us. It's hard for me to look at 9/11 memorial services without thinking that these people are just milking it. Especially the relatives of victims. Maybe it's wrong of me to think that way, but I can't really help it. For me the big memorial-- and think of the meaning of that word for a moment, ponder if you will-- was September 11th, 2002, when I awoke at three in the morning (or maybe it was a bit earlier) with a deep and profound sense of unease that I couldn't put my finger on until one of my overseas correspondents reminded me that this was a big day for America, indeed the world. But the meaning of it was still fresh: the stunning sense that something like that could happen, and the shocking possibility that, any day now, it might happen again.
But it's been too long for me to really think that anymore, for me to reach down and touch that feeling again. Both shoes dropped, we went and scared the bejesus out of the Taliban, and that was it, except for the increasingly ineffective and inexcusable war on Iraq. And, of course, the compelling thing is the aftermath form Katrina, but it's increasingly hard for me to muster any real emotion over that. We made our donation, and that's really that. Ther Red Cross has a stranglehold on the fundraising, and I don't trust the bastards. Some of the people refusing to leave are blaming the Gov't for failing to respond fast enough. And of course that blame game is destined to go on for months-slash-years. And I just heard recently that a major American corporation just switched from materiel relief to a strict cash basis, because the trucks were getting ROBBED before they could start handing out the goods.
Doc Nagel put it best in an e-mail of this morning: "In other news, I came to the realization this morning that the big difference between reading news during the Bush administration versus the Clinton administration is that there's never any surprises now. I never feel dismay, just another daily bummer." Yeah. That's it. A reliable dissapoinment.
The Doc also spelled out a reasonable antidote: "I've been up bouncing in the kitchen to Reggata de Blanc since just before 10." Yes. Sleep in and make breakfast while listening to Andy, Stew and Sting at their finest, when they had the thing damned near down to a Platonic form. Myself, I intend to put this little spot of joy to bed, head home, and settle in for a glass of wine and some semi-quiet-time with my beloved Wifey. I may scan the Newz at 6:30, I might not. I'm not promising anything to anyone.
BLOG ME!?! BLOG YOU!!!: Septemeber 8th: Journalism
Alot of strange things end up in the news. Especially when there's nothing going on. Also when there's nothing more anyone can do about things.
It's odd, but the news media-- not just in this country, all over the world-- seem to have this odd fixation on futility. When things are clearly beyond the point of no return, they find ways to place absurd amounts of blame on people who couldn't possibly do any good. Like the Feds. The Feds got blamed for not responding to Katrina fast enough. And of course, they didn't. But then what do you expect? They're the Feds. They always respond last. And after all that, the blame started falling on the Mayor of New Orleans, which was only fair as he was the chief trumpet of blame in the wake of Katrina, which could only mean one thing: he hadn't done his job as mayor very well. I mean, after all, fair's fair: you take the job, you take the blame. But I suppose that he's like most mayors. Just thought it would be all love and cake.
Then there's the Chinese.
Nobody's ever been able to figure out the Chinese. Especially the Chinese. They can't figure out why it is that they don't rule the world. They still can't figure out why the Japanese kicked their collective ass before World War Two. And then, when they thought they had the world buffaloed by their sheer mass of population, all of a sudden it turns out that population explosion is a baaaaad thing.
Oh! Fine! FINE!!! Then we'll make people stop breeeeding then, shall we? No wonder they went communist.
So it was little surprize when the Chinese came out criticizing our government for failing to respond to Katrina in a timely fashion. Not that I'm supporting the Administration, which seems incapable of doing anything right without smirking. But to blame us for the storm? Like the ush administration caused Katrina!?! (Although if the Bush admin had custody of a hurricane, New Orleans is the sort of place they would have been likely to think to put it.)
Blame US for the storm!?! FINE!!! Then we'll just point out that the Chinese eat donkey meat soaked in tiger urine!* HAH!!! That'll show 'em. Some mornings I am unendingly glad I didn't manage to crack into journalism. I tried a couple of times, but, handily, I screwed up.
*The gag here, such as it is, is that these two stories appeared one after the other on the Charlotte Observer's web site. The tiger urine story actually showed up about ten minutes after I first read the China Blames US For Storm Response article. So that even if it wasn't intentional, it sure looked like revenge. (RRRREEEEEEVENGE!) (Oh no!!! It's K--k-k-k-ken!!! Coming to k-k-k-k-k--kill me!!!)
NO GAG TITLE THIS TIME: September 1st: New Orleans Is No More
So I went to California. I had a great time. I came back ready to rhapsodise about all the wonderful places I went, all the magnificent scenery I saw, how I saw four out of my five favorite natural magical places-- Big Sur, the Monterey Bay, Yosemite, Rosita's Fine Spirits Armory Bar & Grill-- but none of that matters to me at the moment. I'm trying to come to grips with what Katrina did to New Orleans, and the wretched and seemingly endless aftermath.
If I am to be fair to myself, and why not, I have to admit that I had no way of knowing what was going on, seeing as how I was in the air for an effective eight hours last Tuesday. (Five hour flight plus three hour time change, flying West to East, expands the time to an effective eight.) Cap that with the fact that I had spent the last five days in a virtual News Free Zone-- Chris and Lauren's apartment, not California-- and only glanced at a news feed in passing once, last Sunday I think, I could easily hold myself blameless. (Chris and Lauren have no television reception system, and didn't spend much time reading news feeds, since, well, I was there. I can be very distracting.)
So I didn't know anything. The captain of my plane mentioned something about the remains of the storm being to the north of us as we were on approach, and Lauren expressed some concern for my safety-- and that of my area in general-- when I called after getting home that night. Before I left, Katrina was little more than an ill-formed depression in the Carrib, aimed nowhere. So I knew nothing.
So now that New Orleans has been virtually wiped off the map, now that the tens of thousands of destitute have turned out into the streets and huddled and fought and rioted, now that there seems little hope that Federal relief will arrive in time to prevent widespread panic and untold suffering, why is it that I fell like, since I didn't know anything about it, it's somehow all my fault?
It's not like that, really. I know it's not my fault. I know I couldn't have done anything about it. And as soon as they announced a matching fund-- Wednesday-- Rachelle made a donation through TWC to the Red Cross to aid relief efforts. But somehow it's sticking with me. That strange feeling of guilt, if not outright culpability, when I picked up Wednesday morning's paper-- late, at that, mid-morning-- and read the headline 80% OF NEW ORLEANS UNDER WATER.
It was just a bit of a shock, I guess.
JUST A BLOG BEFORE I GO: August 24th: I'm Off To See The Tautology
So I'm going to California again, so I probably won't be posting another blog for, say, probably about the same interval as there was between the last blog and this one.
In other news, I sent a quick e-mail to the guy who came up with the Theory of Flying Spagetti Monsterism, and today came to the tragic realization thast he has not included me among the dozens of "interesting" e-mails he has gotten since the whole thing started. Which, I mean, the guy get's alot of e-mails, but I did think mine should qualify as "interesting." Judge for yourself:
Dear Bobby,
I can't decide which category I fall into. On the one hand, I DO believe FSMism should be taught in schools. (And I would be gald to offer testimony, if you feel the need for input from an unemployed poet and Miata driver.) On the other hand, you are going to hell. Not for (theoretically) pissing off Jesus, but for suggesting that there is a stripper factory in the heaven created for us by the most holy Flying Spagetti Monster. Strippers do not come from factories!!! They come from my house, and your house, and Joe's house down the block, and I personally know of two of them who are living at the Economy Inn on the I-85 access road. They are people, real people, just like you and me, and every bit endowed (he he) with human emotions and feelings by the Flying Spagetti Monster!!!
Yrs,
Jim Williams
PS: Do I still have to buy a T-shirt?
PPS: I have my own hat and eyepatch, and a cool looking machete I can stick a paper salad bowl over for a shield.
PPPS: And when I say you're going to hell, I meant "Las Vegas."
Hah? Fuuunnnnyyyy? Haaaahhh?!?! But he didn't pick it. Mighta had something to do with the subject line. Maybe I shouldn't have titled it "Hell."
WE'RE GONNA ROCK AROUND THE BLOG TONIGHT: August 17th: Questions of Principle
So we took a little trip this past weekend, Sunday to Monday, on the grounds that the Wifey had taken a couple of well-deserved days off for her birthday. Rachelle planned the thing, totting up a few sights she thought might be worth taking in, thinking that by going opposite usual tourist traffic-- out Saturday, back to the flatlands Sunday-- we might improve our odds of missing the masses. And she was right, by and large. On Sunday, we saw mainly Grandma's and Grandpa's out with little kids, at least one seniors' group, and, oddly, a fair number of child-and-estranged-spouse outings. (These were pretty easy to spot, usually given away by an air of awkwardness and a lack of information on the part of the adult in the group who is the estranged one-- "Oh you did?" or "Do you?" were two of the major give-away phrases.)
On Monday, however, we visited Biltmore House.
Biltmore is one of those attractions I have a majorly spotty relationship with. First of all, it's in Asheville. Now, I like Asheville, as a town, for the most part. It has two of the basic drawbacks that all mountain towns have-- the streets are narrow and can be hard to navigate, so the traffic almost always sucks, and because of the terrain sometimes you just can't get there from here-- but, more than most places, it has a kind of social schizophrenia, the sort of thing you find in Austin, or Boulder, or Berekeley, where the people who make the place hip think they run the place, and the people who run the place think they're hip, and both sides are just basically wrong. So it's a hard place for me to spend alot of time in, as my basic instinct is to point out and illuminate hypocrisy. (I've VERY nearly gotten into major trouble in Asheville many times. 'nuff said.) But the major thing, the big problem I have with Biltmore is the nature of the place itself. It's big. It's big and expensive. But, frankly, it's not really very nice.
The thing Rachelle noticed was the beds. The beds all look too small. No, I take that back: the beds all are too small. And aside from one cool-looking chaise lounge and a pair of chairs slung low to the ground for sitting in front of a hearth, most of the chairs and sofas look as if they wouldn't be very comfortable. And then there's the library: something like 10,000 books, but most of them are props. Boud copies of a decade's worth of state crop reports. A book about how to build bridges in New Guinea. Junk like that. And then there's the gardens. They are impressive but during the time they are most beautiful-- Summer-- they are very difficult to spend a lot of time in. They are designed to be fairly windless-- cuts down on undesired cross-pollenation, see-- and so it gets hard to get real jazzed about snooping out the different varieties and hybrids. Or at least it does for me.
The other thing, and this is more strictly about the house, is the tourists. A number of years ago I determined, while on a trip out West to visit Doc Nagel, that I am not a tourist. I used to think of this as a drawback: I have a hard time doing the typical "tourist" things that people do on vacation. I usually can't do the bus rides and the bullshit tours and go see the world's second largest ball of twine. On the other hand, I can spend six hours at MoMA, I can hike the isle of Manhattan from 125th Street to the Battery in a day and syill have time for supper. I can stand driving three hours to sit on the beach at Big Sur for a half hour. I am not a tourist: I am tourista.
Back in the 80's the term fashionista was coined to describe (I think) the way some women shop. (Mainly women in New York City.) The term caught on, na dsoon was being applied to people from the fashion world and the art world, eventually migrating to the business world, where it became an easy way of deflecting and deflating people who thought buisiness was wholely and solely about wearing the right designer suit. (Wrong; business is usually wholely and solely about who is better at bullshitting whom.) And it might have been funny, had the derivation not been so bloody: it came from the term Sandinista, and raise your hand if you don't remember who those bastards were and what they becamse famous for. But I have decided that I can borrow the suffix and use it for my purpose without it being so bloody. (Because I remember who those bastards were and what they became famous for.) The way I mean it is very simple: I am not a tourist in the classic sense, in that I don't go "places" to see "sights," I go out to experience the world, to deepen myself and enrich my soul (and if you think I'm getting corny now, come to Big Sur with me sometimes). I do what I do in order to see the face of God, whether it be in the creation that is our Earth of the works of man that most represent the possibilities of existence. So I am tourista, and if you know what's good for you you'll get out of my goddamned way.
Which is what happened about 80% of the way through Biltmore. We were groiung through the rooms at the top of the house, and this knot of people, a mother, daughter, son, and two males of indeterminate relation, stood in front of me and gawked and blocked my way. And they were doing that classic tourist thing that bugs the living shit out of me: they weren't looking. They were gawking. They were looking around with as much interest (or maybe less) than if they had been walking through Wal-Mart. And they wouldn't fucking mooove!
They literally stood in a knot in front of us, staggered so that they took up all the effective space and were impassible. When one moved so that there was enough daylight fro us to get by, another, almost instinctively, moved in to fill the gap. And the little girl, of course, who was maybe three, saw nothing but objkects on which to hang and spin (these being the post holding the velvet rope separating us from the valuables of the deceased Vanderbilts). I put up with it rather handsomely for the first few minutes, but the longer they stood there, the worse my temper became. They inched along in front of us for some thirty yards, swirling and changing places and blocking the way-- and each time that happened, my temper gbot worse yet. Finally, the hallway opened up, and I made a move to get past them and they-- trust me, this really happened-- they fell into rank, blocking nearly the entire passage. And then-- and then-- the woman, who was on the outside, broke ranks and stepped right in front of me. I almost stepped on her heel.
I took an awkward, over-sized side step, stepped around her, and got out of there, muttering, just loud enough that she might have heard me "Oh, my fucking GOD!" under my breath.
Rachelle, as always in these situation, hoped the woman hadn't heard me. I hope she did hear me. I know that the phrase I used is viewed by many (if not most) people to be offensive. I hope she was offended. I hope she was mortified. I hope that she spent a fair amount of time and strain wondering and worrying that her darling girl child might have heard me say it. I hope it ruined her whole day.
(Nahhhh. Not really.)
To continue. Ahem. (It's actually the next day, the 18th.) (This is one of the downsides to top-down blogging: technically, the rest of this story should appear abover the first installment, which I find enormously distracting. But I had to quit writing yesterday because the Wifey was heading home and I wanted to be done washing the dishes before she got here.) It strikes me that some may think ill of me for my lack of patience with tourists, but let me make it clear that I very rarely act on it. I tolerate. And they mainly stay out of my way. But the stupid way in which tourists behave is the reason Americans get a bum rap around the world, and that, I guess, I do kind of resent.
(Caution: crude joke that I do not find funny lies ahead.)
A semi-unrelated memory came to me after writing that yesterday. I was a roofer for a couple of years, back in the early 90's. It was absolutely classic: after a couple of years of grad school, I determined that I wasn't prepared to go into full blown academia for a number of reasons. Broke and lost, I took the job with the roofing company out of sheer desperation, but it turned out to be a pretty postive experience in many aspects, one of which was a worm's eye view of the lives and personalities of manual labor contractors in the micro-cosm of the mountain community (this would be in Boone, NC). It became my observation that contracors and laborers shared three basic traits: they weren't as smart as they thought they were, they wanted to think they were tougher than anybody else, and they would laugh at damned near anything.
Along about this time-- this would be 1992-- the AIDS epidemic was playing out the end of it's first, terrible siege and the panicky aftermath, and it became hip among Right-wing types to make jokes about AIDS and faggots as a way of reinforcing the notion that homosexuality was immoral. (I don't know; it seemed to make sense to them.) In one of the jokes being passed around at the time, the patient goes to the doctor, who reveals that he (the patient) has AIDS. When the patient asks if there is anything he can do about it, the doctor tells him to visit various ethnic restaurants-- Mexican, Indian, etc-- and, each time, eat as much of the spiciest food they serve, day after day, for up to a week (depending on the teller and how long he wanted to drag the joke out). The patient then asks, hopefully, "Will that cure the AIDS?" And the doctor replies "No, but it'll help you remember what your asshole's for!"
Ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha. How fightfully droll.
Of course, most of the guys I worked with at this stage were either Christians or knew better than to tell that kind of a joke in the presence of the Christians, and a fair number of the other contractors in the mountains were Christian in that hard-core mountain way. So the fag joke, clever as it was, really wasn't something they felt comfortable either repeating or passing around (or, more to the point, perpetuate), so in it's stead out came an old chestnut that just happened to be one of my favorites, a six-months-to-live groaner that dates back to the Stone age. Guy goes into the doctor's office and the doc says "I'm afraid I have bad news for you. Your tests came back, and it turns out you have (disease). I'm very sorry, but there's nothing we can do about it. You have six months to live."
"Oh, dear God!" the patient says, "Doctor! Are you sure there isn't anything I can do about it? Isn't there some way to extend my life?"
"Well," the doc says, "here's what you do. I want you to take that Cadillac of yours, sell it, and buy an old, beat up pickup truck. You quit your job as a stockbroker and go find employment as a fish gutter down at the docks. You divorce that loving wife of yours, and go out and find yourself the bitterest, nastiest, most mean-natured, barstool-hanging hag you can find, and marry her."
The patient sits in stunned shock and says "How many months will that give me?"
And the doc says "Six. But it'll seem like a lifetime."
The ending was changed to "It'll seem a hulluva lot longer" or "It'll seem like more" depending on the teller. And of course, in the self-deprecating machisimo of the contract laborer, the profession was changed to ones own: the patient was told to becomse a mason if the teller was a mason, a roofer a roofer, etc. I remember hearing one of my co-workers, the senior guy on the crew who acted as supervisor when the boss needed him to, tell it to one of the new kids on the crew-- we went through new guys in a matter of weeks or months-- and as he broached, tittering, the part of the joke in which the doctor advises the patient change his profession to that of roofer, I remember thinking "Dude! That's you!"
How that's related to the previous topic I don't know. Maybe they're related. I don't know. I suppose it could be about how I'm smarter than everyone else. But that wouldn't be a very smart thing to write about, frankly.
EASIER THAN FALLING OFF A BLOG: August 9th: All My Bloggy Friends Have Settled Down.
So I guess I'm the last one standing.
The Wifey has decided to shut down her blog, despite her standing in the blogging community-- they love her, of course, because she is wonderful and smart-- and the good Doc hasn't updated his blog since before Bush appointed Roberts, and now that I think of it, there could be a causal connection there (but probably not). The Wife's decision was due partly to fatigue and guilt-- she had had a hard time keeping the blog current during her most recent work project-- and on the reflection that she would rather blog semi-anonymously than by name, which is something I can dig, and a concern Doc Nagel has raised himself upon occasion, but is something that, really, frankly, just doesn't bother me all that much.
Or maybe I should say it just doesn't occur to me that much. I could very easily give you a sort of song and dance-- and believe me, I was gonna-- about how part of the point of this joint is that I am convinced that no one is paying any attention but the Wifey and Doc Nagel (and maybe his paramour Lauren), but that saw is a gag and I only ever meant it as Karmic salt (and if you don't get what I mean by that, I'm not sure I can be bothered to explain it). In fact, I have had a few e-mails regarding entries, usually to correct me on my facts, although at least one of them was, I believe, a dog (someone pretending they were not who they were). And I do harbor the unsung hope that maybe there are people out there reading this and enjoying it. But then why, why, don't I get out on one of these blogger services, join the community, read everyone else's stuff and leave comments so that they will patronize my page and leave comments, and we'll all be one big, happy virtual family!
Dunno. Just naturally hornery, I guess.
But, I guess, when you come down to it, I don't have anything particularly useful or insightful to say on the subject. I was going to make a point that the blogger services must be more trouble than they're worth, that they make you do so much related activity that you can't keep up your blog, but I've read enough blogs to know that that's bullshit (even though it was partially the case in my wife's decision). Or I could make the point that I, myself, am not scared of someone finding personal information about me through this blog thing and use it against me, but, frankly, who would care? And wouldn't that just be some sort of basic, macho, Jack London-esque bullshit anyways? Or, worse yet, it might seem like I'm trying to send some sort of I-told-you-so message to two of the most important people in my life, one of whom I live with. Hands up all of you who think that's a good idea?
So here I am. The last man blogging. Cue the Evil Whammy.* (WOO-EE-OO-EE-OOOOOO . . . Wha-wha-whaaaaa . . . )
*"The Evil Whammy" is probably the funniest way to describe the ubiquitous theme music to "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" ever devised. I just now made it up. Anyone who can say other wise, I invite to get bent.
WHOAAAAAA, BLOGGIN' DOWN THE HIGHWAY: August 4th: So I took a little drive
So this morning I went to breakfast at the Gitmo, and then, just for the hell of it, drove to Mooresville.
Actually, I drove to Davidson and slipped. I had been thinking about driving somewhere after finishing my omlette, and Davidson just seemed like the place to go. I took what I have been referring to as the Northwest Passage up to Cornelius, through Cornelius to Davidson, and then, rather absent-mindedly, continued on through the country side until it suddenly dawned on me that I was in Mooresville.
It is my personal opinion, after great consideration, that Mooresville sucks. It's a great, flat anvil for the hammer of the summer sun, the architechture is early Southern Blech, and the traffic has always sucked. The last time I found myself stuck in it, on the way home from one of Cayla's softball games a year or so ago, I found myself expounding on how bad Mooresville's traffic sucked. The Wife reasoned that, well, at least they tried, they made the road to the I-77 corridor* four lanes, six in places, and I thought a second before proclaiming "No, the traffic in Mooresville has always sucked." At the moment, it ocurred to me that I might let the nine-year-old know I was using inappropriate language, so I looked at her in the rear view mirror and said "Sorry, Cayla."
Cayla said "That's okay, Uncle Jim; you're right, this sucks."
So, finding myself in Mooresville, I reminded myself three times that it was illegal to make a U-turn in the middle of a two-lane road before making one. After another five minutes of sitting at two of their cockememe six-way intersections-- two lanes on one side of the railroad tracks, two on the opposite side, two lanes crossing the tracks, so that four lanes of traffic sit twiddling their freakin' thumbs while two lanes on the other side of the tracks have the green light, never mind that those two lanes have NO FREAKING TRAFFIC IN THEM AT ALL-- I was outta there.
So I got the hell out of Mooresville. I got home right around 12:30.
I did the same kind of thing yesterday, when I went out to buy a piece of plastic tubing for a home modification project I had been planning for some time, a drain line for the drip-vent to the AC. Our house was originally built on spec as a rental property, so there are a few aspects to it that were not as well thought out as they might have been. The drip vent is one of them: it's positioned right above the rail to the steps leading down from the deck, with the resul that during a hot summer there is a constant dripping that results in a slimy coat of muck on the rail and several of the stairs. A few years back I rigged up a collection system using old garden hose and hose clamps, vowing that I would one day get around to rigging up a more satisfactory, less crappy-looking rig. Last Fall, we had our house painted, and naturally my rig came down in the process. This summer has been the hottest in three years, and is on track to go even further into the history books, so the time has come. I started with a collection tray that barely worked at all, but at least had the effect of keeping the steps dry for a while, then made a funnel-and-hose combo that was almost okay, and then, yesterday, fetched the clear plastic hose from the nearby ACE hardware, which is a five minute drive there but, somehow, has turned into an hour's drive back. (It has apparently become necessary to return via Belmont and Mount Holly. I'll never understand the roads around here.~) So anyways, an hour and change later, I returned to the house, rigged up a funnel-n-hose collector system that drains all the way down below the siding of the house and under the stairs. Genius!
Before that, of course, I had to take the recyclables to the recycling center. Wednesday is our day for the recycling truck, and I was heartened to see, on my return from the ACE, that all the recycling bins in the neighborhood had been duely emptied. Except ours. So I strapped down the newspapers, plopped the bin in the passenger seat-- too big for the Miata's trunk-- and made the 30 minute trip to the recycling center. Of course, it took another hour to get back, as I had to go via Shopton Road to Birkdale and back down the Northwest Passage. Bastards!+
And on Monday, I drove to China Grove. Having sought an opportunity to try out a Di Pinto 12-string electric guitar, which I have seen advertised online but never got my actual hands on, I found out there was a dealer in the burg north-east of Concord, about a 40 minute drive on the Interstate. I left here about 9:30, and got back to the house about 1:30. Of course, that includes about twenty minutes kibitzing with the guys at the guitar shop. Turns out they didn't have any Di Pinto's in stock, but it was well worth the drive.
Apparently, I like my new car alot.
*Crossing the I-77 corridor is always troublesome. Most of the routes are clogged up with traffic headed for the ramps and the retail sprawl beyond, the people driving the trucks don't give damn about anyone else, and the people driving the cars have no idea how to drive their cars, or where they're going. Finding ways across the corridor that are free of clutter has become one of my special pleasures. And no, I'm not telling you where they are.
~If anyone isn't getting this gag yet, I am an excellent navigator, and I know the streets of my town, and those around it, terrifically well. I just like driving, so I end up finding some Godawful circuitous routes home from places.
+Ibid. (I know; that was completely unnecessary. I just like writing "ibid.")
A BLOG ON THE HORIZON: July 28th: A Brief Visit
So I get a call from Doc Nagel the other night. "Our flight to SFO has been delayed," he said words to the effect of, "How about we waltz into Charlotte and screw up your entire schedule?"
"Nifty!" says I, "I'll pick you up at the airport at some ridiculous hour!"
"Some ridiculous hour it is! We'll pick the most outlandish flight schedule there is!" So I picked up the Doc and his paramour Lauren at the airport at eight fifteen on Tuesday night (I know, I know, it's not what you would really call a ridiculous hour, but hey, I gotta take my kicks where I can get 'em) and shoved them and their luggage into the Wifey's Mini, which Lauren proclaimed to be even cuter in person than in any picture, and whisked them off to Soggy Bottom, after a quick stop at the Alphabet Store for necessary provisioning. An extended evening of talking, drinking, and abusive guitar playing ensued, and the next morning I was not in anything you would call "shape." Nonetheless, I rose early, coffeed, and took the wife to work on the premise that I would then be able to further whisk the Doc and Lauren around town in her Mini. After getting back to the shack and awaiting the awakening of my slumbering visitors, Chris and I schlepped out to a nearby Bojangles for breakfast materials, and after a suitable wait, we traipsed off into the vast, thick Charlotte landscape. Right around noon. That'll sound significant shortly.
The itinerary (It's A Long Way-- Itinerary!) (Sing that to the tune of "It's A Long Way to Tiperary," if that's how you spell Tiperary) was loose, but included stops in North Charlotte and the University area which were common to the Doc and myself in our college days (Lookit-- the Tryon Street ABC store!) and followed by a running tour of all the places I've lived in this foccocta town, with a quick lunch at the last remaining Akropolis (the original Charlotte Greek food chain) for a quick bite of lunch. Four hours later I dropped the pair at the airport, slung their baggage on the curb, and hugged them farewell, all of us parting with the same single salutation: "See you in a month."
On the way off the airport campus, I thought to check the Mini's onboard computer. I was after the average fuel consumption (MPG, 26.7, by the way) for a day spent traipsing around with the air conditioning on, but first came across the current temp reading: 104 degrees. The hottest day in probably three years, perhaps longer, and I had chosen to spend it running around town seeing sights. Starting at NOON. The things I do for my friends.
Then, of course, this morning my Dad calls to tell me that Scotty and her cherubs have arrived; the cherubs will be in town for ten days while Scotty and her husband, Craig go on a week's vacation. Gad. It never ends. It just never ends.
YO, HO, BLOG THE MAN DOWN REDUX: July 24th: Men and Women
I never subscribed to the standard-issue men-are-different-from-women crap. I always figured that people are people, and have differences and similarities. And although it makes cheap and efficient stand up comedy and bestselling bullshit book material, the whole men vs. women issue always seems to boil down to whatever crap people want to believe about the world in general, bolstered by the notion that things wouldn't be as screwed up as they are if it weren't for those damned men/women and the way they are by nature. Which is a pretty screwed up argument, really, when you get down to it. But yetserday I displayed behavior that puts me, to the casual observer, firmly in the Stereotypical Man category.
Having spent the day running about the counrty side (first in my Miata, then in the Wifey's Mini) with my nephew Joe (Miata) and later with both him and nephew Kyle (Mini), challenging the country roads on the Northern edge of the county and dropping in at Tony's for lunch, all of which was a pre-text for being absent while the ladies of the family threw a baby shower, I took my leave early while Rachelle stayed on to visit with her sisters, and tasked myself with doing the grocery shopping for the week in the process.
It is not generally true, but yesterday, as it turned out, I should not have been allowed to go to the grocery store by myself. In addition to not spending the requisite $40-- the Harris Teeter has week-to-week givaways, spend 40 bucks a week for 14 weeks and win a picnic cooler thingy-- I also didn't get the one thing my wife asked me to get: oatmeal. Instead I came back with a quarter pound of pastrami, a quarter pound of corned beef, a quart of carrot juice, a half pound sirloin patty, eight hamburger buns, a jar of chili, a quart of milk, a bag of frozen french fries, and a six-pack of Sierra Nevada pale ale. Now, not that I don't buy things on impulse-- I do, and I tend to shop by impulse as a habit, since I end up with neater stuff that way-- but this particular venture, in retrospect, was just too much. URRRGGHH. ME MAN. ME GO SHOP, BUY MEAT, BREAD, BEER. BEEEEEEEERRRRR!
BLOGGING DOWN THE HORSE: My Disk Runneth Over.
OK. So it's not Pan. It's Nomi.
"Pan" just never quite took. "Nomi" is Japanese for "flea," and it's non-gender-specific, so I guess I like it better for both of those reasons.
I make these things way more personal than most people, I suppose. Fir instance, after having bought Gracie, the Takamine Jumbo 12-string that my niece Cayla calls a Takamine Taco (for reasons that are still not clear to me), I began to contemplate getting a new guitar strap. The one she started out with was a cheapo Ernie Ball strap that I picked up when I bought my Washburn electric, and, frankly, it just seemed a little . . . well, a little insulting, in a strange way. So I started thinking about what the most appropriate strap might look like.
A couple of years ago, I started wearing Hawaiian shirts.
I had always liked Hawaiian shirts, and in fact some of my heroes wore them as a mark of felicitous irreverence, but for whatever reasons-- mostly frugality-- I never really got around to collecting them. All it took was a bargain at the Old Navy store to start me collecting them, and now, as my wife has noted, "Wintering Out" for me consists cheifly of rotating the long-sleeved Oxford cloth and flannel shirts for the Hawaiians. So the perfect strap is going to be, natch, Hawaiian. And so it is.
It took some doing, and when I eventually found it I actually stumbled across it, rather than having it pop up in my search when I used the words "Hawaiian print guitar strap." The make is Dunlop, the model, I'll have you know, is "The 5-0." And that's all I have to say about that for right now, as I must go figure whether it is just a hoax, or if my Geocieties "disc" is actually 96.7% full, and whether I need to look into getting more storage for $4.95 per month.
PS: It was. The reason I didn't have the pictures-- of my side of the clothes closet and of Gracie and her new strap, respectively-- for a coupla weeks is that the first time I uploaded them, they consisted of 19,873,652,982,762,908,091,210 byte files. I got the Wifey to re-size them.
PPS: Alton Brown is at it again.
A BILGRIM'S BLOGGRESS: July 15th: And Leon's Getting La-a-a-a-a-a-rger
At breakfast yesterday, at the lovely little greasy spoon I call the Gitmo, it came to my attention that it was the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, which used to be known, in the civilized world, as Bastille Day. This took place in the form of the short "Today in History" column on page 2. Of course, back in the days when I used to see Bastille Day heralded on the front page of the paper, little if anything was printed about the bloodshed and devastation that followed, nor the fact that the majority of those freed from the Bastille were not refusniks but criminals. Call that a trade off, I guess.
Speaking of trade-offs, the latest tempest in a teapot involving Iraq, War, and the CIA, has officially gotten beyond ridiculous. Of course it was Rove who outed the CIA agent, and of course he will pay no price, political or otherwise. He's a professional asshole. If it had been one of the amateurs in the White House, that'd be a different matter, there would have to be some blood spilt. But Rove is a Pro. He knows what he's doing. And of course Novak leaked first, but it's the others, not Novak, who need to be punished. Again: a Pro.
Had this been Watergate, Rove's nickname would have been "Deep Shit."
Of course, some bloggers out there actually do have something valuable to say. But not me. Not today.
THE SADDEST LITTLE BLOG IN ALL OF CHRISTENDOM: July 6th: Yet Another Entry Having Little Or Nothing To Do With It's Contrived Title/Subject Line
So this past weekend we went and watched "The War of the Worlds," which, in retrospect, was the logical extension of Stephen Spielburg movie: pure speculative spectacle. At the time, it was easy to marvel at the inventiveness of it, but after awhile the contrivances become cloying, including those scenes which were deliberately laid out to enunciate Speilburg's brilliance as an auteur and filmmaker. Which is fine: he's earned it. Besides, it kind of stands to reason. When Wells wrote his book-- which I have been revisiting since seeing the film-- the nam,e of the game was scientific exploitation. We thought we-- mankind-- were reaching a point where our own brilliance was becoming dangerous! We were within a nonce of challenging God, forsooth! Science was reaching farther than ever before, and Mankind might be in danger of upsetting the Natural Balance of things, perhaps sending the whole order of things spinning out of control! (I ran across several forms of base prejudice and seven kinds of abandoned junk science within the first three pages.) Wells' vision was to be something horrific on the hugest possible scale: the possible, if not probable, annihilation of man, the elimination of the human species from the face of the Earth. Something so horrific it could scarcely be imagined. World Wars I and II were yet to come. Wells had no idea.
So fair's fair. Wells had no clue what was about to errupt, so we can forgive his slogging prose and the notion that the greatest threat to Mankind might come from a like-minded species on another planet (Mars) whose home planet continued to cool after it had formed (as would, Wells claimed, Earth), instead of the conflict between Facism and Imperialism (TWICE). Spielburg has already exploited nature, UFO's, and WWII (TWICE) (THREE TIMES if you count "Empire of the Sun," but I'm trying to be nice about things here), Harrison Ford, and Corey Feldman. (Easy marks, but that's another story.) So it's only fair: give him his due. What is there left to exploit except the kind of blind, blinkered fear that would come with the understanding that the Aliens are here and they mean to wipe us off the face of the planet. (Yeah, yeah: I thought of that too, but where "Independence Day" was more blandly heroic, and its alien attack more measured, Spielburg's "WOTW" is more relentlessly, chaotically destructive, and it's hero more of a calculated Joe Blow.) And it works, for the most part: the entire earth is under attack. Where do you go? What do you do? Probably stumble around doing whatever comes to mind, good ideas and bad, doing whatever you can to survive. And only once or twice does Spielburg the Ham Fisted Moralizer-- whoda thunk it?-- come across with a homina-homina-homily and throw a spanner in. (And of course the ending was ridiculous. Not as bad as Jerry "Throw Money At Me" Bruckheimer's ending for "Pearl Harbor," which made it look as if, in the words of our pal Nick the Brit, as if the American campaign in the Pacific was waged by two guys who grew up together, but still.)
Which brings me back to what was supposed to be the subject of the previous entry: advertising. I was going to go at some length about adverts for products I don't buy and lines I don't patronize, specifically Steak & Shake and Geico. The Geico thing has been ongoing, of course. I like the vast majority of their advertising, and the So Easy A Caveman Could Do It campaign is, well, genius! Sheer genius! And to be completely fair, when Carlita the Corolla got creamed, it was Geico who paid her off and thus allowed me to purchase my nifty little Miata. But, for whatever reason, I will probably never be a Geico customer. I just don't trust 'em.
The Steak & Shake thing has it's own dillemmas. We went top a S&S once, while we were living in Atlanta, with the specific intent of having one of their astounding looking ice cream concoctions. After eating, however, we were both a little queasy; the food had been heavy and on the greasy side, and the last thing in the world we wanted was a milkshake. In the last year or two we have started seeing the ads of TV, and, although I don't know where one is around here, the Wife and I proclaimed our insistance on not going to one of the joints, based on the one visit. And although, again to be fair, we have since thought that we had not perhaps given the chain a good enough chance to impress, I still find it incomprehensible that I am so ga-ga over the ads for their "Sippable Sundaes." The presenter are all cute kids pretending that they work at the Great Steak & Shake in the Sky, where the customers are quiet, the conditions are sterile, and the environment is collegial, almost Greek. And they all respond to interrogation with differing, nuanced attitudes, from slight impatience to outright paranoia to cool lassitude. (The gag is that these gargantuan milkshakes consist of a plethora or toothsome layerings of ambrosia.) (And they do look like deliciosities, indeed they do.) It's not very intelligent or creative (And? And?), but, for whatever reason, they hit me where I live.
Which is, in a nutshell, the magic of advertising, to make people want what they would otherwise abhor. Same as with propaganda. Only I think advertising kills fewer. (Yes, I am hedging; I don't want to be called upon to prove anything there.) On the other hand, there was another commercial that hit me where I live this morning which had nothing to do with the magic of advertising. It was an ad for Chili's, which is one of our favorite chain joints (or joint chains, more appropriately), so it had a leg up. It was for ribs (I believe I'm on record there). And one of the products-- the deal is mix-and-match ribs-- is advertised as dry rubbed Memphis-style ribs. I hadn't been paying attention, but when I heard that, my ears pricked up, and I spent the next few moments with my fingers all but crossed, thinking to myself "Please please please please pleeeeeeeease, not Applebee's. (I know people have had fine and dandy meals at Applebee's. I simply am not one of them.) Once it turned out that it was Chili's, negotiations with the Wifey ensued, with the result that we will be going to Chili's this weekend.
I saw the ad in its entirety a bit later in the day. It's yer standard yuppies-eating-food-at-the-bar approach, not terribly impressive, and the ribs looked like ribs. (You can't tell anything about ribs by looking at them, or not much anyways.) But they sold me. Which brings to mind that old saw of wishfull thinking: if your product is really that good, you don't need much advertising.
But it's not true. We all need advertising. This country, most wealthy countries, run on it. Advertising, for want of a better word, is what is going to save that other malfunctioning corporation known as the United States of America.*
*Cf. "Wall Street."
THE NEXT BLOG YOU READ: June 30th: If You Are Reading This Blog . . .
So after running some basic and only semi-necessary errands, using up the relatively cool morning as an excuse to ramble about in my neato little Japanese sports car, I concluded that a little luch was in order, and, on a whim, decided to try some Taco Bell. I haven't had the Hell-- that, of course, comes from the nickname the extablishments get from collge students, Taco Hell, which it gets because many college students who do not precisely like the food served there are drawn to it because much of it can be had for extremely cheap-- as I say, I haven't had the Hell in something over a year if memory serves, and on this particular visit, I got what I deserved, about which more below. But my immediate subject is that, having had my fill and settling down to some casual web surfing while watching a film about John Lennon.
Suffice it to say I have rarely enjoyed a film about John Lennon quite as much, if taken as a matter of comparison.
Which is to say that the internet, as it sometimes becomes, was broken. It took sites 20-30 minutes to come up, if they came up at all, and without exception I couldn't get any of them to bring up anything past the front page. I re-booted twice; after the last one I seemed to having a better time of it, got my Geocities file manager up and running with little or no trouble, which is usually a sign that all is well, as the Geocities file manager is one of the more ornery web apps I typically pull up.
So all that is by way of saying: if you are reading this now, my luck held. If you are not reading this now, then it did not, and I lost my text because I didn't save it to a clipboard before trying to save it to the manager. Dumbass!
So this time I got what I deserved at Taco Hell. I have often said that the Hell provides a decent approximation of Mexican food, which I don't think is a less than fair assessment either way. This time, the kid screwed up my order in the lightest possible way-- he gave me two orders of Pintos 'n' Cheese, which was okay because they reheat reasonably well, and instead of "a Coke," he heard "to go," which was fine too, since I did mean to take the food home, and I didn't have what you would call a problem with having my food with a Saranav IPA, which I just happened to have in the fridge at home.
However, when I was handed my food, it was in a plastic bag, like the kind they give you at the grocery store. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but when I got the stuff home, poured the beer, and started in, I found that the bag had the effect of slow steaming the food on the way home. So the beans were all right, but the soft tacos and the "Mexi-Melt"(TM) were on the gummy, floury side. The tacos faired OK, but the "Mexi-Melt"(TM) was a complete waste of time. Which had the effect of making me feel a bit better about not liking Taco Hell's TV ads.
BLOGGITY-BLOG-BLOG-BLOG: June 27th: Watching Movies
"Jeremiah Johnson is an experience. It may not be a film that you want to rent with a bunch of friends, but rather a film to watch by yourself, when you are in sort of a contemplative mood."
I have long had a fascination with the film Jerimiah Johnson. It is beautiful, it is contemplative, and it is utterly stupid. On the one hand, the depictions of a man alone living through the winter in the Rocky Mountains are incredibly rich. On the other hand, the myth of mountain men living alone thought winters in the Rocky Mountains is one I never got myself to believe. I mean, I know some did, but it's still a hard ting for me to get my head around. Also, the notion that a man, a woman and a 12-year-old boy can build a log cabin together is not one that stretches the imagination, but the idea that they would build a 20-by-30 foot basketball court sized building is a little ridiculous.
But the scene that gets me is the one where Jerimiah, having agreed to guide the rescue party to the encampment of Christian women and children, who are trapped and starving in the mountains (for no heartily explained reason), guides them directly to a Crow Indian burial ground, which, he says, they cannot cross. The Rescuers (who are Christian, and therefore clearly evil) force Jerimiah to lead them across the burial ground, and this is the transgression which sets up the bloody denoument: the Crow therefore kill Jerimiah's Indian wife and adopted (sorta) son, and this leads to a bloodfeud between Jerimiah and the Crow which finally ends shortly after Jerimiah has wearied of fighting and killing. (The working title for this film, according to imdb.com, was "Crow Killer.")
On the other hand, the imdb.com guy's main complaint, that the film doesn't so much conclude as merely end, is dead wrong. The ending of Jerimiah Johnson is one of the most compelling final scenes in the history of film. It embodies closure, forgiveness, acceptance, and loss in a few silent minutes. And if the imdb.com jerk can't see that, what in the hell gives him the right to write about movies, ever, at all, again? (Except maybe in hell. I guess he could be writing about movies in hell. That I would find acceptable.)
On the other hand, he's right about this being a movie to watch alone while in a contemplative mood. I am at two with nature.
BLOG AND ORDER: June 21st: It Must Be That Sound
I have fallen into a rather suspect habit of late: watching re-runs of Law & Order, which run in the early afternoon, by which time I am usually reading stuff on the net. Most of the time it happens just because there's nothing else on in the middle of the afternoon. (I cannot, for instance, enrich myself by watching "Step Into Liquid" or "Endless Summer" for the gazillionth time.) (Did I blog about this before? Maybe I did. Oh well.) The main reason it comes up as a subject is, while looking for the quote about law and sausages (no luck) (and yeah, I was gonna write something related to the last topic), the show came on, and it finally struck me: the theme music.
I have a perverse fascination for Mike Post compositions. Some time after the whole Miami Vice fad had begun to fade fast (this would be around '84), somebody decided it would be a good idea to produce an album full of Post's TV themes, and an aspiring musician friend of mine got a copy of it. Having admitted he was braver than we were, me and a pal named Matt encouraged him to bring it to school (this would have been high school) so we could hear it. The aspiring musician (whose name eludes me) did so, and we lifted a tape player from the music department, camped out backstage in the auditorium during lunch, and prepared to Share and Enjoy! (HAH!)
During the first tune-- and no, I do not recall what order, if any, the compositions were in-- Matt started flashing me conspiratorial looks, fairly blatently. I remember I could feel myself blushing. I didn't want to let on. Not only did Post's compositions not lend themselves to full-length play-- and the jazz musicians assembled to play the compositions seemed hard tasked to stretch the pieces out-- they flat out fell apart under the various attempts at soloing over a theme or comping to a line. By the third cut, the effect had become downright embarassing, and I was physically retstraining myself from saying what was ringing through my head, which was "No wonder it took so long for this to come out." This had been one of those things that came out something like a year after it had been announced, with a teaser about the project coming soon every month or so. I was saved by Matt, who could lack tact on occasion, who finally looked up at our pal the aspiring musician and said "You got so rooked." Our pal summoned up an embarassed smile, which was something he wore fairly often, and nodded assent. He had been rooked.
We didn't listen to the rest of the album. They tried playing some of the bits on AOR radio for a while. It didn't take, natch.
So it was kind of gratifying, as I sat here with my Bartlett's in my lap, to happen upon the sudden realization that the theme to Law & Order is the underpinning of the theme to Miami Vice slowed down with the melody to Doogie Howser, MD transposed into a minor key.
Of course, that's still not why I watch. I don't know why I watch. Not that you could really call it "watching." But it isn't the theme song, and it sure as hell isn't "that sound." (Blog-blog!)
MY BLOGONEY HAS A FIRST NAME: June 17th: Salami, Salami, Bologna
A shore time back I happened to mention to Dog Nagel that I had been eating bologna sandwiches recently, to which he said words to the effect that he didn't get it, followed quickly by a confession that maybe he didn't really actually know from bologna. A short time later, there was a bit of running commentary in the local paper, starting with a story in the food section touting a local restaurant that specializes in fried bologna sandwiches, followed by a Vent (anonymous mini-rants on the op-ed page) that wehn one goes out to a restaurant, one should expect better than soemthing they might make at home, like a fried bologna sandwiches.
Now, I could be wrong, but I think the Doc's complaint is more or less universal, that is to say that most people don't know from bologna. This is unintentional and innocent, I believe: most people ate bologna as kids, and were thus exposed to whatever it was their moms were slinging into their lunch boxes, which most likely were selected on price rather than virtue. (Nothing against moms here, but, frankly, that's the way things happen alot of the time.) I fell into the same trap myself, despite the fact that when we got bologna as kids it was, in fact, the good stuff (as near as I can remember). But then there's this stuff, this turkey bologna, and it's so damned cheap, and what the hell? Bologna's bologna, right? Wrong. Same with hot dogs. Wrong. These are both sausages, and the making of sausage is something that should be taken very seriously. The people at Gwaltney have no idea what they're doing.
The bologna I buy, when I buy bologna, is the Oscar Meyer beef bologna, thick-cut. I know there are alot of different ways to utilize bologna, but I guess I'm something of a purist: white bread, mustard, mayo, and American cheese. Sometimes I fry the bologna, which . . . OK, nothing else in the world tastes like fried bologna, and there's not point in trying to describe it. My process in this case is as follows: prep the bread with mustard, mayo & cheese, fry the sausage 1 slice at a time. I used to make a lateral cut out from the center of the slice so that the slice doesn't tent and thus cooks more evenly, but these days I've taken to making an X incision in the center of the slice, flipping it when it tents, which seems ot work just as well. Put the sausage on the bread, give the pan a quick wipe down, butter in the pan, dab of butter on the outside of each side of the sandwich, grill it up.
I cannot testify to the kind of bologna sandwich they might have been offering at the restaurant touted by the Observer, and they have been known to tout restaurants that had no virtue except being run by really old people who are not from somewhere else. But the last time I saw a bologna sandwich ordered out was when Rachelle ordered at a joint called Pike's Pharmacy, a semi-upscale sandwich shop over in the part of town people* call South End, what came out was a slice of bologna a half inch thick. It didn't really strike me as something one might make at hom, but then, well, hell, do I seem normal to you? Several times after the bout at Pikes, Rachelle has urged me to buy a slice of the Deitz and Watson bologna at the Harris Teeter deli so I could try making the same kind of sandwich at home. This usually happens after I've already put a package of the Oscar Meyer stuff in the cart. But, one day, while I was in getting an order of shaved pastrami, I noticed that the D&W bologna was on sale for $4.99 a pound. I asked the deli person if she would cut me a single slice of bologna, half an inch thick. She obliged. A few nights later I found myself cooking in my sleep, which I do now and then. I woke up at a little after midnight, standing over a pan, frying bologna. I said to myself, "Well, I guess I'm having a bologna sandwich." It was terrific. I swear to God, there's nothing like it.
*When I say "people," I mean Charlotte boosters, like the Chamber of Commerce and the dinks over at the Observer. Which is fair. They think they're people.
OH, BLOG ME: June 15th: Skepticism
I'm a skeptic.
Now, that's not really saying anything, or anything much. Some people, including Noc Nagel's pal Bob seem to put quite the premium on labeling themselves skeptics, and not to take anything away from them (about which more follows), they're so wrong.
This feeds into my recent fears that I have chosen the wrong path in not beccoming a Blogger(TM). That is, not signing up for a blogging service that allows other to monitor whether or not I have been blogging, and that requires that I engage the blogging community in a wholehearted fashion, in that I may not blog or solicit/accept comments on my blog until I have read and/or commented on the blogs of others (again, nothing agianst Bob, or the Wifey, or Doc Nagel, or anyone else in the bloggosphere for that matter, and again, more about this below). After all, it has been 5 days since my last blog (forgive me, Father), but hey, who's noticed? And why or how would I notice who'd noticed, given that my own blog does not have a self-contained mechanism for encouraging and documenting notice?
My point here-- and I do have one*-- is that part of me is resisting the urge to become a Blogger(TM) because I want to resist the appearance of being an attention whore. And although most of the people who blog-- Doc Nagel's pal Bob, Doc Nagel, the Wifey, and most of the people I know with whom these people have corresponded-- are not attention whores, the Bloggosphere itself was founded by attention whores, and every third time I look around someone is touting the wisdom of someone in the blogging community who has absolutely nothing to offer besides a pathological desire to attention. So that makes me a skeptic.
Which is to to say that Doc Nagel's pal Bob is wrong when he says he's a skeptic. He very well may be, for all I know. But his latest screed, wherein he decries the use of the terms "miaracle" and "tragedy," in that they demean the very siginificance and meanings of the terms, is just wrong. A skeptic, first off, knows better than to believe in miracles. A miracle is either an overblown description of events or an out-and-out lie. A tragedy is in the eyes of the beholder: what I might consider tragic you might consider trivial, and what might be a tragedy for you might not touch me at all. I mean, September the 11th (2001)(TM) was a tragedy until they started issuing commemorative coins for it at 60 bucks a pop, right?
Right?
Years ago, in fact over a decade ago, an ex-lover of mine got infatuated with the novel Oblomov, in which the title character, for the first half of the novel, cannot be moved to get out of bed. Her infatuation was based largely on the fact that post-revolutionary reformers in the Soviet Union accused those who didn't move quickly enough to strike down remnants of the old feudal system of "Oblomovism," which was less than ironic since the reason Oblomov couldn't be made to get up was he was stuck daydreaming about the bucolic life on his farm under the old feudal system. That she made no mention of the fact that people starved as efficiently under the feudal system as they did under the first decade of Communist rule (although they would starve much more efficently in decades to come), or the fact that the second half of the book dealt with Oblomov being defrauded by his confidants when he was finally moved to get up (after being forced to change apartments), nor that what was put forth as the most compelling reason for Oblomov to get out of bed during the first half of the novel was socializing and backstabbing, led me to conclude, eventually, that she had not actually read the novel. (She was an Ayn Rand fan. Go figure.)
Of course, I said nothing. I didn't figure there was any percentage in it. If she ever got up the gumption to seek out and actually read the novel, which would be difficult as best since it is a rare thing indeed to find, she'd find out it was Vanity Fair in ex-Bolshevik clothing. And, to be fair, I never read the book either. (Nor did I ever find that Russian novel one of my college lit studies mentors thought I should read wherein the lead character spends the entirely of the novel lying half-dead in a drainage ditch by the side of the road.) To be doubley fair, I never read anything of Rand's in its entirety. To be tripley fair, she has most likely moved on from that part of her life, and is no longer troubled with Oblomovism. (The ex-lover, not Ayn Rand.)
So that's skepticism. I guess. See? I had a point. Oh, and by the way, DesCartes was not a skeptic. He knew all along that he would prove the existence of God. All the Cogito ergo Sum crap was just a means to a cynical end. And Jane McAlexander Pope, Deputy Editor of the Charlotte Obsever's editorial pages, no matter now much she rails agasinst cynicism, is a cynic. (She claims to be a skeptic, but she doesn't write well enough for anyone to be able to tell.)
*cf. Ellen Degeneres, et al.
LUUUUUUCYYYYY! YOU GOT SOM BLOGGIN' TO DOOOOOO!!! June 10th: Things That I Used To Do
Some time back-- I even went so far as to scan my own back blog to find it, how honest I am-- I claimed that there was no such person as Deep Throat, that Woodstein made the guy up to cover their tracks. Or, more to the point, to justify their specualtions on the Watergate story. That second conjecture was the one that made more sense to me, as it seems as if the guys got lucky on that one story, seeing as they never, either one of them nor both together, ever broke another story of any importance whatsoever. But now it turns out that there was a Deep Throat. So I was wrong. I was lying; I knew there was a Deep Throat all along. I didn't particularly care who it actually was, and most of the speculation, especially the speculation that it might have been Pat Buchanan, I found no more than stupidly amusing. But when it turned out to be Mark Felt, I couldn't help but find it pleasingly amusing. I mean, it made sense: number 2 at FBI, had access to facts but figured that his career was (for the moment) screwed, so he could feel free to blab to the Post guys without worrying too much about it. Also, he had a reason to try to get Nixon screwed, having been passed up for the number 1 spot in favor of a political time server who was, at even date, screwing around and pissing people off. On top of all that, who but an FBI shit-wit would find that whole parking garage schtick amusing? (This is one of the things that made it make sense it might be Buchanan.) Ever spent any time in a parking garage? If there are people talking two levels below you, you can hear them. If you're trying, you can just about make out what they're saying. If you are going for anonymity, you go walking in the fucking park.
But then some of the things that got said took the fun out of the whole thing. The whole "Was He A Hero Or A Traitor?" debate for instance. Especially when Pat Buchanan got into it. That fucker can take the fun out of anything. Especially when he claimed that Mark Felt's betrayal of the White House robbed all the honor from the 58,000 dead Americans in Vietnam. (Yeah. The fucking bastard said that, immediately negating any credibility the flacid dick has ever had in his entire life.) Was Mark Felt a bastard? Yeah. Was he a Patriot or a Traitor? POV. Was he in any way responsible for our failure in Vietnam? Oh, please! Fuck off!!! Not by talking to Bob Woodward, anyways.
Later in his illustrious career he took up arms to defend the Government's right to screw with whoever they wanted on the slimmest of justifications without having to say nothin' to nobody, and, yet again, Harry Shearer was the only member of the media* to point out that particular irony. Felt was a patriot in the way only dedicated gevernment agents can be a patriot: to hell with the country and it's people. We'll decide what's best. Deep Throat's first substantial line in "All the President's Men" is "The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand." Truth be told, if Felt is deserving any condemnation, that's about as accurate as it gets. The tapes, the money trail, the break-in: it was all destined to come out, Woodstein not withstanding.
Of course, I could be wrong about that, too. I've been wrong before. On the other hand, I did find this when I went back scanning my blog for the original DT~ reference, which proves two things: First, Alton updates his blog every month and a half, whether he needs to or not,+ and second, the man is clearly hell with an audience. In the pic placed up top, there are five, maybe ten, people tipping the bit. The rest look like they're actually sleeping. That is a hard trick to pull off.
*I really shouldn't say that about Harry. I don't know him that well, after all.
~Years ago I speculated that the name Deep Throat came from the original nickname DT, which Woodward gave his source because every time he met they guy he was drunk off his ass. The source, not Woodward. All though all things are possible in this best of all possible worlds.
+Fair is fair: he's a TV star and he's on a book tour. Who has time to blog? (I mean, besides me.)
SYNCHROBLOGITY: June 9th: Confluences
It's been a kind of an odd day. Not eventful, just . . . Odd.
I started the day trying to stave off a tinge of guilt, which I don't deserve in any way whatsoever. I'm feeling guilty-- or tending to feel a tinge of guilt-- because while the Wifey is out there fighting the good fight against huge odds and to little tangible avail, I am here at home, where I can write, working on any one of a number of projects I have in mind, play guitar, watch movies, or do all three at once. (Believe me, I am capable of such a feat.) So clearly, he current state of alienation and frustration at work is my fault. 'Cause I'm here. Right?
So in the effort to distract myself from this tinge of guilt-- I'm starting to like that phrase-- I found myself surfing the net. Going to my e-mail, I perused the All Music Guide newsletter, which I actually got yesterday. After zipping past some of the hot new entries, I began to read reviews of old Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass albums, which have just been re-released, while practising a new discipline of listening to newer pop releases on Vh1 while not watching the videos. (This practise is supposed to prove to me that I am forming unfairly unfavorable opinions of the new releases from watching the videos, which are uniformly horrid and sadistic where they're not lavishly pandering to superficial wealth and sexuality. Mixed results so far.) It took a few minutes for it to register, but I began to revisit my always problematic response to Herb & The Brass. On the one hand, the brass was always something of a vanity project: Herb was one of the founders of A&M, in fact he was the A,* so he automatically had the backing, financing, distribution, etc. But, Gad, what music! On the other hand, think about what else was out there! Motown! The last days of the high era of Hard Bop! Oh, yeah: Perez Prado. Chubbie Checker and the last permutations of The Twist. But still: Did "Spanish Flea" deserve eight weeks at number one? (Or whatever the number was, I forget.) Well, in a way, yeah, people were looking for a palatable alternative that what everyone in the music industry thought was the next great alternative, which was Rock & Roll, which some folks just weren't ready for. On the other hand, weren't Herb's solos all single line comps? Can't say all, but . . . Then again, the orchestration! As a rhythm guitarist, I . . . Well . . . OK you know what? Never mind. I could explain that to you all day long, and it wouldn't mean a damned thing unless you sat down and listened to the compositions, and listened for the rhythm guitar lines. They're a bit buiried under the horns.
Which last point I only really am moved to make since I pulled up a dozen or so samples of a dozen of so recordings from a half dozen albums, at which point I reconciled my opinion: OK, OK, so I like the Tijuana Brass. I like Herb's stuff. I don't have to reconcile myself with the widely held view of the musical community circa 1966 that they represented the nadir of popular music, and the meaninglessness of chart position. (What the hell did they know? The Beatles were right around the corner.) Then, finally, I clicked onto the one album that solidified my opinion of Herb (and/or the Brass): Rise.
The work was not unknown to me. The title tune, and it's B-side "Rotation," had been in pretty heavy airplay back in the 80's, but it hadn't been anything I had sought out. (My only in-depth experience with Herb & The Brass prior to that had been with a copy of the album Whipped Cream & Other Delights, which was owned by a kid I knew while we lived in Dallas ever so briefly, who got it on account of the chick covered in whipped cream (or whatever) on the cover, and wouldn't let me listen past the first cut on the record, and wouldn't let me borrow it to take home and listen to because he was convinced I was gonna steal it. The cover, not the record.) Anyways, at one point in college I had a roommate who had a high-end stereo system he didn't understand and a half a record collection. Most of it was genuinely unlistenable crap, but there were maybe a half dozen albums I could stand. One was Steely Dan's Gaucho, which I now have an uncurable crush on. One was The Eagles' Hotel California, which holds its own special place in Rock & Roll history. And one was Rise.
The first half dozen listens were perfunctory, just something to stick in my ear while I read or studied, but after a while I started listening closely, and the same thing I had sensed years ago, listening to Brass tunes, that whole Ameriachi thing, taking elements of style, layering them up, and laying a trumpet line on top. Pure cheesecake.
And what in the world is wrong with that? Lots of people like cheesecake, right?
Then again, that's largely the same argument people~ have been using to justify, even glorify, The White Stripes. Aside from the supposedly bizzarre relationship between the-- I don't know, is this right?-- brother and sister team, aside from their non-descriptly bizarre dress, despite the undertones of Satanism, the occult, and antidisestabishmentarianism, one fact remains inconrtovertable and intact: The White Stripes suck. I spent about a half a lifetime this morning listening to snippets from their latsest blockbuster release this morning, and it's all a load of tuneless, tinny, cacophonous crap. And I listen to Eric Dolphy on occasion.
But the mainstream knows what's best for us, and the mainstream says that if you want to listen to alternative rockers, the White Stripes are the alternative rockers to listen to. I think they're wrong, not to say damned to hell.
But, hey! What the hell do I know?!? I like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass!
*I didn't say that. You said it.
~I mean music critics. I know; I know. But they think they're people.
BLOGGATOA, WEST OF JAVA: June 7th: Listening to Harry Shearer's Radio Show
I should just take the week off. I'm due. The President has accused the people who gave information to Amnesty International about prisoner abuse at Gitmo-- the prison, not the restaurant-- of "disassembling," explaining that this means "when people don't tell the truth," and the only person in the press, so far as I know,* to have the temirity and perspective to point it out has been Harry Shearer. Which has amplified my feelings about listening to Harry's show. Very often, it feels like being in that post-apocolyptic flick where there's a crackpot in the desert, trasmitting the truth over ham radio frequencies, who can't seem to convince anyone of the truth.
I should take the week off. I just should. I'm due.
*To be fair, I heard the quote at least twice, and so could tumble to the conclusion that the people in the press let the thing roll and just figured we could come to our own conclusions, which is not a bad conclusion to tumble to, but, seriously folks, somebody-- somebody-- really ought to point this stuff out sooner or later. (PS: The blog title is taken (sort of) from the ubiquitous chronicle of the Krakatoa volcanic eruption, which, in it's very title, gets things wrong in a very unacceptable and unapologetic manner: Krakatoa is, in fact, to the East of Java.)
BLOG-BLOG, WOOF-WOOF: June 3rd: I Don't Feel Like Blogging
So we are finally done with the last project at Monsters Inc., and it's a damned good thing I signed that confidentiality agreement, because I just don't feel like talking about it. In other news, there's this, from Joshua Tyler of Cinemablend.com, via the Rotten Tomatoes website, on the new film "Lords of Dogtown:"
"More or less equivalent to skater porn."
Ahhhhhh. That's good to hear. Although he should have said "of," not "to." JAAAAAAAAANE! GET ME OFF THIS CRAZY THING!!!
THE ANSWER, MY FRIEND, IS STILL FREAKIN' BLOGGIN' IN THE GODDAMNED WIND: May 29th: News and Non-News
In the kind of serendipitous twist of fate that can only be appreciated in an irony-laden life like my own, The Wifey and I have entered burnout range in our extremely different occupations, a condition that is likely to persist until the passing of our own specific project deadline dates, which also happen to coincide. With the result that both of us are posting blogs the specific subject of which is the complaint that we aren't getting time to blog as often as we might like. Of course, then, there's the fact that this file has begun to become unwieldy (again) and it will soon be time to start another one. (As opposed to, say, actually joining a blogging service with archiving options and all that. That would be silly.)
But my real subject is the daily paper. Our beloved, beleaguered Charlotte Observer has been getting worse and worse of late. The most recent transgression is running the "color piece" wherein their "TV" writer, a weenie named Mark Washburn who rarely ever gets anything right,* and who should be well paid to just shut up and go away, follows our troops around Iraq and writes about how they all joined up because their patriotic and not because they were poor and wanted to shoot people without being charged with assault. (To be fair, he's partnered with some weenie from Ohio, ostensibly, one figures, because he is so incapable of getting shit right.) (Wait. No. That would make sense.) Meanwhile, on page four, no less, where people rarely ever venture, much less read in depth, next to an ad for Fink's Jewelers, there's a story about how we arrested a Syrian-born Canadian and sent him to Syria, kept him for ten months, interrogated him, beat him, and finally concluded that he had no ties to Al Quaeda.
Well. At least now we're sure.
Never mind that the Bush administration is refusing to help with the Canadian inquiry on the ground of preserving National Secrets. I mean that's not really news. The fact that the Bush Administration has no fucking idea what it's doing is in no way a secret. And, well, this kind of thing has been background noise for some time now. The liberals and conspiracy theorists have been rushing about proclaiming that civil liberites are in severe jeopardy for four years now (nearly), but most of us are still walking around in our own shoes, so it's hard to get concerned about the fact that we have had people in prison for over three and a half Judas-priest-ona-blind-three-legged-pony YEARS! (YEARS!!!) They're not Americans after all. (Wait, no, I guess some of them are by now.) But really, instead of Mark Washburn's fluff piece~ proclaiming Those who serve tell of pride, duty, the front page should bear a twelve-point headline proclaiming WE ARRESTED A GODDAMNED CANADIAN!!!
Fink's Jewelers: the President's Gemologists! I've had it. Our president is a fink. His whole administration is filled with finks. I used to let the bastard off by saying that our President is a dumbass,+ but more and more often it is becoming apparent that he is not as wholly oblivious to what is being done in the name of the good ol' USA as he might appear. Every time I see him explain away the actions of the Admin with that stupid goddamned smirk on his face, it becomes more apparent that he is, at heart, a four-year-old who enjoys saying "poopy."
*I mean it, folks. He has written columns about TV wherein he got the STARS NAMES wrong.
~A fluff piece about war. How offensive is that? How offensive should it be?
+Can it, critics; after all, I called Clinton a con man. I'm tough, but fair.
YO, HO, BLOG THE MAN DOWN, PART THE NEXT: May 22nd: Naming the Beast
Pan.
Pondering a name for my new toy (which is how I have been jokingly referring to it before showing it off to my co-workers, all seventy thousand of them, over the course of the last week) before trotting off to breakfast at the Gitmo, Rachelle suggested, and we settled on, Pan. Now, not normally being prone to naming things after Gods or mythological creatures, as I have an irrational fear of tempting fates that I do not honestly believe to exist, I was somewhat resistant, until the third time that the Wifey insisted it would be an understood and unspoken fact that Pan is short for "Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blaster." (She's re-reading the Guide, and it was her reaction on my suggesting the name Raul, and on her discovery that the name was growing on her, to start flipping through the Omnibus edition wildly suggesting names.)
However, it seems not an unfitting name, and has quickly grown on me. I feel especially good now that he-- more on this subject shortly-- has been de-Jerri-curled. Whatever glisten-inducer the fellas at the Porsche dealers applied to the roof, making it appear more-than-factory-fresh, which was completely unnecessary since the roof was in-- is in-- mint condition, had the unfortunate tendency to melt in the sun and then get washed down by the rain, leaving a thick, slimy film* on the rear and side windows. It didn't spread to the windshield until Friday morning, which caused me to be in a funk for the first two hours of the day which picked up as I commuted home right at four, which concluded with my decision that we would, in fact, be going to Mariachi's for dinner that night, signaled by the utterance "That's it; I'm having some f*cking tacos tonight."
So yesterday, after our trip to the zoo, before going out to the Gitmo for supper at the end of a long, rather grueling day, I hit the windshield, driver's side window, and rear window with Windex and paper towels, making a bare dent in all three surfaces. This morning, after breakfast at the Gitmo, I re-doubled my efforts, using one set of paper towels as an appplicator and a second set as a scrubber, with the result that all of the Triple X has been removed from my optics. I am a big fan of keeping the optics clean.
Everybody knows that there is nothing inherently masculine or feminine about vehicles. Cars are cars, and some cars, especially the larger SUV's, are meant to make the owner anonymous, and therefore impervious to criticism. My last car of choice, the Chrysler LeBaron, which we traded in when Rachelle bought her Mini, was named LeBaron von Munchausen Syndrom by Proxy, a sick name for a sick car. I always considered the car female, though, because of a vaguely classicist romantic streak I have that I have never been completely able to wipe away. Rachelle always considered LeMunch-- the car's offcial nickname in our family-- male, and was unconviced, not to say non-plussed, by my constantly referring to Le Munch as "she." The first four or five names we tried out on the Miata just lacked something, and the only one that showed signs of sticking was truly specious-- "Cruella," which depended largely on my getting a solid black racing stripe down the driver's side of the car, which, contrarily, would in no way make the car a DeVille. (And which, in Rachelle's estimable point of view, would amount to yet another form of tempting the fates.) Now, I know not whether she intended to, but by suggesting this morning that the car was begining to strike her more as masculine than feminine she opened the field up to a vastly greater amount of possibilities. In addition to this, the last thing I've said to the car-- yeah, I talk to my cars, so what?-- after ending the day's commute has been "I've gotta give you a name." This attests to the fact that I have been getting desperate.
So Pan it is. For good or ill, it's Pan.
*Like "XXX: State of the Union."
BY THE BLOG'S EARLY LIGHT: May 20th: News of the Whirrled
Last night, due to an intermittent rainstorm, the dog, seeking the safest place in the house from which to weather the storm, chose, of course, the wife's head. It was thus that I woke up at a quarter of six to a grumpy, not to say dogicidal, Wifey. With the result that I got up, mainly out of sympathy, an hour earlier than usual. I went to bed at a reasonable time-- so I began to reason-- I got plenty of sleep, I could benefit from having an extra hour's wake time before commuting in,* and, to top it all off, I could get some blogging in!~
Long story short, that hasn't happened. (You might have guessed that by now.) Not that my current lack of blogging~ has caused any alarm bells to go off, not as if it paid anything, not as if I had an obligation to the Western World or God and Country, but still, I feel guilty for not blogging more regularly, although God knows why. But, good intentions, as it has widely been noted are nothing, nothing, without coffee.
So I now have my coffee. Let the blogging~ begin!
Well, there's not much to say. I changed the strings on Gracie, my beautiful blonde Spruce Goose of a Takamine 12 string guitar, yesterday, and came upon a slightly grisly realization. Gracie is a show piece. I mean, not that she doesn't have a voice like the proverbial horny angel, not that she is not emminenently playable, but still, she's gorgeous. And she's clearly meant that way: the book-matched plys of her back, her cream bindings, the lovely, tasteful inlays, even the oversized, flared pick-guard, all meant for striking effect. Up to and including the rosewood bridge-and-saddle-piece.
The bridge piece is a through-and-through design, something rarely seen on acoustic guitars. Most have a bridge in which the strings are held by pegs inserted into the bridgepiece, securing the ball end of the string. This bridge has horizontal conduits for each string. Which is supposed to increase string life, and has the added effect of displaying the color-coded ball ends of my D'Addario extra light guitar strings, which is kind of cool and funky looking at that. But it also required that the entire length of the guitar string must be dragged across the bridgepiece in order to be strung. I can see not way around it.
Now, thoise of you who are unfamiliar with guitars (especially steel stringed ones) might, at this point, be saying to yourselves "What the hell?" Let me sum it up this way: every time I change the strings I have to drag 5 phosphor-bronze wrapped strings (and 7 plain steel ones) across the smooth, polished rosewood tailpiece. I change strings fairly often. Resulting, possibly, in grooving, scarring, folding spindling and mutilating of the rosewood tailpiece.
It's just kind of ironic in it's own little way.
In other news, the Wifet has given up of Nevil Shunt's book On the Beach. (Okay, okay: Nevil Shute.) This is a book my Dad has shoved at me as a work of genuius! Sheer genius! Rachelle's take was that maybe, in 1957, you might think something like that might happen in the far off days of 1963. But the characters are all walking cliches-- to be fair, that's my criticism, not hers-- and pretty much everything Nevil could have gotten wrong, he got wrong. Cobalt bombs? No such thing.
And in the end everybody kills themselves with, if I remember, cyanide tablets. As I remarked to Rachelle, Shunt's book very well may be one of the first of a long line of Cold War exploitation novels. Still, there have GOT to be better things to read.
*Commute? Hell! My current place of work is a scant eight minutes down the road with little or no traffic.
~Not that I really blog. I'm not really blogging.
BLOGGETH NOT, LEST YE BE BLOGGED: May 16th: Yes, After Breakfast
So in the midst of morning activities, after breakfast, while reading the comics and sipping up the dregs of my coffee, the Wifey blurts out "Soothing lavender-scented handle?"
And sure enough, there amongst the ads for diet aids and chocolate ice cream bars, was an ad for the new Bic Soliel Twilight triple-bladed razor, with, and I quote, "Soothing lavendar-scented handle." (I don't think she got this far: "Available in these sun-inspired colors." Now, unless my fourth-grade physics fail me, pretty much all colors can be said to be inspired by the sun . . . ) Rachelle's heralding battle cry of "What the hell were they thinking?" led me immediately to the thought that somebody somewhere is taking the business of ad agency management way, way, way too seriously.
So I bought a car. I bought a car, I bought a car. I bought a Miata. You can see pictures of it in the current installment of The Wifey's Blog, or you can read it here described. It's a white Miata with black trim and a decent amount of extras, including alloy wheels which are just biotchin' (I should coin that). We paid $6,500 for it, which Rachelle thought was too much until she realized what a peach piece of vehicle the thing is, and in mint condition too. (It's a 95 with 44 thousand miles on it.) We have been through a few names already, but so far nothing's stuck. My first thought was "Blondie," which Rachelle rejected out of hand. After that was "Cruella," but that would depend on whether or not I give her a black racing stripe. (Or two; that battle rages on between the Wifey and yer hero.) Also considered and rejected, suggested by fans of the Wifey's blog, "Dolly." (Small, blonde, big headlights.) Eghhhhh. Makes me think of the sheep. "Sharone" (pr. Sha-ron-eh, eg. the 80's hit by the Knack), But Rachelle said she'd then end up calling it the Balogn-ah (cf. Weird Al Yankovick). I thought of calling her "Grace," but that would kind of clash with "Gracie," which, my fans will remember, is the name of my solid spruce topped Takamine jumbo 12 string that my niece Cayla likes to call the Takamine Taco, for reasons still, to this day, unknown.
The debate rages on. Stay tuned.
EVERYBLOGGY LOVES THE SOUND OF A TRAIN IN THE DISTANCE: May 16th: Negotiations and Love Songs
SO the adjuster finally called, and after a short bout of Olympic-style phone tag the Wifey got the high sign from him: 58 tall* for the carcass of Carlita, which I have now decided to dub the Head of Alfredo Garcia. So off we go, looking for a car. Rachelle has decided on a Miata, which is fine by me. I had been out looking at Corallas earlier, and decided that I had gotten distinctly lucky with Carlita: the Corollas I found, mostly younger models, looked dumpy and dopey for the most part, and I think I lucked into one single model year that rode low and could corner hard. (Most of the people I see on the road in Corollas act as if they might roll over any minute. Coudl be the car, could be the drivers.)
So anyways, we're out to look, and maybe buy, or maybe wait. We won't get the check from the insurance company until after we transfer the title, but we could boot six grand out of savings without any undue discomfort. The only real decision we have to make is what color racing stripe to have applied. (Right now I'm thinking either blue or green, driver's side with a pin stripe.) (Or maybe red.) (Or perhaps black?)
*58 tall=58 hundred bucks. No idea where I got that from, probably Chandler.
CRASH, BOOM, BLOG: May 7th: I Got Smacked
I got smacked.
I was pulling out of the parking lot at Freedom Mall, technically the corner of Tuckaseegee and Ashley Roads here in Charlotte, when out of freakin' nowhere an SUV smacked my front left fender, pushed me a few feet into the adjacent lane, and came to rest against Carlita's back quarter panel. (Which is by way of saying: I was the guy's brakes for the day.) I'm not going to go into any detail as to how exactly this might have come to pass-- we're waiting on an insurance adjuster at the moment, in order to get a claim filed-- but suffice it to say that I did, in fact, have the right of way.
I am an excellent driver. No, let me take that back: I am a driver. When I am driving, that is what I'm doing. It's all I'm doing. It is my essence. My idea of a good time is to get out on country roads where there is no traffic and just drive. In any given vehicle, on any given road, I am the fast traffic. I am also always aware that most of the other drivers on the road, not to be unkind, suck. Which is why I am always watching, at least eight cars ahead, out both sides and to the back, all possible intersections, sideroads, alleyways, parking lots, driveways, pullouts, you name it. This is partly courtesy, but it's mainly heeding the best driving advice I ever got from anyone, this from my father at a very early age:
Don't trust the bastards.
Which is why this wreck is so vexing. It's not enough to know that I had the right of way, that the other guy was in the wrong. I just didn't see him coming. And, even though I know in my heart of hearts that it wasn't for a lack of looking, that the wreck was the result of the other driver's illegal action, that he was probably coming from behind a bus or running a signal because there's no other place he could have been, it still doesn't matter.
Because I should have seen him coming. I just should have. And I didn't, until a split second before I knew the son of a bitch was gonna plow into me. It's not my fault. But when you're a driver, you feel responsible. It's just part of the gig.
BLOG ON THE TRACKS, MARK II: May 2nd: People Who Buy Mustangs
Reserve your judgement for a bit.
Talking to Doc Nagel a while back, I guess we were on the subject of cars.
Quothe the Doc: "What do you think of the new Mustangs?"
Our Hero, taken aback for a moment, sayeth "We saw one that looked nice in red. I think they look good in yellow and white, too." The Wifey and I had formed the conclusion that the new design looked stupid, but after a while we started seeing them in other colors than the industry standard silver, and they started looking better to us.
But what took me aback was not the re-design, nor the Mustang itself, which has regained form after going through a few years of monumentally crappy design and production. Awhile back one dusted me at a stoplight, and I giggled as I watched her driver taker her into a beautiful power-fade-burn mauever through a sweeping turn. He he he he he. Preeeetty Pony!
It was that I hadn't ever thought of Chris as a power car guy. I'd always known him to drive utility cars, including a couple of wouldn't-say-die Honda Accords, one of which went through a Christ-like resurrection at the hands of the freak who bought it from him before it finally shuffled off the ignition coil. I grew up driving an MG Midget, taught by my father, and so learned alot of traditional racing techniques for taking curves and getting the maximun thrust from an essentially under-powered car. I smoked my share of Porsches in that thing. (That share is two.) My next significant car as an adult was my Chrysler LeBaron convertible, an impressive hunk of De-troit steel for what it was, with a six-cylider, three-litre engine that had plenty of chutzpah. Because of the way I drive, I was pretty much the first off the blocks at any given standing start. (Although, admittedly, that I never got dusted was purely for a lack of trying on the part of Beemer and Porsche drivers.) Anyways; my point her is that is was a fun car. The one time I really put the pedal on the floor the engine revved angrily to within a hair of the red line before she came out of first, and I swear I made 0 to 60 in less than 6.
When Rachelle got the Mini, I took over her Corolla, newly christened Carlita, and though she lacks power, especially at dead start, I can usually count on her gearbox to compensate, so I stay at the front of the pack. And she's no Mini, but she sits low and square and I can get some pretty wicked cornering ability out of her. So, although I know she's just a utility car I still have plenty of fun driving her around.
The Doc is an excellent driver, and he's caused me to grab the Oh Hell Handle* handling insane, absurdist, Escherly curves in various places in California, notably Yosemite and Big Sur. So the notion of his graduating from Accords and Neons (the current) to a Mustang, after consideration, makes plenty of sense. And, of course, those of you who want to play the ol' Mid-Life Crisis card, well, you can go right to hell. The Doc, in his current incarnation, cannot be said to be in crisis. As he explained it, he's never had a car he really liked. He has always gotten the sensible car he needed to get stuff done. When I bought a Chrylser on the grounds that it was red and the top went down, it made a fair amount of sense: I am fundamentally silly. (But I did love that car.) So Chris buying a car on the grounds of pure enjoyment, at this stage of his development, would make perfect sense.
That said, I don't get people who buy Mustangs. I got behind a lady in a brand new black model this afternoon trying to get out of our dog's vet's parking lot, and she was driving it like it was a freaking mini van. And it's the same, almost every single time: I see someone driving a pony and they're treating it like an Oldsmobile. Way once in a while I catch someone who knows what the skinny pedal on the right is for, but most of the time they're tooling around like they were driving . . . Well, a Corolla or a Neon. They shoulda saved their damned money.
I had much the same feeling watching the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie over the weekend. While it was good enough entertainment, so far as that went, and it pleasantly reminded me of Adams' masterwork, as far as that went, I just had the feeling that these people were in charge of a vehicle that was simply beyond their skills, beyond their aspirations, and, mostly, beyond their lust for speed. They had no business behind the wheel of that particular hot rod. It was wasted on them.
*The oblong D-shaped handle mounted above the window on the passenger side of the car, which is there for you to grab on to so you don't tumble into the driver's lap. You're welcome.
BLOG, SWEAT & TEARS: May 1st: How We Won The War
Giant billboards of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's late revolutionary leader, overlooked the parade route and adjoining streets, which had been blocked to the public for security concerns.
Familiar themes of national unity and sacrifice were sounded but the commemoration was striking for its focus on the country's economic development, with leaders putting aside communist slogans in favor of touting an emerging prosperity -- particularly in the former South Vietnamese capital, Saigon.
Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, was the country's "economic locomotive," attracting the bulk of the country's foreign investment, the president proclaimed to cheers from the crowd.
--The Charlotte Observer, via AP Wire Service
I haven't ever written much about Vietnam, partially because I figure the subjects's been covered, and partially because so much of what has been written about the country and our conflict with it is bullshit, and partially because Vietnam is the subject of mean-spirited idiots who want some reason to trumpet American ill will as the saving grace of the globe, for reasons that are never terribly clear to anyone, including the writers. But mainly it's that there isn't ever any real and compelling reason to write about Vietnam. A quick study of the country's history reveals that it is, and always has been, an empty vessel, ready to recieve any culture that gets poured into it, and the culture resists any melding of another culture so long as the vessel is filled. Japanese, Russian, Chinese, French, what have you, Vietnam has conformed to as many cultures as it has been exposed to. Including Communist.
Now, don't get me wrong in what I'm about to lay out: Our involvement in Vietnam in the 1960's was wrong. It was the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, and our involvement in the 1970's just went to further prove that we are, by and large, a country contolled by and serving the asshole minority who would rather see dead marines than admit mistakes or lost causes, would rather carpet bomb Cambodia to show those goddamned hippies who was boss than admit that we didn't really know what in the Hell we were doing. And the fact that the Kmer Rouge were worse is still no justification. Oh, also: the Viet Cong were not a "Tough and determined enemy," they were a bunch of sneaky bastards who agreed to play by the rules and then didn't, and many of them only went along with the Communists on the promise of an increased drug trade after the end of hostilities, a promise which was never kept. And the Communists, well, they were Maoists, which is to say they were liars bent on despotism, nothing benevolent about it. The whole thing just sucked.
That said: We just won the war.
On settling in to breakfast at the Gitmo-- two eggs, over medium, bacon, toast, coffee, and I still don't get people who don't eat eggs-- I flipped to the back of the A section where they had buried the piece. Now, the news had been all over the place-- on the Beeb, the Newz, NPR, etc.-- but it was all centered on how L'Anniversaire was that of the end of our involvement, the evacuations of Saigon, the fleeing of refugees. And I had suspected that there was somehitng missing here. But it wasn't until I read the AP bit that it dawned on me: What is really being celebrated here is what we were supposedly after 30 years ago. Vietnam has been converted to a capitalist democracy. We won.
As my wife said: "Communism? Fine. Visa rules the world." What we tried to do through brute force and covert ops and commando tactics was finally accomplished through trade and commerce. Had we been paying attention, we'd have seen it coming ten years, twenty years ago. After all, Vietnam had been seeking trade status with us as far back as the 80's. My own Dad went over in the mid 90's, sheerly on the grounds that the embargoes had finally been allowed to lapse. His company (at the time) sent him over just to see if it was worthwhile trying to do business with them. And that company was not alone. And alot of companies decided that the Vietnamese were worth doing business with. (Although not the one my Dad was working for, because, if memory serves, the people running the company were a bunch of dummies.) I have seen glimpses of it show up in the press, now and again, but it never gets parsed out completely: the Vietnamese always knew Communism was a damned lie, and their vessel is now ready to be filled with American culture, American commerce, and all that it implies. All that the members of our business community need be is ready to pour.
NOTES FROM OUTSIDE THE BLOGGOSPHERE: April 18th: I got Music, I got Rhythm . . .
I don't mean anything by that title. If you think I mean something by that title, I don't.
Last night, and nearly 4 AM, the carbon monoxide detector we got from my Dad two years ago at Christmas (and never mounted) decided it's batteries were dead and started beeping once every six and a half seconds. It is a shrill beep, which our dog absolutely hates, and the interval at which it beeps is designed specifically to be unnatural and annoying, so that people will be prompted to replace the batteries rather than let it go on beeping. And Gabby, naturally, decided that the proper response to the noise, which seems to be physically painful to her, was to sit on the Wifey's head. Same as she does during thunder storms. (Well, hey, that's more logical than most dogs get, really.) Naturally our first assumption was that it was the smoke detector making the noise, because a) it had done so before, 2. it makes the same beep in both frequency and interval, and c) it's a pain in the ass. The last attribute has largely to do with the fact that it is hard-wired to the house, so that it always has a charge, and that it always decides its battery is drained late at night. So, naturally, the Wife got up to fix it, and I, naturally, followed her. Not because she is in any way unable to fix this kind of nocturnal problem, but because if she's up, I'm up, because otherwise I am not executing my husbandly duties to the fullest. Rachelle swiped the nine-volt battery from my Yamaha 12-string, and between the two of us we managed to replace the battery in the smoke detector, with the result that it decided the battery we replaced the old battery with was no good. By this time the dog was so freaked that she demanded to be let out. Rachelle exiled the alarm to the trunk of the Corolla, where we have agreed to just let the damned thing die. It was at this juncture that we realized that the CO detector was also beeping, but a simple removal of the power source solved that problem easily. It was at this point that we went to call the dog, who damned near refused to come back in. After we finally got the dog in, we watched about a half hour of the '70's film "Oh, God!" which marked the high point and the nadir of George Burns' career and contains the most horribly squandered premise in the history of filmdom. (The second most horribly squandered premise in the history of filmdom is "Wrestling Hemingway.")
BLOGSPLOITATION: April 7th: Plan Nine From Navarone
Some time back, in one of the earlier incarnations of this slab o' observation, I mentioned that I considered "Stand By Me" an exploitation film. It exploited Richard Dreyfss, River Phoenix, '50's music, and Stephen King, in that order. Of course, King exploits himself and his genre up one side and out the other, out the wazoo, ten days from sunday, and all day long and into the night, but that's another subject.*
My topic here is exploitation, and it comes up while watching a film I have had a hard time watching for many years, "Force Ten from Navarone." It's a sequel to "The Guns of Navarone," which itself was something of an exploitation film, dealing in Cold War ethos while describing a back-field WWII espionage operation that never happened. (It could be said that it exploited Gregory Peck, but the idea that Gregory Peck could be exploited is a bit of an iffy notion as well.~) "Force 10" exploits many things as well: the infinitely twisty plotline, the deceptions of Allied forces for the ultimate good of the cause, etc. It cannot be said to exploit Robert Shaw, try though they did. He delivers one of the most pasty-faced, obviously stoned performances in the history of cinema, but he doesn't flub a line or miss a beat the whole way along. (This was Shaw's last performance, and legend has it that he was drunk the whole time; as usual, there is the alternate folk lore that he was suffering from a variety of maladies that were causing him a great deal of trouble, and drinking was one way he could manage to function for long enough periods of time to be able to shoot the film. He died a short time later.) It could be said it exploits the original film, but, coming as it does 17 years later, I really don't see how anyone could optimistically believe (drugs) that the film might capitalize (drugs) on the success of the original (more drugs) especially without the presence of Gregory Peck (lotsa drugs).
But then again, really, can we call this an exploitation flick? Isn't this more properly a romp? I mean, it's FUN to make war movies, right? And it gives Harrison Ford a chance to do his steely-eyed veteran, right? And it gave Carl Withers (Weathers? Whoothers? Potrezebie) a jump start on a film career that would culminate in nothing less than Happy Gilmore! And really, what harm is done? It's not like the film takes the details oif a great battle and plays ducks and drakes with them. (Which,if I understand things correctly, is the big evil in making war movies.) And after all, perhaps it does a service in it's way. Follow: war is bad, war movies convince people that war is glamorous, therefore war movies make people more likely to war, which they won't after watching "Force 10," since there isn't a convincing performance (aside from the one turned in by Carl Feathers) in the bunch! Besides that, Harrison Ford is at his pouty, sexy, porcine best, and Shaw looks like a walking cadaver! I wonder who they hired to stick their hand up the back of his neck and make his mouth move like that?!? Oh, to hell with this. I'm gonna go wash the dishes.
*What? I should digress?
~WHAAAAAT?!?
PEOPLE WHO I'D LIKE TO HIT OVER THE HEAD WITH A GREAT, BIG BLOG: April 6th: Chopsticks, Sales, Marketing
Ramen Noodles are diabolical. It's been explained to me that the noodles are fried and that they contain the majority of the flavor of the soup (and all of the fat), that the flavor packets only actually shove the flavor towards one category or another, and this all makes sense as far as it goes, but how something so dry added to boiling water with a little powdered spice can produce such a lovely, greasy, satisfying broth . . .
It's just magical.
Chop sticks, on the other hand, are stupid. As a food deliver system, they are awkward, and in some situations useless; they are specifically designed in such a way that they cannot be simply or easily stored at the side of most dishes, to the degree that some vessels are designed with orifices in which the sticks can be inserted, and over the centuries thousands upon thousands of different designs have been developed to hold the chopsticks at the side of the plate or on the table top, and many if not al of these designs do not completely eradicate the possibility of bringing soils into the food or dripping food on the table or having the sticks scattered across the table or onto the floor with an inadvertent move. That said, I eat with chopsticks every chance I get. I know it's silly, but still, there's something enigmatic about it, something Orientally, inscrutibly elegant about it. (Have I blogged about this before? I think I blogged about this before.)
But, of course, as any reader of my blog might expect, the above has almost nopthing at all to do with the subject I will now address. I was just eating Ramen Noodles with chopsticks for lunch. Not that anyone gives a rip.
Today, coming back inside from mowing the grass in the early afternoon, I discovered a message on our answering machine. It was one of those recordings that was deliberately concocted to not sound like a recording, like someone genuinely leaving a message on an answering machine, right up to the heavy click of the phone reciever being returned to its carriage. Very clearly, the seller-- some crap about a new and supposedly better health care plan than the one provided by my company, which, supposedly, the seller is familiar with-- was expecting to get answering machines, and towards the end it was made plain that "she" would be in "her" office until at least seven that night, so you could certainly call her back when you got this message after getting home from work.
Only problem is that the message started playing before our outgoing message had ended, so "her" message started amid-vowel, so that I don't even know what godamned company "she" is supposed to be representing. While on the one hand I take a kind of vicarious pleasure in the knowledge that this foe has vanquished "her" "self" (HA! TAKE THAT, YE WENCH!), I also have a kind of feeling of . . . It's just kind of sad. I'm sure whoever thought this thing up thought they were being very clever. I imagine they imagine they were gonna move millions of units and generate a real nice revenue stream. (Dumbass.)
Which bears a fleeting resemblance to the reaction I had when I read, in this week's Newsweek,* that Mary Matalin had been given the post of editor-- nahh, I can't say that~-- that Mary Matlin is starting up an imprint for Simon & Schuster that will do conservative books. Now, don't get me wrong: I hate Mary Matalin. I hated her when I thought she was puchased tail for the RNC, I hated her when I knew she was eye candy for George Hiram Walker Texas Ranger Bush III Sr. Esq.'s campaign, I hated her when she wrote that goddamned stupid book with her half-wit campaign loser of a husband who had to be chased back onto television so he wouldn't sink any more candidates. But I don't hate her for heading up the S&S imprint. Newsweek's bit, which is the one where they ask a person a single interview question and let the answer run for about 3" of column space, had her basically doing this: "[Dropped name] didn't get it. Some of the stuff in that book never happened. [Dropped name] knows how to sell books. Some of the stuff in that book never happened. [Dropped name] used to be a friend of mine. I was there when most of that stuff happened. Some of the stuff in that book never happened."
What a goddamned idiot. She's like the poster girl for anti-feminism.
And like I say, I don't hate her for running the imprint, because if she is, I can only imagine the witless, senseless, meaningless uber-crap that is going to resultantly issue from said orifice. Man. I sure as hell hope they have someone over there telling her what to do. With a dim-wit like Matalin in charge, any venture the GOP might pursue seems instantly doomed.
*I do know better, but they won't stop sending the thing, and then eventually they offer it for like 80% off the news stand price, and besides it gives me something to do with my hands when I'm not masturbating.
~I can't say it. Not that I don't know that it's true, which I don't. I just can't say that Mary Matalin might be an editor. I stings in the mouth. It burns the eyes to read it. Who would she edit? Trained apes? People who write ad copy for incontinence products? The functionally illiterate? Carville? (Come to think of it, I guess the idiot could edit Carville. Who'd ever know?)
BLAGGING LIGHTS: April 4th: Anybody Who Gets That Gag Should Be Taken Out And Shot
So I am home sick again, having done the hero thing and gone in despite a hacking cough attack this morning that had me kneeling on the bathroom floor. I managed to hang on until half-time, when I decided I was improving my odds of putting in a full day tomorrow if I bowed early today.
So, on the way home, thinking that it was better to heal than to remain infirm, I stopped in at the nearest grocers for some noodle soup. I got two packs of Top Ramen and two Maruchan Instant Lunch cups for a buck and a quarter, on the grounds that a) Soup good for cold, and 2. Gotta eat.
Now, when I'm sick, nothing seems to taste right, so I have a hard time eating. Over the weekend I had a can of Crap in a Can, which is to say Spagettios with Meatballs, which is something I do only when I am sick. As a kid my Mom only gave us this stuff on special occasions and insisted on washing the last of the sauce out of the can with a splash of water so that the product, in addition to being sweet and pasty, was watered down. So the first time I had the stuff straight from the can at a friend's house was revaltory. So the result was that, for many years, I bought the crap as a treat for those times when I needed cheering up. It didn't take too terribly long for that ironic falacy to wear through. Now I buy it when I am sick on the grounds that anything more complex is wasted on me, which is also a falacy, but when everything tastes weird anyways Crap in a Can goes down as well as anything else, and it is, after all, sustenance. (Of a sort.)
The preparation directions on the Maruchan Instant Lunch cup are terribly misleading. They make it sound so, so simple:
1. Peel lid halfway back; fill cup to line with boiling water. (Done.)
2. Close lid securely and wait 3 minutes. (Lid wouldn't stay all the way down, so I weighted it with a plastic fork; waited four minutes, oops.)
3. Remove lid, stir thoroughly and enjoy from cup. (Done, done, and whoops . . . )
I remember, on peeling back the lid, the last time (or times) I tried this kind of manuever. All the cup 'o' soup type products have their peculiarities, but the Maruchan product is extremely weird for what it is. It has a pungent quality that remains cardboard, like fishballs that have been stored in a newspaper warehouse for six months. And while it is true that Asians, particularly the Japanese, consume into the millions of units of this fine product, which also features shrimp the size of pencil erasers that taste like pencil erasers but can't be because they have the texture of a disposable sponge, it is also true that Asians, particularly the Japanese, are, culturally speaking, nuts.*
The most memorable time I tried one of these products, and it may have been of the Maruchan line, was when I was in grad school. I was broke, bored and depressed, to the point that I realized, one bright, sunny day, that I hadn't eaten in almost three days as a result of these combined qualities. On the way to the grad office, on a Saturday, to do some work, I nipped into the cut-rate Harris Teeter and picked up some items that, I thought, would be both cheap and easy to consume (along with some fruit, cause, y'know, scurvy). Among these was a cup 'o' noodles.
On arriving at the grad office-- HA! Deserted! Just as I had hoped-- I used the electric kettle to bring some water to almost boiling and filled to line, waited three minutes, and peeled back the lid preparing to consume and enjoy!~
Based on my descriptions so far, I'm sure you can guess how that went.
Anyways, while eating the stuff-- hey, it was paid for-- with plastic fork while reading about, if memory serves, Dryden, I absently stabbed into the cup for a forkful of noodles, piercing the side of the cup below the waterline. A stream of broth commenced to spew from the side of the cup. My situation was thus suddenly transformed from extremely crappy to thoroughly crappy.
Thinking quickly, I put the end of my finger over the hole in the cup, and then, in a spirit of experimentation, thinking to myself "Surely the styrofoam isn't that insubstantial," I slid a prong of the fork down the side of the cup, thus creating a larger gash in the vessel and narrowly missing the finger plugging the initial rupture.
Again, thinking quickly, I used the adjacent finger to stem the stream, but the second gas was slightly elongated and difficult to keep plugged completely. I took the injured cup from my desk, at the farthest back corner of the office, out the door, into the hall, and around the corner to the Men's room. Once inside, I spied the first commode and did the logical thing: I dumped the contents of the cup, which I was not, in fact, enjoying, into the commode and flushed.
Being a conscientious lad, I then collected enough brown paper towels to mop up the trail of broth that lead from my desk to the Men's room. As I was mopping up a part of the stream in the Hallway, a member of the Academy that I didn't immediately recognize, probably from the Anthropology department upstairs, watched my progress as he made his way out of the building, first with a look of confusion, then of dissapproval, and finally of what appeared to be outright disgust. It took me a moment to work out that, having no specific knowledge that I was busily mopping up chicken broth, he assumed that I was, instead, mopping up urine.
*Mountaineers and rock climbers eat this kind of thing too, on the grounds that they're lightweight, portable, and nutritious. They are, as a group, also completely insane.
~I reaaaaaaally wanted to use the Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer's line from Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but the line there is "Share and Enjoy!" I thought that would have been stretching it a bit, as well as perhaps causing some confusion among my readers. You got it? Both of you? Good.
BLOGGY OF CHRIST-- WITH OR WITHOUT NUTS? April Fools' Day: Things That Are No Longer Fun
It's been a strange week, all things considered. First there's been the whole Terri Shiavo thing. I don't really take sides on it; I can see the merit of either side in a way, but neither side is really gaining any loyalty from me, although the side that wants to save her seems to have the overabundance of grandstanding assholes. At the start of the week, most of the people I talked to, all of whom were on the not-prolong-the-torture stump, prefessed that they anticipated a morbid sense of relief as son as she died. The morning I heard that she'd snuffed it, I remember thinking to myself "Oh boy; now the shit's really gonna hit the fan."
Well? Can I pick 'em, or can I pick 'em?
Then there's the Pope.
Let me set this up properly: referenceing Thompson, Chris and I made a practice of handicapping the election cycles, starting before the primaries and usually going all the way through the weeks before the election. We started doing this in 88, and every four years since then we have had an ongoing debate over who would survive, who would come out on top, and side bets as to which candidates would be crushed in the clatch and sink without a trace. (In these matters I always ended up losing on sucker bets, most famously, and painfully, betting on David Duke and Al Sharpton.) We stopped just this last year; it was obvious, from the get go, that Bush was gonna win regardless of how unpopular and stupid he could possibly be, no matter what unjustified bullshit he perpetrated (or made to be perpetrated) in the name of security. So it just seemed . . . Well, it just wasn't as much fun anymore.
The week in news has been kinda like that. Terri Schiavo was going to die, and you couldn't trust anything advocates on either side said, and the one person who was most affected didn't seem to notice anyways. Then there's the report that our "intelligence" on Iraq was not just misleading, but out and out wrong. Yeah. So? People have been saying that for over two years now. I started saying it long before we went in. A week after 9/11, I actually came out and said it-- to my wife, mind you-- but I had been thinking it that very day: Bush is going to use this as an excuse to invade Iraq. And then there's the Pope. The Pope, it seems, is going to die.
Which is really a non-story, it its own way. I mean, Popes die. It has happened before. He's going to die without abdicating first. Yeah. So? And sure, this Pope has been more along the beloved lines, and as Popes go he was pretty hip, didn't do alot of weirdo moralistic stuff, rode around in his Popemobile and dispensed good will. Good Pope, as Popes go. But this is turning into a morbid spectacle, the Pope Death Watch, a Countdown to Catatonia, a Grand Prix of Goulishness. And all the while, as the cameras record his dazed appearance and chronical and catalog his medical requirements and interventions, there is an air of contest. It's like they're betting on it, laying odds as to what precise day and time the Pontiff will shuffle off the mortal coil and join the choir invisible. It's just tacky.
Doc Nagel has also been thinking kind of along the same lines. Just as I was starting out writing this, he fired across an e-mail with a link to this. Now, rest assured that it's a satire link, and the button you see there doesn't do anything. Chris and Lauren just thought it was too amusing. And I did actually call Chris to make sure it was just a gag. That is the sort of thing I wouldn't be suprised to see on a Christian web site. They can be pretty loopy. But if you want to see some really savage satire on the subject, you could click here. Keep in mind that I warned you; this is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. In fact, I don't find it funny in the least. That guy's no Canadian.
SORRY, BUT I'M FEELING KINDA . . . BLOG RIGHT NOW: March 31st: Concerns of the Day
I'm home sick today, a sinus thing of some sort. As I remarked to my boss, before leaving after putting in the longest hour and forty-five minutes in the history of hours and forty-five minuteses, I feel like someone's shoved a dime up my left nostril.
Me: I'm going home sick.
Boss: Oh, I'm sorry!"
Me: It's not your fault. Although I feel like somebody shoved a dime up my nose, so if that was you . . .
It took her a few seconds to get the joke, but she's good. It's a wonder she puts up with me.
So I decided to take the opportunity to do some bloggin, since I'm home, have nothing specifically better to do (or that I feel like doing with a cold, or whatever this is), and since my judgement is clouded I can't be held accountable for any particular gibberish I spew. That said, Doc Nagel's on the hunt:
"A couple years ago I struck upon the interpretative strategy of considering that people don't in fact believe any of it, but act in a sort of subjunctive mode, specifically, one that affirms a counterfactual."
His specific topic is why people believe people who lie, in this case, specifically, Republicans. But in all fairness, it's not just Republicans that lie; Democrats lie too. But his examples are interesting. Specifically he claims that Paul Wolfowitz is a congenital liar, and that Bush's claims about Social Securtiy are lies.
Now, not to say the Doc nay, but I don't, and never have, truly believed that there is such a thing as a congenital liar. I have known, and do know, many people who can't seem to help themselves from lying, but that seems to be largely a self-esteem issue. These are people who seem to know that they are less than the sum of their parts, and lie to make up for their shortcomings. The lies Wolfowitz tells are lies in the service of policy, Like when Ford said "Finally, our long national nightmare is over," and it turned out he wasn't saying the Vietnam war was over. (We'll come back to Ford a bit later.) So to visit his intentions in taking over the World Bank on the grounds that he is incapable of telling the truth and thus assume that he will tailor his lies in favor of Captial is a bit . . . Well, let's just say it doesn't cover the bases enough for my tastes. To suggest that he's a Republican, and therefore will tailor his lies in favor of Capitol, seems a better surmise. That his reception by the other heads at the WB has gone from chilly to exhuberant makes me think there is a lot of Beavis & Buthead style giggling going on in backrooms at the UN. Clearly, something is afoot.
On the matter of Social Security, as the good Doc kindly points out, the thought that Social Security is in crisis is a fiction that got cooked up during the Reagan administration to justify fiscally irresponsible behavior. The thinking had been around for years, and it was pretty easy to sustain: depending on how you cook the numbers, Social Security can be made to look sound and sustainable, at a surplus, or in a crisis, and it's hard for anyone to convincingly argue against it (after all, if you've cooked the numbers, the numbers are on your side). So the opposition response amounts to the throwing up of hands and crying "BUSHWA!" Which isn't very convincing, as emotionally satisfying as it might be.
That Bush is lying about this "crisis" is obvious. It's written all over the smirk on his face whenever he talks about it. People don't believe it because he repeats it often enough. They believe it, if they believe it at all, because it sounds plausible and they are not economic projectionists and there's a whole crapload of math to do before the notion can be sufficiently de-bunked. (Remember when, during the first round of debates in the Bush-Gore "race,"* Bush kept claiming that Gore's projections were based on "fuzzy math," while it seemed clear that Bush couldn't even do math? I'm not going anywhere with that, just reminiscing.) But it's a lie in the service of policy, and thus it is defendible. Just like Reagan, who beat Carter because Carter was such a goober, was hailed as an economic genius, and Carter, who beat Ford because Ford was such a klutz, suddenly became a symbol of America's magnamity, our spirit of constant charity, which in itself was something of a lie.
So Social Security becomes the latest straw-man to prop up the Administration's policy. The policy is clearly not intended to "save" Social Security. The thinking, so far as it goes, seems to be that this will be a boost for the economy, rev up the engines of Capital, stoke the fires. The people arguing about it, on both sides of the aisle, don't really care about Social Security benefits. They're all rich.
*Ha!
BLOG NOT, LEST YE BE BLOGGED: March 19th: Where I'm Blogging From Part Deux
So I'm not blogging right now.
I've started my seasonal employment with MI, also known, in my household, as Myocardial Infarction, Mission Impossible, or, as the Wifey is fond of saying, Monsters Incorporated, with the result that I have little if no interest in blogging right now after having read an average of 120 essays in the space of a seven hour day. So I'm not blogging right now. That's okay. Everyone else is.
ONE BLOGGY MORNING: March 8th: Cruelty Humor, Warmongering
I haven't been sleeping well, off and on over the last couple of weeks, due to a number of things that have been on my mind. One is I have an irrational fear of slicing the tip of my index finger open while ascending to an open B on one of my twelve string guitars, which manifests itself during the day with a nervous tic of pressing my thumbnail into the callous, probing for weakness, and at night with the continuing thought that instead of lying there sleeping I ought to be up doing exercises, runing chords, or playing "Georgia Plates."* The lack of sleep, since it has been intermittent rather than chronic, hasn't bothered me much, aside from putitng me in a slightly bad mood some mornings. And some mornings that's not a problem. But other mornings it causes me not to appreciate Geico ads.
Some years ago, Ol' Doc Nagel began a practice of reviewing advertisements, something he quit doing shortly before he turned his life topsy-turvy and traipsed off with his paramour, not that the two events are in any way related. One of his reviews involved early Geico ads, which, as such things go, were oddly satisfying. Geico's ads have been hit-and-miss events since then, some of them being genuinely funny and others being . . . Well, ads. Which is to say dishonest and stupid. They've gotten good mileage out of a couple of different gimmicks, for instance the Gekko and his white bread insurance salesman sidekick, and they have apparently adopted a running-gag theory, running related ads back to back, which is the only thing that makes the caveman ads work. (The first spot shows the ad being produced in studio; the pitychman intimates Geico is so easy to use that a cave man could do it; a suprised grunt offstage, and of course a jump shot to offstage where a neanderthal is manning the boom mike. While the pitchman sputters apologies, the caveman storms off, declaring "Not cool!" This wouldn't be very funny were it not immedately followed by a spot showing the self same ad running on a TV being watched by . . . Neanderthals, of course, in a reasonably tastefully adorned contemporary living room, one reading a book, one playing piano, all calmly and reasonably expressing sophisticated outrage at the statement.
I'm not saying it's fall-down-lauging funny. But it's funny for an ad. Like, think of it this way: there's funny strange or funny ha-ha, and if it falls somewhere between the two, it's ad funny.
The other Geico ad that currently has my attention is the reality TV one. Stop reading here if you have not seen this ad.~
If you have seen the ad and did not stop reading, I don't need to describe the ad beyond saying it's "so awesome!" Three things going on at once in this ad make it funny-- in my estimation, anyways. First is that it looks very reasonably like the kind of stupid stunt some TV execs out there might dream up and call it "reality." Second, and this is really key, is that our two protagonists bear more than a passing resemblance to real life TV personalities, in this case Ashlee Simpson and her sister's husband, which had the effect of making me think, the first time I saw it, "Oh, dear God, they've finally gone too far." The third thing is the pacing and the emotion of the piece: it's fast and hard, and the pathetic mix of optimism and temper tantrums doesn't let up long enough for the audience to catch on before the punch line. As these things go, it's as good as it gets.
I've always had mixed feelings about cruelty humor, but in the final analysis I have to admit that the rest of the world thinks that the root of humor is cruelty, even if I refuse to accept it. Both the Geico ads referred to here are reverse cruetly humor pieces, where the punch line is that what is cruely funny ought not to be accepted as funny. I like that. I sincerely doubt the ad people, not to say the Geico people, intended it, but hell. When it comes to things like that, I gotta take my hits where I can get them.
So I found myself feeling fortunate that both ads ran later in the morning. Last night, in addition to my running intermittent insomnia, we had a series of storms cells moving through, torrential rain and gale force winds. Usually this has the effect of driving Gabby-- the dog-- to higher grounds, which is to say the Wifey's head, where typically she will sit until the storms subsides. As near as I could tell, that didn't happen, but the power did go out, with the result that Rachelle couldn't get to sleep for a couple of hours because she was worried about not waking up on time, with the result that I couldn't sleep because she couldn't sleep. When the power finally came back on, she got me to activate my Indiglo watch and give her the time so she could reset the clock, and then we both knocked off and slept pretty well until the storms came back-- or new cells erupted, whatever the case-- around dawn. After she got up to work out and get ready for the day, I half dozed. After she left for work, I resolved to try and make up for the night by sleeping in, with the result that I slept until 7:35, then to 7:40, then to 7:45, then to 7:50, then to 7:55 when I finally gave up and got up and started my day, surfing the net and drinking club soda because that's what I wanted, saving my coffee for later in the day.
None of this has anything to do with why I've been thinking about warmongering. "Warmonger" is one of the more frequently applied appelations for our President, and, frankly, it is somewhat unfortunate. Over the past couple of days, I have been reading about the wierd combination of conscriptions, propagandizing, censorship, boosterism, and so forth, which accompanied our participation in World War I; the truly bizzare activities carried out by the Japanese in the Pacific Theater of World War II; and the fervor of the Communists up to and through our involvement in the Korean Conflict. Those folks were warmongers. Or, to quell possible semantic quibbles, the politicians who got them to act that way were warmongers. Either way, by comparison, you really can't call our President a warmonger. He led us to attack countries we were certain to defeat who were unlikely to gain anything you might call "allies," at least not officially. History will tell, of course, but I don't think it's fair to call him a warmonger. If he is a warmonger, he isn't very good at it.+
*I was going to describe this tune and when it was written and why, but I figure either you've heard it or you haven't, and if you haven't there's no point in saying it's an Emaj/Amaj7 change in waltz time with a Dsus/Asus change up leading to series of modified E forms no one can ever categorize leading to a high open B sliding back down to the Amaj7 and back to the E, which I started experimenting with the very first day I bought my first 12 string guitar, toyed with over the years, and finished one day while we were living in Atlanta, after walking down the side of a highway, utterly depressed, salving my soul with the notion that one day I might become a famous guitar player and put together albums full of songs with bizarre and virtually meaningless titles like . . . like . . . like "Georgia Plates!" There's just no percentage in it.
~After the Wifey read the description of the ad, she claimed she hadn't seen it. I had to go back and remind her that it was the ad that purported to be a promo for the reality show "Tiny House," which starts out "The relationship was built to last, but the house was built to small . . . " The events that unfold from there, echoing as they do of personality flaws and sexual frustrations accompanied by a stunning lack of intellect would have been true cruelty humor, the real fodder of "reality" TV, if it weren't for the punch line "But it won't save you any money on car insurance." This is followed by a tag line they have been including in the fake commercial line of ads, delivered by the Ashlee-substitute while the two sit in what one supposes they supposed to be a comically undersized hot tub, "Why haven't you called Geico?" Which I suppose they suppose to be funny because calling Geico would in no way mitigate the problem of having been sentanced to live in a tiny house for their newlywed year. But I didn't want to describe the ad in too much depth, because I didn't want to spoil it for anyone who might not actually have seen the ad yet. But then if I put my description in an extratextural note denoted by a tilde, that would no doubt draw the readers eye, and the ones who I meant to spare with my obscure description following . . . Ah, dammit!
+"The notion that we are making plans to attack Iran is unfounded. That said, all cards remain on the table." Schmuck.
EVERYBLOGGY LOVES SOME BLOGGY SOMETIMES: March 4th: No Idea What I Mean By That
I guess I'd have to call yesterday a day of revelations. For the third time this winter my Dad and I attempted a skiing trip to Beech Mountain, probably my favorite set of slopes in North Carolina, which waives lift ticket fees on Thursdays. The last two times we agreed on the trip the day before, despite reports of imminently, eminently crappy weather, and both times the weather defeated us. The days didn't go to waste; the first time we agreed that if we couldn't go skiing we could at least go to breakfast, and the second time he helped me out with a minor plumbing problem (earlier described in the Wifey's blog). This time, though, the weather promised to be just about right, clear and cold, and although it was not predicted a strong, gusting wind was the only element that opposed us.
The first revelation of the day was that ski equipment, say whatever the hell you want, really hasn't changed much in the last twenty years. I used to buy the old argument that you only really notice the difference in equipment if you ski all season long, but what I noticed this time was that the two elements that divide the good skiers from the poor ones are skill and will. This being the first skiing trip I've made in ten years, it took some time to get my legs under me, but then I managed to make a few very nice runs when I had the slope open before me. (Other times I had potentially good runs interrupted by other skiers, but such is life, especially in North Carolina, where the slopes are neither so plentiful nor so wide as to offer unfettered skiing most of the time.) The next revelation is that ski boards suck.
This revelation was prelimmed by my Dad's observation that the ski-boarders' wipe-out pose was, essentially, to fall on their asses. (He estimated that the skiers' various wipe-out poses were more dignified, but I didn't pursue that. Some are and some aren't.) That led me to make a comparison between skiing and surfing that my Dad didn't get at all, having an anti-surfer bias that didn't make sense to me given that he introduced my brother and me to surfing as kids. And the more I watched, the more it made sense: skiboarding is to skiing what skateboarding is to surfing. They are related in form, but skiing and surfing are more organic, more graceful, and, I think, in some way more honorable, although I can't be bothered to explain what I mean by that. The skiboarders, almost all of them, had the same basic trajectory: slide ten feet, lose control, fall on ass; struggle up, slide ten feet, lose control, fall on ass. There were a few boarders who managed to make nice runs, but even they tended to have problems after coming to a stop: one of them managed a nice arcing stop a mere four feet from the people standing in the lift line, and then fell on his ass trying to get his boot binding undone so he could go stand in the lift line.
I guess it sounds like I have a bias against snow boards/boarders, but really I don't. Maybe snowboarding is sillier than skiing, but not by much. That was powered by the cost analysis revelation: back in the mid eighties, when I did the majority of my skiing, things were starting to get completely out of hand: you couldn't get on the slopes for under a hundred and fifty bucks, including equipment rental. And if you bought your own equipment your were going to spend five bills minimum, and most people would end up dropping over a grand, if not two, buying stuff on the grounds that if you were going to ski often enough to buy the skis and the boots you might as well have the waterproof snow wear, and if you were going to buy the ski pants you could get the bibs for not that much more, snd so on and so on and bloodly well so on. The old wisdom that your gear would pay for itself in the savings on rentals didn't even begin to apply: you were going to buy a new set-- the next set-- of boots and skis next year or the year after, the ones that were supposed to be the absolutely best ever, which was demonstrated by cut-away illustrations with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one describing how it was to be used against us in a court of law.
The third revelation was powered by the last one, which, if you didn't get it, was supposed to be that skiing in North Carolina only really makes sense if you can do it on the cheap. During the drive up, and the drive back, while my father negotiated some of the finest mountian roads in our state at cringe inducing speeds in his little red Mazda Miata, I came to the conclusion that the other main objection to going skiing-- aside from the cost-- that it was too long a drive for not much recreation, was bogus. You could just as well look at it the other way: skiing is a great excuse for going for a long drive in the mountains on a lovely later-Winter day.
Another revelation came this morning, when I started reading a spoiler on the new movie "The Jacket, starring Adrien Brody and Kris Kristoferrson, which provided the following plot point:
"Brody is found guilty but insane and sent to an asylum run by Kris Kristofferson."
I am considering adding that to me repertoire: If challenged on the veracity of a statement or observation, I will proclaim "If I am lying, may I be found guilty but insane and sent to an asylum run by Kris Kristofferson."
BLOGGIE-OGGIE-OGGIE: February 26th: Loyalites
I used to listen to John Boy and Billy, the oldest local morning radio Zoo Team and the only one legitimately local in my view, on a fairly regular basis. Usually that basis lasted until I got sick of Robert D. Raiford, the old newscaster they hired to be their newsreader and curmudgeon at large something like two decades ago, being an asshole on general principles. It's the same kind of purile defect I find in so many right wing idiots: complaining of the "politically correct" imperative as a way to justify racism or sexism or just plain mean spiritedness. There is nothing right about being "politically correct," I grant you. Lying is lying. That's how I see it. Decrying political correctness as a back door to being an asshole is, in effect, lying, usually because the political correctness so decried didn't exist to begin with. Also, politically correct is a term that originated in the McCarthy era. Hell, if you're going to own a term . . .
I haven't listened to any morning radio regularly in about three years, since I quit my job and stopped commuting-- itself initially a politically correct phrase-- but I have tuned in to the John Boy and Billy show twice in the past month, and my discovery is that they have turned into right wing assholes.
They used to be fun. Stupid fun, but fun nonetheless. One of their features used to be (probably still is) the Stupie Quiz, which consisted (consists) of questions to which the answers are relatively obvious, but which John Boy can't seem to answer. (John Boy was the stupid-funny one, Billy was the smart-funny one.) But tuning in the last two times I got this:
Billy, speaking on the topic of the fallout from the photos of prisoners being abused at Abu Graihb: "They show videos where they're beheading our guys, and we're all of the sudden supposed to be the bad guys over this."
Weeks later, John Boy bragging about having a piece of marble from one of Saddam Hussein's palaces' bathrooms.
First off, yeah, the crap photographed at Abu Graihb makes us bad guys. Sure, we didn't behead anyone, but if we want to be the good guys we cant go fucking around with people like that, and we certainly can't go taking pictures of it. It's a higher standard. That's what being the good guys means, dumbass.
Saddam Hussein was a pissant. Screw his palaces, fuck his marbel. What kind of symbol Mr. Boy thinks he has I know not. But the smug smirk in his voice made me sick. Wake up, America; there was nothing nobel about the fight against Saddam Hussein. There may have been a successful vote, but wake the fuck up: they're still blowing people up over there. We cannot yet claim to have made things better. In fact, the closest we can claim to success is that the insurgents (sic) have taken to blowing up other Iraqis, laying off the US troops for the moment. The war was undertaken on the backs of lies. By the way, support our troops: 23 of them just came home yesterday. The ones that refused to undertake a stupid and futile mission that had already failed once. Rally round the flag, boys.
My point here is that there ought to be a difference between being a patriot and being an idiot. Maybe I'm dreaming.
After hearing all I could stand of John Boy's crap (four and a half seconds) I happened to switch to a rock station that plays oldies on the weekends and landed in the middle of "Boogie-oogie-oogie," a tune that used to hate but now like. When I first heard it, back in the Seventies, it put me off. "You're gonna boogie-oogie-oogie 'til you just can't boogie no more." Never mind that the kind of people who boogie-oogie-oogied were pretentious idiots who thought polyester leisure suits were the permanent new wave of fashion. It sounded to me like the singer was sentencing the listening audience to some kind of forced death boogie. The idea of being forced to dance until one was so completely, physically exhausted that one could not go on boogieing any longer did not sound like a good thing to me.
"Boogie on wihout me, comrade! I . . . I . . . I can boogie no more!"
WATERBLOGGED: February 25th: Theory and Practice
I reckon I can consider myself on record as being more or less against pretension, although not necessarily against pretense. Which is to say: I don't have much patience with liars.
That said, there are a variety of topics on which I find myself reserving judgement (not that you'd know it from anything you might have read here). Abortion, for one thing. I reserve judgement because my major conviction is that it shouldn't be a political football to be kicked back and forth. That and the fact that most of the people I have known who had strong convictions one way or the other were basically assholes who wanted a good reason to call other people assholes.
Another is the whole subject of UFO's. Until a few years ago, I was firmly in the skeptic category, largely due to the large number of people I knew who wanted to use the UFO thing to justify a largely paranoid theory of government conspiracy.* Also, we just went through this age of Recovered Memory, which is to say of pseudo-scientists dedicating thier lives to helping people develop elaborate lies. But a few years ago, on the way to breakfast with one of Rachelle's friends, a former co-worker I have appelaged Nick the Brit, he told a curious story. He was at an air show-- he's a fellow aeronautics nut-- and late in the day, well into dusk, he saw a foremation of lights off on the horizon. He looked to see what kind of a craft it was, and whatever it was made a sudden lateral move. The kind of move that no conventional aircraft, hell, no known aircraft, could make.
I immediately changed my story. Nick's good people. He wouldn't make that sort of thing up. Or at least I don't think he would. But, much more to the point, it gave me a good enough reason to re-consider something: how in the hell do I know there's nothing out there? After all, the people who give me reason to doubt are the ones who crap their stories up with recovered memories and conspiracy theories, right? what about someone who purports to present straight reportage? Here's what I saw, here's when I saw it, I don't know what to make of it. Finis.
After all, when I get down to it, those are trhe cases that I find most credible. Start adding in little green men and anal probes, and I start figuring your real problem is either insecurity or boredom. (Or both.) This hit home last night while watching Peter Jennings' ABC special on UFO's.
It helped a great deal that Jennings had been on Jon Stewart's show the night before. We watch the re-runs every night at seven,+ so we got to see the interview a slim half-hour before watching the show itself. One of Jon's greatest gifts is the abilkity to pursue the tangent. (Or greatest weaknesses, depending on your point of view.) I watch the show mainly for the satiric take on the news and, especially, politics, but the end-of-show interviews are usually pretty good too. In this one, Peter and Jon mainly screwed around, touching on the subject of the special enough to make it count, and Peter trotted out a conspiracy theory blog his son had tracked down on the internet. All of which helped me get into the spirit of the proceedings better. The show itself, the special, was pretty stright-up: here's what folks have described seeing, here's when they saw them, and they were very good about delineating the photographic evidence from the animated effects. Towards the end they got into some of the adbuction stuff; I thought I detected a slight air of tongue-in-cheekiness there, but I might have been bringing that in myself.
What's this all boil down to? Well, to parse a phrase from the Simpsons: Well, son, I'm not not licking toads!
Which is to say that I don't believe in aliens, but I don't not believe in aliens either. I have never seen one myself, but I do not think that I can, in good conscience, say there ain't no such thing. It's not the same thing as ghosts: I do not believe in ghosts, although I believe vaguely in spirits. I don't believe in any afterlife as I've heard described: no heaven with perfectly imagined bodies, no hell with perfectly imagined tortures, no reincarnation into a butterfly if you were a very good person. I do sort of vaguely believe that there is a hereafter of some kind. I spent years proclaiming that my belief was that there isn't anything after this life: when you die, that's it. Game over. Out of quarters. But I don't know that I believe that, truly. I think it's still what I profess, because my understanding of what's on the other side is still incomplete, but, clearly, somewhere back in my strained psyche I do think there's another side. So maybe I don't not believe that there aren't flying saucers out there that are capable of popping in for a glimpse of our blue little rock now and then. What the hell? After all, it's a great, big, NASA-unchartable universe out there!
Let's contrast that with this: I do believe in Marxism, but I don't believe in communism. What brings that up is this, from a review on the Onion's AV Thingy of a Jean-Luc Godard film about the failures of Marxism in the late 1960's:
"Watching Tout Va Bien 33 years later is like viewing it from a bleak dystopian future, an epoch in which the international left has strayed irrevocably, not just from the youthful utopian idealism of '68, but also from the resigned-but-not-hopeless confusion of '72."
Haven't these fucks been paying attention? 1968 was when the big veil came off and it turned out that Communism, in every government where it puportedly existed, was facism by a different name. 1972 was when actual solidarity began forming in some countries, eventually culminating in the ejection of communists from a key country or two a decade later. And it seems so very clear to me, just from the name of the film itself, that some satire was intended. (Of course, not having seen the film, I shouldn't judge.) Here's the thing: Marxism is theory. It is not reality, and I don't think it ever will be. Capitalism is reality. It is not a theory; you cannot do things in the name of Capitalism, because it's not theoretical. It is a desription of the way the world works, and the world works that way because some people seek advantage over each other, and everyone else watches. The reason Communism fails is that people seek advantage over each other. I once said to an aquaintance of mine that Unions were the best thing ever to happen to Capitalism, and it's true: in the age of Unions, Capitalists were wallowing in hubris and creating inhuman and inhumane working conditions, sometimes strictly because they could, and other times because that's how the machinery of the Industrial Age functioned. Something hadda give. And I cannot say that Marx' glorious Workers' Revolution might not have taken place had it not been for the kind of (to innappropriately quote George Will) watery Marxism that went to ground in the workers' movements around the turn of the century. And there's plenty of Marxism left in the left, especially in Eurpoe, where the occasional strike brings an entire region, and sometimes a whole nation, to a screeching halt. Or here, where the strangest thing has happened: very often our Marxist unions turn into very, very big business. Solidarity, commrades!
What was I saying?~
*I have no problem with government conspiracy. Government is conspiracy. Mystery solved.+I have found myself watching his show at night once or twice, and have reached the conclusion that my sleep habits have changed such that I am far better off watching at seven the following night. I get more out of the show that way. Watching it at 11, I tend to miss alot.
I have decided to call this format "Hyperjuxtaposition." The whole idea is to apply the same kind of logic to two disparite subjects. I got the idea from George Will. Only he's, like, serious when he does it. (I think.)
BLOG OF THE DOOMED: February 21st: Death to Gonzo
So I got up this morning, after lazing in bed with the Wifey through the gray dawning hours of a rainy President's Day, made coffee and checked my e-mail. Next to a standard issue spam was a Yahoo! news feed article forwarded by Doc Nagel:
Legendary US Author Hunter S. Thompson Commits Suicide.
I'm pretty sure I never told Chris this, but years ago, while I was tinkering with my Yahoo! mail in-box set up, I made the decision to keep the E! Entertainment feed on the grounds that, were Thompson to finally kick off, that's where the headline would show up. It didn't. After getting Chris' e-mail, I pulled up the Yahoo news page and read a more detailed obit than Chris had sent. But I wasn't any more satisfied. I'm still not.
There's something hugely unsatisfying about this. Not that it doesn't make some sort of sense: Thompson was renowned for his frequent lack of good judgement, not to say his frequent display of vastly bad judgement. But he had that acrobat sense of danger that helped him pull it back at the last moment. And it was a fascinating act to watch. And if you believed him, if you took him at his word, at face value, there was nothing to worry about: he was a professional.
But then there were always signs that the veneer wasn't all he made it out to be. He was a self-confessed liar, and although he always made out that there was a definite agenda, a purposefulness to the lying that made it all worthwhile, alot of the time he was nothing but self-serving. The Thompson of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was nothing like the Thompson who shaved his head and ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Ticket. The crazy, gun collecting megalomaniac of Woody Creek didn't quite que up with the guy who forced visting journalists to take pictures of him shooting "patterns" into snow banks with a series of shotguns.
I remember watching a sequence filmed by Conan O'Brien's crew at the Owl Farm in Woody Creek. Thompson forced Conan to down double shots of whiskey while they took turns shooting high-caliber weapons at random objects. The whole thing rang false and plastic, devoid of any real danger or any real fun, until one moment towards the end when the object of abuse-- the stuffed racoon (if I remember right) they were shooting at, not O'Brien-- caught fire, and then there was brief, shared flurry of adolescent glee, that innocent adolescent appetite for destruction that stops short of doing anyone any actual harm.
And that's what it was about Thompson: he was capable of taking things unseriously in the most serious way. He came along at precisely the right time, right when we desperately needed someone not to take these craphounds and shitheads seriously. A professional journalist who would get credentials and walk into a convention of police chiefs with ahead full of acid. Someone who could tell the honest truth in a time when being a journalist had come to mean telling the story the way the Journalism Establishment thought the story should be told, with every story bringing out the same facts in the same voice with the same point of view, leaving the major players relatively unscathed. And he rode the torpedo and he chased the dragon. And it was a pure pleasure to watch.
But when he broke down . . . And he broke down often, and in the last years he hadn't been up to snuff. But there was always that hope: for those moments when the celebrity Doc Gonzo dissolved into the Thompson we knew and loved, as when he summed up Roxanne Pulitzer by writing "Clearly, this is a woman who likes to sleep late." (Roxanne forgave him.) I held out that hope, that maybe the next thing would be another great article or maybe an essay delineating the fallacies of the current administration, maybe we could hope that our desperado would come to his senses. But the notion I'm waking up to this morning is just too much. The idea that he took himself seriously enough to think to put a gun to his head and end his sea of miseries . . . It seems like the final confrimation. That shithead I loathed really did finally rule over the acrobat I loved and admired and, to a degree, emulated. And the last rude note of his departure leaves me wondering if I was fooling myself or if he was fooling me all these years. And I think, finally, that Doc Nagel really summed it up best:
Goddamnit, Thompson.
A QUICK PS: Some time later, while discussing the matter with El Wiferino, we resolved to feel better about Thompson's demise if it later came out that he had some debilitative disease. We are both DNR's-- on paper, in our living will-- which is to say if it is a choice between heroic and debilitative therapies and quality of life, we'll take the latter. Thompson had been suffering from pain after back surgery, had one artificial hip, and had broken a leg last summer while visiting Hawaii. I suppose, for a man of his vivacity, that could be considered debilitative. Friends described him as having "demons," which comes perilously close to falling into the old "Hemingway Syndrome" explanation. Which you can buy if you like. I never did.
But that's not really what I wanted to put down here. Having clicked the Full Coverage button on the story in the Reuter's feed about half an hour ago, I found all the major outlets reporting that Thompson ate his gun at 67, except . . . the New York Times, who reported that Doc Gonzo was dead at 65. The goddamned New York Times, what is it with those people? They're sooooooo WRONG! They get crap like that wrong all the freaking time! What is it, does snobbery automatically rob you of IQ points? Are they so busy being the best journalists on earth that they forget what NEWS is? I thought to read the story, see if maybe it was just the headline that was wrong, but I didn't want to bother. Their web site requires registration in order to read their stories. I was registered for a month or two a year and change ago, but after a while I got sick and tired of the snobby and self-important missives that came with registration, which always suggested that nobody who was anybody felt any differently on any subject or had any dissimilar interests than the body of Times readers, who are clearly reading the Times because they're too important not to read the Times. Those people are what the word "smarmy" was invented to describe.
ANY WORLD THAT I'M WELCOME TO: February 18th: Realities
Let me say this about the current and ongoing fervor insisting that the White Man nearly exterminated the Native American Peoples: I get it.
Growing up, I wasn't spared the gloomy, gory details.* I was taught all about the trail of tears, the manipulations of treaties, the out and out violations of treaties, the reservations, and, what is probably the ugliest part of the whole mess, the way the partitioning of reservations turned into a shameless land-grab by rich white men who were convinced that it was their inalienable right to be even richer. The land the Indians-- they were still called Indians when I was a kid-- were eventually "granted" was worthless and barren, and in many cases so completely alien to the tribes placed on it that they couldn't have survived by any farming methods they knew. So yeah: White Men Suck.
On the other hand, we were also taught of the hunting methods of the Western tribes who ran whole herds of buffalo over cliffs and salvaged as much as they could carry and often left as much as half the carcasses behind. (Don't start with me: you cannot fell a stampeding buffalo with a hand-thrown spear. You'll be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.) Other tribes practiced slash-and-burn land cultivation, planting crops in the ashes and then moving on after the harvest season since the land would be barren for the next three or four years. And the tales of raiding parties and scalpings may have been somewhat exaggerrated from time to time, but they were not baseless. And the ones who wiped out Custer and his men? Those were some pissed-off, stone cold killers. They took no prisoners. Custer may have been a half-assed commander and a racist idiot, but that's beside the point.
My point is this: the Native American People were not exterminated because White People are Evil. In fact, the Native American People were not actually exterminated. Our cultures didn't mix well, and some of our people behaved horribly and some of their people behaved horribly, and as is almost always the case, a few assholes on both sides ruined things for everybody else. But the notion that the Native Americans didn't have a concept of "land ownership" is bullshit. Some of them may not have, but enough of them did to try and chase off the white settlers by bloody force to give those settlers cause enough to take up arms against the Indians (they called them Indians back then) . . . And it all ended badly. It was bound to end badly. But I don't believe that it all ending badly is cause enough for me to believe that the Native American Peoples have a spirituality that makes them immune to Modern Evils or give them a greater respect for Mother Nature. And I've known plently of assholes who went into sweat lodges and came right back out the same way.
Nor do I believe that the White Man-- and I beg your fucking pardon, but why are women always excluded from this subject? They might have had less of an actual hand in the brutalization of the tribes, but they are firmly on record as having cheered the men on-- is inherently land-greedy. I think it's kind of the other way around, which is that greed and land go hand in hand, which is why I have a hard time trusting real-estate people for the most part. Which is to say: let's have some perspective, people.
What brings this on? I watched a promo for the latest TNT project, which is produced or driven by or produced by or directed or something by Stephen Spielburg, which is going to tell both sides of the story. Into the West. I am left with a bad feeling. On the one hand, I would not, never suggest that these are stories that don't need to be told. They do need to be told, over and over again. It is very important that we remember our country's bloody past. It's very very important that we understand that at one time religious fervor (in the guise of Manifest Destiny) was used as justification for slaughter. It's important to remember that not all the tribes made totem poles, and that not all of them swept down on settlements and slaughtered every man, woman and child there because the Great Spirit Fathers expected them to. But Spielburg's involvement makes me shudder with suspicion. On the one hand, he is capable of great things. (I saw Shindler's List.) On the other hand, he is capable of ham-fisted bullshit. (I saw AI.) In fact, there's evidence that he's capable of both in the same vehicle (Saving Private Ryan, which starts out as an incredibly realistic and compelling depiction of war before devolving into a John Wayne movie). So if he does this right, it could be a hulluva thing. But if he goes the other way . . . Well, folks, suffice it to say that we might be in for some Class A Bullshit.+
*Except when we lived in Texas, where there was only one kind of history, which was Texas history, in which no Texan every did anything wrong and every ill was the fault of bad Mexicans, and apparently there weren't any Native Americans, and every History class at every level had more or less the same textbook. I kid you not.
+See below.
GO BLOG YOURSELF: February 17th: I Am Way Too Honest
As Barbara Mikkelson of the Snopes website (de-bunkers of urban legends) very correctly points out, the legitimate nickname of the Guantanamo Bay Marine Base is Gitmo, derived from it's travel order designation GTMO. What I said before was a lie.
EVERYBODY'S BLOGGING AT ME: February 15th: Running With Wolves, Running With Lemmings
Having had the bad luck to have read someone else's blog before getting around to starting the next entry of my own-- about which more momentarily-- I have been periodically doomed to recite on topics which others have already broached. Now, I think I have covered this up well enough, periodically, that my readers will not have noticed any particular parroting or thought to accuse me of copying. This has largely to do with my current morning habits. I generally begin each day with a long period of wallowing in bed, occasionally foreshortened by the necessities of work, followed by a langorous awakening process involving a large infusion of coffee, sometimes accompanied by a small breakfast, during which I surf the web. It's only natural that I run across either the Doc's blog or the Wife's in this process, and if I had been in the mood to write, I naturally feel compelled to respond to what I've read in either blog in some fashion. This particular morning, however, I got sent a missive from Barnes & Noble before getting around to reading blogs.
I think I signed up for their newsletter thingy in the process of buying CDs from them online. I'm not sure. It was either a box I checked or they just nabbed my e-mail address. Whatever the case, I get their missives once in a while, and I read them in the same fashion I read most of the stuff that lands in my in-box: scan, absorb, delete. Once in a while I run across something that looks interesting-- I should mention now that this is their bookselling site-- either by title or author. Generally speaking, what looks interesting isn't.
I have a general rule of thumb about lies: if you hear the same story twice from two different people, they're both lying. Like the story about the groom who plants a picture of the bride fellating the best man under every guest's chair at the reception. Or the bit about visiting Mickey Spillane's house in South Carolina. "He'll bring you the first beer, and after that you damned well get your own." Or the bit about watching Greg Corso rob a drunken guest after a party. "The trick is never take it all." Lies lies lies.
Now, I accept that works of fiction are, by definition, lies. And I accept the notion that it's not possible to in some way repeat what's come before. But, on the other hand, I would appreciate it if modern authors, or even the publishing world in general, knew that I read when I am BORED. BORED, BORED, BORED. And I don't care why other people read. I read to stop being bored. Not to BECOME BORED.
This can be a problem. It is true today, as it was in the past, that the publishing industry reserved roughly 80% of its production volume for works by dumbasses, for dumbasses. I ususally sum this up for the Wifey by saying "Apparently there are only SIX PLOTS LEFT in the ENTIRE WORLD!!! I usually say this in a wild-eyed, manic fashion that has the Wifey patting my arm and urging me to calm down before I have a stroke. She doesn't really see why I get so incensed, and in truth I don't really have anything invested. It's not like I have what I think is the Great American Novel on tap, not like I have ever submitted a novel for publication. But it's the notion that I have always been fed about getting published: you hafta pay your dues. It's a fucking lie. The truth is you have to fit the grooves. You have to fit into one of those pre-concieved notions of what's good, what will sell. Thus the six plots. And while on one level, as a writer, it offends me that part of the reason I might not be let into the club is that I am not willing to regurgitate one of the same six plots (or, for those who will argue the example of The DaVinci Code, go the route of combining current crackpot scholarship with the plot of the Bruce Willis vehicle Hudson Hawk). But it's really more than that. I'M BORED, DAMMIT. GIMME SOMETHING TO READ.
So it was kind of a let down when I clicked on one of the entries in the latest edition of the B&N newsletter, based on a quirky sounding title, to find that it involved a retired NYPD detective who agrees to help a friend by checking out a man she met online who has a mysterious connection to a convict in Virginia and then meanwhile, in Noo York, the body count begins stacking up
Great. Then I read on to find that the author is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. I omit the authors name because I've forgotten it already. Apparently, to become a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master you only need to snatch your plots out of three year old episodes of fucking LAW AND ORDER. The chapter headings probably all read (Bong-Bong!).
So, having set my sights on this topic for my next expletive-filled adventure, I went for a quick visit to my wife's website. Great! No new entry yet! I can proceed uninfluenced! Then I dropped in on Doc Nagel. A new entry here, but it's only one line long! That can't possibly influence me. Then I noted that the Doc's entry is just to inform his readers that, having been impressed with the format of El Wiferino's blog, he has elected to discontinue the standard form blog in favor of using the same advanced bloggingh programming service that El Wiferino has been using. It has several advantages, among them offering links to preferred sites and, as the Doc particularly noted, being able to just type reguilar rather than having to stick HTLM tags in all over the place.
That's OK. I would never want to be a member of a club that would have someone like me as a member.
The Wifey just read this entry. She didn't get it. Which says far more about me than it does about her. I am often deliberately obscure, because I think it's funny. Which it sometimes isn't. When it is, it's hilarious. I meant to imply that my anti-club rant abouve was more reflective of my reticence to join clubs to begin with than it is of the quality of clubs. And it's supposed to be ironic on an additional level in that I am continuing to write my sub text in HTML. What sometimes is called meta text. Get it? Subtext? Metatext? It's a joke, see? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
No. S'okay. I'm not sure I even get it at this point.*
*Gotta have one of these in my blog somewhere. It's my trademark. (Bong-bong!)
SWEET SWEET-BOY'S BLOG-ASSSSSS SONG: February 14th: Believe It Or Not, That Title Beat Out Both "Who Let The Blogs Out" and "Mad Blogs & Englishmen Continued"
So this weekend we spent our time divided between ejoying life to its fullest and living in a suspended state of dread. Oddly, it had nothing to do with either the war in Iraq or Social Security; contrarily, Rachelle was coming down with a cold.
Now, this process has several components to it, the first of which is the Wifey's depthless gift for denial (make that Denial, with a capital D). Which is to say that her first reaction to a virus is to say I CAN'T HEAR YOU, LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA! until it goes away, which sometimes it does. I had spent the previous week fighting off the self-same bug, so I should have been prepared for it, but I spent the period of the onset suspecting that I had done something very wrong and that the Wifey was, therefore, angry with me. The third phase involves the Wifey slowly but surely succumbing to the ailment and forcing herself to ingest cold medicine. This last bit has the element of scorched earth to it: while the anti-histamines relieve her symptoms, she hates the taste of the stuff and has to chase an ounce-and-a-half dose down with eight ounces of water, and she has the semi-common reaction of feeling like someone is sitting on her chest. During this phase, I have the standard Gee-I'm-So-Goddamned-Useless feeling that is only natural when one is standing by helplessly watching a loved one suffer. Of course, being the sympathetic sonuvabitch that I am, this feeling transcends all reason, extending long past the point where Rachelle has gone to bed and left me out on the couch. So last night I treated this symptom by watching "The Magnificent Seven." About fifteen minutes in, Doc Nagel called to fill me in on the events of his weekend, with the result that I didn't make it all the weay through the movie before the end. Which is fine, I know how it ends, but I can't help but wonder if that had anything to do with my latest existential irony, which is that I have been having a recurring nightmare in which I am suffering from insomnia.
Now, having been a life-long insomniac, I only discovered in my adult years the value of a full night's sleep. A great deal of this has to do with my wife's habit of sleeping, as near as I can calculate, whenever possible. Her ususal routine has her falling asleep on the couch in the early evening, going to bed mid-evening, and sleeping until early morning. My own habit is to stay up watching crap on television until ten or eleven, then turn in and, depending on whether I'm working or not, stay in bed until eight or nine. This is as opposed to my pre-adult sleep habit of staying up until after one and getting up at five or six. So it is only fitting that, while fighting off a cold I simply didn't want, and then again while feeling guilty for not being able to keep my wife from suffering the self-same cold, I would punish myself by having a nightmare in which I was suffering a bout of insomnia. Rachelle reports that, since I was tossing and turning, she checked and found that I was, in fact snoozing, but in my dreams I was suffering a maddening inability to maintain a state of unconsciousness.
It's good to be da King.
So, naturally, while everyone else in the world is blogging about the war in Iraq and Social Security, I'm filling my social obligation of practicing free speech to complain about the dark underworld of my psyche. Somebody has to do it . . ?
A GOY AND HIS BLOG, PART II: THE SPAWNING: February 13th: Truth and Reonciliation
Some basic observations about My Generation in America.
Everybody thinks we are a dumbassed and empty-headed generation. That's just those of us who were lucky enough to land jobs in media. I can have an interesting and idea-filled conversation any where I go.
Everybody thinks the News is dumbed down. The News has always been dumbed down. How do you think we got through World War Two? Propaganda. One? Propaganda. Hell, the Civil War! Major propaganda. A sense of history is important.
Everybody values and admires the idealism of the 60's. They shouldn't. In the words of the mighty William H. Joel, Rain, mud, b.o. and acid. You didn't miss anything. For the most part, the murky Marxism that was supposed to be such a threat to the establishment was put in service to help people get laid. (Billy Joel said what he said, specifically, about the Woodstock festival. But I think the application applies.)
There are two schools of thought on the policies of the current Admonistration (that was a typo, but I've decided I like it): One is that the Bushies are dangerous and crazy and are going to ruin the world, and the other is that the Bushies are right and moral and have the only solution to The Problem (whatever in the Hell The Problem might turn out to be). The fact is that the Admin is toothless, only has the courage to attack enemies it feels it can defeat, and can't add.* Which is basically to say that everyone is wrong.+ I don't mean that the way it sounds.~ Really.^
Eminem is a uniter, not a divider. The way I know this is that he is absolutely no good at directing traffic. In order to prove that, I am willing to make a standing offer to run him down. In fact, I'll make it a challenging bet: I'll do it in my Toyota Corolla! And the flowers are still standing!#
Ann Coulter is a dumb bitch who thinks it's fun to pick on cripples. Some things need to be said, over and over again, with fierce conviction.
So pop culture and academia are filled with bullshit. Haven't they always been? There's nothing really wrong with this generation. Except the re-make of "Give A Little Bit" by the Goo Goo Dolls. Was that really necessary? Couldn't they have just, say, burned a bible or pissed on a Torah? It would have had the same basic effect. (On me, at least.)
One last observation, this one no limited to the current (or recent) generation(s): there is no such thing as "a literal interpretation of the Bible." It's not possible. The Bible is probably the worst written, most contradictory single volume work in the history of literature, in any translation. The God who declares "Thou Shalt Not Kill" was, a mere few chapters previous, proclaiming that he would help smite enemies. I thus reject anyone's reasoning who prefaces it with a profession of Christian beliefs: they have to be a hypocrite or an idiot to begin with. And sure, Christians tend to be the dominant portion of American society. But they don't mean anything by it. Mostly they just want to be allowed to park in the streets on Sundays. Go to Shoney's afterwards. Maybe hit the mall.
*If they could add, they would have conceded the first election, there wouldn't be a deficit, and the war in Iraq wouldn't be costing a gazillion bajillion dollars, which I offer as a stinging idictment of the newz media today: CAN'T YOU FUCKERS ADD!!!! ASK THE FUCKING QUESTION YOU FUCKING MORONS!!!
+I think. And I can't be sure.
~Yes I do. No I don't.
^Kinda sorta maybe. Yes! No! Perhaps! Splunge!
#I know running down Eminem would do no good. They'd just put him back together again. He's made of Leggos.
DOES YOUR BLOG BITE?: February 11th: McBloggle's
So for lunch today I landed at McDonald's, something I have been doing with increasing rarity these days, and had a McRib sandwich for the second time this fiscal year.* It is something I like to do from time to time, mainly for that absurd feeling I always have at some point in the meal: I shouldn't be enjoying this. This time the feeling was compounded: I shouldn't be eating this, let alone enjoying it. I mean, I guess I can rest well enough assured that what I have my hands on is pretty much all meat product, and it's not to far a leap to assume that it's all pork, but the thing itself offers almost no evidence whatsoever as to the actual facets of it's composition. I half expected Charleton Heston to burst into the place screaming IT'S PEEEEOOOOOPLE! SOYLENT RED IS PEEEEEOOOOOOPLE!+
But in the long run I made it through the meal without undue psychological distress, and made my way over to the Wal-Mart of Doom, which I did only to inflict psychological distress on myself. The Wal-Mart of Doom is the newest Wal Mart in our area, at the intersection of Highway 16 and Mount Holly-Huntersville Road, righ smack dab in the middle of the are where we have done our grocery shopping for the last half dozen years. It became the Wal Mart of doom (for me, not for Rachelle) on my first visit there. There's just something about the place that sets me on edge, I don't know what. (Rachelle doesn't get that feeling at all.) (My sister-in-law Danielle gets the same feeling, also without any discernible cause that she can finger.)
This all got me to thinking about something Alton Brown wrote in his blog last year, after seeing the film "Supersize Me," which is that the big flaw in the film is a lack of perspective: of course McDonald's isn't aware of what harm their food might do to people. It's a corporation, a business. It's all about bucks, and doesn't have any compelling reason to give a damn about the health of the consumer, so long as the consumer is shelling out wampum for their product. He took it a step further: we're killing ourselves with burgers, and that wouldn't be happening if we thought of food as a loving, nurturing thing. At one point he said, basically, that it was a bad idea to let strangers make our dietary decisions.
Which is basically true. I mean, from a common sense standpoint, you have to admit that the idea of trusting a stranger to give you sustenance, on a theoretical level, requires something of a leap of faith. And I'm not saying that we don't or shouldn't trust our fellow man. I believe people are basically good. I also know that people are often incompetent. I'm just saying: it'a a risk we take.
I didn't have much of a point to make earlier, as I was thinking of all this, but I think I do now. For all the claptrap about obesity and corporatization and global economy and everything (not to mention the United States of Wal-Mart), it comes down to a matter of one of two points of view: either the corporatization is ruining us and kiling us and cheapening our souls, and there doesn't seem to be much we could do about it, or we gravitate to places like Wal-Mart and McDonald's because our souls are pretty cheap to begin with and we really don't have much else to do with our lives. I'm not sure which idea is scarier.
Alton-- may I call him Alton?-- summed up his basic argument thusly: "Is MacDonalds food bad for you? What do you think? Does that mean you shouldn�t eat it? No, it just means you shouldn�t live on it or anything else made by someone you wouldn�t hug." I know the people who work behind the counter at my local McDonald's pretty well by now, at least as well as you can know someone who waits on several hundred (or thousand) people a day and only speaks your native tongue as a second language. I'd hug them. Then again, I'm a hugger.
*I don't really mean anything by "fiscal" here. Ir's just that the last McRib I had was back in November or December, which makes this the second McRib in the space of a year, and what I always figured was that one McRib a year would be the maximum number of McRibs I could eat in any given time period, which works out pretty well as McDonalds only does the McRib every year or so. This modern life of ours! How complicated!
+Rachelle and I batted the phrasing there around for a while before I settled on "SOYLENT RED IS PEEEEOOOOOPLE!" I was gonna go through a whole long explanation about how in the film is's Soylent Green (the name of the film, is, in fact, "Soylent Green"), and Soylent Green is one of several synthesized foodstuffs that the people of the future are surviving on, and it turns out to be made of recycled human bodies, but I've decided screw it, you either get it and think it's funny or you don't and it's not.
YES! YES, WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!: February 10th: You Find Some Way To Stick The Word Blog In ThatIn fact, I am about yo close to giving up on blogging altogether.
That's a lie. Last Fall, I came close to giving up while I was doing the help desk gig; I wasn't enetring blogs, no one was complaining, and I said to myself "Why bother?" But of course I went back to it as soon as I found myself with time on my hands. And of course, I am coming back when I have things on my mind. What I have on my mind now, however, does make it hard not to think of quitting this damned blogging buisness.
For while I fancy myself quite the writer, occasionally I am offered reason to doubt how much my contribution might be worth. Now, of course, that's nothing new, but this time around it's . . . well, it's special. Of course, everybody knows Doc Nagel's blog, and now there's The Wifey's blog, and I recently learned that one of her friends has been blogging too. But then there's Alton Brown's blog.
Now, don't get me wrong. I like Alton as a rule, and we watch his show on the Food Network a fair deal and like it pretty well. (Of course, it airs in the same time slot as The Daily Show, and, hey, let's face it: if it's a choice between Alton's show and Jon Stewart's show, well, Jon wins, and no apologies from me about it at all.) Unlike most of the shows on the Food Network, Alton's show has a genuine sense of humor, and even when we reach the conclusion that his preparations, as authentic as they might be, are more trouble than they're worth, the advice is mostly valid, especially as regards gadgetry. But learning that he had a blog was, frankly, a little disheartening.
It was kind of like learning that Julia Childs had a wart on her ass. It's just not something you want to know
(It's not like that at all, but tell me you've ever heard anything compared to finding out that Julia Childs had a wart on her ass?)
Of course, he doesn't update it very often. And, of course, he doesn't tackle nearly the kinds of topics I tend to cover-- with the exception of chili*-- including politics, philosophy, history, and the Unified Sandwich Theory. But I can't help but feel that whatever audience I might have had is slowly being sucked away. Of course, as with most blogs-- most real blogs-- my actual core audience is made up friends and lovers, in this case mostly The Wifey and Doc Nagel, anyways. But still. I don't like the notion that I'm competeing with Alton Brown. Except when it comes to Hawaiian shirts. I think my collection beats his flat, given that I have the added distinction that 95% of my Hawaiian shirts are blue. And I almost always wear them over "Alcatraz Swim Team" t-shirts.
*Apparently he got some flak over a show he did on chili from some folks who have some very specific ideas about what chili is. My idea of chili is Tex-Mex style, ground beef and tomatoes and spices cooked into a spicy mush, but I know there are many, many, many kinds of chili, some of which are nothing but glorified soups, and some of which are downright painful to eat. Arguing about it silly.
THE BLOG IN THE MACHINE: February 7th: Serendipity; Lather, Rinse, Repeat
In the continuing and widening circle of the blogging world, these things are bound to happen. A friend of Rachelle's has started a blog, in which she recently threw a hand at de-bunking the notion that we are a Christian nation with the evidence that most of the founding fathers were Deists, Agnostics, or theosophs who distrusted the clergy (in the meantime Rachelle's sister Danielle is soliciting my help writing about Thomas Morton, who spent a good deal of time and energy trying to de-bunk the notions the Puritans had laid down that it was the will of God that the savages' lands should be taken from them). Rachelle responded to her friend's blog by saying well, that's one of those thinsg where if you repeat it often enough people actually atart believing it. She then circled over to the Doc's blog, the current subject of which is the phenomenon of people believing what's widely said despite a plenitude of evidence to the contrary, ending with the example of the extraordinarily crappy pseudo journalism of Ann Coulter, which is uniformly filled with almost every example of how one can speak a language fluently and be completely and utterly unable to write a single sentance that is worth a week-old crap. However, having already said everything I feel needs be said about Ann Coulter,* I felt that I might not be able to yet again widen the circle of serendipity by making an observation along the same lines. Then, out of the blue, what did I happen to run across on television but the film "All the President's Men," right in the middle of the scene where Deep Throat (Hal Holbrooke) warns Bob Woodward (Bob Redford) not to believe the media-built hype around the White House, that these guys (in the Watergate break in) simply weren't very bright. So now I've got my subject, and I can make my own little explication on the matter. The notion that people will beleive a thing simply because it's repeated is one of those things people will choose to believe simply because it's repeated.
Example: people believe that Woodward was (is) a great journalist in spite of the fact that he can't write his way out of a paper bag (although he did write his way out of several papers, which is why he sticks to books these days) and the "journalism" he is trotting out tends to consist pretty much of badly chopped up and re-worded press releases, this being a more ethical alternative to using make-believe interviews to spice things up when he's drained his subject dry of any possible point of interest. The other thing, and this one I really have a hard time swallowing, even this far out, is that people still believe that Deep Throat existed.
You might as well believe in the Great Pumpkin. Deep throat was a fictional source, a guy Woodward made up to convince people that he was on to something. A trench-coated chain smoker who would only meet him in a darkened parking garage, and no, he couldn't tell you where it was because if he blew the guy's cover, and in the meantime hios contributions to the story consist of "Dig deeper," "You guys have no idea what you're onto," and "Follow the money!"
Bullshit.
Woodward and Bernstein stumbled into the Watergate case. They worked their asses off because they were vying for positions in one of the most cut-throat journalism, and they still had a hard time unravelling what was, in the final analysis, a blatantly illegal and (frankly) stupid operation that didn't actually benefit the perpetrators anything at all. The cover-up became the story, and the journalists covering it made themselves a part of it by insisting that the fact that it was being hid from them made them as important as the story. (Sound familiar?) During the testimony in the summer of 74, my mother often repeated the mantra: all Nixon did wrong was cover it up. Which is actually wrong, but not for the reasons that people usually enjoy trotting out.+ What Nixon really did that was wrong was to initiate the process and let the operation be put into the hands of incompetent bastards, who then tried to obtain by way of cloak-and-dagger what they could have otherwise obtained by walking through the fucking front door during business hours.~ Meanwhile, Nixon't other crimes-- exacerbating the war in Vietnam, normalizing relations with China by letting them know they could lie to us and we would swallow almost any whaopper they told, pissing off the Soviets and heating up the arms race for no very good reason despite the fact he was too much of a pussy to face them off where it might have mattered in Europe-- were either ignored or accepted as "policy decisions." (He also listened to Kissenger, a man who has never said a single thing that has been borne out by subsequent history, but that's not really a crime (see~).)
People operate on the information they have available. There is no other way: we cannot intuit concrete truth, we can only base our knowledge on our observations combined with whatever information we get regarding the rest of the world, and all that combines to form the personal body of knowledge. Sometimes, in a murky situation, an obvious lie (George Bush was elected President) is easier to accept than an iffy possibility (after an intense recount lasting up to a year we may have the result that George Bush has not been elected President). So it's easy to believe that Bob Woodward had a source nicknamed Deep Throat (giggle, giggle) on whose authority we can accept the notion that the real story behind Watergate was that it consisted of actions which were scrupulously ofuscated and muddled. And we can take Woodward's word for it that Allan Greenspan could make the markets rise and fall at will, no matter how much evidence to the contrary there is.
It's intersting and dangerous sounding to say that if you repeat something often enough, people will blithely accept it as truth. I think it's far more accurate, and historically documented, to say that the same is with lies as it is with liars: popular is as popular does. If your give the people what they want to hear, alot of the time they'll hear it. They know it's a lie. They don't care. Especially if it means they're on the winning side.
*Ann Coulter is a dumb bitch who thinks it's funny to pick on cripples.
+He was a crook.
~He was a dumbass.
BLOG ME, BABY! BLOG ME! HARDER!: February 4th: Outside Deep Throat
"Lovelace�s story is really the most depressing to come out of the �Deep Throat� saga, but little time is given her or her ordeal at the hands of husband Chuck Trainor (Lovelace�s sister alludes to his behavior, but little else)."
-- Peter Vonder Har at Film Threat
I feel a bit like I got ambushed, but that's kind of beside the point. I guess it makes sense that, eventually, someone would decide to make a documentary about the film "Deep Throat," the film that launched a thousand rumors, the film that neatly divided the would-be perverts of the Left from the blue nosed hypocrites of the right, the film that threw into deep (sic) relief the basic hypocrisy of the whole nation, in the early 70's, a time when a nation bruised blue by conflicts with no clear winner or loser was about to enter a period of time when it could do no right no matter which way it turned.* Perfect timing.
My animosity towards the film has nothing to do with sex. Or with conventional morality, for that matter. Or, oddly, with porn, although I have huge and abiding problems with the porn industry. (Mostly to do with quality product. Most of what the industry produces, frankly, is pretty unconvincing.) In fact, it's hard to say I really have anything against the film itself, either as artifice or artifact. I've never seen it, but I have been told that it's pretty convincing as such things go. But the kind of hedonistic hypocrisy it provoked at the time had a negative effect on my own developing understanding of pleasure principles. I was seven at the time, and far from being precocious I was fast developing a philosophy. I'm not bragging; I actually was in the porcess of assembling my own Weltanshang, Weltschmerz, whatever you call it, my own world view. I was aware of sexuality as a concept although my own was still developing. (Developing fast; I had my first near-brush with it in first grade, when it turned out that the pretty blonde girl all the boys liked had a crush on me. My reaction was basically "Dammit! You just KNOW she won't feel like that a year from now, when it would be socially acceptable to do something about it. She did, but we were in different classes by then, and I didn't know anything about it until we were in high school. And that's a whole different story, but worth the telling.
We had moved from Charlotte to Dallas, Texas, when I was in fourth grade; we moved back right before I entered sixth grade. As it turns out, we moved in down the block from the pretty blonde girl's family-- her name was Ann, which will save time not having to keep typing pretty blonde girl. But it was a very loooooong block away, and we travelled in different circles, socially speaking: she was in the rich prppy crowd, and I was a brooding loner. One sunny day at the end of summer during my sophomore year of high school we ran into each other outside her house, and had a brief, deep and uncomfortable discussion, during which I found out that she had a crush on me all the way through junior high school, that she found my dark, brooding intellectualism attractive and my acidic sense of humor enticing, and that when her sister had blurted out her secret crush on me two years before her parents basically threatened to cut her legs off if she ever got involved with me, so she smothered the crush and would probably never love anyone again, at which point she smiled sunnily and informed me that she had to go, they were leaving for summer vacation in another five minutes.
I walked away, back up the block towards our house, thnking to myself "Wow. Somthing truly psychotic could happen there.")
Anyways.
So here I am forming my own notions of sexuality, and it was going pretty good, frankly. I had done some basic picking and choosing, and come up with the following: sex is what happens between a man and a woman when they love each other and it feels reeeeeeeeally good. There is nothing inherently wrong with it, although discretion is the better part of valor, and those who talk about it most care about it least. And anyone who thinks there's something inherently wrong with it must have something wrong with them. This was pretty good ammo as it turns out; later when my contemporaries would come back with weird theories as to where babies came from that involved one degree or another of sadism or possible dismemberment, I could dismiss them with my basic understanding that sex was supposed to be pleasurable. (Which is why I don't get S&M and fetishism. I could be wrong, but my basic feeling is that people who need toys to enjoy sex must not get it to begin with. Which, of course, I know I could be wrong. But it's not anything I act on, so it doesn't really mean anything. It's just a prejudice.)
So, basically, I'm good on the sex thing for the time being, and then THIS damned thing comes out. The reality of it was that three elements-- porn making, mobstering, and film distribution-- came together veryu suddenly and serendipitously. The porn makers had a film they had made for very little money; the mobsters wanted something they could make aloooooot of money on, based only on connections and (if needed) intimidation; the distribution people saw an opportunity to side-step the byzantine and expensive studio distribution system with a gray market film, thus, making alooooooot of money. After all, the argument went, the line between hard core porn and R-rated movies was getting fuzzier and fuzzier sooooooo . . .
And then various Liberal types started treating it as a cause celebre. It celebrated sexuality! It broke down the Judeo-Christian sexual repression! It was psychologically healthy! And then it turned out that the people who made the film were all scumbags, except for poor Linda Lovelace, who was drugged and brutalized into turning in a very convincing performance, and when the limelight hit the mobsters things really got weird.
And ugly. And I didn't think sex was supposed to be ugly. It was all just very . . . dissapointing. And it doesn't seem to be a very good thing to be celebrating. Now, I don't really KNOW if that's what the film makers intended, but given the nature of such things-- for instance, the films "Boogie Nights" and "Wonderland," which both posture to condemn with faint praise, if you can dig that, don't bode well, and filmdom, both studio and independent, thrives on trends.
The other side of the coin, that moralizers tend to be uniformly hypocritical, that morality is usually more about money and power than good and evil, ethics something people use to make other people wrong, more about appearance than truth. A short time after I had the real crestfall of my youth. Watergate happened, and I thought that maybe it was the last nail in the coffin of hypocrisy, 70's style. Hey, I was a kid. I was optimistic. It turns out that some people are always interested in acting like scumbags.
A quick check of the movie offerings for this afternoon brought a sharper point to this whole things; one of the films one might watch this afternoon is "Intolerable Cruelty," which is a good enough flick, and is neither intolerable nore cruel. I have only one or two problems with the plot; I love watching George Clooney do his thing, although Catherine Zeta-Jones almost always leaves me a little cold, and I can see what they were after even if they didn't quite get there. I mean, as satires go, I can certainly think of worse. But what it brings to mind is basically this: sex is sex and acting is acting, and never the twain shall meet. Which is why most porn is unconvincing. Which is why a film like "Deep Throat" will always be bad and shouldn't be celebrated. Sex is better than that.
*The real reason the 70's sucked had nothing to do with hedonism, therapy, disco, or the Me generation, and everything to do with a government deeply stung by the atrocity of the Vietnam conflict and the apparent sucess of communism that it alternately struck out like a drunken, enraged asshole (usually at Kissenger's urging) or went cloyingly the way of the universal peacemaker (this would be Carter's administration). (And sure, that's what got the hostages taken, paradoxically enough, but the real crime the Carter Admin committed was the usering in of the Reagan administration, awhich, along with MTV and rap, is largely what made the 80's suck.
ANOTHER HORSE, ANOTHER BLOGGING: February 2nd: Complaints; Why The World Is Going To Hell in a Handbasket
I've been meaning to blog for the last couple of days. Unfortunately, I managed to keep myself busy enough that it wasn't practical to get back here early enough to finish my daily tasks and still stick in a few choice words. Also, there was the matter of picking my subject. There's the voting in Iraq, which seems to have gone well and gives me an inordinate amount of hope for the future of the region. I know. I'm a mook. They'll be blowing people up again in a fortnight. (And unlike the Liberal Establishment, I'm not consumed with this compulsion to cast whatever happens there as being contrary to the Admin's predictions. I heard alot of crap recently about the Admin "lowering expectations" and claiming that the vote wasn't "a numbers game" so that a low turnout wouldn't be interpreted as a failure. I'm happy as all getout about the turnout. I hope it means what the Admin says it means, that stability and democracy will be encouraged in the region, and that that in turn might prove to be a vlow against terrorism. But it doesn't get the bastards off the hook for lying to us. They still lied about why we went to Iraq to begin with.)
Then there was the recent Coolness Survey. There was recently an article in my hometown paper, the Charlotte Observer, about a study commissioned by the city to figure out what might make Charlotte a cooler place to live. Problem is, the people they asked mostly weren't from Charlotte, were here by force rather than preference, and either a) didn't know much about cool or2. didn't know much about charlotte. Fortunately, the Wifey took care of that for me. Then there was the series of tasks I had set myself over the course of the last few days, mainly small things to fortify and beautify the house, including fopur volumes of Thurber, wihout which our humble home would have remained sadly humble indeed.+
But then, finally, there was the spam.
The most recent trend in spam is to camouflage the meassage to make it look like it is an undeliverable meassage returned by a server or ISP, or else to make it look like it's a response to a request for information. Trouble is, they're so transparent, you'd have to be an idiot to actually think the thing was what it said it was: misspellings,~ logical flaws in the format, and hell, who sends so much e-mail that they would suddenly think they had sent mail to a completely foreign address? It's almost as if the idiots sending this crap out are purposely being stupid in order to attract stupid people. Which, I can see how that might be an attractive consumer base . . .
But still. I find it offensive. Mainly because how stupid these people seem to be. Stupid and arrogant. What gives them the right to target me with their crap? Screw them. But today I got one that was particularly offensive. It came as a response to a request for information, based on an acceptance of a commentary. See, here's the thing: this is one that could've almost got me.
I'm a writer, right? And, as any of you who've been paying any attention at all knows, I kind of have a thing about rejection. So any news that I might have had something accepted somewhere . . .
I didn't bite. I did go so far as to open the mail, and even to ask my wife (via IM) if she had any idea what a .pif file was (the attachment was a .pif; she didn't know, I still don't know). But I didn't open the attachment. Not so much for fear of virus-- we're pretty well protected-- but out of that basic disgust for the kinds of sneaky stupid bastards who do this kind of crap. But wait, there's more!
I decided to find out what kind of craphounds would stoop so low as to dangle acceptance out to prospective writers to get them to chomp on their spam. A quick search revealed them to be a rag called Commentary Magazine. The first glance proved it to be the kind of stupid right-wing rag that allows dumb assholes to make stupid arguments as to why war is a good thing, the kind of rag that exists so that know-it-all thugs with small dicks can make up for the fact that they are weak minded little faggots by pretending to be blood-thirsty psychopaths. That kind of thing.^
So it's those kinds of sleazy minded idiots who do that sort of thing. They have to trick other kids into playing with them 'cause everybody-- evvverybody-- knows they are mean and cannot be trusted.
*Unfortunately, one of my favorite local columnist, Tommy Tomlinson, responded to the article with exactly the wrong answer, which is that Charlotte has cool stuff, but you have to drive to get to it, which is exactly wrong. The answer is that in order to have cool stuff to do in Charlotte we have to a) be willing to go and do cool stuff, and 2. quit being such fucking snobs that we don't think anything is cool. I can have a good time, a fine time, just wandering around downtown with my wife and a niece or two, just seeing the sights, finding out what there is to do. THAT's cool.
+I have more books than I can read right now. I might get to the Thurber by March.
~Is that how you spell that?
^And, for some reason, they like to dress it up in religion, like God is stupid too. It's odd what passes for religion sometimes.
BLOG OF THE DOOMED: January 28th: These Friends of Mine
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects... The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of contact or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.
-- Theodor ("She's Too Fat For Me") Adorno
I was going to write about something else today. I swear to God, I was. But then, this morning, smack dab in the middle of my first cup of coffee, I had the misfortune to click in to Doc Nagels blog, and . . .
So, here I am again, responding to Doc Nagel's blog about the importance of avoiding reading Adorno. (My working title for this was to be "Why Adorno Was Wrong," then "Why Adorno Was Almost Right," then "Why People Who Don't Eat Eggs Are Insane"-- I was in the middle of a bacon & cheese omlette at the Gitmo*-- but I had forgotten all that by the time I sat down to write this.) As I remember it, Adorno was one of those thinkers urged on us by our philosophy profs (and left-bent others) in our college days. I think I read some on my own, but I do remember having some thrust upon me (I forget by whom), and I didn't really get it until I came to realize that Adorno was wrong.
Of course, it was a difficult time not to be wrong. And by that I mean the latter half of the 20th Century. Half the world seemed to have been enlightened by science, half the world seemed to have been driven insane by facism of one sort or another, and half the time it was impossible to tell which half was which. By the time the Second World War came around, it was hard to suggest that the world shouldn't be plotting it's own destruction and not risk being called a pussy. By the time we got involved in the Korean conflict, it was all but impossible.
And this was true in Europe as much as it was here. This is the period during which the Europeans, any time their current political culture was held up as racist or dangerous, or their schools of thought were found to be basically facistic, they pointed their fingers immediately across the pond. "Ah, but it is zee AMEERICAAAAAANZZZ who are really decadent and depraved and will prove zee deasss of Western Cultuuuurrrrre." But that's a different matter entirely. Adorno tried hard to be right, but he just couldn't manage it.
Using the above as an example, Adorno was reasonabley accurate as far as how the mechanized world ought to have effected us, individually and as a society. Next time you see someone operating a heavy machine-- say a back hoe or a tractor, or even a snow blower-- notice the movements: they are jerky, they are brutal, and if they aren't quite precise it's because the linkages are loose by design in order to absorb shock. In the middle of our century, that looked to be the way of the world: mechanistic production was going to take over, and we would become faceless brutalizers of our own races, facists beyond any cause or prejudice, beyond any nation or ideology, regardless of anything besides relentless, brutal Progress.
Scary, huh?
That it didn't quite work out that way is no fault of Adorno's. And it could be that he was among the legion who said such balderdash in the hopes that it would forestall the actual coming to pass of same, but the people who recommended Adorno to us wanted to convince us, beyond all the evidence to the contrary, that we should turn away from the false gods of Kapital and turn to the true light of Socialist Revolution. Truth be told, alot can be blamed on the evils of Capitalism, but for crying out loud, I was a freaking English major. I was already digging deep into the soul of culture, right? And I was taking Philosophy courses to deepen my appreciation of it, too. Why not foist this crap on the people most in danger, the Business majors? Tell them about the soul-deadening evils of Capitalism. (Although, truth be told, most of the Business majors we knew were soul-dead to begin with, thus the whole business of majoring in Business in the first place.)
Which is all by way of a backhanded apologia to Adorno as well. Because I think he meant well, I think he really did. Kind of like Orwell did, showing us the worst we could be in hopes that we wouldn't be that way. But there are better and worse ways to go about it. At least Orwell was funny. If Adorno was ever funny, I never got the joke (and the people pushing him on me weren't in on it). But the way things worked out just weren't the way the people doing the predicting thought they would. As it turns out, Capitalism could be wacky fun! Gidget surfed to Rome, Elvis shook a leg, and now we all drive cars that are five times as big as we need to the mall (there's a discount store there.) And we're about to spend twice as much on a war we don't need than we are on helping famine victims worldwide. Those nutty millionaires in their silk hats and waistcoats!
*For those of you just tuning in, "The Gitmo" is my quirky name for the Eat Well Family Restaurant, the diner-style joint near our house here in Charlotte where I often go for breakfast when I am between gigs.
BLOG STEW: January 25th: Revival Chili
Let me start off with: I knew better. Of course I knew better.
In case you haven't noticed (or maybe you're not seeing it wherever you are), there's been a profusion of ready-made chilis on the market over the last few months. One of the best, suprisingly, is Bush's Best Chili No Beans-- Bush's is the bean company. One of the most recent entries in the field is-- brace yerself-- Campbell's Chunky Soups. And, so, since there was a coupon in the paper for the stuff this weekend, I am currently attempting to resurrect the contents of a can of the stuff.
Normally I would try to sucker punch you here, sandbag the results of the experiment to generate some kind of drama, but you might as well know up front: there's no hope. And the coupon was buy-one-get-one-free, and we only bought one, so we didn't even get any discount on it.
Opinions of the Chunky Soups vary. I, personally, can recall having had one that was better than passable, and I can vividly recall having had a couple that were more than dissapointing-- these would be cheese based soups, something for which I have an inordinate fondness, and the problem was that whatever they used as stabilizers reduced the cheese elements of the soup to rubbery glop-- but, frankly, I should have known better than to think they would produce what I think of as chili.
What I got is what I should have expected: industrial grade crap. It reminds me alot of the kind of thing they would try to foist off on us in the elementary school lunchroom when I was a kid: heavy on processed tomatoes, green pepper, and beans, no real spice, no actual peppers were harmed in the making of this stew. Having dosed it with salts-- stop that-- ground black pepper, chili powder, hot sauce (Chalula, natch), and a freshly chopped clove of garlic, I have so far suceeded only in making it hot. I'm in the cook-down phase now, which will last however long it lasts, and I have but the dimmest hope that I might have turned it into something good to eat. Even as I type, the fragrance wafts down the hallway to me from the kitchen: I can but hope that I will manage to cook the industrialness out of it and instill some soul. Wish me luck.
(I swear to God: I knew better. I really did.)
There was one other thing I wanted to blog about, just to get it off my chest. I had thought about it early this morning, and decided to hold off, not to write about it at all, since it is a kind of personal thing, and not of any real import outside of the interasctions of a few people, and maybe I was only really wanting to write about it because I was, at the moment, miffed. But I have decided to go ahead and write about it, because I do think that it reflects larger issues.
One of the people I correspond with on line, kind of out of the blue but in line with recent threads of discussion, asserted that she had made the sudden revelation that what was really wrong with Islam was that they lacked a musical tradition, this based on a documentary she had seen on PBS about religious muiscial heritages in the US. Rather than group-reply, I sent her the following note, discreetly to her and to her alone:
"Are you nuts? Almost all the prayers in traditional Islam are SUNG. Just because there is little or no traditional music associated with Islam in the States means nothing. One of the great ongoing debates throughout the Arab world, in fact, is over whether or not secular music ought to be allowed at all, as it is seen by the clerics as infringing on the traditional, SACRED role of music and song in Islam."
The following morning-- that is to say, this morning-- I recieved a reply from her, asserting that I was being rude and claiming that I had called her names and resorted to ad hominem attacks. And she group replied it.
To the credit of the others in the group, they have not band-wagoned. (I don't know if my correspondent intended them to or whether she simply wasn't thinking when she group replied.) A separate, single line response (after others had joined the thread) reminded the group that the call to prayer in Muslim communities is a song, which elicited a single reponse from one of the group who researched the matter on line and found a mild-manner screed relating to one of those strange Islamic cliques in which the constant quest is to figure out what things are impermissable and why, and even it had only the most basic restriction on music: holy songs only, and no accompaniment besides the most rudimentary and consecrated instruments.
I probably sound like I'm just bitching, but my real point here is this: it's just too goddamned easy to be right, and if you'r idea of deductive thinking is to watch a PBS doc and apply it to the entire world, go home. We have enough of that sort of crap going on as it is, both within and outside the Bush Administration.
There. Now I've called her names. I'm so bad.
A BLOG SENT OUT FROM THE WILDERNESS: January 24th: Politics, Journalism, Ethics, Sausage Subs
Over the weekend, Doc Nagel sent me a largely bullshit article about the growing importance of online bloggers. Now, of course, the good Doctor has his take on the matter, which includes, somewhat selfishly, his take on how his current work on Habermas might in some way apply (though, frankly, I didn't get it). And it also, helpfully, has a broken link to yer humble author's own blog spot, thus reinforcing my general feelings of being cut off from the world of journalism and my increasingly prevalent feelings of irrelevance. But that's not of any real importance right now. What I really want to write about is the vast right wing conspiracy to reinforce the notion that the right wing has anything at all constructive to say anymore.
Of course, it begins, as so many things do, with Rush Limbaugh. In his hard-charging fight for recognition, which actually translates out of his pathetic and child-like yearnings to be Joe Popular at any costs-- his Daddy never liked him-- he found that he could gain a great and sycophantic audience by embracing the right wing hard-liner stance. This allowed him to appeal to the inner asshole in so many of us, especially the meek and timid who have little hard reasoning power but desperately want to be able to exercise white racist leanings without having to come up with a rejoinder when it is recognised that they are leaning white racist. So Limbaugh, applying the classic NRA model, supplies his listeners with milky reasoning that provides it's own rejoinder, and, if you're really lucky, could even provoke your liberal critics into saying thinks like "Abortion is every woman's duty!" or "Surely you can't suggest that we should arrest murderers!"
Fast forward, as I'm fond of saying, however many years you think is fair. (I'm fonder of saying it when I have a sepcific number of years to request you fast forward through. Sorry about that.) (So long as you end up somewhere towards the end of 2004, you're about where I'm suggesting.) It's the heat of the election, Bush and Cheney are lying their asses off on a daily basis. The Merriam-Webster people have sent word out to the wilderness-- note the irony-- that the most Webstered word of the year (which was not yet over) was "blog." Then-- wait for it-- then the election was over, and what had been surfacing in fits and starts was the realization that a great amount of the political folderol people had been listening to had emerged from online bloggers using the freedom of the internet to advance their political agenda. (These guys were surfacing on a much more patchy basis during the election.) Now, suddenly, we have this cockememe article about the ethics of blogging, including some deliberate blurring of the line between blogging and journalism, which, if these people were actually pure bloggers, would never even bleeding exist.
Now, here's the thing: the bloggers who were prairie dogging during and after the election all had affiliations, all had organizations, all had support platforms, and all had shared agendas. And remember: on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. The right wingers were banking on that particularly. Set up some bogus web sites, flog some basic rightie-tightie viewpoints, use that all-important Vox Publicus sense of outrage, use patchy grammar and cheap sarcasm and make lots and lots of typos, and voila, you have the apperance of a grass-roots populist movement to give the questionable "mandate" of the shakily elected admin some kind of credence.
And is it working? I hope not. I mean, after all, it's transparent as hell, the timing has been stupid to say the least, ineffectual to say the most, and the fact that they appear to have, so far, only sucked in fellow right wing types and professionally trained* journalists, suggests that they haven't succeded in fooling most of the people most of the time. These idiots can't do anything right.
But, on the upside, I had a sausage sub yesterday
After a completely fruitless shopping trip, which amounted chiefly to traipsing about the countryside, tra-la, in the Wifey's new Mini Cooper, we dropped into a locally owned and operated joint called Tony's Pizza, which exists paradoxically in a strip center housing a Food Lion at the extreme southern edge of Huntersville. Now, Huntersville has little enough to be said for it, existing largely as a redneck enclave where people could complain about how rotten things in Charlotte were, until about ten or twelve years ago when it turned into a rabid developer's wet dream, acres of scrub brush and piedmont prarie that could be developed into miles and miles of retail and residential developments, which could reasonable be sold as "At The Lake," despite the fact that almost nothing in Hunterville is in any way, shape or form "at the lake." Tony's spot of land is at the absolute fringe of this.
Tony's, which may or may not be owned/run by Tony, is manned by a crew of New Yorkers. The fare is classic New York stuff, oversized slices of wafer thin pizza, calzones stuffed to the rafters with mozzerella and ricotta cheese, perfectly balanced and assembled subs, and so on. So Sunday, when we dropped in for lunch, I decided to try out their sausage sub.
Now, a sausage sub, as I remarked to Rachelle as we dined, violates several aspects of the UST (Unified Sandwich Theory). First of all, the condiment-- and there's only one, marinara sauce-- is pervasive, and the meat dominates the concoction. The cheese is on top and acts as a gasket or seal more than anything else. If properly managed, the sub must be eaten from the bottom up; most subs require that they be eaten from the top down in oder to compress the components, but the sauce makes it so that the contents should be consumed so as to push them against the cheese gasket. Now, there are several schools of thought on the method of construction: one says to align the sausage on top of the sauce inside the bun, place an extra shot of sauce over it, then melt the cheese on top. Another says chop the sausage into more-or-less bite size pieces and layer them inside, roughly the way you would a cold-cut sub, with sauce above and below, top with cheese, melt. The fellas at Tony's went with option #2.
The result was perfect: a sub that had to be consumed more-or-less upside down. The sausage was spicy and the sauce was tangy and the bread was just exactly crusty enough. Just perfect.
Another thing they do at Tony's gives me mixed feelings: when you order a sandwich to go, they wrap it tight, compressing the components, so that when you unwrap it you have a compacted, comestible missile. But when they serve it up in-store, they lay it out on the plate just the way it came out from under the broiler. This allows the consumer-- and never has the word had greater relevance than in service of the UST-- to arrange the sandwich however he/she sees fit. Now, of course, I compressed mine, but the note of anarchy this brings to the proceedings suggests that a prolegomena to any future metaphysics regarding ther UST might, in fact, prove wholly irrelevant. Of course, this won't stop me from visting the boys at Tony's. It's not their fault.
*In other words, labotomized.
BLOG LOBSTER: January 20th: Apocalypso!
For those of you scoring at home, stop it. You can have sex later.
On awaking this morning, while approaching my ritual cup of coffee, I managed to happen across a couple of surreal experiences, or at least experiences that gave me a surreal sort of feeling. Those who know me and insist on being troublesome will point out that this is not a difficult task to accomplish, but, frankly, there's not alot I can do about that. Anyways; one at a time.
I had been thinking about the whole Guantanamo Bay situation, specifically weighing the ramifications of our country having snagged up and held without charges a great number of people that very few other people appear to care about,* and that there must be something to the situation that I don't fully appreciate, when it dawned on me that Guantanamo was the perfect place for such an operation: the place itself lends itself to exaggeration. When that movie came out-- "A Few Good Men," which, of course, was about a few bad men-- I resisted seeing it. When I finally saw it I was taken by suprise: the performances were uniformly good, and the bullshit was concentrated into a few short scenes. Specifically the mythology that suggests that the soldiers patrolling Guantanamo Bay are Cold Warriors who take thier lives in their hands every time they take a sentry post. In addition to simply not being true-- when Castro wanted to put us in our place, he simply cut off the electrical and freash water supplies, and our response, rather sensibly, was to import generators and build a desalinization plant, and that was in 1962-- it also completely disregards the actaul mission of the base, which is to aid migrants trying to cross the Carribean and support the DEA's efforts to corrupt Central and South American governments who claim to want an end to the illicit drug trade in the area. But we bought the whole thing, man; we bought it wholesale. I had a brief moment of outrage when I learned that the movie was based on a play-- Hell! We bought this load of shit TWICE!-- but that subsided when it occurred to me that taking two heapings of libelous bullshit didn't actually make my country twice as dumb.
So. It was with this thought-- or at least fragments of it-- that I approached the e-mail of the day. The former MTers+ had a brou-ha-ha going over whether or not Humanity is headed for hell in a handbasket, with the lemming-like conclusion being of course we are!
Of course we are! We always are! Things always suck worse that ever before, and they're destined to get worse and worse, because our generation sucks worse than any generation before it!
Which is bullshit. Only people walking around with the most accute myopia would see that. Which is to say, naturally, everybody sees things that way. I see it this way: Humanity has a fairly bloody and murderous history, depending on which myths you believe, but no matter what else you believe, you have to be able to see the arc of violence that is the modern world: we went from wars of conquest to wars of the rule of law in the late 18th Century; in the 19th we moved on to mechanized warfare, and in the 20th we turned that into a science. After two world wars, it finally dawned on us that turning out the destruction of mankind on an assembly belt might not be the best idea, and while one whole segment of society, here and elsewhere, cooked up reasons why we should stop plotting to destroy the earth-- and we were, and we were armed to destroy it ten and twenty times over-- a whole generation of Americans got sucked into the war that shouldn't have been, Korea, where the Russians disasterously tried to prove true what they had spent a decade denying, that they were after world domination in order to prove their ideology was superior to ours. After we fought them to a standstill, there was a spike in crime and domestic violence here in the states that took three decades to get into check, and, frankly, if you look around today at the people who claim that our species is violent and self destructive, you can rest assured that the next thing out of their mouth will correlate to some sort of complaint about people being "politically correct." Do the math.
The next thing I encountered, dangerously shallow in my fist cup of java, was the Monty Python film "And Now For Something Completely Different," which is something I enjoy watching for rather perverse reasons, chief among them is that the process of making the film seemed to have deadened the inertia of the sketches, reducing them to dead components ratrher than parts of a working machine. You can't fight entropy.
What do these things have to do with each other? Probably nothing. Perhaps only that they have to do with the role of absurdity in percieving life. I don't know that I ever told anybody this, but in college-- and afterwards, and to this day-- I had a strange relationship to absurdism. On the one hand, I truly love the Pythons, who were nothing if not absurdist, and Beckett and Ionesco, whereas I absolutely hated others, particularly Genet and Pinter. Genet seems to want to make perversity the only window to truth, immorality the true morality, decadence the only honesty, which is fine as far as it goes, but lacks a little something when applied as an ethos. Pinter just seemed mean spirited and deliberatly obfuscatory, and to top it off I could almost always see straight through his bullshit. But I have found that sometimes in order to break out the elements of truth it's necessary to bring the facts out in the light of absurdity. Otherwise thinsg keep getting layered in bullshit and people will think stupid things, like we are living in an age of hyper-violence and we're all damned. Just like people thought Total War was a really great idea. Twice.
Again, for those of you scoring at home, please knock it off. Can't you keep your hormones in check for five minutes?
I finished that first block earlier this morning, around nine, so I guess this part is supplementary, but we're still on the same basic subject: the absurdity of war, and not just the current one. I had been thinking to write something about the Civil War-- make that our Civil War-- the the constant campaigning to fly the Confederate flag as a symbol of respect for the Confederacy and the heritage of the South. Now, what the people who think this is a good idea forget is that the Civil War-- sorry; our Civil War-- was probably the stupidest war in the history of the world. It was instigated by people who wanted freedom for a race of people they considered genetically inferior, waged by people (in the North) who didn't see any point in freeing the slaves but thought that some huge economic advatage might be gained were the South to forfeit the rights to profits from its agricultural trades. (Yes, people really thought that, and they were even so stupid as to write it down.) It was fought in the South by people who thoughta) that the Slaves were property, and that it was immoral of anyone to suggest that property could be freed, or b) that thought if they could sap the industrial strength of the North that this might offer some advantage to their agricultural commerces. (Yes, people really thought that, and they were dumb enough to write it down.)
(These are but a few of the really stupid reasons that people waged the-- sorry-- our Civil War, and they hardly hold a candle to the really stupid reasons that young men went: country, honor, and duty, none of which were served with any distinction by this particular war.)
So, suffice it to say I have a singular view of the people who want to keep the Confederate flag flying-- over, for instance, the state house in South Carolina. The best that can be said of them is that they are closet bigots, too afraid to show the world what schmucks they are and forced to dress it up in the flag that stands for hundreds of thousands of dead dumbasses. The other two slices of the demographic pie, one cannot fail to observe, must either consist of assholes, who think war for the wrong reasons is a glorious and wonderful thing, or idiots, who don't know just exactly what the Hell they're doing.
This was all buffeted by a chance viewing this morning of a film about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro. It was a pretty bad movie, what I saw of it, which in a way was inevitable. The hijacking of the Achille Lauro was one of the stupidest terrorist attacks of all time. It put lots of people in harms way for a cause that wasn't even rational, let alone just. It was carried out by idiots who just about knew which end of the gun to stand at, and the chief and stated goal was to put Jews in peril to encourage the state of Israel to disenfranchise itself. I mean, really. The only thing I can't figure is why they didn't ask for an interview with the Pope while they were at it.
Then again, it's the nature of terrorists to be stupid. For all the flap that was acused by various people debating whether the jackasses who took over the planes on September 11th, this can be said without fear of contradiction: the terrorists didn't win. The terrorists never win. Why?
BECAUSE THEY'RE DEAD.
*One of the really wird things about it, to me, is the lack of outcry on the part of people related to the individuals being detained. The vast majority of what I've heard in terms of protest on behalf of the detainees has come from the mouths of lawyers.+The people I correspond with online, former members of the Journal of Mundane Behavior's chat forum, called Mundane Talk. That whole saga can be found elsewhere on the page.
ALL THINGS WHERE THEY BLOG: January 12th: Clear the Floors to Dance
Hang up your chairs to better sweep
Clear the floors to dance;
Throw the chairs into the fireplace . . .
IN one of those serendipitous moves that often come along in our married life, the Kidney Foundation people called the Tuesday after Rachelle got the urge to shed some flotsam, thus saving us a schlep to the nearest Goodwill collection center and prompting a consolidation of the collection of junk we've had in our garage for the last half a year, this including a hand-me-down computer desk we never really liked and one of those looked-better-in-the-box CD/DVD racks which, when assembled, swayed in the breezes stirred by passersby. All the donatables went out Tuesday morning, and the truck came by to get them before 10 AM. The rest of the purged materiel went out either in the garbage or the recycling bin last night, and the trucks for each were here and gone before 9. To add to the serendipity of having all the crap disposed of, there's the matter of the Not Our Aluminum Cans and the Not Our Beef Jerky Box.
Last Wednesday, returning from chores of various natures, I happened past a neighbor's house when a bag full of aluminum cans took flight. The recycling truck had already been by; someone had obviously run out of room in their recycle bin, and had stored an overflow of aluminum soda cans in an old Belk's shopping bag, the kind made of heavy plastic with sturdy handles. Either the recycling truck guys thought the cans were in an innappropriate container, or they just missed them, or the trash guys thought the bag was meant for the recycling guys or the recycling guys thought it was meant for the trash guys-- whatever the case, the recycling bins were empty all up and down the street, but the bag remained. As I passed by, really just as I approached it, a gust of wind kicked up, caught the bag, and launched it into the air; because of the bag's design, it up-ended and began swirling in the gale, whirling, as has been said, dervishly.
Now, the house of the neighbor in question sits at the top of a hill of which our house is at the bottom, and the sudden wind was followed by younger brothers. Do the math.
Good Samaritan and Hoot Owl that I am, I raced around the corner of the next side street, parked the car, set the brake, jumped out and began chasing cans. The facts that I was on the lee side of the hill helped, but it was still something of a race. I had three cans in hand by the time I caught the bag; once I got the cans in the bag, I headed up hill for the rest of the escapees. at once the wind kicked again, grabbed the bag, and, since I was only haging on to one handle, proceeded to up-end the bag and distribute cans once again. The three cans I had initially captured managed to wriggle out before I got ahold of the other handle, but I managed to stuff them back in the constricted orifice in short order. The rest of the dozen or so cans I managed to get in a series of (sometimes wind inspired) sprints. And so I returned, crap in hand, to the car. I tooled down the hill, and moments later parked the bag of cans in out garage to await the next recycling day.
Fast forward to ther following Tuesday, that is to say yesterday. The cans filled the recycling bin to the brim, so an alternate method had to be found to package the newspapers and cardboard recyclables, traditionally, in our house, the last to be included into the bin before it gets set out to the curb. So-- again, serendipity-- the box out new microwave came in last summer (the old one just up and quit on us one day), which I have been meaning to get rid of for over half a year, became the paper receptacle. Additionally, that gave room for every other scrap of cardboard waste in the garage, with the result that our garage is no fully prepared for a final seasonal cleaning this weekend, something which, Rachelle and I confessed to each other over the weekend, is something we had both been thinking of but had put off due to the rather large amount of crap we'd have had to dispose of before embarking on the task. Voila!
And there's more!
This morning, Rachelle, on her way out to Frau Hummel* for her commute to work, noticed that someone had placed a Jack Link's Beef Jerky~ box on top of our box of recyclable paper stuff. Just kind of sat it there. Now, this is a big box, I mean one for a forty count of display boxed of Jack Link's Beef Jerky,~ and, being the forward thinking and wonderful person that she is, reasoned that if a wind kicked up the box would end up in the creek, and took it upon herself to break the box down and wedge it into the already respectable bulk of paper products I had set out the night before. A bit later, when I went out to fetch the paper, I saw the box, and, after being tempted to get inscenced that someone else had presumed to add to our refuse, thought Oh, well; at least they broke it down. Later, Instant Messenging each other on the internet, she quizzed me as to whether I had put the box there. No; why? She then filled me in on her box-breaking activities of earlier in the day.
So we've been good people. So I can tell a couple of bad jokes, both of which occurred to me earlier, for no readily apparent reason:
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, but not in Haiti.
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach a girl to fish, and she'll go shopping.
(The Haiti joke is supposed to be funny because the waters around the half of Hispaniola that is Haiti are perpetually in danger of being fished out, because the fishermen on the island perpetually catch more fish than they can either sell or consume. The girl joke is supposed to be funny if you are a modern day Chauvanist, eg. if you think that women are genetically pre-disposed to go shopping, when the fact of the matter is that everybody in the Western world, for the most part, does in fact subscribe to the credo "Shop or Die," simply because of the way the world is arranged, and even the hunters in America these days hire their carcass dressing/butchering out rather than do it themselves. The REM/Michael Stipe lyric is from a song on the Document album, about going slowly insane while trying to prepare for a party. It was a pretty neat song. They don't do that anymore, and it's a goddamned shame.)
*Frau Hummel, for those of you scoring at home, is Rachelle's newly aquired and cute as hell yellow and black Mini Cooper, pictures of which you can find at her web site. Frau Hummel is German for "Mrs. Bumblebee." I am leaning towards a mini myself, depending on how our finances work out this spring. What I have in mind so far is a somewhat stripped down model, British racing green with a white roof and white racing stripes, which I am thinking of calling "El Seed." You either get that or you don't, it doesn't bear explaining.
~Bleah!
KISS THE BLOG SPOT: January 9th, 2005: Surreal Considerations
Here's something that's been hard for me to grapple with, much less really adequately explain, for most of my life: I love surrealism, but yet I hate surrealists.
My introduction to surrealism was by way of Dali's famous "The Persistence of Memory," which features both manatees and wilted pocket watches, the universal symbols of absurdity. It wasn't until later that I realised that the manatees and wilting pocket watches didn't symbolize absurdity until after Dali painted them. And although he did a great many great things, and tried to do a great many other great things, his talent and ambitions couldn't help him run away from the fact that he was a schmuck.
This really didn't strike me until I found myself admiring a painting of his called "The Disintigration of the Persistence of Memory" while sitting out a particulalry dull meeting with a philosophy professor during college. I had begun appreciating the disintegration aspect of it, and was ready to comment that he might better have called it the Bisection of the Persistence of Memory, when the professor noted that Dali painted the piece to protest the dawn of the nuclear age.
Of course, a great many things have been done to protest the nuclear age, and a great many of them were stupid, but then again they had to be done. After all, the vast number of morons marching about proclaiming that we had to manufacture more murderous weapons than our foes so that they wouldn't unleash their own murderous weapons on us gave compelling reason for protest. But the funny thing about it was that the vast majority of the protesters were not protesting for any real reason or to any great affect, because they were all selfish egotists and their arguments tore apart easier than wet tissue paper. For instance: the racist mythology that insists that the second atomic bomb would not have been dropped on Japan if the Japanese hadn't been suicidally homicidal maniacs who would have eaten our babies is comparable to the mythology that lead thousands of people to go stand outside nuclear power facilities proclaiming that bombs were being made inside. It had to be done, on some level, but it was often a matter of choosing your stupidity.
And Dali's stupidity was his art. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a great many of his works. But the man was a shameless chauvanist, a helpless egotist, and a self promoter who had increasingly less to say about the stunning product that was Salvador Dali as the years went by and it became increasingly obvious that he really didn't matter all that much. And in no single work did any of this express itself more eloquently than in the film "Un Chein Andalou."
First of all, the title, "The Andalusian Dog," is deliberately misleading in a mean-spirited sort of way. The auteurs-- Dali and filmaker Luis Bu�uel-- worked to make sure that it wouldn't be mistaken for a reference to anything in the film whatsoever, although that didn't stop some European schmucks from making the racist claim that the film symbolically depicted the weak minds of the Andalusian people. The goal of surrealism, they said, was to provoke the mind into a state of disbelief and thereby achieve a state of enlightenment. How this was supposed to be achieved, apparently, was to engage the common sensibilities of sadism and the urge to cross-dress in Denmark. In the first scene, a man slices open a woman's eye with a straight razor. Why we're supposed to want to watch that is never explained. Twenty three minutes later* it makes even less sense than it did to begin with.
Not to go into any great depth, but Surrealism was a movement, and it took in many other disciplines as well. (When I say "took in," I mean took, brother. People actually bought into this crap.) The purpose was supposed to be to shock the mind into enlightenment, but they were, as a whole, stodgy and dogmatic. Except Magritte, who really did understand the real true point of surrealism, which is to make people say "Oh, screw it." Anything beyond that was besides the point. Indeed, if the Surrealists as a school took their own message seriously they would have known that their particular art was responsible for the rise of Facism in Europe, particularly in Italy and Germany, between the wars. I mean, think about it: was there anything more surreal than the propaganda that lead to the rise of Hitler and Il Duce?
Dali painted pretty pictures; all the rest of it was egotistic crap. This was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt when he was invited to contribute photographs to a men's magazine in the 70's,~ featuring a seriously uncomfortable model in dangerous proximity to a panther which Dali had taunted to enragement prior to the shoot. The story goes that the men's mag decided, upon receipt of the works, to reject them as too tasteless, but Dali threatened to sue if the mag didn't run his very important work.
Dali died when I was in college. We had an appropriate period of mourning, which consisted largely of singing "Goodbye, Dali, well goodbye, Dali/It's so nice to have things back where they belong." When we heard that the Dali Museum was located in Florida, my pal Chris and I began a routine of saying "Well, where else would you put it?" followed by an extended mime bit where we looked around corners, under chairs, etc., as if we thought maybe somebody had stashed the museum wherever it was we were. Very few ever got the gag, and fewer still asked to have it explained.
They just couldn't be bothered. Most of the rest of the world felt that was about Dali. He never got that, or at least he pretended he never got it.
The film "Un Chien Andalou" has just been released to DVD, along with a later film "L'Age D'Or," which was a sarcastic mess that nearly ended Bu�uel's career as a film maker. I remember first seeing the film in college; I sat in on a film appreiciation class at the invitation of the prof. It lead to the coinage of one of my most oft used expressions regarding media experiences:
Well. There's that, then.
*The film is 17 minutes long.
~The series of photographs is not referenced on the Dali website; Dali is barely mentioned at all in Harpo Marx' autobiography, Harpo Speaks.