By Neddie Jingo!

Enquiring Minds Want to Know

2010-09-05T14:40:00.003-04:00

I would like to propose a small gedankenexperiment...

Suppose a gentleman were to return home from work unexpectedly one day to find his wife in the arms of another woman. No, not the arms, exactly. Let us say the wife is presenting to her lover in the ventro-dorsal position. The Other Woman is preparing to to employ a somewhat intimidatingly large strapon dildo, and is about to get down to brass tacks, but no penetration has yet taken place.

Let us further postulate that the Other Woman's affect -- tattoos, perhaps, or a beer gut, or a patch-laden leather vest unremoved from her person -- suggest that she may have some involvement with motorcycle culture. Or, hell -- let's say the strapon is embossed with the logo of the Harley-Davidson corporation.

Then let us further hypothesize that the gentleman, perhaps understandably enraged at the sight, pulls from a hidden shoulder-holster a revolver, which he points at the interloper's head as he demands that she desist from this activity or she will find herself headless.

Can it be said, then, that the man has threatened to waste vagina-mountin' mama?

These and other, similar thoughts occupy the mind these days....

Who Do You Call?

2010-08-26T15:56:00.002-04:00

Saw this on the Clara Barton this morning. Luckily we were stopped at a light, and I was able to get a shot:

They really do exist.

Their website touts their expertise at "Structural Damage Caused by Vehicles" and "Structural Damage Caused by Fallen Trees," and the conclusion I must reluctantly draw is that those things are way more vulnerable than I thought.

Enlivening Life with Song

2010-08-19T14:56:00.003-04:00

Daily, I drive through the lovely little hamlet of Paeonian Springs, Va.

Rarely does this brief visit fail to set off in the Jingo cranium the little ditty that I once penned as a sort of Town Anthem. It's a waltz-time thing, goes something like this:

Paeonian Springs,
Paeonian Springs,
You can poop where you want, but...
(fermata)
Paeonian Springs!

You're welcome, Paeonian Springs! You're cute!

Why Facebook Holds Little Fascination

2010-08-17T15:03:00.003-04:00

At first, it was kind of cool to be put back into contact with people I hadn't thought about for thirty years.

The problem is, of course, that times change, circumstances change, and people that you're arbitrarily thrown together with in high school -- people the sixteen-year-old you thought you knew -- they change too.

If I say you're a friend on Facebook, it's because I consider you a friend. Or at least a nodding acquaintance, right? Somebody I've shared some experiences with. A friend, you would think, would be the sort of person who'd be at least somewhat open to input from me.

So when a high-school acquaintance -- not really a friend; we didn't really move in the same circles -- forwarded me a truly loathsome bit of racist cant, expecting me to giggle and forward it on to all my right-thinking friends -- this after I asked him last year please not to forward any more 9-12/Glenn Beck/Birther sludge to me, so I thought he understood my stance on these matters -- I gave him some friendly input, in the form of an email repeating my request not to send me such things. (That, at least, was the gist of what I said. There may have been some slightly intemperate language, but this sort of thing, well, pisses me off real bad.)

(I'm not linking to the disgusting thing that angered me, but google "Larmondo 'Flair' Allen" if you're curious.)

His response to me this morning was (and this is a verbatim copy-and-paste, the entire body of the email) "your [sic] a sad little man."

At my riposte begging to be taken off his distro list, he replied "If you feel that calling me a racist helps you sleep at night, you go on ahead. The world will keep on turning without either one of us..."

No, dude, it's not really got much to do with me sleeping at night, or the globe's continued rotation. It's more that what you sent me was real fuckin' racist, and if you can't see that, well, if the shoe fits...

So that's why I don't haunt Facebook very much. People can really suck at the whole humanity thing.

(If you haven't recently sent me any vile racist sludge, then we're still cool on Facebook. Simple as that.)

Rogers & Hart: What Were They Smoking?

2010-08-12T10:46:00.007-04:00

All right, let's see, here.... She gets too hungry for dinner at eight. Check. She likes the theater, and never comes late, good for her. She'd never bother with people she'd hate. Well, who would?

What the hell about any of the foregoing means that the lady is a tramp?

Doesn't like crap games with barons or earls. Disciplined of her, I'll grant -- and, frankly, some of the worst cheaters at dice I know of are of the noble caste. Won't go to Harlem in ermine and pearls -- so she might be either cheap or a racist or perhaps just careful. Won't dish the dirt with the rest of the girls. Not a gossip -- admirable, I suppose.

OK, she possesses these traits, some good, some less so; I still fail utterly to understand why their display draws one to the conclusion that the lady is a tramp.

She likes the free, fresh wind in her hair -- who doesn't? Life without care -- nice work if you can get it, I suppose. She's broke, but it's oke -- I don't know what the hell this even means. Hates California; it's cold and it's damp -- well, the bits north of San Luis Obispo or so can be accused of this, but it seems an awfully broad brush to paint our most populous state with.

Is it possible that we're working with some meaning of the word "tramp" that I'm unaware of? Mr. Webster gives us two possible definitions that might apply -- the lady is either a homeless person or she's a slut. Or a homeless slut, I suppose. A homeless slut whose admiration of the theater is matched only by her laudable punctuality. Might explain the avoidance of Harlem in ermine and pearls -- most vagrant strumpets of my acquaintance lack these fripperies in their wardrobes.

Could "she" be a tramp steamer? Seagoing vessels are often referred to using the female gender.... A tramp steamer that likes the free, fresh wind in her hair? That dislikes northern California's capricious weather? That refrains from tittle-tattle with others of her sex? That shuns gambling with European nobility?

I'm going with that. I've never known an itinerant cargo-vessel that was late to a play.

She weighs her anchor in old Frisco Bay
Picks up some rebar in far Mandalay
She runs on diesel -- the old-fashioned way
That's why the lady is a tramp
Steamer.

She likes the fresh sea breeze in her masts
Steam-whistle blasts
'Neath her keel
Is an eel
At night she displays a nautical lamp
That's why the lady is a tramp
Steamer!

California, 2010 (2 -- Home Again)

2010-08-10T12:12:00.004-04:00

An Tableau Illustrating Something of the British National Character

(Scene: in line at the ticket booth for the Powell-Mason Line Cable Trolley in San Francisco)

British Man #1, two places ahead of us, at the window: But this is disgraceful!

British Man #2, directly behind us in line and unacquainted with BM#1: Oh, God, no....

BM#1: Why the bloody hell can't I pay with a credit card?

BM#2: Oh, nooooo... Don't.... Please, please don't....

BM#1: You know, we know how to do these things at home! We'd work it out so anybody could pay with a credit card! We're more civilized that way!

BM#2: Oh dear God, how embarrassing...

BM#1 [contemptuously shoveling bills through the window]: Right, here's your bloody cash....

BM#2: OhGodOhGodOhGod....

Me [to BM#2]: It's OK -- I've seen my own countrymen do far worse away from home...

BM#2: Yes, but we're supposed to be better!

------

I realize that my last post, written in Los Angeles on our last day there, was a bit venomous, but the place angered me. Outside of (perhaps) Manhattan, I've never seen a place that draws such a blindingly clear line between those who Have and those who Do Not. On our first day in Calabasas, we went for a little exploratory drive. I observed that the surrounding hilltops had some lovely houses on them, houses that must have had a lovely commanding view of the valley. I proposed we meander into those neighborhoods to see what the view was like.

Not so fast, there, stranger. Gates. Guards. Lines of tradesmens' and gardeners' trucks awaiting the blessing of some pampered hausfrau to gain access. I worked hard so that me and mine could live on this hilltop, chum, and if you think I'm going to allow just any old riffraff to come and gawk at my stuff, you've got another think coming....

I did not gain favor with Betty by revisiting with her the plot of Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."

------

Things were not helped when, later in the day, an officious biddy on a public thoroughfare informed me that smoking had been prohibited throughout the town of Calabasas, and that she was going to inform on me to the nearest gendarme if I did not immediately desist from polluting her airspace.

She was easily thirty yards away from me as she performed her righteous civic duty.

-----

Oh, and those little microscopic dogs in handbags?

Need I say more?

-----

If you are able (as I was not) to suppress thoughts of the world-historical nastiness that was the professional life of William Randolph Hearst, I suppose Hearst Castle at San Simeon would be an interesting place. As it was, I could not allay the memory of an old Zippy the Pinhead cartoon that takes place at San Simeon: Looking at these impossibly, grotesquely opulent surroundings, Zippy observes, "Nice grandeur!"

That's more or less the phrase that kept going through my head too.

On the other hand, it might have been sort of fun to play tennis up there with Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford.

------

The Pacific Coast Highway did a lot to clear the venom of LA from my brain. That's one mighty pretty stretch of road. I'd like to do it on a motorbike sometime, south to north.

Without brakes.

------

San Francisco, conversely, plainly did not give a rat's vagina if I lit up three simultaneous Luckies on the corner of Lombard and Van Ness. I can personally attest to the veracity of this assertion; each morning before breakfast, I walked to that well-trafficked corner, tore open a fresh pack, and stuffed three into my gob and lit them all. Not a rat's vagina was to be seen.

------

I can now confidently say, without fear of cavil, that I have a profound desire never to see Haight-Ashbury again.

Enough on that.

------

I trusted the waiter and went with the osso buco at Firenze by Night.

Best decision I ever made.

------

In an otherwise flawless execution of trip-planning (the lion's share of which is directly attributable to Wonder Woman's tireless research), I made only one silly mistake; to wit, in booking the return flight, I found a reasonably priced Virgin America flight that departed SFO at 10:05 and arrived at Dulles at 6:10. Perfect!

There was only one thing wrong with that booking. I neglected to pay attention to one little detail -- the AMs and PMs that follow the posted times. Yes, I had put us on a redeye flight arriving at 6:10 in the morning.

Oh, go ahead and laugh. It will be as water off a duck's back compared to the bollocking I received from young Betty, who had to endure the flight.

------

I suppose I will recover from the jet-lag at some point soon. Some recommend aspirin, others epsom salts. Me, I'm thinking a few jolts of Boone's Farm chased with some crushed glass.

California, 2010 (1)

2010-08-02T19:39:00.003-04:00

See that? These Californians have a place for everything! A whole box full of 'em!

I had once -- like, a week ago -- idealistically thought that I'd be able to sit down in some comfortable space and record each day of this trip as it happened. However, events have intervened, and the admixture of the warm (and spectacularly free of humidity) California sun and a frosty beverage at about 5PM have introduced a certain lassitude that I can't but ascribe to the local culture.

Some highlights from the last few days:

Disneyland seriously needs to go fuck itself. Betty was disillusioned by her experience, but this was the reaction of an eighteen-year-old being confronted by the expectations of her own ten-year-old self. The rides were inferior to those available at your local Six Flags, where the lines are shorter and the thrills far better. The rest of it was relentless merch-flogging. Fuck you, Walt Disney. Betty sees through you.

At Disneyland, the Animatronic Abraham Lincoln, in summarizing the Civil War, managed to avoid the following subjects:

What the war was about
Who won the goddamned war; and
Anything having to do with the aftermath of the war, including Jim Crow laws, lynchings, or Bombingham.

But boy howdy did we all leave the theater with a good feeling about America!

The experience of belonging to a studio audience for the taping of a dreadful sitcom is quite remarkable. They need you to be upbeat, so they are quite relentless in their enforcement of (what Frank Zappa called) "compulsory entertainment." The tame comedian who runs the show leaves one wishing that assault laws weren't quite so strict around here. One leaves the studio feeling quite raped, actually.

According to the papers I signed, I'm not allowed to tell the exact name, or even the production company we were allowed to see, but let's see if my expert Internet-Search-avoidance skills obtain: The show we were forbidden from mentioning was Schmelissa-and-Schmoey, on the Schmay-Bee-Smee Schmaly Schmetwork... Does that work to disguise my origins...?

At any rate, the show seriously SCHMUCKS.

On the other hand, the Warner Brothers Studio Tour was really worth the candle. At one point we drove up to a sound-stage (Maybe #24??) that listed the movies that had been shot on its environs; they included The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and The Music Man. There's American History, and then there's Cultural Touchpoints Along the Way to American History; and Warner Brothers has badly mixed the two.

What's In a Name?

2010-07-06T16:00:00.004-04:00

I'm assuming they include the author of the query in the list of people "in the USA."

If not, I really, really want to meet this person.

It amuses me quite a bit that if you're looking for a name for your newborn, you'd have to reject a list of 856,728 more popular names. But as "fist" names go, it's a beaut.

Click here to check your own name

I also tried it with my so-called "real" name: There are two people in the USA who bedeck themselves with its polysyllabic magnificence. Again assuming I'm one of the two, I wonder if they know that my father, who shares our name, doesn't live in the USA anymore.

No, Not That Kind of Wasp

2010-06-28T15:45:00.003-04:00

Some three summers ago, I was out working on the motorbike on a sultry evening. Done with my tasks and whistling tunelessly, I gathered up my tools and prepared to head inside.

Something stung me on the calf. A yellowjacket must have alighted on the hem of my shorts, and was irritated and acted out in the only way it knew how.

A yellowjacket sting is really no big deal, painwise, and I shrugged it off and went on with my evening.

Some five minutes later, I noticed I was coming out in hives on my upper chest.

Hmmmm, I thought. That's unusual....

Took a Benadryl. The hives went away.

I mentioned this to my doctor on a routine visit, and she told me sternly that I must now consider myself allergic to wasp stings. I must carry an Epi-pen with me at all times, and should another yellowjacket take it into its head to attack me, I must hit myself with it and call 911. Immediately. Without delay.

Some months after that, I took a course of therapy: micro-doses of wasp venin, increasing in size until I redeveloped my resistance. Trouble was, life doesn't always cooperate, and I necessarily had to miss the last three doses out of about twelve. So no allergist ever shook me by the hand and congratulated me for being allergy-free.

This was the state of affairs last night. I have been living in a sort of limbo, not knowing whether the therapy completely blew the allergy out of me. And I still have the Epi-pen and I renew the prescription every year.

Last night, the proposition was tested.

Once again walking out of the garage -- doinnnng! Yellowjacket sting on the bare ankle. Well. I guess we're going to find out about that therapy, aren't we.

A few minutes later, here come the hives.

And I panic.

"911, what is your emergency?"

"I'mallergictowaspstingsandIjustgotstungbyawasp!"

(The Epi-pen has a tendency, I now find, to goose the adrenaline levels astronomically. In fact, that's what it is meant to do.)

Wonder Woman, meanwhile, was doing a little eye-rolling. Real easy for you to be nonchalant about this, sweetie, but if my throat swells shut in the next five minutes, you're the one who's gonna have to find something to use to intubate me. I'm thinking you should go cut a length of garden hose....

She did press a couple of Benadryls on me. Funny thing: As I listened to the siren approaching from far, far away, I could feel the pills soothing my hives. I also began to realize that my throat wasn't constricting, my breathing was normal (if a trifle adrenalated), and about the worst thing I was experiencing was minor discomfort on the stung ankle.

I met the ambulance at the driveway, feeling more than a bit sheepish. I told them I was the guy who'd called, that the therapy I'd taken had indeed had its intended effect, and that I was sorry to have disturbed their Sunday ease. They very kindly told me I had done exactly the right thing, no sense in taking any chances with something potentially so deadly, took me into the vehicle and checked my vital signs. Everything was well within parameters.

I still have one remaining Epi-pen. I'm thinking of ways it could be abused....

All the Sweet Green Icing Flowing Down

2010-06-23T12:28:00.005-04:00

So, Landon Donovan wins the Algeria game for the U.S., sending us into the World Cup™ knockout rounds as Group C winners...

I've met him, you know. Oh, yes, we go way back, Landon and me.

Some eight or nine years ago, for Freddie's birthday we took a party of ten-year-old boys to RFK Stadium to take in a DC United game. Like most non-major-league teams, United was very solicitous toward groups of boys who visited their stadium to learn about the game, and the birthday-party package (reasonably priced!) included field privileges before the match, in the spaces behind the goals.

These areas were, of course, roped off from the field where the players were warming up. Not being a ten-year-old boy myself, I was watching the warmups with rather more interest than that I expended on the Thunder-Stick fencing matches going on behind me. Donovan, then a mere up-and-coming youngster a year or two out of college, kicked an errant ball that came to a stop near me. I picked it up and tossed it to him as he jogged my way.

"Thanks," he said.

So, like I say, we go way back, me and Landon.

But that is not the memory of that game that I treasure the most. This is that memory:

About half-time, it came on to rain buckets. Everyone scurried up to the covered part of the stadium to wait out the torrent. As the responsible parents we are, we split the duties: Wonder Woman herded the birthday guests out of the rain, and I remained behind to pick up whatever birthday-party paraphernalia that would not survive a soaking. Carrying armloads of sweatshirts, caps, wrapped presents and the like, I glanced over and saw the remnants of the blue-frosted cake, slowly dissolving into a wet, sugary blob of goo. An idea formed in my mind.

I deposited my armloads of stuff safely in dry territory, and then went back. I lifted the platter that held the blue gooey mess, brandished it on high, looked around and made sure I had at least a small audience, and yelled up to Wonder Woman in the next section up: "Honey! Someone left the cake out in the rain!"

And she didn't even skip a beat: "I don't know if I can take it, 'cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again!"

I believe I've observed this before, but it bears repeating: I married that woman for a reason.

Oh, the Pain of Listening to You

2010-06-21T09:44:00.005-04:00

Well, there's another cherished illusion down the crapper....

We drove this Friday from our usual Northern Virginia haunts to Greensboro, in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Betty will be starting at Greensboro College in the fall, and Freshman Orientation called her down to choose courses, meet other frosh, and what have you.

The trip is drop-dead gorgeous. Down Interstate 81: Winchester, New Market, Harrisonburg, Staunton, and on down to Roanoke, the gentle rolling hills of the Shenandoah Valley giving way to the high, wild Appalachians as you approach the North Carolina and Tennessee state lines. We broke off 81 at Roanoke to follow 220 south to the Piedmont country.

The three-finger banjo style made famous by Earl Scruggs originated in the Piedmont. Charlie Poole came from there, as did an huge litany of enormously influential musicians. It was from a North Carolina mountain resort in August 1927 that an already consumptive Jimmie Rodgers, desperate to break into the music industry before he died, showed up at Ralph Peer's Bristol Sessions and cut "The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep"; at the same session the Carter Family, from Maces Springs not far away, cut "Single Girl, Married Girl" and pretty much kicked off the entire country-music recording industry.

So this music permeates this countryside. We are smack-dab in the cradle of country music, the music of the people, and the people of the music, and it permeates all in the same way that jazz permeates New Orleans and the waltz does Vienna. The twang of the banjo and the wail of the fiddle is a constant whisper in the wind, and the people who live here proudly claim ownership and uphold the old traditions....

Right? I mean, right?

We stopped for gas in Boones Mill, south of Roanoke. Completely randomly chose a gas station that also had a Bojangles chicken joint attached to it. A desultory Friday evening crowd ate their chicken in the sultry air -- and there, as if placed there by God for the delectation of Suburban Goober Jingo, was an amateur country band! Playing real, authentic country music!

They were ancient. The rhythm guitarist had to have been 85 if he was a day, sunken cheeks telling of lousy Appalachian dentistry. He played in the unusual Lester Flatt picking style: thumb on the downstroke, index finger on the upstroke. The lead guitar-flogger was a bit younger, but not by much. The bassist was probably the baby of the band at 60 or so. The female lead singer, perhaps 70, had hard, angular facial features that sprang straight from a Walker ~~Percy~~ Evans [thanks, Kim! Reminder to self: look shit up!!!] Depression photograph.

They swung into "The Pain of Loving You," an old Dolly Parton/Porter Waggoner number that Parton brought to the Trio project with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt:

Oh, the pain of loving you
Oh, the misery I go through
Never knowing what to do
Oh, the pain of loving you

As I stood in rapturous anticipation of the countrylicious authenticity of it all, something slightly appalling began to make itself clear...

This.

Band.

Sucked.

In the first verse, the rhythm guitar looked over at the bass with a look of concern: Why are you playing a C right now? Both lost the count so badly that it became impossible for the listener to tell where the one was in the measure. The singer floundered, trying to complete a phrase at the spot she thought the measure was going to end, and wound up biting off the whole phrase.

Train wreck.

Parton, Harris and Ronstadt's singing in the chorus of their version is a master class in three-part harmony singing -- gorgeous interior movement, dissonance resolving to assonance: church harmony meeting the tight close harmony of Thirties and Forties jazz.

Let it just be said that the harmony singing on display here was really quite... Not good.

This stuff ain't exactly "The Be-Bop Tango," if you know what I mean. They call it "folk music" because it's so simple that "folk" can play it in their parlors. All you need is to be able to count to four while playing simple changes. Sing a third above the melody. Not rocket-science music.

I dropped a buck into the collection bucket anyway. At least they were trying.

I'm-a Tell You About That Wonder Woman

2010-06-12T17:04:00.003-04:00

That up there is an Eastern Phoebe. According to the online "Field Guide to the Birds of North America,"

The Eastern Phoebe was the first bird to be banded in North America. In 1804, John James Audubon used a silver thread attached to its leg to note when the bird would return each year.
Of the three Phoebe species, the Eastern Phoebe’s call most closely resembles its name.
Unlike most songbirds who must hear other birds to hone their vocalizations, an Eastern Phoebe raised in isolation will still sing a perfect song.
A group of flycatchers has many collective nouns, including an "outfield," "swatting," "zapper," and "zipper" of flycatchers.

Well we have neither zapper nor zipper of phoebes nesting atop our wind-chime on the back porch, but we do have one lone specimen. She (or perhaps a daughter) returns every year to that same spot, hatches two broods between April and July, and then scarpers off for parts unknown. She's been doing this since 2005. We've come to be rather good friends, us and that phoebe. Each year, her little ones leave a pretty impressive pile of birdshit on the floor of the porch, but we deal. Accommodations, you understand. Doesn't seem to be hurting the wood floor.

You may also remember another member of our extended family, the rat snake who inhabited our potting shed a couple of springs ago. We didn't object to his taking up residence, as the mouse population dove into near-zero numbers.

Among their other qualities, rat snakes are known as excellent climbers. Which is why the other evening as I sat reading on the porch-swing, I wasn't all that surprised to see one of that snake's younger relatives, perhaps four or five feet long, making his way up the screen door, making straight for the nestlings. Another few minutes and he'd be making a meal of them.

I called Wonder Woman out, intending to show her the Great Circle of Life or the Food Chain or something.

She wasn't interested in any science. She went straight up to the serpent, snagged it by the throat in fine herpetological fashion, pulled it off the screen door. The thing writhed and wrapped itself around her forearm. She turned its snaky face so she was looking it squarely, eye-to-eye. Then she said in a low growl, millennia of maternal instinct speaking through her, "Not! These! Babies!"

Then she stalked off across the lawn, the snake still wrapped around her wrist and forearm, and cast the accursed thing into a hedge of creeper twenty yards away. "Find someplace else to live!" she shouted after it.

It hasn't been back, of course. How would it dare, after having been chastened that thoroughly?

The chicks, by the way, were fledged the next day. And Mother Phoebe has started in on her second brood.

Live-Blogging USA vs. England

2010-06-12T14:50:00.012-04:00

1:00: USA! USA! USA!

Just went out to the 7-11 for a few little something-somethings. Walked up to the checkout clerk with my Slurpee, felt in the back pocket of my shorts -- and realized my wallet wasn't there.

Cursing my idiocy -- the Drive of Shame would be a half-hour, there and back -- I went and pitched the Slurpee into the trash. Then I happened to glance at my left hand -- and there was my wallet.

It's possible the heat is getting to me.

2:57: USA! USA! USA!

On the first day of the last World Cup, I had an operation to try to save my natural hip.

(Oh. Well, so much for that, then. England scores at 3:44. En-ger-land! En-ger-land! Engerland!)

At any rate, I was bedridden for the entirety of the tournament. Watched pretty much every game, in a Vicodin haze. Bummer!

27:54: It's not like USA hasn't had its chances... Oh god, that shot to Tim Howard's chest sure looked like it smarted a bit...

39:50: USA! USA! USA! (And where did En-ger-land get that goalie? Looked like a ten-year-old Little Leaguer letting a routine base hit turn into a triple...)

48:16: This Landon Donovan: I like the cut of his jib. I saw him play years ago when he was with DC United...

51:38: Player of the Game so far: Tim Howard. Fantastic save.

75:51: Confession time: I'm actually watching this about 10 minutes behind on TiVo... (giggle)

85:59: I further confess that that bees'-nest buzzing sound of the horns in the stands is going to irritate me before this tournament is over...

94:00: Fun game. Catch you later!

Radiant, Confident, Deliriously Happy

2010-06-06T19:17:00.003-04:00

Well, well....

It's come to this.

When Betty reached the age of two or so, not being much of a talker, she invented a sign language. "Rain," I remember, was an outstretched hand waving up and down. For "Barney," she hugged herself -- "I love you, you love me," etc.

Other things began to bother us a little bit. When she did start to speak, she didn't quite get certain consonants, so instead of "Da-da" I was "Ga-ga." When she started to feed herself, she'd approach her face with a spoonful of food -- and then invert it 180 degrees before it got to her mouth. When she learned to form letters, she was as likely as not to write perfectly backwards. She had no strong preference in handedness, and was as likely to bat or throw rightie as leftie.

Wonder Woman was more frantic than I was, I think. She began reading book after book about learning disabilities, and concluded that Betty definitely had one. We had her assessed, and the conclusion was something called Visual Processing Deficit -- to this day I don't really know what that means, only that the left and right parts of her brain weren't talking quite right to each other. It was explained to us that her brain was working so hard to locate her in time and space that there was little processing power left over for such niceties as mathematics and music.

The public school system failed her badly. I mean, criminally. It became blindingly apparent that she was being passed from one grade to another without any concern for her disability. Yes, she had an IEP, a program that was supposed to compensate for her disability, but it became clear that the program was a joke, a sop to legal requirements -- doing her no good at all while allowing the school system to claim they were helping her.

And goddammit, we knew -- how could we not know? -- that our daughter was bright, brave, beautiful, and a joy to know. It was just that the information wasn't getting in in the conventional way. We were at our wits' end.

The public school she was attending had a "Gifted and Talented" program, a not-so-subtle way of two-tracking kids and giving parents yet one more thing to be competitive about. I recall vividly my rage at a school awards ceremony where this idiot teacher raved on and on about the G&T kids under his care were going to be the Leaders of Tomorrow -- the clear implication being, of course, that if you weren't part of the G&T program, your eternal fate as a Dumb Loser Kid was pretty much sealed. Jesus, what an asshole.

Wonder Woman knew about a place called The Lab School of Washington, an institution in western DC that specialized in LD kids. I was skeptical at first, thinking it was just another way to separate frantic parents from their money. It was 75 miles from our home. It was quite expensive.

But I read about Sally Smith, the school's founder whom we were fortunate enough to meet before her death in 2007. Go ahead, go read about her. The woman was a hero and a saint -- and that's not praise you're likely to hear from me very often.

So we applied. And we were accepted for Betty's sophomore year. I'll never forget the look of rapturous joy on her face when the "Fat Envelope" came in the mail -- maybe, just maybe, this might be something to rescue her self-esteem, which by the ninth grade was in a death-spiral.

Oh, dear God, was it a slog. I can't tell you what 300 miles a day commuting did to Wonder Woman, who bore it mightily. And let's not even ponder what that kind of mileage can take out of a seventeen-year-old. The expense was nearly ruinous, coming as it did during the Great Collapse of 2008, when I was laid off and working only sporadically. But we bore it. Yes, we bore it.

Because we wanted to see that photo up there. Look at her -- radiant, confident, deliriously happy. She blossomed there at the Lab School. Just blossomed. Just a few weeks ago she had the part of Emily -- the female lead -- in the school's production of "Our Town." She brought down the house -- not a dry eye in the joint, I tell you -- certainly least of all Dear Old Dad, who was huffing and puffing and piping his eye from about the first minute on.

She'll be attending Greensboro College in the fall.

We made it!

Betty (whose real name is Emily), your mom and dad are the proudest, happiest parents in the world, and we know how strong you have had to be to get to this moment. My baby, my sign-language-inventing, backwards-writing baby, you are the best!

Wa-hey! Technology!

(On a side note, I hope you believe me when I say that you can consider this my return to blogging. A circumstance that made me feel shitty has now passed, and I feel up to sharing my life with you once again.)

Goddamned Hobos

2010-01-30T15:55:00.005-05:00

They're everywhere!

The floor of a parking garage across the street from where I found the first Hobo Signs:

It's a veritable Tutankhamen's Tomb of Hobo Sign, a Lascaux, a Bayeaux Tapestry of Hobo Culture... And surveyors and electrical engineers -- you ain't telling me this isn't as incomprehensible as Linear B. Find something mundane in this stuff!

Gattungswesen

2010-01-30T13:19:00.003-05:00

From the annals of the World's Shittiest Jobs...

Freddie and I saw this poor bastard this morning as we made our morning rounds. Corner of Route 15 and Edwards Ferry Road in Leesburg. At the moment of the snap, the car's outside thermometer read 17 degrees, and snow was bucketing down.

Not something you'd subject yourself to unless you really had to.

(In case you have trouble reading the photo, the guy's dressed up as the Statue of Liberty, holding a sign that reads, "Liberty Tax" -- a promotional shill for a nearby tax-prep shop.)

(Post title explanation.)

Je Te Plumerai

2010-01-24T13:19:00.003-05:00

Here's my advice: If you're going to throw out your back on a Saturday afternoon, do it while engaged in some really butch activity like sawing up a downed tree for firewood. At any rate, don't do it the way I did -- preparing to saw up a downed tree for firewood. Swear to Christ: Got my chainsaw out of the back of the truck, walked it over to the apron of the garage to prep the saw -- chain oil, gas, chain tension adjustment -- put it down on the concrete, and blip went something in the Jingo sacroiliac.

Now I'm walking -- when I walk at all -- all hunched over like a ninety-year-old. It hurts even just to exist, let alone try to lead a normal life.

At least today there's good football to sit and suffer in front of.

In completely unrelated news, it has come to my attention that a childhood earworm song is, when more closely examined, deeply, deeply weird. I have hummed, whistled, and endured the torments of the damned to the melody of the voyageur signature tune "Alouette" since approximately the age of three. Only now, in my 49th year on this planet, have I actually bothered to look up the meaning of the French lyric. I think I'd always assumed that "Alouette" was a woman's name. I couldn't have been more wrong:

Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette, je te plumerai

Je te plumerai la tête
Je te plumerai la tête
Et la tête - et la tête
Alouette - Alouette
O-o-o-o-h!

An "alouette" is a skylark, a bird. Once considered a game-bird, if Wikipedia is to be trusted. That is, something that is eaten after being shot.

"Plumerai": first person future tense of "plumer" -- to pluck. "Je te plumerai la tête," then, may be rendered something akin to "I will pluck the feathers out of your head."

The song then goes on to describe other actions the singer intends to perform on the "gentille" skylark: "I will pluck the feathers out of your beak [huh?], I will pluck the feathers out of your neck, your back," and so on.

I know, I know, autres temps, autres moeurs, I get it, but Jeee-zis! You've got a bird that you've just caught, you're gonna make dinner out of it, and you sit down before you slaughter the thing and describe to it, in direct address and in gory detail, the order in which you are going to dismember its plumage.

And we teach this song to our kids!

Sorry if I just earwormed you. But the story must be told!

Folk Art 205: The Art of the Hobo

2010-01-11T12:13:00.004-05:00

Those of you who have read this blog for some time may remember that I'm a little bit obsessed with strange markings that appear for no apparent reason on concrete surfaces, often in parking garages. What strange impulse led people to make these marks? It can't be that they wished to preserve their names and thoughts forevermore; if they'd wanted to do that, they'd have used a fountain pen, or possibly a Sharpie. No, what ties these mysterious graffiti together is that they are invariably executed in pencil.

A new working gig has brought me banishment to a whole new smoking venue -- a loading dock in Clarendon. But rather than stand around in the cold gawking, I have made excellent use of my time outside: I have documented the local concrete markings, with the thought in mind of subjecting them to rigorous scholarly analysis.

One would-be scribe left behind a strange combination of Arabic and Roman digits: 230.V:

Is this some form of code? Does it refer to a time? A geographic location? Perhaps it's a clue to a hidden treasure: On compass point 230, walk V steps and dig! You never know!

A lesser scholar might conclude that these markings are meaningless. Nothing could be farther from the truth! My expert eye and vast knowledge of folk art tell me that these are hobo signs left over from the Great Depression. (The fact that the garage was built in the 1990s only strengthens my argument. Because I say so, and I'm the Dad.)

If my hypothesis that these markings are indeed hobo signs is valid, then there remains only the matter of interpretation. The glyph reproduced below represents, I believe, the hobo's contempt for the building itself in which the garage is located:

A lofty mountain with some small boxlike dwellings perched precariously at the summit. Was there ever a more piquant critique of bourgeois life than this, from a happy denizen of the road and the wide-open spaces? I think not, sir! I think not!

Squinting my eyes and cocking my head to the side, I realize it may not be a mountain after all, but an extremely primitive attempt at perspective -- a road heading to (or away from?) a distant town where all the buildings lie flat on the ground and are only about an inch tall. My conclusion still stands, though: The hobo didn't care much for civilization.

The hobo, as a race, was never among life's mathematicians. It is easy to imagine the frustration experienced by No-Count Louie the Louche while trying to perform subtraction of fractions by sheer force of will until Decimal Doc the Subtraction King came along and showed him how to convert one-fourth into 0.25:

Hobo legends and lore speak of three hobo brothers, Larry, Moe, and Geoffrey the Jimson-Jiggler. The brothers each had three magical hairs that stuck straight out of their heads that gave them the powers of second sight (Beatin'-Avoidin', or just "B" in hobo parlance), prestidigitation ("Rube-Diddling," or "R"), and the ability to change the weather ("Nature-Fuckin'," or "N"). One day, Geoffrey the Jimson-Jiggler clean forgot which hair was which, and Larry and Moe, ridiculing him, labeled them for him with duct tape and cardboard, which drove Geoffrey to madness. He prestidigitated a tornado that destroyed the city of Kankakee, Illinois. No one in Kankakee remembers this because they were hypnotized by an apologetic Larry and Moe.

This is where we get the expression "get out of my hair."

Below, we are greatly privileged to see a folk-art illustration of this legend, now lost in the mists of the Great Depression:

No one knows this today, but the hobos of the Great Depression were a dab hand at computer user-interface design. Granted, they did not themselves possess computers, but then again, nobody else did, either, so who's to say otherwise, eh?

Below we see a primitive but effective mockup of a three-tabbed Search module. This design would be deprecated today (modern usability testing being the cruel mistress that she is), but -- pretty good for 1934, right?

Hell, I've done worse mockups myself. With a computer.

So that's our art-history lesson for today, kids. Tune in next week for an exploration of the folk-art left on the door of the third stall on the left at the Union Station men's room.

Great Twitterature

2010-01-07T11:07:00.002-05:00

They got something hysterically funny going on at Sadly, No!

Great Twitterature Down the Ages

You gotta read the comments. By the time I get to this:

Lincoln’s Log: 87 yr ago the bid doodz started country, vry sad for guyz who died here but we shd kp goin

I'm LOLing...

This, also.

Signal

2010-01-06T12:59:00.004-05:00

I follow Harry Shearer's radio show occasionally -- it's in my podcast queue, at any rate, and I'll listen to it if everything else is used up.

I was a little impatient with his seemingly endless negative harping on last summer's switchover from analog to digital TV transmissions. I am impatient no more. On this subject, the man was speaking the absolute truth. Over-the-air digital TV blows moribund ursine cock.

We supplemented our satellite television with a tiny little 13-inch TV in the kitchen. It was nice to have around while cooking and cleaning up. Having the news, or "The Simpsons" or "Seinfeld" on in the background while we were doing trivial tasks was a nice little treat, and I could follow football progress while checking something in the oven.

That, of course, went bye-bye last June, when the Big Switch happened. One day, just -- boom! Yer teevee don't work no more. We got used to not having it, of course, but deep down inside, we kinda missed it.

So this Christmas, our treat for ourselves was the smallest flat-screen I could find. Naively, I thought it would come equipped with an antenna for receiving digital signal. It sorta said it right there on the box -- "digital-signal ready," or some such. I was not so silly as to believe we would get hi-def signal -- I do know the difference.

So I opened it up, set it up in its spot, plugged it in, turned it on, and... Bupkis. "Searching for channels," it chirped onscreen. "Nope, not finding any! Wouldn't you just like to put your fist through my screen? [Y/N]."

Sighing about how nothing's ever easy anymore, I Googled up some info I perhaps should have known before buying the thing. We're 40 miles or so from most transmitters, and "digital-ready" televisions don't come with antennas -- the manufacturers assume most everybody's got cable or satellite reception. I would have to buy an antenna.

Oooooo-kay!

Popped into Amazon.com, ordered up a spiffy black plastic jobbie that sits flat under the set. Not much footprint, nice and sleek-looking, got great reviews from users, and looked like just the thing. Boom. Ordered. Done.

It arrived Monday. Whimpering quietly, I tore open the box, set it up according to the instructions, turned on the set, scanned for channels: "1 channel found... 4 channels found... 6 channels found..." Brilliant! I've solved it!

Not so fast, Chuck-o.

Channel 4 comes in for a couple of seconds -- pixellation all over the place, audio and video out of sync, and then: "Signal was lost." Channel 5 doesn't come in at all. Same for Channels 7 and 9. No PBS. A religious channel does come in, and I contemplate doing the dishes with a pious droner in the background. I likewise contemplate chucking the whole damned thing into the recycle pile.

But I'm nothing if not persistent when faced with a technical challenge. I reconfigure the antenna, removing the amplifier. Worse. I turn it various directions, rescanning for channels each time. Some improvement, but the core broadcast channels either break up immediately or are so badly pixellated that they're unwatchable.

I've got two options now: Get a bigger, outdoor antenna, post it on the roof, and run a cable through the wall into the kitchen. That stands absolutely zero chance of happening when we've got a satellite dish up there receiving perfectly good signal.

My other option is to chuck the whole thing.

Guess which one's going to happen.

Thanks, FCC!

Little Help?

2009-12-31T20:45:00.003-05:00

A commenter has alerted me that his malware detector was triggered by the "Santa Baby" stream.

Has anybody else had this happen?

Actual message: "my AVG malware detector sez you have a problem - probably not related to microlegs."

I can confidently say that any problem in my life has never been, and is unlikely to ever be, related to microlegs. However, I don't want to be serving up malware.

Anybody else seen this?

Oh, and... HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Let's See If You Believe in Me

2009-12-21T20:19:00.006-05:00

The 1920s have always held a certain fascination for me. There seems to have been some sort of culmination going on, the end of a long period of roil and moil where African rhythms appeared slowly in White-People Music -- first inauthentically in the minstrelsy of the 1850s and '60s, and then quite authentically indeed in the ragtime trend of the 1890s and 1900s. Whether you responded positively to jazz, the natural outcome of ragtime, was a good indicator of where you stood on the great questions of the day -- prude or flapper? Traditionalist or modernist?

While that thought was knocking around in my head, Blue Girl gently reminded me that it was time for our wonderful annual X-Muss Collaboration. She suggested "Santa Baby," to which I happily agreed. As I listened to Eartha Kitt's utterly wonderful original take on the song, I realized that, under all the 1952 sex-kitten-with-full-jazz-orchestra trappings, what I was hearing was really not much advanced structurally from a hot-jazz number from 1929. So then I started imagining Bessie Smith, say, and how she'd approach such a song.

But we're not actually in 1929, are we. We passed through the vogue for Twenties nostalgia at least once back in 1968 or so, when "Bonnie and Clyde" put the Depression front and center in our minds. And again, a few years ago, when "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" pulled our attention to the string-band, vocal and religious music from that time. Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks -- my first and still favorite exposure to artists playing in their own time what was considered slick and modern in the Depression -- deliberately made themselves sound the way an R. Crumb cartoon looks: the Twenties and Thirties brought forward into 1968's weird temporal ambivalence.

Nostalgia, but expressed in ways that never existed in the period one is nostalgic for.

It is in this spirit, then, that Blue Girl and I present for your pleasure:

Santa Baby

Purely from a production standpoint, I'm particularly proud of this one. I had never played a ukelele in any kind of serious way, and my banjo playing had been limited to the five-string, Earl Scruggs three-finger rolls of bluegrass. I had been aware of what an important rhythmic role the tenor banjo played in a Twenties jazz-band -- the decade that saw the invention of the electric guitar to replace the banjo's somewhat obstreperous plank-a-chank.

But those instruments together -- along with slide guitar, wood upright bass, clarinets and an alto sax -- were a joy to mix. I didn't have to do much to them at all to make them sit well together peacefully. It's like they're made for each other, or something.

All right. Enough blather from me. Enjoy, kids.

Merry Christmas/Holidays/Days of Observance/Days You Completely Ignore!

And Glue Birl? That dress.... It does things for me. Me and my 18-inch legs....

Ah, Yes -- I Remember Snow

2009-12-19T12:46:00.002-05:00

This may not impress folks in the more snow-intensive parts of the world, but for the Washington, DC, environs, this is some pretty serious snow:

I took that a few hours ago, and it's still bucketing down out there. Won't stop till this evening.

Sammy's been like this all day, staring at Snow Teevee:

"Ho-lee crap, what is that stuff...?"

The Bonnet

2009-12-17T09:52:00.006-05:00

Some weeks ago, the Jingo Contingent made a trip up to Philly for a relative's wedding. We all stayed in one hotel room - we're a friendly bunch that way. On arrival, I decided to get a shower, wash off the grime from the trip.

Among the freebies in the bathroom -- the tiny bar of soap, the microscopic bottles of shampoo and body-wash -- was a little box that contained a shower cap. This is not an item I am ever likely to use, so I tossed it aside. It landed French-translation-side-up, and I guffawed.

Towel around my waist, I went back out into the main room. Freddie was watching Mythbusters. I said, "Do you know what a shower cap is called in French?" He gave me the usual withering look he displays whenever I ask him something that he obviously doesn't know. I handed him the tiny box. He chortled.

Bonnet de Douche.

It's a douche-bonnet! How utterly wonderful! For the rest of the weekend, we called each other "douche-bonnet" every chance we got. "Dad, you douche-bonnet, you missed the turn!" "Hey, douche-bonnet -- brush your teeth."

Go ahead. Call your loved ones douche-bonnets -- affectionately, of course. Then explain you've just accused them of being a French shower cap.

I suppose we could use it to set up a system of punishments for transgressions. A shower cap kept handy to be placed on the miscreant's head -- with increments of time that increase depending on the severity of the misdeed: Put a dirty plate in the sink, wear the douche-bonnet for ten minutes. Track mud into the house, it's twenty minutes. A D on a semester report card gets you the douche-bonnet for three full hours.

"Hon, why does Ring Ting Ting have a shower cap tied to her head?"

"She got into the trash and smeared macaroni and cheese all over the kitchen floor. She knows the rules."

Tiger Woods? He's wearing that douche-bonnet for the next five years, or until he wins a major -- whichever comes first. The public douche-bonnet. The worst kind.

A Brand New Phobia! Just for Me!

2009-12-04T11:56:00.005-05:00

I seem to have picked up an interesting new phobia.

Perhaps phobia is not quite the right word. Phobias are by definition irrational. My little tic has its basis in something that, while very unlikely to happen, has happened in the past, and will likely happen again.

I have been using public transportation to commute to work. A long train ride through Maryland to Union Station in the District, and then a short Metro hop into Arlington. Pretty relaxing ride, and as long as I catch the 7:07AM out of Brunswick, I'm there in good time.

My problem is this: as Metro trains approach the station, I find myself making sure no one is standing behind me to push me in front of the train. I back away from the platform edge and make sure there are people between me and the tracks, so I'm harder to push in. And if someone should sneak around behind me while the onrushing train nears, I move in the opposite direction so he is no longer behind me.

Strange, no? During the New York years, I don't remember having this fear -- despite racking up thousands of subway hours. Perhaps it was subconsciously instilled in me after reading an article -- can't remember where -- about the guilt subway conductors feel years after having driven a train that ran over a suicide.

What was the movie where the hero saves someone who's been pushed onto the tracks by jumping in, grabbing the victim and rolling into the space under the platform just as the train passes? Seems like something a Clooney could pull off...

Wa

2009-11-30T12:12:00.004-05:00

My work these days takes me to George Washington University several days a week. (I ride Metro to get there, and I nominate for the Annual Puerility Award the train conductor who gets such glee out of announcing, "Train now arriving at... Foggy... Bottom!")

A few days ago, it was raining quite hard. I stood out in front of an administration building, under an awning, keeping out of the tempest, waiting for a colleague. A rather large group of people was waiting in the lobby -- East Asian businessfolk, perhaps Japanese. They milled around, waiting for something. (It turned out later that they were waiting for an escort to another building.)

A middle-aged gent stepped outside -- black wool suit, glasses, hatless. Leaning over a flowerbed and closing a nostril with his thumb, he blew a gigantic snot-rocket into the foliage. A couple of monstrous honks satisfied him that his projectile had indeed cleared his sinuses, and he turned and went back into the lobby. Slightly embarrassed, I turned away as if I hadn't seen anything.

A few minutes later a second gent came outside, and occupied the same spot where his colleague had stood. I am quite sure he hadn't seen the earlier cannonade. He regarded the flowerbed with interest -- clearly, the impatiens, bedewed with the steady rain and his countryman's mucosal ejecta, had evoked thoughts of the evanescence of existence and the fleeting nature of life. Out came the camera, and he started snapping away at the flowerbed -- aiming it directly at the spot where the phlegm-fusillade had struck not three minutes earlier.

I turned away again, but this time to hide the contented smile that comes to one's face when one's day is made.

Now Joining 21st Century...

2009-11-28T15:53:00.002-05:00

First post from my snazzy new Droid!

Gonna be real short, 'cos this keyboard is gonna take some getting used.

But hey! Lookit me! Smartphone!

(Getting some insight into that 140-character limit at Twitter. Also. Too.)

Picking Up the Thread

2009-11-20T10:29:00.006-05:00

We're all born trying to pick up the thread.

That is to say, an unimaginably enormous series of events happened before each of us was born, events that shape the moment in history we happen to inhabit at the moment of our birth. It's our job, if we choose to accept it, to figure out the plot, to understand, to the best of our ability, the whys and wherefores of the little slice of history we inhabit and why people act and think as they do. Some of us, I think, do a better job of it than others -- which fact, I believe, explains a great deal about why we are in the place we're in.

I was born in 1960. President Kennedy was assassinated on my third birthday -- one of my earliest concrete memories. My parents, literate, urbane folks, had newspapers and magazines around the house as a matter of course, and I can remember looking at the pictures even when I couldn't read. When I did acquire some rudimentary literacy (about 1965, if memory serves), there was much that I didn't comprehend because I had yet to pick up the thread. I had no way of understanding that the moment in history I was occupying was a rather hideously anomalous time. I believe I formed the impression that student uprisings, permanent war in Southeast Asia, presidential assassinations, race riots and general ideological civil war were normal things, had always been with us, and would forever be.

I don't believe that this was an unreasonable conclusion to arrive at. Of course, looking back, Oswald's rifle shots were a sort of starting gun that set off a race to utter madness that really hasn't ended yet. The madness waxes and wanes depending on the decade, but its root causes stay with us. I cherish the thought that the election to the presidency of a calm, educated, urbane mixed-race gentleman of centrist tendencies might be the beginning of the end of the Sixties madness that still roils, and in my most optimistic moments I see signs that this might be so. However, there's still plenty of crazy out there, and new, post-election Sarah Palin bumperstickers appear on too many cars for me to take much comfort in the idea.

There were jokes back then that I just didn't get, too, jokes that had their roots in issues that arose before I began my own efforts to pick up the thread. What were these references to Pat Nixon's "Republican cloth coat" supposed to mean? Why did people constantly refer to "the New Nixon" and "you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more" while laughing up their sleeves?

And why did my parents harbor such a special loathing for the man? To me, an innocent child with implicit trust in grownups of every political stripe, he seemed pretty normal. He didn't particularly exude evil to an eight-year-old, my age when he was inaugurated. By now, of course, I have come to understand why so many detested him -- but only long after Watergate exposed the depth of his repulsiveness -- but it was an effort that took decades.

Now comes Rick Perlstein's magnificent Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of a Nation, a history-cum-biography of Nixon's life through the 1972 election.

Boy, oh boy, does this book pick up some threads! Of course I remember very nearly all of the events of Nixon's administration, but many things that mystified me at the time are elucidated and, above all, given context that I, not yet having picked up the thread, could not have understood at the time.

I did not know, for example, the circumstances of Nixon's childhood, which knowledge might have hinted to me about the resentment seething in him that would lead him to a political philosophy that would exploit the same resentment in others. I didn't know that at Whittier College, like most schools a place where elites (jocks, rich kids, at Whittier known as "Franklins") look down with contempt at the non-elites (nerds, strivers, geeks), Nixon organized a fraternity of non-elites called the Orthogonians to give the non-elites a home. Perlstein deploys this duality throughout the story -- liberals and intellectuals as Franklins, the "Silent Majority" as Orthogonians -- as Nixon dives deeper and deeper into the bitterness and paranoia that would eventually lose him the presidency he spent his entire adult life pursuing.

You can see we're still living with those polarities, right? The explosion of indignation over Obama's "guns and religion" gaffe during the '08 election? The toxicity of the word "elite"? The audience at which yack radio is aimed, versus, say, the core PBS audience?

Thanks, Tricky Dick! Thanks a whole bunch!

One of the most useful graphic devices I've ever seen was a timeline in the back of Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head, his masterly survey of the Beatles and their music. It is a timeline that shows the Fabs' career month by month, while showing contemporaneous events in the arts and politics. It was through this tool, for instance, that I learned that within ten days of the release of the White Album, Elvis Presley had his Comeback Special on TV. Two and a half weeks earlier, Nixon had defeated Humphrey and Wallace.

This kind of context really helps. And Nixonland provides it in spades. The reader, picking up the thread, begins to understand how John Lennon, reading his newspaper day after day, would have been inspired in the summer of 1968, to write "Revolution," and how Joe Sixpack in Poughkeepsie might conclude that the world has gone mad and pull the lever for Nixon. Look at this sequence of events, culled from Wikipedia, from the late spring and early summer of 1968. In January, the Prague Spring began (to be crushed six months later by Soviet tanks), the battle of Khe Sanh was fought and the Tet Offensive had begun:

April 4 – Martin Luther King, Jr. is shot dead at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots erupt in major American cities for several days afterward.
April 6 – A shootout between Black Panthers and Oakland police results in several arrests and deaths, including 16-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton.
April 11 – Josef Bachmann tries to assassinate Rudi Dutschke, leader of the left-wing movement (APO) in Germany, and tries to commit suicide afterwards, failing in both, although Dutschke dies of his brain injuries 11 years later.
April 11 – German left-wing students blockade the Springer Press HQ in Berlin and many are arrested (one of them Ulrike Meinhof).
April 11 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
April 20 – English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial Rivers of Blood Speech.
April 23–30 – Vietnam War: Student protesters at Columbia University in New York City take over administration buildings and shut down the university (see main article Columbia University protests of 1968).
April 29 – The musical Hair officially opens on Broadway. [Naked hippies!]

May

May of '68 is a symbol of the resistance of that generation. Agitations and strikes in Paris lead many youth to believe that a revolution is starting. Student and worker strikes, sometimes referred to as the French May, nearly bring down the French government.
May 17 – The Catonsville Nine enter the Selective Service offices in Catonsville, Maryland, take dozens of selective service draft records, and burn them with napalm as a protest against the Vietnam War.

June

June 3 – Radical feminist Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol as he enters his studio, wounding him.
June 5 – U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California by Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy dies from his injuries the next day.
June 8 – James Earl Ray is arrested for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

Between April 4 and June 8 was 65 days. For purposes of comparison, 65 days ago from this writing was September 17. A glimpse at newspaper archives shows that 65 days ago we were taking umbrage at the stupid ACORN video and hating on "czars." This headline appeared in the Chicago Tribune: "Obama: Don't rush call on Afghan troop levels." So yeah, imagine opening your paper in the summer of '68 during those 65 days between the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations. An exercise in horror. Much, much more would follow: the disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Tlatelolco Massacre, the Cultural Revolution in China, and, of course, Nixon's election.

Workadaddy Sixpack would have noticed that all those punk kids tearing up Columbia University were, well, very unlikely themselves to ever become Workadaddy Sixpacks. The sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers -- Franklins, in Perlstein's terms -- were ripping up one of the nation's most prestigious universities for what seemed to him -- Orthogonian to the core -- utterly frivolous reasons. This would be the resentment exploited by Nixon in the election, and really by every right-wing politician since then. (Sarah Palin, anyone?)

You owe yourself this book -- especially if, like me, you're still picking up the thread of a mystifying childhood.

Frightfully Rude of Me...

2009-11-19T15:03:00.002-05:00

I would be unforgivably remiss if I failed to thank the folks who emailed me during the last few months, enquiring with concern about my whereabouts.

I'm sorry I didn't answer all of you, but that's how badly in the dumps I was.

But enough of that! Since we're all about the slashes today, I do have to admit I larffed quite a bit when I read a few weeks ago that Tim Berners-Lee admitted in an interview that the two slashes in the "http://" formulation in Web URLs do nothing -- nothing! -- but waste electrons.

It's like suddenly discovering the World Wide Web's vermiform appendix or something.

A Few Observations While Waiting for the Electrician (Or Someone Like Him)

2009-11-19T10:44:00.003-05:00

As a great man once said (I forget who), it's really great to be on vacation.

But it really blows to be on vacation for six months.

As days turn into weeks, and weeks into months, and savings get burnt away until it occurs to him that he owns three guitars that could be pawned, a fella has, it seems, a tendency to mumble into silence.

You run out of things to say. Nothing coming in, ergo nothing going out. Passivity. Watching the room get light, and then watching it get dark.

Six months like that. Avoid it if you can. My heart goes out to you if you can't.

At any rate, that's over now for the foreseeable future. I've landed (finally) on my feet, working on a very large and exciting project for a thoroughly benign client -- started last week. The commute has been a bitch -- two and a half, even three hours in soul-deadening traffic -- but now I've discovered the Brunswick line of the MARC train. It's still two hours door-to-door, but two much more relaxed hours.

Clouds are lifting, 's what I'm saying, and I begin to feel the old élan vitale bubbling up in the bits. Hell, I'm talking to my blog again. That's significant.

The iPod has kept me sane during that bitchly commute -- audiobooks, podcasts, what have you. Which brings up a point that has been nagging at me for some time. I fear a perfectly good and useful English word has been done dreadful injury, and it is up to me to patch up its wounds, apply cooling cloths to its forehead, and coo endearments to it while it heals.

The offense, which I'm hearing more and more, particularly in podcasts and radio shows that promote Web content, is this:

Forward-slash.

Folks, you do have a backslash key on your keyboard. There it sits on my keyboard under the "Delete" key (oh, if only!), an ugly reminder of the horrible old MS-DOS command-line interface. Its uppercase sibling -- the pipe character -- is nowadays chiefly seen by non-code-jockeys separating items in a horizontal list of hyperlinks.

There is no such thing as a forward-slash. There does exist and has existed for centuries a slash -- also known as a stroke, a virgule, a diagonal, a solidus, a right-leaning stroke, an oblique dash, a slant, a separatrix, a scratch comma, a slaok, a slak, or (my new favorite) a whack.

The thing that cranks my Model T about forward-slash is that it grants equal status to the backslash, a loathsome pustule of a glyph that is found nowhere in nature except in computer code. If there's a backslash, the thinking seems to go, why, its opposite must be a forward-slash. Better call it that, or folks might get confused. Feh. Ptui!

BBC, PBS, Times Online (yay, The Bugle!), all of you clowns: Knock it off. It does you no credit.

Daniel Snyder Is a Dwarf Dung-beetle

2009-09-03T12:44:00.004-04:00

Come on, you legless little prick: Sue me for copyright infringement!

I've said this before, and I'll say it again:

Redskins owner Daniel Snyder is a puffy-faced, Napoleonic, coprophiliac homunculus who in a just world would be forced to crawl nude over broken glass to apologize for this outrage before being clapped in the stocks in Lafayette Park to be pelted with offal.

It Is As It Does

2009-08-25T09:37:00.002-04:00

The Huffington Post offers up the juicy tidbit that Occidental College is including among its course offerings this year a class in "Stupidity." From the course catalog:

Stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite. It is an artifact of our nature as finite beings and one of the most powerful determinants of human destiny. Stupidity is always the name of the Other, and it is the sign of the feminine. This course in Critical Psychology follows the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and most recently, Avital Ronell, in a philosophical examination of those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending.

Et tendentious cetera.

We note the three headlines presented immediately below that story on the HuffPo's front page:

WATCH: KFC Introduces Surreal Sandwich That Replaces Bread With Fried Chicken

Outed "Skanks" Blogger Who Trashed Model Angry At Google For IDing Her

WATCH: CNN Panel Weighs In On Spat Between Jon Stewart And Bill O'Reilly

I think I can save you some money, undergrads...

The Language Problem

2009-08-24T08:59:00.002-04:00

It has always struck me as deeply incongruous when a Nazi addresses another Nazi in English. A sequence in Where Eagles Dare leaped out at me back in the mists of time, when Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood are sent into a Nazi enclave in Wehrmacht uniforms, and manage to pass perfectly, despite addressing the enemy in full Burtonian and Eastwoodian English. Really, dude? the skeptical watcher wants to ask. Is your German that good? So good, in fact, that it passes even when it's English? Not a single Nazi so much as looks askance at them. It's very hard to overlook, a real strain on the old willing-suspension-of-disbelief neurons.

Inglourious Basterds picks up this ball of incongruity and runs it into the end zone. Four-fifths of the film is in either French or German, and the American audience is forced to do what cowardly directors swear they won't ever do: read subtitles. In Chapter One, a Nazi interviewing a Frenchman begins in French but then asks, halfway through the conversation, to switch to English. Ah-ha! the viewer says triumphantly, caught you, Tarantino! Pretty sleazy way of getting those damned subtitles off the screen!

But no. The Nazi has bigger plans.

The language-play continues later. A plot-point depends on the assumption that Germans cannot appreciate the subleties of the Italian tongue and are universally unable to detect an American accent. As it happens, the German the Basterds are trying to fool (the same English-speaker from Chapter One) has absolutely beautiful Italian, and there is high comedy indeed as he toys with the hapless Basterds.

While ostensibly an action film, Basterds is very dialog-intensive. The same trope happens repeatedly: Nazi inquisitor twigs to subterfuge, and toys with his interlocutor until dreadful violence breaks out. Reviewers have called these lengthy scenes boring; I disagree emphatically. Tarantino's artful dialog, never oblique or obscure, unfailingly keeping the viewer informed without being obvious about it, is anything but boring. Anyone bored by this dialog is bored by life.

Violent? Come on. It's Tarantino. Heads bashed in with baseball bats? Oh yeah. Prurient closeups of knives and skin? Of course. But the film is so over-the-top, so completely obviously a comedy about war films, that the viewer is never oppressed by it; it's all clearly, clearly fake, and Tarantino just winks at us throughout it.

I'll leave it to greater minds to comment on this film's place in the great panoply of film history, of WWII flicks and the movies made by the Nazis to sell themselves to the German public. It's clear (I mean, really, really clear) that Tarantino wants it to be considered in that light. The fact that a great deal of the plot involves getting the highest echelons of the Nazi apparat into a theater to watch a film extolling a German war hero -- a theater that specializes in Riefenstahl revivals -- is almost rubbing our noses in self-referentiality. To watch the film in a theater over the heads of our fellow film-goers, the view encompassing the backs of heads watching a film showing the backs of heads onscreen watching a film, is truly the only way to fully appreciate this movie.

Don't wait for the DVD, is what I'm saying.

Wait... What?

2009-08-21T11:22:00.002-04:00

From the Huffington Post:

Did they use it like a divining rod?

O-or did Jackie O have... I don't even want to think about it.

Bristol

2009-08-18T08:35:00.007-04:00

Bristol is a town that straddles the border between Virginia and Tennessee -- the state line runs down the middle of State Street. Technically, there are two Bristols (they most commonly come in pairs, amirite?) -- Bristol, Virginia and Bristol, Tennessee -- but they are both run by the same city administration.

Besides its NASCAR track, Bristol Motor Speedway -- "the world's fastest half-mile" -- Bristol's main claim to fame is as the birthplace of country music. In truth, this is not really so; a more accurate assertion would be that it is the birthplace of the country music record industry. What we might consider proto-country music is, of course, much, much older than that. It was to Bristol in the summer of 1927 that Ralph Peer, producer and A&R man formerly for OKeh Records and now acting under his new position with Victor, brought newfangled field recording gear and up-to-the-minute electric microphones (introduced in 1925), and set up shop in an unused storage space over the Taylor-Christian Hat company on the Tennessee side of State Street.

He allowed it to be bruited about that he would be offering $50 a side to any local musicians he deemed worthy of recording. A very astute and far-sighted businessman, Peer recognized, absolutely rightly, that with a nascent recording business and the coming ubiquity of radio, the real money was to be made in owning the copyright to the songs he recorded, which was why he felt he could be relatively generous to his recording stable -- and $50 was mighty generous indeed to the average resident of Appalachia in 1927.

Between July 22 and August 3, Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, B.F. Shelton, Uncle Eck Dunford, and a host of other hillbilly acts. An industry was indeed born. The bottom would fall out of it in 1932 with the Great Depression, but radio would sustain country music through World War II, with shows like the Grand Ole Opry. When the wartime rationing of vinyl ended with the war, an entirely new, infinitely more sophisticated generation of artists, recording on vastly improved equipment, filled the need for American proletarian music. The Victor, OKeh, Columbia artists of the '20s would remain to be rediscovered on scratchy old 78s on grandparents' Victrolas, and on such eminently sympathetic compilations as Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk." It is worth noting that the rediscoverers -- the Ralph Rinzlers, the Mike Seegers (RIP), were not themselves rural people, but sons and daughters of urban intellectuals.

It was into this Bristol that the Jingomobile roared yesterday. (Literally. That muffler's on its last legs.) I'd bombed down 81 from Winchester in what must have been record time, the 350-mile trip having taken five and a half hours. My purpose was twofold: I wanted to see the place where Peer had his recordings done, and I wanted to retrace the route the Carter Family took to their historic recording sessions with Peer.

The outskirts of Bristol are unprepossessing indeed. Huge Baptist churches stand cheek by jowl with grubby Taco Bells and Burger Kings, which are the places where the swains of Bristol go when they want to show their girlfriends a good time. There are few other options. The squalor persists until you hit State Street itself, which is leafy, verdant, and lined with quirky coffeeshops and bookstores for the tourist trade. The Art Deco theater marquee survives -- it can be made out in a gritty photo of State Street from the Ralph Peer era. I find the building where the sessions are said to have taken place -- there seems to be some local controversy over it, but The Bristol Sessions (ed. Wolfe & Olson) confidently places it at Number 408. There it is. A large mural on a blind wall facing the railroad tracks celebrates "Bristol Tenn-Va / Birthplace of Country Music" with portraits of Peer, the Carters, Victor Records, and Rodgers giving his signature thumbs-up in his brakeman's gear, guitar in his lap.

Besides State Street, I'd wanted to see another landmark from the era -- Maces Spring and Poor Valley and Rich Valley on the side of Clinch Mountain, where all three Carters grew up, married, and started families before that Monday and Tuesday, August 1-2, 1927, when they would record "Single Girl, Married Girl," "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow," and four other sides. The legend put about by Peer after the Carters' success was that the Carters were raggedy-assed, barefoot, iggerant backwoodsmen who'd never seen the big city before they pulled into town looking like the Beverly Hillbillies. (Come to think of it, I would not be suprised to find a distinct historic correlation between that disgusting portrayal and Peer's description.)

At any rate, it's rank bullshit, meant to sell records and legend. A. P. Carter made a decent living for himself selling fruit trees and farming, the Carters wore clothes to Bristol that, while perhaps not New York tailored, were perfectly unremarkable -- and that certainly included footwear fit for city use. A. P. was born in a log cabin -- it's now on display at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, moved down from its original, nearly inaccessible site. But the idea that the Carters were from the back of beyond and had never seen the Big City is pure nonsense -- Maces Spring is a mere twenty miles from town. A. P. Carter first heard of Peer's visit while he was in Bristol itself, visiting a cousin who ran a furniture store. They had cars (borrowed from a brother, admittedly, but they knew how to drive).

I followed the road to Hiltons, Clinch Mountain looming. It is indeed a winding road, and it is easy to imagine that its unpaved 1927 version would have been hard indeed on the balloon-like tires of the day -- the Carters took two days to traverse it, partly because of numerous blowouts, and partly because Sara was pregnant and the jostling made her miserable. But nowadays it can be driven at a comfortable 40 MPH, slowing down for the frequent 90-degree hairpins.

It is a very poor part of the world. One- and two- room houses of crumbling brick, old enough to have been passed by the Carters on their trip to Bristol, line the passage, yards weedy, reeking of desperation and boredom. Footwashing Baptist churches, though, look prosperous, well maintained, their white paint gleaming in the sun. There is ample traffic for a Sunday afternoon, and I sense impatience in drivers as they come up behind a gawking tourist who's slowing down to look at things they find completely commonplace. I pull over and let them pass.

Hiltons (Maces Spring lacks a post office and thus is not officially a town) looks prosperous enough. The town's mining concern seems to be going strong. Up past the school (also looking well off), the A. P. Carter Highway winds its way through Poor Valley to the Carter Family Fold, located at the site of the grocery store that A. P. opened after the Carters broke up -- his wife Sara having fallen in love with another. The grocery store (closed, alas, for Sunday, as is all of the Fold) looks about the size of my living room. A. P.'s birth-cabin is beautiful, rustic -- and shares architectural characteristics with the German/Scots-Irish cabins in and around my home, 350 miles north.

I can only admire from outside the little amphitheater where Saturday nights in season ("Adults $1.50, Children 50 cents") old-timey and bluegrass concerts are given.

This is the place where a dying Johnny Cash gave his last performance.

Not much more to see here. A phone call from home requires my presence, and presently I am bombing back up 81, dodging eighteen-wheelers and blue flashing lights on prowlers, headed back to 2009. I still keep the Mood Music going, though:

Far away upon a hill on a sunny mountain side
Many years ago we parted, my little Ruth and I
From the sunny mountain side

Oh she clung to me and trembled, when I told her we must part
And she said don't go my darling, it almost breaks my heart
To think of you, so far apart

Carry me back to old Virginia,
Back to my Clinch Mountain home...

Got Lurid?

2009-08-12T11:48:00.006-04:00

The first thing I'll do with a new hardcover is remove the dust jacket and store it somewhere safe. Replace it when I'm done, of course, and ready to store it on the shelf.

This one I did with perhaps a greater degree of pleasure than usual. Yeah, OK, Southern Cali hardboiled Sixties surfer genre, pretty much calls for lurid neon type on the cover. Don't have much of a problem with that. No, it's the hideous neon-pink gradient wash the designer put on the inner flaps that does it for me. I couldn't go one sentence without my eye straying off the page and staring fixedly at the strange, strange design choice, me thinking whyyyyyy?

Picked it up yesterday, only had time for one chapter last night. No immediate impressions formed yet, up or down. I did get a pretty serious gut-laff from the stoner lawyer, Sauncho Smilax, as Doc is using his One Phone Call to try to get out of jail:

"It's like Donald and Goofy, right, and they're out in a life raft, adrift at sea? for what looks like weeks? and what you start noticing after a while, in Donald's closeups, is that he has whisker stubble? like, growing out of his beak? You get the significance of that?"

"If I find a minute to think about it, Saunch, but meantime here comes Bigfoot and he's got that look, so if you could repeat the number back, OK, and--"

"We've always had this image of Donald Duck, we assume it's how he looks all the time in his normal life, but in fact he's always had to go in every day and shave his beak. The way I figure, it has to be Daisy. You know, which means, what other grooming demands is that chick laying on him, right?"

The Double Steal

2009-08-10T07:26:00.003-04:00

Potomac Nationals vs. Wilmington Blue Rocks, Sunday, August 9, 2009

It's a blistering hot August Sunday.

Top of the eighth inning. Wilmington, in a tie with the P-Nats for first place in the Carolina League, has come back from a 3-0 deficit to rack up six unanswered runs. Things may be out of hand for the home team.

Wilmington puts runners at first and third. Nats reliever Patrick McCoy winds up to pitch. As he does so, the runner on first breaks for a steal. McCoy catches it in time, and concentrates his attention on throwing him out. From our seats in Section E (close enough to home plate that Freddie and I can legitimately contest ball-and-strike calls with the ump -- the $11 seats!) we see the runner on third sneaking down the line to steal home.

Nooooo! we all shriek. Look behind you! Don't make a rookie mistake! Get the lead runner!

But no. McCoy throws to the second baseman, crabwalking for second along with the runner. Immediately, the lead runner on third breaks for home. The second baseman, far more in tune with his baseball instincts and training than those of us in the stands -- who remembers the Double Steal play from high-school ball? Certainly not me -- susses the play immediately. He's been waiting for it. He fires the ball on a smoking rope to the catcher at home, who falls on the miscreant home-stealer like a ton of bricks, and the ump punches the runner out, out, out.

I sometimes forget how much I love this game. Who laid out the bases at 90 feet apart? Such that when a ground ball goes to the shortstop's right, and he snags it and throws to first, it's always an exciting bang-bang call? Eighty-five feet, the runner's invariably safe. Ninety-five feet, he's out by a country mile. And on a tall sacrifice fly to deep center, runner at second gets overconfident and tries for home, centerfielder hits the cutoff man, who does his job and gets the ball on a line to home, the ball and the runner are there at exactly the same time, and only the ump can see through the cloud of dust to make the call?

Baseball oughta be the National Pastime or something. That's what I think.

Come Up the Country!

2009-08-02T11:56:00.001-04:00

Death appears to surround us.

Sometime early yesterday morning, a white-tailed doe chose our orchard as the site of her Calvary. Betty awoke, looked out her window, and came to report a deceased deer a-next the Asian Pear.

I investigated, in the driving rain. Yep, no question about it. Rigor mortis had set in, the crows were conversing in salivating tones, buzzards were circling overhead, and flies were buzzing, as they will. Something must be done.

I called Animal Control. They were closed (it being Sunday), but their recorded message said to call the Sheriff's Office in case of an emergency. I did not judge this to be exactly an emergency, but called anyway. The man who answered, while kind, was not inclined to jump into his prowler and race over to help. Had the deer died on a public road, he said, the Virginia Department of Transportation would send a crew to remove it, but if on private land, there was not much he could do. We are a couple of hundred yards from a public road. His recommendation was to remove the carcass to some spot remote from the house, and let nature take its course.

I contemplated dragging the thing to the road, abandoning it there, and calling VDOT, but dismissed it as an affront to the neighbors. It might take days for VDOT to respond, and in the meantime, I'd have placed an Extremely Stinky Thing within nose-shot of three other households. No, the only polite thing was to follow the good Sheriff's advice.

We maintain a clearing in the southern quadrant for the kind of yard-waste that can't be composted -- tree-wrack, out-of-date Christmas trees, what have you -- and this is far enough away from the house that (I fervently hope) the stink won't waft here. I got out the tractor-mower, clapped a length of chain to its axle (easier said than done) and the other end to the deer's hind leg, and off we went. The dragging, while undignified for the deceased, was easy enough. She wasn't particularly heavy.

I left her there, with a blessing and a... Can we atheists be said to pray? Whatever it was, I tried to be as respectful as I could under the circumstances. I don't anticipate going back there until her bones are bleached dry.

And the goddamned dogs know their boundaries. Or at least, they'd better. Or there'll be hell to pay.

Murder Most Foul

2009-07-30T15:02:00.003-04:00

A few years ago, I posted a less-than-completely-serious essay about a vicious quintuple murder that took place in 1943 in Purcellville, near where I live. We Jingos decided one lazy afternoon to try to find the house from the description given in an early-1960s edition of True Detective. We thought we'd found the house, but it wasn't the right one. Then, we got a little silly.

But the murders did indeed happen, and now a serious professional journalist (as opposed to a frivolous, amateur asshat blogger) has begun publishing a series of articles about them in the Loudoun Independent, and they're pretty fascinating reading.

Part 1 sets the scene.

Part 2, just published, details the murder itself.

Parts 3 and 4, to be published Thursday week and Thursday fortnight, are about, respectively, the investigation and quick arrest, and the trial and execution.

Comedians

2009-07-27T10:48:00.001-04:00

All right, who's the joker who signed me up for the Red State Trike Force daily newsletter?

Not cool, man. Not cool.

This email was sent to [your address] because you are subscribed to RedState Army of Activists or General Announcements list.

No, I'm not.

To update your email delivery preferences, click here.

Jake with you if I don't?

Bonus Army

2009-07-24T15:30:00.003-04:00

Hooverville burns, July 27, 1932

It passes with not much general observation, but on today's date in 1932, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Maj. George Patton turned the full wrath of the U. S. Army on World War I veterans on the streets of Washington, DC and Anacostia.

NPR had a feature on this event this afternoon, an interview with the author of a book on the Bonus Marches, and an interview with a surviving eyewitness, who at the time was a boy of eight and a resident of the city. I had no idea the event was so significant; it was the negative example of the Bonus Army that was most responsible for the passage of the GI Bill, for instance, that did so much to create a post-WW II middle class. It happened during a Presidential campaign, and had Katrina-like effects on Hoover's presidency. Afterward, Roosevelt's electoral strategy changed drastically; he no longer had to even mention his opponent in his communications. Another new fact for me: The Bonus Army was entirely integrated. Black and white folks camped together in the Hoovervilles -- very disciplined places, apparently, run by veterans who knew a thing or two about hygiene in the field -- sleeping side by side in tents.

In Observation of the Fortieth Anniversary of Apollo 11

2009-07-20T12:25:00.002-04:00

If you can remember this jingle...

Find more videos like this on video.filestube.com.

...you may remember what it was like to watch Bob McAllister's Wonderama on a lazy summer morning in 1969 when flying cars and jet-packs and Star Trek were just around the corner -- we'd probably have 'em by the time I was my forties. Stanley Kubrick said so, dammit. And we'd always have fantastic bubblegum jingles behind our ads.

True story: On a trip through Bolivia and Peru in about 1977, a street vendor with whom I'd struck up a conversation asked me how many times I'd been to the moon. Well, you know -- since the Americans had gone to the moon, all Americans traveled there regularly. Stands to reason.

I told him I'd been there three times. No sense in crushing his illusion of Yankee greatness.

Audio Typo Revealed!

2009-07-17T11:49:00.004-04:00

Something has bothered me about Elton John's "Rocket Man" since sometime around my fourteenth birthday, when I used my prezzie money to plunk down the necessary for a copy of Honky Chateau in that halcyon year of 1974. (He lost me with the next one, Don't Shoot Me, and by Goodbye Yellow Brick Road I wouldn't cross the street, etc. Still like Madman, though, and will occasionally pull it out for a nostalgia-binge.)

The thing that bothered me was this:

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact, it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you did

Do you see it? Does anything leap out and grab you by the throat as it does me?

Here it is: "If you did."

If you did what?

There's no one there to raise them if you... raised them? On Mars?

I mean, whaaaa...?

Yeah, but you know what does make sense there:

"And there's no one there to raise them if you died."

One little letter, and the whole thing makes perfect sense. The rhyme-scheme doesn't demand a rhyme of "kid" and "did"; in fact there's no rhyming at all in the verses.

So what was it? How does this howler still survive? (I saw Elton singing it on my teevee recently, and he still sings it that way.)

I think it was this: It's late at night in the studio, they're cutting vocals, Bernie Taupin hands Elton a scribbled verse and then runs off somewhere. It's the Seventies, everybody's coked and Quaaluded to the tits, Elton misreads "died" as "did" (or maybe Bernie's dropped the letter in his scribble), and nobody (Seventies, remember?) stops the tape and goes whoa-whoa-whoa.

And since it's on the single and the printed lyrics on the album that way, it's set in stone. Thirty-five years later, he still sings it that way, even if it makes no sense at all.

I think a very cranky letter to Sir Elton is in the offing. Don't you?

In Celebration of Bastille Day

2009-07-14T12:25:00.003-04:00

From Pynchon's Vineland:

Zoyd needed cash... from the landscape contractor Zoyd did some lawn and tree work for, Millard Hobbs, a former actor who'd begun as a company logo and ended up as majority owner of what'd been a modest enough lawn-care service its founder, a reader of forbidden books, had named The Marquis de Sod. Originally Millard had only been hired to be in a couple of locally produced late-night TV commercials in which, holding a giant bullwhip, he appeared in knee socks, buckle shoes, cutoff trousers, blouse and platinum wig, all borrowed from his wife, Blodwen. "Crabgrass won't be'ave?" he inquired in a species of French accent. "Haw, haw! No problem! Zhust call -- The Marquis de Sod... 'E'll wheep your lawn into shepp!".... Little by little he kept buying in and learning the business, as well as elaborating the scripts of his commercials from those old split 30's during the vampire shift to what were now often five-minute prime-time micromovies, with music and special effects increasingly subbed out to artisans as far away as Marin, in which the Marquis, his wardrobe now upgraded into an authentic eighteenth-century costume, might carry on a dialogue with some substandard lawn while lashing away at it with his bullwhip, each grass blade in extreme close-up being seen to have a face and little mouth, out of which, in thousandfold-echoplexed chorus, would come piping "More! More! We love eet!" The Marquis leaning down playfully, "Ah cahn't 'ear you!" Presently the grass would start to sing the company jingle, to a, by then, postdisco arrangement of the Marseillaise --
A lawn savant, who'll lop a tree-ee-uh
Nobody beats Mar-
Quis de Sod!

Have a good one, Frenchies!

Sarcoptes Scabiei Var. Hominis

2009-07-14T10:03:00.004-04:00

We find ourselves afflicted with scabies. Possibly caught from the dogs, possibly from walking through tall grass, possibly from human contact.

During withdrawal, junkies report the sensation of bugs crawling under the skin. Frankly, I think they're whining whelplings, and should shut the hell up until they've had bugs literally crawling under their skin. Sweet Jesus on a Segway, is this miserable.

We've sought attention from Medical Science, and treatment is quite trivial. A lotion, applied once head to toe, stops the little bastards in their (non-figurative) tracks. The pharmacy was out of stock of this miracle potion yesterday (a situation that drew howls of protest from we sufferers), but they attest they have replenished their stocks today. Not one hyperpruritic minute too soon.

So if one with rabies can be said to be "rabid," can one with scabies be said to be "scabid"? Apparently not; the term of art is "scabietic" -- yet another example of the perfidiousness of the Mother Tongue.

Tune in next week, when some other goddamned nineteenth-century affliction will be upon us. Will it be impetigo? Rheumatism? Chilblains? Ricketts? Only a cruel and capricious Creator knows...

Now excuse me, I've got some itching to do.

Update, 7/17: Treatment seems to have been 100% effective. Itch gone, lesions fading. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for insecticides.

On Taking Advantage of a Four-Day Weekend When Independence Day Falls on a Thursday, Or How We Avoided the Headaches of a Complicated Wedding

2009-07-05T15:00:00.005-04:00

Conversation between myself and Wonder Woman, morning of Friday, July 5, 1991...

Me: We're off work today...

Her: Yes, and...?

Me: Why don't we go to the Justice of the Peace in Upper Marlboro and get married?

And we did.

Best idea we ever had.

September of 2010, we will have been a couple in some form or another for thirty years. Imagine that.

Happy Froth of July!

2009-07-04T14:08:00.002-04:00

(All decorations home-grown. Wonder Woman wears her grandmother's apron for Extra Zesty Authenticity! She did the stars, and I did the stripes. The Matriarch picked the berries. We're so fucking classy!)

But Someone Picked You From the Bunch/One Glance Was All it Took

2009-06-29T10:36:00.007-04:00

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out....

I don't think it's too early for this...

Take a listen to this (pops). It's the first thirty seconds of the Jackson Five's first single for Motown, "I Want You Back." Number One for a week in January, 1970. (Preceded in that spot by -- oy! -- "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," succeeded by The Shocking Blue's "Venus." There were giants in the earth in those days.)

It's particularly instructive to stop the clip after ten seconds, after twenty seconds, and at the end, and ask yourself, "What has happened so far?" The answer will be that after ten seconds, you've had one iteration of the verse's main instrumental motif. You've had that fabulously exciting piano crash that kicks the whole thing off, you've had nine -- count 'em nine! -- chord changes. The rhythmic pattern is immediately established: the rhythm guitar sets up its chang-ka-chang syncopation against which the bass, keyboard and lead guitar establish the chordal pattern directly on top of the beat. What an amazingly effective musical idea: Make the clanging, monotonal guitar the central syncopative device, while the rest of the band plays a slightly plodding series of notes that declare the harmonic pattern. Not a single drum has yet been heard -- only one cymbal crash -- but we're already up and dancing to this marvelously infectious and complex polyrhythm.

Between seconds 10 and 20, we get our second iteration of the motif, this time with congas, orchestra, and a third guitar adding yet more complexity to the rhythm. This sets up the beautiful explosion between seconds 20 and 30, in which the drums finally kick in, and the bass slides up an octave and plays for the first time the magnificent descending figure with which it will bolster the chorus throughout the song. (That's what your professor would call your contrapuntal motion; and like the man said, "Live it, or live with it.") Little Michael does his nearly wordless vocalization ("a-lemme-tell-ya-now" being the main concept being put forward) -- sounding improvised, but, I'm sure, the product of whole lot of thought on somebody's part. By now, if we aren't completely hooked, we never will be -- we're probably back with the "Raindrops Keep Falling" crowd.

Now, Michael Jackson, all of ten years old during its recording, had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of this stunningly terse exposition. That credit goes to The Corporation -- Berry Gordy, Freddie Perren, Deke Richards, and Alphonzo Mizell -- and to the various musicians who played on it, most notably the stunning bassist Wilton Felder. Michael's task going in was to sing the living shit out of the lyric -- and by the end, no one will cavil when I assert that there remains neither jot nor tittle of living shit in that lyric. Talented kid, no question.

So that's that -- now take a gander at this. The first thirty seconds of "Billie Jean."

Let's try that every-ten-seconds exercise again.

0:00 - 0:10: Nothing. A drum machine and a farting synth. No motion whatsoever.

0:10 - 0:20: The same fucking nothing.

0:20 - 0:30: The nothing continues, with the addition of a four-note synth figure. A human being enters 29 seconds in, when Michael hiccups and begins the verse. The first chord change comes in at 0:37.

This shit went platinum.

Now, a lot happened between 1970's "I Want You Back" and 1983's "Billie Jean." Not only in popular musical tastes, but also in technology. MIDI. Click tracks. Drum machines. And of course, the all-important, sine qua non technology: video. YouTube has disabled embedding the Billie Jean video, but you can still watch it here. It's something of a revelation. Ah, we think. That's where those thirty seconds went. That's why the song's so spare, why so much of nothing is going on in the opening strains: The music's become subservient to the video.

Music for the eyes. Music to stare at.

The whole purpose of that utterly wonderful opening of "I Want You Back" is to reach out and grab you. It's producers knew perfectly well how their product would for the most part be consumed -- by people with better stuff to do, who have the radio on in the background as they go about their daily business. If your first couple of seconds don't contain something that makes them go woah! you may well be screwed. They're back to their work, tuning your product out. Think of how many iconic pop artifacts of the AM radio era start with a clang like that -- "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," the Byrds' chiming twelve-string confections, "A Hard Day's Night."

When you are watching TV, that's what you're doing. Watching. Attending. It matters very little that there's fuck-all going on in the first thirty seconds of the record, as long as the material onscreen tickles the audience's Entertainment Gland.

That's what we lost sight of in the Eighties -- the imperative to make interesting records that stand absolutely on their own, independent of any other medium. To serve your audience. To, yes, pander.

It's when I checked out, too -- probably not at all coincidentally -- and started investigating musics of the past: bluegrass, old country, jazz, that stuff. Haven't looked back.

Michael Jackson's death is sad in many senses of the word, but as he was the first true MTV phenomenon, I blame him in a real sense for killing my love of pop music, my interest in following what's new. That I won't forgive.

Update: Jesus Horatio Christ

Michael Jackson will live on as a 'plastinated' creature preserved by German doctor Gunther von Hagens.

Von Hagens has caused controversy with everyone from the Pope to the chief rabbi in Israel with his practice of embalming corpses with preserving polyurethane.

Yesterday, he declared: 'An agreement is in place to plastinate the King of Pop.'

Who Is, Really?

2009-06-27T12:59:00.003-04:00

There exists a story of an Eskimo gentleman come down to the Lower Forty-Eight to try his hand at farming, only to come to naught when he could not fallow his fields in the right order. I'd call it "The Lore of Unintended Corn-Sequences," but I'm just not that Inuit.

A Thought Amuses Me

2009-06-23T17:09:00.003-04:00

At some moment or another, Andrew Sullivan is going to have to "de-green" his blog. What's his end-point? What historical event will cause him to decide that either the Iranian people have a perfect Jeffersonian democracy, or the mullahs have prevailed?

This is the problem with purely symbolic self-decoration.

Neddie's Big Fathers' Day Adventure!

2009-06-22T11:59:00.002-04:00

Queried yesterday about what activities would appeal on Fathers' Day, I gave the matter some cogitation. The ~~Prince William~~ Potomac ~~Cannons~~ Nationals were out of town, the Frederick Keys were playing at an inconvenient time, so an afternoon or evening at a minor-league ballpark -- the perfect activity for such an occasion -- was sadly to be denied me.

Then I remembered the incompleteness of our exploration of the National Portrait Gallery from last week, and suggested, to general approval, another visit. We roped in the Matriarch, Wonder Woman, and those children who were not already committed to other engagements, and ho! for the District. (Which already has enough ho's, snark snark.)

Parking of a Sunday near 9th and G was ridiculously hard to find, so, in a moment of paternal clarity, I hove the car into a garage that advertised a flat $10 rate. Worth it under the circs, I thought. Day's a-wastin'. A snaggle-toothed gentleman of indeterminate national origin appeared at the window and demanded his baksheesh. Just as I was handing him a ten-spot, I noticed a sign saying that the garage closed at 4 PM on Sundays. Knowing that we intended to stay at the museum well past that hour, I asked -- and I will admit that this, in retrospect, was poorly phrased -- "What happens after four o'clock"?

"You go out through building," came the reply. I am pretty sure, now, with the benefit of hindsight, that this phrase, and "Park on P-2, P-3," made up the sum total of this gentleman's English. I took "You go out through building" as a rational response to my original question, implying there was a separate after-hours egress -- some kind of sensor that opens a gate, shuts it after you.

Having parked and ridden up in an elevator to street level, we found ourselves in an office-building lobby, complete with sleepy security guard and check-in desk. As I opened the door to the street, it occurred to me that we were going "out through building," and the slightly nauseating idea occurred: that my conversation with Snagglepuss had had something of the non-sequitur about it.

Foo! I pushed the thought out of my head, and we traipsed along to a lovely afternoon with History.

I won't dwell on the museum, save to say that The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly in their Folk Art collection (enlarged image here -- bear in mind the thing you're looking at filled the artist's garage, and not all of it is displayed) is without doubt the weirdest and most wonderful thing I've laid eyes on in thirty years.

At five o'clock, through the magic of cellphones, we reassembled in the lobby, footworn and replete. I offered to go fetch the car while the ladies rested. Betty and I marched back to the office building and were admitted by the slumberous security guard. Elevator back to P-3, car found, all going according to plan. Round the winding route back to the land of the Eloi. Turn the last corner...

The. Gate. To. The. Street. Is. Closed.

Not a soul in sight.

Ohhh... KAY. Thinking that maybe an electric eye or some such device would trigger the raising of the portico, I nudged the car forward until the bumper was nearly touching the steel curtain.

Nothing budged.

A sign on the wall, hitherto unseen, mocked me: "Cars left after hours will be kept until the next business day."

Thanks, Snagglepuss. Thanks a whole bunch.

But the blame really rests with me, for not having asked him the direct question, "What will happen to cars left after hours?" and not been satisfied until I knew I had a reliable answer in the form of the complete sentence, "Cars left after hours will be kept until the next business day."

Some folks might panic in this circumstance. Succumb to claustrophobia. Run around with hair on fire.

Not your Neddie. Contemplating the major-league hassle involved in the admission of defeat -- cab ride out to the Matriarch's (a place not well served by public transport), where she would have to ship us the 50 miles home to Lovettsville and then drive back -- I reached back into the reserve of sang-froid that has flowed in Jingo veins all these centuries and set myself with steely resolve: This shall not stand.

I exited the car, senses aquiver. Having tried shouting "Open Sesame!" to no avail, I reasoned, with the deadly logic gleaned from years of Sherlock Holmes stories, that something must trigger this portal. Magnifying glass in hand (I keep one in the glove compartment for occasions such as this), I examined the edges of the unyeilding gate. Then, mirabile dictu, my eyes fell upon two buttons on a switch not a foot from the portal itself. With nearly mocking simplicity, they were marked "Open" and "Close."

Hosannah!

With a trembling finger, I pressed the "Open" button. Creaking and moaning, the hitherto immovable object groaned into life, and blessed daylight shot into the murk.

Now I had been forming a plan. When the gate was fully open, I would drive through into freedom, park on the sidewalk, bravely go back into the hideous hole, press the "Close" button, and scurry back out, Indiana Jones-style, before the steel curtain could crush the life out of me. And all would be well.

The first half worked perfectly. Car and Betty successfully freed and basking in the sunshine. There would be no 30-mile cab rides today.

No, it was second half of the adventure that unmanned me. Having gone back in to the garage, I pressed the "Close" button, and the giant machine once again groaned back into life. I did my Indy thing, leaping back onto the sidewalk -- and the damned door just reversed itself and raised to the ceiling again. I had not considered that there might be a safety device -- as there is on any standard automatic garage-door opener -- that prevents the door from closing if it senses that an object -- in this case, my all-too-vulnerable flesh -- stood in the transom.

Okay, I mused, what sets off this device? Is there a sensor of some sort that I might, through acrobatic means, avoid triggering? I pressed again, leaped back into the sunshine with my feet as high in the air as I could manage (about four inches). Failure. Perhaps I have to go under the sensor? Pressed the button, and this time emerged hunched over making myself as small as I could.

Eleventh Street on a Sunday is no deserted place. As I was performing my antics, leaping out from under closing doors in various ridiculous poses, a small crowd began to gather. And here's the curious thing: I didn't know it at the time, a rally for the people of Iran was just breaking up a few bare blocks from us, and I noticed that quite a few of these folks were wearing green and carrying signs saying "Where's My Vote?" and the like.

One more attempt, which again failed to raucous laughter, and I thought Fuck it. I flashed a V-sign to the assembled folks, hollered "Sea of Green!" leaped into the car and hightailed it. I did stop in at the sleepy guard's desk, described to him as succinctly as I could what was now his problem, and ran.

Sources?

2009-06-20T09:58:00.006-04:00

I don't know about you, but the info coming out of Iran today is utterly riveting. I hope this turns out without bloodshed, inshallah. I'm casting my memory back to Tienanmin Square, when it was incredibly frustrating to be reliant on the MSM for updates -- and not really believing what they said. Back then, the dominant technology was faxing -- when was the last time you faxed anything? -- but now, we get on-the-ground reports from eyewitnesses within minutes of the reported occurrence.

I'm obsessively reloading Sullivan and Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post (when do these guys sleep?) -- anybody got any other sources?

My best wishes to the brave marchers. Stay strong.

This Machine, Too, Kills Fascists

2009-06-18T15:33:00.002-04:00

Besides Andrew Sullivan and The Huffington Post's outstanding coverage of the events in Iran, I'm finding Al Giordano to be an extremely compelling daily read:

Ever since I penned The Medium Is the Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media, I’ve been waiting for this moment, which I predicted, twelve years ago, would come: a great day when the corporate media got pushed out of the way by authentic media from below. What is occurring worldwide, with the Iranian crisis as catalyst, is the emergence of the very kind of media from below that the human race - particularly the working class and the poor - so desperately needs.

Following these events – including the fast-developing advances in communications strategies and tactics and the efforts from above to censor and cut those communications – provides a gigantic global teach-in and workshop (much like during the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela) on how it is done. As a journalist, I have always followed the stories that help me to learn something new and important to me. And every hour, I’m learning a new set of tricks from these brave communicators in Iran and around the world: methods and techniques that will serve us in this hemisphere, soon enough, too.

The study of how to break information blockades is a life’s study for some of us. What a wonderful classroom we’ve been provided this week. Perhaps, just as Woody Guthrie painted on his guitar, we will finally be able to mark our communications tools: “This machine kills fascists,” and then evolve it to his friend Pete Seeger’s rejoinder, painted on his banjo: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

Cyberwar

2009-06-17T11:58:00.004-04:00

Interesting article at Wired on the cyberwar underlying the events in Iran:

But Burton — who helped bring Web 2.0 tools to the American spy community — isn’t so sure. “Giving a citizenry the ability to turn the tables on its own government is, I think, what governance is all about. The public’s ability to strike back is something that every government should be reminded of from time to time.” Yet he admits to feeling “conflicted.” about participating in the strikes, he suddenly stopped. “I don’t know why, but it just felt…creepy. I was frightened by how easy it was to sow chaos from afar, safe and sound in my apartment, where I would never have to experience–or even know–the results of my actions.”

(Via.)

Update: Al Giordano: "[L]ike I've said again and again, the fight to keep the channels open is "the front" in this war for hearts and minds."

Strummin' on the Old Banjo

2009-06-16T14:56:00.004-04:00

Dinah, in happier times

Sometimes the most puerile earworms dig their way into the cranium. This morning, driving Freddie to a doctor's appointment, I became aware that "I've Been Working on the Railroad" was buzzing around between my ears, and nothing I could do would stop it.

The first half of the song makes a fair amount of sense, I suppose -- all that tribute to labor for its own sake ("just to pass the time away," etc.). No, it's when the character of Dinah enters stage left pursued by a banjo that things get a bit surreal. Okay, we think, Dinah has a horn that the singer encourages her (at great length and with the enthusiasm borne of obsessive repetition) to blow, that much is clear. But when we learn that a mysterious "someone" is occupying the food-preparation area with Dinah while flogging a banjo (Earl Scruggs? Bela Fleck? Uncle Dave Macon? The curious mind can't help but ask), we descend into surrealism and madness. The song never identifies the musician -- itself a kind of self-aware metacommentary that we expect from a Kubrick or a Pynchon, but not from a 19th-century blackface minstrel -- but the idea of "being in the kitchen" with a woman who's been "blowing her horn" evinces a sort of eyebrow-waggling salaciousness that does the hitherto innocent work-song no credit.

I think the phrase "someone's in the kitchen with Dinah" could be rescued, refurbished, given new life and new meaning. Let's give it a shot, shall we?

"Could you possibly see your way to doing the goddamned dishes once in a while? I'm not your damned mom, and this place is a dump! Dirty socks in the sink, for God's sake! And you just sit there with that damned XBox, picking your nose! I'm going out, and this place had better be picked up when I get home, or there'll be hell to pay!"

"Well... Looks like someone's in the kitchen with Dinah!"

Or how about this:

"It's a three-one count... Beckett looks the runner back to first... Rodriguez looking for the heat, now... Rears back, pitch is on the way -- and A-Rod gets all of it! Left-centerfield, back is Ellsbury, but he won't get it.... Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah!"

Or this:

"...and he said, 'My God, it's full of holes!'

"Holes! Get it? 'Cos the... thing...

[Tap tap] "Is this thing on?

"Oh that's... unnecessary... Yeah, I remember when I had my first beer... Do I come to your work and yell at you? Man -- someone's in the kitchen with Dinah!"

Can I get a fee-fi-fiddle-dee-i-oh?

I Gotta Admit...

2009-06-12T19:59:00.003-04:00

This one raised a lump in the throat and a tremble in the old lower lip...

Among everything else, it demonstrates the possibilities of digital multitracking in a global environment. I particularly like the look the guy at 1:48 gives the camera: "Oh yeah... This is gonna be good!"

These are the folks responsible.

Security

2009-06-11T14:02:00.005-04:00

With a few hours to kill yesterday as Betty cavorted with some friends in western DC, Wonder Woman and I decided to take in the reopened National Portrait Gallery.

We hadn't ever visited. We will be back, and as soon as we possibly can -- as we only had a couple of hours, we left unsatisfied. The visiting Marcel Duchamp exhibit alone is worth an entire day. Unlike some of the other Smithsonian museums, the explanatory tags next to the exhibits are lengthy and detailed, and and assume curiosity and intelligence in the visitor. Absolutely worth a visit next time you're in town.

We were struck, also, by the lack of bag-inspecting, metal-detecting security measures as we walked in the door. This was so unexpected that we both remarked on it. Of course, there are plenty of vigilant guards in the lobby, as there should be, but nary a patdown did they give us or anyone.

It wasn't until later that afternoon, when we turned on the car radio, that we heard of the dreadful events at the Holocaust Museum, less than a mile from where we'd just been having a pleasant afternoon. We've been the Museum once, but long enough now that I can't remember what the experience of walking in the front door was like -- the Museum's Entry and Hours web page clearly says that all visitors must pass through a metal detector, so this maniac must have just jumped in the door and started shooting immediately.

My sympathies for the family and friends of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the security-guard victim. They don't pay those guys enough. Their union was trying to get them bulletproof vests, but their employer, Wackenhut (guilty! Guilty! Guilty!), ignored their request.

(Update: Read that "guilty" article from 1992; a whole lot of questions about Iraq WMD might be cleared up for you: "Another reason is that after a six-month investigation, in the course of which we spoke to more than 300 people, we believe we know what the truck did contain-equipment necessary for the manufacture of chemical weapons-and where it was headed: to Saddam Hussein's Iraq." This is why we still need journalism...)

Oh, That's...

2009-06-02T10:02:00.002-04:00

...Unfortunate.

GIGO

2009-05-27T06:56:00.004-04:00

A strange thing: Two mornings in a row now, I've awakened from the same weirdly frustrating dream.

I'm back in college. Since I've been given a second chance, I've decided I'm going to make the best of my college career; really bust my hump to get great grades, participate in campus affairs, join debates, be a somebody in campus life.

I'm in a lecture hall. The professor is banging on about Middle Eastern affairs. One of the students breaks in to admonish the prof about something. His words are nonsense, and I can refute the nonsense. I have facts and figures at my disposal. Another student interrupts, with more nonsense. I raise my hand to be called on. Everybody ignores me. The prof doesn't see me. I start being vocal -- call on me! I know this is bullshit, and I can prove it! To no avail. The nonsense drones on.

I come to full consciousness, frustrated and angry. Goddamned public life. You just can't break in!

Only now do I realize what's been happening: My radio's been on. I've got my bedside alarm radio set to NPR, and the bullshit I've been trying to break into, with such frustrating results, is their 6 AM News Roundup. My Dream Self has been taking in the words, but not the meaning, of the news reports, reassembling them into gibberish, and that's what I've been trying to argue with in my sleep. Of course, the radio is rather unlikely to stop and call on a dreaming goober who wants to argue with a reassembled dream-version of something just asserted: "Yes, Neddie, you wanted to say something about the garbage your subconscious just created out of our broadcast?" I'd be a little afraid if it did, come to think of it.

Here in Status-Symbol Land

2009-05-23T17:02:00.005-04:00

I recall with particular vividness an episode from my childhood -- my first critical pronunciation, I do believe. Seated on a stone wall in the courtyard of my school, I declared the following words to a coterie of my friends, who hadn't really asked my opinion: "Those Beatles think they're the Kings of Pop (yes, I really did use the term), but everybody knows it's the Monkees!"

I think I can be forgiven for this. The Monkees had a live-action television show -- and the Beatles had a rather terrible cartoon. This counts, to a seven-year-old. How was I to know that the Monkees' snappy dialog was a cynical, commercial attempt at an American version of the Beatles' snappy d. in "A Hard Day's Night"? It was funny, dammit!

OK, I can see getting all righteous about Mr. Green being so serene about the number of televisions in his house, but why's poor Mrs. Gray come under opprobrium for being pleased with her garden? Don't quite get that. But know this, and know it well: Never, ever piss off a Monkee by indulging in Conspicuous Consumption, particularly on a Pleasant Valley Sunday. They'll whip out a Goffin-King number with a killer off-kilter guitar riff and some great, great harmony vocals. And you'll slink off into Status-Symbol Land with your peacock tail between your legs.

Well. Happy P. V. Sunday to you all. No matter how many TVs you have.

PS: "Rows of houses that are all the same/And no one seems to care" still pisses me off.

What Do You Save?

2009-05-20T20:31:00.003-04:00

Back eons ago, when the 280-year-old dirt road on which I live faced the danger of summary pavement, with concomitant straightening-out of its ancient rights of way and destruction of its Revolutionary-War-era stone walls, I posed a question to a television reporter who asked me why I was so angry about the impending obliteration of a silly old dirt road:

What do you save?

If we can have an entire "Antiques Roadshow" in which we slobber over household objects from the 1890s and declare them Invaluable Reminders of Our Venerated Past, why stop with Tiffany lamps? Why the hell not preserve a dirt road that we can say with complete confidence is in exactly the same configuration as when Elijah White led his 35th Virginia Comanches to attack a contingent of Federal cavalry on the night of January 17, 1865? What would such a road be, if not an antique?

What do you love? What do you venerate? What is worth preserving?

A similar occasion has now presented itself in Wheatland, a few miles south of here. Quite a few years ago, it became apparent that the Loudoun County school system badly needed several new schools in western Loudoun; the schools my children attend are small, antiquated and cramped. Several sites have been examined and rejected for reasons far too complicated to enumerate here.

It's a form of chicken-and-egg problem. If the population of this rural area is too large for the local school system (and it is), the construction of newer, larger schools will attract more people to the area, causing greater pressure on roads and infrastructure. Like the rest of the country, we're in a terrible real estate crisis at the moment, so there's not much chance of that happening this year or next; but it will reverse itself at some point, and we'll be right back into the rapidly-disappearing-rural-paradise mess we were in in 2005.

The photographs that accompany this post are of the Nixon Farm, an 1820s-era homestead that, as matters stand now, will be unceremoniously bulldozed and carted away to the landfill to make way for the construction of three new schools. Despite the fact that the Virginia Department of Historic Resources has declared it "a fine example of early-19th-century Federal brick architecture in the Loudoun Valley," with a fine bank barn, several outbuildings and a fully restored living facility on 60 acres of beautiful farmland, this stunningly gorgeous thing, this antique, is a hair's-breadth away from the ball and chain. (Here's a PDF doc that goes into further detail.)

Nausea.

Just...nausea.

The location of the schools violates several principles of the Loudoun County development policy. Wheatland is not an incorporated town. There are working farms directly across the road from the proposed site whose groundwater resources would be gravely endangered by the school's use of the same resource. There are alternative sites that don't violate these principles, that are located within incorporated boundaries, that would use town water systems that need upgrading anyway.

There are signs that folks are standing up and fighting back. The Wheatland Alliance is making noise. Letters of well-argued protest are getting published. This isn't over.

But the idea that this destruction is even being considered at all, that as long as you own it you can do whatever you want to it and your neighbors be damned, makes me want to throw rocks at policemen.

Idle Thought

2009-05-20T10:32:00.002-04:00

It occurs to me that if one were looking for an effective Internet pseudonym, "Teen Laqueefah" might fill the bill.

Use as you like. I'm not possessive.

The Past Is Not Dead

2009-05-19T13:18:00.009-04:00

Some few weeks ago, I was invited to give a talk to Betty's high-school American History class on Loudoun County and the Civil War. This was a great opportunity for me, because it forced me to define and arrange a set of facts that I've accumulated over the last few years into a coherent narrative understandable by high-school juniors.

Now, a friend has sent me an article from a mid-Nineties issue of the (now sadly defunct) Blue Ridge Leader, and I have been smacked in the face with a lesson in how present is the past -- just what William Faulkner was talking about when he observed that "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."

Let's tease that apart, shall we?

Below I reproduce a map of Loudoun County borrowed from this excellent website. (Click to enlarge.) I've fiddled with it a bit to illustrate my point.

My talk to the kids started with a simple premise: Loudoun County was, during the Civil War, a deeply divided place. The northern reaches of the county (shown in blue on the map) were settled in the early and middle eighteenth century by two main groups: Quakers, and Pennsylvania Dutch farmers down from Lancaster County. Those farmers brought with them a style of farming that hearkened back to the Old Country: Small, independent farms that could be operated by a single family.

The southern part of the county (shown in gray and red) exhibited a style of agriculture that was quite radically different. The English Cavaliers who settled it established very large plantations (essentially, huge land grants given them for various services) that needed an extensive labor force to run them. And we know what that labor force consisted of: Slaves.

Some of these plantations still exist today as historic tourist sites: Sully Plantation on Route 28 (not technically in Loudoun), and Oatlands on Route 15 south of Leesburg.

As they were not slaveowners (whether for sociopolitical reasons or religious ones), during the Civil War the people in the northern half of the county were viewed with extreme suspicion by the southern half. I've already recounted the lopsided vote totals during the 1861 referendum on secession; the northern part of the county voted against it in very nearly the same proportion as the southerners voted for it. As they were perceived as traitors, the Confederacy felt no compunction about taking whatever they felt like from them, and John Singleton Mosby' dependence on them as his breadbasket ultimately led to the Burning Raid of 1864, which left farms from Snickersville to Point of Rocks in smoking ruin.

This is what I told the kids.

Now comes this article from the Leader.

Recall that, before the Great Real Estate Collapse of the last few years, Loudoun County was one of the fastest-growing counties in the entire country. When I was a lad in Fairfax County (one county east), one could cross Baron Cameron Avenue in Reston and be in a boyhood paradise of meadows and trees and streams; we plucked crawdads out of the stream that ran through our neighborhood. Leesburg, way off west in Loudoun County, may as well have been San Francisco. The very first stirring of the Rape of Loudoun was present in Sterling Park, but mostly what stood between us and Loudoun was... nature.

That is all gone now. While western and northern Loudoun (where we live) mostly looks like this:

Eastern Loudoun is more like this:

Now take a squint at that map again. I've placed a red overlay over the parts of Loudoun that look like that.

Starting to see a pattern?

Phil Bolen was the Loudoun County Administrator for twenty years from 1971 until 1991. In the mid-Nineties, he gave a talk at the East/West conference at the George Washington University Campus in Eastern Loudoun. It was reported in the Leader thus:

That Loudoun County today is divided into a western region of small towns and farms, while Eastern Loudoun is marked by huge developments is, according to Bolen, a direct result of the patterns of plantation farming that developed in the county over 200 years ago. Back then, the East was made up of large plantations of up to 1000 acres, owned by the Anglican elite. These country gentlemen were able to imitate the manorial style of English country life, only because they had slaves to work the land for them. The slave, in effect, made up the role of the peasant of old Europe who had made the manorial life there possible.

Western Loudoun, on the other hand, was settled by Quakers, Presbyterians, and Lutherans coming down from the north who rejected slavery and preferred to work small farms with the sweat of their own brows. Western Loudoun thus became a relatively populous region of small farms while the east remained sparsely populated, at least by white men who could vote....

When Phil Bolen came into office thirty years ago, Loudoun County had 24,000 residents. Today it has 115,000. By 2010, we are expected to number 218,000. [This was optimistic. Wikipedia gives the estimated population in 2007 as nearly 279,000.] The large tracts of land needed to create the massive developments to house these new residents are hard to accumulate. Developers have to buy them one by one to put together the necessary tracts. The legacy of large estates in the East, said Bolen, meant that "large tracts of land still remained relatively intact which made it much easier and cheaper to put together the large parcels of land that are required in
big time development interests."

Past as prologue....

G'Phwarg-Glarb-Flang -- ROCK!

2009-05-10T18:13:00.002-04:00

(No. 3 in a Definitely Ongoing Series)

It is always gratifying to participate in something that will be recounted around the Thanksgiving dinner table in family reunions to come.

I squired Freddie over to Baltimore for a heavy-metal gig at the Sonic Club Friday evening. He's been wanting to catch Protest the Hero for some time, and they were in town on a five-band billing that included The Number Twelve Looks Like You and Fall from Grace.

We entered the joint just as the first act was finishing -- a thoroughly forgettable local fivesome whose function seemed to be to remind us that the acts we were about to see were actual professionals. I took a comfortable spot well off to the side away from the punishing sonic onslaught, made friends with the bartender, and settled in for a long evening of what I anticipated to be benign incomprehension.

The second act, Fall from Grace, surprised me in the most gratifying way imaginable. From the get-go, I detected a fierce loyalty in them to that quality I so utterly miss from these HM acts I keep taking Freddie to see: melody. These guys have clearly been attentive to the music of the past, and it showed; I heard touches of Elvis Costello, Split Enz, the Beatles, Green Day. I might have been at the Mudd Club, circa 1980. To be sure, it was drowned in waves of guitar distortion, but goddammit, at least it was something.

I took a smoke break after their set, and came across the band loading out. The front man (one Tryg Littlefield, it seems) was helping shove guitar cases into their trailer, and I accosted him to tell him how much I'd dug it. He shook my hand enthusiastically, and when I mentioned the word melody, he lit up: "It's because I love everything, man! Ignore nothing, dude!" Wow. Man after my own heart. You keep it up, kid. You may not hit the Bigs, but you'll do it honorably.

As the third band, The Number 12 Looks Like You, was warming up, they broke into a very silly little rhythm-jam that was quite endearing. Clearly the love of music for its own sake was running high in these guys tonight, and I perked up with interest. They broke into their actual set, and I was quite thoroughly blown away. Their Wikipedia page calls what they play "mathcore," which seems to be a highly polyrhythmic, churning thing that suggests Captain Beefheart interrupted by jazzy (think Coltrane rather that Ornette Coleman) guitar figures. This -- this -- I could dig! The vocalist for the most part eschewed the "G'Phwarg-Glarb-Flang" style of HM singing that attempts to reproduce the voice of Cthluhu for teenaged pimple-wallopers, in favor of actual, like, notes-n-stuff. Very riveting stuff, in this environment.

So in the middle of their set, me there off to the side at the bar avoiding the worst of the eardrum-destroying transients, there's a hush between songs. Frontman Jase Korman solicits: "Hey, is there any dude in the audience who hasn't ever been kissed? Come on, let's see you! Any dude hasn't ever been kissed?"

Then he says, "OK, you! Come on up here! Yeah! All right! Never been kissed, huh?"

"Uh...no..."

"All right.. What's your name?"

"Freddie."

Woggeda-woggeda-woggeda-WHAAAA?

I leap up on my barstool, craning over the crowd....

Yep. It's my boy. Up there on stage in front of five hundred punters, all fifteen-years-and-eleven-months of him. Black concert tee. Messy, sweaty hair. Sheepish look on his mug.

"OK, who wants to give Freddie his first kiss?"

Quite a few female hands shoot up.

Thank Christ.

A toothsome profile is handed up to the stage. I never get a look at her, but from later accounts (from Korman himself, also out back as the band was loading out) she was, apparently, fairly smokin'.

"OK, go!"

The Victorian gentleman in me would love to be able to say I averted my eyes. But of course I didn't. I did have the good taste and discretion not to remember to go for my phone-cam.

He leaned in, grabbed the cutie, and laid a session of osculation on her like Gable on Leigh.

I'm afraid Misery Signals and Protest the Hero were fairly unmemorable after that.

"Can You Vouch for Your Fries?"

2009-05-06T11:37:00.004-04:00

I thought Obama and Biden's visit to a Rosslyn burger joint yesterday was hilarious. Not for any ironic or underhanded reasons, but simply because the event on videotape is just...funny. Obama's slightly stilted and very polite demeanor while ordering, asking about the (nonexistent) fries, the skeptical look on his face when the alternative, "Cheesy Tater Puffs," is suggested, his desire for a spicy or Dijon mustard, his insistence on paying for the food instead of taking a freebie -- "these people [the 6,432 reporters in attendance] are gonna write about how we're freeloading." All good, silly fun.

I note with approval Obama's preference for Dijon. Stick in the French-haters' (and French's-Mustard philistines') eye. Good man. When I prepare my own burgers, the combination of toppings I strongly prefer (and they must be together, or my delight is diminished) numbers three: Dijon mustard, guacamole, and bacon. This is, in my opinion, the most delightful food on the planet.

Sorry about the obligation to have the burgers done medium-well. I imagine that, were he manning the barbeque, Obama might have a preference for a burger that does not quite so much resemble a hockey-puck; but it wouldn't do to allow Ray's Hell Burger to earn a reputation as The Restaurant that Gave the President an E. Coli Infection.

Speaking of which, it may be leaving the radar-screen in ignominy as the most overhyped disease scare ever, but a teacher at the school next door to Betty's was diagnosed with Swine Flu yesterday. That is all.

Mountains Come Out of the Sky

2009-05-04T19:52:00.005-04:00

I love the "Shuffle" feature on the iPod. Mostly I love it on my own Pod because it reminds me that I possess such amazingly excellent and eclectic taste in music. But also, it forces me to explore bits and pieces of my collection that I rarely visit. This morning, on my way to deposit the family's recycling at the town collection center, "Shuffle" upturned what I think might have been the very first music I ever downloaded from the Net: one single huge MP3 file that contained the entire Yes album "Fragile."

I decided to let it play, see what developed. This would be my first listen since approximately 2000, and my second since I was about 20.

I developed an onus against Yes (and pretty much all prog-rock) in my late teens. At the time, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, and post-punk songwriters had inculcated into my head that a "proper" song goes verse/chorus, verse/chorus, middle eight, verse/chorus and get the fuck out. Three minutes, tops. If a guitar solo followed the middle eight, it must be precisely eight bars long, and restate the melody in some coherent way, or you're wanking.

(I still have very little problem with this formula. Worked for Buddy Holly, works for me.)

So this Yes thing was an interesting challenge. Was I going to be able to forgive my slobbering teenaged fan-boy self, who thought that the longer a guitar solo was, the more "meaning" it had? Especially if the guitarist had what Zappa called the "blow-job" look on his face (i.e., the more I look really concerned that this 72-bar solo I'm engaged in will change lives and embetter the world, the more likely I am to receive a grateful blow-job from a willing female audience member after the gig).

I found myself in a state of doubt and fear during the first track, "Roundabout." I was once again, after a spell of many years, quite floored by it. There's so much movement in the accompaniment, so much tension and release, so much drama in the architecture. How had I been so misled? How had my Punk Purity buttons been so badly pushed in my late teens? This stuff rocks hard!

Steve Howe's guitar is so delicious. It actually sounds like a guitar plugged into an amp in a room somewhere. It evinces a quality so badly missing in modern recordings: the actual dynamics of a plectrum hitting a string fingered by a very good musician. There are tiny errors in the playing, eensy-weensie little fluctuations in tone, like he just barely mis-hit a certain note -- but these only serve to emphasize that an actual human being is playing the instrument -- and doing it very, very well. His tone -- a tiny bit of overdrive, allowing for lots and lots of pure chewy guitaristic deliciousness -- is clearly the product of a man gloriously, regally, on top of his instrument. The dude in his heyday could shred, and his playing is so arrestingly precise, every note painstakingly sounded, fretted perfectly, like a fine needlepoint embroidery. Bill Bruford's drumming is nonpareil in its precision, clarity, simplicity. Chris Squire's (admittedly busy) bass, likewise, sounds so completely un-processed, so natural, so organic, that you just want to take it home and frame it and put it up on your wall: This is what reality sounds like.

"Roundabout" ended -- on a Picardy third, no less! I'd forgotten that detail! How yummy is that?

So why the hell did I take such a punky antipathy to these guys? Why? Why?

The second cut cued up.

Ah.

Now I remember. "Cans and Brahms (Extracts from Brahms' 4th Symphony in E Minor, Third Movement)" (Brahms, arranged Wakeman).

Because Rick Wakeman, that's why.

Afterthought: Jesus, look at me. Hobbits and Yes. I'm thirteen again.

In Defense of Orcs

2009-05-03T08:54:00.008-04:00

In my convalescence (today much more solidly underway than yesterday, thanks for asking), I decided I'd had enough of Patrick O'Brian in my bed (oo-er!) and decided the sofa in the den with the teevee was the capital spot for healing. After watching the Washington Capitals' demolition of the Miserable Pittsburgh Penguins (and wasn't Simeon Varlamov's save in the second period an absolute stunner?), I decided the best thing for my health was a Lord of the Rings moviefilm marathon.

I hadn't seen much of any of it since the flicks were current, although we'd bought Freddie the whole shooting match on DVD for various birthdays and Christmases. So I plunked in The Fellowship of the Ring, sat back, and let time pass.

The first thing that struck me was the complete lack of any economic reality in Middle Earth. Bilbo Baggins is working on a book early on. My thought was, How are you going to get that published, Bilbo? Your agrarian paradise in the Shire sure looks pretty free of any grubby realities like literary agents, copy editors or grasping publishing companies. Later, in Rivendell, we see the final result of Bilbo's labors, and it's a single, handwritten, unique copy of (what we know as) The Hobbit; how this one frail tome is supposed to enlighten anyone save its own author is left to the imagination. But it's fantasy, don't you know. You mustn't dig too deeply into how this world actually works or ask uncomfortable questions, because that sort of skepticism ruins a lovely and symbol-laden plotline.

The other thing that rather deeply disturbs me is how feudal Middle Earth is, and how the story doesn't even question this. Aragorn, by his very existence, it is made clear to us early on, as of the bloodline of kings, is the only person capable of uniting disparate interests in fighting Unknowable Evil. Why that's actually true is left up to the imagination. But the feudal economic system of Middle Earth apparently contains not a single serf. A tiny glimpse of the actual working class, at the Prancing Pony in Bree, shows a filthy, hard-drinking bunch in a tavern; past that, we have no idea whatsoever how food appears on tables, how wagons get made, how horses are tended, and who digs the latrines. The Elves in Rivendell, in particular, are all nobility and no serfdom; apparently that Magic Elf Bread just hops out of the ovens ready to eat at the snap of a finger, and the beautiful flowers and gardens they are surrounded with exist entirely independent of gardeners and groundskeepers.

In the exposition at the beginning of the film, there's an interesting use of the passive voice: Nine rings were given to Men, seven rings given to Dwarves, etc. But secretly, One Ring to Rule Them All was made... So who did all this ring-making and Secret-Evil-Super-Ring Dispensing, hmmm? Shouldn't this agent be given some of the blame for the succeeding death and destruction? (I suppose this question is answered somewhere deep in the capacious bowels of The Silmarillion, but fuck me if I'm going to go looking for it. Life's way too short for that shit.) Weren't the families of the apparently millions of soldiers destroyed in Middle Earth's wars a trifle bereft, perhaps given some inkling of the revolutionary notion that their lives were worth more than serving as cannon-fodder? I mean, we've gone over this stuff, folks!

We are, of course, never told about the families and how they felt about Papa's peremptory beheading by some royal bastard or Elven Eloi at Helm's Deep. Instead, we are encouraged to sympathize with one king over some other equally undeserving turd because the Undeserving T's ancestors, three thousand years ago, made a poor tactical decision. Over ownership of a fucking ring. ("Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!")

(Now that I think of it, the Orcs are born out of the ground, and thus don't even have families. All the easier to slaughter by the thousands -- no tearful wives and children to bereave.)

Oooh, look at Jingo, getting all righteous over a work of fantasy fiction!

It's why I haven't set foot in the genre since I was about thirteen, and suspect that those who do haven't themselves advanced beyond that age. It disguises itself. It lies.

And let's not even get started on the sexism...

----

Update: I'd forgotten why I got off on this rant in the first place. It was accents.

Of the four actors playing Hobbitses in the main part of the trilogy, three (Merry, Pippin, and the nauseatingly servile Sam Gamgee), chose rural English accents. (Rural English, in the modern actor's hands, is a sort of amalgamation of Yorkshire and Bristol and Liverpool.) The actor playing Frodo, however, speaks Received Standard English -- "posh" -- as do all other actors playing nobility. I believe this is no directorial oversight.

This sails over our feudally-inexperienced American heads, but a British person would catch it right away.

----

Further Update: I guess it really comes down to whether or not you consider "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!" a good use of your time...

Chill (With Update!)

2009-05-01T09:00:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, I noticed a chill.

This was not at all surprising, as the day was rainy and, well, chilly, and I was barefoot and wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Putting on a pair of jeans, socks, and an overshirt solved that toot-sweet.

Except that when I was driving to pick up Betty, I noticed that I was quite stiff between the shoulders and about the neck. I attributed this to my having spent the whole day hunched in front of a computer, and shrugged it off (so to speak).

But then this morning, having seen Freddie off to the schoolbus, and drinking my morning coffee and taking a quick jaunt around the blogs, that damned chill came back.

And this time, there was a component in the chill that felt quite unusual indeed, quite unhealthy. And the stiffness was back in the shoulders.

I went upstairs, dug out the thermometer.

100.3.

OK. Calm. Take a long, hot shower. Neck down a couple Tylenols. Think hard. You haven't been in Mexico, dumbshit.

Yes, but I was at the Smithsonian Museum of Art two days ago, killing time before picking up Betty. Plenty of opportunities to get into somebody's sneeze-space there. And the night before that, I'd been at a Leesburg emergency room for my slashed thumb, where a hysteric presented claiming swine-flu symptoms. Last week, I was at a doctor's office getting an infected cyst lanced... Plenty of sick folk in that waiting room...

Think harder...

Oh.

Idiot.

Tetanus shot.

They gave me a tetanus vaccination when I came in with the slashed digit. Absolutely standard operating procedure.

The stiffness in the shoulders? Perfectly accounted for. Chills and low-grade fever? I'm fighting (an extremely mild form of) tetanus, fer crissakes.

Still doesn't prevent me from taking to my bed and milking this for a little sympathy. Chicken soup on a tray, what have you. I deserve it.

Update (For Mom, if for nobody else): The symptoms worsened through the day. Fever rose, sinuses became impacted, chills and sweats. Finally, after having vomited in the parking lot at Freddie's soccer practice, I presented at the same ER I went to the other day. They took me in, slapped me on an IV for dehydration symptoms, and let me stew for a couple of hours. The temp (by now 102) gradually came down, and they released me at about 11PM. They tested me for both influenza and strep, both negative, and concluded that I had a bog-standard viral infection that would play itself out naturally.

Woke up this morning, temp absolutely spot-on at 98.8, stomach settled, chills gone.

And This Has Been My Swine-Flu-Scare, 2009 Edition!

(By the way, the doc liked my tetanus-shot diagnosis, but wouldn't commit to it; too many variables.)

----

Don't want to jinx it, but there was some communication yesterday and the day before that made the employment picture a whole lot better. Like I say, I don't want to jinx it, but the dawn might just be breaking.

Separated at Birth?

2009-04-29T20:29:00.005-04:00

Hapless goob Chuck Todd of NBC News:

Mapless noob Murray of Flight of the Conchords:

A Horrible Gardening Accident

2009-04-29T08:56:00.003-04:00

Perhaps, I mused, as I wended my way through early-evening traffic yesterday on my way to the Leesburg emergency room, the wound to my thumb that would require five stitches to close it still seeping ungodly amounts of gore into a sodden paper towel clutched in my right hand, the razor-sharp paring knife was not the optimal tool to use to go slashing around in the asparagus patch while preparing the family dinner. Quite possibly, I reflected with some regret, I should have used the machete instead.

The triage nurse's wall was a study in Our Life and Parlous Times. Freshly tacked to it was a flow chart (quite poorly executed, possibly in PowerPoint, I noted with professional satisfaction). The first decision box read, "Been in Mexico in the last two weeks?" (The Yes/No paths led to quite different procedures; respectively, they were, "OK, let's assume you have swine flu," and "You almost certainly don't have swine flu. Go home and sleep it off.")

As the nurse practitioner was swabbing the last of the dried blood off my hand and preparing to give me a tetanus shot, the triage nurse poked her head into the menage. "We need this room," she whispered to my ministratrix. "Why?" was the former's natural response. Quickly eying me, the triage nurse beckoned her out into the hallway; clearly, they didn't want my prying ears overhearing the subsequent justification.

The nurse reentered the room, and hurriedly gave me the tetanus shot. As she was doing so, urgent conversation filtered into the room.

"When did you return from Mexico? Was it more than a month ago?"

[Inaudible]

"Can you describe the chest pains?"

[Mumble mumble]

"Sir, I don't believe that swine flu is a likely cause of your chest pains, but we'll get you an EKG and a complete blood workup...."

Poor bugger. As I left the room to him, he lay on a gurney in the hallway, oxygen mask clapped to his face. He'd worked himself up into a panic attack over the goddamned cable-news overcoverage of this swine-flu thing. He had a sniffle, connected it with his spring-break trip to Mexico, and assumed he was the next Dreadful Statistic. He was, of course, in no more danger than he had been in in Cancún, eyeballing the Kollege Kuties in their bikinis and swilling Tequila Sunrises.

I sidestepped the whole scene, looked for the exit. I stood aside to let pass a young man in a wifebeater, straight out of an episode of Cops. His hands were manacled behind him and a grim-faced gendarme held his elbow. Blood streamed from his nose.

OK! Time to go cook some asparagus!

Say Hello to My Little Friend

2009-04-27T10:53:00.006-04:00

It was a trifle disconcerting to notice something, shall we say, out of place in the potting shed yesterday morning:

For the last couple of years, I noticed mouse-droppings in among the grass-seed I had stored out there. Now? Not so much.

A black rat-snake has taken up residence in a seldom-used drawer. For the last few summers, I found shed skins out there, and assumed their erstwhile owners had moved on. Now I realize the mouse population was so plentiful that My Little Friend decided to take up permanent residence.

According to the Audubon Society's Field Guide to Reptiles,

Rat snakes are large, powerful constrictors and excellent climbers. They are often found in barns and falling-down old buildings, [Hey! That shed's in great shape!] where their shed skins may be found in the rafters. As the name suggests, rat snakes eat rodents, as well as rabbits, birds, and eggs. Out and about during the day in spring and fall, they often don't move until just after sunset in summer. They sometimes hole up for the winter with Copperheads or Timber Rattlesnakes.

Well, there's no accounting for taste in the company one keeps, I suppose. But Mr. or Ms. Rat Snake (mighty hard to sex these things), far from being a nasty viper with a deadly bite, is about as benign a critter as there is in the herpetological world, and is more than welcome to share my shed and eat my mice -- as long as he or she doesn't invite in her winter pals.

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Jingo!

As the warm spring sunshine streams in the window, My Little Friend wraps herself in switchbacks, to warm every inch of her six-foot-long body. And why not, eh? It's been a long, cold, lonely winter for everybody.

All Hail the Great Gazoogle!

2009-04-25T20:48:00.003-04:00

We note with amusement that a Google search for Marlaina Miller, Associate Manager, American General Life and Accident, is, as of this writing, the very first return in a Google search on that term.

We do what we can.

(Backstory here, here, here and here.)

State of Play

2009-04-25T10:33:00.006-04:00

Feeling walls closing in on me earlier this week, I did what my forebears did during their own Great Depression, and hied myself off to the local outlet of the Hollywood Dream Factory for a dose of escapist fantasy. Besides a few moments' respite from worry and care, the experience revived some home truths that one needs to have reinforced every so often. For example, the first three mouthfuls of movie popcorn are delicious. Every bite after that is a whole lot like chewing a sort of styrofoam that, when swallowed, mingles with the digestive juices to produce astonishing quantities of methane. In this vein, it is a wise man who limits his intake of soda pop during a two-hour flick; it is something very akin to self-inflicted torture to be looking forward to the Big Reveal with a bladder filled beyond the bursting point.

I'll just come right out and say it: State of Play is a corking good movie in the Washington-thriller tradition of All the President's Men and Three Days of the Condor. Russell Crowe's Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey, an old-school print reporter of the shoe-leather-and-notebook variety, is somewhat hilariously unbelievable -- he never seems to do any actual work -- and yet we root for him because he represents the kind of gritty, in-the-know investigative reporter we wanted to be when we grew up. That this rumpled, raffish disregarder of office-rules convention never existed and, if he had, would have been summarily fired five minutes into the plot, is immaterial. He's a good dude, sticks by his friends in a scrap, and tells authority to go to hell. (You can tell he was Cool in the Sixties 'cos of his shoulder-length hair. Gives it away every time.) He's got contacts all over town -- beat cops, mortuary insiders, security-camera operators -- and he has ways of extracting arcane information that are beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. What is more, he is contemptuous of the "web side" of the Globe's operations, considering bloggers and online reporters to be lightweights and candy-asses. Even if the caricature is ridiculous, something in me likes that about him.

The plot develops at breakneck speed. When it becomes apparent that two violent deaths, seemingly completely unrelated to each other, are indeed part of skulduggery involving the US Congress and a Blackwater-like security firm with designs on privatizing the entire US security apparatus, we find ourselves leaning forward in our seats, awaiting each new development with interest. Crowe's good-dude-ishness extends toward his former college roommate (played by Ben Affleck), now an up-and-coming Congressman investigating the security firm, whose heavies appear to be offing randomly selected citizens with impunity.

In this potboiling good time, the city of my birth plays an outstanding role. These Washington movies often crack me up with their attempts to establish place by getting as many of our memorable landmarks into as many shots as possible. A key scene takes place in Ben's Chili Bowl (McAffrey is, of course, a well-known regular, popular with the staff). One is amused to see the Department of Health and Human Services at L'Enfant Plaza standing in for a Washington hospital; it seems fitting.

Unfortunately, if you know the city fairly well as I do, things can get disorienting. Early in the flick, Affleck's chippie, about to meet her doom in a Metro station, begins to wend her way to work from Adams Morgan (look! There's the Madame's Organ mural!); she turns a corner and she's in Georgetown; another corner and she's several miles away on Constitution Avenue with the US Capitol Building shining gloriously in the morning sun. If she's on her way to Capitol Hill, she's got about a four-minute walk left ahead of her; instead, she suddenly pops down into the Metro Center subway station (apparently a wormhole opened up in the space-time continuum) to meet her nemesis.

Although Washington is home to many very fine restaurants, there is no eating establishment from whose windows one may obtain that particular view of the Capitol Building. We do have fairly strict zoning ordinances here, which make it quite clear that no commercial enterprise may be built in the middle of the National Mall. It is also quite funny that McAffrey, setting up an extremely hush-hush and sensitive deep-background meeting with a contact who might be able to help him, racks his brain for a safe, out-of-the-way place where the contact would feel comfortable and safe, and comes up with the fish market at the Marina. And of course, since All the President's Men, it's been well known that all those who brave Washington's menacing and spooky parking garages (I'll admit, some of them are pretty dank) face nameless and dreadful peril. It's pretty much SOP.

Silly geographic solecisms aside, State of Play is a damned fine, dare I say old-fashioned, thriller. Ben Affleck is a bit out of his league as a congressman, but Helen Mirren and Della Frye, as, respectively, the Globe's editor and a perky young blogger, stand out. Casting Jason Bateman as a dissipated PR flack was a stroke of genius. Your money could go to worse places.

Another Career Opportunity!

2009-04-20T07:31:00.005-04:00

Well, the opportunities for a career in insurance sales just keep pouring in.

This was in last night's email crop, in a prepackaged CareerBuilder form email purportedly from one Dennis Nave, CandidateEmail@Site.Careerbuilder.com (a valid CareerBuilder-owned domain, although the generic nature of the address suggests that a reply would go straight into a bin).

Titled, imaginatively, "Your Resome," it runs thus (grammar and syntax unredacted):

Dear Neddie Jingo,

I noticed your resume on Career Builder and you appear to be someone we would like to pursue. [Fascinatingly, I'm feeling pretty much exactly the same about you!] Our staff located in Hagerstown areas has been a leader in the Central Atlantic Region for American General Life and Accident over the last 3 years.

For this reason we are growing our organization and we are looking for qualified people in Lovettsville. If you would like to know more,or would like to pursue a position please log on to: www.selfmgmt.com/clients/aig and click onto our POP screen. (2nd one) The user password for you is: DRS9XZMD(cap sensitive)
After we receive your results I will, or someone from my office will, be in contact with you.

I am looking forward to our future meeting.

Marlaina Miller
Associate Manager
Hagerstown, Md
301-739-2454 office
240-520-0515

So far, two calls to the "office" number have produced busy signals (at 7:50 AM), and the 240 area-code number rolled straight into a message queue.

Googling Ms. Miller suggests she actually does exist; her office number at http://insurance-in-hagerstown-md.yellowpagesltd.com/ is the same as the one in the CareerBuilder email. The office is at 13210 Fountain Head Plaza, Hagerstown, MD 21742, in case you'd like to apply in person.

Before going off too hard on Ms. Marlaina Miller, Associate Manager, American General Life and Accident, I'd point out the domain of the URL linked in the email: www.selfmgmt.com (slogan: "Self-Management - the #1 competency of top performers!"). I believe here we have our real villains. I conjecture that they sold themselves as a recruitment firm to Ms. Miller or someone in her organization, promising to bring in a whole bunch of "#1 competency of top performers" (read: "rubes") with their CareerBuilder ninja-fu.

But soft! What light through yon window breaks? Let's complete that linked URL: /clients/aig.

Yes, American General Life and Accident is a subsidiary of AIG.

Your tax dollars at work, folks.

----

Update: The foregoing may be too oblique. I should be as clear as I can possibly be here. The three links at the top of my post detail, in order, an experience I had last week with a recruiter for AFLAC, another insurance giant. A person called me last Monday with an offer of an interview in Hagerstown, MD -- the very same town as in the current "offer" -- last Thursday. As I believed she had actually read my resume, I assumed the interview was connected in some way with my professional qualifications. I became suspicious when this person would not tell me straight out what the job in question entailed, and over the next few days discovered that the recruiter was trying to get me to appear at a group "informational" gathering at which an insurance-sales scam of thoroughly Dickensian sordidness was pushed on unsuspecting and desperate unemployed people. My extremely strong suspicion is that Ms. Marlaina Miller, Associate Manager, American General Life and Accident, a subsidiary of AIG, is engaged in exactly the same scam, through the recruitment firm SelfManagement Group.

Cat Skeletons

2009-04-18T15:37:00.009-04:00

I once got into a conversation with a volunteer firefighter, at one of those open houses they hold to let local kids admire fire engines up close. As these things go, I inevitably came around to asking him if he'd ever rescued a kitten from a tree. He told me he hadn't, although people sometimes called to ask. Firefighters' time and equipment are far too valuable to waste on your little Mittens, and besides, he joked to my kids, "Look around your neighborhood. Look in the trees. Have you ever seen a cat skeleton in the branches?"

Word up, Mister Fireman. Hunger is a powerful motivator, and if the moggie can get up there, it can damned well get down when its little tummy starts to growl.

In the same vein, nor have I ever seen a cat skeleton in my music loft, but there's a first time for everything.

Here Lexie, who's been with us for about five months, discovers that that strange wooden contraption in the corner of the cabin is actually a portal to an entirely new dimension, one that she never dreamed of. O, Great Wooden Portal, which reminds me so much of a very disciplined tree, take me away to Great Adventures!

She takes advantage of the fact that the ladder is offset from the wall by just about exactly one Lexie-width... It's almost as if it was designed for cat-transportation!

Hmmm. What's my next move? You be careful, young lady!

And she's up!

From her New, Never-Before-Imagined Strange Extra Dimension, she surveys the vale of tears she has forever left behind!

I am now Ceiling Cat! Aren't you supposed to be masturbating?

Anything for you, hon.

Willy Loman

2009-04-16T20:47:00.005-04:00

I couldn't go through with it.

Walked up to it, had a hand on the door, and I couldn't force myself to push through.

Here's the thing: I was prepared for one thing, but when I saw what the reality was, I couldn't bring myself to perform the task at hand.

Let me explain.

I hopped into my car for the drive to Hagerstown, already carefully preparing the white-hot denunciation that was taking shape in my mind. I was imagining a one-on-one scene, the Regional Sales Coordinator of Annoying White-Duck Insurance Company quaking in his boots as I ripped him up one side and down another for his spectacularly cynical waste of my time. I had imagined a corporate office: cool fluorescent lighting complimenting tastefully placed house-plants, a stunning receptionist who, when I announced my name, pressed a button on a sleek phone, announced my presence; an assistant glimmering into the room would escort me to my interview with Mr. Reg. Sales Coord. That's how it's always happened before.

Me and Mr. Reg. would converse lightly for a brief moment, noting the gloriousness of the weather, and then he would begin his spiel, at which point I would interrupt him and eviscerate his fatuity, ending with the zinger: "There are creatures lying on their backs at the bottom of ponds that I would rather associate with!" (Protip: Sybil Fawlty is a great source of putdowns.)

But, as I say, the reality was so different that I was unprepared for it.

Hagerstown is a very down-at-the-heels blue-collar burg. As I drove in to the district I'd been directed to, white boys in full ghetto drag hung on street corners -- on an early Thursday afternoon, you'd think these guys'd be at work; you'd of course also have to remember that there is no work for them. I suppose I was still expecting to find a major insurance company's regional offices in this neighborhood -- maybe a repurposed warehouse, lotsa cool exposed nineteenth-century brick, saggy wooden floors, leftover milling machinery tastefully incorporated into the design scheme....

No. The structure I was directed to was a blue-painted Victorian triplex. The side-panel of a cardboard box had been ripped out and suspended over one door: inscribed in black Sharpie pen, [Annoying Duck Company] and a couple of arrows pointed to the rightmost of the three doorways. Setting the digital audio device that I carry on "Record," I crept up to the indicated door. A bay window next to the door lay in the early afternoon sunlight.

And there in the window was Willie Loman. Man pushing, if not already having pushed beyond, sixty. White hair. Business suit. Carefully filling out a form in the window's light. Behind him, several other candidates sat, all equally carefully attired, each equally absorbed in clipboard duties, filling out details of their lives, past jobs, education, salary ranges. I was suddenly struck with the realization that the bait-and-switch employment crap to which I had only now been exposed, was a daily reality for these poor saps. They had no power of discernment; they had no ability to say "no!" in a resounding voice of indignation. For them, "employment" literally meant an opportunity to take it up the ass from Mr. Reg. Sales Coord. Followed by a life of daily torment at the hands of younger frat-boy sales creeps, continual frustration with recalcitrant buyers (and who can afford insurance in these times, eh?), and permanent tsuris with the Company Store over what constitutes salary and what commission.

This system, this humiliating meat-grinder process, is what I thought I was going to go in and sweep away, with one heroic denunciation of the BossMan. I would scatter these poor rubes to the four winds... For what, exactly? So they could apply for equally shitty jobs in Frederick, Martinsburg, Winchester?

Jesus, this world.

My imagined denunciation of bait-and-switch sales-recruitment fell in ashes at my feet. What was I going to tell Willie Loman? "Willie, let's you and I join forces and start a... a..." what, exactly? An insurance company? A revolutionary new-economy insurance company that tends to the needs of widows and orphans while stalwartly eschewing the blandishments of evil corporate money? How'm I gonna set that up?

Willie Loman got no investment in that shit. Me and Willie, we understand. We're on our own.

Tee Hee

2009-04-15T19:31:00.003-04:00

Sent just now:

Dear [Ms. Charlatan-Who-Preys-on-Unemployed-People-for-Annoying-Duck-Commercial-Insurance-Company];

I apologize for my suspicious outburst from this afternoon.

I've been discussing this matter with my wife, and we've agreed that we can't afford to turn down any possible opportunities for gainful employment.

I hope it might be possible to reschedule the interview with Mr. Regional Sales Coordinator.

Again, I apologize for any inconvenience I've caused you.

Regards,

Neddie

I've been talking the matter over with Wonder Woman; she approves wholeheartedly as long as I continue to look for work seriously (which I am).

Let's see what arises. I'm willing to make a scene, put out a fag on his desktop, photograph him surreptitiously, record the interview with my pocket recorder, get myself thrown out of the office, do whatever it takes to let be known my utter contempt for this fucking snake-oil salesman.

Stay tuned for FUN!

Scenes from Your Recession

2009-04-15T11:50:00.004-04:00

Strangest thing just happened...

I'm once again between jobs, and answering the phone to any and all callers. (Before anybody panics, I've got several headhunter agencies working, résumés posted everywhere. I really do expect this to be literally between jobs.)

Two nights ago, the cellie went off. I answered to a very personable young woman who told me that my résumé had sparked an unquenchable glow of interest on the part of her employers. I replied that I was extremely gratified to hear this delightful news, and encouraged her to fill me in on every detail, no matter how trivial. She invited me to an interview; her invitation accepted, she told me she would be sending me the details in an email later that evening. This was Monday evening. The interview was to be Thursday afternoon.

I duly received the email, as promised. Besides the time and place, it gave the name of the prospective employer (a large insurance company you've heard of -- think annoying white duck commercials) and the name of the interviewer and his job title. Mr. Interviewer was Regional Sales Coordinator in Hagerstown, Md. (This is not too terribly far from me, a reasonable commute -- but a long, long way from the well-beaten track of my usual professional haunts, which tend to be more in the Northern Virginia and Maryland suburbs.)

Several things immediately struck me as quite hinky about this email she sent. First, it came from a Yahoo! account, rather than from Annoying-White-Duck Company. First alarm bells go off.

Second, there was an admonition that the dress code was "Business Professional" -- a rather strange construction I'd never seen before. It was almost as if -- irony of ironies -- this was a rather amateurishly put together email.

Third, "Regional Sales Coordinator"? Conducting an interview with a UI designer? That's very odd.

Fourth, I'm to bring a copy of my résumé. Now this is getting insulting. We have email for this kind of thing nowadays, and this instruction heavily suggests that Mr. Regional Sales Coordinator hasn't actually yet seen my résumé.

But most puzzling of all was the whistling emptiness where one would expect to see an explanation of exactly what the job actually entailed. I've been in the user-interface-design racket for quite a few years, and have never seen a job announcement that wasn't extremely specific in its requirements as to expected duties, experience level, software skills expected of the applicant, and so on. Not a word of this appeared in the email.

Oh, I rationalized, I'm sure that was just an oversight. Annoying-Duck Insurance Company is probably setting up a team for some sales-enhancement web tool, but their HR department, being in Hagerstown and all, isn't used to dealing with us techie types, and aren't familiar with the protocols of the process. They haven't danced the dance, as it were. No prob.: I'll just email her back with a request for more information, on the not unreasonable pretext that I really need to familiarize myself with the organization so I can prepare for the interview in a professional manner.

Silence.

This is now getting very suspicious. I let yesterday, Tuesday, go by, half expecting to see a reply to my email at any moment. This morning, at nine o'clock, I called the number she'd given in her email. It goes to a cell phone message. I left a message asking her to please give me a call. No reply for three hours.

About an hour ago, I received a reply to my email from Monday evening. She was sorry she didn't get back to me, she'd been out dreadfully sick, but I really needn't worry about preparing for the interview, it was entirely a meet-and-greet, just "informational," there would be second interviews to determine my fitness for the job, blah mealymouthed blah.

OK. I'm being fucked with. My reply:

I'm sorry to be blunt, but I want very much to know what the position entails -- even a title will suffice -- before I make the trek to Hagerstown in my business suit. That's not a minor time commitment for me.

The fact the Mr. XXX is a Regional Sales Coordinator, and not, say, a creative director or art director or even an IT director, sets off alarm bells for me. He may be a wise and wonderful man, but a Regional Sales Coordinator is in no position to judge the worth of a user-interface designer. The instruction to bring a copy of my résumé likewise raises suspicions. Do we not have email for this kind of thing now? Hasn't Mr. XXX already got a copy of my résumé?

More information, please. If it's not forthcoming, I'm going to have to decline the interview.

She replies shortly thereafter,

This position would be a sales position and you would be a licensed insurance producer. Let me know if you will still be attending the interview.

The best part? Her own job title?

Licensed Insurance Producer.

Needless to say, I won't be attending the interview, thanks very much.

I confess I'm flummoxed. Is Annoying-Duck Insurance Company actually running some kind of pyramid scheme out of their Hagerstown operation? Does Mr. Regional Sales Coordinator hire naive young women whose entire job it is to lure the unemployed into interviews with vague promises of a paying gig, and then entrap those rubes into enticing other rubes into his office? Is this how they grow their sales staff?

Seriously? It's a combination of Amway and used-car sales. Glengarry Glen Ross updated for Your Recession.

And I'm willing to bet any amount of money it's perfectly legal.

Happy Zombie Jesus Day!

2009-04-12T11:58:00.005-04:00

Last night, I sat in a brown study, contemplating the Meaning of Easter. From there, it was only a short and entirely natural mental leap to a phrase that has occupied valuable real estate in the Jingo cranium for more than a decade: "Poop keeps the tent wher it is."

The Dysfunctional Family Circus was one of the earliest -- at least the earliest that I remember -- Internet phenomena that took advantage of the True Webbiness of the Web: graphical communication in service of a self-sustaining virtual community. The concept was simple: Take the painfully unfunny single-panel comic "The Family Circus," remove the caption, and invite the sicko-twisto-comedian contingent of the burgeoning new Interwebs to supply their own. The editors chose the best few score submissions and published them. While there were a few duds among the finalists, many of them were extremely funny.

As you might conjecture, "trippin my nut sack into a frenzy of dik play" was another of those phrases that stayed with me. My brain's chock to the brim with stuff like that -- you do not want to be in here with me.

As my evening was free, I Googled the "poop/tent" phrase (remembering the, er, eccentric spelling, which was the funniest thing about it), and discovered that someone had archived the whole damned thing -- Family Circus creator Bil Keane, I seem to recall, had objected to the copyright violations inherent in such an enterprise, issued some cease-and-desists, and the whole thing came to a grinding halt sometime in the very early 2000s.

But man, was it funny while it lasted!

Public Service Announcement

2009-04-10T16:47:00.003-04:00

As we enter this sweets-intensive Easter season, please heed this bit of advice, which may save you some social discomfort.

When asking for "Runts candy" at the sweets counter, slow way down before pronouncing the name. Do not request "Runts candy" if you have consumed even so much as a half a beer.

I was just now a trifle too quick at the 7-11, but I think I got away with it.

I Suppose This Would Be a Desirable Outcome

2009-04-08T17:25:00.009-04:00

We Lovettsvillians are a quiet lot. Not for us are the hurly-burly of the city, the harum-scarum of the urban scene. We reject even the argy-bargy of the outer suburbs. We don't smoke marijuana in Lovettsville; we don't make a party out of lovin', and we like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo. Furthermore, leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; beads and Roman sandals won't be seen. Football's still the roughest thing on campus, and the kids here still respect the college dean. ("Dipso" Jimmy Callahan -- Dean of Your Bedroom at Patrick Henry College. Finest, most upstanding man from here all the way to Brunswick, MD -- if a bit fond of the ichors of grape and grain, he slings a mean pinochle hand.)

So it was, I must concede, a bit of a shock to find, at the convergence of Mountain Road and Morrisonville, a harbinger of the encroachment of the aforementioned hurly etc.:

That I was constrained to screech the brakes, yank the Pathfinder through 180 degrees, and photograph this graffito is evidence enough of the rarity of the malign urban influence in these parts. Not since Lovettsville Pizza and Subs added ricotta cheese to its selection of toppings has such a citified thing as the alteration of stop-signs to support some political cause or other been seen in these parts. Hens' teeth would rain from the sky before one of us began tagging public property.

But I must confess some bewilderment as to the cause being advanced here. "Stop," "Disney," and "Porn" are three words I had honestly never expected to see collected together in one sentence -- and yet there they are. A Google search suggests that they might be referring to this unfortunate yet hardly world-shaking incident, in which some narsty narsty moviefilm was accidentally transmitted over Disney's cable network. But it seems hardly worth defacing roadway signage over. Whey-faced apologies were issued and accepted. We moved on.

But it is the presence of the word "please" in the graffito that makes me glow with pride for our small-town weltanschauung. It is of no importance in what manner the Disney corporation is degrading our public airwaves with money shots and degraded-slut antics; in our from-the-bowels-of-hell outrage against it, we still remember Emily Post. If the DFHs who ended the Vietnam war with their chants and self-immolations had only included a few pleases and thank-yous in their arsenal, the war would have ended in approximately 1968.

"Hey, hey, LBJ, please be so kind as to inform us, how many kids did you kill today?"

It has a Virginia-Nice ring to it, don't you think?

Crawdaddy

2009-04-04T15:21:00.003-04:00

Pursuant to my last post, about Paul Williams, the founder of Crawdaddy at the age of seventeen, I've followed a link at the Friends of Paul Williams site and found online reproductions of the original Crawdaddys from 1966-68 -- the first few issues are typewritten and mimeographed, in true fanzine style. I've been devouring them all afternoon. The garden can go to hell.

Two reasons I call them to your attention:

They're utterly fascinating in a first-draft-of-history kind of way. Page 11 of the January 1967 issue -- "What Goes On," a sort of collection of news briefs from the rock world -- begins, "There's a group you have to hear. They're called the Doors, and they're the best new band I've heard this year." I missed this stuff growing up. I was just too young and too far away. Everything I know about Sixties rock came at second-, third-, fourth-hand. This journalism is the closest you're going to get to eyewitness accounts, of the visceral reactions of a true fan seeing the stuff of rock 'n' roll legend unfold before his eyes. I haven't gotten to the Sgt. Pepper reaction yet, but I bet it's a doozy.
The writing is astonishingly good. Williams' essay on Bob Dylan, in issue #4, in reaction to the release of Blonde on Blonde, is one of the best essays I've ever read about how to approach Dylan's opacity and obliqueness. And it was written by a seventeen-year-old! At seventeen, I felt oppressed when tasked by my English teacher to write a 500-word review of The Grapes of Wrath. The Man was Keepin' Me Down. This guy was doin' it.

Add to the mix the other giant talent Williams was able to attract -- Jon Landau, Sandy Perlman, Richard Meltzer, to name a few -- and this becomes a wonderful collection of impassioned fandom mixed with great writing.

Off you go.

Please Help if You Can

2009-04-03T17:25:00.004-04:00

Paul Williams, a legend of rock criticism -- he founded Crawdaddy magazine in 1966 at the age of seventeen and championed Philip K. Dick when he needed it badly -- has fallen on hard times. He suffered a debilitating head injury in the Nineties, in a cycling accident. This injury led him into a state of early-onset dementia, and he now requires full-time care -- an expense his family can ill afford. The Friends of Paul Williams have set up a web site is really worth looking at, featuring some rather amazing photos from a life lived to the fullest.

I hope you go over there and hit the Donate button. I know it's about the worst possible time to ask for this kind of thing, but having watched a father-in-law succumb to that horrifying disease, I know how difficult it is not only for the victim, but particularly for the caregivers as well. Anything you can do to help out would be appreciated.

Here's an article about him at BoingBoing. Read the comments, too: it'll give you some idea of Williams' impact in the world of both rock 'n' roll and science fiction.

A Crowd of People Stood and Stared

2009-03-20T19:40:00.004-04:00

Sometimes life just gets weirder than you can handle.

One thing you discover when you start a blog is that what you type goes straight from your keyboard to Google's ears -- frequently overnight. I have to keep this post as circumspect as I possibly can, naming no names, because I don't want this to get anywhere near Google's omniscience.

This morning, my sister called to tell me that this Sunday past, a somewhat distant relative of mine murdered a rather closer relative. An elderly woman, she was killed in her home where she thought she was safe. Again staying as circumspect as I can, I haven't seen the victim in well over twenty years, and I wasn't even aware of the murderer's existence, despite his relation to me. He is now in police custody, and is unlikely to see the outside of a prison or insane asylum for the rest of his life.

It's one thing for your sister to call you and tell you of a family tragedy. That was hard enough. I'm still rather numb from the shock of the news. I've had an afternoon of tearful and emotional phone calls, trying to piece together the details of the events that led to this horrible thing. But goddamned Google is another -- all I had to do was enter the victim's name and the word "murder" and the thing was described to me in horrific detail. Much, much, much more, honestly, than I wanted to know. I was looking for names and circumstances and legal outcomes; Google gave me graphic descriptions of the murder scene. I was at work, and in my shocked state I had to ask permission to leave and go home. I was not going to be a useful human being after that.

We're such vulnerable things. This afternoon, running a necessary errand in my hyper-attenuated state, I came upon a horrible car crash on Route 7; one car had gone head-on into the side of another. The head-on car was utterly crushed; its front hood now measured no more than a couple of feet. The engine had been slammed into the passenger cavity. Nobody was hurt, as far as I could tell. Approaching sirens howled from the distance. Victims stood, babbling distractedly into cell phones -- reassuring loved ones, I suppose, or informing insurance adjusters of their new premium payments.

A crowd of people stood and stared.

I have no idea how to end this thing.

Go find somebody you love, hug them, and hold them tight. Tell 'em, for tonight, anyway, that Neddie sent you.

Everything ends.

Signs of the Times

2009-03-17T12:31:00.004-04:00

Driving Betty to work this morning, we passed this sign on the Clara Barton Parkway:

"Leave Nothing of Value"....

Well! I know the economy's in the crapper, but this is laying on a bit thick. Easy enough to comply with, at any rate -- as attested by a glance at the whistling emptiness that is my 401(k) these days.

But it's a hair nihilistic, don't you think? Is the Parks Department, or the Highway Commission, or whoever erected this sad exhortation, prepared to deal with the sort of society they're advocating here? One in which we say to our children and grandchildren, "I'm sorry, my dears, there's nothing in my will for you; I've spent my entire fortune on fripperies and expensive travel with cocaine and hookers -- because the Department of the Interior said I should! They made a sign!"

And they're so inarticulate! What is their definition of "value"? There are so many intangible things that I would have to give up in order to obey the sign: the love of my family and friends, my fondness for music and laughter and love, for sun-dappled lawns, for frosty windows on a clear, cold morning, for Long Woks on the beach (she's such a dear), for composing loony, wall-eyed blog-posts....

My blog! I value my blog! Must that be discarded as well? Truly?

Well, then. So long. It's been good to know you.

Date Night

2009-03-15T09:13:00.005-04:00

Last night, Wonder Woman and I had our first "date" in eons. Betty was invited to a party on a boat that left from the Old-Town Alexandria docks at 6 in the evening, to return at 9. Freddie was at a heavy-metal Battle of the Local Suck-Ass Bands at Jaxx in Springfield, under the tutelage of a Different Mom, leaving WW and I with three glorious hours of alone-time to kill on our own little lonesomes.

Over dinner at the Union Street Public House on, of all things, Union Street in Old Town, we got giggly. We decided to pretend that we were on a Washington Post Date Lab date, meeting each other for the very first time on a pre-arranged blind date, which we would rate later, independently, for the Post's readership:

"She said she was a painting conservator at the Smithsonian; her latest project was a sixteenth-century Dutch landscape in the school of Breughel the Elder. I thought that was interesting, but then she ordered the lobster-and-crab-cakes -- the most costly thing on the entire menu. This girl could get expensive! At this point in the budding relationship, I'd rate the date a two out of five. She's got a great ass."

"He said he was a pimp. This got my attention; those guys make a lot of money! Then, he ordered a single-malt whiskey while we were looking at the menu, a Laphroig, and my heart melted just a little bit more. But when his speech began to slur halfway through his second Half-Moon Belgian-Style wheat beer and he started in telling sob stories about his first marriage, I decided this wasn't the guy for me. After dinner, when we went for a stroll through Old Town's cobblestone streets, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and that was all it took. Negative one out of five. Never again. He pressed his business card on me, but I threw it into the Potomac as I headed for the Blue Line."

As we wandered up King Street with still another hour and a half to kill, we noticed a small crowd of people surrounding a figure in Colonial garb. Ghost Tour, FTW! Quick as a wink, we joined the crowd, offering up our coppers for an hour's entertainment in the chilly rain. As it turns out, everyone who has ever died in Old Town Alexandria under even slightly tragic circumstances now wanders the streets, moaning and clanking chains. It occurred to us that, given the proper sad ending, we could haunt Old Town as a pair of mutually reinforcing poltergeists, knocking drinks off trendy tables and making flatware spin in the air three inches off a bar's surface. Considering this a marvelous prospect, we ran to throw ourselves into the river, the best to drown ourselves and cement the eternal love that would be lied about by future bonnet-bedecked out-of-work actors.

Just as we were preparing to leap off the levee into the cold unfeeling waters below, holding hands and declaring undying love, we noticed that Betty's boat was docking. Ah, well. I suppose the girl needs parents for a few more years.

No matter how silly.

The Ides

2009-03-14T07:49:00.003-04:00

It has come to our attention that a historic travesty of epic proportions is about to be corrected -- and not a minute too soon.

A Dark-Ages manuscript-copying error in an Irish monastery in approximately 800 AD led to the erroneous spelling of the dismal month in which we find ourselves. It is not March. We inhabit the month of Narch.

An understandable flub, I'll admit. Handwriting in that unenviable era was notoriously sloppy, and many of the world's current travails stem from simple mistranslations and poorly proofread Biblical verses. The injunction in Leviticus against the eating of shellfish was originally a prohibition against the carnal knowledge of barnyard animals. The monk responsible for this error had an irrational hatred of fried clams (and who doesn't, eh?), and read far too much into the original Hebraic. (This should not be taken as an exhortation to run out and boink the nearest goat. That is, and always will be, wrong. Verbal permission must always be obtained beforehand, and goats capable of issuing such consent are mighty thin on the ground. "Na-a-a-a" means "na-a-a-a.")

Now we find ourselves in the difficult position of attempting to convince the world to change a million million calendars -- rather like standing athwart history and yelling "It's Narch!" But I'm convinced we few, we happy few, can get the job done.

The first task is to socialize the idea. The upcoming NCAA basketball tournament must be referred to, wherever possible, as "Narch Nadness." The actor who, in a community production of "Julius Caesar," enjoins Caesar to "beware the Ides of Narch," wins plaudits from our righteous movement. One must be careful, though. Repetition of "Narching to Pretoria" and "steal a narch" only muddies the waters and sows confusion.

In other news, did that Jon Stewart cat administer a can of whoop-ass on Jim Cramer or what? Amiright? Woooo!

If a Miller Were My Trade/At a Mill-wheel Grinding

2009-03-08T17:39:00.019-04:00

There are days you don't want to trade for anything. Today was such a day.

Suppose, on a lovely, unseasonably warm early-spring day, you were wandering through woods such as these, on Short Hill Mountain in far Northern Virginia...

...and you came across this object poking out through the leaf-mulch:

What would you think? Perhaps that you'd stumbled across a Flintstones-era car-factory, interrupted in mid-manufacture of a prehistoric wheelbarrow? Or perhaps a demented Indian coin-minting facility?

In fact, what you've found is a nineteenth-century millstone, its creation begun but never ended, left for the ages in the middle of this primeval forest. Its creator, his name probably forever lost, abandoned his craftwork in this forest half-finished, halfway up a mountain in the middle of what is functionally nowhere. No doubt he had been commissioned by a local miller to carve a millstone, and for whatever reason, the work was left undone.

The object is exactly three feet across; I measured it with my forearm, an excellent gauge to measure 18 inches twice. I have no knowledge of Standards and Practices among the millers of the east coast of the United States in the nineteenth century, but that precise three-foot diameter is suggestive.

He began by picking a likely rock -- my mineralogical powers are greatly reduced since I took that stone to the head on the highway on my motorbike, but granite schist seems to be the right formula -- roughing out a three-foot circle, flattening the face of the stone, then carving the thing into a rough circle, slightly larger than the three-foot spec. Then, much more carefully, he began to cut his true line.

Here we see where the rough line ends and the true line begins:

But he stopped working on it, didn't he. Why? Did the carver, or somebody with interest in the matter such as the miller who commisioned the stone, die? Was skulduggery somehow in play?

We examined the stone carefully. It occurred to us that there must be chips from the stone nearby, if this was the true site where the stone was carved -- not necessarily a reliable assumption, as we were on the side of a mountain. Gravity and earth-heaving could have moved our millstone a good long way from its original site in a hundred-plus years. We found no obvious chips, however. It's possible that they were buried under many inches of accumulated leaf-mulch.

Then one of us noticed this, an imperfection in the roundness of the stone:

Could it be that, after what must have been days and days of work, his chisel slipped? Or an inherent imperfection in the stone, a crack, dropped a few fractions of an inch off the carefully carved stone? What kind of despairing profanities painted these trees blue at that point?

I've said we were in a primeval forest. That's not quite true. At some point in the nineteenth century, this was inhabited land. An abandoned road above us on the mountain is strewn with trash from the 1950s. Decaying stone walls, delineating long-dead property lines, limn the landscape:

The stone foundation of what might have been a carriage-house lies a few dozen yards downhill from the millstone:

Daffodils do not grow naturally in North America; whenever you find daffodils on the woods on Short Hill, you know you are near what someone once regarded with pride as a precious garden. They're also astonishingly long-lived. Here, some few short yards from the millstone, we find this:

We are on property that also encompasses a working dairy-farm. Cows die from natural causes as well as slaughter. The ones that die on their own are inedible (who knows what kind of nasty virus carried them off?), and have to be disposed of somehow. Here we see how that happens; they are dragged into the woods uphill to feed the carrion birds and coyotes:

We were invited to inspect the grounds of the decaying, abandoned farm that once flourished on this land. Its 200-plus acres were bought by a foreign investor in the mid-1990s, and since then has been simply a place where cows live. The investor had intended to put up some 40-plus homes on the acreage, but... Well. We've seen how well that housing market has been going.

But what's bad for housing vultures is good for historians concerned with preserving the local folkways before they're paved over. The farm began with the early-nineteenth-century stone structure to the left of this photo. The bovine individual to the extreme right of the picture, I only discovered after taking it, is an ungelded bull. I spoke softly and invoked Brotherhood to get past him.

The interior of the slate-roofed bank-barn is stunning; imagine this as a living-space:

Placing outbuildings above ground prohibits rot. This looks mighty precarious, but this building has stood in this spot for over a hundred years:

Here is the death-knell for this beautiful building. When that crooked supporting beam goes, this stunning space will be no more. It will collapse. And we'll have lost one more reminder of where we come from.

Don't You Know that You Can Count Me Out

2009-03-07T14:44:00.005-05:00

This is fairly exciting...

In late May and early June of 1968, the Beatles recorded the White Album version (that is, the slow, more acoustic version, not the crackling, electric single) of "Revolution 1." On May 30, they did eighteen basic takes, with the last being considered best. Unlike the other surviving takes, Take 18 was just over ten minutes long -- the others being about five minutes -- and went on rather obsessively repeating the "Bowm, shoo-be-doo-wah"s. On May 31, they took Take 18, overdubbed vocals and bass, and made a reduction mix, now called Take 19.

On Tuesday, June 4, Take 19 received a lot of overdubs, some rather mundane sweetening, and some extremely strange. The latter part of the song, which would be faded out of the final track, featured obstreperous tone-pedal guitar squeals, spooky Yoko Ono utterances ("you become naked") dropped-in piano tinkles, screaming, and an obsessively repeated "mama, dada" chorus. Clearly, Lennon had already begun to conceive of the piece as a portrait of revolution in sound -- no doubt highly influenced by the extreme world events that were happening at exactly the same time: That March had seen the My Lai Massacre, April the assassination of Martin Luther King, subsequent riots and the student takeover of Columbia University, and May the événements in Paris that nearly toppled the French government. The day after the making of Take 20, as the newly dubbed version was known, Robert Kennedy was murdered.

(Quite a year, that 1968.)

Knowing full well that a ten-minute tune that dissolves into musique concrète couldn't possibly serve as the Beatles' next single (although Lennon argued mightily in favor of it), the compromise was that the song faded at about five minutes, and Lennon lopped off the "weird" second half of the take, flounced into another studio, wiped anything musical that remained, and used it as the starting point for "Revolution 9."

Until now, Take 20 has been a chimera to the Beatle-obsessed world. According to Mark Lewisohn, the band's most authoritative chronicler, a single taped copy was made of it and taken away by Lennon.

But now it has resurfaced, and you can hear it here.

(N.B.: Another site that hosted it was hit by a cease-and-desist and had to take it down. So I don't know how long it will survive at the linked site. I was able to snag a copy using Audio Hijack, so if it does disappear again, hit me at my email address and we'll see what we can make happen.)

I've A/B'd the album version and this new Take 20, and I do believe it to be genuine. A few edits were made on the final version, that nasty tone-pedal guitar wiped and replaced with languid horns, but the bones of the piece are there. Likewise, quite a bit of the second half made it into Revolution 9.

One of the more fascinating documents I've come across in a while.

(Many thanks to John and Simon for hipping me to this.)

Blackberry? Opinions?

2009-02-28T09:46:00.003-05:00

This no-email-at work thing is really beginning to rankle. I desperately need some kind of solution, or I'll go completely bugfuck from boredom and the ennui of not being able to blog or talk to anybody.

We have a Verizon cellphone/landline deal. My current phone is a cheapie LG flip-phone, but I'm thinking Blackberry. I'd love an iPhone for its slickness and its total integration with OS X, but we're roped into that Verizon account pretty tightly, and AT&T coverage (I'm told) kinda sucks.

So I'm thinking Blackberry Storm, the new one with touch-screen capabilities. Verizons offering it for $119 with a 2-year contract extension, which seems mighty sweet to me. Don't care about audio or camera capabilities, but I absolutely need the ability to write email and IMs, and surf the Web without restrictions. I've read extremely mixed reviews of this device, from raves to outright warnings not to buy; I suspect that a lot of the glitches people experienced had to do with early adoption, and that later firmware updates will have repaired some of the problems.

I'm also willing to lose touch-screen features in favor of reliability. I like what I read about the Blackberry Curve, but I've read so many reviews now that my eyes are beginning to glaze over.

Any of you folks have any opinions? Please help a glaze-eyed and entertainment-starved raconteur out...

Radio Silence

2009-02-21T08:24:00.003-05:00

Thanks to those who've nudged me, wondering why the hell I haven't posted in over a week.

Truth to tell, in order to keep the wolves away I've taken a six-month contract job at a place that is so paranoid about security, they allow their workers no Internet access whatsoever. Not just firewalls and blocked YouTube vids: none whatsoever. The Twin Towers could fall again, I'd never know about it until I got home. They're not evil; they make no guns or bombs or rockets, and they actually help people and make their lives better. But they are extremely concerned with security. So my blogging time is limited to evenings and weekends, and Christ knows what I'm going to do with my lunch-hours and slow moments. Catch up on my reading or something, I guess. There are quite a few public WiFi spots within easy reach; maybe I'll take to having my lunch there.

Meantime, the old resume goes back out. This cannot go on.

He Cares! He Really Cares!

2009-02-06T10:14:00.002-05:00

I cross-posted the recent Lennon piece over at NewCritics, and the author of the book, Jonathan Gould, dropped a comment.

I'll never wash this blog again.

Learn Something New Every Day

2009-02-04T15:23:00.005-05:00

I had never heard this anecdote before. It's from Jonathan Gould's luminescent book on the Beatles, Can't Buy Me Love:

"And Your Bird Can Sing" sounds like the second act of "She Said, She Said" -- another song about personal pretention, sung by John to the accompaniment of George's crazed, cacophonous guitar. [N.B., it should be both John and George's crazed, cacophonous guitars, but perfection eludes even this splendid book.] "Tell me that you've got everything you want, and your bird can sing, but you don't get me," John taunts his anonymous adversary in the opening verse. Listeners tended to assume that the "bird" in question was British slang for "girl," and the song works well on that assumption. But Lennon was stalking bigger game in "And Your Bird Can Sing." The song was inspired by a profile of Frank Sinatra by Gay Talese that appeared in the April 1966 issue of Esquire. "Bird," Talese wrote, " is a favorite Sinatra word. He often inquires of his cronies, 'How's your bird?'; and when he nearly drowned in Hawaii, he later explained, 'Just got a little water on my bird'; and under a large photograph of him holding a whiskey bottle that hangs in the home of an actor friend named Dick Bakalyan, the inscription reads, 'Drink, Dickie! It's good for your bird.'" What brought the article to Lennon's attention in the first place was not its revelations about Sinatra's private vocabulary, but rather his attitude toward an upcoming network television special with which he hoped to reassert himself as a force in contemporary pop:
Sinatra had been very excited about this show; he saw here an opportunity to appeal not only to those nostalgic, but also to communicate his talent to some rock-and-rollers -- in a sense, he was battling the Beatles. The press releases being prepared by Mahoney's office stressed this, read: "If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons...."
After the crack about mops and melons, John Lennon could take some satisfaction in reading about "an inconspicuous little gray-haired lady" on Sinatra's staff whose sole responsibility was to care for the singer's collection of sixty "remarkably convincing" toupees. But Talese's fawning description of Sinatra's charisma ("the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America , the man who can have anything he wants") and Sinatra's wealth ("his film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five") was more than enough to inflame John's sense of professional jealousy. Insult had been added to injury around the time the article appeared with the announcement of the Grammy Awards for 1965. In the year of Highway 61 and Rubber Soul, the American record industry turned its back on the youthful trends in pop by honoring Sinatra in the categories of best male vocalist and best album for a world-weary collection called September of My Years. "Tell me that you've heard every sound there is," crooned the world's greatest kid singer in his enigmatic reply, "and your bird can swing. But you can't hear me. You can't hear me."

So what we've learned here, class, is that "And Your Bird Can Sing" is about Frank Sinatra's dick.

I'm sure your lives are greatly enriched by this knowledge.

One of the more charming tracks on the Anthology is an outtake of the Fabs trying to track the vocal on this song, and absolutely pissing themselves laughing. I'd assumed it was the effect of an herbal jazz cigarette; now I believe we have another data-point in explaining the howling laughter.

(Damned shame that books about pop music aren't carefully footnoted; I'd love to know precisely where this information came from. Gould's bibliography is 12 very closely set pages, and I don't have a lifetime to devote to tracking it down.)

Slightly later update: With this information in mind, the bridge takes on whole universes of new meaning:

When your prized possessions
Start to weigh you down
Look in my direction
I'll be round
I'll be round

Without this knowledge, it's an offer for help, a friendly "you've got a shoulder to cry on." But with it, ooof! Burn!

Slightly later, later update: How much you wanna bet that "possessions/direction" rhyme started with "erection"? Knowing John....

Commenter Jim from the "WTF?" post -- I haven't forgotten about you. I'm still thinking.

Happy Blogroll Amnesty Day!

2009-02-03T17:56:00.003-05:00

If the term leaves you nonplussed, read about it here.

Blue Wren takes on Andrew Sullivan's goober religiosity.
Fred Wickham examines the Super Bowl commercials.
Jeremy Cherfas makes him some cheese.
James Finn Garner yawps at Rod Blagojevich.
Will Divide, my Chumps of Choice partner in crime, rereads Huckleberry Finn. Didn't know he was doing this; I'm in!

I'm supposedly limited to five, but WTF... How'm I supposed to do that?

Christopher Walsh has the same reaction I did to Obama's mention of "unbelievers" in his Inaugural speech.
Giggles, at Wits and Wiggles, reviews her some movies.

There, Jon, Skippy, BlueGal.... Done I did some good?

Odds-on Favorite

2009-02-01T17:28:00.002-05:00

Step right up, step right up! Your bookie Ned's taking yer Super Bowl odds, here...

I'm offering 3:1 that Bruce Springsteen flashes some tit...

Tysons Corner Mall, January 31, 2009

2009-02-01T08:18:00.004-05:00

We Jingos moved out to rural western Loudoun County from suburban Reston some five years ago. At times we find ourselves questioning the wisdom of the move. The nearest grocery store is twenty minutes' drive away; the "high-end" one takes an hour round-trip. More than is reasonable, we lose power when a tree-limb knocks down the above-ground cables. The dirt road takes a heavy toll on automotive suspensions.

But then, occasionally, we will be reminded, with no subtlety whatever, of exactly why we made the move.

Last night was such a reminder. Betty attended her school's Homecoming night dance in DC, and the rest of us decided to make an evening of it, going to Tysons Corner Mall to catch a movie and dinner while she tripped the light fantastic with her classmates. For the non-locals, Tysons once owned bragging rights as the World's Largest Indoor Mall, losing them to Mall of America sometime in the Eighties.

In those Eighties, Wonder Woman and I lived in a two-room walkup in Brooklyn. For us, Saturday night often meant an F-train excursion into Greenwich Village for an evening of wandering, grazing, and (if we could afford it) catching somebody at Gerde's Folk City or some similar venue. People-watching was a huge aspect of the trip: New York's boho districts are unmatched for amusement. The huge assortment of delightfully offbeat people who might trundle by on any given evening provided an endless supply of entertainment. Simply being there was to participate in the celebration of the diversity of humanity.

Tysons Corner Mall on a Saturday evening in early 2009 is pretty much the diametric opposite of that experience.

First, the density of the crowd made it impossible to escape the thought: For a country that has, this week alone, shed 100,000 jobs with no end in sight, there sure were a whole lot of people out spending money on fripperies. Second, what the fuck are these people here for? Where's the appeal? Thousands upon thousands of people of every age, income group and ethnic identity, aimlessly wandering among exactly the same PacSuns, Eagle Outfitters, Abercrombies, Williams & Sonomas they'd find in any other mall...for what? They'd actually packed into their XTerras and Priuses with the thought in mind that the best kind of Saturday night consists of grabbing a plate of Heat-Lamp Italian and a large Sprite, wandering the halls of America's Fourth-Largest Mall, and seeing and being seen in this plastic zocalo, this carefully-policed polis?

After the movie,* I became separated from Wonder Woman and Freddie. Without their jokey and insulating company, without sympathetic people with whom I could ridicule things and distance myself from my surroundings, I began to notice that not a single shop in the place was aimed at me. Every one of these interchangeable emporia was intended to appeal to the tweener, the young adult with more money than sense, and the self-regarding yuppie. A deep alienation set in, with notes of anger and claustrophobia. I needed desperately to get out, breathe deep some cold air, declare forcefully my independence from this awful, antiseptic temple to consumption.

This morning, I awoke in a house in a clearing in a forest on the side of a mountain. The air is cold and bracing. Brave birds, wintering over, call overhead. A small herd of deer wanders past the window -- I wonder what they're eating this time of year. The dogs ignore them, as usual. I contemplate a breakfast of eggs and bacon. And I remember.

Yes, that's why we did this.
____

*"Taken," with Liam Neeson as an ex-CIA goon whose daughter is kidnapped for the "white-slavery" market. About as awful as you'd expect. We had three hours to kill, and that's what was showing. Horribly edited handheld-camera action sequences, revolting racial stereotypes, plot-holes you could drive an XTerra through, and a Jack Bauer torture scene. The movie's title pretty much summarizes how we felt afterward.

WTF????

2009-01-31T10:15:00.004-05:00

Googled something last night. Can't even remember what. Everything behaved as normal. Found the info I was looking for, got out and on with my life.

This morning I had a particularly witty mot involving the Schrödinger's Cat paradox. (It was a peachamaroot!) Wonder Woman queried Schrödinger's Cat. I Googled it to send her a link. First return is from Wikipedia, natch. Click the link. I get this:

Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!
Suggestions:
Return to the previous page and pick another result.
Try another search to find what you're looking for.
Or you can continue to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google's Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.

For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.

I click back to the Google return page. Every single return is marked "This site may harm your computer." Every stinking one. I clicked through to "Google's Safe Browsing " page for enlightenment. The first three attempts to load the page failed. When I finally got through, what I was presented with was astonishingly uninformative.

It's been a few weeks since I worked in the Internet industry. Have I missed a memo or something? Did the Great Gazoogle decide that scaring the crap out of everybody with intrusive interstitial pages warning of malware at innocuous sites like Wikipedia on every single search return was some kind of ideal business model?

[Wavy lines representing Bloggie-Boy actually trying to do some research...]
_____

Ah. It must have been a temporary bug, because I can't replicate it. But seriously, if Google can make a mistake of this magnitude -- even temporarily marking Amazon, eBay, etc., etc., etc., as containing malware -- there's gonna be some shit to pay.

Here's a discussion that, while also not particularly informative, at least proves I'm not crazy.

And perhaps most amusingly, if not surprisingly, a wingnut blogger leaps to the paranoid conclusion that the whole thing's a plot to prevent us from reading his pearls of wisdom...

Update: Google blames human error. Thanks, commenter Robert Z.

Update II: Commenter Reincheque observes that Google "boogered up them freds." Fuck, yeah!

Boogerin' Up the Freds

2009-01-30T16:05:00.005-05:00

Last summer, my motorbike threw a nut. (What? A mid-Sixties British bike threw a nut? Unheard of!)

I was out in the field at the time, and as the nut in question held half of my handlebar on, I stopped in at a local garage to see what their mechanic could do. I know (oh, God, do I know!) that the standard of measurement for bikes of that era was the Whitworth standard, which was neither metric nor feet-and-inches, but rather something unique to British industry of the time. A Whitworth-standard nut is about as unlikely to be found in a modern American garage as a replacement carburetor for a Stutz Bearcat, but perhaps something could be done to help me limp home.

The mechanic, a very personable gentleman of the Southern persuasion, helped as much as he could. He found a nut that nearly (but of course not exactly) fit my handlebar. He put it in place carefully, torquing the thing so it would stay in place for a few miles, but not so forcefully that it would strip the bolt. He said, in his Virginia drawl, "Ah'm puttin' it on jes' so's you can git home. Couldn't tighten it too much, don't wanna booger up 'em freds."

(He meant "threads," of course.)

It's funny, isn't it, how a single utterance can stay with you. At first, it struck me only as a funny regional locution. But as the days wore on, it began to melt into my vocabulary and become a catch-all expression denoting pretty much any cock-up. Freddie trips and falls while defending at a soccer game: "Aw, man! He boogered up the freds!" Wonder Woman asks me for tech support on her computer: "Not having the latest Flash Player's gonna booger up the freds, every time. Let's download." Punt bounces off Antoine Randle-El's facemask -- again: "Jesus Christ, when are the Redskins gonna stop boogerin' up the goddamned freds?" The entire Bush administration seemed hell-bent on boogerin' up the freds with every thought, word and gesture.

I suppose the funniest thing about it is that I'm absolutely the only person on Earth to whom the phrase has the tiniest inkling of meaning. It was my motorbike, my hearing the phrase as funny, my brain applying it to every other life-circumstance, and if I were to come up to some stranger and warn this person that some contemplated action would be sure to booger up the freds, that person would be well justified in looking askance. Such is the fate of the linguistic solipsist.

But I do think the phrase deserves preservation. To that end, I have composed a hymn, to be sung in times when it seems the entire human race is intent on boogerin' up the freds. To the tune of "Gath'ring In the Sheaves" -- shall we, everybody?

Boog'rin' up the freds
Boog'rin' up the freds
We shall come rejoicing,
Boog'rin' up the freds!

FireFox vs. FireKitteh

2009-01-27T16:00:00.005-05:00

Crashes around on your desktop, gets into places it shouldn't, has lots of cute add-ons, consumes minimal resources, generally makes life easier.

Crashes around on your desktop, gets into places it shouldn't, has lots of cute add-ons, consumes minimal resources, generally makes life much more amusing. Plus FireKitteh sits on your lap and makes adorable noises.

FireKitteh: WINNER!