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.
Friday, May 01, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Separated at Birth?
Hapless goob Chuck Todd of NBC News:
Mapless noob Murray of Flight of the Conchords:
Mapless noob Murray of Flight of the Conchords:
A Horrible Gardening Accident
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!
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!
Monday, April 27, 2009
Say Hello to My Little Friend
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,
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.
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.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
All Hail the Great Gazoogle!
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.)
We do what we can.
(Backstory here, here, here and here.)
State of Play
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.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Another Career Opportunity!
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):
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.
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,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.
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
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.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Cat Skeletons
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.
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.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Willy Loman
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Tee Hee
Sent just now:
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!
Dear [Ms. Charlatan-Who-Preys-on-Unemployed-People-for-Annoying-Duck-Commercial-Insurance-Company];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).
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
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
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:
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.
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.She replies shortly thereafter,
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.
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.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Happy Zombie Jesus Day!
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!
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!
Friday, April 10, 2009
Public Service Announcement
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.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
I Suppose This Would Be a Desirable Outcome
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?
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?
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Crawdaddy
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:
Off you go.
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.
Off you go.
Friday, April 03, 2009
Please Help if You Can
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.
Friday, March 20, 2009
A Crowd of People Stood and Stared
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Signs of the Times
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.
"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.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Date Night
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.
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.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
The Ides
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!
Sunday, March 08, 2009
If a Miller Were My Trade/At a Mill-wheel Grinding
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.
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.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Don't You Know that You Can Count Me Out
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.)
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Blackberry? Opinions?
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...
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...
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Radio Silence
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.
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.
Friday, February 06, 2009
He Cares! He Really Cares!
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.
I'll never wash this blog again.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Learn Something New Every Day
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:So what we've learned here, class, is that "And Your Bird Can Sing" is about Frank Sinatra's dick.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."
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.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Happy Blogroll Amnesty Day!
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!
- 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.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Odds-on Favorite
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...
I'm offering 3:1 that Bruce Springsteen flashes some tit...
Tysons Corner Mall, January 31, 2009
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.
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