The Name Game 2008

You can't avoid politics during this season. I've tried. Here's a short list of nicknames I have found for some of over dozen politicians of both major American political parties running for President of these United States next year. You can be sure this list isn't complete. Enjoy. Alphabetically:

Bacark Yomama
Breck Girl
Hitlery
Her Thighness
Huckleberry
The Huckster
Julie Annie
Kookcinich
McPain
McShame
McVain
Osama
Rooty
Rudy McRombee
RuPaul
Silky Pony

And here is a list of nicknames for the supporters of just one of the candidates:

consprazoids
Paultards
Paulbots
Paulistinians

One of the people with the clown names will be , sooner than you can imagine, the Leader of the Free World! Ouch!

Comic Desolation

The cafe next door was open, as was the pub. I went for a walk around downtown before returning to the pub for a couple of pints of dark ale. Christmas Day afternoon. The Indian deli was open, Mickey D's was closed. There was a line in front of one of two cinema multiplexes, a beggar pestering film aficionados. A bookstore called The Comic Relief, located between a fantasy bookstore and the best bookstore in town or anywhere Half Price Books, was open, at least a half a dozen customers inside. The Subway sandwich shop was open too, as were the two drugstores in the neighbourhood. Beggars, the homeless, a group of teenage punks at the plaza in front of the subway station which was open.

I stepped inside the pub. A basketball game was playing on the flat screen TVs. Not one familiar face among the two dozen customers. A half dozen goth punks at the bar and at tables. The barmaid, Erica, is a goth punk herself, her T-shirt this afternoon said "DESOLATION". She was the only staff member in. What if there is trouble, I wondered. Well, her goth punk friends drinking free beer would come to her aid, I concluded. The kitchen was closed as usual on holidays, and Erica could only heat up and serve yesterday's chili, if anyone asked.

A bearded, four eyed man, looking like the stereotype of a computer geek, sitting at the bar, wore a green sweatshirt with the following, supposedly Irish poem on the back of it:

May the roof above us
never fall in
And we friends beneath
never fall out

Fair enough. A fat, aging, bleached blonde goth punk woman at the bar was giving me The Look. Oh, no. My drinking buddy Mike soon arrived and we had one of our deep conversations. What's the next rebellious look, we wondered. What can beat the lip, eyebrow and nose earrings for outrageousness? When he gave up hippiedom, Mike said, he only had to cut his hair. How will they go straight with tattooes on every finger of the knuckle? And what about music, I asked? In the past century, it's come from Scott Joplin and Louis Armstrong, both classically trained, to the reductionist anti-music of the illiterate rap "artists". What's next? Good questions. We wished each other a Merry Christmas, I stepped out and drove home.

Beet it!

The palms of my hands are red from beet juice which isn't so easy to wash off. I pray I won't be called to another interrogation any time soon, or more trouble would follow as a result. To the first one of those (mandatory interrogations), I arrived carrying a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Invitation to a Beheading, ostensibly as a packaging of sorts for the Bob Dylan CD titled Lovesick, published for some odd reason on a Victoria's Secret record label, which CD had been presented to me raw, without a jewel case, and was to serve there as a piece exculpating evidence. Given the weird cultural atmosphere of the times, that idea didn't quite work. But that's another story altogether. Back to the beets.

Slicing beets is a Holiday ritual for me, making borscht, using a recipe that is in part improvised, as I have been looking for, but have not found, the secret ingredient that gives it a special tangy taste, like mom and the woman who now owns a restaurant in Santa Monica made it. Is it the Maggi sauce? Or white vinegar? Or dried mushrooms? I use all three and still am not quite there. Maybe it's the wrong dry mushrooms, you must use those that grow in the forest where wild bisons roam, pee and poop? I don't know, but I keep trying, using the Japanese variety that's available here. (The cookbooks are not much help. The taste must be a deep secret like the Coca Cola formula!)

The other dish I know how to make from red beets is called Ćwikła (go ahead, pronounce it!) and it is beets pickled with fresh horseradish and white vinegar, a dish that none of my co-workers will touch if I were to bring it to department pot luck parties, not even the Indians among them, who normally enjoy eating spicy foods. That's all right, more for my friend and me! (A strong alcoholic libation is required, too.)

And that's the Christmas Holiday non-traditional beet story.

The Hate Man

There once was a man in my town who called himself the Hate Man. Like many other street people, he'd hang around the neighbourhood where university students lived, played, shopped and walked to classes. Standing on the corner in front of a bookstore, he shouted to no one in particular, and to all who could hear him "I HATE YOU!". He dressed in women's clothes from a Salvation Army store, long dresses, shawls, worn out sweaters, long gray beard, tennis shoes on his feet, mismatched striped socks, cheap jewelry jangling on his forearms. A character. People said he was a former university professor who had gone mad after taking one too many LSD trips. Another madman on city streets. I've no idea what happened to him, I haven't seen him in ages.

Just the other day I ran into a mention of him on some Internet forum. According to the poster, this was the philosophy of the Hate Man:

Never say anything good to anyone, never say I love you ever. When you hold something in, it builds more tension, and makes you more inclined to DO something good for someone--since actions speak louder than words.

However, if you hate someone, or have ill feelings toward them, then say it. When you express something, verbally it dilutes the feelings you had: catharsis.

I pass it along without a comment (not sure what it means.) Whenever I saw the Hate Man, observing his antics for a minute or two, I had the impression that he was really a comedian, a joker, a mocker of the Peace, Love and Understanding naive philosophies of the Aquarius Age, and that somewhere out of our sight he lived a perfectly boring middle class life. A part time Hate Man in a world gone full time mad.


P.S. The above was written before I found this reference.

Future Revenge

Here are some items from the Internet news discussion forum that I participate in anonymously (like everyone else there).

A recent Associated Press news item (abbreviated):

A long-missing Michelangelo sketch for the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, possibly his last design before his death, has been discovered in the basilica's offices, the Vatican newspaper said Thursday.

One forum participant's response:

One of my buddies bought a circa 1830 house, ripped the walls apart but didn't find anything of value. Before he closed up the walls, he placed TWO cans with coins and trinkets into the walls...labeling them 1 of 3 and 3 of 3.

Another news item (paraphrased):

Starbucks has issued a recall for 140,000 coffee mugs because the handles may just come right off. Made in China.

One forum participant's comment:

My heart bleeds for all the upscale white trash that stained the seats of their Beemers with cafe latte.

And finally, a tragic news story from the state of Georgia:

City police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the shooting death of a 22-year-old Brunswick man Tuesday. Police said Wednesday that a 35-month-old toddler may be responsible for pulling the trigger of the gun that killed Curtis Gabriel Collins, also know as "C-Real," at a music studio at 2405 Stonewall St., Brunswick. Police said the toddler allegedly took a gun from a table in a room at Gutter Entertainment.

(NOTE: C-Real was a rap "artist".) Two comments from forum participants:

[1] Perhaps it was meant as a subtle criticism of his talent.

[2] “Whadda ya mean, I can’t have a cookie?”

And so on. Fun, fun, fun. This is actually a serious forum with a mission, clearly stated principles and a particular view of the universe. (Above are not my responses, by the way. Mine aren't newsworthy!)

Party Time Times

Maybe I've been living on another planet, or not paying attention, but it has dawned on me that we are living during party time times. Or, perhaps it's just my timing, Tim? All right, all right, enough bad puns, time out!

I'm not a party dude, nor am I a party pooper, I've been invited to only one party recently, and due to a misunderstanding on my part, I missed it. There were to be 85 participants, and you were to wear a costume (yeah, wearing a costume, like they did in France before the Revolution!)

But the country has been partying lately, it seems to me, and it has been partying non-stop. A blogger I know has been closing all her posts urging the reader(s?) to "party on", thus diminishing and trivializing whatever intelligent message she tried to convey in the paragraphs preceding it. Would Elias Canetti end his famous journal entries with such a phrase? Sure, nobody's Elias Canetti, not even Elias Canetti, who's dead, but let's get serious occasionally. Anyway, it's her choice, it's innocent, who's to argue.

I have been hearing about partying more lately than in years past. Do you think it's the prosperity and peace (such as it is) , that brings the mindless party animals out of us? Like the Gay 20s? Or the early 1960s teenage dance crazes? (Hmm, every 40 years? Are we onto discovering a new historical loop?)

Whatever, it seems to me that the example comes from above, and this is what provoked this post. The "above" is of course the media and Hollywood. The trio of so-called celebutantes from Hollywood has been in the news constantly for the past couple of years, getting themselves arrested for drunk driving, going into rehab, emerging only to get arrested again, going to jail even, emerging loving Jesus, and then getting arrested again, and so on. But one constant in this operetta has been partying. These young women, all three of them in their mid twenties, who for some reason don't have to work, in between the rehabs and arrests they party, and they party until they drop, several times a week. Perhaps seven times a week. These are our children's role models, oh, not yours, not mine, but many others', to be sure. Party on.

I read that the prominent party hosts in the celebrity party cities (but certainly in many others too) London, New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., compete for celebrity guests. If a prominent Senator or the lead singer of the Aerosmith (but not the drummer, no thanks) can grace your party, some of his heavenly light will fall on you the hostess, raising the price of your stock in High Society.

The Society page of one local newspaper, titled Red Carpet, prints a weekly page of photographs of party goers in the city, all of them from the best families, beautiful women all blond with, curiously enough roots of their hair dyed dark, with names such as Alexandra, Alexis, Claudia, Jenevieve, Kimberly, Whitney, and not one Sue or Jane among them! So that we don't feel guilty about partying so much while the globe is warming and wars rage, all these Society parties, needless to say, have been arranged to be "benefits for the needy".

There is a book you can find in the largest section of most large American bookstores, the Self Help Section, titled Life is Short, Wear Your Party Pants, full of jolly if banal advice, and sophomoric platitudes to go along with it, on how to travel through life as if it were a party. No, sorry, dance through life WHICH IS a party! (You can purchase a copy through Amazon for the price of one red American cent!)

What more can I say, party on!

Enrico Donati

Enrico Donati, 98 years old, is the last of the original surrealists. He is still working and exhibiting.

(1930) That same year, Donati and Duchamp prepared a window display at Manhattan's Brentano's bookstore to celebrate the publication of their friend Breton's book "Le Surrealisme et la Peinture." In homage to a work by Rene Magritte, Donati painted toes on a pair of shoes and those were added to a headless mannequin that Duchamp brought. They put the book in its hands, and set it up next to a running faucet. Not an hour went by before members of the Salvation Army rushed into the store to warn store owner Arthur Brentano Jr. that he was risking damnation for the blasphemy of a headless man reading a book. Donati chuckles at the memory.

"(Brentano) told us, 'Get out with all this stuff.' So we took it around the corner to the Gotham Book Mart. We installed it there, and it stayed there until the end of the month.

"Surrealism was done by instinct, and you were looking at an object not with the eye, but behind the eye. You had the feeling of something extraordinary, but you didn't see it, but you had the feeling of it. So you put the feeling on canvas, and it became Surrealism. It was automatism, in which you do it by a succession of thought. One thing brought you to another thing, then another thing. At the end of it, it was something else, something new that you never saw with your eye, but you felt it. You felt it, and it came out because it was something that was in you, and that's very Surrealist.

"That's all."

A screenplay in the making

A friend, who's in the film industry, suggested that my tragi-comic misadventures this past year are a screenplay in the making. Coincidentally, and like Paul Auster I do believe in coincidences, and also in telepathy, I thought of something similar a day or two earlier. Let's see. I don't know who could play me (Mike Myers? Roger Moore?), but as far as the lead female role, what's the name of the actress who played Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

Actually, I was thinking more of a book, a fictional account. Fiction writers have been known to exact revenge on their former spouses and lovers by fictionalizing their personas into unpleasant characters in their books. Most readers never suspect, but those who need to know, do know. However, I'm afraid that it would take a better poison pen (keyboard?) than mine to describe the bizarre things I have experienced, the promises and betrayals, the poetry written, chocolates consumed, the trials without a jury, the cold bureaucracies, and the heavenly taste of the sweet banana bread that she baked me in February. Or was it in January?

It's the stuff of country and western songs, too. She hated country music and thought that Bob Dylan was country (!) Now, that's a c&w song in the making. (There have been plenty of heartbreak songs, but to write another one and hope to sell it you've got to have a somewhat original angle. )

Anyway, I can't tell the complete story here, as I've been sworn to silence, except to tell you that it's a story of boy meets girl, girl accuses boy of an unspeakable crime that he didn't commit. More to be seen soon at a cinema near you. Or a bookstore. Or a country radiostation.

A moment of truth

The circus performance has finally started. It'll go on for exactly one year! Whoopee! Let me describe the first act.

A leading Presidential candidate and the entourage visited a diner in Iowa, ran up a $157.46 bill , paid it, and, according to the waitress who served them, whose name is Anita Esterday, left no tip. The next day the leading Presidential candidate used Anita's hard luck story (she has to work two jobs to support her family) in a speech elsewhere. All this was reported on the National Public Radio, a government supported organization that is not supposed to endorse any candidates, but, despite everything, is clearly endorsing this very leading Presidential candidate.

The leading Presidential candidate's damage control team went to work. It first claimed that it had left a $100 cash tip to the manger, who, it later turned out, was not present there, and then a day or two later, a local representative of the leading Presidential candidate, who as all know is for the "little people" went to the diner to hand Anita $20. That would come out to about 12.7 % of the bill, whereas in the United States the standard tipping percentage is 15 to 20%.

Well, the Internet went to work. It's buzzing and buzzing and the opposition is having a field day with this incident. Who can blame them! For the "little people"? Indeed. The true character of the candidate and the supporters is now on full display. It's the little things that count. What is usually called a moment of truth. Now songs are being written, I kid you not. The waitress' name lends itself to the task. Here is a fragment of a full song written just Yesterday:

Esterday...It's a game that you don't want to play
In the end, you know I'll get my way
I'm warning you Ms. Esterday

You got stiffed by me but you should have held your tongue
Those who dare cross me find their lives are soon undone...yes, really

And so on, until the next November!

Another language lesson

There is an Internet forum I often visit. It is not a joke forum, or a linguistics forum, but a political, slash cultural forum. I caught an interesting exchange on it the other day, and here are some excerpts, starting with the initial post. I guarantee you'll learn something today.

Initial post:

I'm an engineer and yes...I use a lot of duct tape but after 35 years of marriage my wife still translates items she can't put a name to as a "thingy". I've let this pass with a smile but have wondered how many people actually use this word (if it is a word) during everyday conversation...

Interesting responses (some shortened):

• Same as a whatchamacallit, but different than a whatsits.....
• Halfway between a gizmo and a doodad.
• is that the same as a thing-a-ma-jig ?
• It is a basic version of a dohickey
• In Monty Python sketches it is a euphemism for “sexual congress.”
• Its like a peepee only smaller.
• Technical NOTE: 2 thingys together make a “KLUGE”...............
• if something involves a person who’d name escapes me, they become a Hoozit.
• I think it is the same as a doomawhatchit.
• It’s a small hoohah, but not as complex as a widget.
• A Thingy is the opposite of a Dinghy!
• thingy is short for thingamabob or thingamajig.
• A comosigiama.
• I often use "Chingaletta", which a Mexican forman I used to work for would use to call anything he couldn't name at the time. It wasn't until about 6 years ago when I found out the true meaning of "chingaletta" It means "F#$%ing thing". Usage: "Hand me that chingaletta over there"
• A “thingy” is a “shmingy.”
• It depends ... a thingy can also be a gozinta or a gozouta, depending on its orientation.
• ”dooflatchey” is also acceptable.....”
• Isn’t dooflatchey the socially unacceptable passing of unknown gases?
• Same as the “deal”.
• “Thingy”......you know.... it’s the same as a somethin-or-other.
• It’s the opposite of unthingy.
• As long as you remain the gazinta, you needn’t worry about the thingy.
• In German it’s Dingsdabums.
• It’s a dunsel.
• In my little corner of the Air Force, "thingies" don't exist. However, "whatsits" and "how ya doins" are in abundance: "Hey there, Hero. Give me that whatsit over there by the how ya doin." That sentence wouldn't confuse me at all.
• Thats called a phatch-a-motter. You use it with a bisco-fig-nut.
• Whatnot.....
• Thingy = 1 Whoozie-Whatzit however1 Thingy = 2.32 Hooky-Dookies. Hooky-Dookies are metric.
• No, thing-a-ma-jig is used to connect thing-a-ma-bobs...
• It’s an unspecified word, so when she can delay deciding the definition of that word. Wife: “Go fix the thingy”You : “Okay”.... a few hours later, Wife: “I thought I told you to fix the dripping faucet” You: “When you said thingy I thought you meant ice tray.” Wife: “No! I meant the faucet, now go do it!” Wife (thinking to self): “Men just don’t listen.”
• It’s usually next to the Doowangus
• Probably short form of “thingummy,” which is also a Britishism.
• I remember my first dinorkel.
• In my culture it's a fremmis.
• No one has mentioned bazooty. Originally, it mean just odd things found in food, like bad meatloaf. It has expanded to mean any kind of unknown, small object.
  
  
• Thingy, thingy, bo-bingy Banana fana fo fingy Fee fi fo fingy. Thingy.

• Actually, a thingy is ganip of the ganap variety. I thought everyone knew that.
• It’s the same as a whatsamagigger.

And so on, you know, more thingies like that...

Natan Sharansky

A true modern age hero, a man who has lived a life of a Count of Monte Cristo's. Here's a link to an interview with him in the Saturday Wall Street Journal. Some favorite quotes from it:

An anecdote or joke is never absent for long in conversation. As almost any East European will tell you, humor makes unpleasant reality go down easier.

[T]he West confuses the ballot box with democracy. "The election has to be at the end of the process of building free society," he says. "If there is no free and democratic society, elections can never be free and democratic."

"Democracy is a rather problematic word, because democracy is about technique. I would prefer freedom. I would say people don't want to live under constant fear."

Mr. Sharansky's stubbornness is famous. During his 1986 release, in exchange for a couple Soviet spies, the KGB told him to walk straight across Glienicke Bridge. He zigzagged. This account, he tells me, is partly apocryphal. That happened earlier, at the airport in East Berlin, when he meandered from the plane to a waiting car. There is a funny but less well-known story about the bridge. Mr. Sharansky was dressed in civilian clothes bought for him in Moscow, which were too big. The KGB didn't let him have a belt for his baggy pants, and he was forced to hold them up with a rope. "When I was on the bridge and I asked the U.S. \[official\]"--who was guiding him across--"'Where is the border?' At this line, he pointed. 'Oh freedom!' and I jumped over. The rope broke. At the last moment, I caught my pants.

"Then they asked me, 'What was your first thought when you came to freedom?' 'How not to lose my trousers!'"

And he laughs.

Clarence Thomas

Here is a link to an interview with a man I greatly admire Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court.

Theodore Dalrymple

Why read me? If you haven't read Theodore Dalrymple, maybe it's time to start now!

Sunny side of the street

Every time my dog and I leave the house for a walk, find the sky sprinkling lightly on us, and we decide the pour is light enough to continue, my dog immediately leads me to the other side of the street, something he never does otherwise, as if thinking that it won't rain there. (Once or twice, believe it or not, he's been correct.)

It's a perfect metaphor, or an outright example of the follies of human (and canine) thinking about things we cannot affect. If only we had elected the other guy (just coincidentally, of course, from "my" political party.) If only the U.N. had passed such and such resolution. If only everybody on the highway (except for me, I can't!) took public transportation. If only guns were banned. Like in Switzerland. No, wait, never mind. If only they put up a speed limit sign on my street.

Well, they did put up a 25MPH speed limit sign in front of my neighbour's house. The neighbour protested to the city hall and they moved it, so it now stands between my house and the house of the neighbour on the other side. As if I had to say it, having the sign there has had no effect whatsoever on the cars speeding through my residential street.

I lost a friend once, a firm believer in the goodness of government action, when I mocked the "No Drug Dealing Zone" sign we passed driving through a neighbourhood, as the billboard advertising where illegal substances can be obtained, at all hours of day and night. That was the beginning of the end of our friendship.

There is a poster hanging in the common area of my office building advertising an event called 'Walk to Cure Diabetes'. That's right, you walk to cure diabetes. (It doesn't say if it's your own diabetes or the disease of diabetes in general for all humanity.) Well, I walk more every day than anyone I know in this car cursed culture, and so far it hasn't helped to cure my children's colds much less some still incurable diseases.

But that's just me. You go ahead, don't let me stop you from meditating for peace. The earth needs it (peace, not meditation.) Maybe it is sunny on the other side of the street, after all. If only we had elected the other guy, I wouldn't be in such a pickle now!

Book Excerpt

Emotions, what are you doin'?
Oh, don't you know,
don't you know
you'll be my ruin?
(Brenda Lee song)

An excerpt from Love and Language, by Ilan Stavans.

Deborah Kerr

Read this thoughtful, perceptive tribute to movie actress Deborah Kerr.

The Pope in Washington

The president of the United States (POTUS) is like a Pope to many in this country. Revered, if he's of your own political party or irrationally despised if he's of the other party in this two party system. And so, many public figures and private citizens threatened to move abroad in 2000 if George W. Bush had been elected. None ever did, of course, and there is never any shortage of excuses. Now, I'm beginning to hear the same from the other side, partisans of the Right threatening to move if She, who cannot be named, is elected.

All of this, hatred and worship are irrational and reflect a certain amount of ignorance about what the POTUS can and cannot do. The first job of the POTUS, one that is seldom mentioned, is to promote and propose policies that do not threaten the economic stability in the country. The President is not alone in this task, and is not always successful, as the economy runs its own course of ups and downs.

The ignorant who elected and worshipped the criminal hillbilly in 1992, tend to think that the President is the one who can keep their sacrament of abortion legal. Others are convinced that their priest of global warming would have kept the country out of war following 9/11.

There are checks and balances on the Presidents and certain things that the followers of various pretenders to the Presidency believe will be done, if and only if their guy is elected, will never be done. Example: Ronald Reagan ran against the government in 1980, promising to eliminate the federal Departments of Energy and Education. You can easily check on how successful he was.

The interesting thing to me is that the haters of the other party's president, however educated they may be, are seldom if ever aware of the ideological basis for their resentments. There is a deep ideological divide in this country, and the best explanation for it that I know of you'll find in Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions. Here is a link to Thomas Sowell's website.

By the way, if you think the "criminal hillbilly" reference above betrays my own partisanship, you should educate yourself on the scandals of the years 1992-2000. The Wall Street Journal, alone among the fawning mainstream media (89% of America journalists vote Democratic) kept track of them and published a compendium of its investigative reports. (If you must know, as a radical Monarchist, I despise them all.)

But here's a small recent example. Sprinter Marion Jones, who for years denied using performance enhancing drugs, and only recently admitted to having lied and returned her Olympic medals, at one point hired a well known operative of the 1992-2000 administration as a publicist to help her with the lies and to divert attention from her use of drugs by attacking in public all those who doubted the lies. From the local newspaper:

Their playbook was thin: Attack your opponents, lie, lie, lie, and try to look good doing it.

This was the famous tactic of this and other operatives of the criminal hillbilly. Oh well, what can you do with the Cult of Personality condemned so long ago by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, First Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Secret Speech Delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956.

Hot!!

Al Oerter

A great athlete died yesterdat at 71. Al Oerter, Olympic discuss thrower who won gold medals in four straight Olympics. Later in life he became an artist. For the last 25 years of his life he was outspoken against drug use by athletes. Quote and the reason for this post:

" What sense do you have of yourself when you're cheating!"

Guys and Dolls

Here is something I found:

Taken across the board, in aggregate studies, there is not a particle of difference in overall intelligence between women and men. What they do with the intelligence, and how the approach problems can be dramatically different, but in balance, they equal out.

Women are better at diffused awareness, men at focused.
Women tend to use both sides of the brain, men one side or the other.
Women use more relative logic, men use more logic vs principle
Women take in more data, but filter poorly, and have a tendency to data flooding
Men filter data inputs, avoiding flooding, but often miss obvious aspects of there environment.

Overall, the different types of awareness are complimentary.

Mucho interesante

A link to a fascinating article in Asia Times: It's easy for the Jews to talk about life By Spengler

Sprachgefuhl

We'll get to what the German word means in a minute. There is no English equivalent , by the way. An article about the making of Merriam-Webster English dictionary appeared in the newspaper a few days ago. The dictionary is edited out of Springfield, Massachusetts. A team of editors there scours newspapers and journals in search of words, new words, old words. They have no telephones on their desks (!) (I do have one on mine, but it rarely rings and I've no idea how to use its advanced features.) A new word must appear at least eight times somewhere in print (everyday speech, television, radio, don't count!) before it can be considered for inclusion in the next edition of the Collegiate Dictionary. A recently added word which no longer appears, will be dropped. This is what happened to 'snitty', meaning disagreeably agitated. It was added in 1989, then dropped a few years later, to be added again most recently.

Around 1995, the word 'regift', which meant to make a gift of something that had been a gift to us, was introduced by the television comedy show Seinfeld. But the word didn't start appearing in print publications until 2001, when it was finally picked by the Merriam-Webster. Here are some new words being considered by the editors: 'za', for 'pizza', and 'air-kiss', meaning exactly what is says. I wonder if there is a word for the meaningless hugs so often forced on us in group meetings, after yoga classes, and such, by people who often enough hate our guts, just because it's become a custom. Jerry Seinfeld should have invented it back in 1995, he hated those hugs too.

Oh, and finally, the skill required of the editors of the dictionary. It's called 'sprachgefuhl' in German and it means a feeling for the language, an intuitive sense of what is linguistically appropriate. Have you got it?

Le Fantôme de la liberté

Here is another missing scene from a Luis Buñuel film. This time the film is Phantom of Liberty, his 1974, next to last masterpiece (I don't know you if you haven't seen it and are not going to do your best to see it soon! You may borrow my copy.) This is the one that starts with Spanish prisoners (among them monk Luis Buñuel) about to be executed by Napoleon’s soldiers, and shouting "Long Live Chains!" Anyway, here is the link.

Mayer Kirshenblatt

Mayer Kirshenblatt is a 91 year old self taught painter residing in Toronto, who has been painting for close to twenty years. His subject matter is mostly the life in the Jewish shtetl in southern Poland where he grew up until emigrating to Canada in 1934. The painting pictured above is titled The Purim Play: Krakow Wedding. Read more here . Also note that the terms naïve art, or primitive art are never mentioned in the article.

Gateway to Heaven

(A Chinese Parable)

A farmer was hurrying on his way with his horse and dog. Suddenly lighting struck and killed all of them. Like many newly dead souls, they didn't know they were dead and continued to hurry on their way.

They kept going under the scorching sun. They were sweating and in unbearable thirst. Then they saw a beautiful gate leading to a glittering square. There was a clear spring in the middle of the square. He hurriedly went up and greeted the gatekeeper: "What is this beautiful place?"

"Heaven." The gatekeeper said amicably. "That is very good. We are all very thirsty. Can we go in to have a drink?"

"You can go in, but not your horse or dog. We don't allow animals to enter."

"Oh. Let's forget about it then."

The farmer couldn't bear to leave his horse and dog behind. They thus continued on looking for water. After walking for a long time, he found a place with a water source. Again, there was a man guarding the gate.

"Hello, can I and my horse and dog have a drink of water here?"

"Go ahead," said the gatekeeper.

After they satisfied their thirst, the farmer thanked the doorkeeper and asked him: "What is this place?"

"Heaven." The farmer was perplexed: "How can that be! We just passed by a beautiful gate and the gatekeeper there told us it was the heaven."

"That was hell," said the gatekeeper.

"My lord, you should prohibit them from confusing people like that. People will be fooled."

"Not likely," said the gatekeeper. "We should thank them for their help, because they'll keep those who abandon their friends there."



Source: The Epoc h Times

Dysphonia

Dysphonia? Sounds euphonic, but what does it mean? It is a voice disorder (Google is your friend for life,) and the word I was looking for following a weekend day recently, when I spoke to no one for a period of 24 hours, though (one hopes) not as a result of any new disorder amongst my tired old disorders.

I found this word last Wednesday in an article about singer Linda Thompson, who, the article said, had suffered from hysterical dysphonia, which is a condition that makes it impossible for one to speak. Linda Thompson is of course, the former wife of Richard Thompson and mother of Teddy Thompson, all three of them fine British folk rock singers and songwriters. Linda has a new album out, as does Teddy, and Richard is just hitting town on a tour. A lot of noise altogether. I wonder what the antonym of dysphonia is, blabbermouth?

Nothing

Record producer Phil Ramone, who has recorded everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones, was a musical prodigy who graduated from Juilliard at 16. He won the first of his nine Grammy Awards in 1965 for the classic album "Getz/Gilberto."

"You can get used to awful," says Ramone. "You can appreciate nothing. We've done it with fast food."

Across the big blue sea

An astute, highly intelligent woman I know, became so frustrated on seeing again screaming headlines about some politician's sexual peccadilloes, that she shouted "I want an information revolution!" Like many of us, she's frustrated by the personality and scandal obsessed media here in America, bombarding our eyes, ears and minds with meaningless trivia every day. She wants to read news of substance and meaning that she can share and discuss with her children.

Who can blame her. I share her frustrations, but what could I do, except to say to her "I love you for your mind, let's run away together across the big blue sea, where we'll find such newspapers, culture and history and everlasting love amidst the monuments, museums, fountains, cafes, parks, bakeries and beer taverns." (I'm awaiting her response, as we speak.)

There was some prescience or coincidental timing in my friend's reaction, because at about the same time, Daniel Hen ninger of the Wall Street Jour nal was writing this commentary. But wait, there is more. At the very same time, I was sitting at home, re-reading a book of interviews with Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, where this very issue is raised.

Here are brief excerpts from the Introduction by journalist Cynthia L. Ha ven who collected and edited these interviews in one volume:

Brodsky's interviews reflect as much about the Western sensibility as they do about him, often painfully so. Their frequent repetitiveness shows the monomania of Western journalism - its voyeurism, its vulgar fascination with suffering not its own. [...] The corny CBS "voiceover" sound of typewriter keys clicking- or Morley Safer joining Brodsky as they gaze soulfully out to the Hudson - provide distressing illustration, exemplifying Brodsky's declared enemy "poshlust".

And later, a footnote explaining "poshlust":

Gogol's "poshlust" was defined and extended by Nabokov to include corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities," and in contemporary writing, "moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over-concern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know." Poshlust "is especially vigorous and vicious when the sham is not obvious and when the values it mimics are considered, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the very highest of art, thought or emotion."

And from Wikipedia:

Poshlost' is a Russian word (пошлость) defined by the literary critic Vladimir Alexandrov as a kind of "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity" (Alexandrov 1991, p. 106).

Oh, and incidentally, the headline story that so upset my woman friend was about a U.S. Senator getting arrested for public pederasty at an airport bathroom. She asked:

"Is this what men do for fun? Go into restrooms and solicit each other for sex. No wonder the men's restrooms are always a mess."

The way I walk

"Don't dawdle!" one character ordered another in a British mystery television show with actress Diana Rigg in leading role (It went down from there and I didn't watch to the end.) Which brought to mind the Walk. No, not the sixties dance craze, or would be dance craze among 1,000 other wannabe dance crazes. No, the Walk, as in the way people walk.

The way I walk is just the way I walk
The way I talk is just the way i talk
The way I smile is just the way I smile
Touch me baby, and I'll go home wild!

So hiccupped Lux Interior, the lead vocalist of the fabulous Cramps, to the biting strains of electric guitar played by his wife Poison Ivy.

I can tell foreigners straight off the boat, as the saying goes, by the way they walk. I too am recognized as a stranger in strange lands by the way I walk (and I have proofs of that!) But, fully aware of this handicap, after a few weeks there, and some excrutiating effort, I begin to blend. Isn't it our life's purpose, after all, to blend into the background?!

One of the interesting effects of competitive long distance running, which requires high mileage training, is the way it affects one's walk. Having experienced it myself and seen all kinds of amateur long distance runners, I can tell you that many of them walk as if they were in some way crippled, while at the same time they run with the grace of well trained athletes. I suppose that may be because their bodies become more used to running than walking. Go figure!

Each corporate environment I have been in has its way of walking the office corridors. This is an unwritten rule in the corporate world. In one corporation, in an old, traditional industry, the rule was to walk stiffly and fast, as if one were in a hurry to return to one's desk and PRODUCE again. At another corporation, more modern, more hip, and more relaxed, the rule was to walk slowly and at an easy pace, to demonstrate coolness, availability.

One of my co-workers, who is a devil of a competitor at the gym, whether he's running a treadmill or riding a spin bike, is the slowest walker on the corporate floor I've ever seen.

We all remember the Ministry of Funny Walks in the sometimes (OK, often) funny British television show Monty Python.

One of the pieces of advice given to employment candidates is to fake a confident walk when arriving at an interview. It's a good piece of advice, but I must say, though I am quite an expert at it myself, it's never worked for me. Well, the way I walk is just the way I walk, so touch me baby...

Halleluyah, pass the carbon offsets

Here's an interesting article, which leads to another interesting essay on a religious topic: Global... etc

We have met the enemy, again.

I urge to read this article by the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger in his column Wonder Land.


And also in today's Journal another worthy article by Jeffrey Zaslow entitled Are We Teaching Our Kids To Be Fearful of Men? (NOTE: if you cannot access it, let me know, and I'll try to have it e-mailed to you.) The war against American men continues.

À propos your precious advice

A Buddhist buys a hotdog. The vendor says, “That’s $4.50.” The Buddhist gives the vendor $5, and the vendor puts it in the cash register. “Hey, where’s my change!?” asks the Buddhist. The vendor replies, “Change comes from within.”

The missing scene

You remember Luis Bunuel's 1972 film The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, don't you? If not, quickly, rent it, buy it, see it, you'll love it.
It is a story of a group of wealthy folks in Paris, who repeatedly gather together for dinner, and repeatedly have it interrupted, by some major event.

Here is a story reported recently by Associa ted Press that sounds like a scene missing from the film (NOTE: misspellings and last name abbreviations are mine to deceive copyright violation seeking bots.)

It started about midnight on June 16 when a group of friends was finishing a dinner of marinated steaks and jumbo shrimp on the back patio of a District of Columbia home. That's when a hooded man slid through an open gate and pointed a handgun at the head of a 14-year-old girl.

"Give me your money, or I'll start shooting," he said, according to D.C. police and witnesses.

Everyone froze, including the girl's parents. Then one guest spoke.

"We were just finishing dinner," Cristina "Cha Cha" Ro_, 43, told the man. "Why don't you have a glass of wine with us?"

The intruder had a sip of their Chat eau Malescot St-Exupery and said, "Damn, that's good wine."

The girl's father, Michael Ra_, 51, told the intruder to take the whole glass, and Cristina offered him the whole bottle.

The robber, with his hood down, took another sip and a bite of Came mbert cheese. He put the gun in his sweatpants.

The story then turns even more bizarre.

"I think I may have come to the wrong house," he said before apologizing. "Can I get a hug?"

Cristina, who works at her children's school and lives in Falls Church, Va., stood up and wrapped her arms around the armed man. The four other guests followed.

"Can we have a group hug?" the man asked. The five adults complied.

The man walked away a few moments later with the crystal wine glass in hand. Nothing was stolen, and no one was hurt.

Once he was gone, the group walked into the house, locked the door and stared at each other — speechless. Michael Ra_ called 911, and police came to take a report and dust for fingerprints.

Police classified the case as strange but true. Investigators have not located a suspect. The witnesses thought he might have been high on drugs.

Who's that girl? (I want to meet her!)

One of my Internet e-mail accounts is named after the model and year of a car that I sold through it many years ago. I rarely use it now, never give its address away, and receive only daily mailings from Buy.com and from an office supply company. At one time I received a few spams but those have stopped, an unheard of turn.

Late one recent Tuesday evening, an e-mail was sent to it from a mobile telephone in a far away state, and containing only a photograph of a young woman. No message followed, and opening that e-mail the next morning, I wondered what it was about. Then, later on Wednesday morning, I received a long e-mail that I quote below in its entirety (I have deleted the last names mentioned). The subject line was blank:

This is what was sent to Amy! Kiss my ass David! You are nothing but a womanizing liar that needs to grow up, stop popping pills and hurting people that love you. Love me?? You never did and you will never get the chance. Goodbye....Crystal M____

P.S. Aren't you sick of all this shit yet, I think you & Amy both are addicted to it.


Note: forwarded message attached.

Here's the attached note referred to in the first sentence above:

You may scare David, but you don't scare me. Stop calling me house. Detective S_______ at the Hillsb orough County Police Department has already been notified and will be requesting my phone records, she has also taken a statement from my daughter whom you had no right speaking to that way. I was asked if I would like to press assault charges on you for the threats that you made. I thought of Noah and said no, however, I can at anytime. I was also asked if I would like to press charges on you for soliciting my husband for sex (I did not even know that was a crime, if you were not charging money) again, I said no. This is your written notice, as required by law, to stop harassing my family by, phone, mail or via the internet immediatly.

I told you before I DON'T WANT YOUR HUSBAND, I HAVE MY OWN! HE contacted me 2 weeks ago and there is nothing going on between us. When I came to Georgia (back in 2005), you know as well as I do that he said you two were separated and getting divorced. I had no idea you two were together. If you do have a lawyer, make sure you let him know that. BTW.....you cannot sue someone that has no income. The courts cannot make a family with only one form of income pay anything toward a judgement. They can place a judgement against me to garnish my wages if I were to ever get a job, but I have no plans of doing that in the near future. My best friend is an attorney and has confirmed this for me. I don't speak out of my ass, I do know the law. Besides, you would just be taking from Tim, not me. You would also be taking from my children who are completely innocent. David told me what kind of person you were, I didn't believe it till now. Stop bothering us about something that happened 2 years ago. I never meant to hurt you, David said that you kicked him out and the two of you were not together back then. It's the past...let it go. You guys are separated and getting a divorce for God sakes. I tried to help you and send you the messages last time he contacted me, you crossed a line when you involved my daughter though. I deleted everything this time. I have no use for it and will not have any contact with you or him beyond this point. If you were going to do something like this, it should have been done 2 years ago, not now. I have not contacted you nor him and have done NOTHING wrong or to hurt you since 2005. Hell, the statute of limitations is probably already up. So, take your backwoods drama and leave me out of it. I don't have time to deal with you, him or your drama. Move on and do what is best for your son! All you guys are doing is hurting him.

~Crystal M_____

That was the end of it. No more mysterious e-mails at this address. What to make of it? Your interpretation is as good as mine. The telephone area code, from which the photo was sent, is in one of two Hillsborough Counties in the United States. I suspect that 'David' , in his drugged state (if we to believe Crystal's accusation), was giving out my e-mail address instead of his own, by mistake, or on purpose, making up my address on the spot.

Poet laureate

On August 2, 2007, Charles Simic, 69, who was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the country at 16, was named the country’s 15th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress. He succeeded Donald Hall, a fellow New Englander, who has been poet laureate for the past year. Here are some quotes from newspaper reports and a handful of his poems. (Others can be found on the Internet.)

Simic said his chief poetic preoccupation has been history. "I'm sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents," he said. "If they weren't around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity."

Yet he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. "That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, 'What is the role of the writer?' " he said.

Simic is known for short, clear poems. His poem "Stone" often appears in anthologies. It begins:

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone..."

Fear -

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling.
And there is no sign of the wind.

My Turn to Confess

A dog trying to write a poem on why he barks,
That's me, dear reader!
They were about to kick me out of the library
But I warned them,
My master is invisible and all-powerful.
Still, they kept dragging me out by my tail.

In the meantime, in San Francisco (quote from the metropolitan newspaper):

"Sorry I was late," Lawrence Ferlinghetti apologized to the overflowing crowd at Caffe Trieste. "I was putting more Impeach signs on the upper windows at City Lights."

The crowd cheered.

No, that was not a report from an Agitprop event, but from the San Francisco Poetry Festival (what followed was more angry political rants recited by the 88 year old Mr Ferlinghetti.) Poetry anyone?

Surrealism lives!

Well, of course it does (live.) Long coopted by the advertising industry, it doesn't shock as it did in the 1920s Paris. It sells tampons, toilet tissue, and insurance, among all the consumables we purchase and use.

But this is about the last original surrealist still among the living, Enrico Donati, who is 98 years old, still working and still exhibiting. He associated with Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp and all the greats of the movement. His seminal work was the Fist (1946) bronze sculpture. Yes, those are two eyeballs staring at you. (There are many reproductions of his work on the Intenret.)

Here's what Mr Donati has to say about young artists today:

"They have no imagination. People think they're geniuses. They stand in their studios and look like little Napoleons. They think 'I'm a genius'. I don't think I'm a genius at all."

In the meantime, in the city of San Francisco, the taxicab driver who holds the city taxi medalion (permit) No. 666, asked the city taxi commision that the number be retired and that he be issued a new medallion. The driver said that the number (the sign of Lucifer himself) brought him nothing but bad luck even though the taxi had been blessed by a qualified friar. The commission voted 5-1 to keep No. 666 on the streets, citing concerns that the case might open a can of worms with other drivers asking that their numbers be retired. After all, San Francisco is a multi-ethnic city and various ethnicities consider many other numbers as unlucky. Incidentally, 666 is the address of SS Peter and Paul's Church on Filbert Street in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, a well known actor, married (as of this writing) to a well known Hollywood actress has been hired along with his spouse to act in a bio-pic portraying a stormy marriage of some real life characters. Both the actor and the actress, incidentally, have been over the years frequent visitors to the gossip celebrity pages describing their antics and scandals. Here is what the famous actor said recently about the filming:

"All my actor friends warned us, saying, 'Those abusive husband-and-wife scenes are gonna be difficult. It almost scared me into quitting. With those scenes, we'd end up exhausted. But driving home, we'd just look at each other and say, 'We are so normal."'

Kosmos Knows

On Friday afternoon I transferred at the usual station. They were already on the train.

{                       }
{L    doors   R}

................ F| <--- seats
................ E|

A B ...... C D
_ _ ...... _ _ <--- rows of seats

_ _ ...... _ _
_ _ ...... _ _

Two young women in their twenties in seats A and B, made up, well dressed. A young man in his twenties in seat D, T-shirt, fashionable semi punk haircut. A woman in her late thirties in seat E, no make up, lowcut blouse. A man in his late forties in seat F, short sleeve shirt. Caucasian race. They were together, conversing. I entered through door R and sat down two rows behind woman A, looking at her back, both our backs facing the train's direction of travel.

At the next station, another pretty young woman came on waved in by woman B, and sat dawn in seat C. Woman B introduced her to everyone. I heard only that man D is woman's B boyfriend. A minute later, woman E mentioned something about her fiance. Woman C showed everyone a photo on her cell phone. Woman C asked young man D a question, which he answered, and man F jokingly added, "yes he's been in prison". Perhaps he was the young man's father, but no, woman E was too young to be his mother.

The train was noisy, there were other conversations around, and I didn't make out much of their exchanges. I only concluded they were all going for a night on the town, or maybe to a ball game, and that they were unfamiliar with the route. Man F rose and walked over to check a map hanging on the wall past door R. Woman A held a sheet of paper with another map.

And then I noticed. C, D, E, F had all the same noses. (I couldn't see the faces of A and B.) The same bridge, the same nostrils, the same proportions. Class VI. I watched them as they turned, faced me, turned their left and right profiles toward me, and the noses all looked identical. I looked around me at other passengers, to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, and they all had different nose shapes, all classes of shapes represented. The young Chinese man who sat down next to me had a Class II, the Greek nose. A black worker across the isle had a Class III the Nubian nose. A Hispanic woman had a Class V, the Snub nose. I started wishing I had carried a small mirror with me, like when I was sixteen.

Five stations before my destination the train becomes crowded with passengers transferring from another line. The young Chinese man got off and an older white woman took his place beside me. I examined the shape of her nose. Class I, the Roman. I focused at a dozen other noses. All different. Two tall men in their thirties entered and stood by doors L, as all seats were now taken. One of them soon approached woman B and out of the blue asked her where she was from. She answered "From around here", "You're from around here?", he asked. "Yes," she said. The man retreated back to his companion. I checked out these two men's noses. The questioner's companion's nose was shaped the same as the noses of this group.

They finally got off one station before I was to disembark. I could see that woman's B nose was much wider and shorter, the Snub nose, but woman's A nose was the same as the noses of the rest of them.

The woman sitting next to me disembarked as well. A young man, who was standing by our seats took her place. Class III nose, I noted. He turned to me.
"Excuse me, I noticed that you were watching the group that just got off the train," he said.

"Yes. So?" I answered a little embarassed at being caught staring.

"Well, you see I'm a student at the University, working on my Ph.D in Physical Anthropology, and I have a keen interest in people's physiognomies, in fact it's related to my thesis.

"Oh?" I said.

He answered, "Did you by any chance notice those people's ears?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, no," I said, as the train was slowing down. I added "oh, here's my station, goodbye."


(This post was inspired by the memory of Witold Gombrowicz' novel Kosmos.)

The choice

“Deep down, he’s really superficial.”

-- Dorothy Parker about
Ernest Hemingway

I don't follow leaders, and I watch the parking meters, as advised over 40 years ago by Bob Dylan himself, so you can be sure that I'll be the last cat to steer you in the direction of some television preacher, guru du jour, or a motivational speaker. I thought I saw the essence of motivational speaking a couple of decades ago on public television, in the person of a motivator whose selling spiel was a story of how for a long time he had been a lost man barely subsisting in some American city, before he saw the proverbial light and got motivated to become... guess what, a physicist, computer programmer, teacher, journalist, doctor, lawyer? No, folks, motivated to become a motivational speaker! That was the bloke's entire resume, presented to motivate ourselves to do something with our lives! I remember flipping the channels.

That said, there is one fellow I've come to admire, having at first dismissed him as another one of those. He's been around for 30 or so years, has written numerous books, conducts seminars all over the country, produces occasional programs for public television, that are shown usually during membership pledge times, like the concerts of the forgotten 1960s teenage heartthrobs, now aching and balding, when the local stations beg the viewers for money and more money every month from then on. (I flip the channels at those times, too!)

The reason I like this man is that, as I've seen over the years, he has gone deeper than the usual motivational speaker banalities and cliches, has reached to the ancient texts and to religious and literary sources of wisdom, and has become, for lack of a better term, a sort of popular philosopher. He's no Mortimer Adler, that's for sure (another author to look up), but he comes close enough.

His name is Dr. Wayne Dyer. Check him out. I don't buy everything he says, and I'm not qualified to write a summary of his teachings, as there is plenty information (as well as some controversy) about him on the Internet.

All of the above as an introduction to a thought I have been meditating over recently, that, I am told, originated from Dr. Dyer:

"When given the choice between being right or being kind, always choose kind."

Wow! It may not be deep, but it sure is provocative, and, I'd say, a bit discomforting (Feel free to disagree.)

Is this a white flag of surrender? Is this a real or artificial choice? A manifesto of a feminized American male? All these questions came up as I chewed on the sentence over the past month. A short time before hearing it, I did in a manner of speaking choose kindness over rightness to deal with a tough professional problem with personal ramifications, emerging from the experience not exactly unscathed, or much wiser, but alive and kicking, which was better than I or anyone had expected.

Lead us from here

I'm an ape man, I'm an ape ape man,
I'm an apeman
I'm a king kong man, I'm a voodoo man
I'm an apeman.
I don't feel safe in this world no more
I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore
And make like an apeman.

(Apeman, by Ray Davies)


I spoke to my Wednesday yoga teacher before class. I told him I had picked up a copy of Bhagavad Gita, as he had recommended, and started reading it. I said that as far as sagely advice went, the Gita or Sun Tzu, as I remembered them, had little or nothing to say about relationships between men and women. And I said, I thought that was because in those days, relationships were about cavemen dragging the cavewomen by the hair into the cave, as illustrated by modern cartoons, and, even if not entirely true, that was more or less, metaphorically, the essence of it. (Caveman, apeman, same thing.)

"Is that what you would like to do?" he asked.

"Well," I answered, hesitating for a second, "what's a fellow to do?"

(You thought I wouldn't hesitate, didn't you?!) I have sought his advice lately, and we have had several longer conversations about this and that, about relationships and so on. It never hurts to ask.

"It's advice about life in general," he said referring to the Gita, "But relationships are a big topic, aren't they."

I asked him if he had seen her, in his other classes outside. No, he hadn't, he said. I told him about a recent encounter, seeing her drive by.

"Did she try to run you over?" he asked.
"She looked angry, sad, and pained at seeing me. Why, after all this time?"

"Divorce is not easy," he answered, "Seeing her affected you too, didn't it. Now, go change."

It wasn't strictly speaking a divorce, but I didn't argue. It was getting close to class time.

"Isn't it great to be alive?" he asked cheerfully before I started out in the direction of the locker room. I recalled that line from the Rolling Stones' song Angie.

"No," I replied cheerfully, this time without hesitation.

As I walked to the locker room to change, I thought that all these books with advice about life in general are intended for and read by people who have achieved a certain level of bliss with plenty, perhaps too much leisure time, living surrounded by modern comforts, who feel just a little out of sorts, slightly neurotic, and not for people finding themselves in dire straits, sleeping under the bridge, or making a decision whether to jump from a bridge.

I changed, threw cold water on my face, as I usually do before heading back to that bright, warm, mirrored room with the smiling yoga teacher standing at the center.

"Angie, Angie,
When will those dark clouds disappear,
where will it lead us from here."

______________________________________________

DISCLAIMER: The above work of fiction, and any resemblance between
the characters herein and real persons living or otherwise is purely coincidental

A man on a fuzzy tree

There is an idiomatic slang phrase I use occasionally, most recently during a conversation with my yoga teacher, relating to him an encounter with a certain Her we both know fairly well, when she had passed me in her car as I was walking down the street, and having noticed her facial expression of anger, sadness and pain, as a reaction, I thought, to the sight of me, I told the yoga teacher that the experience got me all shook up!

Uh, uh, uh, I'm all shook up! Yes, it's incorrect grammatically, but who'd ever say 'I'm all shaken up?'! During formal occasions, when I slip up and say the incorrect phrase, I have a bit of trouble backing out of it, and I'll correct myself saying something like, "uhm, I got a little shaken up.' The society ladies present raise their eyebrows, but in the end, they find it in their hearts to forgive. Except for one of them, but that's another story altogether.

The ungrammatical phrase originated most likely on the streets of New York, or among Southern blacks, but it gained wide usage after Elvis Presley recorded a song by Otis Blackwell titled, well, 'All Shook Up' and took it to the top of the charts in 1957, as a follow up to his hit composed by the same Otis Blackwell, and titled 'Don't Be Cruel'. Incidentally, according to reports, Presley mimicked on his recordings Otis Blackwell's own interpretations he heard on the acetate demos. The two never met.

How the great Otis Blackwell, who went to write numerous hits for Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and others, and remained and died in obscurity, came up with the song, is another story, which I'd like to relate here.

Actually, there are several version of this story and, in the spirit of John Ford who had a line in the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that went 'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend', I'll relate the version I heard first and consider my favourite.

Otis Blackwell, already enjoying the big success of Don't Be Cruel, visits his music publisher, Shalimar Music in New York, bragging that he can write a song about anything. One of the owners of the company walks in, shakes a bottle of Pepsi Cola he's holding in his hand, and says "Here, write about this!" (A historical note: while the circumstances of the event, as well the identity of the person who shook that bottle vary in the different versions of the story, one element remains constant throughout: it was a bottle of Pepsi and not Coke!) Otis came back the next day with the song, which in part went like this:

A well I bless my soul
What's wrong with me?
I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree
My friends say I'm actin' wild as a bug
I'm in love I'm all shook up
Mm mm oh, oh, yeah, yeah!

[...]

She touched my hand what a chill I got
Her lips are like a vulcano that's hot
I'm proud to say she's my buttercup
I'm in love, uh, I'm all shook up
Mm mm oh, oh, yeah, yeah!

The DISCLAIMER

Early morning Friday the 13th, after a night of dreams about electricity, guitars and bridges, I find myself munching on an almond cognac croissant and talking to a lawyer.

"You've got to protect yourself," he tells me.

Ho hum, doesn't everyone.

"You write about easily identifiable people in your blogs, embellishing them, adding descriptions and dialogue that never took place, right?"

"Right, just as I told you," I said.

"Well, some of them might not appreciate your embellishments, feel offended, complain, sue, g_d forbid shoot you, then what?"

"Well, I survived one small incident with a gym staffer, I'll survive the rest."

I told him about the fiction of W.G Sebald, which reads like a memoir, and that this style is what guided me too. The 'I' in Sebald was not really himself, and the 'I' in my blogs is not entirely myself either.

"I'm not writing a diary, man, which is one of the reasons it took me so long to get started - I had to think up the form and the content. You know, some of these characters are invented out of whole cloth. I might even invent you."

"Not funny," he said.

"Well, after all you're a lawyer, counselor," I replied. We know each other well enough to engage in a little teasing.

"You need to put a disclaimer in your blog posts," he said, his eyes signalling lawyerly seriousness.

"Like this?" I opened a book I was holding and showed him the following:

DISCLAIMER: The following is a work of fiction, and any resemblance between the characters herein and real persons living or otherwise is purely coincidental.

He studied it slowly, then said: "That's a particularly weak one, but yes, something like it."

We finished without agreeing on anything, and I headed to work meditating on Friday the 13th, and on the lucky penny I found yesterday while thinking about someone special, and if it would bring better luck than the pennies I kept finding in previous months.

What drawer?

What is "writing for the drawer", anyway? Google this phrase surrounding it with quotes, to learn more, in the meantime, I'll tell you where I picked it up.

I picked it up from a newspaper review of a collection of Susan Sontag's writings. It was a quote from something she had written. Where did she pick it up? Google suggests an answer. Susan Sontag was known for her interest in writers behind the Iron Curtain, writers who had to put up with strict government censorship, and often "wrote for the drawer", unable to publish their works. (She was also known for her relentless, extreme Leftism, which leaves us with a question about Sontag's state of mind and her reasoning for reconciling her support for oppressed artists with a belief in the ideology that spawned that oppression.)

You will see that Google hits refer to many such Eastern European writers, who for a time wrote for the drawer.

Needless to say, this blog misuses the phrase in a way, as blogger.com is a public, uncensored (?) forum. On the other hand though, I think that, unless one's an exhibitionist or a megalomaniac, vanity press projects are similar to writing for the drawer, since no editor or publisher is given a chance to scrutinize them and decide whether our rants and rages deserve to be seen by the public at large.

Censored and ostracized writers in totalitarian states who wrote for the drawer, wrote for that drawer, but also for a few trusted friends and acquaintances, and this is what we are doing here now.

Going...

"If you're going through Hell, keep going."

-- Winston Churchill

Isn't it strange how you can be going through hell, I mean psychic hell, uncertainties mounting, head hurting, dark tunnels without an end, and at the same time, be writing jokes, thinking up puns, writing them all out on Internet forums, exchanging quips with co-workers at the water cooler. Schizophrenia and "tears of a clown when there's no one around"?

The Age of Irony, someone called our times. We tend to respond to everything with irony. To relieve our ever present anxieties with verbal absurdities. At least on the outside. But then there is this story. A man deep in debt, his wife's private medical clinic failing, took her and the children for a ride in the hills a couple of weeks ago, stopped the car, pulled a gun and shot them before killing himself. His neighbours later said he was his usual cheerful self the day of the incident.

One benefit that comes from reading newspaper celebrity gossip columns, as I have been doing lately on the afternoon train back home, is the life affirming implicit assurance they carry that the rich and famous, with all their money, mansions and leisure time, are, at times, as miserable, heartbroken, and sad as the rest of us. The gossip, which is, I suspect, written with just that in mind, gives us hope to continue going through our private hells. Of course, while the regular, plain folks readers of such columns understand all this subconsciously, we the overundereducated must first interpret such phenomena theoretically before we can stoop down, go slumming and read such tabloid trash.

It has been a strange week for us here in America. With the Fourth of July Holiday falling on a Wednesday, we have had a work week consisting of two Mondays and two Fridays, one could say. In the meantime, I found this unattributed quote on the Internet this past week, quite a propos the Independence Day celebration:

"This country is not free by the pen but by the back, brains, and bullets, of a soldier."

Psycho

A couple at the pub this past weekend sat in a booth facing each other and text messaging back and forth between themselves. ('SMS', as it's called in civilized countries, that are not as fond of acronyms as we are here in America.) Once they became bored with the game, they sat in silence drinking their beers. I was sitting at the railing opposite the bar, glancing occasionally at the woman's low cut blouse, expecting for a nipple or two to make an appearance any time (they never did), and trying to figure out a way to connect some stories I was jotting notes about on an insert pulled out from a free newspaper, advertising something called Argosy University. Wanna quick doctorate in Business Administration? I didn't think so. I'd only lose my job if I got one! Anyway, SMS, a new way to communicate without wasting one's breath. Well, they say that most of our communication is non-verbal.


My dear friend asked me verbally earlier this year, out of the blue, if I thought her breasts had been augmented. ('augmented' was not the word she used, but I don't recall the exact term.) After some hesitation, I answered "Umma, umma, you know, I never thought about it (which was true), but knowing you as a person and without having a peek, I think not!" She said, "They aren't , but they are beginning to sag." I then said " Whatever, I love you just the same." Which was perfectly true.

There was recently a well publicized trial of a woman who had murdered her psychiatrist husband. She had been his patient as a teenager, he left his wife and married her, 25 years his junior. Three sons, weird beliefs shared between the two of them about satanic cults abusing children, and "recovered memory theories", popular once and long since discredited, divorce and then the murder. She fired several attorneys and defended herself, an intelligent but psychologically disturbed woman, she was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced, now two books appear about the case. In one of them, the author cites a friend of the victim, who says that the doctor so loved her that he let her kill him and "died from suicide by wife".

I related some of the comic details of my own near-tragic melodrama to a longtime friend, one of the very few I had confided in, and he sent me an e-mail in reply, suggesting I move to his country where femme fatales are not as common as they are here. He then issued his own diagnosis, saying that, oh, she (the other player) must be such and such astrological sign, what with the anger, the revenge, the plotting. And I answered, dude, she isn't, I am that astrological sign myself, and anger, revenge and plotting are the farthest things from my mind. In fact, it's everything opposite of that I'm thinking about. He replied that I'm a strange specimen of that sign, and advised me to return to writing about music.


The way our thought patterns work, you'd expect that a folksinger named 'Elvis Perkins' were some desperate show biz pretender nobody with a stage name cashing in on the familiarity of the names of two co-inventors of hillbilly rock and roll, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. Wrong, thought patterns! The fellow turns out to be the son of Anthony Perkins himself, best remembered in the role of the psychologically disturbed motel owner Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's horror film Psycho.