Ray Davies

Ray Davies, formerly of the Kinks, is on tour in the U.S. promoting his latest solo album. Reading an article about him in a local newspaper, I found this interesting tidbit:

Davies often strolls through his London neighborhood undetected, notebook in hand. “The only formal training I’ve really had is as a painter, and in trying to pick up emotions within pictures,” he explains. “And I guess I’ve learned to do that. … I can look at people, and they say something, then everything goes into slow motion and it registers inside me. I can pick up on that vital element, that significant visual, and paraphrase it. So I’m still in awe of great art, because something inside me still wants to be a painter,” he says. Like his songs, “There’s something about great art, where that moment can only exist as one thing. You can do reproductions, but there is only one original.”

19th century on the ropes

Hollywood actor and writer Ben Stein, perhaps the lone conservative there, takes on Darwinism. This is going to be fun to watch. Read about it here.

The properties of words

Have you ever seen an animal shrug, asks Tom Wolfe in this fascinating interview published in this morning's newspaper.

GFE

I had to look it up. Euphemisms and acronyms, in which the American culture revels so much, have a way to invading one's mind that after a while, seeing one over and over, you start thinking that you are the last person on the continent who doesn't know its meaning. And so you look it up. It's a relatively easy task these days, what with the Internet, the search engines, discussion forums where you can ask, etc.

I figured out myself what 'TS' meant. Trans-sexual, or tranny, or in earlier times hermaphrodite, except that 'hermaphrodite' refers to the time before surgeries made it possible to become a tranny. The acronyms were all in the ads. Two inch by one inch advertisements in the backs of weekly "alternative" tabloids, three such newspapers in this area. The ads support these, often radically left wing rags, that I (and everyone I know) pick up free to read restaurant, film and record reviews, that often are quite good, and not the feverish and loony political rants and crusades. Sitting at a bar and scanning through the pages I cannot avoid seeing the three or four pages of ads for prostitutes and massage parlors, with their fuzzy photos, telephone numbers, business hours (24x7 often enough!), and keywords such as "Incall", "Outcall", "TS" and of course, "GFE", or "NO GFE". What? Hold on a minute.

As I learned this past week, the ads may be entrapments set up by the police who don't have enough to do chasing the rare street crimes, so they ensnare men to solicit prostitution, which is a crime everywhere in this country except in some Nevada counties. Whenever the cops shut down a prostitution ring in the area, one often managed by East Asian immigrants, they keep running the ring's ads in the weekly rags for a spell, for the purpose of entrapping potential customers and making the world a safer place for the rest of us.

Back to GFE. Thinking that I was the last person in the 49 continental states who didn't know what it meant, I researched and found out. Still thinking that everyone knew, following the recent news of the Governor of the State of New York being caught in a prostitution related scandal, I asked around if the $4100 per hour fee he was paying included the GFE. No one I asked knew what I meant.

It's time to explain. 'GFE' stands for 'Girl Friend Experience'. The prostitute will (or will not) provide it. Or she'll provide it for an additional fee. If she provides it, she'll act during the encounter like the client's girlfriend instead of like a cold, contemptuous clerk at the government tax office. Who wouldn't want it?! Everything is for sale, even the GFE!

Vaclav Klaus

"It is not about climatology. It is about freedom," says Vaclav Klaus in an interview published this morning by the Wall Street Journal. Choice quotes:

The world, he argues, is full of risks, and the risk of catastrophic climate change is just one of them.

"if you are afraid that there are risks to something, you may prohibit everything."

King's evil

Coffee was first imported into London from the Middle East in 1657. An advertisement from the time said:

"A very wholesome and physical drink that helpeth indigestion, quickeneth the spirits, maketh the heart lightsom,is good against eye sores, coughs, head-ach gout and the King's evil"

Dude, what is "King's evil"? It is scrofula (WHAT?), a tuberculous swelling of the lymph glands. OK, I think we're safe. In the meantime studies show:

• That older women drinking one to three cups a day are 24% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease.
• One study shows that after 13 years of drinking there was a 14% greater risk of hypertension, while another study (from Hahvahd, no less) could not find a shred of evidence that coffee contributed to hypertension.
• Twenty studied proved that coffee helps ward off diabetes-2 disease.
• 400 studies demonstrated that coffee was protective against colon, rectal and liver cancer.

• Finns who drank 10 or more cups daily were 84% less likely to to develop Parkinson's disease.

But I bet they were more likely to engage in Saint Vitus dancing. Well, that's all right, it's perfectly acceptable as it's now called hip hop!

The Remainders

I'm reading By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel (original French title The Gray Souls), which caught my eye yesterday at my favourite bookstore, and I picked it up paying one dollar for it. I go there almost every weekend (to my favourite bookstore), and head straight to the back wall shelf where the unwanted, unpopular books are placed and sold for one to three dollars a tome. This weekend I saw there Jim Crace's Being Dead and Aleksander Hemon's The Question of Bruno, two terrific works of fiction, that everyone ought to read, but apparently no one will, even for the price of one dollar each.

The bookstore, called Half Price Books is part of a chain out of Texas, which specializes in used and deeply discounted books. You'll never know what you'll find there. Here, it is located inside a former five and dime store called Kress' or, earlier, Kresge's, that, as all five and dime stores, went out of business, despite their success (they've been replaced by 'Dollar Stores'.) It is a grand Art Deco building downtown, the underground floor now occupied by a jazz club. I miss Kress' where I bought my detergents, inexpensive socks and brushes, but Half Price Books makes up for it nicely.

The new books they sell are either foreign imports (from Great Britain, mostly) or publishers remainders, that is books that originally cost $25, and now go for under $10. The $25 books that become remainders the fastest are those "written" by politicians, or political commentators, and related to some current events. I put "Written" in quotes, because politicians never write their own books, and not often read them. These books take 6 months to arrive in remainder racks, and remain as uninteresting as when they first came out. Others remainders are often novels by unknown writers, that just didn't manage to make it to the bestseller lists. There are illustrated albums, and history books you never knew existed, plus more sudoku collections, and computer manuals for software products obsoleted after six months.

The best finds are proof copies sent out to reviewers, who then sell them to Half Price Books, often before the official publication date. They are in paperback, and cost just a few dollars, while the hardcover editions are sold elsewhere for $25.

And by the way, some noted writers, including Stephen King, once formed an amateur rock band called, what else, The Remainders, and even went on tour!