Not Even the Silly Season

Oh my, this (below) made me laugh. It’s from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words, a website worth visiting and a newsletter worth subscribing to. It’s weekly, so sometimes hard to keep up with, but almost always full of gems. He looks at new words coming into use in English (both British and American (and other variations too)), the odd history of words, and funny misuses of words.

The following is from his most recent newsletter from the section called “Recently Noted,” about words coming to prominence.

E FOR EVERYTHING So many words in the public prints now come with the “e-” (for “electronic”) prefix that I’ve long since given up mentioning them here, or in most cases even reporting them to the Oxford English Dictionary. But a big row in the UK last week led to the terms “e-petition” and “e-petitioner” becoming widely known. It all started with some bright young person in the Prime Minister’s office—some papers have fingered the in-house Web guru, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, surely an escapee from a Wodehouse novel. He had the idea that the Number 10 Web site should allow electronic petitions to be submitted. Some spectacularly silly ones have been organised, one of them demanding that mice be allowed to travel free on public transport and another one—which has gained a surprising level of informal support—arguing that Spandau Ballet’s “Gold” should become the new national anthem. The row, however, was over very tentative proposals to introduce road-pricing—charging road users by the distance they travel. At the last count, 1.8 million signatures had been added to an e-petition demanding the scheme be scrapped, even though trials are several years away and full run-out could not happen for a decade. Douglas Alexander, the Transport Secretary, was understandably displeased with the whole idea of electronic petitions. “Whoever came up with this idea must be a prat,” he said. (Prat: an incompetent or stupid person, from an old term for a person’s buttocks that also appears in “pratfall”.)

Don’t miss Gold on YouTube—priceless.

Random Flickr Blogging IMG_1610

Dizzying plains.

by sjareb

(Random Flickr Blogging explained.)

Another Great Voice Quiet

This was a voice not so much to listen to for its beauty, but to read or hear for its mordant wit and exposure of hypocrisy and idiocy. Molly Ivins died yesterday, and I’m sad.

She was 62. It was breast cancer, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, that other great voice recently quieted. I don’t personally know too many people who’ve died of breast cancer but I do personally know way too many who have had it. I have no idea if these kinds of things actually do anything, but there is a site that claims to support free mammograms if you just click…

Of course that, or even searching for the cure, doesn’t address the real issue of why there is so much of this kind of disease among otherwise healthy people….the poisoning of our world, basically. But I digress. More on this in another post, if I remember.

I have had many an excellent laugh from Molly Ivins, though quite a lot of that laughter rueful. Her invective was not toothless. In fact, with that Texas accent even coming through in her writing, one might not even recognize it as invective. There was a certain generosity in her bitingly funny critique. A generosity that might leave wiggle room for some toadying, power-hungry, narrow-minded greedyguts to excuse their behavior on the grounds of being a complete moron.

Here’s a great paragraph from The Nation’s article about her:

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins’s columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

The New York Times remembrance ends with these paragraphs:

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”

Confessions of a Lazy Blogger

I realize it is not done to manipulate one’s posts. I know it is fogeyish to overconstruct one’s supposedly casual rants and raves. I dig that it’s all about the immediate.

But still. Sometimes I compose a post in another application, you know, like Word or a textpad or even an e-mail. And then, sometimes, when I’ve been sitting there too long and my fingers have grown icy…. it’s just too much to actually take whatever heartfelt thingamajig I’ve composed and copy it over into the clicks and boxes of WordPress. It’s not that this interface is particularly onerous either. I’m just particularly lazy. And then, that poor post, not feeling so urgent once it’s written, gets filed for the next (next, next) day.

So my confession to you, imaginary reader, is that I’m gonna backdate some posts to the time I actually wrote them. If the machinery allows me such deception. I haven’t actually tried it yet. Such a revelation of disorganization or inertia or fiddling with dates may prevent me from running for public office one day, but I hope you won’t hold it against me. Thanks.

Grateful for the Well-Spoken and Annoyed

Toothless I remain (not literally, thanks to Dr. Polansky), but where has all the invective gone?

My god, things have come to such a pass that I am reduced to spluttering. Which is why I don’t post much here, in the place I thought I would do my political ranting. Take Bush in his press conference today, going on about the dire, most serious, portentious, and did I say dire, situation in regards to Korea (a.k.a. part of the Careen Peninshla). Trying to look like a responsible leader. Here’s a snippet:

[THE PRESIDENT:] Kevin.

Q Thank you, Mr. President –

THE PRESIDENT: If I might say, that is a beautiful suit. Q Thank you, sir. My tailor appreciates that.

THE PRESIDENT: And I can’t see anybody else that even comes close. (Laughter.)

Q Thank you very much. I’ll be happy to pass along my tailor’s number if you’d like that, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: I’ll take that back. I will recognize that — please.

Q On May 23, 2003, sir, you said — you effectively drew a line in the sand. You said, “We will not tolerate a nuclear North Korea.” And yet now it appears that they have crossed that line. And I’m wondering what now, sir, do you say to both the American people and the international community vis-à-vis what has happened over the last 48 hours?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I appreciate that, and I think it’s very important for the American people and North Korea to understand that that statement still stands, and that one way to make sure that we’re able to achieve our objective is to have other people join us in making it clear to North Korea that they share that objective. And that’s what’s changed. That’s what’s changed over a relatively quick period of time. It used to be that the United States would say that, and that would be kind of a stand-alone statement. Now, when that statement is said, there are other nations in the neighborhood saying it.

And so we’ll give diplomacy a chance to work. It is very important for us to solve these problems diplomatically. And I thank the leaders of — listen, when I call them on the phone, we’re strategizing. This isn’t, oh, please stand up and say something; this is, how can we continue to work together to solve this problem. And that is a substantial change, Kevin, from the previous times.

Suzanne. First best dressed person here. Sorry.

Q Kevin and I coordinated.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. He actually looks –

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq. A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December, at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?

Et cetera.

See, where do you begin? Well, in truth, I begin by appreciating those with the stamina to give voice to their outrage. Even if it feels it has no effect, it does no good to stop, right? I think I’ve mentioned The Disgruntled Chemist in here before. Did I mention Arse Poetica? Just a likeable soul who appreciates good things (say, food and praying mantises, though not together), suffers with others, and excoriates public idiocy (say, questionably elected leaders).

You can always find something good, if more intellectual than visceral, on 3 Quarks Daily. For example, you can’t beat a headline like this:
The Return of Henry Kissinger: Will We Never Be Free of the Malign Effect of This Little Gargoyle?, which links to a column in that vein by Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com.

One Good Move is a good compendium of outrageous observations, remarked upon with a blandness that accentuates the beyond-rage quality of outrageousness.

I’ll try to keep sharing the voices that in some way or other say what I would have said if I were half so clever. Or profane. Or not beaten down by the disbelieving dread of it all.

Fearful Invective

I know this is a really trite and prissy thing to get irate about, but certain brands of so-called reality TV do seem to succinctly represent a rotten society.

I’m late jumping on this bandwagon, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t deride these “competitive” reality shows, even the people who say they like watching them. The reason I’m late to this is that I’ve avoided the whole gamy field by simply not paying any attention at all. So, my vitriol is uninformed. I won’t argue that. That doesn’t make it wrong.

I had remained safely in my “reality”-free world until they upgraded the workout room in my workplace. I was very grateful for the new erg and the replacement for the antebellum weight machine and so forth, but sad that dual TVs had been deemed critical to the improvements. These days, as it happens, I tend to frequent the room at the same time as some very nice seeming person who treads away on a conveyor belt and watches Fear Factor.

Here, people, is the end of western civilization. (See my previous mention of The Four Gated City.) This is the irrevocable crumbling decay that is happening under our own stuffed-up noses.

The first few bits of the show that I caught while whipping through my weight workout didn’t seem so bad. People climbing a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter to grab a flag, swimming underwater to unlock something—whatever, these seemed like physical challenges no more bizarre than football or platform diving. But soon the whole gross-out aspect became evident. Transferring leeches between two containers using only your mouth, lying in a bed of millipedes, that kind of thing. Retarded. But the thing that put me over the edge, made me have to leave the room and think the world was going down the toilet, was when they introduced some buxom contestant and did the sun-dappled profile of her. Ahh, here she is with her sister riding horses in the countryside and the sister’s voiceover saying how sweet Ashlee is, though tough, and how much she really, really loves horses. So naturally her challenge is to play horseshoes with someone and whoever loses has to take the number of points they lost by and eat that many inches of horse rectum. Yes, that’s right friends, horse rectum (apparently dried). The screen shows the pretty girls, the host holding up a yard long thing that looks like your dog’s rawhide chew toy, and of course, of course, a couple of horses (ass view) in the background.

Really. I don’t expect people to want to always watch something edifying or be Dr. Bloody Bronowski or anything, but is this stuff really worth the firing of a single neuron? The crass manipulation of emotion and the encouragement of nastily selfish behavior is what seems most offensive, though on the other hand, aren’t they supposed to not harm animals in the production of entertainment? Did the producers just pop down to Safeway to buy a whole horse rectum, byproduct of some otherwise legitimate horse slaughter? Admittedly, I’d probably find the eating of horse rectum objectionable under most circumstances, even say, the more benign Iron Chef, but there was something especially repellent about the setup on Fear Factor. I know, duh, that’s the whole idea, get it—fear and repugnance. Primal, maybe irresistible things. But is there no better way to scratch that particular itch? And not to get unbearably righteous (like I haven’t already), isn’t there something despicable about eating as punishment when there are people starving in the world?

You may be wondering what happened to that horseshoe contestant, but literally, I left. And ever since when I’ve had to be in that room while the treader watches her show I blast music into my ears at dangerous levels and studiously don’t look at the screen.

A security professional I sometimes work with posits that the replacement of quasi-civilized TV (e.g., Spencer for Hire or The Beverly Hillbillies) with the truly abominable crap known as reality TV is what has caused the world to hate the United States (as the source of most of it), and want to strike out at us and all we stand for. I think he has a point.

Saw a Cool Thing Today

Someone had taken a whole lotta those ubiquitous yellow-ribbon “support the troops” stickers, and with minimal snipping had turned them into stylized letters which they had affixed to the tailgate of their pickup truck to read:

n o  w a r

Wish I’d had a camera on me.

Disgruntled Chemist Writes Letters

I do not know the Disgruntled Chemist, but I like his blog and the pep and righteousness of his disgruntlement. Plus dry humor. And who doesn’t love chemistry?

He posted a letter he wrote to his senator regarding U.S. policy in the Middle East and he invites all and sundry to steal and add to it and send it to their own elected officials. I will send something like it to my two Senators K. and I pass on his invitation to anyone who stumbles upon this page.

I like the notion of passing this on. It’s a rootier grass roots than old MoveOn.org, which I found inspiring during the ‘04 election, and still admire, but which now seems a bit diffuse and unfocused.(Sadly, I hardly ever open mail from Eli Pariser anymore.)

I was once a teaching assistant for a professor who tried to preach to his torpid-looking students in the windowless classroom that they ought to DO something. That activism wasn’t that hard, nor did it demand much. Five minutes a week, he said, could make a big difference. I try to remember that, and even act on it, though usually end up expending half a year’s five minuteses in one big clump, toothless and all.

Charming Invective

Just want to direct attention to a blog of infrequent but delectable updating. The author Suzanne is a friend of my friend Sara. We’ve never met but I feel like we have. She began her blog to chronicle her move from San Francisco to New Orleans in midsummer 2005, thus the blog name SF to NOLA.

Besides her mordant writing, she gives a different view of New Orleans than you can easily find elsewhere.

Bush Impersonations

Here’s a funny topic. Rhapsodizing about satire that pounces on the things one usually expends one’s invective on. My sister recently sent me a few amusing links:

On wimp.com, a surreally accurate Bush rendition. Especially combined with the low res video, you have to really ask yourself if it’s an impersonator (with a false nose, has to be). It’s a roast for Jeff Foxworthy, probably from Comedy Central? Not riotously funny, but as I said, astoudingly accurate.

Onegoodmove.org has another. Don’t know the original source. Will Farrell doesn’t do the best W impersonation, but it’s good enough to suspend your disbelief and the funniness builds as he gets more outrageous, though within character.

So, OK, let me praise a country that allows people to go unmolested (I think) for making fun of their elected leader. That to me shows a high level of sophistication. To believe that critique alone won’t topple a sound system, just the individual doofuses when their time comes. I do hope we can hang on to that.

It also reminds me of a million years ago, when my boyfriend on a soul-searching trip around the country was taken in briefly by the Moonies. Remember them? He said they were very nice, happy people really and seemed sincere in wanting him to be happy too…. It was the realization that the full embrace of happiness in their style meant the exclusion of things like Neil Young and Howlin’ Wolf and Virginia Woolf and other expressions of the blues that put him off. There was something untrue to life in excluding all that.

Why am I reminded of that? I don’t know, I must tell you honestly. What was I talking about? Oh, it’s that, well, if we had Utopia, we wouldn’t have satire, would we? Always look on the bright side of life…..