Operation Zipless Cakewalk.
TBogg points us to this interview with Tony Kushner, which (among many other things it’s good to hear being said) has added “his zipless little war” to my lexicon. —Also, he’s working on a musical.
The show abides.
INT. STUDEBAKER. DAY.
KERMIT
Why are you jumping up and down?
GONZO
I’m hoping mad!
KERMIT
Guy’s got a sense of humour.
FOZZIE
Hey, why don’t you join us?
GONZO
Where are you going?
FOZZIE
We’re going to follow our dream!
GONZO
Really? I have a dream too… but you’ll think it’s stupid.
ALL
No, no! Tell us!
GONZO
Well, I wanna go to Bombay, India and become a movie star.
FOZZIE
You don’t go to Bombay to become a movie star! You go where we’re going, Hollywood!
GONZO
Sure, if you wanna do it the easy way.
The next time it’s getting to be a bit, well. Remember the International Channel. Especially at 9 o’clock on a Sunday night when Showbiz India is on. Not just for the impossibly cheerful and preposterously joyous clips of song-and-dance numbers from mass-produced Bollywood musicals (where Michael Jackson’s old choreographers must be lauded like those old Beijing Opera fighting masters on the sets of Hollywood action movies), though that’s what lifts the heart and crooks the grin in the first place. —It’s also because you get to hear a long rambling interview with Gurinder Chadha, who was born in Kenya and grew up in England, and whose new film, Bend it Like Beckham, is sparking girls’ soccer leagues like wildfires across India. You get to hear her talk about casting her aunt in a background role and having relatives call from Australia to crow about seeing Auntie on the telly in a movie and you remember once again how big and wide and unexpected the world is and yet people somehow manage to crisscross it with something approaching grace (Jane puts down in New York a newspaper picked up in Australia; she can replace it with another copy from the kiosk on the corner)—and somehow it manages not to unravel in total chaos except.
Except.
—But at least these days it’s easy enough; we can all be superstars of Bollywood. (Each in one’s own unique idiom, of course.) Lots of bhangra and Najma and Vijaya Anand to be played at work this week. Talvin Singh, too. —Especially the stuff he did with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, except we’re getting rather far afield from Bollywood. But why not? Bring along some Muslimgauze, too, and Sif Safaa—except. Except.
Sometimes, though, you just can’t resist that pellet.
Keeping in mind that skewing an online poll is mockery for ever taking the damn things quasi-seriously in the first place, Atrios is right: Wolf Blitzer deserves as much grief as you can possibly give him for phrasing a weasel-assed question like today’s. Go. Vote early and often.
What are you protesting?
Whaddaya got?
Meant to note this one earlier: Kevin points us to a fun little piece by Geoffrey Nunberg on the semantic drift of the word “protest”—since you now hear “pro-war protest” referred to every now and again:
But it sounds a little weird to talk about a protest in support of a war that’s about to be initiated by the Administration in power. Maybe that’s just semantic sloppiness, as if “protesting” nowadays were just a question of getting together to yell slogans—why should the other side have all the fun? Or maybe it’s a strategic blurring of historical memory. It’s hard to keep this stuff straight in an age when the oldies stations are apt to play Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” back-to-back with Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which was a number one hit a few months later.
Worth a chuckle.
And you thought “freedom kissing” was a joke.
One of Daze Reader’s readers sent in this photo of a Nevada brothel menu.
Bush! Klaatu barada nikto—
It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet. But if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We will be waiting for your answer.
Which, to be fair, risks being misread, or rather read as a mirror image of my own reading; after all, in some imaginations, it’s Bush standing at the head of the flying saucer’s ramp, having been shot in the back by paranoid, squabbling (former) allies, delivering his cinder speech to Saddam Hussein—whose present course they fancy threatens to extend his violence. (The persistent lack of any option to join us and live in peace in Bush’s various ultimata rather militates against this reading—but the risk, nonetheless, is there.) Still! The first thing I thought when I read this—
Berkeley – After more than a million years of computation by more than 4 million computers worldwide, the SETI@home screensaver that crunches data in search of intelligent signals from space has produced a list of candidate radio sources that deserve a second look.
Three members of the SETI@home team will head to Puerto Rico this month to point the Arecibo radio telescope at up to 150 spots identified as the source of possible signals from intelligent civilizations.
—the first thing I could think to do was run outside and find a really tall hill and start yelling as loud as I could: “Help! Help! You frickin’ Galactic-Federation-formin’ Ashtar-Command-runnin’ Fermi’s-Paradox-duckin’ motherfuckers, get your butts down here and do something!”
All di tings wey dem talk about di rights, wey human beings suppose to get, na im de for this small book.
[...] Article 7
Everi one na im be, di same for law, no mata wetin di person be or di kind person e be. Di law of our kontri must to make sure say notin happen to am. Di law must to make sure say dem treat everibodi di same, so tay all dis tings we de talk about human right, nobodi go against am, or gada people to go against am.
—via Open Brackets: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Nigerian Pidgin English.
Pardon my French.
It was kind of pathetically funny when Neal Rowland did it. But actually slapping the moniker “freedom fries” on the US House of Representatives cafeteria menus is—well, it’s upholding a long-standing tradition of moronic House grandstanding, but it’s still pathetic. Disappointing, even. —But no longer funny.
Don’t take the weasel’s way out: don’t try to argue that they’re really Belgian fries, and the only reason we call them “french fries” is because of the technique of frenching, or slicing in long, thin strips (more properly referred to as “julienne”), thereby proving the protest is not only moronic, but misguided; Snopes makes it pretty clear that we call it frenching because that’s what you do to make French fried potatoes, and not vicey-versey. —Just go out, have some lunch, and order french fries, loud and clear, by golly.
Speaking of lunch—
Happy Easter.
I think I’m just going to take a pass on this one.
Retailers went on the defensive. “There was no intention on our part to offer up a violent Easter basket. We’re very conscious of what will and what will not offend our customers. It was meant to be a lighthearted and fun gift,” says Kmart spokesperson Abigail Jacobs. “It’s in my opinion a harmless toy included in an Easter basket.”
The reaction to a Voice query at Walgreens contrasted sharply, with company representatives retreating instead of digging in. “Going forward next year, we don’t plan to have Easter baskets with toy soldiers or a military theme. The thinking on these Easter baskets was more toy-related and we didn’t really think about it otherwise,” says Walgreens spokesperson Carol Hively. “We apologize to anybody who is offended or felt that this was inappropriate.”
Anyone else want a crack at it?
However could I have forgotten the Generating Stabilizing Electro Carbon Condensating Atmospheric Pro-Cyclonic Compact Dynamic Magnet Box?
There’s been some recent traffic at an old post, one I wrote back in December on kid detectives (and inventors, and magicians) and magic and slandering Encyclopedia Brown (and just as a side note: sitting across the table from Kristen Brennan at Bucca di Beppo’s is a delightful exercise in fragmentary multichannel signal-as-noise watch-me-for-the-changes-and-try-to-keep-up brinksmanship): Mike Tatreau came through, finding the book long since forgotten but rather tenuously described as having “this haunting nighttime flight home over moonlit countryside on a bicycle, and a midnight picnic of sandwiches in a field in the middle of nowhere.” Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jan Wahl’s The Furious Flycycle! —Except, of course, for the fact that the flight is away from home during (mostly) the daylight, and it’s a noontime picnic (with iceberg watermelon pickles), and there is some haunting moonlight, but it comes later, and anyway, Wahl slanders wolves. But. There it is.
—Now we just need to find that Dutch? German? French? book in English translation with the Purloined Waldo cartoons for each bite-sized chapter-mystery. Anyone? Anyone?
Word to the breakaround, y’all.
Or something like that. —If there’s any blogger I’d ever want to be (aside from myself, that is), it’s the languagehat. The man’s polylingual like a fittstim, snarky like an illywhacker, he’s all-too comfortable brachiating happily through the madly glorious exfoliations of the liberal arts, and every time I think of him as the Rosetta stoner, I break out in a fit of Flight Lieutenant Biggles; if nothing else, he raises the bar for links to cool stuff you might otherwise never have heard of but now can’t imagine living without, you know? Which, for me (cue standard MeFi lament), is what the web is all about.
His write-up of the New York Times obituary of Robert K. Merton, for instance, which, in the course of firmly cementing another book into my teetering must-read-soonest stack, reminded me of the all-too-terribly cool word “anafractuous,” in the course of seeking a quickie etymology of which I stumbled over this lovingly detailed exegesis of John Bellairs’ “The True History of St. Fidgeta, Virgin and Martyr.”
In other words, today I had a good coffee break. —So. Thanks, ’hat. Look on this perhaps as sincere flattery, inspired if nonetheless inept; I just wanted to give a little something back. Yo.
t.A.T.u. en passant—
Elena posts some interesting insights from Russia into that phenomenon known as Tatu—who, I am given to understand, are 50 cents shy of the number one spot on TRL. (There’s a moral or something in that, or maybe it’s an ironic O. Henry twist, but I don’t give too much of a damn. I’m enjoying h too much for that.) —I’d just note that in the version I’ve seen of “Prostye dvizheniya,” it’s not at all clear Yulia’s, well, jilling off; she was assembling a time bomb to blow up her school (metaphorically, maybe; these music videos are irresponsibly slippery when it comes to the Truth) because Lena was making out with some guy in the middle of a slo-mo carousel. But that video was I’d thought for “30 Minut,” so what do I know? —I’d also note that mentioning t.A.T.u., Taty, or Tatu prominently on your website is a great way to score traffic from web searches.
Pictures, pretty pictures, and statistics.
I was temping in the mailroom of a [commodity] company’s world headquarters (or, if you like, the world headquarters of the [commodity] division of a much larger company; it all gets so complicated with all those interlocking boards of directors, you know?)—and from here on out, whenever someone speaks dreamily of the inherent superiority of private corporations over government institutions when it comes to being lean mean efficiency machines, I’ll think of the Shanghai junk mail. International inter-office mail went out twice a week via FedEx, see. You’d take whatever had accumulated in the Shanghai in-box, say, over the course of the week, and stuff it in a FedEx international overnight envelope, weigh it, print up the shipping invoice, and put it on the stack for the guy to pick up at 4:30. Now. Since the guy in Shanghai did almost everything by phone or fax or email, and anything physical that absolutely, positively had to be there overnight was, well, sent overnight (since none of the local stationery shops had watermarked stock certificate paper of the archaic dimensions favored by a Mexican law firm, we had to get that firm to send up a chunk of their blank stock via FedEx so that appropriate certificates could be printed at headquarters and then FedExed to a board meeting elsewhere so three people who wouldn’t otherwise be in the same place at the same time could sign them and then FedExed back to headquarters so that we could FedEx it back to the Mexican law firm—FedEx: it’s not just a transitive verb, it’s a racket), and didn’t languish in the interoffice in-box, well, what was left, twice a week, was junk mail. Seminar come-ons, offers on the latest businessprech books, stamp-your-logo-on-this-ash-tray-and-give-it-out-as-a-sales-incentive pitches, executive travel package deals, credit card offers, magazine subscription cards, and thinly veiled attempts to buff up a marketing database by urging you to renew your membership in this or that dodgy [commodity]-based professionals’ fraternity or who’s who directory, all of it gang-addressed to the names of every company executive on some three-year-old list (“Who’s X?” I’d ask, trying to sort the mail my first couple of days. —“X? X? Oh, right, he’s dead”)—and since they were all executives, logic (absent real information as to actual locations) dictates it all be sent to the home office. Including, you know, the stuff for the guy in Shanghai.
So twice a week—in addition to shopping for stationery in Mexico City—I was shovelling a snowdrift of 3×5 and 5×8 cardstock (matte and glossy), shrink-wrapped trial issues, and no. 10 windowed envelopes (“0.0% APR!—For the first 90 days, then…”) out of the Shanghai inbox, dumping them into a FedEx international overnight envelope, and blowing $35 so the guy in Shanghai could have his assistant open the envelope and dump all the contents straight into Shanghai’s paper recycling stream.
“Can we just skip it this time?” I asked, the first time I put together an international interoffice run.
“International shipments go out twice a week. Germany, Ireland, Shanghai, England. It’s all got to go.”
“Yeah, but the guy in Shanghai has nothing but junk mail.”
“So that’s what you send.”
So I sent it. What the hell. Wasn’t my money. Wasn’t the money of the person who was showing me the ropes. (The dodgy nature of anecdotal evidence aside, money to burn will be burnt. Whether it’s public or private. So.)
—But! That wasn’t what I wanted to point out. One of the seminar come-ons that I ended up keeping (everyone in the chain of command got one, including the guy who’d been dead three years) was for visual representations of data—you know, charts and graphs and such. At the top of the flyer was the arrestingly beautiful graph-map of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign, by Charles Joseph Minard, acclaimed in the flyer (and elsewhere) as the best graph ever done by anyone, anywhere.
There seems to be something of a Minard meme running around lately; at least, ever since I tucked that flyer away (along with a copy of Scientology’s Advance! magazine, addressed to an executive who’d moved on to other things, and a charming renn faire catalog ditto), I’ve seen it crop up in unexpected places, like tacked to the wall of Scott McCloud’s studio. (Actually, thinking about it, that’s not that unexpected.) —The most recent place (also, thinking about it, not that unexpected) is over at Ray Girvan’s criminally underappreciated cornucopia of miscellany, the Apothecary’s Drawer; there’s a dearth of permalinks for individual entries, but scrolling down to find the one dated 14 February 2003 will take you past so many other cool, time-wastin’ links that I’m sure you won’t mind. When you get there, you’ll find links to re-visions of Minard, Florence Nightingale’s contribution to the history of statistics, and other historical milestones in the field of statistical graphing—including this stunning 1880 stereogram, perhaps the first stereogram ever done, breaking out the population of Sweden from 1750 – 1875 by age groups. It might not be the best, but it’s certainly one of the most beautiful. In an austere, geeky way.
And now for some necessary comic relief.
Me: It is possible that some people might have found the plot a little improbable. They might find it hard to believe that, in order to garner political support for his tax cuts, George W. Bush would secretly arrange a giant parade in Washington honoring the richest people in America, who would march front to back in order of their net worth. Or that a cadre of earnest, teetotaling college students would get wind of this and, encouraged by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, rise up to stage a heroic counter-parade honoring basic American values like morality and hard work. Was this perhaps deft satire, a nifty Swiftian touch?
Burrows: No.
Me: Ah.
—from Gene Weingarten’s interview with Robert Burrows on his novel, The Great American Parade.
I should probably fall back on Aristotle at this point and note that the comic is properly the ridiculous, which is itself a species of the ugly—and one must admit that the ridiculous (especially as a species of the ugly) is not without its own (quiet) dignity. (“Dignity!” cries the Gene Kelly in the back of my brain. “Always dignity!”) —For all that The Great American Parade sounds truly, ridiculously wretched (if not so much the worst novel ever published in the English language), Burrows has earned a hallowed footnote in the history of holy follies.
Or, at the very least, he’s made me smile. Here’s one to him, then.
Given the source
of the quote in question, I’ll put my money on option C.
A bit of whimsy, with coffee.
Parking spots, via Anita Rowland. (Coffee? I meant my coffee. You’ll have to get your own, I’m afraid.)
It rather speaks for itself, don’t it?
Folks: the National Geographic swimsuit edition. (Thanks to the Daze Reader.)
You can even select which cover you would have chosen, had you been the art director—and offered only three shots, of women in swimsuits, five minutes before deadline.
(Fret not overly, o androphiles: there’s a bit of beefcake in there, too. —Wasn’t that magnanimous of them?)
