what the hell are you writing about?

You say you once read here something about, like, different types of wind, and now you can't find it, and you desperately need to, because you've met this wonderful boy/girl/very young FBI agent who's really into, like, weather? Fear not - I have created an index to this site, which will allow you to find such arcane entries. See the link over there, on your right, below the archives links? Good!

(This was too self-indulgent even for me to maintain...oh well.)

Press Those Trousers!

We're planning on getting rid of all the annoying grass in our postage-stamp backyard (what's left after we'd built the brick patio, that is), and so Rose (whose undergrad degree is in landscape architecture) has been getting all these catalogs in the mail from vendors of various seeds, plantings, and other horticultural paraphernalia. Anyway, one arrived the other day bearing the slogan "Plantsmen since 1950." "Plantsmen"? (Wasn't that the band Robert Plant led in 1965 or so?) Now, it's a cliche that flowers and such are not the sorts of pursuits that impress the guys down at the construction site (unless a backhoe is involved), but that word sounds positively macho, doesn't it? "The doughty plantsman wrestles with the dreaded Heracleum mantegazziani!" No quiche for these shear-wielding bruisers! Of course, gardening already shares the term "ground cover" with an extremely macho discipline: warfare. So I suppose butching up gardening is a perfectly supportable endeavor.

This Week's Theme: Driver's Licenses!

Did anyone else notice the amusing editing glitch on 24 last night? (I'll attempt to phrase this to avoid spoilers for those who haven't seen it...) In the scene at CTU wherein That Woman's ID is projected on a screen behind them, we can clearly see that the ID bears the first name of the actress who plays the role. (And also her birthday, in case anyone wants to send a card.) I'm guessing they'd intended to digitally edit in the character's first name, but that detail was overlooked.

the tower is everywhere

Wow! Was that really Thomas Pynchon (as himself) on The Simpsons Sunday? (Yes.) That's got to be pretty near the casting coup of the century (okay, the century's not that old, but you get my point). You can see the segment here. Of course, Pynchon's not really as reclusive as all that: he popped up a few years back to write the liner notes to a Lotion album, for example.

And then there's the Wanda Tinasky thing...but that, alas, wasn't him.

Hey, what are you doing? I didn't sign the back of my driver's license!

Joy has come to this house in the form of the CD issue of the Couch Flambeau compilation I Did a Power Slide in the Taco Stand. Anyone who went to college in the eighties probably remembers these guys, with their killer combination of hard rock guitar and absurd, sometimes gleefully stupid lyrics delivered in Jay Tiller's bemused, nasal squawk. Of course, one could quibble with the song selection: a lot of my favorite tracks from the earliest years (when they were still known as the Couch Potatoes, until the organization of that name got snitty) are missing, probably because the original master tapes were lost and the songs that do appear here had to be remastered. The band's Models EP seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the discography as represented on its website - no huge loss, except for the immortal "Satan's Buddies" - but that's why I still own a turntable. And sadly, the band's balance between "I'm a really good guitar player" and "I'm a huge geek" tipped a bit too much toward the guitar end in later years: too many of the songs from the band's more recent releases are longer than they need to be and slightly curdled in wit. But it's great to have this stuff in the rather-less-transient-than-cassette CD medium in any event. Since the all-inclusive box set with extra disc of bonus tracks is probably not feasible for a band that was a cult phenomenon at best (a phrase which here means "never threatening Michael Jackson's reign over the eighties charts"), I'm happy to have what this set offers.

Oh - and the band continues its habit of incorporating Beatle-geek lore in its release's catalog numbers: previous titles have cribbed from the original, US Capitol Records releases, while this one is catalog number LMW28IF...

we love Arnold Corns

Someone really should check up on the water being provided to members of the RIAA and heads of record companies...their increasingly absurd paranoia makes the later years of Howard Hughes come across as a pinnacle of commonsensical reforms in hygiene and comfortable footwear. They remind me of someone at an airport worried to a feverish sweat that something they say might possibly be construed as a reference to an idea that could imply familiarity with a joke that might refer to a bomb. I refer to Greil Marcus's "review" of...well, I, too, am afraid to tell you, exactly, lest someone find out - but a text search on the word "watermarked" within the text frame at the above link should help you find it. Apparently, the new idea is to try to sneak out new releases by high-profile, potentially bootleggable artists in an entirely sub rosa fashion, as if they're spies tunneling beneath the Berlin Wall and bearing coded transmissions of the most ponderous import. Are they blood-testing music reviewers yet, and assembling thick dossiers on their history and trustworthiness?

(I wonder how the "real" Arthur Moore - featured on this compilation - feels about his new fame? I guess I give someone some credit for picking a clever, obscure pseudonym, anyway...)

nothing to see here - move along...

You'd think Amalgamated ConHugeCo and their ilk would get it by now: launching lawsuits against folks who'll take an entire lifetime to earn what the corporation's CEO earns in five minutes is not exactly good public relations. So yeah, here's Microsoft, living up to its heavy-handed reputation... The best part, though, is this: "Rowe registered the [website's] name in August. In November, he received a letter from Microsoft's Canadian lawyers, Smart & Biggar" - wait a minute, "Smart & Biggar"? Is that supposed to be intimidating? Didn't Bart use that once calling Moe's? It gets better, though...at Rowe's website (which I'm not linking directly, because his host is getting overwhelmed - and my five readers would send that camel to a chiropractor, at least, particularly if they happened to carrying any straw), he notes that Microsoft claimed that the phonetic similarity of the name might cause confusion, in that even though Microsoft doesn't do web design (Rowe's avocation), it does make a web-design package, FrontPage. Uh-huh...a corporation that consistently copyrights generic words and phrases for its products and services (Office, Word, FrontPage, "where do you want to go today?") now is fighting the fight for clarity and distinctiveness in product-naming.

In even more trivial news, we were watching American Beauty earlier this evening, and I'm wondering why Peter Gallagher's eyebrows didn't receive their own credits. Do they each have their own IMDb entry, and do they squabble with one another like the Olsen twins...?

image of the day

Last year on our visit to California, one of our drives took us along Hwy. 111 and the Salton Sea area (geography perhaps suspect and sheer guesswork). My friend Susan took several photos, and this is one of my favorite photographs, period. I'm not sure she was going for what I see - but what I love about this photo is the way the light, color, and reflection on water work to create a painterly impression. There's no Photoshopping or alteration of any type: what you see is just a straight scan of the print, which was taken with a nothing-special film camera out the window of a moving car, if I recall. Part of my fondness for this photo is its sheer accidental beauty - I know I couldn't have taken this photo if I were trying to get it. I love the color palette, the gray-green of the vegetation set off against the reddish brown of the soil and hills in the background, the icy blues, grays, and whites of the lake - and by contrast, the rusted metallic hulk in the left foreground.

Offshoring the Ass-Hat-in-Chief to an Extraordinary Rendition

At the beginning of each year, the American Dialect Society votes on distinctive words that characterize the preceding year. The results for 2003 are in and are currently posted as the main item on the Society's webpage. Incidentally, don't you hate it when items are placed in obviously temporary URLs? It seems likely, wandering around the site, that it'll eventually show up at /woty.html. Previous years produced some insight into what might herald a divide amongst the society's members: in 2001, "most inspirational" was added as a new category solely to accommodate "let's roll"; the fact that someone the next year nominated "grid butt" (you can look it up at that sub-URL) as a candidate for that category suggests that there was less than universal praise for the existence or necessity of the category - which indeed has disappeared.

The words and phrases picked to signify 2003 seem apt - for better or worse - although I'd never heard the word "flexitarian" (voted Most Useful) until now. (I wonder if the same person who nominated "grid butt" as Most Inspirational last year nominated "ass-hat" as Most Useful this year?)

Naturally, I quibble: a brand name that's existed for years (Tofurkey) simply doesn't belong here, either as new or creative. I'd nominate the quasi-vegetarian version of the infamous turducken, in which tofu replaces the outer layer of turkey, as the winner here: ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Tofucken.

It's a sad comment that every one of the Most Euphemistic winners is about death and destruction. Oh for the old days, when we'd euphemize about sex.

I have to wonder what "tomacco" is doing here at all: first, because it was introduced in a Simpsons episode probably five years ago, and second, because that very fact means it will "succeed" to the extent that Simpsons fans will know what it means as long as the episodes keep being watched. The word's reputation will only embiggen as the years pass.

Past years' entries show the Society's done a reasonably good job guessing which words will survive - although in other categories, eyebrow-raisers are frequent. For example, "m'kay" is not a "euphemism for the F-word" in the South Park movie (why would there be a euphemism for "the F-word" in the movie when the word itself is used, oh, a trazillion times?).

Viva

I've been on vacation this week, the first part of which was spent with several friends in Las Vegas. I am not, it's fair to say, a Vegas kind of guy: for one thing, gambling holds no appeal for me, not because I have any puritanical moral objections to it, but simply because I know the odds and don't think it's fun to throw money away. What can I say? Anyway, we went more to see Las Vegas, for our various reasons (Rose is an architect, for example) than to actually do Las Vegas. Here are a couple of observations.

1. As you walk down the strip, you'll notice tight little groups of people, usually youngish men, often Latino, advertising "strippers" who can entertain you in your hotel room. (Prostitution is not legal in Clark County, but enormous winking and nudging clearly occurs.) What's interesting about these guys is their routine is highly stylized. They'll sort of roll from side to side, alternating their balance from one foot to another, and when a guy approaches (doesn't matter whether he's with a woman or not), they'll move toward him. They carry little brochures advertising their "product," which they'll slap against their other hand as they call you out. Even though many of them actually have t-shirts imprinted with phrases like Strippers - 24 hours direct to your room, that slapping gesture immediately establishes their purpose to anyone who's been in Las Vegas for more than a few minutes.

One wonders how that gesture developed, at what point it became the thing to do, and how it spread from the various vendors to be nearly universal. Someone should send out a semiotically inclined anthropologist to research this phenomenon.

2. While we stayed in one of the older, rattier hotels (the Tropicana - because it was cheaper), we never made it to the oldest part of Las Vegas. In our two days there, we wandered about through most of the major casinos from Mandalay Bay down to Caesars Palace - including many of the newer casinos pitched toward the new, more family-friendly Vegas, which are essentially shopping malls crossbred with amusement parks. These tend to have themes, which are signaled in their names: Excalibur (medieval hoo-ha, apparently the favorite of families with younger children), New York New York, Desert Passage. What's interesting about these is the way these themes get played out in the structure and layout of the malls...errr, casinos. I imagine designers and architects fan out to photograph and study actual buildings from which they can cop details and layout. But that's not sufficient...since even if you copy the design of a genuine Moroccan building (say), that doesn't guarantee that the public will read it as "Moroccan." (It's doubtful they're that specific, either.) So it seems likely that they'd also need to research what the public imagines for such an "Arabian Knights" scenario - probably from movies, TV shows, etc. Which probably explains why much of Desert Passage looks like a small-scale set from Casablanca.

PS: Yes, the rumors you've heard are true: I indeed was in Las Vegas at the same time as Britney Spears. However, the media story about some hometown boyfriend marrying her for twelve hours is, shall we say, somewhat misleading. I will say only that I will never forget those twelve hours, and that I'll never play the trombone again.