I was compelled to go to church yesterday on my own, which is always a little nerve-racking. Not that being a lone male is awful, but I have to say that people hear so many horror stories about weird loners that being a man on his own is often taken as suspicious. No wonder so many single men hang around bars. No one cares there.
The real issue is the Sign of Peace, that part of the Catholic Mass where the congregants are encouraged to give each other a sign of peace. You might hug and kiss family members and friends, but otherwise you shake hands with those around you, smile, wish them "Peace be with you" or "Peace of Jesus Christ be with you," or something like that. It's beautiful, really, it takes us out of our selves, it reinforces the community, and it is the most dreaded part of the Mass for mysophobes and the terminally shy. Little kids like being sweet and like fooling around, so they're okay with it, or they hide under Mommy's wing and look cute. Teenagers usually hate it like poison.
When I'm with my wife, she of course gets my blessing first; then I seek out those around me. When I'm there by myself, I start thinking about it early, to plan my attack -- usually at the Gospel reading, when it's safe to say we have everyone we're going to get. Yesterday I was at the last Mass of the day, the spottiest, which adds some challenge. Were it a packed Mass, like the 10:00 AM, I could just grab for the hands around me; were it very sparse, like a daily non-obligation morning Mass, I could sit away from everyone and just wave at them.
All right, let's scope out the churchgoers.
The handsome chap in the center of the diagram is, of course, your narrator. To my right is a single middle-aged lady (pink); there is another elderly lady on her own behind me (orange). In front of me is a man and his teenage son (purple) and a family of three ahead of them (yellow). Behind me is a mother and her two children (gray).
I quickly assess the situation and make my plan:
As a singleton I have to approach the other singletons first, and to prevent snubbing the church lady on the same pew as me, she is my first contact, followed by the one behind me. That puts me facing rear, a good position to wish peace to the mom next; the children are wild card. You never want to grab for a kid's hand, but if it is proffered, a smart, professional handshake is in order. Then I will turn and see if the man and his son are still doing peace, or if they've assumed a manly face-forward-hope-we-can-move-on-now posture. If the former, then bid them peace. Forget the family two pews up; if they turn I can give them a wave, but you never reach over two pews for anyone but a blood relation, and then only one you really like.
I was confident in my game plan, and indeed it worked out just as I'd expected. I silently complimented myself on my smart use of spacial awareness and peace strategy.
Took baby dog Nipper out to do his thing the other night, and he stopped dead in his tracks. As readers of the Great Lileks's blog would say, he boofed.
A boof is a preliminary vocalization that may be performed when judging the presence and nature of a threat. Had it been a deer, or God help us a skunk, barks would certainly follow. But he stopped at the boof, because ten feet away was the first bunny of spring.
Apologies for the bad iPhone pic; could not
adjust settings for better zoom while restraining
crazed puppy.
Don't get me wrong, Nipper still wanted to run over there and make havoc. Whether it would have been just for fun chasing or for reenacting the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I prefer not to know. Experience of other dog owners tells me that their sweet little fluffy friend can turn into a killing machine for rabbits or squirrels, and as Jonah Goldberg says, I hate when cute things kill other cute things. So I held on to that leash as tight as I could. Bunny could not seem to comprehend that toothy death was right nearby.
I guess I've got a soft spot for rabbits. Never could get myself to try the Pel-Freez products. But other woodland critters? Pass the plate.
Groundhogs, for example, are on my murder list. It has nothing to do with their stupid winter predictions. When we first moved up to the country, we would occasionally see a fat li'l groundhog waddle across the backyard. "Look!" I'd say. "A cute little beaver!" I really was a city boy.
Some of the forested lots around us got bought, the woods torn down, more houses put up. Then we started to see more groundhogs. And then I started to see gigantic holes in the backyard. I'm not kidding. They have grown over the years. Two of them off the main yard are literally large enough to bury a fawn. Chuck holes keep popping up. So I've been at war the last four years or so. Chemical repellents. Noise repellents. Poisons. Dirt. Bricks. Cinder blocks. Yesterday, no lie, I was outside playing with Nipper and my leg sunk into a hole almost to my knee. These fuzzy little son-of-a-bitches do not take a hint.
This is why I hate movies like Furry Vengeanceor Peter Rabbit anymore. I'm living it. Also, the movies suck.
We'll see who wins this battle. Either they are going or I am going. And I am not going. (How can I? Who wants to buy a house that's being undermined by hell's own woodchucks?)
[Author's note: As I wrote yesterday, today we're running chapter 1 of my fantasy novel Bob the Mage. It's unlike any of my other books, one of the reasons it holds a special, wacky place in my heart. It's not a long book, but this is one of the longer chapters, so I hope you have time to enjoy it. It will be serialized here every Friday.]
Bob the Mage
By Frederick Key
(Although He Probably
Regrets It)
Chapter 1
Tegora! Land of stone cottages and whitewashed manors!
Kingdom stronghold of Maximo VII (may his cows never run dry), the wise and
powerful! Land of loaves and fishes! Milk and honey! Wheeling and dealing! Null
and void!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The brochures
make it sound pretty.
If I had to pick a time and place
where things really got bad for me, it would probably be there in Tegora one
brisk afternoon in early autumn. It was a typically pleasant day, the sun perky
in the sky, sewers sloshing along toward the reservoir, merry pigeons running
for their lives from hungry townsfolk, and I doing some conjuring tricks on a
street corner, earning coppers and derision from the locals. I had not eaten in
days, but for the odd crust of bread from the street and the odd pile of pork
chops pilfered from the nearby abattoir.
“Ho ho!” laughed the twenty or so
townsfolk as they watched me conjure a purse from thin air. “Ha ha!” laughed
the large man whose purse it was. “Chuckle chuckle!” laughed the mob as it
chased me through town.
This might seem like a tight spot,
but I’m used to being chased and frankly I’m pretty good at it. I turned some
corners swiftly, ducked through some alleyways, doubled back under a moving
cart, cleared some fences, shrieked as I saw the mob standing in front of me,
cleared the fences again, shinnied up a drainpipe, and broke into a house. As I
heard the thundering boots of the mob pass by below I was so frightened I could
barely stuff my pockets with valuables.
Remember when I planned to do Fiction Thursdays and it didn't happen? Yeah, good times.
Actually, it looks like we're on again, only now it will be Fiction Fridays! Which, you must agree, is alliterative. So it has that going for it.
To recap: I recently uncovered a book I wrote a number of years ago. Never mind how many. I can't count that high. But it was soon after I graduated college. I had been working for years on a serious satire (yeah, I know) about Society and Beliefs and Stuff, Man, and not surprisingly that book was gliding along like a zeppelin full of bricks. I hope I burned all the pages, although burning is too good for it.
What I did next was a great relief. I'd always been a fan of fantasy and science fiction, and when I wasn't wrestling with ponderous mega series like Dune or Lord of the Rings, I would cool off with light comedy. I read a lot of Piers Anthony, Robert Aspirin, Ron Goulart, Robert Sheckley, Terry Brooks (Landover series), Anderson and Dickson's Hoka books, and guys like Barry Longyear (Circus World), Marvin Kaye (The Incredible Umbrella), and even George MacDonald Fraser (The Pyrates, a lot more straight-up laughs than his other historical fiction). So when I had to stop thinking seriously for a while, Bob the Mage was the result.
I wrote three or so drafts and got it polished up to where I thought someone like Tor (which had a sense of humor back then) or DAW might be willing to run it as a paperback original. But I never got a foot in the door. Back in those days it was still thought, as had been prescribed for decades, that your best bet was to publish short fiction in genre magazines before making the leap to novels. However, the number of genre magazines had dwindled from dozens in the 1930s to about the number of fingers on Captain Hook. So I never had any luck there, either.
And it wasn't like Bob was great literature. It was written to be a funny adventure, and I think that it is. Desperately in need of editing, though, which was unable to do then but am able to do now (you're welcome, younger Fred). I think the story holds up and many of the jokes are pretty sound, so I'm going through it and bringing it up to modern Fred standards.
What's it about? About 200 pages. (Ba dum dum.) See? Humor!
The story is about a loser wizard, the eponymous Bob, who runs into trouble with the law, gets drafted into the magical corps, then mixed up with buccaneers, runs afoul of a mighty sorcerer, falls in love, and spends a lot of time running from people who want to kill him. Your basic picaresque fantasy adventure, told by our plucky hero.
I hope you'll stop by tomorrow for Chapter 1. It made me laugh out loud, and I hope it will do the same for you.
A serious issue has come to my attention. Apparently some of you are having children when you should be adopting dogs. This is a matter of grave concern to the Canine-American community.
I do not wish to sound like I dislike children. Nothing could be further from the truth! Children are some of my favorite people. They are small and cute. Sometimes they smell great! We doggies usually love them, even ones that pull our tails or whiskers or ears or stick fingers in our heinies -- you know, not really crazy about the heinie thing. But they are usually very friendly to dogs, giving us pats and love, and they often slip us food, which is very good. So I and my canine chums agree that children are all right.
The thing is, it seems that some people who would make perfectly okay dog owners are instead having children. "Oh, a doggie is too much responsibility," they say (probably). "I think I will just give birth instead." Maybe even, "I am simply too lazy to have a dog. I will have offspring."
This is wacky kind of thinking! Trust me, your dog will turn out to be a lot more helpful than a baby. Babies just lie there and do nothing, unlike dogs who do... Well, if a burglar came into the house, I promise you, you would not see the baby hanging off the naughty man's leg by his teeth!
What's more, children continue to be helpless and stupid much longer than puppies do. I don't want to name names, but I have heard of some able-bodied humans who remain helpless and stupid as adults. Do you want to take a chance on that?
To bolster my point, I would like to list these reasons why dogs are better to have around than children.
1) You don't have to buy a dog clothes. (You can, but you don't have to.)
2) A dog will never steal your car. (Well, almost never.)
3) Dogs do not require Back-to-School sales.
4) Many dogs are soft and fuzzy. Babies may be soft but are never fuzzy.
5) Pee on lawn vs. pee in pants: no-brainer.
So before you do something rash like get hold a human child, think of the many benefits of dogs. And if you must get children into your house somehow, first get that dog to help you out. Your sweet canine buddy will gladly assist in raising your wee one. We will keep an eye on him while you do dishes. We will play with him so he gets exercise. We will help him dispose of unwanted dinner foods. The list is endless.
All we pups ask is that you bear in mind this simple thought:
Dogs may fuss and chew up bones But never need to take out loans For college.
This has been a public service announcement from the dog.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Say, Fred, how about those Girl Scout Cookie yogurts by Yoplait? As a reviewer of Girl Scout Cookie cereals, and sometimes even Girl Scout Cookies themselves, you must have an opinion."
By gum, of course I do! I'm an amateur pundit, so I have opinions on all kinds of things. Lack of knowledge is no bar to punditry, you know. But in this case I actually went out and bought the three flavors of Yoplait, licensed by the Girl Scouts of America, since branding is all they ever do:
What we have here is a Caramel Coconut yogurt in the Yoplait original line, inspired by the Samoa cookie (also known as the Caramel deLites), in the center. On the sides are two yogurts in the Yoplait Whips! line, a Peanut Butter Chocolate, based on the Peanut Butter Patties (also called Tagalongs), and the Thin Mints, based on the Thin Mints (also called... Thin Mints). Anyone hoping for a shortbread-flavored yogurt is out of luck.
If you aren't familiar with it, the Yoplait Whips! yogurts are light, airy yogurts that have been whipped to fluffiness. Do not write to me about your thoughts of Girl Scouts and whips. That is not what this is about, and you should hang your head in shame.
See? Fluffy.
Despite the fact that the Girl Scouts are so lame as a scouting organization that thousands of girls have forced their way into the Boy Scouts (why, yes, I'm still furious about that, can you tell?), I was willing to try these as a public service to you, the reader. And because I like yogurt and I love cookies.
First up was the Peanut Butter Chocolate. There's no way to sugarcoat this: It was weird and unpleasant. Peanut butter yogurt is bizarre. PB is not bad in ice cream, but the tang of yogurt just doesn't work with it, not to me. The chocolate is all right, and in fact Yoplait makes a chocolate yogurt in the Whips! line that I like, but the peanut butter just ruins everything. It's as lame as... well, as the Girl Scouts.
Next came Caramel Coconut. It's all right, but nothing like a Caramel deLite or Samoa, my favorite of the Girl Scouts' confections. The cookie has coconut and caramel, but also chocolate to tie the flavors together. This yogurt has no chocolate, and thus no richness of flavor. I don't think I would have known it was supposed to be caramel flavored if it were not on the label. Disappointing.
Finally I tried the Thin Mints. Easily the most successful of the three. The chocolate is good, the mint is strong but not too strong. Tastes most like the cookie. Good job on that one, Yoplait.
Interestingly, each of these yogurt cups is 160 calories. That's equal to four Thin Mints, or slightly more than two Samoas (150) or two Peanut Butter Patties (130). How is a low-fat yogurt more caloric than a serving of cookies? Perplexing. I mean, when you eat a yogurt, especially a non-Greek yogurt, you don't feel like you've put anything in your stomach, but you might with a simple serving of cookies. Which is really worth the calories? Is that why we're really all so fat -- we're shoveling down yogurt? Would we be better off skipping yogurt and eating cookies?
Maybe. I'm eating both. No wonder my pants hate me.
Our March storms damaged a lot of trees, and there are lots of sticks and branches still lying around. The one you see here at the curb was a big, healthy branch before the blizzard.
But I'm not aiming to complain about winter again today. No, I'm pointing out the upside of tree damage -- I get walking sticks. When I'm walking the big dog, Tralfaz, I can basically reach down anywhere and pick up a new hiking stick. Not so with baby dog Nipper, who tries to eat them while I'm walking with him.
Inevitably while walking with a stick I think of the opening verse of "Me Ol' Bamboo," a musical number from the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:
A gentleman's got a walking stick
A seaman's got a gaff
And the merry men of Robin Hood
They used a quarterstaff
On the Spanish plains inside their canes
They hide their ruddy swords
But we make do with an old bamboo
And everyone applauds!
It is, hands down, the greatest number ever written about sticks.
A lot of people hate Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but others love it. I've seen grown women get weepy over "Hushabye Mountain." Unlike Mary Poppins, this film allowed Dick Van Dyke to play an American, which was a good idea, as Van Dyke famously did some lousy British accents in Poppins. (In an interview on Gilbert Gottfried's podcast, Van Dyke did point out in his defense that Mary Poppins had a large cast of British actors, and not a single one of them bothered to tell him that he was doing a terrible job at being a cockney.) Benny Hill also appears as a toymaker in Chitty, which is good, but is underused, which is bad.
I like the movie all right, and it was adapted into a successful stage production. I did not care for the Fleming book when I read it as a tot, and I supposed it's probably just as well he died in 1964 and never saw the movie. He might have gotten as grouchy as P.L. Travers did (the real one, not the Emma Thompson one, who hated the Mary Poppins movie).
By 1968, with the exception of Oscar winner Oliver!, no competent musical was being filmed. I believe no one has made a decent musical since. The plot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang doesn't make a lot of sense, and has some repellent aspects. As a child I was not entertained by the comical attempts at spousal homicide by Baron Bomburst; this heartless man-child is perverse and disturbing. One scene that should have been the sweetest in the film, Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes disguised as human-size toys as he serenades her, is ruined by being played for laughs. If Disney had made this film rather than MGM, they might have had a story editor to help the plot and fix these issues.
The song-and-dance bamboo number is worked into the movie poorly, but does advance the plot. Caractacus Potts's inventions usually go awry, as does his haircutting machine, resulting in him being chased through a fair. To escape his pursuer he jumps into a musical act. Were this a Jerry Lewis film he would have been put in the chorus and proceed to destroy the number, but as this is Dick Van Dyke, his character not only knows all the words and some tricky steps but winds up leading the number. He makes enough money in tips to buy the titular car. The number itself is well done, designed to highlight Van Dyke's gift for physical comedy as well as his dancing, while being appropriate for the period (c. 1910).
The Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, wrote all the songs for the movie, as they had done for Poppins, and here providemusic that is bouncy fun and lyrics that are terrific. I appreciate them better now through the magic of the Internet as I never knew what they all were, especially the repeated line in the chorus -- you can 'ave me 'at or me huh? Turned out to be bum-ber-shoo; i.e. bumbershoot, umbrella. The word bumbershoot is more American than British, says Webster's, but who cares? It perfectly fits the lyrics.
And some lines are quite sly -- A collier in the pits o' Wales / He leans upon his pick, for example. Not Goes mining with a pick or Fills his barrow with his pick or something; he leans on it. Did the Sherman bros. know that there was a miners' strike in South Wales in 1910? Or were they making a Teamsters-based joke on lazy workers? Hmm. In any event, as each stick is mentioned, it gives Van Dyke and the dancers an opportunity to play off the action described.
It's very singable if you can remember the words; being a catalog or laundry list song,the lyrics don't flow from line to line. In a song like Danny Boy the words build a picture, but a catalog song like Cole Porter's "You're the Top" uses bullet points, so to speak, to make its case, so it's easy to get lost. Being the helpful guy I am, I made a spreadsheet of the sticks mentioned in the song to help us all keep things straight.
It made me think that there might be a lot more things that could have been used, if you wanted to extend the song. Men have used sticks for all sorts of things, you know. Here's my extended list:
So, all these sticks: Phallic? I really doubt the Shermans were thinking that way. I'm sure the dancers would have made it clear about five seconds into the first rehearsal, though. But as my spreadsheets above make clear, sticks really are used a lot, not just for puberty level humor.
"Me Ol' Bamboo" has appeared the 1975 film Smile, in a UK episode of Big Brother, and in parody form on Family Guy, and possibly in horrible form in many school productions. I haven't seen any of them. But it shows the enduring popularity of the number. You don't see people singing "Truly Scrumptious" or "Toot Sweets," now, do you?
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the #10 film the year it was released, but marked a downturn in Van Dyke's career. I believe his battles with alcohol date to around this time, and a former acquaintance of mine was sure he appeared drunk in some scenes of this movie -- I don't see it, but I could be wrong. Soon Van Dyke would star in Garson Kanin's worst film, the horribly dated Some Kind of a Nut (if you haven't seen it, don't!) and a couple of years after that in Norman Lear's unwatchable Cold Turkey. The latter film has some defenders, but they are wrong. It is terrible, unfunny, and also horribly dated. But Dick Van Dyke was and is an astonishingly talented man, and has always found a way to keep coming back.
All these thoughts proceeded as we walked along, buoyed by the cheery melody playing in my head. "Songwriter/lyricist Robert B. Sherman was inspired to write the song by his own use of a bamboo walking stick, which he used after a World War II knee injury," Wikipedia tells us, so it's not surprising that using a walking stick would make me think of the Sherman and his old bamboo. We gotta stick together.
I walked Tralfaz yesterday and found a great stick. As soon as we got home he chomped on the end and broke it. Hope he doesn't do that with me 'at or me bum-ber-shoo.
I guess it's safe to say winter is over now. It's been spring for a month. The snow is all gone at last. Even the last of the snirt has faded away.
Snirt, Parking Lot, April 13
The first round of the hockey playoffs are over. At least for the Devils.
So winter is gone, although temperatures still hover around freezing in the morning. And the damage is still being fixed. Below is a picture of a small brick walkway that had a brief encounter with an enormous plow blade.
Those got pushed back into place, but the grass that got scraped up was not so easily fixed. Worse was alongside the driveway, where the truck plowed up a large swath of lawn. It took me 11 bags of topsoil to fill the gouge, plus a mess of overpriced grass seed.
Last fall I asked some guys to go up on the roof and replace any missing shingles. A big windstorm last week took off one more shingle. I have neither the ladders nor the height tolerance to go fix it myself, but it's a clearly visible gap from the street. I don't want to drop another C-note to fix one shingle. Doggone it.
It's all part of the game when you're a dazzling suburbanite.
I guess my point is, assuming I have one, that winter is one of two seasons that makes it presence known after the fact, especially when it takes so goldurn long to go away. Spring burns off in the heat of summer, and summer fades, and they both do so quickly. Winter causes a lot of damage, directly or incidentally, that tends to linger into spring. Fall is the only other season that reminds you it has passed, and that's because it dumps dead leaves and crap all over the joint. And yet, in every other aspect of life, it takes a long time to create something and no time at all to destroy it.
If there's one thing I hate -- hold on, never mind, there are many things I hate --
Of the many things I hate, one of them is --
Try again.
One thing I hate is organizations that are stupid about their acronyms. I really hate it. When a group changes its name it often means it has lost its focus. And that's only part of it.
So FFA, which used to have the purposeful and clear name of Future Farmers of America, decided that they didn't want to just focus on people who wanted to be farmers, in America, in the future. No, it was silly that people would want a thing like that! "FFA welcomes members who aspire to careers as teachers, doctors, scientists, business owners and more"...
They were focused on promoting agriculture careers. That's a clear and important mission. Now they're promoting any careers in anything. They have a little something for everyone. Which means what they do have has been devalued. No one but St. Paul can be all things to all people. In other words, the FFA has no reason to exist.
But what most irritates me is that they decided to keep the acronym FFA, even though it doesn't stand for anything. THAT IS SO STUPID. What, you were too cheap to buy new stationery?
You want to change your mission? THEN CHANGE THE NAME. Don't just have letters that are meaningless. It reveals the hollowness of your thinking.
"Hey. Psst. Kid. Wanna join the FFA?" "What's FAF?" "FFA, kid. Get it right." "What's FFA stand for?" "Nothin'."
Change the stupid name.
If there was anything dumber than that, it had to be this, from AARP:
If you can't read that, it says that the American Association of Retired Persons changed its name because some of its members were still working. Because they were enraged at being represented by a bunch of retirees, I guess.
So now, AARP also doesn't stand for anything, but they call it Aarp. Ahrrp. Which sounds like the last word you say after you fall off your walker and expire waiting for help to arrive. "Aaaarrrrp."
AARP seems to want to disguise the fact that its mission is to help old people. It was organized to help those who had retired and had all the various problems that come with old age and loss of income and even purpose. Now they want to help people who aren't old -- not really -- and aren't even retired. So they too have lost all meaning.
At least you could CHANGE THE STUPID NAME.
I fully expect that the Boy Scouts of America, who have stomped on the key word in that name -- Boy -- by allowing people other than boys to join, will become just "BSA" in the next decade or so.
"What does BSA stand for?" "Nothin'."
When the American Academy of Dietitians wanted to expand beyond mere national borders (something I suspect they would not have done except that George W. Bush was in the White House, but I'm just guessing), they didn't just call themselves AAD and say it stood for nothing. They became the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and to hell with the stationery. Why can't these other twit organizations do this? I mean, yeah, as AAD they might have gotten confused with the American Academy of Dermatology, but it was still a good idea to change the name entirely.
These dumbasses basically want to eat their cake and at the same time have their cake. They want to change the name for whatever dopey reason, like mission creep or greed for new recruits, while not losing name recognition. They are looking to split the difference. You cannot split that difference. You can only stick to thy last or CHANGE THE STUPID NAME.
It all makes me want to use language that is not worthy of a PG-rated blog. Besides, I have already used the ugliest word I know: Aarp. Which means, "I've fallen and I can't get up."
Last week I said I hoped that Thursdays on this blog would be Fiction Thursday, where I could run some new or recycled stories for your reading pleasure, or something. I have barely been able to think creatively or in fact in any other way because all my brain cells have been taken up with
INDEXING
Everyone knows that Copy Editors like your obedient servant here are pretty geeky, but indexers are geeks' geeks. It is a highly specialized skill within the field. It's like the open-heart surgery of editing; sure, every editor knows the theory, but few would want to have to stick their hands in there and take a whack at it.
Plus, it's boring as hell.
On the surface it seems very simple. Take your nonfiction book, note all the bits of information on each page with the page number, run it through Word's alphabetizing thingie, and break for lunch. In fact, Word even has an indexing feature, so you can just go down the document and flag key words for the index, and Word will spit it out at the back. Easy Peasy Lemonade Squeezy, or as the indexers say:
Easy
Lemonade
Peasy
Squeezy
HA! Shows what you know.
The chapter on indexing in the Copy Cats' scripture, The Chicago Manual of Style (new 17th edition!), is 51 pages long. That's a lot of pages to tell you how to compile an adequate index. Here's one chosen at random:
The thing is, indexing involves a lot more than knowing that A comes before B; it requires cross-referencing, subreferences, a knowledge of how to alphabetize names and foreign words, and whether numbers are listed before or after letters or spelled out and alphabetized as letters. In fact, before you even go that far, you need to know how the publisher alphabetizes. Yes, there's more than one method. Do you alphabetize word-by-word or letter-by-letter? In the latter, pear comes before pea soup; in the former, pea soup comes first.
As for those names, you may have to look every one of them up -- Carl Van Vechten, author of Spider Boy (1928), and Vincent van Gogh, the painter, are not alphabetized the same way. They are:
Gogh, Vincent van Van Vechten, Carl
Why? Because Webster's New Biographical Dictionary says so. Even though Vincent is called Van Gogh and not just Gogh. You just have to look them up. And don't even think about the Chinese or Japanese names, or worst of all, those Spanish names where every freaking family member gets a hand in, like "Carla Rodriguez Hermena Calderón de García." Where's the last name? Better look it up. If a foreign title is mixed in, you may not realize where the name ends and the title begins. If the person is known by a nom de guerre or something (Il Duce, Abu Mazen, La Grenouille Frénétique), do you list him under that, just add it to the name, do a separate entry, or just a cross-reference ("Verrückter Karl -- see under Von Hoopenschmactchter, Karl")? It is difficult, demanding, and yet still boring.
So what happened was, a friend of mine I do some work for asked me to give a thorough check to an index. As it happened, the deadline was very short and I had an appointment that day, so with great regret I had to pass on the assignment. 😅 A few days later he sent me a note and said, Guess what? We got an extension! Here it is! 😭 So that was my week.
All I had to do was check every single reference on the index, just to make sure the page numbers were correct. I didn't have to actually compile the thing. But it reminded me that indexers really are in a class by themselves. I salute you, indexers! No one gives you the credit you deserve.
My wife enjoys Project Runway, and I must confess that even if I'm doing something crucial, like writing this blog, that it's easy to be drawn in when she has the show on. "Ooh, no," I'll say, "orange and pink is daring but no one can make it work, especially not you, sugar." Or, "Honey, you got that fit 'n flare so backward it looks like a fare 'n flit." This from a guy who would probably spend all day every day in sweats if he could.
And it's not just the fashion, about which I really know nothing. After all, the great thing about being a guy is that when you want to look nice you can wear the same suit you could have worn thirty years ago, maybe with a tie that isn't old enough to vote, and bam! Well dressed. No, the appeal of the show includes the kindly mentorship of Tim Gunn, 3M salesman though he may be; also the way Heidi Klum throws people off the show with a tart "Auf wiedersehen!" like she's an ace away from having flunkies chuck them bodily into the street. In other words, the show has personality.
When I saw these disposable coffee cups in the supermarket -- because that's why you dream of being a designer, to have your designs on disposable cups in the supermarket -- I almost bought them for my wife.
The cups were designed by a contestant on the show, or rather based on his dress design, according to the press release from Dixie. Designer Brandon Kee (no relation), "Man Bun" to the viewers -- well, this one, anyway -- won that challenge (spoiler alert!) but not the season. He came in third. And yet his design graces supermarket shelves, presumably until supplies run out.
We use travel cups from time to time, because sometimes we have to leave the house and we are both pathetically addicted to coffee. Sometimes a reusable travel cup is just too inconvenient. And while Dart cups have the better lids with the little plastic flip that covers the drinking hole, Dixie's travel cups are okay too. BUT!!! (!) These Project Runway cups have only a 12-ounce capacity, not the preferred 16! Those extra four ounces could mean the difference between alertness behind the wheel and a fiery crash! Sorry, Heidi and Tim, but NO WAY. Auf wiedersehen, cups!
I would actually prefer something a little more manly, anyway. Maybe if there was some kind of crab-themed travel cup to link to The Deadliest Catch?
I'll bet some of you remember this from your childhood, and like me, may be surprised it is still around.
Yes, good old Old English Spread cheese product from Kraft. Apparently it appears in the movie Silver Linings Playbook, which I have not seen, and even used by chef Paula Deen, but I remember this product well enough. As I recall, it had an Olde Tyme font for its design in the past, which, going by this aged jar that appeared on eBay, was the product labeling for a considerable period.
"For Lovers of Rare Old Cheese"
Something I didn't know, and wouldn't have if not for the Internet, was that Old English did not just come in jars, but at one time was sold as a loaf, a companion to the still-loafed Velveeta.
And like Velveeta, both are shelf-stable in the store; no refrigeration needed.
I succumbed to temptation and nostalgia and purchased the jar up top. And my first thought on tasting it was not "This is tasty" or "This is how I remembered it" but "This tastes like Velveeta."
And that's the rub -- when you get down to it, Kraft various cheese-like comestibles (Velveeta, Old English, Cheez Whiz) all have that Velveeta vibe. Nabisco's Easy Cheese (a.k.a. Aerosol Cheese) does too. I know that by USDA rules they have to have some relationship to cheese to call themselves cheese, but they're all so much a non-cheese that they could have been in the Monty Python cheese shop without affecting the sketch.
Of course, here in the Hudson Valley, a very cultured part of the nation, home of the Culinary Institute of America and some of the finest restaurants in the world, home of West Point, and home of the famous school of landscape artists, we would never have anything to do with something as low-rent as Velveeta...
Since my hair decided that we would have to begin dissolving our relationship some years ago, I always thought that the upside was less time thinking about hair. Fewer trips to the barber, less concern about hairstyles and products, bed head and hat head of little notice, much less hair to pull out of drains and sweep off of floors. And indeed, while my wife's got a luscious head of hair, for years there was little attention paid on my part to the keratinous commodity.
Then we got two large hairy dogs.
I've seen this meme going around dog-loving circles:
All I can say is, we must have the most pixie-blessed house in town, if not the state. Spring cleaning came this weekend, and we exhausted ourselves, our Swiffer Dusters, our Eureka floor vacuum, our Bissel Pet Hair Eraser, our Swiffer SteamBoost, our blood, sweat, and tears -- and there's still dog hair around.
You keep feedin' 'em, they'll keep makin' it.
I have to wonder what TV's Burt Ward, who famously houses up to 50 dogs at a time (and runs a dog food company), does about all the dog hair. He's often focused on short-haired big fellows like Greyhounds and St. Bernards and Great Danes, not long-haired hippies like our dogs, but I'm sure he's got a lot of hair here and there. Hell, I've pulled dog hair out of an electrical outlet; we found a hair in the freezer. That glitter goes anyplace it can. How does he deal with it? He must have a staff, but how does anyone deal with dog hair on the industrial level?
It's a constant battle. It's also a testament to our dogs' lovability. But despite it all, we somehow manage to keep dog hair out of the food. So if you ever come to dine here at Seven Keys to Baldpate, you can rest assured that you will never find a dog hair in your pasta fazool. And if you do, it's just glitter.
Last November I reported on the death of Ken -- Ken More, our top-freezer refrigerator that had served us faithfully for close to two decades -- and its replacement with W. Pool, a side-by-side refrigerator that -- most importantly -- would fit in the same space as the old one.
So, how's that working out?
Great! It's a nice cold fridge that has an ice maker and a water dispenser with a built-in filter. Keeps the food perfectly well. Looks nice too. In fact, thanks to my wife's new No Magnet rule, W.P. looks nice and neat outside as well as in.
But thanks to the new appliance, I had to bring a tape measure to the grocery store.
Even then, it was a close fit.
As you can see, the 12-inch diameter Screamin' Sicilian frozen pizza had to go in on the diagonal. I knew that would be the case, as the freezer is only 9 inches wide and I had measured the pizza box right there in frozen foods, but it was a tighter fit than I had expected.
Apparently side-by-side units are the least energy-efficient of the popular types, and yet they're still popular. So are frozen pizzas. The frozen pizza section of the supermarket is only second to ice cream in terms of freezer yardage. I can't be the only person who had trouble stuffing a pizza in the freezer. And no, that's not a euphemism.
Of course, I could have rearranged the shelves, stored the pizza upright, but nothing else in there is this shape. Unless you're stacking a bunch of them, you'll have wasted space. Still, for many families frozen pizza is a staple, and they would have no trouble keeping a stack of vertically stored pizzas in the freezer and eating them in turn.
I'm sure I'm overthinking all this. After all, we have proven that this freezer is a perfect size for frozen french fries, ice cream, and even -- gadzooks -- vegetables. I'm sure it would work well with cheapo pizzas in narrow boxes like Ellio's or Stouffer's French Bread Pizzas. But a Wild Mike's large pie is 14 inches wide -- and would have forced either the moving of shelves or the immediate consumption of pizza.
All I am saying: Give pizza a chance!
No; what I'm saying is that we have a compatibility issue between our pizzas and our freezer. Maybe this is the real reason people have freezers in the cellar. You think it contains large mounds of venison and boar from bowhunting season, but really it's just all the frozen pizza that won't fit in the side-by-side freezer. Mighty hunter indeed!
Hi, gang! Going forward on this blog I was thinking about running stories and such every Thursday. Found an old book of mine, a very early effort that never went anywhere, but I thought I could spiff it up and serialize it.
Haven't started that yet, but I also found this old chestnut I thought I'd share with you today.
CLOAK AND ÉCLAIR
by Frederick Key
💣💀👥🔫🔪💵
The sweat was hot on my brow as I turned the corner and stopped. Hands shaking, I let a cig. Don't show it, I told myself. If you show your nerves, you're a dead man.
My opponent was smooth, though. I didn't know if he was still following. I didn't dare turn to look. That would reveal my face. Be cool, I told myself. It's just too important.
The big boys play for keeps in this business. Not a racket for the weak-kneed. Or the fainthearted. The lily-livered do better than you might think. But the pigeon-toed, forget it.
I had to keep moving. I had taken enough chances, and it was getting so every nerve in my body was doing the mambo. Had to give this guy the slip but good.
I darted into the next door along the Strasseheidelbergen. Took the rattling elevator to the second floor and broke into the fourth apartment along the hall. "Hi, honey," I said, kissing the Teutonic woman inside. Before she could scream I jumped out the window onto the roof of a passing bus. Leaping from bus to moving van to box truck to cement mixer (that kept me on my toes!), I managed to get across town. Then I shinnied down a lamppost, flagged a cab, handed the driver a fistful of counterfeit Euros, and said, "Airport! Schnell!" Then I rolled out the passenger side as he took off. I did that with other cabs, sending them to museums, theaters, massage parlors, and the zoo. That last one looked like he could use an outing. Soon I was all alone on the Himmelstrasse except for a potted fern, which I kicked over, sharply. Then I started for the shop.
It was two blocks away, so to be safe, I walked 67. When I finished the hike the sweat on my brow was still hot. I should see a specialist about that. But I had made it, and I hadn't given away its location. It stood before me like a pub before a thirsty footballer.
Ye Olde Spye Shoppe said the sign, cleverly covered in cloaks and daggers. Strips of microfilm dangled around the window, and track lighting illuminated racks of guns and knives.
It's hard to believe that the movie Office Space is almost 20 years old. The office tech in the 1999 film dates it, but it's not as different as a 1979 movie would be to a 1999 movie. Forget the Internet; in 1979 almost no one would have a computer. Michael Bolton would not be destroying a printer because there weren't any. Theme restaurants with unhappy waitstaff were just becoming a thing in 1979. In some ways the 20 years between 1999 and 2019 is not as different as between 1979 and 1999, and way less different than between 1959 and 1979.
The reason that Mike Judge's movie endures, though, is the terrific comedy characters brought to life by a great cast. Two of the greatest character actors of their generation, Gary Cole and Stephen Root, are particularly brilliant as passive-aggressive boss Bill Lumbergh and petulant mumbler Milton Waddams respectively, but everyone's good. Even Jennifer Jane Emerson, playing the thankless role of Female Temp, has one of the great comedy lines in movie history:
One thing that hasn't changed since 1999 or 1959: we still hate Mondays.
Efforts to make offices better since Office Space came out can be summed up in one word: Failure. It's not hard to see why. People are allowed to dress like pigs in many offices now -- in 1999 that was reserved for quirky Internet startups -- and on the whole having everyone look like a stoned undergrad does nothing for team unity or a sense of purpose. If people thought cubicles were dehumanizing prairie-dog holes, the despicable and counterproductiveopen-concept office has made us long for those halcyon days. More recently we have seen the weaponization of Human Resources, which is not likely to lead to a happy place.
A lot of this comes from company higher-ups acting like a teen's parent, trying to be "down" with the kids, and works about as well.
Bottom line: Whether your boss is a soft-spoken jerk like Bill Lumbergh or a loudmouth jerk like Alan Brady or even someone you like and respect, work is work and has to be done. If you're in a bad place, I hope you can find a way to go work in a better place; it is not always easy to find a good job. I've been laid off three times and chased out of bad workplaces and had to take pay cuts and had to piece together a full-time paycheck out of multiple part-time jobs, and sometimes the options are all crappy. May you find the least-crappy ones.
One thing that doesn't change: Mondays will still suck. Shift work and flexible hours don't help. Mondays suck even if they fall on Tuesdays.
Meanwhile, on the Roman side of things, today is Divine Mercy Sunday, which is a very helpful day indeed.
Celebrated the first Sunday after Easter Sunday since AD 2000, this day is a chance for Catholics to really set things right. For some, it is a glorious example of the boundless mercy of God, as revealed by Jesus to St. Faustina. For others, it's a makeup exam after flunking Lent.
How does it work? Well, at my parish there will be a celebration this afternoon featuring veneration of the famous picture of Jesus and the Sacred Heart (the Divine Mercy Image), with Reconciliation (Confession to you old-timers), exposition and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and recitation of the Divine Mercy Chaplet.
I'll just pop down to the neighborhood chapel.
The Chaplet of the Divine Mercy is particularly potent, as Jesus has promised mercy even to hardened sinners who pray it. A chaplet sounds like an olde-tyme cape, or a little teeny church, or a short British gentleman, but it is defined as a "part of a rosary featuring five decades." And as a wreath worn around the head. And "a small molding carved with small decorative forms." English is weird.
Anyway, sounds like a good deal, right? It's even better than that. Because we don't just pray for ourselves, but for every human being on the planet. In the rosary, in place of the 50 Hail Marys, we pray, "For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world." That means all of us palookas, every one. And we need it.
Of course I have a commitment I must attend to during our parish ceremony, so I'm going to miss it. It's a pity, because that mercy sounds like something I could definitely use. For the times I've been cross and angry and yelling at my dogs or at people (the dogs, at least, usually don't deserve it), for the times I have gotten mad at parishioners driving the wrong way in the church parking lot (it's not that hard, folks!), for the times I have asked St. Celestinia, patron of asteroids, to send just a couple of wee little meteorites down on the heads of mine enemies, for these things and others I could use me some mercy. It doesn't even have to be totally divine; just, like, 80 proof divine would be great.
And I could use some divine education. Imagine how embarrassed I was to find out there's no St. Celestinia! No wonder I got no meteorites.
