The bright side of a Moon
Why, yes, I am in fact up at 1:52 AM in the morning.
What am I doing? I’m taking the Pew News IQ test.
I scored a perfect 9 out of 9 questions. How did you do?
Just so you know, if you tend to watch local news, or listen to Rush Limbaugh, or Fox “News”… you probably won’t do so well.
However, if you tend to watch “The Daily Show” with John Stewart… you’ll do fine.
Note to my friends: Don’t worry, I’ll still love ya no matter what your score is.
As Bucky Katt says: “I don’t need constant adoration and ego stroking to feel good about myself. I’m not a dog.”
If you’re not seeing some of me in Bucky… you’re not looking hard enough.
Even Tracy sees it. Really, really well. Especially today. Click through the link to see what I mean.
Perusing the Sunday paper and digging in to my reward breakfast (reward because I ran a personal best time in the Race for the Roses 5K this morning – 27:12! 8:45 per mile pace!) in a window seat at the Limelight. Home-fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, French toast, sausage.
And coffee. Lots of cream and sugar, and I’d just gotten it to the perfect combination of temperature and flavor. The cup was half-full.
Lydia approached the table, asked me how I was doing. “Great,” I said, smiling. She carried a coffee pot.
She started to turn away, saw my coffee cup, turned back. Poised the coffee pot over my cup. “D’you want me to top it up?”
I didn’t answer right away. I sat there, looking at the cup, mentally still tasting the flavor of cream and coffee and sugar, feeling the hot-but-not-too-hot-to-drink liquid splashing over my tongue and warming my tummy.
The moment, silence… lengthened. Grew.
I looked up at her. “…ok” I finally said. She flipped her blonde bangs from her eyes, and her normal polite smile shifted into an amused sly grin.
I felt compelled to explain: “It’s just that I’ve got it to that perfect state -”
She laughed. “Oh, no, I remember!” She filled the cup, the milky tan fluid darkening to a rich medium brown.
“- and I didn’t want to have to do it again, but I figured the cup -“
“It’s a delicate balance,” she agreed.
“- was half gone already, so…” I trailed off. She knew. She understood.
“I drink mine black now, but I remember the ritual of preparing my coffee, back when I drank it with waaaaay more cream and sugar than almost anyone I know,” she continued. She’d moved to the next table over, and was clearing away the leave-behinds of the previous patrons. “But then I went camping -“
“Oh,” I interrupted “and you had to!”
Her eyes were focused on another time while her hands moved in the present. “Yes, exactly. No cream, no sugar. But I couldn’t go without coffee. So I learned to associate the good feelings of being in the woods with the black coffee. It’s just so” her hands left her task in the present and folded themselves around an imaginary mug while she leaned her face over it and took in the scent “rich and dark and strong.”
“That’s awesome,” I said. My mouth twisted into a smirk. “But that’s not gonna work for me. I hate camping.”
b!x at Furious Nads! had been covering the teacher in Sisters, Oregon who was fired for teaching Creationism in public school science class. He mentioned that one EMALman was questioning b!x about his coverage.
I took a look, and decided to jump in to answer at least one of EMALman’s questions. After two tries, it seemed obvious that the discussion was going nowhere so I politely declined to continue the discussion. I didn’t want to get angry over the massive amounts of miscommunication going on (on both sides, admittedly) and figured I’d call it off. I didn’t want to troll his site, I only wanted to present my own point of view. But EMALman’s follow-up questions showed that I would have to literally start from the beginning of my philosophy, which would take waaaay longer than just a comment or two. Not worth my time, and though he may find it interesting to discuss, I’d rather put those posts on my own site, actually.
At any rate, keeping all that in the back of my mind, I read in this week’s Ask Marilyn column some tips on keeping political discussions friendly:
Rule No. 1: Don’t expose weaknesses and flaws in the political beliefs of others. It provokes defensiveness, because everyone believes they are right; it makes people mad, because everyone hates to be called wrong; and people who are both defensive and mad are going to be ready to quarrel. Plus, showing people the error of their ways doesn’t make your ways right.
Rule No. 2: Explain the positive basis and evidence for your own political beliefs. People are more likely to adopt new beliefs than to drop old ones; also, people are more receptive to other ideas when not annoyed, and they will listen longer to pleasant, well-grounded comments and points. Plus, your beliefs needn’t be “right”; they need only to be a better choice.
Marilyn vos Savant is apparently the smartest person in the world – based on her scores on several I.Q. tests. I like her take on things, and in this instance I think she’s hit on a brilliant way for people to talk about so-called “touchy” subjects and still keep things civil. In spite of her disclaimer I think this would work for religious discussions, too – except for really aggressive evangelical-types, who would tend to not see a difference between talking about the benefits for themselves and their ideas of the benefits for others… though perhaps Rule No. 1 would mitigate that somewhat.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you dieting and exercise “don’t work”. When you stick with them, they work wonders.
I used to be big. That picture was taken in 1998. I was wearing 40″ waist pants at the time (in that picture, even – I hadn’t planned well that day, I was on vacation in Mexico, and I wore regular walking shorts to that aquarium, instead of swim shorts). Within just a couple of years after that, I was wearing 42″ waist pants – snug 42″ pants.
Dig back into the archives for the most recent dieting and exercise updates, but, long story short, today I did some clothes shopping and I came home with a pair of pants with a 33″ waist.
I haven’t worn pants that small since… well… probably since I was twelve! And I’ve got a bit more to lose…
This post at the Language Log makes me feel much, much better for not having read Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”:
I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.
The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, ‘Prologue’) is the Louvre, late at night:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don’t do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.
But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist’s profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn’t work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.
The writing goes on in similar vein, committing style and word choice blunders in almost every paragraph (sometimes every line). Look at the phrase “the seventy-six-year-old man”. It’s a complete let-down: we knew he was a man — the anaphoric pronoun “he” had just been used to refer to him. (This is perhaps where “curator” could have been slipped in for the first time, without “renowned”, if the passage were rewritten.) Look at “heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.” We don’t need to know it’s a masterpiece (it’s a Caravaggio hanging in the Louvre, that should be enough in the way of credentials, for heaven’s sake). Surely “toward him” feels better than “toward himself” (though I guess both are grammatical here). Surely “tore from the wall” should be “tore away from the wall”. Surely a single man can’t fall into a heap (there’s only him, that’s not a heap). And why repeat the name “Saunière” here instead of the pronoun “he”? Who else is around? (Caravaggio hasn’t been mentioned; “a Caravaggio” uses the name as an attributive modifier with conventionally elided head noun “painting”. That isn’t a mention of the man.)
My apologies for the long quote from the original article. It’s just that I love words, and especially well-crafted words, words used in the service of snark.
And if you give me well-crafted words used in the service of snark about other people’s poorly-used words, well, sir or madam… I am delirious.
So, yeah… Dan Brown’s a hack. I’m glad to have had that confirmed.
Note to self (and any nervous parents out there): do not try to diagnose yourself, or a loved one, via teh Google. You’ll only freak yourself out.
Celebrate the living. Celebrate life.
The world was better for having Kurt Vonnegut in it.
The world is a bit sadder without him.
Goodbye, Mr. Vonnegut… goodbye.
I scanned the list over at Wikipedia that shows all the events on this day in history. Although some of the events were intriguing (birthday of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan? Ill-starred launch for Apollo 13 mission to the moon?)… still I found no inspiration there.
Where do ideas come from? What do I write about when there’s nothing leaping to mind?
I could put up an awesome quote.
I could talk about my day via the alphabet.
I could go on vacation and never come back (yes, I am linking to the most recent post, as of the morning of April 11th).
…so many options. I could rant about my day; I could complain about some poor service I received; I could rhapsodize about a shiny new object that will finally (finally!) make my life complete.
There’s ideas for blog posts in the everyday and the extraordinary; the personal or the political; small posts and large posts.
…and then there’s the kind of post that just tosses a bunch of stuff on the screen, as a place-holder until another better idea comes along. I call these “montage posts”. It feels like cheating, or being lazy… But it’s still blogging.
Welcome to “Got Nothin’ Day”.
