Charles Bronson got your tongue?

9:59pm: I bought the biggest jar of Tussin they sell at the grocery store, and got carded thereby (??), although I know cough syrup no longer has alcohol in it. I opened the box and discovered that i have 8 oz. of that stuff in a jar! plus 2 "to go" doses of 10 ml each. 10 nl is 0.34 oz., by the way. Which Google tells me is not quite the dose of 2 teaspoons (~0.4 oz.), but what the hell, they come in funny little plastic spoons with a twist-off top.

At 2 teaspoons a dose, lessee, a pint's a pound the world around, I've got a cup of fluid, and there are 16 tablespoons in a cup (I know because it is printed on the sides of butter sticks, i.e. one stick is 1/2 cup), and 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, so there are 48 doses in this gigantic bottle.

Sometimes, I think we keep imperial measurements just because they are funny. Now if only it didn't taste like sweetened crap.

(I also bought chocolate pudding, to assuage my illness woes. Two colds in a month! This is unheard of in me.)

11:18am: I've never been on food stamps, but it turns out that about 50% of the US population is, at one point or another, before the age of 20. That's a lot of hungry kids, man. Or rather, that's a lot of kids a little less hungry.

The interactive US map is pretty good: mouse over, and you can get breakdowns by county. The article itself mentions racial categories other than the basic black/white, but the map isn't robust enough to show those data. The comments on the article, needless to say, include insulting and ignorant crap.

I was watching a PBS program a week or two ago, about the photographers who worked for the Resettlement Administration in the 30s. You know the photo, just one of a zillion, of that careworn migrant-laborer woman with dirty children in her lap -- the bosses sent out a whole cadre of people with cameras to find out what the US really looked like (pretend there isn't argument about the camera as neutral recorder), and got back pictures of poverty. Entrenched poverty, many-generations poverty, seemingly-hopeless poverty. Which had been there all along, but when everyone is feeling financially precarious, it gets a little harder to blame the poors for their condition. Or anyway, you can still do it, but I get to call you hard-hearted when you do.

And then I wonder: where are the RA photographers of today? How are we making poverty vivid, not just statistically but in emotions and stories and iconic imagery? What would it take to goose the American public out of its clueless bootstrappy mythology and into a greater sense of organized mutual care? And how can we purge the insulting and ignorant crap from this type of discussion?

11:36am: There's a gorgeous picture of Hillary Clinton on the front pages of the Times. Her embroidered coat is aces.

*

The fall draws down and I turn to yarn; I have begun knitting almost nightly, to the detriment of my left hand. (Hand-sewing always affects my right, while knitting hurts my left.) I'm an experimental knitter, prone to adapting patterns, but I suffer from a basic visual-spatial deficit and cannot translate a 2-D image into a 3-D one in my head.

It's very frustrating. I can draw a 3-D image of what I want to make, and I can draw 2-D images of the pieces I think I have to make to create the 3-D object, but the images are usually wrong, sometimes in big ways. I can't predict how many increases will make a turn, and which increases at what count will produce the look I want. This means I always have to work from a pattern the first time through, and moreover I have to trust the pattern entirely, because I can't visualize what it will look like when finished. It's only then that I can get a conceptual handle on what I'm doing, and throw out the pattern entirely. This means I never knit any item any less than twice, unraveling it after the first try to do it again my way.

People who give away free patterns on the internet are... interesting. In looking up hoods -- the kind that tie under the chin, but do not encroach on the forehead like a hat -- I discovered people who knit for their freakily-realistic baby dolls, and people who knit to make pony-play headdresses for their BDSM club. I swear I am just trying to make a hat that will keep my ears warm without messing up my hair. Honest.

*

I've been watching the History Channel's vaunted WWII in HD miniseries while I knit, and the narrator goes to great lengths to explain the intensive worldwide search for color film, lovingly restored and converted to HD, blah blah painstaking blah Serious Face. This same narrator (Gary Sinise) obviously doesn't speak German, and nobody on staff ever corrected his pronunciation of Norfolk, Charlestown*, or the German town of Geilenkirchen**.

(* I'm sure it's confusing that there's a Charleston, SC and a Charlestown, MA -- never mind that the latter isn't even a city, but within the City of Boston -- but dudes. Look at a map some time. I am pretty sure that they even spelled it wrong in a supertitle.)

(** Wikipedia has the correct pronunciation. But you know what? I have watched enough WWII TV in my day to make a wild guess about how German consonants are pronounced, so that hard CH, like match, in the middle of a German word, was just obviously wrong to the ear. You know where I watched most of that WWII TV? The everloving History Channel.)

Way to prove your painstaking seriousness! Anyway, it's got actors breathily reading the narratives of people who were there -- Rob Lowe, melodramatically; Rob Corddry, with a fine Weymouth accent I've never heard from him before; Tim DeKay of White Collar fame with a brisk tonality that suited the material best -- and devolves, as it goes along, into bathetic tear-jerky flag-waving. One expects it to be American-centric and even flag-wavy, it being the History Channel, but it was bad enough I changed the channel several times.

Still, the images themselves are interesting. Not least because the show is not shy, and provides extensive images of the mangled dead, including civilians. Aerial footage of Mustang dogfights is disorienting and makes clear how much of any battle was guesswork and luck. You really can't watch a flamethrower in action, brilliantly orange, and pretend it's anything but a weapon of intimate annihilation. I wished, especially as the Pacific island campaign went on, that there had been any serious expression of the non-American viewpoints; but you only get footage of things of which color footage was available. That means that the losers, the bewildered civilians, the victims -- what they would have filmed is not to be seen.

7:31pm: Thanks a lot Vonnie! One link to Bert and Ernie singing gangsta rap, and now I am doomed to plow through 100,000 YouTube muppet music videos. Some of them pro, like Beeker's Ode to Joy, and some of them clearly, uh, not. Of the many videos reworking Beeker on stage in a green velvet tuxedo (I think the first of these was a Rickroll, in fact), probably the best involve speed metal and growling. And that's not even the one starring Cookie Monster.

(For the record, I already have "Cookie Disco" -- to the tune of "Shaft" on my hard drive. Cookie Monster is a versatile fellow.)

It also turns out that the addition of unnecessary bleeps makes everything sound pottymouthed; witness this clip of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

Oh! Oh! You know what is really awesome? John John all growed up.

10:13pm: I just realized, apropos of the Berlin Wall falling 20 years ago today, that we've entered the part of my life where I do remember things from 20 years ago. I remember the Loma Prieta earthquake (though I did not know to call it that till years later), with cameras shooting footage of an empty baseball stadium, and the pancaked Bay Bridge, and buildings all tilty and on fire. I remember the Berlin Wall coming down, or rather what I remember is seeing people standing on top of it, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and all the newsies vaguely choked up. And I never knew why then, or really, I didn't know anything at all about the regional politics, just the half-digested textbook lessons about the end of World War II. So to my eyes it seemed like coming up daisies, just one day everybody decided to do something they couldn't have done the day before. The idea that machinations might have been involved, behind-ward, was beyond my comprehension at the time.

The next thing in world events I remember from being 14 is when Nelson Mandela stepped out of prison, in spring 1990. I think it was a Saturday, or anyway I was at home watching on TV in the late morning (afternoon in South Africa) and that was thrilling. I remember the size of the crowd awaiting him, how long it took, and I remember thinking that he was very small, although in the pictures of him before his arrest he'd seemed big. I knew there'd been machinations involved in getting him free, though. That's not the kind of thing you just wake up and do one morning.

Surely there must have been world events when I was 13, but I don't remember any of them, not even the inauguration of Bush #1. I don't think the wars in the Balkans got well-and-truly started till I was 16. For a while there, in my adolescence, it seemed like things were trending naturally towards awesomeness, and it was an unpleasant surprise to discover that such trends are arduous struggles, with a lot of setbacks.

4:11pm: Apple Curmudgeon
Dear Verlyn Klinkenborg,

Me and my Rhode Island Greenings invite you to suck it.

Cheerfully! And with the leisurely elan of the retired essayist living in an undisclosed rural location! These kids today!!

no love,
me.

3:38pm: When is maroon not a crayon? When it's a word for escaped slave communities in the interior of a country, from the Spanish cimarron, meaning literally "those dudes hiding out up the hill." In Brazil they were called mocambos (huts), and then quilombos, a borrow-word from an Angolan language. Because it turns out that the Portuguese dragged an awful lot of Angolans to Brazil, and they escaped into the interior like crazy, and made new lives there.

Carlos Diegues's 1984 movie Quilombo tells the story of the biggest and most famous Brazilian maroon community, Palmares, inland from Recife, which flourished from the 1630s till 1694. It's an epic-style film (although only 2 hours long), with a big cast and a real sense of myth-making: consecrations, symbolic transfers, cool outfits, cast of thousands. It begins in the middle of the Dutch-Portuguese War, and the first thing that happens onscreen is a ridiculous, painted Portuguese noblewoman watching in boredom and irritation while one of her slaves is tortured to death. Which is to say: it's not a subtle film. Every character and line is politically positioned, and there's not a lot of time for ordinary life-drama unless it's also serving a symbolic or anthropological-expositionary function. A slave-girl is demeaned in the sugar-cane fields, and moments after a revolt she pays it back with violence. An escaping slave pauses to give birth in the forest, and her child is destined for greatness.

Which is not to say it isn't an exciting and stirring movie, beautiful to watch and well-acted and taking the time to portray tensions among the leadership of Palmares, as the white people conclude their war among each other and turn their attention inland. Anointed by the goddess Acotirene, an ordinary escaped slave becomes Ganga Zumba, leader and sometime-avatar of a divine presence. (The film hasn't a big effects budget, but makes good use of wipes and dissolves; Ganga Zumba is suddenly wearing a veil of cowries over his face, and speaks with more than his own voice.) He accepts white refugees and outcasts, Indians who choose to stay, and anybody escaping slavery; and they get on with building a society symbolized by gigantic piles of clay pots. Really! They are everywhere, sometimes full of bounty, but mostly just there. They're skill and work, and the same mud that they use to build tall, narrow ovoid houses, and probably with the addition of movie magic the same mud they use to paint themselves exciting colors when warfare comes to town.

As it must. Ganga Zumba bribes the Portuguese soldiers, and makes alliances among white Portuguese squatters, but the big plantation owners push and push and bring in their own special army. In the meantime, a child born free in Palmares, but kidnapped and sold to the local priest, escapes back into the arms of his family and becomes Zumbi, the messianic leader who follows, chafes with, and eventually supercedes his father-figure. There's this whole complicated symbolic thing about Christianity -- who takes up the cross, which side the church takes (or its individual representatives take) -- which I presume is related somehow to 1984 politics and possibly Liberation Theology of which I have the slimmest grasp. But anyway, Ganga Zumba is a big, nice guy with smile lines, and Zumbi is a narrow young slip of a man, bearded, Very Serious. They argue about tactics and do a lot of referring to the general shape of history rather than the specifics of it -- I think if you're a total newb to colonial politics you'll be a bit at sea -- and it's all very heartfelt and honorable. Because, of course, in come the professional soldiers from away who are developing experience with putting out rebellions, and they roll in with new weapons and new tactics and a lot more people and that is the official end of Palmares. Fire, slaughter, you know how it ends. Dandara, the girl demeaned in the opening sequence, gets the best death: elderly now, her braids gray, she walks off a cliff-edge in front of her attackers, stiff with dignity.

The movie even -- I am sure this is not a Primary Goal, but it's one of my historical pet topics -- demonstrates how in the 1690s a spear or a good lance was just as good as any weapon the mechanized West could develop. We see the shortcomings of cannon in a rainforest environment! And the rapid development of tactics on both sides to compensate. As with Ganga Zumba, Zumbi gives up his life for the last scraps of his people, who flee further inland. The end crawl reminds the viewer that the last mention of Palmares as a living place was a century later -- 1797 -- and that escape and resistance continued onward after that.

I got to the end and I was like, I cannot imagine seeing this movie made in a US context. (I mean, I don't know if anybody's ever made a movie about USian maroon communities -- which tended to be smaller/fewer, and constantly displaced by white settlement into the interior -- and I don't think anybody American would make Quilombo without defanging it.) Or if it did get made, it would be by Mel Gibson, and it would be all about the grotesque suffering and not at all about the dignity or the mashup civilization building itself upon a hill.

The movie's available on Netflix Instant View, BTW. It's not the greatest video quality -- could stand a remaster -- but no better or worse than most video from 1984. In Portuguese and a few unglossed, presumably-Kimbundu phrases, with subtitles.

8:22pm: The World Series has begun. This morning I woke up to the radio announcement that the Yankees had lost Game 1, and that some people from some city somewhere had beat their asses. My local public radio station, yo.

I watched part of Game 1, and the Phillies were pretty good, or anyway two of them (pitcher Cliff Lee and hitter Chase Utley) were. The Bronx crowd was needless to say annoyed.

So far all I have noted about Game 2 is that Joe Buck just called A. J. Burnett "Beckett." Dude! Beckett belongs to us, and unlike A. J. he has a chin. (And regrettably, chin pubes.) So yes, coverage on Fox is as shitty as one might expect: I just watched a whole Matt Stairs at bat, complete with hit and RBI, in which they did not show the name "Matt Stairs", his position, or his stats, at all. I did find out that Budweiser is a cool, smooth, drinkable beer, however.

Matt Stairs looks like a middle-aged shlub, by the way. (Dude, he's 40!) I love my sport's oddly-shaped athletes.

This is looking a bit like a battle of Nervy vs. Nervy, i.e. A. J. Burnett is a little squirrelly on the mound, known to go wild suddenly, and my longtime readers will recall Pedro Martinez's fickle irritability. He's better in some ways than he used to be: his first innings used to suck, because his bum shoulder was slow to warm up; tonight he retired the side, with 2 Ks. His changeup is still his best weapon, or his changeup and his brains. And of course the Yankees lineup hasn't changed that much: he knows these hitters. I live in hope that he will yet bop Jeter and dissuade him from sitting on top of the plate.

If the camera coverage were better, I would feel like I was watching a real game! Instead it is all headshots and superclose focus shots of people's eyeballs and ears. I can report, however, that the up-the-lefty-pitcher's-ass "mound cam", intended to catch every nostril-flare of the (*cough* right-handed) pitcher, has been gently retired to the Attic of Stupid Television Ideas.

9:54pm: An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore Will Not Write Books About
All kinds of raw cabbage taste like gym socks smell.

Also, I don't know how to cook cabbage, but that's not something Al Gore needs to give a shit about.

1:02pm: The Great Ladybug Migration
I was ten feet from my building this morning when a colorful spot appeared on my khaki-colored trousers. I realized after a moment that it was an orange ladybug, and shooed it off my knee before heading inside.

An hour later, Woman Friday notes with some alarm that she has 6 ladybugs crawling on the inside of her windows. She inspects my windows and finds a similar number. There had not been any ladybugs there the previous day, nor indeed any other day that we can think of. Woman Friday goes into a ladybug-saving frenzy! We open the windows! A piece of paper is used to scoop miladies off their several surfaces! It is possible one is accidentally incinerated in the heating grate.

(There are not even any rose-aphids about, or any other reason one might acquire ladybugs intentionally. The two phalaenopsis orchids are peachy in the sun -- one of them producing flower-buds even in this season -- and show no signs of infestation.)

Now (I think) there are no ladybugs in the office. I don't know where they came from, or how they got into a locked office with closed windows. While the windows have been open, no ladybugs have flown in, but clearly they were only stopping here for the night on their way towards their ultimate destination.

(Woodstock? The Emerald City? New Crobuzon?)

7:53pm: So yes, snow in the Westerlands. Really, it's more like slush now, big ugly wet pellets, and by morning it is likely to be ice on windshields. Though early as it is, the ground won't freeze, so at least it won't be ice on roads. Verily, that would suck.

I roasted a pumpkin the other day, and then in the middle of figuring out what to do with its flesh realized that yes, truly, the flavor in white bean soup really does come from the sherry, and not really from anything else. So I turned off the stove and went up the street and bought some (cream) sherry and made pumpkin white bean stew. Without blendering anything to mush (because I hate mush soups), and with penne (because they seemed more dignified than potatoes). It is the compleat fall soup (or would be if I had been able to scrounge up any sage; basil and pepper were made to do). Too bad we are suddenly now in winter.

I took my mother out to see Bright Star, because she likes Keats and I like Jane Campion, and we both came away satisfed though it's possible we saw two different movies. It was a very visual movie, all textures and depths, and I say that as someone generally poorly attuned to the visual, so for picture-oriented people it was probably a brain-overload. Anyway, I liked it.

My mother afterwards described going about Rome many years ago, and discovering the Keats-Shelley house by chance; I'd been too (not by chance), and we realized it was probably she who told me to look for it. They took a death-mask of Keats, which is how we know he had a bulbous nose and an overbite, and that's about as creepy as you might imagine. I asked the curator when I was there (lo 14 years ago) how exactly Shelley pronounced his middle name. (Answer: BISH-ee.) The Wikipedia link above has a humdinger of a story about protecting Romantic poet paraphernalia during the various WWII bombings of Italy.

10:10am: Recently discovered on the internets: LOL used to mean laugh out loud, i.e., something so funny you even laugh in your meatspace situation. The expression appears in some circles to have gained a modifier:

LOL IRL.

Apparently, overuse on the internet (or possibly texting) has denatured the "out loud" value of LOL, so much so that it needs a strengthening adverb-phrase to make clear that no, really, you laughed physically, in a somatically noticeable way, and not just in your head.

(Shut up, yes, I read ONTD sometimes when I am bored. Doesn't everyone?)

This is kind of like discovering that the British sentence-tag "innit" had begun to apply to sentences with plural subjects or first- and second-person subjects. Because on the one hand, dude, deconstruct your sentence and think that through for a minute. "I'm cold, isn't it?" doesn't make any sense! And on the other hand, it's a signal that the figurative meaning as a sentence-tag has begun to obliterate the literal meaning. Which is kind of cool.

(I am just old enough and just suburban enough to remember "queer" changing its meaning within my lifetime. I used to read children's mystery books called Something Queer at the Public Library [and other locations as needed in the series]! There obviously was a long slangish history of dual meaning outside of my notice, where weird and gay sat side by side in the same word and inflected one another, but by the time I was old enough to perceive that fact, "queer" was already in the midst of reclamation, and the weirdness was falling away.

(I remember that change as a loss, because I really like the Q-sound and the long E and the way you can draw out the word into strangeness, and those phonemic attributes only work for the weird meaning of the word. It's creepy! It's kind of a cool word! That you can't use in mysteries any more unless they're set in the past, or feature ironic gay detectives.)

10:07pm: You'll all be relieved to know that the Red Sox got themselves swept out of the playoffs today. Because the first two games were in L.A., and started at 9:45, I didn't see a peep of their play till this afternoon. And what I saw them do today was carry a 2-run lead into the top of the 9th, at home, get down to the last strike of the game twice, and still lose the game. And that is kind of where this year was at, really. Lots of potential, all the firepower in the world thrown at the problem, and disappointing results.

Yes, I'm aware, Pirates fans and Baltimore fans are playing tiny violins for me. Truthfully, if I'm to watch any other team in the playoffs, I'm happy to watch the Angels. If for no other reason than to read Mike Scioscia's lips as he comments on the umpiring. For all his cagey strategy, he doesn't mind people knowing what he thinks on that matter.

(As long as the Yankees lose!)

I am not looking forward to the horse-trading of winter, I tell you what.

4:08pm: The daylight lamp made its first appearance this morning. (Mostly because I rearranged the plants into their winter configuration -- away from the best windows -- over the weekend, so they get the lamp or else die of darkness.) Boy, did I wake up at 6am! All hail $5 mechanical timers.

I'm not sure I need it yet, but it's nice not to be rushed and incoherent on your way out the door in the morning.

In commercial news, Starbucks is selling instant coffee now. I am by no stretch of the imagination a coffee snob -- at home, I drink grocery-store-brand --, and yet I could totally tell which was instant, oh I mean "ready brew," and which was made the old-fashioned way. I don't even like Starbucks! It is bitter! The samples were unsweetened and lacking in cream! And I could still tell which was instant, because it was like bitter dishwater instead of bitter coffee. Starbucks, your instant does not put its pants on any differently from Nescafé.

(OTOH, I learned to drink cafe au lait in European highway stops, i.e. a cup of hot milk with a packet of Sanka poured in, so actually I would go with Nescafé over Starbucks.)

Anyway, I got a coupon for free coffee. Even free coffee I don't like is still free.

12:13pm: Craphound alert
Autumn rain, and the suburban craphound prowl. The nice thing about affluent suburbs is that the impulse to get rid of things is more powerful than the profit motive: the quality of stuff is often high while the prices are sometimes ridiculously low.

Thus is it that I have acquired a complete ratchet-socket set, in its case, for $2. Okay, it was probably made in 1960. It is not like socket sets go bad! I have no idea what I would need it for, but it was $2 and there will come a moment when it will rescue me from skinned knuckles and/or frustration.

Looking at other people's crap makes it obvious the kinds of things affluent people acquire without meaning to: sets of specialized wine glasses (sherry, cordial, etc.); single-purpose kitchen-clutter implements (juicers, et al.); trivets; ugly purses; Revere ware pots; teenagers' boomboxes and alarm clocks of years past; and most of all display glassware. Who ever needs to buy a vase new? Hundreds and hundreds of vases, most of them I am sure arriving via actual flower arrangements, and then once the flowers are gone the vases stay behind and start breeding in some dusty cabinet.

Several tea sets, most of them with odd numbers. Much as I like tea sets, I feel that my current 5 wine glasses and 7 saucers (for 4 matching cups) do not need any more company. And it's not like I have the space to put any more. And that's how I keep my craphound tendencies under control, not that I do not fantasize about having a garage or a basement in which I could hide rakes and table-saws and restoration-ready federal-style cabinets from 1935.

11:38am: Well, toast my bikkits
Today I got into my car and realized that the condensation on my windshield was solid. FROST, people! Second day of October! Sigh. The radiator behind me is gurgling quietly like a digesting baby, and all my sweaters are in a ridiculous pile on the couch at home. Wow, I own a lot of sweaters. I forget every year.

I have discovered that series television and cooking are a symbiotic process in me: the TV gives me an excuse to stand in the kitchen, and the cooking gives me an excuse to mostly-watch (but not with devotion) a TV show. It doesn't work well with Netflix movies -- I have a Chinese-language movie languishing in the DVD player, because you can't do anything else when you're watching a movie with subtitles -- and it doesn't work well with TV on DVD either -- I'm too conscious of the fact that I can stop, pause, and rewind at any time. This would also be why I don't have a Tivo: most TV is only mostly-watched in my household, and anything taped deserves to be all-watched. So the Tivo would just fill up on stuff I would feel guilty about not watching. This is my weird brain issue. It also doesn't work well with baseball, I find, because the audio cues are not consistent enough for me to tune back in at the right times. Also, it's absorbing enough for knitting, but not enough for cooking.

Which means I watched just enough of Flash Forward last night to judge it pure cockamamie, and to watch John Cho swan about angstily in a bulletproof vest while stuff blows up. (And then, change channels, and watch Anna Torv and Pacey do the same thing!) I have watched worse cockamamie, although I've also watched better, and thus ended up at 8:30 in my landlady's house suffering her oppressive attention while the chicken soup simmered. (I think Fringe has better cockamamie, or anyway it's cock-eyed, cheerful, plate-spinning cockamamie, and also has Lance Reddick from The Wire, and I could watch that dude figure actuarial tables.) I would not altogether mind if Alias were to come back on my TV screen; that was the perfect show to bake biscuits to.

Biscuits are life, people. I swear, the temp got down to 55 at night and I instantly started in on my butter supply like the world was gonna end.

1:19pm: You know how Don Draper from Mad Men looks a scary amount like a Xanaxed Guy Smiley from Sesame Street? Yeah, Sesame Street noticed it too.

One of the peeps at work was in Istanbul and brought back Turkish Delight (lokoum) from Secerki Haci Bekir Confectioners ("Since 1777 the Best Taste to Please Everyone"). And it's not bad! But I can also see how it would have made Edmund sick to eat a whole box of it. I've had Turkish Delight before -- from a Greek (or Cypriot? Anyway, in Greek letters) confectioner, and the pieces were huge and rubbery and dull. It was like eating cubes of very, very dry Jello. Whereas the stuff from Haci Bekir is much smaller pieces, and with pistachios near the bottom of every piece. (We did not get a box of the pink flavor; I think this is honey-flavor. Although the box is mostly in Turkish, so I don't know.)

I am to understand that the superfine sugar on every piece is meant to keep the pieces from sticking together; the outcome, however, is to get white powder on the imperious black clothing of imperious figures. Who today look like they have been baking, what with the white thumbprints on their hips. (The peeps among whom I am sequestered are not nearly cool enough for any white powder to look like cocaine.)

Really, though, it is not at all what I imagined when first I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe lo these 20+ years ago. (I was probably imagining something chocolate.)

7:59pm: MACARONI AND CHEESE. The real kind.

4:39pm: Work suddenly went bananas on Wednesday afternoon, and I've hardly raised my head since. (Hint: don't have three major events in one week, especially not if one of them is a conference.) The upside is, I have basically performed a power-grab due to Woman Friday being so busy her head is spinning. Invites and tallies -- to say nothing of briefings -- shall be mine, all mine! The downside is, bananas.

*

First pie of the fall. Okay, galette, but I made it in a pie pan for neatness. I made it with canned peaches, because you only put into a pie fresh fruit that is coming out your ears and making you sick to eat them raw, and fresh peaches are never coming out this region's ears. I put in way more cornstarch than was probably wise, but anyway the thing did not leak all over hell and creation and that is a plus. I ate it all up toot sweet, anyway.

Second pie will be pumpkin this weekend, I think. I picked up my first fresh pumpkin a couple days ago (eating ones, 2-3 lb., speaking of fresh fruits we have coming out our ears).

Ginger golds came late, and probably they're almost done already, especially after last night, which was cool enough to warrant the fuzzy slippers. So, maybe a 3-week season instead of 6 weeks. Stupid cold summer. Stupid climate change. On to Macintosh and Macoun, and the two Cortlands I have waiting at home for me.

*

The baseball season is rounding to a close, and we aren't doing terribly but neither are we great. The Angels are always a great team to play, though, big Mike Scioscia happy to have his lips read as he asks what crack the umpires are smoking. Wednesday night's game was a good one, by which I mean it was close and we won it. (It really was an exciting game, back and forth a lot, walkoff single after a wildly disputeable walk to load the bases.) That's it for them for the regular season, though.

It's a relief to report that Matsuzaka did well his first night back in the rotation (Tues) and that Buccholz has stabilized some. The score always seems high but we seem to pull off a win nonetheless, or anyway just often enough to stay in the lead in the wild card.

*

I watched Fringe last night and realized with an IMDB assist that Pacey is 31 years old. No! Pacey shall always be in highschool! (Yes, yes, I know his name is Joshua Jackson, but honestly people with boring last names, you need to look into better first names, like Stalwart or Idris or Buttercream.) So Buttercream Jackson aka Pacey is 31 years old, which is practically my age. It is weird. Thanks to my never having watched any of the Mighty Ducks movies, he does not fall into the "you were prepubescent after I was not" valley* (like the uncanny valley, only different), so it's not weird to think he is hot. In a Pacey way.

(*Christian Bale is actually a little bit older than me, but thanks to the varying schedules of developmental hormones, I do remember him as a prepubescent boy at a time when I was technically post-pubescent. Therefore, although I've liked a lot of movies he's in -- okay, the earlier, independent ones better than the muscled-up crap of late --, he still pretty much falls into this valley and I've never found him particularly hot.)

Fringe makes no sense, by the way. You can tell it is a J. J. Abrams show. But it cheerfully makes no sense, like what would happen if you gave The X-Files ecstasy, and then populated it with several of my favorite actors from HBO. Effwordy, muppet-dancing aliens for everybody!!

2:51pm: Thanks to last-minute corporate tickets procured in Boston, I went to a Red Sox game on my birthday. And we won! And it would have been embarrassing if we hadn't, because it was against the Orioles, who are terrible this year. Paul Byrd was the starter, and didn't get past 5 innings -- it's clear that the Orioles' sucking is mostly in the pitching department -- but it was nice to be there and be close and watch his funny little windup. He takes a back-step and swings his arms behind him like he's starting in on a Broadway vamp dance number. I'd been reading recently about Tim Lincecum (many strikeouts OMG, blah blah, pretend the NL west is actually competitive, blah blah) and his strange, violent-seeming pitching motion, which he ends with one toe behind him pointed at the sky like a ballerino, and Byrd is nothing so dramatic as that. Sadly, he also cannot blow an 87-mph fastball by anybody, and was getting fouled off like the world was ending. His pitch count hit 58 in the third inning.

I also got to see Billy Wagner, and he's a bitty little thing. His windup and pitch are inseparable, like a sudden sneeze, and he seems to move his body with a rare efficiency (compared, especially, to the long-limbed, horse-assed -- I mean powerful hindquarters, not stupid -- giant block o' cheese kind of reliever of which many lately). Manny Delcarmen (giant block, and not doing so great), young Bard from the minors (also blocky though hasn't filled out yet, okay, a little too into the dramatic staredown), and finally our own Papelbon, who has got it down to an hilariously theatrical science. Even the music cues were timed carefully to maximize his closer mystique, although he wasn't nearly as effective as I've seen him in the past. We got the win, but it was closer than I like. Especially against the poor dumb Birds.

Who have working for them, not only a bunch of forgettable shmoes, but a couple of rememberable shmoes, namely Adam Henn and Cla Meredith. (The former will never live down the drubbing he got as a Yankees spot-starter, NY Post headline HENN LAYS EGG; and the latter had, for at least the first several days of his major league career, an ERA of infinity, having walked the bases full and given up a grand slam in his first game without ever recording an out. Poor noodles.) I'd forgotten, though, that Meredith is a side-arm pitcher, and he wasn't half-bad in the 2/3 inning I saw of him. His ERA last night wasn't low, but it certainly wasn't infinity.

Now if only the game had ended before 11 PM! (Dudes, the playoffs are the only games that are allowed to go 4 hours for 9 innings.) I think between them the teams had 15 pitching changes. So I went home a tired birthday girl and am that cottony, crawly kind of half-awake today.

11:42am: 09-09-09
Line of the day (from an io9 comment thread about a live-action Akira set in New York): "Honestly, if they just made it The Warriors with psychics, I wouldn't be upset."

That would be great! I mean, what else does The Warriors need, except possibly for gangs of spike-haired unnecessary-belted trust-fund hipsters in the newly-remade subway stations of Brooklyn! They will kill you with their coolness!!

...Today is my birthday, so somebody needs to make that movie.

6:36pm: Now that I work on the wrong side of the river, I find I am often enveloped in that bubble of University and People's Republic earnest nonsense. To wit: none of my immediate coworkers has said a word about Ted Kennedy, his death, the voluntary paralysis of the city as his mortal coil does a greatest hits reunion tour at the front of a lengthy motorcade. So I came home to the news and was not already up to here with the televisual mourning and Kennedy-dramatics. It was even interesting and refreshing and nice, and comfortingly familiar that scroll through the Boston on-the-street interview archetypes rather than eye-rolly. Why, ABC News went and found an Irish immigrant to interview!

It pleased me, to see the crowds cheer for his hearse as it came by, like a victory parade. The overpass in North Quincy had a whole fire truck parked on it (illegally, I am sure), with firefighters in their dark t-shirts hanging over their rig to watch the stately progression. We who snootily ride the Green Line hastily consulted our maps to figure out where in the hell the viewing location, at the JFK Library, is. (The stop is called JFK/UMass, so it should not be so difficult.)

Senator Kennedy was a big ugly potato of a man, and not altogether an upstanding man at various times in his life. Sometimes I think that it's all royalty hoopla, all nostalgia for the last gasp of the legitimacy of aristocracy in public life, the way that people are reacting to his death. (When JFK, Jr. died, now that was a stinkeye occasion. Oh, the sorrow of a young life cut short! Babe, that happens every day. Go mourn all those unfamous people and get back to me, kay?) But the stories emerge about Ted Kennedy, the kind stories I guess because we're still old-fashioned enough not to speak altogether ill of the dead, and they're stories about attention and persistence and the personal touch, things that your executive assistant can help you on but can't fake for you.

And after all, I'm young enough not to recognize the world of 30 or 40 years ago. It's always been like this for me, living in the Most Evil Liberal State Evar, and he's part of the reason why. I used to think he was just the biggest buttinsky in the world, how often the national media would quote Ted Kennedy on a social issue -- race, education, early childhood intervention, gay rights --, but then after a while I realized it was because he had something to say, and a lot of other people didn't. Maybe he could afford to say what he wanted because he was a Kennedy, or because he was Senator For Life, but say it he did, and helped normalize positions that used to seem radical.

Blunderingly, awkwardly, with that foghorn voice. The WBUR remembrance of him yesterday ended on some kind of event blessing the opening of the Greenway (named after his mom), and somehow he'd been induced to sing, some ancient ditty meant for children. As with most aspects of his life both public and private, Ted Kennedy again proved himself well-meaning and quite human: dude could not carry a tune in a bathtub, and kept singing anyway.

9:06pm: "I didn't think it would be this hard."
I got on the bus and the bus said NOT IN SERVICE except it obviously was and that happens all the time. Someone was talking to the bus driver so I figured it was someone telling him the sign was wrong. Two enormous suitcases (one pink, and hard-sided) sat blocking off seats, unattended. This, if you don't know, is absolutely no-go in terms of bus etiquette. If it's yours, it is in your immediate hand-reach, and I get to say that, because I still have the bruise from a suitcase that overtoppled onto my ankle and I shouted at the woman who'd let it happen. (Mostly I shouted "Ow!" but she was abashed and never let go of the thing after that.)

The girl talking to the bus driver comes back and the suitcases are hers. Oh, all right. But they're two wheelie suitcases and only one girl, and she can't keep them well under control. She's wearing teen-girl clothes, some short frilly skirt/dress and flip flops. She is dumb and annoying. The bus lurches and I am pretty sure she is flashing the people sitting across from her as she uses her bare legs to control the suitcases. I don't listen to the low commiseration; I think she should know better.

I tune in when a woman across from me -- white, wrinkled, that practical haircut to the chin of many a sturdy Anglo librarian -- asks why the girl didn't take a taxi. "I did," says the girl. "From the airport. He said he didn't know how to get there and he dropped me off in the Square and told me to take this bus." The sturdy woman exclaims that this is, I think she said illegal, but I think she meant immoral, to strand a helpless twidget in the middle of the Square with no idea how to get to Belmont Center where she's headed. Consensus emerges: this bus does not go to Belmont Center, not really even close. The difference is far, and uphill.

The girl makes one of those flip comments, the kind where you've resigned yourself to the suck and are trying to make light of it for everyone else, about catching another taxi. She thinks there's a bus that connects with this one -- but she doesn't know the number and doesn't know where the connection is -- so a taxi will be fine, seriously, it's fine, she'll be fine.

I look at the ungainly luggage, and the sturdy woman across the aisle has taken one of them away from the girl, and holds it between her own knees. The tags on the suitcase handles say Atlanta. It is way too much luggage for one person on a trip unless it is everything this person intends to live with for a semester. It is orientation week at the University.

A short silence, as we plow through a big intersection. I am thinking, my car is parked in Belmont. I have a detailed street map in the back seat. How messy is my car? How would we wrestle those enormous suitcases in? What does Belmont Center look like in my mind, and how would I get there from here? But I don't get the chance to offer. I open my eyes and the sturdy woman is offering: her stop is closer to where we are anyway, and her car parked just like mine. She doesn't have any idea the names of the streets in Belmont Center but at least she has a car.

The girl says, I'll be fine, and No I couldn't. A couple sitting together -- my age, beefy, alike though the man is brunet and the woman blonde -- say in tandem, She's trustworthy. You can trust her. Someone next to me volunteers the option of calling a friend, that layer of security you do when you're relying on a stranger. It seems ridiculous to mention it, in front of this sturdy librarian woman. Someone volunteers specific, visual directions to the named street: go under the bridge, under the bridge? Yes, under the bridge and then a left. It's no trouble, says the sturdy woman. I don't say anything, just watch the bus passengers convince the girl to say yes.

They stand, girl and sturdy woman, each with a suitcase. They head toward the front of the bus. The woman asks whether the girl has her fare-ticket and the girl doesn't. The girl asks, How much is it? and I am thinking about whether I have any quarters in my bag, but she has a change purse. While they wait out the traffic to their stop, the girl says it to herself: "I didn't think it would be this hard."

Of course it's that hard. There are bus lines on wires and bus lines without; there are two sets of trains. The one-way streets are rife. There is no party you go to where the conversation doesn't eventually turn to how you navigated there, and how best you might navigate back. It's an old-world city, messy, tight, with switchbacks and awkward five-way intersections and streets that change names ten times. What was she thinking, I wonder? And then I remember: she is eighteen. She wore a teeny tiny short skirt and flip flops to travel in. She is from away, from some other kind of city where it's not that hard. It's possible she's never had to do it herself before. She'll learn.

They get off the bus together, chatting, that polite distant inquiry to fill an awkwardness. I say, Good luck, and that's the first thing I've said. We all say it, Good luck, the whole bus, and they're off into the sunlight with the wheelie cases. And I think to myself, as we pull away from the curb, that people call us cold because they're from away, because they don't know us, like they don't know how to get around. Some of them learn, though.

2:26pm: In the interest of embiggening my brain, I went ahead and tried my first Bollywood movie, with Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998). It's a romantic comedy, with singing and dancing and hilarious mid-90s fashions, so I figured, how hard can it be? And the answer is: the title song is a desperate earworm, and the movie didn't need to be 3 hours long, but otherwise, actually, it was refreshing to see a romantic comedy that wasn't all about "the battle of the sexes."( Read more... )

Watching it, I was reminded of college, and the tiny-obscure video place down the street that carried all the film noir I could ever want (some of which was not exactly in print at the time), and how they had a relatively good foreign film selection and one tiny basement room of anime. And at the time -- 1995, 1996 -- they'd really only just started getting professional translations and US releases of anime, and I watched Demon City Shinjuku and a couple of other feature movies and felt like there was this whole world of storytelling I'd never even heard of, much less understood. (As it turns out, I may never understand anime, although that's more a statement on its form than its content.) I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of Bollywood in 1996 at all, and I suspect it wasn't widely available subtitled in the US at that time, and it filtered into my knowledge-sphere only via Saturday night lines at the local independent theatre and a big sign on the door THIS FILM HAS NO SUBTITLES. (In fact, Hindi cinema used to play at the Allston till it went under, so when they came to the Somerville it was a sudden thing, like Bruce Springsteen was in town except if all his fans were South Asian.)

In lieu of a cool-obscure video store, I've got Netflix, so it took me longer to browse over into a new genre (and honestly, I don't care what kind of kudos it gets, I don't need to see a 4-hour movie about cricket, so I was trepidatious). I'm not surprised the film wasn't available with a dubbed soundtrack -- the songs would never go -- but that means I think that my niecephews will not be watching it for a couple of years yet. It did surprise me how much English was peppered into the (Hindi) dialogue, offhand phrases here and there and even whole scenes, like an effortless switch that all the characters possessed. I suspect that I'll be looking into Hindi dramas in future, because romantic comedies are like cotton candy to me, and soon forgotten. (I just hope they're a little bit shorter, grumble grumble.)

I really hope it is irony (but suspect it's not) that the man who played Rahul, Shahrukh Khan, got stopped at US immigration last Friday, resulting in an uproar so loud that US public radio noticed (this morning). Because it turns out that he's about the biggest star there is (and magically un-aging too; he looks the same as he did 11 years ago!), but all US immigration knew about him was that he was brown-skinned and had the last name of Khan. Nice.

12:13pm: District 9 is a weird and uncomfortable hybrid of a movie: on the one hand, it's a reasonably good sci-fi movie with whizbang and grossouts and stuff blowing up, and the occasional plot-flabotinum that tends to populate sci-fi movies these days. On the other hand, it is aforementioned movie taking place in a teeming, segregated shantytown in Johannesburg, in such a manner that it's obvious the filmmakers intend for us to grasp the real-world analogy. It's that other hand that fails, really, and that makes the movie uncomfortable: the metaphor doesn't hold up, isn't investigated, doesn't come to fruition, and comes back around in insulting and eye-rolly ways.( Read more... )