Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Don’t Panic — But Happy Towel Day!

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May 25, as of course you already know, is celebrated worldwide as Towel Day*. Whatever you do, do not forget your towel today. If you cannot be properly entoweled, you might consider alternatives… carrying somewhere on your person folded-up paper towels purloined from the restroom, say.

The point is, do not go about unprepared. Because, well, you never know.

Per Wikipedia, here’s the passage in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy encouraging towelage:

A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Note: The image at the top of this post is but one of thousands of Flickr images tagged “towelday.” (Edit to add: …to say nothing of YouTube videos.) The photographer, one per_p, helpfully reminds us that inanimate objects, too, deserve protection. Especially sentient inanimate objects.

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* Or, as it is known in Colombia, Dia de la Toalla.

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In the Water

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[For information about this photo, called “Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida,”
see the Note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Adrift

Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, bap­tized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, win­ter, spring,
sum­mer. Leaves over­head, under­foot.
Waves arrive, buf­fets from friends
offended, ene­mies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.

(William Stafford [source])

[Read more…]

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Official 2010 Write Your A** Off Day (Pt 2)

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I mentioned a “contest” of sorts in my post the other day about the New York Writers Coalition’s June 12 event: write 3,000 words on that one day, they said, and you could enter a drawing. Winner of the drawing would receive a free consultation with author Jennifer Belle. But I added:

…other than this email [from a NYWC publicist], I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.

Now I’ve got some of those details (thanks, Adaeze!):

  • First, sign up for the online “write-a-thon” here. You have to register, but it’s free.

Note: New registrations do not take effect automatically, but are human-moderated. This means you should expect a time lag before being able to do much of anything at the site. Do not wait until June 12 to register!

  • On June 12th, they’ll use the honor system. (My correspondent says, “We’re relying on them to be honest with themselves” — and I’ll wag my own index finger in your direction on this point. I mean, come on: it’s not like they’re requiring 3,000 tightly written words, right?)
  • When you’ve met the basic word-count requirement, you’ll post a comment on a write-a-thon thread they’ll open at the site.
  • At the end of the day, they’ll close the comment thread and draw a winner, announcing it at the site.
  • And then, finally, they’ll provide details to the winner about the logistics of claiming his/her consultation with Jennifer Belle.

If I learn anything else about the rules, or The Day itself, or Jennifer Belle, or… oh, hell: if I learn anything else about anything vaguely relevant, I’ll post the information here at RAMH. In the meantime, if you feel ready to take the challenge, hie thee to the NYWC discussion board and sign up.

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Official 2010 Write Your A** Off Day

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You may remember from a few months ago that Moonrat, that charmingly impetuous rodent, instigated an early “Take 2” of the Write Your A** Off Day which I myself pretty much ripped off last year, from the New York Writers Coalition.

As expected, the official 2010 version of Write Your A** Off Day will occur somewhat later. I’ve recently heard from a Coalition publicity official, who tells me that this year’s date is set for June 12. As before, if you will be in the New York City area on that date, the Coalition has all sorts of activities planned for you.

But my correspondent also tells me that they’ve put an additional twist on this year’s commitment to devote a day to your writing:

We’ve created the challenge of writing 3,000 words (about 10 pages) in one day, and we know you can do it!… In addition, everyone who completes the challenge and writes 3,000 words on June 12 will have the chance to enter a drawing to win a free private phone consultation about your writing project with Jennifer Belle!

Three thousand words in one day. You can do that, right?

(True, NaNoWriMo demands only an average of one thousand words a day. But this is a Saturday! Still a month away! Plenty of time to outline what you’re going to write, stock up on food and beverages, purchase tickets to send family members out of town…!)

Now, one caveat: other than this email, I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.

Update, 2010-05-15: I’ve got more information. See this more recent post on the 3K-word challenge.

In the meantime, what say? Give it a try? Launch yourself into a summer of big writing with one big day?

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Medical Update

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The Stepdaughter and The Missus: both doing fine, albeit exhausted.

The immediate crisis — borne mostly by the former, although vicariously by The Missus and the rest of us — finally passed last night, sometime after midnight. Now begins a loooong period of physical and psychological recovery. This has been a sad, scary, tiring week. So very glad to have finally put this much behind us.

Thanks so much to Facebook and Twitter friends for your support over the last few days.

Whether or not you “know” me from those other online milieus, whether or not you have any idea what crisis I’m talking about, I encourage you to learn at least a little — via Google or other resources, online or offline — about the term partial molar pregnancy. It’s not very common; The Stepdaughter’s very good, very experienced doctor said he has seen only three in his long career. But its real and potential impact on a mother-to-be and those around her is wildly disproportionate to its rarity.You, too, may never encounter it firsthand — even second- or third- — but it may not be a bad bit of information to have tucked away in the back of your mind.

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Real-Life Dialogue (Household Hints Edition)

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The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. Family gathering for Kentucky Derby viewing: gambols and gambles. Much food and beverage being prepared and consumed. He has just returned to house after walking Pooch. Everyone but She is in the living room, talking, laughing, watching TV.

He: [entering kitchen, where He knows She must be] We had a productive walk— What?

She stands before open pantry, laughing madly, pulling things from shelves and dropping them on floor.

She: I can’t find my baking soda!

He: [mentally running through menu items, not remembering any which involve baking soda] Your, uh, baking so—

She: Yes! Baking soda! I can’t find it!

She shuts pantry door, which immediately springs back open because of heap of boxes, cans, and canisters on floor.

He: What do you need baking soda f—?

She: [reaching back into pantry, emerging with familiar dull-yellow box; running around to front of stove, and still bursting sporadically into demented giggles] I need it for the fire!

He: Er, the fire—?

She: Yes! [yanks open oven door] The fire! The potholder fire!

She points, needlessly now, to a flaming mass of thick furry dark-blue fabric on bottom of oven. The oven is filled with smoke, and also with a pan of oven-broiled sandwiches for the Derby Day crowd. She dumps half the box of baking soda on the erstwhile potholder, and shuts the oven door.

She: I dropped a potholder in the oven.

He: Yes, I noticed. But the—

She: I knew baking soda would put it out safely.

He: But the, uh, the pan—

She: [leaning back against counter, sipping at mint juleps] You should never use water on an oven fire.

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The Face of the Writer

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Just found this at Jesse Kornbluth’s Head Butler site.

The subject of the post was James Frey, author of the Million Little Pieces bogus memoir of a few years ago; I liked what it said about writers and writing, and liked the Orwell quote very much:

Contrary to what Frey, his publisher, Larry King and Oprah believe, writing is not a career. For some writers  — for the writers who, I like to think, will endure — it’s a calling. Those who write especially well are like priests. It follows that books are sacred texts, and that the best ones — even the best novels — faithfully deliver what the writer believes is the truth.

That is why we have favorite writers, just as we have favorite musicians; their works “speak” to us. And it is why we have very definite ideas who they are. George Orwell ends his essay on Charles Dickens by addressing this:

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

[Read more…]

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Stretching to Make a Point

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One of my favorite RAMH regulars kindly forwarded this video to me. It’s a clip from a 1944 film called Broadway Rhythm, and the performers here were called the Ross Sisters.

More information on the girls can be found (naturally) on Wikipedia. The video’s been around long enough that I should be embarrassed not to recognize it (especially since I’ve got a copy of That’s Entertainment III, which Wikipedia says includes the bit). But I’m enjoying it too much to be embarrassed.

Innocent times…

For those of you who are writers or artists, do you have any “tricks” which you knowingly perform — because you know you’re good at them (even if you don’t usually admit it, for the sake of modesty or other reasons), and because they’re identifiably yours? Take your last name, or your commenting handle, and add an -ism suffix to it (e.g., Simpsonism): what are your characteristic isms, that is, your bits? what’s your shtick?

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Not Quite Chinglish, Not Quite a Pun

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From his vantage point of working with the English language behind the Bamboo Firewall, friend of RAMH Froog wages what must at times feel like a lonely battle against Chinglish. (For the uninitiated, this is the generally mangled result of applying Chinese grammatical rules, pronunciations, and mindset to ideas expressed in “English.”)

I have no wish to steal her punchline, so I will just point you to The Intern’s recent post. It’s an exquisite example (even if just a joke, or a PhotoShopped image*) of a related but different phenomenon: a phrase in “Chinese” which sounds as if it means something wildly (in)appropriate in English.

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* Not a joke, apparently: Someone on a snopes.com forum has tracked it down. It’s currently listed (about halfway down this page) as a retailer of books for Oxford University Press (China).

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