Writing exercise, short version: Write a story (or poem or essay or what-have-you) (blog entries don’t count, ahem) whose title is “The Touraine Passenger.” The “the” is optional, but the other two words must be used in that order in the title; one or both may, at the author’s discretion, be italicized.
(If you’ve no other ideas for how, even generally, to use the word “Touraine,” er, well, you do know by now that Google can be your friend, right?)
Need more details? Read on.
Real post coming up later today.
In the meantime… Below is a screen capture (not an actual YouTube video — don’t (duh) bother clicking the Play button) of the amazing video of Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice.”
For the actual video, well, the YouTube version (as sometimes happens) has had its “embedding disabled by request,” i.e., it can’t actually be pasted into a blog post. So just go here to see it.
I’d forgotten how much I liked this when it came out. The reminder today came from Kate Lord Brown’s What Kate Did Next blog.
P.S. Obviously, the planned four-day absence I mentioned last week didn’t materialize. I’ll keep the little stack of posts about figures of speech in a back pocket, to use as needed.
Cynicism is an easy response to life.
(It’s also often a funny response to life, which may be a good part of its appeal. Sarcasm, satire, parody, stand-up comedy, cartoons — all depend for their success on the glib assumption not that some things are better than others, but that many, perhaps most, things are worse than others.)
Famously, Theodore Sturgeon once claimed — in a formulation known commonly as Sturgeon’s Law — that “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” More often than not, Sturgeon’s Law is cited as a commentary on that ninety percent. This disregards its original use: as a defense of the ten percent. The idea is that you can’t reasonably point to some class of popular culture (science fiction, in Sturgeon’s case) and extrapolate from the merely largest chunk of it to the entire class. Another way of stating it, indeed, is: Ten percent of everything is worth paying attention to, even celebrating.
Author Rebecca Ramsey seems to be a fierce and whimsical proponent of the notion that there might be an inexhaustible supply of things worth paying attention to, even celebrating. Granted, she’s only been blogging since April. But it’s astonishing that every day, she finds something to cheer about.
Her blog goes by the apropos moniker Wonders Never Cease. And if, because of that title or because of my description so far, you guess that it’s a fatuous “Everything Is Beautiful” inanity… Well, just look at the site.
The idea is to focus on a single good thing or experience every day, not writing about it in airy lyrical terms but in punchy!!! prose with lots, LOTS! of exuberant and especially SHORT!!! phrases/sentences, generously exclamation-pointed, and illustrated with plentiful photos from Flickr and other sources.
What kinds of topics does she cover? The most recent posts in her “Wonders of Nature” category might give you a good idea:
Last month, I reported on a new initiative which our local neighborhood was undertaking — a neighborhood crime watch. The Missus and I learned of this initiative, as I said, via a letter from our street’s block captain: “As your block captain, I will be asking for you to provide phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, which will allow two-way communication between neighbors and the neighborhood crime watch program.”
Now, you need to understand something about the way our household is organized — or rather, isn’t. We’re very good about hanging on to Important Papers such as bills, insurance records, and so on. We’re equally (and regrettably) good about hanging on to Less Important Papers, such as magazines from 1994 or so. And then there are Truly Unimportant Papers — political-candidate promotional flyers, the bi-weekly mailing from the local swimming-pool company which doesn’t know that our property will never be suitable for a swimming pool, cheap 10-page ads from department stores in the next county, and so on — which go more or less immediately into the recycling bin.
This letter from our block captain fell into a fourth category. It has no formal, capitalized name, this category. It’s a category which might be loosely described as “papers which may at some point turn out to be important, but we really hope they don’t because [fill in reason], but maybe they’ll just disappear on their own accord and thereby relieve us of further responsibility for possessing them.”
And you know what? By golly, such papers eventually do wander off someplace, their tails between their legs. I imagine a whole auditorium of them, somewhere beyond the pale of imagination, eternally whimpering in neglect.
One of the hammer blows which Tropical Storm/Depression Fay landed upon our area was the pair of trees (not just one, as I’d thought earlier) which fell over in a neighbor’s yard. One simply lay the width of the front yard. The other, even bigger, remained propped on a corner of the (remarkably undamaged) house for a few days following the storm’s passing. I told The Missus I couldn’t imagine how the tree could be removed without punching through a wall or the roof. “They’ll have to use a crane,” I said.
In the event, no crane was required.
Three guys drove up in a plain white pickup. In the back of the truck were an assortment of chainsaws, about the length of an arm, and a couple of loooooooong orange-nylon ropes. The latter, they draped over the limbs of a nearby undamaged tree. One end of each was wrapped and tied around the upper end of the tree; the other ends were affixed to the rear of the pickup truck. All they had to do was drive the truck forward, and up would come the tree.
Needless to say, this operation — in a neighborhood so pedestrian that most people are in bed by 9 p.m. — drew a little knot of onlookers. We gathered in the cul-de-sac, discussing theories of geometry and the dynamics of nylon, the concepts of levers and pulleys, as though we actually had any idea how this would actually work. It seemed obvious that as soon as the tree was lifted off the roof, it would swing back and, I don’t know, take out the entire north wall of the second floor.
Into the mini-crowd suddenly wandered the block captain. He didn’t say anything at first, so I rather hoped he was simply assessing the risks and, perhaps, constructing in his head the preferred evacuation route when the guy turned the truck’s ignition key.
Not so. He was just waiting for a break in the conversation.
I felt a timid tap on my shoulder. “John,” he said, “did you ever receive my letter…?”
At that point i knew I was doomed. After all, of course we received his letter. I even remembered receiving it. Between gaps among his words, I even fancied I could hear, in the distance, the bleating of a small lost white sheet of paper.
So anyway, what I told him was that after the tree thing was over, I’d go back home, find (gulp) his letter — which included his email address — and send him my own email address and our phone numbers.
(All of which would have happened, by the way, except that there is no longer such a sheet of paper. So I just typed up the information he wanted, printed it out, stuck it in an envelope, and then put the envelope in his mailbox.)
The conversation turned to other matters, in an attempt to relieve the suspense as we waited for the truck to start moving. Few of us had ever really spent time talking to one another, so naturally one of the first orders of business was: What do you do for a living?
I said, “I’m a computer programmer. A Web developer.” (Both of which are true. I don’t typically just flat-out tell people I’m an aspiring author, or perhaps re-author would be more accurate. Other aspiring authors will understand.)
“Ooooh,” several people said. And before anyone else could jump in, the block captain took advantage of their slow-footedness to buttonhole me himself.
“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “See, I just got a new computer and I’m trying to transfer all my contacts from the old Outlook Express list to the new one and it’s just, not, working…”
I was reminded of this story this afternoon, when I came across a link from the Froogville blog (over there on the right, under “Writers to Be Read”). Froog had included the image at the top of this RAMH post in a post of his own, saying he’d found it at his “new favourite website, FrostFireZoo.” Given the image, and given Froog’s endorsement, naturally I had to visit FrostFireZoo myself.
Which was where I found the image below, and cracked up:
My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman handles edges defines his or her success at it. Buildings fall down; patterned wallpaper fails to match up at the seams; bookshelves wobble, and a marble placed on the floor rolls freely from one corner to another.
This doesn’t apply just to physical structures, to edifices. It applies, I think, to just about everything artificial.
One of Merry-Go-Round‘s underlying themes is the fragility of technology. Any one piece of equipment or software, even two or three, may work just fine after being tested and tested and tested. The word for this is “robustness”: the more robust a system, the closer it is to that magical (and mythical) state commonly known as fail-safe.
Where problems begin to arise is, yes, along the edges: those conceptual little nooks and crannies where the surfaces of multiple technologies come together.
A while back, I said I’d be trying to fix things so that printouts of Running After My Hat posts would look more like “real” articles or stories as opposed to Web-based content: omitting the left and right margins, increasing text font sizes, and so on.
Just in time for the ginormous “Fay, Part 2” post, that feature is now working.
I’ll be tinkering with it off and on, no doubt. In the meantime, hope it helps your experience here!
Back in the day — you know, the day — you could say (as I used to) “I work for the phone company” and no one would doubt which phone company paid your salary. That’s why Lily Tomlin’s old “Ernestine the telephone operator” could say, without ambiguity, “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to care.”
Aside: Okay, listen, this isn’t the point of this post but now that I’ve got Ernestine on the brain I just had to look her up on YouTube. She’s there, all right. Here’s a sample:
Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…
Anyway, aside from the fact that there are now as many phone companies in the USA as there are neighborhoods, the technology itself has of course made huge leaps. Cell phones, obviously. Cordless phones. Caller ID. Phones that take pictures. In fact, phones do so much anymore that it’s easy to forget some of the things they no longer do.
For instance: when your power goes out, so do your phones.
In the Writers to Be Read category over there on the right, you’ll see a link to something called Froogville. Its proprietor, one (presumably pseudonymous) Froog, runs a second blog as well: Round-the-World Barstool Blues whose mission, he says there, can be summed up as “Musings on life & love from the bars of the world.”
In a recent post, titled “Great Drinking Songs (9),” Froog includes a video of a group of Cornish fishermen singing the song “[Bound for] South Australia.” Which is entertaining, sort of — in the way any given film of any arbitrary group of non-professional semi-professional [thanks, Froog] singers, singing any given drinking song on a beach in a vaguely disorganized way, is entertaining.
Much much better, though, is the YouTube video below (a simple link to which Froog provided in his post), of an Australian guitarist named Tommy Emmanuel — playing the same song in a manner which frankly left me slack-jawed with amazement. I have NEVER seen or (I think) heard anyone play a guitar this fast.
See what I mean? I close my eyes and hear not a guitar but a banjo, or maybe a mandolin. But guitar…?
An interesting article by Rachel Donadio will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review, on the practice of blurbing — that is, authors (generally best-selling ones who, as the saying goes, Need No Introduction) providing capsule reviews to appear on the back covers and jacket flaps of books by authors who, well, generally need every introduction they can get.
Specifically, the article covers the work of a new company called Blurbings LLC. From their site’s About page:
Longfellow says, in “My Lost Youth”:
A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
Adds Grace Paley:
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Today’s been a day for lack of focus (by necessity, not choice) and wandering around in brief, staccato bursts of Web activity. Among the periwinkles, whelks, and sand dollars scooped up: [Read more…]
