Drugs!

---

 Partner and I attended an event the other night at which a very nice (and rather attractive) young psychiatrist did a presentation on Alzheimer’s disease: diagnosis, treatment, medications.   He then invited questions. 

 

 

There was a noisy giggly group of older women there, who’d been cackling through most of his presentation.  One of them raised her hand.  “I got the fear of the elevator,” she said in Italian-accented English.  “Other people get on, I get on too, sometimes.  But alone – no!”

 

 

This quite evidently had nothing to do with Alzheimer’s disease, but there are always people who solicit free medical advice from doctors, and Doctor Cutiepie was obviously used to this.  He nodded sympathetically.  “It’s a phobia,” he said.  “Anxiety is the number-one psychiatric disorder in the United States, and phobias are one of the commonest forms of anxiety.  I had a patient who didn’t leave her house for seventeen years: agoraphobia, very common.  And I prescribed Prozac, and –“

 

 

That was enough for Elevator Lady.  “A drug!” she spat.

 

 

Doctor C. nodded.  “A drug.  But effective, in this case.”

 

 

Much muttering from Elevator Lady’s table.  You could tell that Doctor Cutiepie had gone down a few pegs in their book.  He was advocating drugs!

 

 

Later that same evening, Partner and I had a conversation with a nice couple across the table from us.  The husband suffered from sleeplessness.  “But!” he said triumphantly.  “My doctor said: Do you take anything for it?  And I said: No.  And he said: Good for you!”

 

 

He and his wife grinned across at us.  “Well,” I said, “we both have insomnia issues, and we both take Ambien.  It does the trick for both of us.”

 

 

“Really?” the husband said, a little tremulously.  “What’s that called again?”

 

 

(I ask you, kids: has anyone really never heard of Ambien?)  “Ambien,” I repeated.

 

 

“It’s pretty safe,” Partner added.  “They usually give you a prescription for twenty pills once a month, so that you can’t take one every night.”

 

 

“Oh!” the wife said.  “You need a prescription for it.”  She looked at us both sympathetically.  “Haven’t you tried something like Tylenol PM?”

 

 

I am not known for my tact.  “Feh!” I said.  (Literally, I said “Feh.”  I surprised myself a little bit.)  “Tylenol PM is kid stuff.  Why bother with that, when you know there’s something that can really help you?”

 

 

You have to wonder what people have in their heads these days.  I have heard otherwise intelligent people say things like: “Well, I get the flu shot every year.  But sometimes it gives me the flu.”  No, honey, it doesn’t.  Or: “I hear a lot of stuff on TV about how the flu shot’s not really good for you.”  Would you please tell me on what Satanic TV channel you hear such nonsense?

 

 

I know lots of people who believe it is a sign of weakness to take medication.  Aspirin (or, in life-threatening situations, Tylenol or Advil) is permissible once in a while.  But nothing more! 

 

 

I carry a few Claritin in my briefcase for emergencies.  I don’t find it very useful, frankly, but on a bad allergy day it can be a life-saver.  I proffer it to people sometimes when they’re coughing and wheezing, and they react as if I’m giving them heroin. 

 

 

Seriously, kids: human beings are highly irrational.

 

 

I really should have asked Doctor Cutiepie about this while I had the chance.

 

---

 

The United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change, Durban, South Africa, 2011

---

The Durban climate conference began yesterday.  According to the Financial Times, the conference is given “low expectations of success.”

 

 

No surprise here.

 

 

(Cherry trees are blooming again, down by Fox Point here in Providence (latitude forty-one degrees).   They were blooming downtown two months ago, if you recall.)

 

 

(So climate change has at least driven the trees crazy.)

 

 

(That’s something, at least.)

 

 

The President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, wrote an editorial in the FT last weekend to say that his country (a small group of very low-lying islands, none of them more than a few meters above sea level) was striving to become carbon-neutral and environmentally responsible, and asking other countries to do the same.

 

 

Then again: George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom, was recently quoted as saying that he would not “kill Britain to save the planet,” or words to that effect.

 

Hm.

 

 

Does he realize that, if the planet dies, Britain goes with it?

 

 

Last, and most somber of all: another FT article seriously discussed the possibility that the human race is endangered.  One scientist, quoted in the article, thinks that we will hang on – but marginally, the way that Native American languages have survived in Mexico and South America.

 

 

Doesn’t that make you feel hopeful?

 

 

Me neither.

---

 

The Muppets

---

Partner and I saw the new Muppet movie on Cape Cod at Thanksgiving.  I laughed myself sick several times, and teared up a couple of times.

 

 

I know, I am a doddery old coot.  But listen:

 

 

This is an excellently well-made movie.  The doubters said that modern kids would not like this movie, since they are not familiar with the Muppets.  These doubts were completely put to rest when I heard the children in the theater audience laughing themselves into delirium.   Chris Cooper rolls out a contract on a scroll, and it’s five feet long, and I heard a little boy in the back shriek: “It’s so long!”  Best of all, there’s a musical number performed completely wordlessly by clucking chickens, and Partner and I were laughing, but the little girls behind us were laughing so hard they were in tears.

 

 

There are lots of references that five-year-olds will not get.  The sequence beginning with Kermit’s robot butler serving Tab and New Coke, and ending with Gary Numan’s song “Cars,” is wonderful, and I was bellylaughing through the whole thing.  I got it: the Muppets were very early-1980s.

 

 

But then there's the new material.

 

 

I credit Jason Segel with this wonderful mash-up of nostalgia and cleverness.  He looks like a big human Muppet (as one of the songs in the movie affirms), and – according to sources, including Amy Adams (who plays his girlfriend) in New York Magazine – he is the biggest Muppet fan in existence, and is both the co-executive producer of this masterpiece, and its co-writer.

 

 

I don’t know if he wrote the songs, or collaborated on them, but they too are wonderful.  Kermit sings a sad little song early on in which he invokes the memory of his old Muppet comrades, and it’s lovely.  Jason and his Muppet brother Walter sing a wonderful duet early in the movie that’s reprised later, and it is also wonderful.  The big number - “Am I A Man Or Am I A Muppet?” – is (impossibly) both moving and hysterically funny.

 

 

And when, late in the movie, Kermit sings “Rainbow Connection” from the first movie back in 1979, I dare you not to get a lump in your throat.

 

 

It is a sweet movie.  I can’t tell you more than that.  Both Partner and I left the theater giggling, and nostalgic, and having had a wonderful time.

 

 

I don’t know much about viral advertising, or about social media, but I see a lot of my Internet friends and acquaintances getting excited about this movie.

 

 

See this movie, kids.  It is absolutely worth your time.  It will make you laugh, and make you sentimental, and hopefully you will hear (as we did) some kids shrieking with laughter.

 

 

It will give you hope for the future.

 

---

 

 

Sunday offering: "Raise Your Glass," by Pink

---

I heard this song on the radio several times – downtown, and on the Brown shuttle – and didn’t pay much attention.  And then I found myself muttering/singing some of the lyrics under my breath: “And if you’re too school for cool . . .”

 

 

The song’s great.  And the video is hysterical.  Give it a watch.

 

 

 

---

 

 

Cast members

---

There is a huge building in Orlando with the word CASTING on the roof.  It is the nerve center of Disney staffing: the place where all of the Donalds and Goofys and Cruellas and princesses and cowboys and restaurant staff and happy greeters get hired and trained.

 

 

Because they are not staff, you see.  They are “cast members.”

 

 

They are always in character, or almost always.  Now and then you see a tiny flicker of weariness: the waitress in the Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn and Café seemed tired and overworked, and some of the people working on the rides were almost (but not quite) testy.  But most are amiable and perky to the point of being unnatural.

 

 

(Universal has tried to copy this idea.  Their “cast members,” or whatever their equivalent term is, are just the tiniest bit less perky than the Disney cadre, but they do their best.  The Universal people are not, I think, given quite as much Manchurian Candidate Juice as their Disney counterparts, and are forced to improvise.  At Doctor Doom’s Fearfall in Universal, for example, the cast members are all dressed in odd Space Age / Ruritanian outfits, and one kid leapt and did a dramatic pirouette and said “Velcome to de Latverian Embassy!”)

 

 

The Disney people are (I’m sure) briefed on their roles.  In places like the Haunted Mansion and the Tower of Terror, for example, they are very grim and morose, reinforcing the idea that horrible things are about to happen to you.

 

 

But I will most remember the kid who greeted us at Spaceship Earth in Epcot, our last night there.  He made conversation with us while the little cars were being emptied and lined up; I didn’t notice it right away, but he was walking backwards on a big rotating disk, at a very methodical pace.  Partner asked him how long his shift was, and he said it was eight hours.  “Walking backward the whole time?” I said.

 

 

His expression changed very slightly.  “I even dream about it,” he said.

 

 

I believe him.

 

 

May the ghost of Walt Disney bless him and grant him a pay increase.

 

---

 

Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"

 

---

 I was in Symposium Books downtown last week, and somehow I got into conversation with a bright-eyed older lady.  We were negotiating our way through the minor fiction of Virginia Woolf - “Flush” and “Orlando” and “Melymbrosia” - when my eye fell on a stack of cement-block-sized volumes lying near me: nicely-bound new NYRB editions of Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” priced attractively at $10.99.  They were hefty little tomes; even if I never get around to reading it, I reasoned, I could always toss it at a pursuing enemy and at least slow him down.

 

 

(I just weighed it on the postal scale.  It’s two pounds twelve ounces. It'd leave quite a dent in your forehead if I chucked it at you.)

 

 

The new proprietor of Symposium, a funny hipster of whom I approve (the former guy was a drippy-looking Robert Crumb caricature who, according to a writer friend of mine, looked like he was either dealing or using, or both, in the back room.)  He regarded my purchase thoughtfully and approvingly.  “My wife is doing comparative lit,” he said, “and she’s reading all of these things.”

 

 

“Thomas Brown,” I said.  “Chaucer.  ‘The Faerie Queene.’”

 

 

He nodded.  “I had to read that one too,” he said. 

 

 

“And Traherne,” I said.  “And Hakluyt.  And Sir Thomas Mandeville.  And –“

 

 

Yes, yes.  Of books, and the making of books, there is no end.

 

 

I don’t know if you’ve ever read Burton.  I never had, until last week.  If you are, like me, a booklover with a sense of humor, you will adore this book.  It purports to be a list of all – all! – the causes of human melancholy, and every single cure ever put forward for each one of them. It is plentifully annotated.  Burton read everything available to him, and he remembered everything he ever read. 

 

 

If it sounds like a dismal topic – well, it’s not.  It is light and charming.  That’s the idea, after all; you’re melancholy, you pick up the book, and it cures you.  It is the original over-the-counter remedy for depression.  Samuel Johnson (per Boswell) said it was the only book that ever got him out of bed early.

 

 

Here’s a taste, from the section on eating too much:

 

 

“A true saying it is, Plures crapula quam gladius. This gluttony kills more than the sword, this omnivorantia et homicida gula, this all-devouring and murdering gut. And that of Pliny is truer, "Simple diet is the best; heaping up of several meats is pernicious, and sauces worse; many dishes bring many diseases." Avicen cries out, "That nothing is worse than to feed on many dishes, or to protract the time of meats longer than ordinary; from thence proceed our infirmities, and 'tis the fountain of all diseases, which arise out of the repugnancy of gross humours." Thence, saith Fernelius, come crudities, wind, oppilations, cacochymia, plethora, cachexia, bradiopepsia,  Hinc subitae, mortes, atque intestate senectus, sudden death, &c., and what not.”

 

 

 

I know just enough Latin to struggle through the quotes even without Burton’s helpful glosses (although they are often a relief – and when he omits a translation, I know it had a Bad Word in it).  Every phrase has its little pleasure.  Oppilations?  Cacochymia?  Plethora?  O god, bradiopepsia, I think I have that right now.  And sudden death!

 

 

And what not.

 

 

 

This book is my new best friend.

 

 

Although I still might hurl it at someone, to dispel my melancholy.

 

 

(Note: you can download it free at Gutenberg.org, though they’d be glad of a couple of bucks, if you’d care to throw a few bucks their way.)

 

 

---

 

 

Thanksgiving offering: Sweet potato pie a la Haggers

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 I didn’t know what to post for Thanksgiving until I suddenly remembered this recipe.  It was featured on a 1970s Norman Lear show called “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” which was Norman’s salute to the soap-opera format.  It was on five nights a week, and it hit every theme: sex, violence, deviant behavior, death, illness, marriage, love . . . And it was very funny.

 

 

So anyway: Mary Kay Place played a character named Loretta Haggers, a sweet little ol’ thing married to a much older man.  Loretta wanted very much to be a country singer, and kept almost breaking through, but something always got in the way.  This recipe comes from an episode in which Loretta actually gets on the Dinah Shore show, sings a song, and does a cooking segment; sadly, however, she makes some unfortunate comments, and she’s booted from the show.

 

 

SWEET POTATO PIE A LA HAGGERS

 

• About a pound of potatoes
• Half or a cup of sugar
• A tap of nutmeg
• Two taps of cinnamon
• A half tap of cloves
• Three big eggs or four littler ones
• A wee bitty glug of vanilla
• Half a big stick of butter (or margarine)
• A cup of sweet milk

1. Mash the heck out of your potatoes.
2. Throw in your sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, eggs, and vanilla extraction.
3. Pour the melted butter and sweet milk right into that.
4. Beat this with a beater.  Whip the daylights out of it.
5. Pour it all into a ready-made pie shell.
6. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. 
7. Bake for 1 hour and 25 minutes. It will be done to a nice turn.  Once the smoke clears, it’ll be some dandy eatin’.

 

 

 

---

 

 

Halloween candy

---

 I don’t know about you, but my memories of childhood are not wonderful.

 

 

Take Halloween, for example.  As I recall, I loved the idea of it: pumpkins, dressing up, getting free candy.  When it came down to it, however, dressing up was a little embarrassing, not to mention uncomfortable (those 1960s-era plastic Fred Flintstone masks really didn’t allow you to breath very well).  Also, going to strangers’ houses to ask for candy – in the dark, yet! – was sort of scary.

 

 

So I was pleased to hear this story from a coworker:

 

 

Her little boy, three years old, went out with his father to go trick-or-treating. They were gone for a suspiciously brief time; it turned out later that they’d gone to a total of five houses.  But the little boy was deliriously happy.  “I got so much candy!” he crowed. 

 

 

And he dumped out his plastic bucket –

 

 

And he’d gotten maybe ten or twelve small pieces of candy.

 

 

But, to him, it was a windfall.

 

 

My friend is apparently very strict about her son's candy consumption, so he was very circumspect about eating anything from his bucket.  “Can I have one piece now?” he asked.

 

 

“Sure,” she said.  “But just one.”

 

 

He pulled out a fun-sized Kit Kat, unwrapped it, ate it, and went into a kind of satori.  “Mamma,” he said, “what was that thing I just ate?”

 

 

“It’s called a Kit Kat,” she said.

 

 

“It is,” he said dreamily, “the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.  Can I have another one?”

 

 

“One’s enough for now,” she said.  “Maybe if you’re good tomorrow, you can have another.”

 

 

“Okay,” he said.  He took another Kit Kat out of his Halloween bucket and laid it on the table.  “I’m going to put this right here,” he said.  “And it’ll be right here waiting for me tomorrow.”

 

 

That’s the nicest story I’ve heard in a long time.

 

 

And now I am going to have a Kit Kat.

 

 

But just one.

 

---

 

The Vegetarian Times

---

Last weekend I cooked a pork roast.  I also read the latest issue of the Vegetarian Times.

 

 

Yes, I know. 

 

 

But here’s the thing: I am not the carnivore I used to be.  I go meatless two or three days a week at least.  I like very much Mark Bittman’s compromise: be as meatless as you can be without driving yourself crazy.

 

 

There are some good recipes in the most recent issue of the Vegetarian Times. I intend to try the black-bean-and-sweet-potato enchiladas, and maybe the stuffed mushrooms, and the nice Hungarian crepe-and-jelly dessert. 

 

 

But there is also a whole mindset to this vegetarian thing, a fiery self-righteousness.  One reader wrote to complain that a recent article might actually encourage people to eat sweet corn, which – gasp! – might be genetically modified.  The editors duly apologized.  References to obscure food items – tempeh, kombucha, chaga, spelt – are everywhere.  It’s like any other club: the members really don’t want you to understand what they’re talking about. 

 

 

It’d be helpful if they relaxed a bit.  It’s not a religion, after all; it’s just a way of eating.

 

 

I was especially bemused by references to something called Quorn.  Evidently it was a meat substitute, but I had no idea what it was; I assumed it might be something like soy. 

 

 

But, oh my, it’s ever so much better than that!

 

 

It’s a mycoprotein: a substance produced by a fungus called Fusarium venenatum.  The fungus produces strands called hyphae, which resemble the fibers in meat.  If you grow this fungus in a vat and harvest it, you can moosh it up and turn it into a meat substitute.

 

 

I have no problem with this; I’m Polish on my mother’s side, we love to eat fungi.  But the nice people at Quorn were concerned that people might not like their product, so they started telling little white lies.  They said, for example, that Quorn was “mushroom protein.”  (Our friend Fusarium is a fungus, but not all fungi are mushrooms.  Fusarium, to be frank, is a mold.  It is probably not good for sales to say so out loud.)  If you haven’t seen Quorn much in the USA, that’s because a couple of other companies screamed loudly that Quorn causes dangerous allergic reactions in a significant percentage of consumers.  (It appears that the claim is vastly overblown, and that Quorn is no more dangerous than, say, mushrooms.  Or peanuts, for that matter.)

 

 

And who funded the anti-Quorn campaign?  Why, a company called Gardenburger.  You may known them.  They make meatless products. 

 

 

See?  Vegetarians aren't necessarily nice people.

 

 

This makes me feel better, because I know I will never be a nice person, vegetarian or not.

 

---

 

 

Solitaire: the gift that keeps on giving

---

 When I was maybe six, my family stayed for a few days in Ocean Park, Washington, in a little cottage belonging to the parents of my sister-in-law Janet.  I don’t remember the beach, but I remember being huddled in the too-small cabin with what must have been six or seven other people.  They were probably miserable; I was in heaven.

 

 

And, to top it off, Janet taught me War.  And Slapjack.  And, best of all, Solitaire.

 

 

You may call it Klondike, or Patience.  You may play with slightly different rules than I do.  But I will always return to the simple deal-three-at-a-time version that Janet taught me in Ocean Park.

 

 

I spent many rainy summer afternoons at home playing it on my parents’ decorative coffee table at home, with two decks of bridge cards my parents never used because they didn’t play bridge.   I seldom won.

 

 

I took to it again in college.  I played compulsively, demonically, on my bed, my legs crossed in a Lotus pose that few can duplicate.  (I’m double-jointed.)  I actually got to the point, believe it or not, that I was winning two out of every three games.

 

 

I left the game for a while.  I came back to it in the Peace Corps, where it was useful for killing long warm dull North African afternoons.  My British friend Austin, watching me methodically lay out the cards one day, said in his picturesque way that it was “the most extraordinary waste of time and mental energy he’d ever seen.”  I thumbed my nose at him and continued to play.

 

 

Then computers came along, which revolutionized one-player card games, and one-player everything for that matter, if you know what I mean.

 

 

I got an iPad recently.  And it was not two days before it occurred to me to check the App Store for a nice free Solitaire app.

 

 

The game still takes me back to cloudy Northwest days, when I sat laying out game after game on my parents’ smooth cool Lucite table inlaid with petrified wood. There’s the quiet slap of cards as they're put down, and the whirring sound of the shuffle, and that's enough.  The rest is between me and Fate, also known as Dame Fortune, also known as Those Damned Cards.

 

 

I’ll have to drop a note to Janet and thank her for all these years of quiet absorbtion.

 

 

Now let’s just see if I can win three in a row.

---

 

Sunday offering: "Kicks," by Lou Reed

---

 

I know I’ve posted “Heroin.”  As far as I’m concerned, this song is much darker than “Heroin.”  Listen closely to the lyrics, and you’ll figure out what’s going on.  And it ain’t very nice.

 

Hey, man, what’s your style?  How do you get your kicks for livin'?

 

 

 

Lou_Reed_-_Kicks.mp3 Listen on Posterous

 

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Breaking Dawn: Part 1

---

 It’s bad form to review a movie or play (or anything, really) without seeing it.  Walter Kerr famously reviewed “Oklahoma!” without seeing it; he knew it had to be terrible, but he was afraid that if he saw it, he’d like it.  He wanted to retain his own personal purity of soul.

 

 

Well, I have not seen “Breaking Dawn: Part One.”  I am not, ahem, part of its target demographic.  I have seen the first two movies, and have read the books, et cetera, but nothing more.

 

 

I do, however, know someone who is a fan.

 

 

Apollonia is a rabid Twi-hard.  She owns (as I’ve mentioned before) a life-sized cardboard cutout of Robert Pattinson, which she keeps at home; she used to keep it in the office, but I kept putting baseball caps on it, which she considered sacrilegious, so she took it out of my reach.  She has been trembling with excitement all week.  “When are you going to see it?” I asked her the other day.

 

 

She looked at me incredulously.  “Are you kidding?” she said.  “Twelve-oh-one on Friday.  Midnight show.”

 

 

“You’re doomed,” I said.  “Either the crowd will kill you, or you’ll collapse of exhaustion.”

 

 

“Or I’ll die of ecstasy,” she said rapturously.

 

 

She showed up for work right on the button at eight-thirty on Friday morning, with a feverish light in her eyes.  “It was wonderful,” she managed to sputter.  “Kristin Stewart – well, you know I don’t care so much for her.  Or that Taylor Lautner.  But – oh – Robert Pattinson -“

 

 

(I will spare you the rest of her ravings.  In case you’re wondering: she was amazingly clear-minded for most of the day, but the exhaustion began getting to her by Friday afternoon; she’d been up until at least 3:00am the night before, after all.  I suggested to her at one point that she lie down on the floor and go nighty-night, but she resisted.)

 

 

I’m being mean for no reason.  Manohla Dargis in the New York Times liked it; it’s a love story, she said, and it’s well-filmed and reasonably well-acted, and the cinematography and direction are both very good.  (The Financial Times, my other favorite newspaper, was very snarky about it, but then again, they are British and snobby and supercilious.)   

 

 

But, let’s face it, the great love stories in Western literature are mostly pretty silly: Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Cathy and Heathcliff. 

 

 

And “Twilight” is a silly love story about a small-town girl who falls in love with a small-town vampire, and marries him, even though there’s a small-town werewolf who carries a torch for her. 

 

 

So what’s the matter with that?  It happened all the time when I was in high school.

 

---

 

Every good blog deserves favor

---

Apollonia’s younger son recently began a nice little blog, mostly about food, called Topsytasty.com.  It is very well-written and entertaining, and I wouldn’t have expected anything else from any offspring of Apollonia.  (He wrote a very nice little piece about Apollonia on her birthday.)  Lioness that she is, she is very proud of him.  But she worries.  “I don’t know if anybody’s reading it,” she told me.  “I mean, I am.  But who else is?”


“That’s the way of the Internet,” I told her.  “Who knows?  He could get discovered.  He might catch on.  Look: I post mine on four different websites every day, and I’m lucky to get maybe fifty reads total.”


“Huh,” she said.


“Well, some days I catch fire,” I said.  “But most days are slow.  I don’t write like Dickens, after all.”


“You write like the dickens,” she said whimsically.  (When she was a girl, back before electricity and indoor plumbing, “the dickens” was a euphemism for Satan.)


Anyway.  Go read that young man’s blog.  You will pick up a few good recipes, which is not nothing; also, as I said, he writes well, which is not all that common these days.


And, as a side benefit, you will make Apollonia happy. 


And, believe me, that is no mean feat.

---

 

Doing time at the DMV

 I had to go to the DMV a while back to renew my photo ID.  (I don’t actually have a driver’s license; I’m far too jumpy to drive.  And, believe it or not, Rhode Island makes you renew your photo ID too.)  The building was packed with the usual assortment of people.  I was lucky to sit next to a lady and her elderly mother; the lady herself bitched steadily for two hours about the wait, blah blah blah, Massachusetts has quicker service, blah blah blah, I’m taking time off from work I can’t afford, blah blah blah, I’m just here to transfer her title –

 

 

(Mom was almost completely silent for the entire two hours I was there.  She’d sit up whenever anyone new came into range, and she’d point and giggle when she saw something that amused her, but she was entirely well-behaved compared to her daughter, the Complaining Machine.)

 

 

At one point the database crashed.  It was explained to us that this was a nationwide phenomenon, not an only-in-Rhode-Island one, and we would be kept apprised. 

 

 

Naturally this sent the whining levels through the roof. 

 

 

On the plus side: I had my brand-new iPad with me, so I was able to answer emails and actually do some work, and play solitaire a bit on the side. 

 

 

Also on the plus side: Rhode Island has a real superfluity of over-thirty men who work out, and who wear nice tight clothing to show off their physical development.  It was very pleasant to have something to rest my eyes on once in a while.

 

 

And my number got called before Complaining Lady’s number.

 

 

I bet she had a stroke.

 

 

So: all in all, it was a good day.

 

A nice aimless story

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Partner and I were in Stop & Shop before Halloween.  He was in the deli, and I was in the grocery.  I was zipping through the candy aisle, and something caught my eye: the word JESUS, which seemed oddly out of place.  I stopped and examined the item: it was a box of Christian lollipops for distribution on Halloween, each wrapped in a cute little paper decorated with a pumpkin, bearing the legend: JESUS SAID: I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.

 

 

Aha.  I’ve heard of this.  Jesus-ween, right?  It’s an evil holiday, so let’s Christian it up.  You don’t see it much here in pagan / Catholic Rhode Island, where people often allow the Virgin Mary to camp out year-round in a bathtub on their front lawn, but it’s an interesting phenomenon.

 

 

So now Partner and I are done shopping and are rolling the cart out into the parking lot.  I am aware of Partner’s hearing difficulty; God knows I am hard of hearing too.   So I try to enunciate, as carefully as I can, as we walk: “They were selling lollipops with Bible verses on them, for Halloween.”

 

 

And Partner looks at me with total incomprehension and says: “Wally Cox?  Why did Wally Cox have Bible verses on him?”

 

 

Partner and I are the Burns and Allen of the Third Millennium.

 

 

Except I’m not sure which one of us is George and which one is Gracie.

 

 

I think we take turns.

 

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Final arrangements

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Partner and I are both getting on in age, and have begun to talk about our final arrangements.  Naturally we want to be together, even after we’re both defunct.  (This is irrational, but we’re human, so naturally we’re irrational.)

 

 

We have, unfortunately, discovered that we have a little discrepancy in our final wishes.

 

 

Partner wants to be cremated (after he’s dead, I mean, not today) and have his ashes thrown into the water off the Pacific island of Maui.

 

 

I want to be buried in a proper wooden casket and put in the ground in Venersborg, Washington, close to where I grew up, in a grave facing Spotted Deer Mountain, in northern Clark County.

 

 

So, you see, we have some negotiating to do.

 

 

I think we will do a catch-as-catch-can scenario.  If I go first (which I think is very possible), I want him to take me with him wherever he goes.  It would be nice if some little part of me – even a keepsake – were put in the ground near my parents, but really, it doesn’t matter that much.  It matters much more to me that I be with Partner.  He can take me to Maui if he likes.  There’s enough of me in Venersborg already, I suppose, after having grown up there. 

 

 

And, if he takes me with him to Maui, Partner and I will be together.

 

 

And if (God forbid) Partner goes first, I will carry out his wishes, and he will swim with the fishes off Maui.  But a little pinch of him is going to stay with me, and I will be buried in Venersborg with an envelope in my pocket, and that envelope will have some of Partner in it.

 

 

And, if I bring a little piece of him to Venersborg with me, Partner and I will be together.

 

 

And that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

 

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Bill O’Reilly versus the tides

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Bad science is nothing new; just ask Galileo.  I will say, however, that the American right wing, with its notoriously anti-intellectual bent, is making Galileo’s persecutors look positively enlightened.

 

 

Michelle Bachmann, to score some political points, threw the (not so old) canard at Rick Perry that vaccines cause autism.  Except that vaccines don’t cause autism.  But Michelle claimed that someone – a mother! - told her that they did.  And that’s that!  Take that, you stupid doctors and scientists!

 

Rick Perry himself, a Christian, prays for stuff.  He prayed for an end to the Texas drought earlier this year; he also prayed for the economy to improve.  (Prayer is so much easier than social action.  And you can always say, if nothing happens, that “God is working it out.”)

 

 

Mitt Romney, who once was almost rational on the subject of the environment and climate change, is creeping toward denialism.  He sort of acknowledges that the climate is changing, but says that we can’t possibly know with certainty whether the human race is responsible for it.  And, without this key piece of information, Mitt says that any attempt toward green living – CO2 reduction, for example – is silly, and a waste of money.  (Hey, Mitt, here’s some information for you: climate change means rising sea levels. Better get your ass back to Utah, where it’s high and dry!)

 

 

But the best, and worst, and most cringeworthy of all, is Bill O’Reilly, on the subject of the earth’s tides.  (This is old news – it dates back to January / February of this year – but he still hasn’t corrected himself, and it’s still a deliciously stupid story.)

 

 

It all began when O’Reilly had a guy named David Silverman on his show.  Silverman represented an organization called the American Atheists Group, which was mounting billboards around the country, some of which called religion a “scam.”  O’Reilly, he of the “war against Christmas” campaign, wanted to sink this guy in the mud.  So he chose an example of the miraculous in everyday life: the earth’s tides. 

 

 

To wit:

 

 

O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

 

 

But of course we can explain the tides, Bill.  It involves the moon, and the sun, and gravity.

 

 

Every fifth-grade science teacher in the country jumped on this howling gaffe.  It was just too much.

 

 

But (in the words of A. A. Milne): did O’Reilly blinch?  No no.

 

A few weeks later, on his website, he posted the following:

 

Okay, how did the moon get there? How'd the moon get there? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How'd the moon get there? How'd the sun get there? How'd it get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn't have it? Venus doesn't have it. How come? Why not? How'd it get here?

 

 

A “pinhead” is someone who didn’t pay attention in science class when the tides were being explained.  A “pinhead” is someone who looks in the sky, sees the sun and moon, and says, “God put them here just for me!”

 

 

Also: a “pinhead” is someone who makes a howling mistake in public and then refuses to admit it.

 

 

As the Huffington Post put it: “O’Reilly: zero.  Science: infinity.”

 

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Sunday blog: Mahler's "Urlicht," sung by Maureen Forrester, conducted by Glenn Gould

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 I recently found this clip on YouTube.  It’s lovely: Maureen Forrester, one of the great contraltos of the 20^th century, singing one of the great contralto arias – the “Urlicht” movement from Mahler’s Second Symphony – accompanied by an orchestra conducted by Glenn Gould.

 

 

An acquaintance had the nerve to mock me for liking this on YouTube.  What do you like about this? he said.  Mahler?  Forrester?  The schmaltzy conducting of Glenn Gould? 

 

 

All three, actually, I said.

 

 

Mahler is all about feeling.  Everyone involved in this performance is heavily into feeling.

 

And sometimes feeling is what it's all about.

 

 

So huh.

 

 

 

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Let the Muppets host the Oscars!

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Eddie Murphy recently decided not to host next year’s Academy Awards ceremony, for reasons which are a little murky, but seem to involve his loyalty to Brett Ratner, the show’s director, who was fired after he got a little frisky in a couple of interviews.  

 

 

I like Eddie Murphy, I suppose; I got a few laughs out of “Bowfinger,” anyway.  Oh, and he was cute as the voice of the donkey in “Shrek,” and the mini-dragon in “Mulan,” although it was sort of the same performance in both movies.  But I was out of the United States during a key period in the 1980s – the period during which “Ghostbusters,” and “Miami Vice” were popular, and during which Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy were the new faces of television comedy.  As a result, I am more or less apathetic about Eddie Murphy in general.  Let him go, let him go, God bless him, I say.

 

 

More importantly, however: whatever shall we do for an Academy Awards host?  (You know how strongly I feel about the Oscars.)  We could pray for the wiry Hugh Jackman, or the nimble Neil Patrick Harris, I suppose.  And I hear that Billy Crystal (who must be eighty years old by now) has already been approached, and has mumbled and clicked his agreement through his ill-fitting dentures.

 

 

But I just saw the best idea of all online recently: let the Muppets host the Oscars!

 

 

Think of it!  Kermit cheering and leaping around on Julia Roberts and Emma Stone.  Miss Piggy doing at least one (and maybe all) of the musical numbers (with Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem as backup), and making out (or trying to) with George Clooney.  Statler and Waldorf heckling the performance from the audience.  Fozzie doing comedy relief in tandem with Zach Galifianakis.  We could even have some crossover Muppets: the Count!  Big Bird!  Grover!

 

 

If you don’t agree with me that a touch of Muppet improves almost anything, please to watch this clip from “WWE Raw,” in which lab assistant Beaker gives a wrestler a Secret Energy Drink!

 

 

So let’s dump tired old Billy Crystal, and let him go back to Boca, and give the Muppets a chance.

 

 

Wocka wocka!

 

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East, west, home is best

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 I used to love to travel, back when I was a pent-up country boy longing to escape from the rural Pacific Northwest.  I remember my first airplane flight, from Portland to Seattle in 1978, and it was thirty minutes of pure liberation.  (I also remember the stewardess running up and down the aisle with the beverage cart, because the flight was so short.)

 

 

But I am older, and I now have my mother’s nervousness about travelling.  Whenever Partner and I go on a trip – even a short one - I go through days and weeks of suffering first.  What about the flight?  What about the transfers, and the weather? 

 

 

Shouldn’t we just stay home?

 

 

In the past – the very recent past, really – we’d get back from a trip, and I’d look around the apartment, and it looked dusty and dismal and uninteresting, and I would wish intensely that we were still on vacation.

 

 

This last trip, just last month, coming back from Orlando, we got back around midnight on Saturday, and I looked around the apartment and thought: Hooray!

 

 

Vacations are lovely, and travel is necessary, and a break in routine is imperative for one’s mental health.

 

 

But home is home, especially for old ladies like me.

 

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The A-List: Dallas

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 I have already written about “The A-List: New York.”  To recap: it’s Logo’s gay reworking of the “Real Housewives” formula (a group of upper-middle-class women who barely know each other, but who pretend to be best friends on camera; naturally they can barely tolerate each other, and they are scripted and filmed to within an inch of their lives, but they are assured! that they will be give branding opportunities to make up for all the onscreen unpleasantness.)



“A-List: New York” borrowed the same formula but staffed it with gay men, and at first Partner and I were speechless with horror, but now we’re raving fans.  We love Rodiney Santiago, the heartachingly handsome Brazilizan model who came to New York to be with Reichen Lehmkuhl, a former Air Force pilot and winner of “The Amazing Race,” who’s also amazingly handsome, but who has (evidently) accepted Botox into his life as his personal lord and savior.  We hiss and boo Austin Armacost, the pudgy little troublemaker who cries at the drop of a hat.  We admire Mike Ruiz, the serious (and slightly older) professional photographer, who just proposed to his (also very sweet and very handsome) boyfriend at the end of Season Two.


And now Logo has gone one step further: they’ve expanded the franchise to another city, to wit: “The A-List: Dallas.”


Oh my dears.  This flock of puerile goobers makes the New York group look like the Algonquin Round Table. 


For one thing, every third word in their conversation is “gay.”  Gay gay gay.  Yeah, we get it: the concept is probably still kind of new in the Republic of Texas.  (I wonder if they know about Donna Summer yet?)



Also, the group is exceedingly – well – juvenile.  All the drama in the show comes from who’s dating who.  The hunk-of-the-moment is the self-defined “cowboy” Levi, who’s not bad-looking, but who has a strangely off-kilter face – sort of a less-attractive Owen Wilson.  Partner pointed out the other night that Levi rubs his nose a lot, which might indicate a number of things . . .  (By the way, Levi is also a fashion designer.  He has a line of swimwear/underwear called "Inch Wear," which - well, hm.  But it's now on TV, and it will probably actually sell.)



There is James, a trust-fund baby with a fat toothy face, who drinks too much and inserts himself in everyone’s business.



There’s Philip, the (sorry, but it’s true) token black man, who’s as gay as Christmas at Bloomingdale’s, and who shrieks and wags his ass at the drop of a hat.  (Much of the drama in an early episode revolved around Philip being pushed into the pool at a pool party.  “My Salvatores!” he wailed.)



Then – why? – there’s Ashley, a woman!  Well, a girl.  She is headache-inducingly chirpy, and a self-proclaimed Christian (though you could never tell it from the way she acts), and a photographer, and a cheerleading coach. She is Reese Witherspoon multiplied by Kristin Chenoweth and minus all talent.


And the others: the fat-faced Christian Republican, the guy with gigantic hair, and somebody else.


The show is utterly repugnant. 



We’re watching, kids, we’re watching.

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CEOs are not like the rest of us

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The death of Steve Jobs brought forth a spate of worshipful obits, didn’t it?  I honestly had no idea.  I mean, rest in peace and so forth, but as a businessman, he was - hmm – brilliant but a little monomaniacal.  But I heard people quoting the most inane Jobisms, and odd little reminiscences – his (very substanceless) Zen meditations, his quick temper . . .

 

 

I am seeing, under all of this, a creepy renascence of the Victorian figure of the Captain of Industry.  For one thing, there’s that repugnant CBS show “Undercover Boss,” in which CEOs dress up in bad wigs and goatees and take front-line jobs in their own stores; it always turns into a Cinderella story, and the boss turns out to be Just A Guy After All, and Not So Bad.  He hands out gifts and bonuses and so forth at the end of the show, and pledges Never To Forget The Little People Again.

 

 

Phooey.  I bet.

 

 

I never said CEOs were bad.  I simply assume that they are, like the rest of us, greedy and venal.  The main differences between CEOs and the rest of us is that they have gotten their hands on some boodle, and have now shifted their focus to hanging on to what they’ve got.

 

 

They have also generally convinced themselves that they are somehow magical high priests of the material world.  There are large segments of the media (CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, even my beloved Financial Times) which constantly assure CEOs that they are very smart. 

 

 

The FT interviews a famous person every week over lunch; they even include the menu and the bill.  A few weeks ago, it was the pianist Mitsuko Uchida, who had some insightful things to say.  The following week, however, it was the CEO of J. Crew, a nonentity named Mickey Drexler, who was incredibly full of himself, running around being very cute, telling everyone very loudly that he knew everything. (He predicted that the restaurant's best-selling pizza would be margarita, and was delighted with himself when he turned out to be right; then he ranked the most popular cookies: chocolate chip, right?  Then oatmeal.  Maybe oatmeal raisin.  Then sugar.)

 

 

Genius, right?

 

 

The FT often asks CEO questions like: “Describe your work ethic in ten words.”  You can imagine the answers; I won’t reproduce them here.  But the column often also asks them: Do you deserve your salary?

 

 

And, do you know, every single one of them so far has said “yes.”

 

 

No demurral at all; no “Well, I hope so.” 

 

 

Aarggh!

 

 

As Archy the Cockroach said almost a hundred years ago: "Yours for red rum, ruin, revolt, and rapine."

 

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Recipes I will never make (although, on the other hand, you never know)

 

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 I like reading cookbooks, for the following reasons:

 

 

-        Sometimes I get good ideas from them.

-        Sometimes, believe it or not, they’re well-written. From the dry beautiful prose of Elizabeth David to the wisecracks of Peg Bracken, you can lose yourself as easily in a good cookbook as you can in any novel.

-        Now and then you read something really eye-crossingly strange.

 

 

Albert Einstein performed “thought-experiments,” in which you didn’t really perform any physical experimentation; you just thought it through. 

 

 

These recipes, for me, are “thought-recipes.”

 

 

I know, for example, where to find a recipe for Roast Hump of Gazelle.  (I think camel hump can be substituted, if you’re out of gazelle.) 

 

 

My old copy of The Joy of Cooking includes a series of diagrams showing how to skin a squirrel. It involves putting the squirrel under your boot and pulling the tail upward.

 

 

I have read many times Alice Toklas’s recipe for Oeufs Francis Picabia (basically a big bowl of undercooked raw egg with lots of melted butter mixed into it), and for Truffled Sweetbreads (to be served on lettuce leaves).  Elizabeth David recounts a three-page all-day process for cooking a rabbit, which I think begins by analyzing the mental health of the bunny before you cook it.  It ends with people lining up outside your house, mesmerized by the delicious smell of the dish you’re cooking.

 

 

Then there is salade Rossini, which is (take this down):

 

 

·       Potatoes cooked in chicken stock;

·       Mussels (a third less than the potatoes);

·       “As many truffles as the budget will allow, sliced and cooked in champagne”;

·       A nice fruity vinegar and olive oil and salt and pepper and some tarragon over all. 

 

 

It actually sounds delicious, but my budget does not allow for any truffles at all, so I will not be sampling M. Rossini’s salad anytime soon.

 

 

I also have a recipe for stewed dog, to be served at weddings.  I can send it to you if you don’t believe me.

 

 

And here’s one I’ve read, but can’t find (Apollonia has seen it too, and we continually reassure one another that we’re not crazy, we’ve both seen this recipe): a big hunk of Bologna sausage, roasted and basted with grape jelly.

 

 

My mouth waters whenever I think of it. 

 

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Herman Cain

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So I notice Herman Cain seems to be embroiled in a bit of a controversy lately.

 

 

There is really nothing like watching a CEO flounder like a lungfish out of his local pond and into real life.

 

 

CEOs are not like the rest of us.  They are a strange and rare breed, like unicorns.  They breathe a purer thinner air, full of self-approbation and the praise of underlings.  They can do no wrong.  Their decisions are always right.  Their jokes are always funny.

 

 

This is why they get so blinky and irritable when you get them out into the light of day.  Without their flunkies and minions to support them, they get downright cranky.  I’m thinking Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling.  I’m thinking of Steve Jobs, rest his soul, whenever it was pointed out that an Apple product was less than perfect.  I’m thinking of Raj Rajaratnam snarling at the press.  I’m thinking of Jamie Dimon being nasty to the governor of the Bank of Canada only a month or two ago.

 

 

And I’m thinking of Herman Cain misspeaking about China’s nuclear capability – evidently he didn’t know they had A-bombs – and then saying, in effect, “No, I said the right thing.  I just said it in a way that you didn’t understand.”    And saying that women have the right to choose, but not to choose abortion, which is a form of genocide.

 

 

Not to mention all of those sexual harassment cases, which he has recently said he will no longer discuss.  (Poor baby!  Poor innocent!)

 

 

These allegations, to me, are especially telling.  If I had to guess, I’d hazard that Herman had no idea he was doing anything that could be considered offensive.  He probably thought he could say and do pretty much what he liked, and laugh it off later. 

 

 

Noblesse oblige, right?

 

 

Except that this kind of reasoning doesn’t work outside the boardroom. 

 

 

You and I (voters!) don’t have to do what Herman Cain tells us to do, or believe what he tells us to believe.  We can make up our own minds, and not worry about whether or not he’ll fire us for insubordination.

 

 

So what do you think of that, Herman?

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Sunday blog: "Cover Girl" by RuPaul

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We are in the sad season of the year between the conclusion of “RuPaul’s Drag U.” and the reprise of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” 

 

 

I am a little in the dumps. 

 

 

But this song perks me up right away!

 

 

Cover girl, put the face in your walk /

Head to toe, let your whole body talk . . .

 

 

RuPaul_-_Cover_Girl.mp3 Listen on Posterous

 

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