P90X

---

As you know by now, when I go to the health club, I rely on the local beefy boys for inspiration. Nothing gets my motor racing like the big boys in the fitness pit, huffin' and pressin' and curlin' and sweatin' and generally trying to outmuscle one another. It is sheer joy to me, like air and water and sunshine.

 

 

Sometimes, however, on a slow day, when most of the patrons are (like me) slow and feeble and elderly, I have to rely on my treadmill TV for inspiration.

 

 

Have you seen the infomercial for something called P90X? It is some sort of exercise program which appears to involve jumping up and down, pushups, and clapping your hands. It is extreme. It is guaranteed to turn you into Johnny Weissmuller (or at least Elmo Lincoln) in ninety days.

 

 

I like the transformation stories on these infomercials. They always start with an athletic guy (there are a few women in the mix, but the marketers concentrate on the men here, and I think they know what they're doing) telling his story, wearing only a few scraps of clothing; then we see pictures of him fat or skinny or unwell; then we see him jumping and bouncing and doing his P90X routine; then we return to the vivid reality of his sculpted new body. All these guys are adorable, and very pleased with themselves. I would just like to munch them all up.

 

 

As for the actual exercise routine: I have my doubts. I'm sure it's a perfectly valid program – anything that involved that much jumping and hopping would probably make you healthier – but ninety days? Dubious at best.

 

 

This, of course, is a bow to our results-obsessed culture. Remember when Bart Simpson took up the guitar, then quickly gave it up? “I wasn't good at it right away, so I quit.” And Homer approved of this, saying: “If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing.”

 

 

But wait! I recently saw an ad for Shaun T's Insanity sixty-day fitness program – with guaranteed results!

 

 

And last week, on the Cape, I saw a commercial for a thirty-day program!

 

 

Eh. I'll wait for the ten-minute version. I'm a very busy girl.

 

---

 

Chelsea Handler

---

An old friend wrote me a note recently to tell me how much he enjoys reading this blog. “You are the web version of Chelsea Handler,” he wrote. “You two should write a book together.”

 

 

First of all, I love this, because flattery makes me go all mooshy inside.

 

 

Second of all, this will never happen for two reasons. Firstly, I am not worthy to buckle the little shiny thingies on Chelsea’s expensive shoes. Secondly, she scares the bejeezus out of me.

 

 

If you’re not familiar with Chelsea, you should watch her show. (It’s on too late for sedate oldsters like Partner and me, but we DVR it.) She has a uniquely dry delivery, and is unimpressed with pretty much everything. She has elevated the word “stupid” to new heights; she pronounces the word with such heavy ironic ferocity. The show’s on the E! network, which also comes in for a heavy dose of her mockery, especially when she’s forced to have guests from some of the other E! shows, like the dreaded Michael Yo, or Kendra. She also produces and stars in yet another show on E!, though only a weekly one. She has written four books, all of which have made it to the Times best-seller list. (One’s up there right now.) She sponsors a stable of writers and comedians, who appear regularly on her show, and who all seem to be doing pretty well under her tutelage.

 

 

She's smart and funny and unapologetic. You should read the recent New York Times article about her!

 

 

All this despite the fact that women aren’t funny.

 

 

Go figure.

 

 

Go Chelsea!

 

 

(All kidding aside, I know I'd never be able to go up against her one-on-one. She's pretty fierce.)

 

---

 

 

Tornado warning: southern New England

---

Partner and I were on Cape Cod last Wednesday when the tornadoes marched through Massachusetts. Cape Cod is normally pretty placid weather-wise, but the water was very choppy that morning, and there were some big ominous-looking clouds up in the north. We knew there were some storm warnings, and even hail -

 

 

And then we heard the tornado warnings on the radio.

 

 

We knew we were out of harm's way. But northern Rhode Island was on tornado warning for the entire afternoon. Central Massachusetts got hit, especially Springfield, where there were several deaths, many injuries, and extensive damage. We spent the evening watching weathermen breathlessly Telestrating the map, talking about debris clouds and rotation and the Fujita scale.

 

 

Do you understand that this doesn't happen here?

 

 

New England is not Tornado Alley, by any means. New England is famous for the changeable nature of its weather; didn't Mark Twain himself say, “If you're not happy with the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes”? And God knows we get storms, sometimes pretty ferocious ones. But tornadoes we do not get.

 

 

One more sign that the weather is changing, and the world is changing.

 

 

It kills me that people do not get this. But here's the thing: it's not that they don't get it. They just pretend to believe either that it's God's great plan, or that it's just the way weather works.

 

 

Oh, no. Not in this particular epoch, dear hearts. We have turned the page, mostly through the stuff we've plentifully sprayed – mostly carbon dioxide and CFCs, but lots of other interesting stuff – into the atmosphere. Also overfarming and overdevelopment. Also miscellaneous pollutants. Also -

 

 

Anyway. The world is changing. And we helped.

 

 

We've passed the point of no return. Even if Sarah Palin herself (who, in a motorcycle rally a while back, said something stupid like “I love the smell of those emissions!”) were to begin recycling today! - it wouldn't make a bloody bit of difference.

 

 

I don't think we're doomed.

 

 

But I think there are going to be a lot less of us in a hundred years.

 

 

And, in a very little while, I won't be around to snark at everything.

 

 

Won't that be lovely?

 

 

Ah me. How very old the world has become.

 

---

 

 

Representative Anthony Weiner

---

Folklore tells us that Alexander the Great grew tired of being lectured by his resident schoolmaster, Aristotle, on how sex was a waste of time. One evening Alexander sent a prostitute into Aristotle's room, just to see what would happen.  He waited a while, and opened the door to find the prostitute riding the naked Aristotle around the room like a donkey.

 

 

Moral: sex makes smart people do stupid things.

 

 

I wrote a few months ago about Republican Representative Christopher Lee and his funny shirtless frolics with a camera and a mirror. Now we have Anthony Weiner, a Democrat, also playing “Candid Photography Click Click Nudge Nudge Say No More.”

 

 

When it's a Republican, I hoot and whistle, I know. I can't help it. When it's a Democrat – Weiner, or John Edwards, or Bill Clinton, or Ted Kennedy – I just squirm uneasily. And I get all forgiving and moral. Does it make them bad lawmakers? Does it matter who they have sex with? Or whether they use cigars when they do it? Or whether they pay off their mistresses with campaign funds?

 

 

Well, um, yes, I think that last one does matter, now that I think about it.

 

 

All professions have their share of jerks. Jerks are sometimes actually good at their jobs; in some professions, it's probably actually an asset. Rahm Emanuel comes to mind. By all accounts a horrible person; a very effective politician, however.

 

 

I think the thing that bothers me most about the Weiner story is the attitude he's been displaying lately. He's not contrite; he's angry and hostile. Angry at being found out? Probably. Angry with himself for not being more discreet? Possibly.

 

 

Bitchin' bod, though.

 

 

Who knew?

 

 

The Congressional weight room must have a dynamite conditioning program.

 

---

 

 

Old Cape Cod

---

Partner and I spent a few days on Cape Cod last week. It's barely an hour away from Providence, but it's a different world altogether. The weather is milder. The light is softer. The air is different.

 

 

It is so bloody quaint that it makes me want to hold my head and moan. Little white houses buried in rhododendrons and wisteria. Little shingled houses with American flags flying on the porch. Little brick houses with wizened cherry trees in the yard. Oh my God!

 

 

Little old ladies are everywhere, having brunch and powerwalking and selling taffy. Handymen and landscapers and lifeguards are everywhere, big and burly and suntanned. And all the convenience stores sell t-shirts three for ten bucks.

 

 

We stopped for breakfast at – where else? - The Breakfast Room. “Room,” by the way, was spelled, not with two Os, but with two fried eggs. (Partner: “Well, we gotta eat there. I mean, look at the eggs on the sign!”) We had eggs (what else?) and coffee and toast. An older couple came in after us, sat nearby, and regarded the menu dolefully. “Well,” the husband said after a few minutes, “it looks like they just serve breakfast.”

 

 

Even the geography is quaint. Take Dennis, for example, where we stayed. You've got South Dennis, and West Dennis (which is also “Bass River”), and Dennis, and Dennisport, and East Dennis (which is just north of South Dennis). I finally found North Dennis on the map; it's a mile west of East Dennis.

 

 

The same naming pattern is repeated for Sandwich, and Harwich, and Yarmouth, and Falmouth. (I won't even tell you about the Upper Cape. You're not ready for that. It's like quantum physics.)

 

 

You've never seen many birds. I understand now why people go nutsy for birdwatching on the Cape. Eighteen different species of bird were perched on the hotel sign when we pulled in, arranged (I think) either by size, or alphabetically. I lay half-awake one morning, listening to the dawn chorus of birdcalls, and I think some of them were just making the calls up, to show off. I mean, really: “Peep peep peep peep brrr brrr brrr toowhaa toowhaa”? What the hell kind of bird does that? An imaginary one?

 

 

We ate at Captain Parker's in (West) Yarmouth our first evening there, as we usually do. Partner adores their clam chowder, and the fisherman's platter, which is served on a plate the size of a laundry hamper. I had the mussels marinara; the mussels were local, and huge, and terrifying. (Partner told me later that a kid at the table behind me was watching me dissect and consume my mussels. To be fair, they were prehistoric.)

 

 

Take it away, Patti Page!

 

Patti_Page_-_Old_Cape_Cod.mp3 Listen on Posterous

 

---

 

 

Sunday blog: "God Only Knows" by Joe Henry

---

This song was used a few years ago by Turner Classic Movies for their necrology of the year's movie-industry-related deaths.  It played under a sad video of a rainstorm on the beach, turning to sunshine at last. It was remarkable.

 

 

Some of the lyrics are painfully sharp:

 

 

“Lovers laugh and cross this way / Weaving out into the street / Seems we never were so young / Or it was never quite so sweet / But the world is always beautiful / When it's seen in full retreat . . .”

 

 

A song of regret, and loss, and pain.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

12_-_God_Only_Knows.mp3 Listen on Posterous

 

---

 

 

Robert Bly

---

I have met a few poets.

 

 

Richard Eberhart I met in the late 1980s, a frail old man. I shook his hand after one of his readings and told him how much I loved “The Groundhog.” He smiled and nodded politely, but he seemed pleased.

 

John Ashbery was (and still is) very cute, and giggled when I told him how much I admired him.

 

 

Marge Piercy, back in the 1970s, was a cloud of black hair, lost in a dream. I was introduced to her, but I doubt that she noticed.

 

 

Seamus Heaney, like Marge, was drifting in limbo when I met him.

 

 

Poets are crazy, right? The muse drives them over the wall and up the mountain and back again. Some of them (like Ashbery and Eberhart) are the Apollonian type, writing Poetic Poetry, full of rhyme and meter and control; but the madness and the beauty crept into their poetry too. “There was no sign of the groundhog,” wrote a young Eberhart, and that line broke my heart. “A chorus of smiles, a winter's morning,” wrote a young Ashbery, and it was a vision of beauty and perfection.

 

 

Then there was Robert Bly.

 

 

He did a reading in early 1978 at Gonzaga. He was huge and tall and loud and mostly drunk. He “tuned up” by reading/reciting other poetry, which is an idea I like very much; I remember he did a few Emily Dickinson lyrics. Why not? Then he started putting on masks and stalking around the hall making menacing gestures at people. I suppose this was part of the whole “Iron John” thing, and coming to terms with one's manhood, and voodoo priesthood, and the sunset of the Beat Poets. It was creepy and compelling, though.

 

After the reading I was introduced to Bly. I'd won the University's poetry award that year, for a forgettable little lyric that was a mishmash of Ashbery and Eliot and who knows who else.  He belted down another drink and loomed down at me and ate a fistful of peanuts. “Were you born at the winter solstice?” he bellowed down at me.

 

“No,” I whispered. “July.”

 

He snorted and looked away.

 

I don't think he was very impressed with me.

 

 

Herewith his best lines:

 

“The world will soon break up

into small colonies of the saved . . . “

 

---

 

 

Black bananas

---

“Lisa!” Marge says in an old episode of “The Simpsons.” “We have black bananas. And you know what that means.”

 

 

“Banana bread!” Lisa shouts with glee.

 

 

My work nemesis Apollonia is (as you surely know by now) severely unbalanced. Among her other quirks, she cannot abide bananas with black spots. “They're sugar spots,” I said. “They don't mean anything except that the banana is ripening.”

 

 

“They're hideous,” she shrilled. “I can't stand them.”

 

 

Mental illness is a terrible thing. But sometimes you don't know how deeply it goes.

 

 

I saw her the other day, and she looked like she'd been through an atomic explosion. “I just got off the shuttle,” she said. “As soon as I got on, I saw that the driver had a black banana. Oh, man. And then he stopped, and I knew he had to kill some time, and he peeled it, and he actually ate it. Oh, my god. I could smell that banana.”

 

 

“You have a very serious condition,” I told her. “Get help immediately.”

 

 

By now, everyone in the tri-state area knows about Apollonia's preferences. Partner and I were in the grocery store the other day, and he bought some really perfect bananas, but one had a tiny black spot. “Apollonia wouldn't like that,” he observed.

 

 

See?

 

 

(Do you know, this is the second blog I've written about bananas? There must be something profound about them.)

 

(And, by the way, I bake a killer banana bread.  And black bananas are always the best in it.)

 

---

 

 

Twitter: more fun that I thought it was going to be

---

Last year I wrote a blog entry comparing Twitter (unfavorably) to Facebook. It’s less personal, I said. These people you’re following, they’re not really your friends. It’s really all about branding. Yada yada.

 

 

All of this is true. With the addendum: I’ve changed my mind. I can see now what it’s all about.

 

 

Largely this is because I've only recently begun to use a handheld device. In some unexplainable way, Twitter comes alive on a handheld. On my laptop screen, it just lies there lifeless; it reminds me of those old 1990s bulletin-board sites that were only one generation beyond MS-DOS. On my BlackBerry, however Twitter looks zippy and cute. I can scroll up and down with the touch of a thumb and watch the world skitter past.

 

 

Of course, it takes a while to figure out whom to follow. Here are some of my favorites:

 

 

• My policy wonks, the snarky/cute Jake Tapper and the twinktastic Ezra Klein, both of whom always have something to say (and Jakie likes to take pictures out the window of the press helicopter!). (Fun fact: Jake dated Monica Lewinsky once or twice.)

• The whole Chelsea Handler crew – Gary Valentine, Josh Wolf, Ross Matthews, Jo Koy, Sarah Colonna, Chris Franjola, Chelsea’s dog Chunk – all of whom can be relied upon for zingy one-liners, as well as the occasional pantsless backstage pic.

• The Bronx Zoo Cobra. (Sample tweet: “Hey, everyone, it’s Glass Cutter Day at the zoo! Bring a glass cutter and get in for half-price!”)

• A couple of astronauts, because they’re cute, and you never know when they might actually tweet something from space, and how futuristic would that be?

• Harvey Levin of TMZ. I love the gossip (even though 75% of the people mentioned on the show are unfamiliar to me), and Harvey himself, all five-foot-three he-man lawyer inches of him, is adorable.

 

 

I used to follow the Jersey Shore cast, but they are so galumphingly stupid that it became tiresome to read them. (“I UP IN THE HOUSE HATERZ!” Bleah.)

 

 

Look for me in your message feed: @lorwil.

 

 

And remember: HATERZ GONNA HATE!

 

---

 

 

Fancy names for pretty flowers

---

I used to work with someone named Tom. Tom was one of those people who was always rolling his eyes at something; he couldn't ask you to pass the salt without sounding terminally weary and disgusted with everything. And, to top it off, he was a gardening snob. I was looking at a bouquet in the lobby once and wondered aloud what one of the flowers was. He looked at it critically. “Well,” he said in his whiny Paul Lynde voice, “it's obviously a Cornus of some kind.”

 

 

I could have slapped his silly face off.

 

 

The thing is, I do exactly the same thing.

 

 

I love scientific names, especially for plants. A flower can have a dozen different names in English, and a dozen more in every European language, but it will only ever have one scientific name. This is, by common agreement, the flower’s true name.

 

 

And (as we all learned at Hogwarts), if you know the true name of a thing, you can conjure with it.

 

 

Some names are obvious. Tulips are Tulipa, roses are Rosa, violets are Viola. Some plants have only their scientific names: Poinsettia, Fuchsia, Rhododendron, Azalea, Camellia.

 

 

Now we get to the snarky part.

 

 

Are those sweet-Williams, or are they pinks? Or even gillyflowers? No, sugar. Those are Dianthus.

 

 

A friend asked me about “those yellow flowers in front of the supermarket.” I thought for a moment and then brighened. “You mean the Hemerocallis?” I said cheerily. She looked at me with a veiled expression, which I believe meant she wanted to slap my silly face off.

 

 

Partner pointed at some California poppies, and I shook my head. “They're not even Papaver,” I said. “They're Escholtzia.”

 

 

It really is maddening, isn't it?

 

 

But sometimes it’s worthwhile.

 

 

When the witch-hazel blooms with its eerie yellow-red spidery flowers in the January and February snow, I look at it and whisper: “Hamamelis virginiana.”

 

 

A name to conjure with, on a cold winter day.

 

 

And best of all: there is a lovely tree hereabouts, that grows to enormous heights, and in summer bears extraordinary yellow-green cuplike flowers in its upper branches. It looks supernatural.

 

 

It is, of course, the tulip poplar.

 

 

Oh, no, it's not.

 

 

It is the Liriodendron tulipifera.

 

 

Now that’s a name.

 

---