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For week four, a song that should, I believe, just have been a poem to begin with. A poem published two years into the Bush Ⅱ regime. Here it is, without music:
Sleight of Hand
Routine was the theme; he’d wake up, wash, and pour himself into uniform
Something he hadn’t imagined being
As the merging traffic passed he found himself staring down at his own hands
Not remembering the change. Not recalling the plan. Was it…?He was okay, but wondering about wandering
Was it age? By consequence? Or was he moved by sleight of hand?Mondays were made to fall. Lost on a road he knew by heart,
It was like a book he read in his sleep. Endlessly.
Sometimes he hid in the radio, watching others pull into their homes,
While he was drifting.On a line of his own. Off the line, on the side. By the by.
As dirt turned to sand
As if moved by sleight of handWhen he reached the shore of his clip-on world he resurfaced to the norm
Organized his few things; his coat and keys
And he knew realizations would have to wait
Till he had more time. More time.A time to dream to himself. He waves goodbye to himself;
“I’ll see you on the other side” –
Another man moved by sleight of hand
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So, The Crest, right?
There is an impossibly divey bar in Temple City by the name of The Crest. It looked so run-down that for years I assumed it was out of business. Then I found out it wasn’t. I just had to go there. I went there last week — it’s the “country bar” I referenced — not knowing at all what to expect. What I didn’t expect were $2.75 drinks, though I probably should have from the place. Also, what I didn’t expect were really nice people working there.
So I went back tonight.
Tonight is Monday. This is, it turns out, a significant day-of-the-week in American sports. Oh yeah. OK. I figured I was lucky to get a seat at the bar. I am way weird at this bar. I’m used to hanging out places at which the weirder you are, the more you fit in. This is not one of those places. Par example: Last week I attracted the attention of another patron because of [redacted reason]. He came over to me and we started talking. He was maybe in his late forties.
This is one of those occasions I’m discovering as an adult where Niall is really useful. “Kids” is an icebreaker. He had two sons. I asked how old they were. I find out the older one is 24 and the younger “passed away”.
Quick: look very sympathetic and very impassive. “I’m. Um. Very sorry.”
“Oh, it’s OK,” he said.
“I’m. Um. Sorry?”
“He was in Iraq.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I tell people this: and, I don’t mean to offend you, I mean I just met you, but people who are anti-war, I don’t know if you are…” I am, but quick, impassive! “I tell people this. ‘Let’s say someone breaks into your house. He kills your son, rapes your wife, rapes your daughter, and kills your daughter in front of you. What do you do?’ ‘Oh, I fucking kill him.’ ‘See?’”
“That’s a really good reason for being in Afghanistan, and not a very good reason for being in Iraq,” I reflexively reply. Oh holy fuck. Not cool, McGee. This is not the safe, rarefied air of the liberal blogosphere. This guy’s son died in Iraq. Also, fuck, drunk Republican! Do I need to duck?!
His gaze stumbles, and he gestures in a placid, equanimous way. “Well, you never know,” he says.
“No, I guess you don’t,” I say. Fuck. Recover now. “And what greater sacrifice can you make for your country?” In the spur of the moment, this strikes me as ridiculously poor logic but something that might sound consoling to a conservative. I was right.
Back to tonight. The almost-run-in did not deter me from returning. I went back. The bartender remembered me. Not my name, but remembered that I had said I was going to return. And football was on the television. I settled in and ordered my bizarre regular drink. She said, “Oh, that’s right!”
She brought me the drink and asked me, “Hey, want to join the football pool?”
“No,” I demurred. “I don’t know enough about football to join a football pool.”
“Oh, that’s OK!” she said. “You don’t have to. You see, we take the score and go across, then we take the score and go down, and the person in the square wins the pool. It’s $150.”
Working. Working. Working. Nope. “I’m sorry?”
“See, it works like this.” She pulls out a piece of paper with that week’s pool. “We take the first team’s finishing score. We count that score across. Then we take the other team’s score. We count that score down. Then we look whose name is in the box. Like, pretend this is me.” She points to ‘Paula’. “She’s one-two-three-four-five-six across. Then one-two-three-four down. If it’s six to four, she wins. So it’s kind of random.”
That’s. Not. Even close to random, I think, but, impassive is the name of the game. “Maybe next time,” I say.
So no one knows me here. No one knows how weird I am. The know my drink is weird, they know I look incongruous, they know I have some weird habits that I have to declare in advance so they don’t get me thrown out on my ass. They also don’t know I’m a vegetarian. And they have $8 steaks. Steak. Been a long time for steak. What the hell, right? I order a piece of a dead cow.
And they deliver it. I had ordered it medium rare. I figured they’d overcook it, which was OK.
They didn’t. It was seared, and — I believe this is the right term — slightly warmed inside. Well, fuck. OK. I start to eat the steak. I get halfway through and, oh shit. Body does not like this. I quickly ask bartender to watch my bag, and I go to the restroom. And vomit. Just a little bit, yes, but, retch. And kneeling in the bathroom, I think to myself, OK. You have to pretend you’re someone else to get by in here. You don’t like the music. You don’t like the sports. You like the bartender, but are somewhat afraid of getting killed by the other patrons. What the fuck are you doing here?
You know what? I couldn’t come up with a very compelling reason. So I went back and said, “Could I close this out?”
Bartender looks at my half-finished steak and untouched potato and salad and asks, “Would you like a box for that?”
Oh. Right. Box. You’re supposed to look like you’re going to eat this later. “Great!” I say. Internally: Hurry. Pepto Bismal required.
Box is fetched, I make haste, and I am … OK, if I say “Crest-fallen”, it’s going to look like the post was a wind-up for the pun. I actually just thought of it now, but I’ll avoid it anyway. I am … determined to find places to hang out where I don’t have to be someone else. Somewhere with weird punk hairdos, somewhere with asshole bartenders, somewhere with indifferent patrons, and, unfortunately, somewhere with $8 drinks. Will it work? Well, you never know.
One of my many get-poor-slowly website ideas is a site that would be called unreadablecaptchas.com. Therein people would post any captcha images (challenge-response text images) that were baffling to them, even as human beings. I’ve been collecting several of my own, but this one takes the proverbial cake:
I need to convince myself — again — to stop following links further and further into the bowels of Wikipedia. But: Yorkshire Dialect and Accent:
One of the closest differences in dialect in the area is between the West of the City of Wakefield (such as Ossett, Wakefield and Horbury) compared with the East (eg. Castleford, Pontefract and Featherstone), areas less than 3 miles apart
What? Three miles?
I know I’m Californian. Anglos have had a strong presence in the area for about a century and a half, and not far before the arrival of the Trans-Continental Railroad. Railroads, I would expect, smooth regional accents. Mass media, more so — and California, having Hollywood and early television and radio studios, essentially created the more-or-less-standard U.S. accent. So, bearing that in mind: three miles? Weren’t people walking in those days?
This kind of fine-grained distinction in accents — and I’m most familiar with the phenomenon in Britain — suggest a kind of dialectal inertia that is baffling to me. I understand that towns had hundreds of years to develop their accents in isolation, but the fact that so many are preserved into the 21st century, though modified — and just how geographically close-by some distinct accents are — still surprises me. I imagine that there must be some in-group/out-group identification going on. British humor seems frequently to revolve around accent — Python, for instance, Wallace and Gromit, and Neil Morrissey’s character on Men Behaving Badly come to mind — and much of that I understand only at an intellectual level, and I presume I still miss most of it. The Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine film Sleuth (if you haven’t seen it, don’t Google, don’t read the description, just watch it) uses accent for a pointed social commentary, and I entirely missed that when I first saw it.
A book I once read — I’m pretty sure it was Jane Walmesley’s Brit-Think, Ameri-Think — talked about the experience of young British women coming to America and being told their accent was “beautiful, even if they were from Liverpool or Birmingham” (I think that’s exact, but I’ll have to wait for the maturation of Google Books to be sure.) The book, by the way, is constantly hilarious, maybe never more so than in the dedication of the book to the author’s daughter, child of an American and a Briton, who reportedly describes herself as “half and hahff”.
The title of this post references the seminal Homicide: Life on the Street episode Three Men and Adena, in which “the arabber” tell the detectives that if they say the name of the city — “Baltimore” — that he could tell each of them what street he (the detective) grew up on. The difference, by the way, frequently seemed to me to be the length of the “ah” in “Bahll-mər”. This suggests that the phenomenon I’ve described is not unheard of in this country, but I’m just citing television at this point. More erudite commentary is courted.
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I am … still ….
I don’t really know how to express my emotions about Pearl Jam’s Backspacer. Everything I try to come out with sounds like lolspeak. The album is sublime. For years all the fans have felt that they had a Led Zeppelin IV in them, and we were holding out for it. Turns out, they had an album of “John Lennon with The Who” in them. And, it turns out, that’s better.
Backspacer is brave but vulnerable; hopeful but humble; honest but never strident; drenched in rain but wanting to sing anyway … or maybe because. Emerson wrote:
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
But Emerson was a jerk, and Ed isn’t. I quote this not because Ed is speaking what I have thought and felt; no, I have so much to learn from him that I’m ever catching up. But rather, Ed puts himself on the line, singing, without affectation, what is in his heart, even if he has not heard it before in the voices of geniuses. He would be the first to disclaim his own genius, to disclaim wisdom. He would likely say, as he does twice on this album, that he’s just another human being. All he’s doing is speaking the truth as he currently understands it. But maybe — but probably — that’s what wisdom and genius are.
“All that’s sacred,” he said fifteen years ago, “comes from youth.” But this is an adult’s album. Not an album for adults, though I am sure it will be. No, rather the album of an adult. Indeed, if we are fortunate, it will also be an album for some youths. Maybe they will be able to learn that while it is important for their elders to understand their angst, that maybe they can trust some of their elders’ accumulated wisdom. “I still remember,” he said those 15 years ago. And I’m sure he still does. But his vantage point has changed. I hope that his listeners’ will be changed also. But that’s really outside the scope of what I want control over. What I want is for mine to change.
Why deny this drive inside?
Just looking for some peace
Thank you, Ed. Thank you for having the courage not to deny it. And keep looking. I’ll keep listening.
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Oh, wow. The new album, Backspacer. Uplifting, consistent, melodic, hopeful, full of love and joi de vivre. I want to write at length about the album, and I will. But for my third Tuesday Vedder, I can think of nothing more appropriate than a song from the new album.
Amongst The Waves
What used to be a house of cards has turned into a reservoir
Saved the tears that were waterfalling
Let’s go swim tonight, darling
And once outside the undertow, just you and me and nothing more
If not for love I would be drowning
I’ve seen it work both ways, but I am up,Riding high amongst the waves
I can feel like I have a soul that has been saved
I can feel like I put away my early grave
I gotta say it now
Better loud than too lateRemember back the early days when you were young and thus amazed?
Suddenly the channel changed the first time you saw blood
Cut to later, now you’re strong, you’ve bled yourself, the wounds are gone
It’s rare when there is nothing wrong
Survived and you’re amongst the fittest, love ain’t love until you give it upRiding high amongst the waves
I can feel like I have a soul that has been saved
I can see the light coming through the clouds in rays
I gotta say it now
Better loud than too lateRiding high amongst the waves
I can feel like I have a soul that has been saved
I can see the light coming through the clouds in rays
I gotta say it now
Better loud than too lateI gotta say it now
I gotta say it now
I gotta say it now
Better loud than too late
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From Paul Bergner’s review of The Complete German Commission E Monographs: Therapeutic Guide to Herbal Medicines:
The arcane rules and regulations of the commission have led to a book with bizarre contradictions and inconsistencies. Echinacea purpurea is approved for use. Echinacea angustifolia, the stronger herb in practice is not approved. To make matters more confusing, although Echiancea angustifolia is not approved, it is listed as contraindicated in autoimmune diseases because it might aggravate them. Which is it? Either it is an ineffective medicine or it is safe, it can’t be both.
Which is it? Um … that it’s … not … safe? E. angustifolia is not approved and … um … they list it as contraindicated in autoimmune disease?
The only way I can make sense of this is if Bergner thinks that by listing it as being contraindicated with patients with autoimmune diseases, that it’s OK for every other patient. Compare a possible statement of “hemlock is contraindicated in patients with liver problems” or “cocaine is contraindicated in patients with heart arrhythmia”; it may be an especially bad idea for those people, but probably still not a good idea for everyone else.
This person is apparently “Editor, Medical Herbalism journal”, according to the Amazon profile. I think I’ll go ahead and skip that publication.
I accidentally tried to pay a seller through PayPal with an old bank account. The payment fizzled. I now have a PayPal balance of -$4.72.
To resolve the negative PayPal balance, I need to pay PayPal with a credit card. No problem. I try to add my credit card. I am told that I have the maximum number of credit cards on my account, and have to delete one before I add another. I go to delete a credit card, and:
I cannot delete a credit card because I have a negative balance.
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In my I-wish-it-wouldn’t-be-continuing series of “learning shit from the covers of magazines at the supermarket”, I was introduced to a (?) Kardashian today, which seems to be a race of bitchy-looking girls with names beginning with “K” (?) with 3cm-deep caked-on makeup (?).
Actually, Wikipedia eliminated a couple of those question marks (the first question mark being “Should I remember you from Deep Space 9?”) and the articles all seem to direct to “Famous for Being Famous”.
I also learned — and I don’t think I will ever be able to unlearn this term, so I might as well inflict it on my readership — the portmanteau celebutante. This, in addition to being one of the ugliest portmaneaux I have ever encountered, appears to be a portmanteau that applies to some of the ugliest people I have ever encountered. I mean, I don’t know if they are physically ugly — I think a prep session deflating silicone implants and sand-blasting away foundation would be required — but more like “why do you have to be a bitch?” ugly.
I guess … you can become famous … by stepping in front of cameras, having a sex tape broadcast, and pretending you are famous?
I promise I am not being faux-elitist. I am honestly curious. Apparently like Paris Hilton, these KKs had a reality show? I’m not going to Google for a link, but I think that is true, from what I’ve read. And I am genuinely inquiring as something I could not learn by Googling: Do people who watch such shows aspire to be these girls/women, identify with these girls/women, hate these girls/women and want to see them be humiliated, are entertained by the antics of these women, or … um … at this point I could randomly insert verbs phrases.
Honest honest honest question: what is the draw? I don’t imagine many of my readers to actually experience these verbs, but through cultural osmosis against which I have insulated myself … please? Help?
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Information Scientist 1: Want to hear something surprising?
Information Scientist 2: Sure.
Information Scientist 1: ONE!
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Oh, hey, Patrick Swayze died. I just saw it on a magazine rack at the grocery store. The cashier said he died “like two days ago”, but oh boy is it clear that there was a full glitzy feature ready to run in People at the press of a button.
So, “like two days ago”. And I find out from a magazine rack. I think this suggests that the news I consume may be wide, but is not exhaustive. Granted, the headline of my news article (if I had a blog, say) would be something like “Rich white guy who used to be in movies dies of natural causes after receiving ‘best medical care in world’”. And I’d have to weigh that against any possible dog trials coverage, to see if it even gets a last-page mention.
But, OK, kind of scary again: another cultural bit I missed. I have — snobbish? elitist? pass-the-espresso-with-lemon-twist? — news sources. Does that make me superior to a Fox-News-And-Only-Fox-News consumer? My intuition is “yes”, but the proof is eluding me at this moment.
(Mandatory) exercise for the reader:
I have my list, but, if you cooperate (“coöperate” is so much prettier!), my list will be different at the end of this exercise.
I’m going to put the blame for much bloodshed squarely on the shoulders of Google Translate. Like this [imaginary -ed.] story that came out a couple of days ago, about the U.S. (arrogant unwashed bastards!) trying to impose Jeffersonian Enlightenment ideals on the Middle East. The U.S. reflects:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The U.S. tells this to Israel …
אנחנו מחזיקים אמיתות אלה להיות מובן מאליו, שכל בני האדם נוצרו שווים, שהם ניחנו ידי בוראם זכויות מסוימות צאן ברזל, כי בקרב אלה לחיים, לחירות את המרדף אחרי האושר.
… who tell it to the Palestinians …
ونحن نحمل هذه الحقائق لتكون بديهية ، أن جميع الناس خلقوا متساوين ، وأنهم هبوا من خالقهم بعض الحقوق الحديد الأغنام ، أنه من بين هذه الحياة والحرية والسعي لتحقيق السعادة.
… and the Palestinians tell the U.S. what Israel told them:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights, iron sheep, that among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Palestinians ask the U.S., “What the hell is with the iron sheep? Are they saying we are iron sheep? That we all have the right to iron sheep? More likely, that only Israel has the right to iron sheep, no?! That’s just like them!”
So the U.S. mediators try to calm them down. They tell the Palestinians what they told Israel in the first place, and note that there’s nothing there about sheep at all …
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
… so the Palestinians say to the Israelis, “You idiots, what they said was this!”
ونحن نحمل هذه الحقائق لتكون بديهية ، أن جميع الناس خلقوا متساوين ، وأنهم هبوا من خالقهم بحقوق معينة غير قابلة للتصرف ، أنه من بين هذه هي الحياة والحرية والسعي لتحقيق السعادة.
The Israelis take it and mull it over …
אנחנו מחזיקים אמיתות אלה להיות מובן מאליו, שכל בני האדם נוצרו שווים, וכי הם ניחנו לפי עם בוראם זכויות מסוימות הן צאן ברזל, כי בקרב אלה הם החיים, החירות את המרדף אחרי האושר.
… then return to the U.S. and accuse them of telling the Palestinians:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights, iron sheep, that among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“Is that true?” they say. “Did you really call the Palestinians iron sheep? ‘Cos we think that’s pretty cool. They’re obstinate, hard to move, and are as dumb as ingots of steel.” Then they think for a second and say, “Wait, did you bring up the iron sheep to them at all? It looks like they’re calling us iron sheep! What the hell? This is supposed to be a peace process! I’ll show you ‘iron sheep’, you
בני זונות
The Palestinians respond, “No it’s you who are the
اولاد القحبة
And the U.S. negotiator says, “See how McGee had to give the insults their own lines because there’s a switch from LtR to RtL reading order? That’s some common ground for y’all to start from, isn’t it? That y’alls write backwards? In our opinion, the whole sorry lot of you are iron sheep, fuckers who can’t all but never write youze sentences in the right erection!”
Then both sides — separately — tell the U.S. that there was nothing precluding them from denying the other side rights, so what is the fuss about. And the U.S. says, “It’s right there: inalienable!” And the two parties (who aren’t talking to each other any-more-so-there) say “The word is unalienable, you twit, and the other side kinda deleted that sentiment. If they are willing to alien our rights, we can alien right back.”
The U.S. negotiator goes back to requisition an unabridged dictionary to find out whether it is “inalienable” or “unalienable”, and, oh yeah, what does that mean?
Then there is much cursing, gnashing of teeth, a small amount of white phosphorus, and a smaller amount of white erudition. And in the resulting confusion, no one bothers to tell the U.S. to leave because they aren’t helping.
The world’s come a long way in the ten years since The Most Narcotic Period of Anniversary. Now we’ve got Google. And now we have many more languages. So, read that link for the methodology; basically, it’s playing “Chinese Whispers” (“Telephone”) with Google Translate. Here it is, flip-flopping with English all the way, alphabetically by language (i.e., English→Afrikaans→English→Albanian→English→…)
I’ve chosen a strong pair of sentences, very recognizable (I promise), each containing what I thought was one universally immutable noun. But that wasn’t the case.
Sweet voice and Amazing life experience! But I mention it Clearly. Now I know.
And here it is chained (i.e., English→Afrikaans→Albanian→Arabic→…, starting and stopping with English but skipping it in the “E”s section.)
Only on the life of a line, said the widow; The good Intention, but I understand now that loss.
What this suggests to me is that Google is not using — at least universally — some kind of internal hyper-Esperanto; if the sentences were being abstracted to a(n ultra-cool) meta-language, these two modes would yield similar results, and they are not even close. But they’re doing something else, apparently, which seems to involve remembering the outbound translation for the inbound return. But I’m not willing to wager anything on that hypothesis.
So the battle of wits has begun. What was the original text? It ends when we discover who is right, and what quote he will secretly submit to me for the next round. Post answers below. Also, for bonus points (the normal mcgees.org prize is a banana through the mail), I want critical interpretation of those lines — the author was cryptic, but what was he trying to say?
(I thought about “Google Torture Porn” for a title, but thought that was in rather poor taste.)
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I am utterly bewildered by the criteria people use to buy wine.
I was standing behind a couple (?) at my local grocery store a few minutes ago. He had four bottles of wine for checkout, she had one. I was looking sidelong at the bottles, trying not to be too obvious. We’re well below having the commonality be “well-reviewed” or “from good wineries”. I entertained other ideas, such as consistency in vintage, region, varietal: as far as I could tell, nothing linked them. They weren’t even all behind pretty labels. I’m scanning them one by one: dishwater, graywater, bilge-water, bong-water, hello, 2006 Charles Krug Yountville Cab blend. The latter is not a great wine, but compared to the rest, it’s a Petrus.
The cashier says, “If you get another bottle of wine, you save 10%” — the half-case deal which is ubiquitous in Southern California and maybe elsewhere. The cashier explains to the confused couple what that means. The woman says, “OK, I’ll pay for all of them.”
The cashier looks at her for a beat, and says, “You’ll need one more. Which do you want me to double?”
I lean over and point to the Krug. “That one,” I say in a quiet voice.
The couple look at me a bit oddly, simultaneously let out a little giggle, and say, “OK, that one.” The cashier doubles it; the woman waits for the man to go fetch the second bottle; I pay for my carrot juice and leave.
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Second week — for a new tradition, I’ve made it past “one”, which is always an accomplishment.
In My Tree
Up here in my tree
Newspapers matter not to me
No more crowbars to my head
I’m trading stories with the leaves insteadI wave to all my friends
They don’t seem to notice me
All their eyes trained on the street
Sidewalks, cigarettes, and scenesUp here so high I start to shake
Up here so high the sky I scrape
I’m so high I hold just one breath
here within my chest,
just like innocence.I remember when
I swore I knew everything
They say knowledge is a tree
It’s growing up just like meI’m so light, the wind he shakes.
I’m so high, the sky I scrape.
I’m so light I hold just one breath
and go back to my nest
sleep with innocence.Up here so high, the boughs they beak
Up here so high, the sky I scrape.
Had my eyes peeled both wide open
And I caught a glimpse
of my innocence,
got back my inner sense.Got it
Still got it
Would someone please fly me to Belgium for the Metal Female Voices Fest VII next month? I’ve found it as cheaply as $792. I can contribute the $2 if it helps. Don’t bother with a hotel — I’ll CouchSurf when I get there — but thanks for offering anyway.
Leaves’ Eyes, Autumn, Flowing Tears, Epica, and 20 more bands with identical publicity photos.
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Ladies, how would you respond to this picture I found online?
Would it be more or less weird if it were (only?) posted online instead of on a public street?
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