Apropos of halloween... whenever I hear a bit of Poe's "The Raven" I think it must be one of the best-sounding poems ever. There is something so good about the rhythms and the rhymes and repetitions. It's structured and rhythmic, almost musical, and not in an obvious or annoying way.

Anyway, I heard Garrison Keillor reciting it on the radio this past weekend, literarily, and accompanied by some dramatic yet classy music. It was not bad, but it only made me think of the vastly superior, perhaps definitive version from the simpsons.

Nothing beats when Homer says "Take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off my door!" seriously. Doesn't hurt that they got James Earl Jones too.

I just had someone say "jiminy christmas!" to me, non-ironically. Second-best exclamation ever, after Larry Craig's "jiminy god!".

Noticing grammar mistakes became bitching about grammar mistakes became telling the editor became doing an occasional job as unpaid proofreader for a prominent car blog. I like proofreading; it gives me a sense of pleasure and accomplishment, slightly improving the way something flows. They say to enjoy the small pleasures in life, and I don't know that there is a smaller pleasure in the entire world than correcting a hyphen or an apostrophe.

Okay, I don't like it when people get a bit confused about exactly which plurals require an apostrophe (hint: NONE OF THEM), but it's understandable because sometimes they do look weird. but wtf do you have to be smoking to think you are supposed to do this:



Notice that the writer not only uses an apostrophe on every single plural, but on third person singular verbs as well. I think he believes that every word-ending 's' in English must be apostrophized.

Slate's Jack Shafer tells of the rise and fall of the 'bus plunge' story. The NYT used to publish a number of tiny stories (known as 'K-heds') primarily in order to fill layout holes in the paper. Chief among these was the 'bus plunge' story. Here's a canonical example:



As layout techniques improved and gradually moved to computers, the need for filler articles gradually disappeared, and, along with it, the bus plunge story. And along with the death of the bus plunge died a particular kind of skill at radical distillation of news.

What, my friends, do you think is the most pretentious word in the whole (English-speaking) world? I can think of three candidates at the moment: palimpsest (a manuscript that's been written on, scraped off, then written on again, generally used by literary types as some kind of metaphor for depth or complexity, the layering of history into the formation of a person or piece of literature), crepuscular (describing animals that come out around dusk, generally used in atmospheric descriptions or metaphors about things in decline), and quotidian (ordinary, everyday, often placed in a character's mouth ironically to show that he's particularly pretentious).

now that I think about it more, I think palimpsest is the clear winner. what could be more pretentious than a writer using a word from classical scholarship to construct a metaphor for something-as-literature? but if you have other candidates, bring em on.

  "Would you tell me, sir," the simulacrum said, "what a man is?" ...
  "A man can be defined as an animal that carries a pocket handkerchief. How about that? Mr. Shakespeare didn't say that."
  "No sir," the simulacrum agreed. "He did not. ... Now, you've defined a man as an animal which carries a pocket handkerchief. But what is an animal?"
  "I can tell you you're not," Barrows said... "An animal has a biological heritage and makeup which you lack. You've got valves and wires and switches. You're a machine." ...
  "Then what, sir, is a machine?" the simulacrum asked Barrows.
  "You're one. These fellows made you. You belong to them."
  The long, lined, dark-bearded face twisted with weary amusement as the simulacrum gazed down at Barrows. "Then you, sir, are a machine. For you have a Creator, too. And, like 'these fellows,' He made you in His image. I believe Spinoza, the great Hebrew scholar, held that opinion regarding animals; that they were clever machines. The critical thing, I think, is the soul. A machine can do anything a man can -- you'll agree to that. But it doesn't have a soul."
  "There is no soul," Barrows said. "That's pap."
  "Then," the simulacrum said, "a machine is the same as an animal." It went on slowly in its dry, patient way, "And an animal is the same as a man. Is that not correct?"

-- "We Can Build You", Philip K. Dick

My mom and I used to have this same basic debate. I don't think I ever convinced her.

"Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, as the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, for the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals."

Some people would say that this has already essentially happened to us, and there's some truth to that. Certainly, there's a strain of popular culture that is basically inoffensive pablum. But that's always been woth us, and it hasn't taken over; I'd say it isn't even dominant. I think we've seen the opposite in the past ten years or so: entertainment (and other products) are increasingly niche-marketed; markets are fragmented, a version of everything for every conceivable taste and temperament. Each minor minor minority has its web sites and news sources and interest groups, and then can all carry on their self-contained lives independent of the others, except when they get in yelling matches with each other, or fight over things like TV ratings or political power. Between the extremes of blandly inoffensive and totally self-regarding lies an ideal of comity that we once, supposedly, enjoyed.

chiliad eremite autochthon armiger optimate deodand carnifex lictor autarch zoanthrop eidolon cacogen uhlan estoc antepilani

Taking a break from the Japan stuff (yes, there is plenty more to come, but a visit from J happily distracted me from editing photos)... Slate has an article today on GooglePrint , which discusses the tradeoff between authorial exposure and authorial control. It's a pretty clear explanation of what GooglePrint is (there's been a lot of confusion) and argument for why it is good.

Ever wonder about that supremely useful Scrabble word QAT? It's a "green twig chewed for its amphetaminelike properties", and it's also making one town in Kenya really rich.

Once there was Robin Hood. Then Batman came. Then prince John came--he's the king. Then Superman came. Superman battled with Batman and Batman died. Then he came alive again. Superman died. And then Splinter, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo came. Then an Indian came on a horse with a bow and arrow. Then a cowboy came on a horse with a bow and arrow just like the Indian and shot Superman so he wouldn't ever come alive again. And they lived happily ever after. The end.

A story written by a four-year-old boy, in this paper, quoted in this DeLong post about disaster movies. This story is so great I don't even know where to start. Imagine the movie! The best thing though might be that, at the end, they do indeed live happily ever after. DeLong's post is pretty interesting too, with the stuff about the differences between boys and girls.

I have a longstanding thing about crappy reviews people write online. The kind I especially love/hate are the ones where the people are trying hard to sound sophisticated and professional but end up botching it (though even when there's nothing intrinsically wrong, I think that kind of tone just doesn't work in the context of an IMDB or Amazon review page).

Anyway, while flipping through the reviews of "Brave New World" I came across this gem in the midst of a wordy review: "Huxley describes his society with a great deal of detail which makes his dystopia (a term for a negative utopia) seem convincing." Now, I don't mean to be too hard on the poor guy, but really. If you really think "dystopia" needs defining, do you think explaining it as a "negative utopia" is really going to help? What would you estimate to be the percentage of people who know what a utopia is and get the idea of a negative utopia, but don't know or can't figure out what dystopia might mean? There's something endearingly well-meaning but bungled about the condescension of explaining "dystopia" but leaving "negative utopia" to hang in the breeze.

Not that I'm one to talk. I once posted a review of a movie that consisted almost entirely of me saying it was "pretty darn good".