Week 1 (16)

Fucking machines.
Friday, 12:27

So I’m listening to an Add N to (X) mp3 (“The Orgy of Bubastis”) and chuckling over ASCII-encoded porn while contemplating how to write up Ray Glass’s piece on fuckingmachines.com over to the Spectator. It’s not a brilliant piece by any means, drawing some warmed-over conclusions about humans’ newfound love of machinery that were maybe au courant in the ’70s, updated (?) only slightly by the claim that “dancing to techno (or trance, house, and the like) is like getting fucked by a machine—and not in a bad way.” —I mean, geeze, Ray.

But I come not to bury Ray for his banal musings on a trend that’s been simmering for at least 150 years; instead, I want to praise him for calling out this particular fetish (by which I mean consumption of pornography involving images of women [I’d like to say “people,” but in this case, it’s pretty much just women] using these machines; not the use of the machines themselves), and for some nicely crunchy behind-the-scenes details jotted down before he tries to cop a Zeitgeist. (To say nothing of the small photo gallery which accompanies the piece, ahem.) —And: for not falling prey to a fallacy common to those who try to comment on sexual trends without getting their feet wet (he has, as he notes in the piece, “always harbored a fetish for machine sex”): there’s no attempt to map the fetish or the image onto actual sexual relations—which would, in this case, result in a hand-wringing assessment of the mental state of these (presumably male) viewers who (presumably) imagine themselves transformed, or replaced by, machines. What does this say about our rapidly dehumanizing society? our hypothetical commentator would (presumably) bleat. (Presumably, this commentator is not in any way affiliated with MIT.) Far less insightful and more odious by half than anything Ray has to say. The truth (such as it is) is at once simpler and more slippery than that.

But William Orbit’s remix of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” just came on, so.

 

Cockroaches.
Friday, 08:59

While I adore insane geniuses (genii?) who come up with insane ideas like this, I do worry about insane genii who are too absent-minded to remember to change the page title that GoLive automatically slaps on every document you build with it.

(And yes. Absent-minded or not, he was, indeed, serious.)

 

It’s official.
Wednesday, 19:53

Star Wars has jumped the shark.

 

“Fritz” Heisenberg.
Wednesday, 15:14

It occurs to me—since I grabbed the link in the previous entry from MIT’s blogdex ranking of the top 25 blogged links, and as blogdex will crawl this site at some point in the next 24 hours (mostly likely tomorrow at about 7:19 AM, though I’m not sure if that’s EST, PST, or Zulu) and record the links herein—that my link to the List of Banished Words will be noted and added to its total, thereby affecting its ranking in the index. —The very thing that measures and records its popularity has had an effect on that popularity.

Or was all that too bloody obvious?

 

Not, however, known for its English department.
Wednesday, 14:39

What a bunch of—well. Malcontents? Nitpickers? Point-missers? Soreheads? I mean, my own sorely malcontented head has been known to miss a point or two even as it picks nits with the best of them, but most of those who submitted candidates to Lake Superior State University’s 2002 List of Banished Words need to, you know. Chill.

Not that I’m objected to the idea of such a list. Or even to some of the proposed banishments; lord knows I could go the rest of my life without hearing “surgical strike,” “faith-based,” or “ramp up.” But—

Take “9-11,” for instance. (Pronounced “nine-eleven,” of course; sometimes written on the net as “S11,” which, contrarian that I am, I generally prefer.) We have people complaining that, you know, we didn’t call the Chicago Fire “10-8” because it occured on 8 Oct., nor do we refer to Pearl Harbor as “12-7.” Of course not. In both cases, we have discrete locations to which to refer. S11, on the otherhand, was scattered—attacks occurred in New York, DC and Pennsylvania. Referring to it by the date encompasses the totality more neatly and efficiently than anything else, and anyway, it’s reinforced by the image of the twin WTC towers, the 1 and the 1. (To say nothing of riffing off the 911 phone number, to boot.) —You’ll note that none of the naysayers propose alternate names. What would they have us call it? “The Day We Were Attacked by Terrorists with Three Planes?” Bonus to Anonymous Nominator from Sault Ste. Marie: There’s a reason Y2K was referred to with dates and digits, nimrod. It was a computer problem. Dealing, you know, with dates. And digits.

Or “disenfranchise.” Mike Bunis, of Key West, Florida, rightly points out that it’s much the same thing as “disfranchise,” and the unnecessary redundancy is apparently twisting his knickers in knots—but he forgets one teeney little thing: language is spoken as well as written. Try saying “disfranchise” aloud. Then “disenfranchise.” Which is easier? More fun? Sounds better?

Or “frig,” which is actually pronounced “frick” in the context Merri Carol Wozniak (also of Sault Ste. Marie) is decrying— But wait. Where does this leave me, picking nits off nit-pickers? Grousing about a bunch of narrow-minded puritanical language police? (Keep that gangsta language out of wholesome sports jargon, by gum.) I should, perhaps, quit. While I’m if not still ahead, at least not wholly underwater.

Just don’t ever use “impact” as a verb around me, dammit. Or “disconnect” as a noun. Still haven’t forgiven Clinton for that one.

 

What I learned today.
Wednesday, 13:37

bhangra + (reggae and/or dub) = bhangramuffin

Or, you could just have fun with this.

 

One more year.
Wednesday, 09:31

Having recently re-grown my beard (yes, it was a mistake; yes, the grin looks so much better with than without; it will never happen again, perhaps), I am amused? dismayed? mortified, perhaps, at the number of new grey hairs therein.

On leaving the bathroom, I frequently light a match. —Vegetarians, you know. You don’t? Ask a gorilla.

I sit quietly at parties for up to five minutes at a time.

Nor do I get all that jazzed about cooking.

My father once pointed out that if Robert Ludlum could get published, any sonuvabitch could. —Now he says that about James Patterson.

I’d say something about Bigby, but there’s maybe a dozen people in the world who’d get the reference, and none of them are here. —And besides: you never say its name. Ever.

My Lego X-wing is dusty.

The best keep losing all conviction at an alarming rate; that slouching beast never even bothered to show. Though: “Bethlehem’s occupied.” Two years old, but still (at least) worth a giggle.

That line from that Flowerthief song keeps tolling through my head: “Another day wasted, instead of being spent.”

 

Where I’ve been; what I’ve been up to.
Monday, 16:17

—Looking for work, which sucks; one has much less time when one is not employed than when one is, because one ends up spending all that unused time worrying and fretting and feeling guilty about doing unproductive, unremunerative things, rather than getting them all done.

—Using sushi to divine my personality. (It’s scarily accurate, given an admittedly statistically insignificant sample of one.)

—Flying. (I did not, in the end, have to have my shoes scanned.)

—Driving up and down three miles of hairpin curves strung loosely along the side of a Smoky Mountain every time I wanted more coffee.

—Teasing a nine-month-old. (Niece.)

—Getting drunk with siblings and brother-in-law and the Spouse. (The next time you’re hanging out with a tipsy Marxian professor of antebellum Southern history who’s originally from somewhere south of London, say “Crikey.” The reaction will prove amusing.)

—Feeling generally rotten about not updating hereabouts, which results in my avoiding the thing which makes me feel rotten, which, because of one of those stupid human short circuits, means I don’t actually avoid “not updating hereabouts,” which is what’s really making me feel rotten; instead, I avoid “hereabouts,” which, perhaps, is less work, but makes me, you know. Feel rotten.

—Wallowing in smut. Well, not so much wallowing. But peeking, certainly.

—Seeing The Lord of the Rings. (Yes. Wow.) Wanting to see The Royal Tennenbaums.

—Thinking pink.

—Not, in fact, doing much writing at all. Sigh. Maybe I should make some sort of promise to myself. You know, resolve to do better the next few months, or something. Something like that.

PS: I got the English language in a box for Xmas. Who the man? Who the man?