Joe Richman (of "Radio Diaries") had a fascinating report on the original "Veep," Alben Barkley. He was Harry Truman's vice president from 1948 to 1952.
Barkley died in an odd, yet fitting manner. After Truman left the White House, Barkley returned to the Senate, where he had served for decades.
The former Senate majority leader found himself sitting in the back row with the other junior senators. In 1956, Barkley gave a speech on the irony of finding himself among these D.C. newbies.
The speech ended when he died.
You can hear Barkley's last words by clicking on this blog entry's title, or here. (If you have trouble playing the sound file, listen toNPR's online version. The moment of truth occurs 6 minutes and 22 seconds into it.)
Postscript: I almost forgot one of my favorite Barkley quotes: “If you have to eat crow, eat it while it’s hot.”
Der Spiegelhas an interesting story on the El Colacho festival in the Spanish town of Castrillo de Murcia. Dating back to 1620, the festival features a feat designed to drive evil away from the town: Baby jumping!
Or more properly, leaping over babies.
But let's get the order of events right. First, a parade gathers and focuses all the resident evil in Castrillo de Murcia's church. (It just does, okay?)
Men dressed as devils (and they’re well-dressed devils, too) take it from there. A number of them are outfitted as the diabolical figure known as El Colacho. (Definition, anyone?) Dressed in a bright yellow and red outfit, they flee the church, bound over the babies, and then keep going. This metaphorically removes all evil from both the infants and the town. One miraculous side-effect of all this is that the babies are instantly potty-trained.
Speaking of “diaper dandies,” 20-year old Andrew Simon represented Oregon as the youngest of its 59 delegate at the Democratic Convention. (Full disclosure: Andrew is a former student.) In addition to lending his considerable intellect to the proceedings, Mr. Simon was charged with holding up the right rally sign at the right time. As he wrote, “No! No! Hold up the ‘Strong Middle Class’ signs! The ‘Securing Our Future’ signs were for the last speaker!”
Yeesh, the indignities meted out to the young.
Andrew was also sideswiped in a piece by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist in the process. The Willamette Week's Nigel Jaquiss had a feature article that took a jaundiced view of the relationship between Oregon's delegates and corporate donors. I guess it was just as well that Jaquiss doled out only a few words on Andrew at the end of the piece. Nonetheless, someone in layout ran a half-page closeup of Mr. Simon, that photogenic devil.
Mr. Bookman, the library cop, was one of my favorite characters from Seinfeld. As played by Philip Baker Hall, Mr. Bookman had a clipped, Joe Friday-esque delivery that was comic gold.
The following dialogue concerning Jerry Seinfeld's overdue (by 20 years!) copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer still makes me smile. Bookman: You took this book out in 1971. Seinfeld: Yes, and I returned it in 1971. Bookman: Yeah, '71… Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards, Abby Hoffman telling everybody to steal books. I don’t judge a man by the length of his hair or the kind of music he listens to. Rock was never my bag. [jabbing his finger at Jerry] But you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the New York Public Library, fella!Think it's a joke? Think again, fella. Heidi Dalibor of Grafton, Wisconsin, was arrested earlier this month after failing to return two library books. And she was only one year overdue!
But hey, Dalibor was almost asking for trouble. She received four library letters, two phone calls, two official notices, one citation from the police, and a court appearance notice. But she ignored them all.
What was Dalibor thinking? “I said, ‘What could they possibly do? They can’t arrest me for this.’ I was wrong.”
Her wrong-ness and sunny personality led to a strangely cheerful mug shot. To her credit, Dalibor was cool about her overdue infamy. She paid her $170 fine and told reporters, “I completely take responsibility for not paying my fine on time and not going to my court date.”
Good on her. Still, Dalibor isn’t planning on returning the books. Hey, she's paid for them now.
As for the two books that caused all this trouble, they were Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. Hmmm. If you had to go to jail to read a book (or two), what titles would be worthy? (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn came to mind for me.)
While you're thinking about that, here's a Bookman clip:
George Orwell (1903-1950) has a new blog entry today dated "August 26, 1938." (Brief Orwell bio here.)
The Orwell Diaries are composed of entries Orwell made 70 years ago. At that time, he was recuperating from tuberculosis in a sanitarium in Kent.
Perusing newspapers and watching the weather, Orwell will make note of the storm clouds over Europe shortly. While we know what happens next, what will Orwell make of it? I shall return.
Like everyone else, I was required to read Animal Farm and 1984 in school. But it wasn't until delving into a collection of Orwell's essays and discovered his touching personal piece "Such, Such Were the Joys" that I understood what a profoundly observant and moral writer he was.
While Orwell is often described as the "conscience of his generation," that sounds a bit flinty. How about a "role-model for any generation"?
From Jeannette Catsoulis's review of the new film "Sixty Six": Sixty Six is rated PG-13. Characters whine, philander, and eat dinner in their underwear.
I love that sentence. In July, the Deseret News reported that gang member Miguel Monroy was arrested in Orem, Utah, for stealing a tricycle and providing police with false identification.
While that's a creative way to establish street cred, this guy has a long way to go before he can challenge Igor Kenk.
But while it's flattering to have my headshot paired with Philip Pullman's, perhaps you join me in feeling a bit queasy about it. I mean, Pullman's a big deal and—
Oh wait, I hadn't seen my pull-out quote yet... oh my, that's a good one. Expressive yet pithy, and I'm clearly onto something important. Queasiness averted!
As to the article itself, it explores the role of discipline vs. inspiration (or muscle vs. muse) in our writing lives.
Below is an image of as much of the article that I could cram into my undersized scanner. (Oops, there's that picture again. I guess it can't be helped.)
The good people at Foreign Policy have analyzed what they term "the toilet situation." That is, they've discovered the toughest place in the world to track down a decent bathroom.
An especially low achiever was Yemen, where school children find themselves particularly afflicted by a lack of restrooms. The report states that to cope, Yemeni students "develop bladders of steel and hold it all day long. Others (usually boys) relieve themselves on school walls."
Yemen's close neighbor, Eritrea, bottoms out the worldwide list, with 85% of all people (and 95% of rural inhabitants) relieving themselves in the open. (That is, "fields, forests, bushes, bodies of water, or other open spaces.")
Of course, both Yemen and Eritrea are impoverished countries where residents struggle to find enough food to get the digestive cycle started.
At the other end of the spectrum are cultures that conspicuously waste food. Case in point: The reality-TV show Hurl. Its contestants stuff themselves with food. They are then marched onto nausea-inducing carnival rides like Loop-the-Lower Intestine and Crack the Colon. The looping and cracking do them in.
Okay, okay, but how do you win? It's a simple goal for contestants: Don't hurl. (This is perhaps just as challenging for viewers.) As the Washington Postreported, Hurl "oozes under the lowest bar ever set by reality television."
In his new book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, Michael Gazzaniga's casts some unlikely light here. The author is a cognitive neuroscientist who argues that disgust is among a handful of traits that set humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Thus, we shouldn't castigate a reality program like Hurl. The disgust it engenders only makes us that much more human. Sigh. (See your local listings for air times.)
ColumnistJohn Bogert shares this obituary from the Vallejo Times-Herald: Dolores Aguilar, born in 1929 in New Mexico, left us on Aug. 7, 2008. Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing.
Her family will remember Dolores and amongst ourselves we will remember her in our own way, which were mostly sad and troubling times throughout the years. We may have some fond memories of her and perhaps we will think of those times, too. But I truly believe at the end of the day all of us will really only miss what we never had, a good and kind mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. I hope she is finally at peace with herself. As for the rest of us left behind, I hope this is the beginning of a time of healing and learning to be a family again.
There will be no service, no prayers and no closure for the family she spent a lifetime tearing apart. We cannot come together in the end to see to it that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren can say their goodbyes. So I say here for all of us, goodbye Mom.
From Nathan Lee's review of "Death Race":Death Race is rated R. [It has] mauling, maiming, bruising, beating, impalement, immolation, detonation, decapitation and a flagrant disregard of automotive etiquette.
On the heels of discovering the sophomoric linguistic hijinks of EngrishFunny.com, I find this week's Sports Illustrated briefly examines Chinese nicknames for a handful of U.S. Olympic hoopsters.
Carlos Boozer gets the best one, namely Betrayal Skull Dude. (That's Boozer to the left in a Chinese promotional poster.) It seems unfair that Boozer receive such a cool nickname inasmuch as he got it for bailing out of Cleveland in favor of more lucre with the Utah Jazz. Of course, lots of things in China don't necessarily compute to Westerners; after all, Chinese crowds cheer wildly for Kobe Bryant, a.k.a, Vile Jumping Man.
Okay, okay, it's actually Little Flying Warrior.
Exploration of the NBCOlympics.com website reveals an intrepid reporter has also pursued this story. With a chart and everything!As you can see in its last entry, whether table tennis star Porcelain Doll wins or loses, she will weep. Just like real tear-duct-equipped porcelain dolls!
Perhaps one of the least flattering nicknames (it's not on the chart) was picked up by French cyclist Jeannie Longo Ciprelli. Given her age (almost 50!) and the fact that Mademoiselle Ciprelli has been in seven Olympic Games, she is affectionately known as Grandma.
The forces of cuteness threaten to overwhelm me. First, I see that the Cute Overload calendars are sold out. Drat! If you're not familiar with it, this is a daily calendar born from the Cute Overload website.
If Cute Overload ever joins forces with StuffOnMyCat.com, there will be heaven to pay. But while I admit to enjoying this neotany, I'm not its ideal demographic. According to a piece in the New York Times, the deepest diggers of all things cute are women between 18 and 34. Web expert (and man) Henry Copeland says, "For these women, recently graduated from college and sitting in grim corporate America, Cute puts them in touch with their nonwork selves."
Okey-dokey, though I've always feared meeting my nonwork self in a dark alley.
Thankfully, there is a mildly snarky site that has spun off from the intentionally tortured syntactical cuteness of I Can Has Cheezburger? It isEngrishFunny.com, which specializes in "Engrish Pictures and other Funny Engrish Mistakes in English from around the world." This is an ongoing riff on the idea of books like Chinglish (put out by my publisher, Gibbs Smith). I gave a copy of the book to a friend who had just returned from teaching in China for the last two years. He made polite amused noises. Maybe I should have gotten him a Cute Overload calendar instead? (Dang it, are they STILL sold out?)
In sharing data on the approximately 50,000 births in Oregon last year, it divulges that among the least common names for girls was "God" and "ESPN."
Of course, the parental units have failed to be the real originals they fancy themselves. Think of the millions of people who watch ESPN! A much less obvious choice would have been ESPN2.
It was undoubtedly a man who named li'l ESPN, and he's a throwback to an earlier, less enlightened age. Up until the mid-20th century, men had much more influence over choosing names for their kids, and the results were not good. Sure, mothers were often responsible for dismal choices like Oswald, Lucretia, and Hazel, but you can count on more men than women to give out “funny” names.
For example, how many dads have wanted to have a son whose middle name was “Danger”? Answer: More than you think.
But here’s the problem. Studies show that people with odd and ugly names do more poorly in school and are both less popular and more likely to have emotional problems. (Hey, don’t look at me. I’m doing fine. Just fine.)
In fact, I’m doing WAY better than the American kids from the past namedHelen Troy, Goblin Fester, Cheese Caeser (sic), and Garage Empty. (Goblin Fester? I actually sort of like that!) Historians who have gone through census records have also found that people have named their babies Ogre, Wrath, Lucifer, Medusa, and Ghoul.
But ESPN? What is the next most likely cable channel or media outlet to provide some unlucky kid with a namesake?
Der Spiegel had a story on the flour wars that take place in the Greek village of Galaxidi.
The day is known as "Clean Monday" (or Καθαρή Δευτέρα), though that is a bit misleading, given that villagers throw over a ton of colored flour at each other.
According to the article, "Preparations for the war -- also known as alevromoutzouromata or 'people throw flour at each other' -- are intense. Locals dye bag upon bag of flour with food coloring and paint their faces with charcoal.... And revellers, at least those who know what they are in for, bust out goggles to protect their eyes from the flying starch....
"The flour fight dates back to the very beginning of the 19th century... Villagers began celebrating Carnival in defiance of the Ottoman occupiers, painting their faces with ash and dancing in decorous circles, one for women, one for men. Now the fun is co-ed and the flour throwing non-discriminating."
No need to be frightened!
