The cruelest month: All jive

For Day 2 of National Poetry Month, I give you a taste of Langston Hughes:

Motto

I play it cool

I dig all jive

That's the reason

I stay alive

My motto

As I live and learn

Is dig and be dug in return

There’s a wealth of Hughes I could choose from; but I was introduced to this one in an episode of Law & Order, where the detectives are on a stakeout in an empty apartment. Det. Lennie Briscoe, a true renaissance man when it comes to le bon mot, is playing cards with Lt. Anita Van Buren. He recites the first four lines, with Van Buren completing the poem, with raised eyebrows.

Briscoe explains: quoting Hughes used to work well as a chat-up line “on the Jewish girls from Riverdale.” Van Buren answers that it still works pretty well on girls from Jackson Heights.

On girls from Pasadena, too.

Joking giants

Okay, so the corporate kings of April Foolers are Google. These guys plan for April First like wiccans setting up for Samhain.

But it turns out that Microsoft, in its quest to take search market share from the Big G, are fighting back.

Yesterday, if you went to bing and searched on the term “Google”, here’s the result:

If you’re one of the millions who don’t use bing, you should know that the little squares are incidentals to your search. So, hovering and  clicking on the four would get you respectively (starting with blue):

Which led to:

The red one was:

Which brought you a video of paint drying:

The yellow was:

And this link:

Finally, the green was:

Which was the ringer—click that link and it brought you to the bing v. Google “blind test”:

Well—A for effort.

The cruelest month

Well, April may or may not be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot tells us in The Waste Land, but it is National Poetry Month. And I intend to celebrate it by posting a poem a day, the poems in mind being ones that have particular meaning to me.

Prepare for a cultural assault such as you’ve never encountered in this blog.

To start us off, I’ll give you a few lines from The Waste Land:

 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(If you'd like to chow down on the whole thing, you can find it all over the place, including here.)

The thing about Eliot is that he’s exactly the poet you want to be reading in high school, when you’re ready to be so full of cynicism and world-weariness. He makes you want to go totally Goth.

Plus—high school is the period where you’re most likely to have the bleeding excess of energy necessary to read The Waste Land all the way through, and then actually discuss it.

Since this is April Fool’s Day, I’ll soften the weltschmerz with a sop from Ogden Nash:

 The Hippopotamus

Behold the hippopotamus!

We laugh at how he looks to us,

And yet in moments dank and grim,

I wonder how we look to him.

Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!

We really look all right to us,

As you no doubt delight the eye

Of other hippopotami.

That’s the beauty of poetry—you can cover so much ground with so few words. If you do it right.

The cheese stands alone

Just in time for April Fool’s Day: this story comes out of New Jersey. Well, of course it does.

Seems some guy with $200,000 of stolen cheese (42,000 pounds) from Wisconsin was apprehended at one of the rest areas off the Jersey Turnpike.

To be specific, it was the Vince Lombardi Service Area.

I’m reminded of an exchange from an episode of The West Wing, between President Josiah Bartlet & FBI Special Agent Michael Casper:

FBI Special Agent Michael Casper: "In thirteen years with the Bureau, I've discovered that there's no amount of money, manpower or knowledge that can equal the person you're looking for being stupid."

President Josiah Bartlet: "God, well... Some of the stupidest criminals in the world are working right here in America. I've always been very proud of that."

Also, I keep coming back to the phrase: you just can’t make this stuff up.

Not an Easter basket

A while ago I was at one of the lengthier stoplights a couple of blocks from my flat & I noticed this woman waiting to cross the street:

Not much of a fashion plate, but I purely admire her ingenuity vis-à-vis after-market storage accessories on her bike.

Matters of Supreme importance

In case you’ve been in a Nepali monastery for the past week or so with the battery on your iPad completely drained, the Supreme Court of the US is hearing arguments on two cases involving how governments accommodate (or don’t) the institution of marriage. Specifically, whether states can enact laws banning same-sex marriage (California’s Proposition 8, from 2008), and whether the Federal government can define a marriage as being solely between one man and one woman (the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996).

There’s not been such a potential for blushes and sly asides in the Court since the Supremes in 1964 took on the issue of determining what pornography is. (Okay, officially that was a ruling that obscenity wasn’t in fact free speech and was therefore not protected under the provisions of the First Amendment. But you’ll perhaps recall the high point of that case was Justice Potter Stewart’s admission that pornography was bloody difficult to define legally, “but I know it when I see it.”)

You can find coverage on the arguments pretty much anywhere in the mainstream media and the lunatic fringe. I like two speculative viewpoints: Andy Borowitz’s “report” of Antonin Scalia throwing a hissy fit at having to hear about gay couples all week long, And The Onion’s “story” about the entire Court engaging in a gigantic yawn and proclaiming that the whole same-sex marriage thing is a big drink of no-alcohol beer.

So far I’ve not seen any comment on the fact that six guys in dresses form the majority of the team that’s going to decide these issues. I guess that’s what I’m here for—to point out important things like that.

Cleanup in the bakery aisle

While I was in Sedona at Christmas, I went into a gourmet-type grocery store & had a bit of a nose around. I’m always interested in these things, particularly the meat market, fish counter the & bakery area.

I have to say that when I saw these “savory scones” I was absolutely poleaxed.

I mean, the confluence of the various colored bits & the rough-edged mounds of drop scones…well, frankly, it looks like little slightly-tidied-up scoops of vomit.

Just sayin’…

Fast times

Britain’s The Telegraph has pretty much raised the practice of writing obituaries to a high art. You know you’re in the groove when they collect your stuff and sell them in book form. Multiple volumes’ worth.

It was the Torygraph’s obit of Elizabeth Taylor that I used to anchor my thoughts on that classy dame, and you can easily spend hours just clicking through their various retrospectives. Makes a nice change from the quasi-literate stuff a lot of news outlets pump out these days.

A few days ago a friend forwarded this obituary of a bloke I’d never heard of, but whom I wished I’d stood next to at a bar after reading it. I mean—the guy’s a cat burglar, for crying out loud. I didn’t even know we still had cat burglars—although, I suppose one could infer, with this obit, that we don’t, that it’s a dying trade. Like carriage makers, or pocket calculator manufacturers.

Well, the thing that struck me about this piece was the phrase “flashy cars and fast women”. And I wondered, Are those modifiers interchangeable? Could it be “fast cars and flashy women” and still mean the same thing?

For that matter, what, exactly is a fast woman? Is being a fast woman a good thing? Does your answer to that depend on whether you're a woman or a man? Is there such a thing as a fast man? If so, does it carry the same connotations as the female designation? Is calling some chick a “fast woman” equivalent to saying “she’s no better than she should be”? If so, how good should she be?

(Sidebar inquiry: why is it you never hear anyone remark, “He’s no better than he should be”?)

In “Early Mornin’ Rain”, Gordon Lightfoot tells us, “The liquor tasted good and the women all were fast.” I have a feeling that this doesn’t refer to their mental acuity.

Either way, I’m thinking I don’t qualify. I find this oddly dispiriting.

I’m betting that fast women may or may not come to good ends; but their passing will be noted in The Telegraph.

Springtime for Hitler & Google

You know, that one clip from the film Downfall has to be the most recycled Academy Award nominee in history. It’s got more incarnations than the inhabitants of a large Tibetan monastery. You know the one: where Hitler is huddled in the Führerbunker deploying non-existent armies in the defense of Berlin while waiting for the Old Gods to smite the Red Army for good and all.

I myself have brought a couple to your attention: the one purporting to have our Adolf going mental at discovering CalTrans is going to close the 405 Freeway in LA, resulting in Carmageddon. He asks the eternal question: how’s he supposed to get to LAX? “Fucking Sepulveda? Please!”

I feel his pain.

And the one where he’s just learned what real defeat is: when your software hosting provider screws the pooch and you take a look at the fine print of your service level agreement (SLA). The thought of Hitler and Goering starting out programming in COBOL is just cherce.

But Third Reich 2.0’s latest installment (that I know of, as of this writing) gives new meaning to the tagline, “Don’t be evil.” It.has our intrepid Nazi receiving the news that Google Reader is shutting down, because the monolith needs to focus on a few products, like Google Glass. 

“Fuck those fucking glasses and the nerd they rode in on.” I’m looking forward to seeing those words on a tee-shirt sometime soon.

¡Daß ist ausgezeichnet!

Tending the flock

Hmm, despite the report that the papal Twitter account would shut down when Benedict XVI hung up his mitre, it looks like Pope Francis the Numberless (apparently; I guess you don’t get a numeric designator until there are at least two of you) has taken up the social challenge.

So far (as of time of writing), he’s had one tweet, but nearly two million followers. I’m assuming they’re mostly inherited from Benedict.

Still got a long way to go to catch up with the Dalai Lama, though.