Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

This is a classic Onion article from 2007; apparently, history is repeating itself.

It Only Tuesday

October 16, 2007 | Issue 43•42

WASHINGTON, DC—After running a thousand errands, working hours of overtime, and being stuck in seemingly endless gridlock traffic commuting to and from their jobs, millions of Americans were disheartened to learn that it was, in fact, only Tuesday.

"Tuesday?" San Diego resident Doris Wagner said. "How in the hell is it still Tuesday?"

( Continued... )

Exactly.

W. A. Pannapacker (what a name!) has an interesting piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the link between procrastination and genius, specifically in the case of Leonardo da Vinci.  Da Vinci, as you may or may not know, what an epic procrastinator, filling notebooks with sketches of future ideas, too many to follow through on in a lifetime.  Pannapacker notes, "Nowadays, Leonardo might have been hired by a top research university, but it seems likely that he would have been denied tenure. He had lots of notes but relatively little to put in his portfolio."

The essay concludes,

Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some practical end, a career rather than a calling. And so we complete research projects that no longer interest us and write books that no one will read; or we teach with indifference, dutifully boring our students, marking our time until retirement, and slowly forgetting why we entered the profession: because something excited us so much that we subordinated every other obligation to follow it.

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.

As a dedicated procrastinator, I appreciate the sentiment.  In perusing the virtual pages of the Salon, however, I must admit that if Dark Days in Monkey City, Mansquito, and Hamster on a Piano are the traces of my roiling genius, my legacy is in trouble.

I've long had kind of a crush on SNL's Seth Meyers, but his take this weekend on the whole Michael Phelps debacle tipped it over into a kind of love:



ETA: Really, NBC?? Um, here's the clip via some weird conspiracy theory site; let's see how long this one stays up...

ETA2: Here's one that doesn't promote a conspiracy theory, just AOL:



Exactly.

From GraphJam:


more music charts

As my anonymous reader says, this is beautiful:

From another stunning collection of campaign photos, this one at Boston.com.

God bless America!

Thanks, spedbug!

D sent me a link to this beautiful series of photographs. Callie Shell has been traveling along with Obama's campaign for the past couple of years, and she has captured some gorgeous images. I don't remember the last time I found pictures of a political candidate so moving.

Courtesy of my baby sister, a hilarious short film on the political sensibilities of kindergarteners. Some of my favorite lines: in favor of Obama, "because he has the hair"; on McCain, "Who the heck is he?"; and, being torn between the two, "I wish you'd brought Ralph Nader because I like him."

ETA: Sorry, all. There's something wrong with their embed code. You can watch the video here.

Compare to this:


Watch CBS Videos Online

And this:


Watch CBS Videos Online

That is all.

For the past few years, my dad has been leading the fund-raising and development campaign at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, which just reopened after an enormous, top-to-bottom renovation.

From the NYTimes review:

Many museums, serving far less troubled neighborhoods than this one does (Crown Heights) are coming to think of themselves as community centers and alternative schools. How much more effective might they be if play and information were intertwined, with children’s museums leading the way?

Perhaps because of this potential, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s fund-raising was immensely successful, with more than $80 million coming from public and private sources. And the museum spared little expense in its redesign. In its 104,000-square-foot reconstructed building it has almost doubled its exhibition space, to 20,000 square feet from 12,500, and added another 10,000 square feet on the rooftop, where bleachers frame an outdoor theater. It expects to increase annual visitors to 400,000 from 250,000. Its architect, Rafael Viñoly, has created a new second floor that is light and clean and functional. The building is green, with waterless urinals, token solar panels and geothermal heating and cooling. Many of its exhibitions will undoubtedly amuse and teach. There is much to appreciate here.

Awesome work, Greg from Riverdale!

I didn't plan to talk about David Foster Wallace in class this week, but today I taught Swift's Tale of a Tub and found myself suggesting that the Swiftian literary "ruse" laid the groundwork for a whole body of brilliant literary work, including novels like Infinite Jest, that approach meaning paradoxically by spinning away from the places we presume it to be.

The NYTimes obituary in its entirety:

David Foster Wallace, whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, an experimental contemporary of William T. Vollmann, Mark Leyner and Nicholson Baker and a clear influence on younger tour-de-force stylists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46.

Mr. Wallace was an apparent suicide. A spokeswoman for the Claremont police said Mr. Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself. Mr. Wallace’s father, James Donald Wallace, said in an interview on Sunday that his son had been severely depressed for a number of months.

A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, Mr. Wallace was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity — about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century. He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian. Critics often noted that he was not only an experimenter and a showoff, but also a God-fearing moralist with a fierce honesty in confronting the existence of contradiction.

“David Foster Wallace can do practically anything if he puts his mind to it,” Michiko Kakutani, chief book critic of The New York Times, who was not a consistent praiser of Mr. Wallace’s work, wrote in 2006. “He can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once.”

Mr. Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College in Southern California since 2001 and before that had taught at Illinois State University, came to prominence in 1986 with a broadly comic first novel, “The Broom of the System” (Viking), published when he was just 24. It used the narrative frame of a young woman’s search for identity to draw a loopy portrait of America on a comic and dangerous spiral into the Disneyesque confusion of reality and artifice.

Mr. Wallace was best known for his mammoth 1996 novel, “Infinite Jest” (Little, Brown), a 1,079-page monster that perceives American society as self-obsessed, pleasure-obsessed and entertainment-obsessed. (The president, Johnny Gentle, is a former singer.) The title refers to an elusive film that terrorists are trying to get their hands on because to watch it is to be debilitated, even killed, or so it’s said, by enjoyment. The main characters are a stressed-out tennis prodigy and a former thief and drug addict, and they give rise to harrowing passages about panic attacks and detox freak-outs. The book attracted a cult of fans (and critics too) for its subversive writing, which was by turns hallucinogenically stream of consciousness, jubilantly anecdotal, winkingly sardonic and self-consciously literary. The following year Mr. Wallace received a MacArthur Foundation grant, the so-called genius award.

In contrast to the lively spirit of his writing, Mr. Wallace was a temperamentally unassuming man, long-haired, unhappy in front of a camera, consumed with his work and its worth, perpetually at odds with himself. Journalists who interviewed him invariably commented on his discomfort with celebrity and his self-questioning. And those who knew him best concurred that Mr. Wallace was a titanically gifted writer with an equally troubled soul.

“He was a huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer,” Jonathan Franzen, a friend of Mr. Wallace and the author of “The Corrections,” said in an interview on Sunday, adding later, “He was also as sweet a person as I’ve ever known and as tormented a person as I’ve ever known.”

Mr. Wallace was born in Ithaca, N.Y., where his father was a graduate student in philosophy. When David was 6 months old, his father got a job at the University of Illinois, and the family moved to Champaign, Ill., where David became a locally prominent junior tennis player. At Amherst College, he studied philosophy and English, graduating summa cum laude in 1985. It was also at Amherst, said his mother, Sally Foster Wallace, an English teacher who specialized in grammar, that he began to write. One of his two senior theses became “The Broom of the System”; the other was about Aristotle and whether statements about the future can be true.

Mr. Wallace received a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona in 1987 and began sending out his short stories, many of them collected in the volumes “Girl With Curious Hair,” “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” and “Oblivion.” He also wrote essays and reported pieces on an astonishing array of topics, from lobsters to Roger Federer, the pornography industry to John McCain, collected in several volumes, the latest being “Consider the Lobster and Other Essays” (Little, Brown, 2006).

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2004, and his parents, who live in Urbana, Ill., Mr. Wallace is survived by a sister, Amy Wallace Havens of Tucson.

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst.

In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Astute reader (and karaoke superstar) SHock recently sent me this follow-up to my last Weird Japanese News alert. Yahoo! News reports that a Japanese patient's "tumor" turned out to be a 25-year-old towel:

TOKYO (AFP) - Doctors who carried out surgery on a Japanese man to remove a "tumour" had good news and bad news for him. He did not have cancer -- but the "growth" that had been causing him pain was in fact a 25-year-old surgical towel.

The patient had been carrying the cloth since 1983, when surgeons at the Asahi General Hospital in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo left it in him after an operation to treat an ulcer, a spokesman for the hospital said.

The man, now 49, went in to another hospital in late May after suffering abdominal pain.

When examinations found what was believed to be an eight-centimetre (3.2-inch) tumour, he underwent the operation to remove it. It was only then that surgeons realised it was a towel.

"The towel was greenish blue although we are not sure about its original colour," the Asahi General Hospital spokesman said, adding it had been crumpled to the size of a softball.

Asahi hospital officials visited the man and apologised, he said.

The former patient has no plans to sue the hospital, which is in talks with him over compensation or other measures, the official said.

Japanese media reports said the man, who was not identified, still had his spleen removed.

The part I don't get is "still had his spleen removed." Like, for the hell of it?

According to the NYTimes, Jim Davis is a fan of Garfield Minus Garfield:

Jim Davis, the cartoonist who created “Garfield,” calls himself an occasional reader of the site, which he calls “fascinating.” He says he is flattered rather than peeved by the imitation.

“Some of them really work, and some of them work better,” Mr. Davis said in a telephone interview.

...

“I think it’s the body of work that makes me laugh — the more you read of these strips, the funnier it gets,” Mr. Davis said. As for Garfield himself, “this makes a compelling argument that maybe he doesn’t need to be there. Less is more.”

As I've said before, Garfield Minus Garfield is one of the most brilliant things I've come across recently. I read it every day.

In other news, Wired informs us that YouveBeenLeftBehind.com, a website that allows you to send email to your unsaved friends after the Rapture to let them know that they are going to hell and you are not, is For Reals. From YouveBeenLeftBehind.com:

We all have family and friends who have failed to receive the Good News of the Gospel. The unsaved will be "left behind" on earth to go through the "tribulation period" after the "Rapture". You remember how, for a short time, after (9/11/01) people were open to spiritual things and answers. (We are still singing "God Bless America" at baseballs' seventh inning stretch.) Imagine how taken back they will be by the millions of missing Christians and devastation at the rapture. They will know it was true and that they have blown it.

It goes on to say that emails sent from the site are intended to court those left behind during their "small window" of opportunity to join the saved. It seems to this reader, however, that the best use of this service is merely to mock non-believers with an "I told you so," as if enduring the apocalypse and facing eternal damnation were not devastating enough for them. At least that's what I'd use it for ... which is probably why I'll be left behind in the first place.

And yes, I do get ALL of my information from The Morning News.

This is a very weird story out of Tokyo.

A homeless woman has been arrested after living undetected for almost a year in a tiny cupboard in a man's house in Japan.

...

Horikawa told police that she had nowhere to live and had first taken up residence in the cupboard, in a room that the man rarely used, about one year previously when the owner of the house had gone out and not locked the door.

Police believe she may have moved between different addresses in the neighbourhood during her stowaway year.

The woman did not apparently steal any money or other items from the house, but did make use of the shower and toilet.

The police described Horikawa as looking neat and clean. She was charged with trespassing.

Locally, my lady NKB-VP-LTL is in town for the weekend and last night we almost killed ourselves with fun. We've spent the day convalescing on the couch. The cycle shall continue through Monday.

Because I often wish I were Jenny Davidson, I'm copying her citation of the Times' piece on Oliver Sacks and its delightful photo of its subject:



Oliver Sacks is so invited to my imaginary dinner party. Jenny Davidson, too—though I have hopes of having real dinner with her some day.

Let me state for the record that I'm deliberately not stating for the record my preferred candidate in the media circus that is Election Campaign 2008. This for a number of reasons I don't have time to spell out right now, but may or may not later on. (We're kind of out the door as soon as D emerges, dressed and ready to seize the day.) But in the last presidential race, I did outwardly support John Edwards up until he dropped out, because I really like him. I still do. In fact, when I took that "Which Candidate Is For You" meme that went around a while ago, I was matched up again with Dreamy McEdwards by the internet gods (also, Kucinich, which I'd rather not talk about).

This morning, Edwards announced that he's dropping out of the race. So that's that. I knew it wasn't going to last, but it makes me a little sad (for, well, America) that it couldn't.

The Scooter has moved on to that big Yankee Stadium in the sky. (Not the one I wrote about in terza rima for an 11th-grade English assignment inspired by Dante's Inferno, in which George Steinbrenner is condemned to an eternal home game in which the Yankees flub every possible play—under the management of the then-recently-late Billy Martin—and George is perpetually prevented from firing anyone by the divine intervention of baseballs that fly out of nowhere and down his throat every time he opens his mouth. No, I'm certain Phil is chillin' at the game further upstairs.) From the NYTimes obit:

Phil Rizzuto, the sure-handed Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop nicknamed The Scooter, who punctuated his extended Yankee life as a broadcaster with birthday wishes to nuns and exclamations of “Holy cow!” died today. He was 89.

...

He was a 5-foot-6-inch, 150-pound sparkplug who did the little things right, from turning the pivot on a double play to laying down a perfect sacrifice bunt. He left the slugging to powerful teammates like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller and Yogi Berra.

“I hustled and got on base and made the double play,” he said of his role. “That’s all the Yankees needed in those days.”

His career statistics were not spectacular: a batting average of .273, 38 home runs and 562 runs batted in. But in his best season, 1950, when he hit a career-high .324 and drove in 66 runs, he won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.

Rizzuto was frequently compared with other shortstops of his era, among them Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Marty Marion of the St. Louis Cardinals. But to DiMaggio, his teammate for eight seasons — each man lost three seasons to military service during World War II — Rizzuto was the best.

“The little guy in front of me,” said DiMaggio, one of the game’s great centerfielders. “He made my job easy. I didn’t have to pick up so many ground balls.”

Though he may have been the "little guy" on the field, Rizzuto towered over other commentators in the great game of Divergent Baseball Announcement. Quoth the NYT: “Rizzuto’s ramblings and pro-Yankee sentiments maddened detractors, who felt he paid too little attention to the game. But fans adored Rizzuto as they would a delightful uncle, and colleagues were fond of recalling his scorecard notation of 'W.W.,' for 'Wasn’t Watching.'”

If you've never read O Holy Cow!, a collection of found poems based on Rizzuto's broadcasts, now would be the moment to do so. A sample (courtesy of the Comic Baseball Association, which has considerately posted a few of the pieces online so I don't have to run home and dig out my copy of the book and come back and transcribe—they've got more over there, so pay a visit):

Chess

I.

A lot of money in that chess.
I'll tell you that.
It's gotta be..
Can't be...
Not a good game for television.


II.

I'm not knocking it.
But it's not a spectator sport.


[September 4, 1992
Texas at New York
Rich Monteleone pitching to Rafael Palmeiro
Seventh inning, no outs, bases empty
Yankees lead 6-3]

Hall and Nokes

So second time around
Mel Hall and Matt Nokes
Solve Tapani's pitch
Heh Heh
That's right
John Moore's on the ball.
It does sound like a good rock group.
Hall and Nokes.
Oh?
Hall and Oates?
Oh yeah?
That's one I missed.
I'll have to go out
And buy some of their records tonight.

[June 11, 1991
New York at Minnesota
Kevin Tapani pitching to Alvaro Espinoza
Fifth inning, two outs, two base runners
Twins lead 1-0]

Reversal of Opinion

And he hits one in the hole
They're gonna have to hurry.
THEY'LL NEVER GET HIM!
They got him.
How do you like that.
Holy cow.
I changed my mind before he got there.
So that doesn't count as an error.

[July 10, 1992
Seattle at New York
Dave Fleming pitching to Andy Stankiewicz
First inning, no outs, bases empty
Mariners lead 1-0]

And finally, in memoriam:

Prayer for the Captain

There's a little prayer I always say
Whenever I think of my family or when I'm flying,
When I'm afraid, and I am afraid of flying.
It's just a little one. You can say it no matter what,
Whether you're Catholic or Jewish or Protestant or
whatever.
And I've probably said it a thousand times
Since I heard the news on Thurman Munson.

It's not trying to be maudlin or anything.
His Eminence, Cardinal Cooke, is going to come out
And say a little prayer for Thurman Munson.
But this is just a little one I say time and time again,
It's just: Angel of God, Thurman's guardian dear,
To whom his love commits him here there or everywhere,
Ever this night and day be at his side,
To light and guard, to rule and guide.

For some reason it makes me feel like I'm talking to
Thurman,
Or whoever's name you put in there,
Whether it be my wife or any of my children, my parents
or anything.
It's just something to keep you really from going bananas.
Because if you let this,
If you keep thinking about what happened, and you can't
understand it,
That's what really drives you to despair.

Faith. You gotta have faith.
You know, they say time heals all wounds,
And I don't quite agree with that a hundred percent.
It gets you to cope with wounds.
You carry them the rest of your life.

[August 3, 1979
Baltimore at New York
Pregame show]

Alert procrastinator atabei has directed my attention to this disturbing news out of North Korea:

NATION BANS KARAOKE BARS, INTERNET CAFES?

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's security agency has ordered the shutdown of karaoke bars and Internet cafes, saying they are a threat to society, a South Korean newspaper reported Wednesday.

...

The North's Ministry of People's Security said in a directive that all karaoke bars, video-screening rooms and Internet cafes operating without state authorization must shut immediately, the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper said.

The paper did not say how it obtained a copy of the directive.

"It is so promulgated under the mandate of the Republic in order to crush enemy scheming and to squarely confront those who threaten the maintenance of the socialist system," the daily quoted the ministry directive as saying.

And I'm thinking, Korean karaoke must be fucking awesome.

Not that any one death is any more tragic than any other over in Iraq, but there's something about a poet, journalist, and peace activist getting blown up that brings the ongoing travesty into momentary, devastating focus. The Houston Chronicle reports:

June 25, 2007, 3:56PM
Blast kills Iraqi peace poet

By SAMEER N. YACOUB Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD — The poet Rahim al-Maliki wrote about his dreams of Iraqi unity in a place where such appeals are drowned out by daily bombings. One of them took his life on Monday.

Al-Maliki — whose fame grew by hosting two shows on state-run television — was among 13 people killed in a suicide attack at a Baghdad hotel, where he was filming tribal leaders about their decision to join U.S.-led forces in the fight against factions linked to al-Qaida. Four of the tribal sheiks from the western Anbar province were among the victims.

In one of his shows, "The Guesthouses of our People," the 39-year-old al-Maliki visited Sunni and Shiite groups and used his poetry to open dialogue about ways to end Iraq's sectarian bloodshed. In Anbar, many tribal elders have agreed to help U.S.-Iraqi troops fight groups linked to al-Qaida in an alliance that the Pentagon considers an important blow to the insurgency.

Al-Maliki's other show on the state-run Iraqiya television was "Feelings," which examined love poetry written in the style he favored: the ordinary Iraqi dialect rather than classical Arabic.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite who is not related to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, received several honors in recent years, including the top prize for patriotic poetry in 2006, colleagues said.

Under Saddam Hussein, he was imprisoned twice on accusations of criticizing the government and expressing sympathy for fellow Shiites who suffered widespread crackdowns after a failed uprising in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He did not publish his work during Saddam's regime, but he read his poems at gatherings — and they were passed along by admirers who memorized the verses.

Al-Maliki became well-known across the country after his shows were aired by Iraqiya.

In one episode of "Guesthouses," he was shown wearing Arab traditional dress among tribal chiefs and policemen in Ramadi, the main city of Anbar, calling for all Iraqis to be united. He also wrote poems praising Anbar tribes for taking up arms against al-Qaida.

Al-Maliki lived in the Baghdad district of Sadr City with his wife and four children.

In one of his poems, he called upon all Iraqis to understand their shared stake in the country.

"If you do not love Iraq

Then do not pray with me

You, Iraq, the land of well-being

When you stand tall, we stand tall

They throw stones at your windows

But your glass has destroyed their stones."

The rolling body count over there can be mind-numbing for those of us following the war at a distance, but a story like this should jumpstart our senses of sorrow and horror.

For the past twenty-four hours or so, I've been mentally concocting the snooty post I was going to make about the joys of traveling through U.S. airspace, covering canceled connecting flights, serpentine security lines monitored by morbid airline carnival barkers, and living with the conviction that one will never get to leave Los Angeles, only to come out of the fog of jetlag and discover one is, instead, stuck in Dallas.

But then, upon arrival in Dallas, I heard a CNN snippet of the news out of Virginia Tech, and all the self-pity and sarcasm were immediately wrung out of me.

I spend almost all of my time, at work or at play, with professors and university students. The enormity of such a campus tragedy is beyond my comprehension.

Recall, if you will, the opening of Kafka's The Metamorphosis:

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He was lying on his back as hard as armor plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs, to whose dome the cover, about to slide off completely, could barely cling. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, were waving helplessly before his eyes.

Carrying over the theme of yesterday's disturbing insectival encounter, these very lines flashed through my mind as I read the following story from Reuters:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A 91-year-old German sparked a rescue operation when he slipped mending his roof and got stuck fast in tar "like a beetle on its back," police said on Tuesday.

Passers-by were so shocked to see the elderly handyman working on the roof they first thought he was planning to commit suicide, according to police in the eastern city of Magdeburg.

"In fact he was just re-coating the roofing with bitumen. But then he slipped," said a spokesman for police.

"When we got there, he was like a beetle on its back, with his arms and legs sprawled out and completely glued to the roof," he added. "Due to his age, he couldn't free himself from his unfortunate situation."

Local firemen carefully detached the man using ropes and ladders. He was unharmed, but had sticky clothes, police said.

Lest you think I am callously amusing myself with the poor gentleman's anguish, let me point out that my favorite line in The Metamorphosis is actually at the end of Chapter 1: Gregor's father is chasing him violently back into the bedroom, through a too-narrow doorframe that crushes the edges of his beetling body, and the narrator informs us that "now this was really no joke anymore"—as if, up till this point, waking up to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin" had been quite a laugh. In fact, what I love about this line is how it marks its own moment of metamorphosis, the moment at which a tragic situation tempered with the comedy of the absurd—a man changed in his sleep to a giant bug, or, perhaps, a 91-year-old German man repairing his own roof—suddenly becomes a situation in which the absurdity is itself tragic. Thus the moment "this is really no joke anymore" is precisely the moment neither the character, nor we as readers, can free ourselves from the "unfortunate situation."

Plus, nothing sucks more than being publicly humiliated and sticky to boot.

The BBC reports that a South Korean woman has set a "karaoke record":

A South Korean woman has set an unofficial world karaoke record after singing nearly 1,000 songs in just under 60 hours, reports say.

Kim Seok-ok dropped to the floor after her marathon effort, which she said she undertook to cheer up her sick husband.

Ms Kim picked up the microphone at a karaoke bar on Monday and continued until Valentine's Day evening.

She beat, by 36 minutes, the record set by a German man last year, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.

Ms Kim sang for 59 hours and 48 minutes, with a break of just a few minutes every hour, witnesses at the bar in Seoul said.

She did not even sit down, even though the rules say she can.

The 52-year-old said she did it for her 45-year-old husband who is fighting a brain tumour.

"Life may be painful, but face the challenge," she said. "I want people to live with hope like me.

"I wanted to send the message, for those who are living with patients in the family, that if you live cheerfully without being discouraged, it will give them immense strength."

If I were the competitive type, I would consider the gauntlet thrown. 60 hours of karaoke just doesn't intimidate me. Hell, it sounds like a warm-up. However, in the spirit of world peace, I'd prefer to call this woman and collaborate with her to establish a karaoke therapy foundation, through which we will perform, tirelessly and ceaselessly, to bring the joy of karaoke to the weak, suffering, and infirm.

I do wonder, though, why the article doesn't report the husband's response to his wife's gift of song. I fear it may have been, "KILL ME NOW."

If you slap one of those "I [HEART] OIL WAR" bumper stickers¹ on your Jeep Grand Cherokee, you are being:

A. Ironic.
B. Stupid.
C. An asshole.
D. All of the above.

¹I actually kind of love those bumper stickers, but it occurs to me now that Americans might not be allowed to make that joke. Especially the ones with bumpers.

---

In other news, thebiblioholic has alerted me that NASCAR champ Jimmie Johnson broke his wrist falling off a golf cart at a celebrity tournament. I'm sorry, but that's just sad. If Tony Stewart turned up with any broken bones, you know it would be from, say, kicking someone's ass. Now that's NASCAR.

ETA: I just read to the end of the story, and discovered that Tony Stewart has indeed made news with his broken bones: "Tony Stewart broke his wrist and bruised his ribs last January when he flipped a car during a qualifying race for the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals." See? NASCAR.

Reuters, you delight me. Who but you would alert me to the little-known dangers of sexsomnia?

LONDON, Oct 25 (Reuters Life!) - Researchers are struggling to understand a rare medical condition where sufferers unknowingly demand, or actually have, sex while asleep, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday.

Research into sexsomnia -- making sexual advances toward another person while asleep -- has been hampered as sufferers are so embarrassed by the problem they tend not to own up to it, while doctors do not ask about it.

As yet there is no cure for the condition, which often leads to difficulties in relationships.

"It really bothers me that I can't control it," Lisa Mahoney told the magazine. "It scares me because I don't think it has anything to do with the partner. I don't want this foolish condition to hurt us in the long run."

Not to sound callous to Ms. Mahoney's plight, but I must note that I find this the most perplexing "us" since Diddy dropped the P ("The name is changed. We made it simpler. We removed the P. The P was getting in between us. We're entering the age of Diddy"). Is "the partner" part of the "us"? Or is "the parter," with whom "it doesn't have anything to do," getting in between "us"?

Sexsomnia confuses me.

Thanks to the Salon's British correspondent BC for the following story from the BBC:

China Stamps Out Poor English

China has launched a fresh drive to clamp down on bad English in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Previous attempts to wipe out Chinglish - the mistranslated phrases often seen on Chinese street signs and product labels - have met with little success.

Emergency exits at Beijing airport read "No entry on peacetime" and the Ethnic Minorities Park is named "Racist Park".

Beijing city authorities will issue new translation guides by the end of the year, Xinhua news agency said.

The booklets would be handed out to hotels and shopping malls, on public transport and at tourist attractions.
Chinglish has become a running joke among many foreigners in China, and several websites have been set up listing humorous examples of mistranslation.

A road sign on Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace warns of a dangerous pavement with the words: "To Take Notice of Safe; The Slippery are Very Crafty".

Menus frequently list items such as "Corrugated iron beef", "Government abuse chicken" and "Chop the strange fish".

The mistranslations arise because many Chinese words express concepts obliquely and can be interpreted in multiple ways, making translation a minefield for non-English speakers.

The municipal government in Beijing first tried to stamp out the problem just a month after being awarded the 2008 Olympics back in 2001.

A year later the Beijing Tourism Bureau set up a hotline for visitors and residents to tip off examples of bad English, and said results would be reviewed by a panel of English professors and expatriates.

I admit that this linguistic clean-up initiative saddens me. In much the same way that I love spam poetry, I adore both unwittingly funny translations and weird signage, and have often taken pride in my people's excellence in both fields. (Fayetteville, incidentally, also proffers the occasional gem—for example, the delightful sign near the one-lane bridge that declares "Road Closed When Underwater.") Still, thanks to the BBC for making the most of the Chinglish situation by giving us the following visual, with original caption:

Occasionally, a sign makes sense.

In other news, today is Z's birthday, so direct all your warmest thoughts his way.


Add 33 years and make a wish, Z.

From today's NYTimes:

Subway Sleuth Clears Dinosaur of Cannibalism

A graduate student in paleontology was standing on the downtown subway platform at the American Museum of Natural History stop. He idly inspected the bronze cast on the wall of one of the museum’s dinosaurs.

The student, Sterling J. Nesbitt, was surprised to see what looked like crocodile bones that had presumably been the dinosaur’s last feast. This set in motion a re-examination of two specimens on display in the museum’s Hall of Dinosaurs, and wiped clean a dinosaur’s reputation that had been besmirched by suspicions of cannibalism.

Museum paleontologists found that the exhibited predatory dinosaur, Coelophysis bauri, had in fact not eaten one of its own.

“Our research shows that the evidence for cannibalism in Coelophysis is nonexistent,” Mr. Nesbitt said in an interview, “and the evidence for cannibalism in other dinosaurs is quite thin.”

Sterling J. Nesbitt—on behalf of maligned predators of the world, we salute you.

Happy Friday, friends. I dare you to find a better news item than this today, or any day, bygone or yet to come:

MAN BITES PANDA AFTER PANDA BITES MAN

BEIJING (Reuters) - An intoxicated Chinese man who tried to give a panda a hug at Beijing Zoo found himself biting it in self defense after his clumsy attempt at affection was savagely rejected, local media reported Thursday.

Zhang Xinyan, a building worker on holiday from China's central Henan province, climbed into an enclosure that held Gu Gu, a seven-year-old panda, at Beijing Zoo after the man had drunk four pints of beer during lunch at a nearby restaurant, the Yanzhao Metropolis Daily said.

Zhang, who couldn't remember the incident clearly, had wanted to hug the panda and shake its hand after having watched similar scenes on television.

"When I was in there, the panda was eating bamboo. Then, it seemed some people shouted, which startled the panda. He rushed over to bite my leg," Zhang said.

Zhang, who tried in vain to push the panda away, was bitten twice and forced to the ground, the paper said.

"I took the opportunity to bite the panda's back, but its fur was too thick," Zhang said.

Eventually, a zoo worker sprayed water from a hose to rescue Zhang from the panda's clutches, the paper said.

Both were worse for wear after the tussle. Zhang was rushed to hospital and given tetanus and rabies shots, while Gu Gu lost her appetite, Xinhua news agency reported.

"It was scared by the intruder and refused to eat for one and a half days," a zoo spokeswoman, surnamed Ye, told Xinhua.

But Gu Gu had recovered and was back on display Thursday.

Zhang, however, faces at least a half-month convalescence, due to the "deep wounds," Xinhua said, citing Zhang's doctor.

His pride had also been injured, after reading stories of his exploits in newspapers.

"I wouldn't have jumped in if I knew what would happen," Zhang said.

The zoo, which plans to install cameras to monitor the enclosure, would not prosecute, Xinhua said.

But Zhang had already been tried and found guilty by Chinese Internet surfers.

"The man should be fined for the trouble he made," an anonymous commentator said in a posting on 163.com.

"He deserved to be bitten."

And that's really all there is to say, isn't it?

Who is this C. J. Chivers? That's what I asked myself when, as I read his NYTimes story on the giant hillside swastika of Kyrgyzstan, I got to these lines:

But aside from the presence of the tree formation itself, unraveling the origins of the lost Nazis’ presumed insubordination is a chore undercut by time. History has become malleable, a yarn by turns sinister, wry, clever and Soviet.

Where does a journalist learn to write such sentences? Does he giggle as he types them, or does his head swell with orchestral gravitas? Which would I find funnier?

So I Googled our mysterious Mr. Chivers, and discovered through this interview that while certain chapters of his training are exotic indeed (he was a Marine before he was a journalist), others hit quite close to home: he attended Cornell (my parents' alma mater), went to the Journalism School at Columbia (my own alma mater), and his first job was at the Providence Journal, the hometown paper I avoided reading during my 7 years of grad school. More importantly, however, I suspect that C. J. Chivers and I may have the same sense of humor, though I'm still not sure he knows it's a sense of humor—he may believe it's a sense of truth. My suspicions were aroused when he stated in the interview, "I still read The Providence Journal on the web, watching the paper tell the story to the state. Who doesn't enjoy smelling all that muck getting raked?" He goes on:

After two years the editors moved me into the capital to cover the police at night and Buddy Cianci's city hall. Buddy's in jail now, but when he was banging around the corner office, swilling his scotch and cursing into his speakerphone, hemmed in by crooks and sycophants and cops in knee-high leather boots, he made my job interesting.

My point is that I am now fascinated by C. J. Chivers, and I wish he would write a pulp detective novel. I would totally read it. Perhaps I'll write him a letter to that effect. I am a bored, lonely woman and Saturday is my oyster.

"He only wants two things: to feed, and to mate."

Please note that as I write this, I am watching a movie on the SciFi network called Mansquito. I firmly believe that when opportunity knocks, one cannot not watch a movie called "Mansquito." I have been rewarded with such rich dialogue as "You were going to break protocol ... you make me sick," given voice by the hot lab assistant with the Fuck Me lips, and by watching this same lab assistant, now stripped down to her lacy pink bra and panties, beginning her grotesque transformation into a Womansquito. Now her cop husband is wrestling with the Mansquito himself, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to a degenerate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I think my favorite thing about hokey sci-fi horror flicks, though, is how someone inevitably points out the "Factual Errors" in the premise of the film in IMDb's "Goofs" catalog. In this case, some helpful viewer notes:

Factual errors: Since only female mosquitoes bite people and drink blood, the creature Ray Eriksson became should not have been feeding. Male mosquitoes feed on plant juices, so maybe the Eriksson creature should have gone around attacking trees.

Maybe he should have. Instead, he has now cornered his would-be Bridesquito in the lab and is, I believe, attempting to mate with her. I think she is now impregnated with Babysquitos. This is all profoundly disgusting, and it demands my full attention.

Thanks to lagizma for the heads up on this story, which vindicates editors, English teachers, and other uncompromising grammarians everywhere: Misused Comma May Cost Company Millions. Globeandmail.com reports:

Rogers [Communications Inc.] thought it had a five-year deal with Aliant Inc. to string Rogers' cable lines across thousands of utility poles in the Maritimes for an annual fee of $9.60 per pole. But early last year, Rogers was informed that the contract was being cancelled and the rates were going up. Impossible, Rogers thought, since its contract was iron-clad until the spring of 2007 and could potentially be renewed for another five years.

Armed with the rules of grammar and punctuation, Aliant disagreed. The construction of a single sentence in the 14-page contract allowed the entire deal to be scrapped with only one-year's notice, the company argued.

Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

Rogers' intent in 2002 was to lock into a long-term deal of at least five years. But when regulators with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) parsed the wording, they reached another conclusion.

The validity of the contract and the millions of dollars at stake all came down to one point — the second comma in the sentence.

Had it not been there, the right to cancel wouldn't have applied to the first five years of the contract and Rogers would be protected from the higher rates it now faces.

“Based on the rules of punctuation,” the comma in question “allows for the termination of the [contract] at any time, without cause, upon one-year's written notice,” the regulator said.

Rogers was dumbfounded. The company said it never would have signed a contract to use roughly 91,000 utility poles that could be cancelled on such short notice. Its lawyers tried in vain to argue the intent of the deal trumped the significance of a comma. “This is clearly not what the parties intended,” Rogers said in a letter to the CRTC.

But the CRTC disagreed. And the consequences are significant.

Rogers looks to lose $2.13 million. Seems like a decently paid proofreader might have been worth it, eh?

Classes start tomorrow—wish me luck.

I grant that "Wal-Mart Image-Builder" is probably way up there on the list of All-Time Most Thankless Jobs, but you'd think one would go about it with a lightly savvier strategy than this. The NYTimes reports:

The civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had “ripped off” urban communities for years, “selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables.”

In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart “should” displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

Mr. Young, 74, a former mayor of Atlanta and a former United States representative to the United Nations, apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview last night. Less than an hour later, he resigned as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group created and financed by the company to trumpet its accomplishments.

Well, duh.

I seem to have inherited Z's cold, which is simply charming on the eve of the fall semester at a new school. I'm sucking on Cold-Eeze and trying every home remedy in the book, from garlicky chicken broth to slices of raw ginger. My throat still hurts.

Otherwise, my life currently consists of boring details like getting a computer and a parking permit and making lots of photocopies, so today we shall focus on the glamorous lives of the rich and famous. According to IMDb Celebrity News, James Woods has called it quits with his insensitive 20-year-old girlfriend:

Veteran actor James Woods has dumped his 20-year-old girlfriend, Ashley Madison, after the stress from the May-December relationship sent him to the emergency room. The 59-year-old star was distraught after his brother Michael died unexpectedly of a heart attack last month and was shocked by Madison's insensitivity during his funeral. Woods' friend Scott Sandler tells the New York Daily News that Madison showed up for the service dressed inappropriately "in a 3-inch miniskirt and chain-smoking." He explains, "At the funeral she was concerned about the amount of magazines she was in. Jimmy was on his knees with tears staining his shirt, and she was showing pictures of herself. Jimmy was so overcome by grief his blood pressure went through the roof early last week, and he had to go to the hospital. When he came out, it was like he had seen the light." The actor has known Madison, the pal of a golfing buddy, since she was five-years-old. Adds Sandler, "She's the anti-Christ. She truly has the soul of a moth and the brain of a dead trout."

If that's not poetry, I don't know what is.

Also, Jared Leto has gout.

While we're on the topic of noteworthy evil, I'd like to share the Most Disturbing Story Since The Announcement That Jared "Jordan Catalano" Leto Has Gout (an affliction I associate with Dr. Johnson and other lumpy Englishmen of the 18th century): Maine Residents Wonder If Dead Animal Is Mystery Beast:

TURNER, Maine --Residents are wondering if an animal found dead over the weekend may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation.

The animal was found near power lines along Route 4 on Saturday, apparently struck by a car while chasing a cat. The carcass was photographed and inspected by several people who live in the area, but nobody is sure exactly what it is.

Michelle O'Donnell of Turner spotted the animal near her yard about a week before it was killed. She called it a "hybrid mutant of something."

...

Mike O'Donnell, who is married to Michelle O'Donnell, said the animal looked "half-rodent, half-dog" to him.

It was charcoal gray, weighed between 40 and 50 pounds and had a bushy tail, a short snout, short ears and curled fangs hanging over its lips, he said. It looked like "something out of a Stephen King story."

"This is something I've never seen before. It's an evil-looking thing," he said.

This creature has terrorized Maine for "half a generation" and was brought down by a car while chasing a cat? Much like James Woods's 20-year-old ex-girlfriend, such a beast must truly have the soul of a moth and the brain of a dead trout.

(Today's assignment: work that line into conversation at every opportunity. Extra credit if you also invoke Jared Leto's gout.)

The NYTimes reports that pioneering Asian American actor Mako has passed away at age 72.

Mako, who used only one name professionally, was born in Japan and came to the United States as a teenager. An Academy Award-nominated actor, he was also a distinguished presence on the Broadway stage, winning a Tony nomination in the leading role of the Reciter in the original cast of “Pacific Overtures.”

Mako earned an Oscar nomination for “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), in which he played opposite Steve McQueen. Among his other films are “Conan the Barbarian” (1982), “Conan the Destroyer” (1984), “Seven Years in Tibet” (1997), “Pearl Harbor” (2001) and “Memoirs of a Geisha,” released last year.

My family and I saw the revival of Pacific Overtures with B.D. Wong in the role of the Reciter—it was pretty awesome. The only one of Mako's films I've seen is the recent and forgettable Memoirs of a Geisha, but perhaps we'll watch The Sand Pebbles tonight in his memory.

This summer, my favorite snack is salted limes. Yes, that's just a lime cut in quarters, sprinkled with salt. Z thinks it's disgusting, but I say it's like a virgin tequila shot, which is delicious.

The older I get, the more my childhood sweet tooth atrophies. I'm not sure I ever even had that much of a sweet tooth; my favorite foods have always tended toward the salty and sour—lemons, tomatoes, pickles, olives. But these days, especially in the heat, I positively shy away from anything remotely sugary. So I was delighted to see an article in the NYTimes last week on how sour is currently the hippest taste among the New York foodie set (replacing last week's Capital-S-Spicy, which I still love, food fashion be damned).

I am not delighted, however, to find that my lackadaisical approach to passing along vital information culled from cyberspace—particularly that which confirms that I Am Cool, Even The New York Times Says So—has resulted in this story's being filed away under Times Select, which means that when you click on the link, you will be ordered to hand over cash in order to read the story (unless you are not po' like I am and have already anted up the fee to read the NYT's good stuff). Do not do this. Refuse to support the conspiracy of extortion aimed at the slacker reading public. Just take my word for it that I have cutting-edge taste buds and leave it at that.

Here's a news item from the SFGate that you can read: Bush Acknowledges Racism Still Exists. But I think the headline really says it all on that one.

Bookslut provided a link to this story: Murakami hits out at Japanese nationalism.

"I'm worried about my country," the author told the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper based in Hong-Kong. "I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something."

This man confirms my suspicions that the very best novelists are profoundly good people.

The BBC reports that a stroke gave a woman a foreign accent:

Linda Walker awoke in hospital to find her distinctive Newcastle accent had been transformed into a mixture of Jamaican, Canadian and Slovakian.

The 60-year-old may have Foreign Accent Syndrome, where patients speak differently after a brain injury.

I am fascinated on many levels. Mostly, I want to know what "a mixture of Jamaican, Canadian and Slovakian" sounds like.

Perhaps I'll spend this Fourth of July practicing it.

Did you hear the story about Dirty Dr. Diana?

I heard about it through Bitch Ph.D. Start here, then follow the links to Dr. D's own, um, coverage of the scandal.

I'm not ashamed to say that I hunted around in her flickr account to view the nudie pics myself, and they are lovely, and funny, and witty, and about the least pornographic thing I have ever seen. In fact, they communicate the kind of quick intellect and sense of humor that I would hope to find in a teacher.

Here's the thing: they're just nipples. I have them, you have them, even Jesus had them. And yes, shocking though it may be, professors have them too.

Of course, Dr. D is right when she says that it's obviously not about the nipples. It is, among other things, about the way our culture objectifies female bodies such that, when we want to discredit the authority of women, we can always charge them with the dirty and shameful possession of boobs. I mean, how are college students going to get a decent education from boobs???

Women's bodies are the open secret of our social world. And some of us live in them.

Why did I not know about this feature of the NYTimes Online?

Keywords most frequently searched by NYTimes.com readers [in the last 24 hours]:

1. immigration
2. iran
3. colbert
4. china
5. india
6. bush
7. education
8. gay
9. iraq war
10. mexico

I'm sure there's much to be said about this little snapshot of the American mind, but I haven't had nearly enough coffee to take it on just yet. Please, talk amongst yourselves.

I was already grossed out by the ads for K-Y Warming Ultra Gel. I didn't need to see the K-Y Warming Ultra Gel lady talk about how moist her Miracle-Gro potting soil gets.