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World Wide Words notes the widespread usage of the word “brokeback”.

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The success of the film Brokeback Mountain, the love story of two ranch hands, has caused “brokeback” to begin to appear in everyday conversation as a near-synonym for “gay”. Jesse Sheidlower, boss of the Oxford English Dictionary’s US operations, reported this week he heard a man say “He got a Hummer? That’s so brokeback!” Naturally, he queried the usage: “The speaker said it was used in reference to things that are so exaggeratedly masculine as to call into question the sexuality of the man involved. Thus a man driving a minivan wouldn’t be brokeback, but a man driving a Hummer would be. The speaker was a New York-raised late-30s heterosexual man, who hadn’t seen the film.”

Perhaps our difficulties in education stem in part from bad textbooks. Case in point: in the course of helping with a page of seventh grade math, I was forced to reckon with two unfamiliar acronyms, SMM and STA. Problem 2 had the parentheical statement”(Use the SSM method.)” at its end. Upon perusing the text, I discovered that SSM meant Some and Some More. STA means Some Taken Away. We’re talking addition and subtraction here. Ya.

Now math has always been burdened with arcane vocabulary – subtrahend anyone? – but it seems to me that adding gratuitous acronyms to the sum of what must be learned is just plain wrong.

My love for the songs of Robert Burns is manifest, but until the other night I had not been cogniscent of the rituals involved in a “Burns Supper.” First comes the bagpipes leading a procession bearing the haggis (The origin of the phrase “piping hot,” I presume.) followed by a ritual slaying of the haggis. Then, after dinner, the toast to the laddies and the toast to the lassies – which both are full of humorous barbs – more skewerings than toasts really. All great fun. Happy Burns Night to all!

In the early Beatles songs, it’s hard to tell the voices of Paul and John apart. In case you were wondering who the lead vocalist on “She Loves You” was, this video has the answer, though the cameraman was hoping it was the other guy and manages to catch a sweet little psychodrama of George’s mood swing and Paul’s good humor while they sing the harmonies. Grainy black and white goes great with the Beatles. And the way they sing that last “glad!” OMG it’s AWSM.

Courtesy of video.google.com. An’ dat’s way cool.

A four minute featurette about KanYe.

Courtesy of video.google.com. Dat’s cool.

January 7
Athens GA

Philip Pullman, author of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, doesn’t think much of his fellow Oxfordian authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He makes several comments about them in this New Yorker article. He does concede that “The ‘Narnia’ books are a real wrestle with real things.”

In “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” pre-teen Lucy meets the faun Mr. Tumnus on her first visit to Narnia. In the movie, the sensuality and budding sexual tension of this scene are especially apparent – maybe it’s all the close-ups. This is a story more about coming of age than about religion.

The other main relationship in the story is between Edmund and the Queen of Narnia. All Edmund wants is the Turkish Delight the Queen provides. All the Queen wants is to maintain her frigid dominion over Narnia, and failing that, at least the death of Edmund. In the somewhat over-long battle scene, I was most impressed with the Queen’s inexorable approach. That bitch, like the Energizer bunny, just kept going and going.

The study is fine, but the conclusion is bass-ackwards. The point of view this is written from furrows my brow with puzzlement. Imagine Oliver Twist asking for less.

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A study published in the BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, confirms that even experienced bartenders tend to unwittingly pour more alcohol into short, wide glasses compared to tall, skinny ones.

That means two cocktails from a squat tumbler might actually pack the punch of 2-1/2 drinks. So instead of that martini glass, those watching their drinks might want to ask for a highball glass instead.

The whole story is here.

I recently thought of Shakespeare when I read this in the PT Umphress review of R. Kelly’s fabulous “Trapped in the Closet”:

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As though a movie about everybody cheating on everybody else in the most tangled and bizarre romantic web imaginable (and all of them finding out about it on the same day) wasn’t enough, Mr. Kelly decided to up the ante by playing every wild card in the deck.

And now there’s the “Top Ten Shakespeare / Hip-Hop Analogues “ at Stylus Magazine.

All that may be going a bit too far, but it is fair to ask who these days is having the most fun with spoken language, and who is delighting in / wallowing in all our messy humaness.

“Hoodie” by Lady Sovereign.
This song really moves along and is chock full of sonic doodads. I think I even hear a Pylon sample in there. If an M.I.A. song can be in a TV commercial, I guess it’s OK if Lady Sov wants to specify exactly which commercial she will be in.

Put on an Adidas hoodie
and jus’ boogie-woogie with me – ooh.
or you can jus’ put on your dancin’ shoes
and get loose, can you get loose, can you?

The song is playing on her web site.

This month Lewis discusses how hurricane Katrina is a windfall for Halliburton. The bitterness is palpable, and shared by me. “In Wahington at the moment we have a government owned and operated by a rapacious oligarcy that seeks to privatize – i.e. appropriate or destroy – the public infrastructure.”

Sorry no links. Harper’s is even worse than the New Yorker in their online publication.

I watched R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” again tonight. It may be a pointless exercise in dissecting something that really needs to be experienced as a whole, but here are some lines that struck me as highlights:

• Shit, think, shit, think. Put me in the closet (chap. 1)
• Brother, spare me the details. (chap. 3)
• Woo-oo woo-oo (chap. 4)
• Oh (oh (oh)) All I could say was ‘oh.’ (chap. 4)
• I say, “Cool, climax” (chap. 4)
• The policeman that stopped you. (chap. 5)
• Plus I got a ticket. (chap. 6)
• Baby – I mean – James (chap. 6)
• I said, ‘Get married later.’ (chap. 7)
• I’m not opening another mutha-fuckin door (chap. 7)
• Twon said, “She’s a G, no doubt.” (chap. 8 )
• Hon, I bought you some pears. (chap. 8 )
• Bitch move. She moved. (chap. 9)
• He wipes cherry pie off his face. (chap. 10)
• What’s that smell? (chap. 10)
• Because I’m blessed. (chap. 11)
• You said ‘Chuck and Rufus.’ (chap. 11)
• The phone is ringin (ringin) (Chap. 12)

I went to the contradance at OCAF in Watkinsville satuday night. It is so much fun to dance or even just to watch. There is just so much smiling going on! A part of it is from the fun of dancing and part of it is laughing at all the clumsiness going on especially in the first few run-throughs before everyone learns the pattern of the dance. A contradance is a microcosm of a perfect world – such a variety of people young and old, short and tall, all dancing with each other.

The illustration is from an 18th-century dance book in the Library of Congress collection of dance manuals.

As anyone who knows me knows, I like to dance – but that’s not the point here. “Golddigger” by Kanye West does have a great beat and the Ray groove going on is incredible – but look at the narrative here. First he’s in the beauty shop and runs into a girl with a baby in her arms. He’s looking for “the one.” His psychic told him she has four kids and her name ends with eena. After musing on the wisdom of pre-nuptual agreements, he goes into a vague story about eating in a restaraunt and not having the money to pay, and so the girl ends up washing the dishes and somehow ends up with the ambitious janitor. That’s nice,but he’s going to leave her for a white girl. All in all, it doesn’t make a lot of sense but somehow he strings it all together, and has some great rhyming fun with lipo and geiko. The apparent stream-of-consciousness recitation is impressive.

“Shake a Leg” by Roll Deep.
You can watch the video at Yahoo Music.

From Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (1857)

“I have done,” said Mrs Clennam, “what it was given to me to do. I have set myself against evil; not against good. I have been an instrument of severity against sin. Have not mere sinners like myself been commissioned to lay it low in all time?”

“In all time?” repeated Little Dorrit.

“Even if my own wrong had prevailed with me, and my own vengeance had moved me, could I have found no justification? None in the old days when the innocent perished with the guilty a thousand to one? When the wrath of the hater of the unrighteous was not slaked even in blood, and yet found favour?”

“O, Mrs Clennam, Mrs Clennam,” said Little Dorrit, “angry feelings and unforgiving deeds are no comfort and no guide to you and me. My life has been passed in this poor prison, and my teaching has been very defective; but let me implore you to remember later and better days. Be guided only by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities. We cannot but be right if we put all the rest away, and do everything in remembrance of Him. There is no vengeance and no infliction of suffering in His life, I am sure. There can be no confusion in following Him, and seeking for no other footsteps, I am certain.”

Here we go. wordpress. My second attempt at installing blogging software. So now I’m 100% validated CSS. After a lot of tweaking, it looks pretty much like it looked when laid out with tables. It runs on PHP and MySQL and seems to work OK. I don’t know much about how it works but that the beauty of open source software.