"Anti-perspirants do not work by jamming little particles into the openings of sweat pores in the armpits. That might work if sweat shot out of your body’s sweat pores in miniature geysers, but on the micro-level of the skin, geysers, hoses and all of the other usual ways we think of water emerging from a pore do not exist. Everything’s too small. There’s no way the incipient sweat water could build up a high enough pressure in its sub-surface tubes to flow. This is an odd limitation, but useful. If sweat gushed out of us like water out of a tube, then all parts of our body aiming downwards would be perpetually leaking – feet, armpits, fingertips, and chin, while those aiming up – shoulders, scalp, and little else – would be perpetually dry. Rather, sweat emerges because it’s tugged out. It has a negative electric charge as it hovers in its little beads inside, and as the surface of the sweat pores has a positive charge when excited the result is that the sweat ooze is pulled out. It’s like yanking a sausage from a tight tunnel."Enter the aluminum. Falling off from the roll-on anti-perspirant tube, landing on the crushed skin surface newly contoured by the pressure of the applicator, it short-circuits the whole sweat-extruding operation. Aluminum flecks, which are the key ingredients in anti-perspirants, are negatively charged. That means the extra furry cloud of negative electrons they carry around with them counterbalances the normal positive charge on the skin surface. There’s no pull on the sweat sausage any more. The aluminum is even more likely to have a little left over to poke down the sweat pore tunnel and electrically repel the negatively charged water waiting deeper inside—like a hand pushing the tunneled sausage deeper. There’s a crackle, some static, the equivalent of sparks, and the whole system is shut, short-circuited and out of operation for hours. the sweat caught inside dissolves back into the body, crumbling through cracks in the sweat tubes like water from a leaky hose."
-from The Secret House by David Bodanis
Classified
I love job postings like this one, because they conjure up such a complete fantasy of the ideal employee. Sir, I write in response to your posting because it so happens that I am on fire with with passion about the CRIME genre. Of course, there are also postings like this one. Let's see -- a copy editor with "vast experience covering allergy medicines and the respiratory system." I'm sure there are plenty such, but the phrasing seems so unnecessarily grand; as if someone were seeking an seasoned expert in answering phones for the adhesives industries, or a deeply talented filer of plumbing invoices.
Copycats
This weekend we lost our patience with WNYC's Ira-Glass-knockoff show, The Next Big Thing. It struck us as weird when the station announced the launching of a show whose creative mandate seemed to owe everything to that possibly overrated but still-great show they do at WBEZ.
But as of this week, the local product, which has been inserted into the late-AM-Saturday lineup where This American Life used to go (and which fit so nicely into my housecleaning/grocery shopping/running schedule), reached rock bottom, with a recounting of a weary meme, to wit, using the Web to see who else shares your name (in his case, a relatively common one). With nothing new to add, he gasbags it for a few minutes about the metaphysics of names, and then he's finished.
Now, we’re not suggesting you’re getting anything more valuable with this here website, but at least we haven’t advocated replacing, say, your subscription to Granta with our dim-witted meanderings. By all means, let Dean Ulsher have his show – but don’t give him my late Saturday morning just yet. Of course it could be worse: instead of ripping off TAL, the culture-mongers down at WNYC might have given another hour to the execrable Satellite Sisters.
**Shiver**
Wait a second. Lets make sure we've got this straight: slavery; followed by no reparations for slavery; followed by con artists suckering people into paying them for fraudulent forms supposedly to be used to collect non-existent reparations "tax credits"; followed by the IRS threatening to levy fines (for filing frivolous claims) against those same poor suckers fooled into paying for (and sending in) aforementioned worthless forms.
We hereby give up hope.
Review: Tenacious D.
We don't get out much, it's true; and for fear of revealing our age we hesistate to mention which Britpop act was strutting about in its louche fashion last time we found ourselves standing among the masses in front of a big stage.
So when Mr. Edwards provided the means for an impromptu field trip to the land of craning-our-necks-above-taller-people-to-catch-a-50-yard-glimpse-of-a-guitarist, we felt it was about time. Our destination was the Tenacious D show at Roseland; for those few of you as culturally behind the curve as we apparently are, Tenacious D is actor-goofball Jack Black and more musically talented partner Kyle Gass making "real" what they did in a set of shorts originially produced for Comedy Central and HBO: they form a monstrously and hilariously self-aggrandizing "band" - whose musical armament consists almost entirely of their two acoustic guitars - and their goal is the elevation of the Dorm Room Guitarist to superstardom. They don't cover Zep or "Freebird," but the notion of doing so with great earnestness is implicit in their entire act.
(Yes, yes, Spinal Tap. Right. We know. But still. It's different enough. And they don't fake any accents or make up names for themselves).
Aided by a gigantic backdrop of a winged Satan (of course), smoke machines which billow at key dramatic intervals, and a couple of roadies to play off of (as well as a small cast of less compelling secondary characters), Black and K.G. create a convincing pastiche of heavy-duty Rawk of the sort every Gen-X'er grew up with.* Jack struts the stage, rhymes a lot of things with "Tenacious D" at a blistering pace which would do any would-be rap-metal frontman proud, and is clearly having a very good time. His cooler-headed cohort Kyle plays just well enough to make many of the pieces tuneful references to the galloping guitars of yore (again, think of that guy in college who would strum out "A Horse With No Name" with a lot of feeling and you get the general idea). And Black is always ready to launch into a loopy vocal "solo" consisting of nonsense syllables babbled out in rough imitation of a noodling heavy-metal guitar turn.
While a lot of the bits are undercooked one-offs, funny more in the conception than in the execution (there's a guffaw-worthy song about how it's time for Ronnie James Dio to "pass the torch", for example, that Black seems to have just stopped writing after it hit about 90 seconds), they do well in the stage banter in between, Black's blustery persona suddenly deflating: "Take a solo, dude. I'm tired out from 'Hornets Nest' " -- that being Tenacious D.'s appropriately braindead "commentary" on the political situation in the Middle East. When Black decides that he needs a chair to stand on (in deference to "all of the short people out there") it turns into a subtle one-upmanship contest that invokes, of all things, The Smothers Brothers.
There is of course the Rock-Star-As-Sex-God thing, which Black does so effortlessly one realizes that he probably really does have his pick of screaming fangirls from the audience. Along similar lines is their paean to "The Road" which is such a great beating of a dead horse it makes you wonder why the sport is so unpopular. And Black and Gass are pitch-perfect in a few longer songs which combine geeky melody/time signature changes with flaky mysticism and the construction of some kind of Bowie-esque story involving superheros and the band itself.
In moments like this, Tenacious D. do more than earnestly re-enact the kinds of pleasantly dumb music that Spinal Tap and Wayne's World spent their yuks on. They also skewer the easy surrealism of a lot of bands we'd like to think don't have anything to do with Dorm Room Rock. Fifteen minutes of Tenacious D. will probably change the way you listen to, say, Neutral Milk Hotel, which is as good a reason as any to approach with caution - we likes our hipster pretentiousness just fine, thanks, and it was a wee bit troubling to be reminded that in the dark it's hard to tell your Guided By Voices from your Yes.
None of this, we suspect, would have been all that much fun if we'd heard a single note before coming to the show (and would have been twice as much fun if we'd been in a club one-fifth the size). Which why the presence of a packed crowd who knew the songs was a bit hard to explain. Fully aware of the gag status of the band, they wanted simultaneously to treat Tenacious D. as real, and the amount of singing along was perplexing at first. Do people get pleasure out of seeing a comedy act for which they can already repeat every joke? The answer, we conclude, is yes. Jack Black is offering up comfort food to the fans, a familiar and reassuring experience where you can rock your cake and laugh at it, too. The songs are so familiar the newcomer almost thinks he's heard them before; and Black, for all his glower and strut, is a teddy bear waiting to be hugged on a cold January night. Know the lines, join the club, and feel cozy. It's not in the end for us -- but there are worse antitodes for the midwinter doldrums.
*For our readers outside of these borders - the occasional New Wave single aside, U.S. radio in the early/mid 80's was dominated by an invention called Classic Rock, which was sort of an endless mix tape of all of the ponderous, guitar-heavy AOR produced from 1970-1978, salted with a little inferior heavy metal, plus late hits by aging bands thrown in for good measure. Even those of us who naturally drawn to, say, the Soft Boys have "Dust in the Wind" and suchlike locked up note-for-note in memory's cage.
Tropics
Things are getting off to a bang, design-wise, over at the constantly-evolving precincts of Bootswanna's Equatorial. Beauty lived and occasionally elaborated.
Here we will make do, mostly, with some predictable arrangements of words. Also, as evidenced below, cheesy clip art manipulated clumsily in Photoshop. Never will I abandon this simple and yet effectively eye-wrenching form of self-expression. Next year, the gods willing, I'll present for your delectation a whole tableful of crappy-looking, animated clip art marsupials gathered at some kind of horrible tea party setting (you know, drinking tea and maybe eating what is supposed to be cake) lifted from a site dedicated to helping secretaries generate cheery office-festival invitations.
Plan for a distractable winter Friday: make one more cup of coffee and sneak in another few pages of Austerlitz.
The use of the phrase "kick ass" below is a regrettable lapse in our general Wombat File "no kick-ass" policy. It is a long-cherished belief here at the file that we would never, even in an unguarded moment, discuss the manner in which something rocks or rules, is the shit or -- even in the spirit of faux-hip irony-- da bomb. And yet, there it is, on this very ordinary January day. We have unmistakably decreed that the Clean "kick ass". And though we would like to use our editorial power to wipe the offending phrase from the otherwise frat-language-free surface of this particular browser window, we must let it stand. Testimony to the power of an early-morning listen to "Point that Thing Somewhere Else" to override all decorum.
Moderately big changes coming. In the meantime, a roundup of like and link:
**"Consider themselves less geeky than..."
**A liberal dose of Rory
**Marian Keyes Isn't Down With It
**Cronkite Denies Satirical Allegations, Denounces Socialism
**Not a very interesting link, but don't the Clean still kick ass? Don't you wish that there were more Clean-derivative bands than all this fucking Pearl Jam-influenced crap? Don't you?
**Some days the staff here is kind of snotty. But on other days all the people here are very sweet and helpful. And I saw Ozzie Davis, too.
Stavros presents some Connections-style musings on the long-term potential effects of the introduction of ultrasound technology into a society which highly privileges the birth of male children.
Sinus-Clearing Ginger Tea
Requires:
- One medium-size piece of ginger, maybe thumb-sized or a bit larger, peeled and divided into thin slices
- A couple of cinnamon sticks
- 10 cloves
- Black tea -- 2 bags or the equivalent in loose tea
- Sugar to taste
- 1/2 cup Milk
- 3-4 cups of water and a pot of some sort, along with non-nuclear source of heat
Ephemera Monitor
Sure, we found They Fight Crime! on that site we always find stuff on but it doesn't mean that we're lazy.
Wait...Yes, it does.
Today's NY Times magazine has this story of a firefighter who survived and can't remember why:''I just wish I had learned one thing today,'' he said, ''anything that showed I was trying to save someone other than myself.''
For your consideration: Martha Nussbaum's Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism:
Becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business. It is, in effect, as Diogenes said, a kind of exile -- from the comfort of local truths, from the warm nestling feeling of patriotism, from the absorbing drama of pride in oneself and one's own. In the writings of Marcus Aurelius (as in those of his American followers Emerson and Thoreau) one sometimes feels a boundless loneliness, as if the removal of the props of habit and local boundaries had left life bereft of a certain sort of warmth and security. If one begins life as a child who loves and trusts its parents, it is tempting to want to reconstruct citizenship along the same lines, finding in an idealized image of a nation a surrogate parent who will do one's thinking for one. Cosmopolitanism offers no such refuge; it offers only reason and the love of humanity, which may seem at times less colorful than other sources of belonging.
Unscheduled
Across from us on yesterday's Manhattan-bound Q as we passed over the bridge: he had huge brown eyes that looked as if they'd contemplated Infinity from any number of sleepless 4 A.M. colloquies with silence; despite his youth, he sported a positively Biblical beard of the sort that both Stonewall Jackson and John Brown made a splash with back in the day; and a copy of Cleanse and Purify Thyself, Book One : The Cleanse. We saw that he was a small man but one whose self-possessed manner would in many situations compensate for any disadvantages inherent in having a compact physique. His athletic shoes were new, and of an uncertain manufacture. He ate in a casual, devil-may-care fashion, munching from an open, half-empty jar of green olives, which he plucked out with delicate white fingers.
We had quite a few of questions for him, but pressing business took him from the train at Canal St., before we could get the interview started.
Tar
Walking about on this otherwise beautiful, mild morning, I can smell tar everywhere in the neighborhood around. It's a hateful smell: acrid, insidious, unmistakable.
During one of my many endless summers schlepping boxes in a chain drugstore, the strip mall in which my workplace was located decided to re-tar the roof. The tar machine (tar melter? liquifier? infernal poison-smoke demon?) was placed just outside of the back door of our stockroom, and belched a foul white smoke all day, as we hauled deliveries out of trucks and took trash to the dumpster. The southern sun and the tar machine collaborated to produce a Venusian kind of heat, humid and deathly. I cannot begin to imagine the conditions on the roof itself. The re-tarring process took a long time, more than a month: my assumption at the time was that each day's crew had to knock off at noon to bury their dead.
The machine pumped a continual feed of tar through a pipe to the roof; when the level of tar got low, a crew member minding the machine would dump in a roll of solidified tar from a nearby stack. I and the other hourly-wage monkeys from the drugstore got to know him.
His crew colleagues called him Petey. He looked like an emaciated David Crosby, with a long dark moustache that gave him a unique air of mournful dignity; he could have been thirty or he could have been sixty. I never saw him wear anything other than a pair of thin dark pants and beat up tennis shoes. His bare chest and back were the color of a Christmas ham, and he had a long crease of a scar, as if he'd been improperly folded at some point, running diagonally across his torso. He toiled alone with the machine, except at lunchtime, when the crew would call his name and he would climb up to the roof to join them for lunch. They acted toward him with a mix of derision and protectiveness that reinforced the idea that he was in some way disabled or injured.
Petey was extraordinarily friendly: when idle, he would rush to help us unload a truck, shrugging off all protests and grabbing heavy cases with aplomb. Due to his thick speech impediment, it was hard to understand Petey, but Andrew, one of my co-workers, liked to chat with him. The only thing I remember Petey saying was this: "People look at me and think I must be a drunk, but I never liked to drink beer or nothing." Long pause, followed by a sunny smile. "Smoked a lotta dope, though!"
I Hear Voices
Today when I got off the F train I heard the conductor’s voice telling me “Stay where you are.” I puzzled over this for a moment as I walked to the stairs, before I realized that he was actually saying “Seventh Avenue,” which is the name of the station.
When I lived in a different part of Brooklyn, hard up against the East River in a not-yet fashionable Williamsburg, I took the L train in to work and school every morning. This particular train had a recorded “Stand Clear of the Closing Doors” announcement that was unique in the transit system. Every morning when I got on the train, I heard a cultured baritone voice inflexibly intone the reminder, with a precise adherence to a singular pitch, rhythm and inflection. Why didn’t the other trains use the same one? One morning I happened to stand next to the conductor’s booth, and was shocked to see him bend to the mike and say the words. His rich, plummy tone, so unlike that of any other conductor; the exact adherence to a million previous utterances of that phrase. It was as if this phrase had become his mantra, his goal to submit himself to those six words in such fashion as to erase his individuality, his mere humanity, and to become solely The Conductor, a presence inhabiting the whole of the transit system. The Boddhisatva of the subway.
We've finally managed to cobble together a summation of our professional experience here.
As far as creative wedding presents go, the Stax was damn near perfection. But today a we received a copy of the OED in the mail. If you look under the definition of cool you will find the names of all of our friends.
List-making, coffee-brewing, clothes-sorting, tiny-how-are-you-and-happy-new-year-email-sending, nail-trimming, sweater-changing, cat-amusing, reference-hunting, clock-watching, worry-warting, speculating, metafiltering, weblogging. These are the symptoms of General Paralysis of the Soul. Oh where is there an echinacea for the brain, to ward off acedia and loathsome torpor?
Super-Affirmations To Super-Charge Yourself
We confess we didn't realize how thoroughly-researched the Tom Cruise character from Magnolia was. "At last I'm on my way to kicking ass with women!"
Resolution
As 2002 is the first numerical palindrome year we've enjoyed since 1991, we pledge ourselves this year to symmetry, balance, classical models of order, and the constant repetition of the phrase "A Man, A Plan, A Canal -- Panama!"
In other news, the comments script has been removed because all of the free commenting services are currently overloaded. At some time in the near future we may implement a commenting system of our own. In the meantime, please feel free to email comments and you'll see them reproduced without much editorial interference, right here on the main page. Isn't it time you helped to recharge the Wombattery? What better way to kick off the calendrical unit than with a Wombat-powered rant or screed of your very own? An audience of dozens (at least one and a half dozens, we're sure) awaits your every hastily-considered word.