We spent the day at the office constructing lists of the Literary Works of the Great and Near-Great; thus, we had occasion to search-engine ourselves silly in pursuit of various bits and pieces of information. In our more-or-less purposeful meanderings, we happened across a few things you might desire a gander at, viz:
1. The Centaurian, the website devoted to All Things Updikean; in a peculiar form of tribute to the writer's lyricism and subtle command of description, the site is as deliberately ugly and unsubtle as a ninety-nine cent store. Headline after headline, brought to you in many a screaming color, providing the lowdown on all that goes on in the fast-paced world of Updike studies & fandom.
Professor Yerkes (the Chief Centaurian) has collected some great photos -- man, that Young Updike knew he was the shit.
2. Can't get enough of that Old-Tyme Wombat File Quiz Goodness?. Hooked on factoids like the patent date of the the Underwear Steamer? Strain your brain Gilded-Age-style with the Mark Twain Memory Builder.
3. There's nothing special about the ad-clogged Isaac Bashevis Singer bibliography on this page, but what happens after you leave it is noteworthy; those curious should open the page and then close it again; when you do, you see a typical schlocky pop-up ad -- and a surprising pop-under message from an organization that wants your help in an important cause.
Today's Quiz brought to us by last week's winner of the controversial Rollercoaster Quiz, Gavin.
Who is the author of the following passage?
Take the tobacco-chewer. In the morning, when he gets up, he puts a quid in his mouth and keeps it there all day, never taking it out except to exchange it for a fresh one, or when he is going to eat; oh! Yes, at intervals during the day and evening, many a chewer takes out the quid and holds it in his hand long enough to take a drink, and then pop it goes back again. This simply proves that the appetite for rum is even stronger than that for tobacco. When the tobacco-chewer goes to your country seat and you show him your grapery and fruit house, and the beauties of your garden, when you offer him some fresh, ripe fruit, and say, "My friend, I have got here the most delicious apples, and pears, and peaches, and apricots; I have imported them from Spain, France, and Italy--just see those luscious grapes; there is nothing more delicious nor more healthy than ripe fruit,so help yourself; I want to see you delight yourself with these things;" he will roll the dear quid under his tongue and answer, "No, I thank you, I have got tobacco in my mouth."
The first correct answer posted to comments wins a box of Tic-Tacs. Flavor of your choice.
There’s been a painful lack of "content" -- what we used to call writing back in the old days -- here of late. In part this is because we’re involved with the entry of a lot of data at our new day job, the endless cutting and pasting from browser to spreadsheet that makes the words Incipient Repetitive Stress Disorder loom large in our imagination. It’s the sort of thing that makes one less inclined to come home of an evening and rattle off a few hundred words on the events of the day. (And it should, we hasten to add, be temporary.)
But it's mostly the welter of unprocessable events that make us shy away from our webloggerly calling; the news is just so Uniformly Dreadful that we don’t know how to be sardonically expository in response to it, despite our desire to soothe you with Wombat Soup for the Soul. We’ll admit it: we fail to grasp what we could add to the international conversation about the shredding of hope for peace in the Middle East – the infinite regress of “context” on that one is enough to make our head (OK, my head, but I don’t feel like dropping out of the editorial we just this minute; it’s comfy, like an old sweater) spin right clean off our neck. Who’s less wrong – the vengeful suicide bombers or the Rush ‘em & Crush ‘em Sharon government? Thanks, but we know when we’re conceptually licked. And it doesn’t incidentally make us feel any better to have the flattening of Jenin bring back to mind the uncounted dead our Infinitely Just nation recently liberated via high explosive a few thousand miles down the Silk Road.
And we don’t even really know how many miles it is, or if the Silk Road could be reasonably said to connect, say, Haifa and Jellalabad. This is what we’re talking about: composing a worthwhile post on damned near anything that’s going on these days would require more googling than you’d get in a daycare center full of the newly verbal.
To say nothing of medieval conclaves in Rome gathering to fine-tune their institutional denial. To say nothing of the Republican party getting poised to snatch it’s narrow margin in the Senate back. To say nothing of the vanishing of due process (read, please do read, the cover story in this month’s Harper's), the obscene energy policy maneuvers currently passing for "debate", the rise of Le Pen, and the disappearance of News Radio reruns from A&E.
Granted, nobody we know comes to the WF for a well-researched emendation of the fluff what does pass in these days for journalism. (And we’re grateful, because we'd fail quickly and dramatically and no one would ever return to this our cherished Mumbling Pit.) Maybe this is simply a delayed version of the feeling that swept over so many people six months ago: nothing feels so appropriate, many of these days, as silence.
You can sing the title of Norman Mailer's first book over and over again to yourself, to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell."
Damn the man. Back when we were floundering through our post-dissertation period, trying to figure out what in the name of Urizen we'd actually want to, you know, publish, one of the many ideas we batted around and talked about in lieu of actually getting any work done was the impact of the underrated George Orwell novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying; we gave a couple of papers on Orwell in the process, but one of the things we never got around to was writing up something about how close in spirit it seemed to Kingsley Amis's more memorably venomous Lucky Jim; but really, it was next on our list.
Charakterpanzerung, "the armor-plating of character." (A coinage of good ol' Wilhelm Reich.)
Thanks to Dr. Claire, our resident expert on all things psychologistickal.
A quick note here before we begin today's quiz; we will be posting in the near future some kind of Quiz FAQ designed to orient newcomers, due to the fact that we can't resist overexplaining anything. Look for this exciting piece of new verbiage soon!
And now, today's Quiz, brought to us by today's Special Guest Quizmaster, Boxjam, who comes to us all the way from the Windy City. After rejecting several interesting preliminary questions (the answer to each was invariably "Marilyn and Whittaker Chambers"), our esteemed colleague finally settled on the following puzzler:
Roller Coaster scholars disagree about many things; however, they do agree on when the first roller coaster with a loop was constructed. In what decade was the first such roller coaster built?
First correct answer to comments takes the honors. (In the interests of fairness, we ask contestants to post only one answer per six-hour period.) Good luck and Godspeed!
Parent: We are moving to a tiny house many miles away. All of your stuff that remains here will be destroyed in a celebratory bonfire unless you ask us to send it to you.
Child: Please send particular items.
Parent: Specify items worth sending.
Child: Legos. Plus other (specifies other incidental, unimportant items.)
Parent: These items will be sent.
**time passes**
Parent: Have you received the items?
Child: I have received some of the items.
Parent: Those were all of the items you requested.
Child: Where are the Legos?
Parent: Oh, the Legos. You want the Legos?
Child: Did I not specify the Legos?
Parent: We were planning on keeping the Legos.
Child: Why?
Parent: For your grandchildren to play with. Your grandchildren will enjoy the Legos when they visit.
Child: The Legos are mine. I want the Legos.
Parent: Why?
Child: I just want them.
Parent: We just thought it would be better if we held onto the Legos.
Child: JUST SEND THE LEGOS!
Parent: Well, fine, if you really want them...
__________
In an oddly synchronous moment, we received the Legos in question not long before finding this.
Tomorrow's exciting continuation of the quiz tradition continues with an exciting new wrinkle: Guest Wombat Rick 'Boxjam' Box will be the master of ceremonies. Rick has promised "a grueling cranial workout that will involve either a longstanding conundrum in molecular physics, an amusing detail about the Articles of the Confederacy, or some stuff about the actors on the Sid & Marty Kroft classic Sigmund and the Sea Monsters." Marilyn Vos Savant may show up. Stay tuned.
Tom Carson is one of the few critics we'll read on damn near any subject with the anticipation of pleasure. In this interview he says a bunch of things which confirm our good opinion of him, not the least of which is the following, in response to the perennial bleating about the destructive qualities of "irony:"
Real irony is a coping strategy with a moral value, because it lets you stay true to your point of view when you can't do anything to affect the situation. It's a useful tool to have in your emotional repertoire, and I've always just been sort of puzzled by people who think it's an end in itself--whether they're criticizing it or doing it. People forget that what really put the whole Age of Irony in the saddle was that Ronald Reagan was president. You had to become an ironist just to retain some sort of belief in your own sanity.
If you don't mind traveling back in culture-time a bit, you might also want to read his utterly convincing dissent from the herdlike response to Spielberg's Big War Film. Worth it, just for the stuff about Jesus in the suburbs.
TheraDate
Geeky Parody Raps
Making Your Sig File Market For You
Following Nathan Lane
Sylvia Browne
First correct answer posted to comments wins one of those tiny airline liquor bottles filled with crushed Sweet Tarts.
According to the most recent statistics we could find (1999), which country (at 12.2 liters of alcohol per person per year) currently holds the title for highest consumption of alcohol per capita?
check this out all you tired ex-radio geeks: 37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster
genki?
Artesian
Bossy*
Contumacious
Dingbat
Eleemosynary**
Feckless
Glad-handing***
Heel
Incorrigible
Jackanapes
Klutz
Limn
Megalithic
Noodle****
Odd
Peccary*****
Quid******
Runaround
Sempiternal
Tintinnabulation
Unguent
Viviparous
Whippet
Xerxes*******
Yonder
Zetetic********
*Particularly when used in Bossy Bessy.
**With a nod to A. Trollope
***We tried not to include hyphenates, but the hell with that.
****Without which we would not, presumably, have “canoodle.”
***** Although pants is technically funnier.
****** A fixation due to puzzled early reading of Andy Capp.
*******The only proper name on the list, and worth it.
********Nope, we've never used it. But we still like it.
In the office there is a food vending machine of the kind one used to commonly find in bus stations and suchlike places where the necessities of waiting and frugality (and the non-availability of such personnel as might otherwise take money and serve food) made the idea of an automated dispenser of comestibles an inviting business proposition; they are all we have left of the automat -- the shabby stepchild of what once appeared to be the model for America's dining future. There has been no discernable evolution in the design of these machines since the early seventies.
One of these lives in the kitchen/lounge at the office. Next to the towering, aggressively slick Coke machine, the food machine seems to slump; its internal flourescent lights give it the greyed appearance of a man whose white shirt has been washed too many times. This specimen has the usual inventory of rigorously preserved food. Individually packaged portions of cereal. Milk in cartons reminiscent of a grade-school cafeteria. Forbidding-looking pot pies ready for a microwave finish, pastry that looks to have been made of extruded polyvinyl, and apples which have the dull shine of industry.
But it doesn't matter that the food looks like its going to taste like something a DOD logistics analyst commissioned for the troops shipping out to Indochina in 1965 -- it's the delivery system that fascinates. The machine provides its own reason for being; the pleasures of observing and operating the mechanism, with its ingenious set of rotating trays, coy peek-a-boo windows and miniature doors. It invokes an advent calendar, or that wall of doors on Laugh-In. One pays for these felicities in the guise of a cheese sandwich (on "bread" that probably never went through a process remotely like what you picture as "baking"). Each item lives in its snug little apartment until it is chosen; garishly backlit for maximum effect. Old stock footage of conveyor belts whisking consumer goods through a factory; the allure of Milton-Bradley's old Mousetrap game; even Tom Clancy descriptions of some lumbering piece of destructive might cycling through its intricate processes; all of these things touch us in the same mysterious fashion.
It is a curious corollary that we are hopeless at any kind of mechanical repair work whatsoever.
We actually thought we might find a band bio for P-Funk.
(In response to the bad scene attendant upon last week's quiz, we've had his week's answers verified by auditors from a trustworthy outfit called Andersen Consulting.)
Ah, Clio, Muse of History! Friend of the Quizmaster! Outcast of the televisual world! Inexhaustible source of trivia!
In the early 15th century, a bunch of angry Protestants got pissed off at some Catholic government types in a city that's become recently become a famous international slacker destination (nope, not the one where you can buy weed legally). The ensuing squabble culminated in the"defenestration" from some castle windows of two of the Hail-Mary-sayers, although they were saved by (sources vary) either divine intervention or a fortuitously located dung heap.
This little Bohemian brouhaha is sometimes credited, probably incorrectly, with igniting the major war which followed; this conflict had a Bavarian Period, a Danish Period, a Swedish Period, and a French Period.
By what name do we know this war, this confusing mess of Early-Modern Mayhem?
Post your answer to comments. First correct answer earns the right to opine freely about the situation in the Middle East, and we will listen nicely for three whole minutes.
But today we are humble before creation, and merely report on the Greatest Crossover Marketing Idea Ever Pitched. It comes, of course, from the man who brought you The Bible Cure for Candida and Yeast Infections, which is ample evidence of a creative thinker at work all by itself. But it seems he's refined his skills with titles.
We had this plan, sparked by our recent reading of Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys; we would chart our Bloom-like journey through the day, linking to all of the issues of substance which occupied our thoughts, as well as the simple pleasures provided via headphones; or the meditations on mimesis inspired by a Tintin calendar.
But while, as we ankled toward our writing group meeting in a glorious April twilight, we happily enumerated all the ways in which our peregrinations through this storied archipelago were super-duper-significant and deeply interesting, when we hauled ourselves out of the hammock this morning what seemed just last night to comprise a delectable batter of frothed Experieince had hardened into a stale little cookie of dried memory.
We hate it when that happens.
What we love about this kind of investigative quasi-journalism (call it investigative journaling?) is the patience, the diligence, the commitment to the notion that there are no shortcuts to be taken in exposing a scam (the irony being that the scam itself promises a fast and effortless passage to wealth and/or beauty), and the un-self-consciousness of the whole thing. It won't make us less slackerly, desultory, or short-cut addicted ourselves -- and self-consciousness is our long and awkward middle name. But it reminds us that the facts, laid out at whatever length, are worth having. (via MeFi)
