Dear Spam:

Thanks for writing. I feel kinda bad about my end of the correspondence. I feel like you're the one doing all the work. I'd like to tell you that will change, but I just can't keep up with your energy -- you're just so tireless!

It sounds like things are going really well for you -- the money pouring in, feeling (as usual) great about yourself. Did you really make over $25,000 this month working from home? That's amazing. I think the thing that I like most about you, spam, is that you're never shy about owning your triumphs, celebrating your own life with the people who care about you. I know it's something that I have to work on for myself.

You asked me if I was ready to change my life -- and the way you used all those capital letters impressed upon me the seriousness of your question. The fact of the matter, spam, is that I don't know if I'm ready for the kind of dramatic changes that you seem to have incorporated into your daily routine, you know?

I know what you're going to say: "Give me five minutes and I'll show you how to flood your bank account with serious cash." I want to know how cool it is that you're there willing to help your friends get to where you are. And it means something that you want things between us to be "NO hype! All legal!" That's the way it's always been between us, buddy: no hype, all legal. So I hope you'll understand when I tell you that there is a big part of me that feels threatened by the prospect of "flooding my bank account with serious cash." That sounds like both a good thing and a bad thing: in floods, people drown. Would I drown, spam? Would the part of me that is not ready for serious cash be swept away in a tidal wave of $$$UCCE$$?

By the way -- I hope your car is out of the shop. I agree that car repairs always come at a bad time; of course I don't have one. But it sounds like you have a great handle on how to extend your car's warranty AND not be left with huge bills. So, while the general situation is frustrating, I'm glad to see that with your usual swiftness you've "beaten the system" again. I have to say, I don't know how you do it!

Now, I have to bring up a touchy subject: it was so sweet of you to offer to invite me to the World Series, Superbowl, Daytona 500, Final Four and Masters tournament (and it's so thoughtful of you to make sure that I knew that it would be FREE -- but of course it was, since that's the kind of stuff you always do), but I'm afraid I'm going to have to say no. Thing is, if we went to those things, I'd spend the whole time with you feeling a little weird about why I am getting the chance to "live the dream" while others who are still working the "40 X 40 X 40" lifestyle are out there in the cold. I'd just be too self-conscious to enjoy the fabulous perks.

(By the way, I think I'll also have to say no thanks to all of the wild and kinky pornographic material that you're always encouraging me to check out. I can see how when you're so wrapped up in your work it seems like a welcome diversion, but I have to say I find "Unlimited Adult Action" almost as intimidating as the "Turnkey Marketing System" you've told me about. Hope that doesn't make me sound like too much of a prude!)

I know you believe that "Everyone can do it!" Of course it makes sense to you -- you're the generous type of person who has more to give and to share than they know what to do with. Every time I get an e-mail from you, spam, I think about how much that belief means to you, and it warms me inside. I don't know if I agree, but I hope you never stop trying to convince me.

Take care and enjoy that amazing cruise vacation with your family that didn't cost you anything. More than anyone I know, you deserve a break.

Your friend,

BT

I was probably reminiscing about Mississippi in the last post because it is positively subtropical here these days. This evening I found myself humming "Too Darn Hot" by way of being very, very obvious about the whole thing.

And it struck me that the version I had in my head, which is unfortunately on a CD not in my possession (I *think* its Ella Fitzgerald's version), has a number of lyrics at the end which the transcriptions I've looked at don't include.

But this isn't a question about Cole Porter, or Kiss Me, Kate, or Ella Fitzgerald. Be patient.

One of the lines I remember at the end -- an extended riff on the "Mr. Adam, for his madam, is not" line -- was "the gyrene for his queen." That had puzzled me for a long while. Someone finally clued me in on gyrene as slang for a Marine, that is, a member of the USMC.

And so to our question. Whence gyrene? The Historical Dictionary of American Slang gives the lie to the fable that the word (which goes back to at least the 1890's) is a combo of "G.I." and "Marine" (which wouldn't make sense anyway). Instead, it points to a more probable solution that the words origin is in a Greek (and, from Greek, Latin) term for a morphologically appropriate kind of organism -- an form of animal life which is, if true, a clever enough metaphor.

What is the English word for this putative Greek origin of gyrene?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a commemorative poster from Cheap Trick Live at the Halls of Montezuma.

Mississippi State Highway 49 runs along next to the seawall along a fair stretch of miles of the Gulf Coast. As you travel East on a Saturday night from a town like Long Beach towards Biloxi the houses are on your left; some big stately southern piles that you and your family are not likely to get invited into; some little and astonishingly humble, marking those who have lived there for decades, from before you needed much money to have a house overlooking that particular stretch of generally placid ocean; some were no longer homes but merely the outlines of those swept away in the last great hurricane, which for your time means Camille in 1969. There are lots where in the last bits of fading light you can see the concrete front steps that led up into a living room long ago knocked to pieces and swept out to sea.

The sea, or the somewhat un-sea-like part of the sea that is the Gulf of Mexico is on your immediate right, beyond the big flat mostly empty beach, every few hundred yards measured out by the line of a fishing pier extending out over the dark, still water. On a rare evening, some portion of its dim expanse would be illuminated by a church youth group or softball team having a bonfire. On other nights one could sometimes see the yellow lights carried by waders out in the water, gigging for flounder. Tonight, in the wake of a pounding summer storm, there is no one there.

There are no casinos yet. There won't be for years.

The seawall is a fairly recent innovation. So is the beach. Some years ago -- before you arrived from somewhere else, before you were even born -- there was no seawall and no beach, just a mudflat. The Army Corps of Engineers built the seawall and created the beach. Because of the barrier islands ten miles offshore, there is no surf to create one naturally. At the edge of the sand, the water laps with no more force than that of a lake. The water is shallow and warm and murky with the gigantic plume of silt continuously flowing from the mouth of the Mississippi river ninety miles behind you.

Out there on the Sound once you saw a waterspout, like a gray piece of fuzzy wool thread hanging down from cloud. It wasnít raining where you were standing, by the car in one of the little parking areas by the seawall. It was hard to imagine that the funny thing on the horizon bore any relation to the tornado drills that were a regular feature of Spring in school.

You are drinking Budweiser tallboys, in the back seat of a small car. You are with other people who feel that they donít really belong here. You are headed to an arcade in a building that was once a hangar for small aircraft. You will play Centipede.

You are listening to Cheap Trick.

Rory's mention of Phillip Pullman's wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy a few months ago reminded me that I really had to go ahead and finish the damn thing. I just did.

I can't say that the third book, The Amber Spyglass completely fulfills the promise of the first, or, rather, that it could possibly achieve the imaginative splendor of The Golden Compass (called Northern Lights, I believe, in the rest of the English-reading world) or the bracingly tragic vision of the second book, The Subtle Knife; it's less riveting, less tightly wound and breath-stopping; and a whiff of didactic stuff about learning to be good starts to creep in toward the end. But to make too much of these shortcomings' to make such distinctions is cavilling. It's got all the Blakean/Miltonic themes set forth in the first one, coming back in unexpected and complicated ways. It's got angels, which are not as nifty a conception as the daemons introduced in the first volume, but which come pretty close. It's got lots of zeppelins (all books need more zeppelins, except possibly The Great Gatsby). And it manages to finesse a more or less happy ending without quite spoiling the essentially tough view of life that Pullman takes with his characters, which allows -- unlike the more programmatic heroic feats J.K. Rowling apportions to her destined-to-conquer hero -- one to accept without flinching those rewards and accolades which Lyra and Will receive at the story's end.

Any fantasy story (or, as Rory would have it, parallel-worlds SF tale) which invokes Keats' negative capability as a quality its young heroine must learn is going to have a long life on my bookshelf.

Yes, I know, we're all distracted by the World Cup. But we must forge ahead with business, even though Germany is up by one as I write.

A recent theme returns for a sub-rosa encore in this week's quiz.

In 1963, physicist Murray Gell-Man assigned the term "quark" to his newly discovered fundamental particle. According to the scientist, he already had the sound of the word in mind, but later got the spelling from a literary work.

What was the book that gave him the word?

As usual, no Googling or looking into the soul of the student sitting next to you. An assortment of rare used quarks to the contestant with the first correct answer posted to comments.

Time permitting, there'll be something more here soon.

In the meantime, why not check out the pleasures of Planned Obsolescence, the new venture from a recent Wombat File Quiz Champ. I'll be lurking, I suspect, in many a comment thread...

I searched in vain on NPR's site for an archive of a report I heard this morning about the notion, being advocated by Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Department of Extra-Homeland Defense, that the U.S. should get re-cozy with the Indonesian military. Paul "Superhawk" Wolfowitz was on the radio championing his thesis that it's time to accept the reality that the best way to encourage democracy in a country is through the tried and true method of getting their professional soldiers together with ours and so by a kind of martial osmosis transmit our values. A kind of trickling down of human rights then follows as surely as Evil follows Axis.

I don't mean to sneer too reflexively. But I can't help but raise an eyebrow. This is a vintage cold-war strategy for international relations -- we're now fighting "terror" but basically the idea seems awfully familiar: still the same right-wing desire to cozy up to any reasonably palatable dictatorship or military backed semi-democracy, trade a certain not-well-specified amount of training and equipment, and hope that the number of communist-- excuse me, I meant terrorist -- partisans you wind up bagging outweighs the bags of mail Amnesty International sends concerning whatever communities/ethnicities/political groups/islands get tromped on by the way. If everyone has forgotten as much about East Timor as it seems, well, then chances are good nobody's going to even notice if we have to give up this "embargo" on military aid.

And, aside from providing assistance the War Against Terror*, the local military will also, by dint of discussing Tom Paine, Plato, and Thoreau with the members of American military units, slowly evolve into ambassadors of virtue. Yes, that's the ticket!

Those who know something more than this about the situation, feel absolutely free to tell me why my cynicism is misplaced.

*As long as we're fighting a war against terror, I think we should also take on Horror, which is something I think we can all agree we recoil in far too frequently. Until Maine and Louisiana extradite Stephen King and Anne Rice to the Hague, we will never be free of this scourge.

Sunday: stripping of leaves from many flower stems; applying of clear tape to the tops of vases according to instructions; telling of stories to insistent four-year olds (while incompetently messing with tape and vases); swearing at Brooklyn traffic while maneuvering a car jammed with delicately arranged flowers and one very talented friend busy still assembling corsages; hauling delicately arranged flowers into Prospect Park, as if there weren't plenty there to begin with; washing up hurriedly in a bathroom not really meant for serious washing up; praying (or reasonably facsimile thereof) that the sunshine would hold for a few more minutes; beaming at Amy and Mark and wishing I understood Hebrew; saying one half of one seventh of the Seven Blessings; feeling indescribably good about the coolness of aforementioned couple; appreciating something called a Tequila Limeade; appreciating even more the super-soul dancefloor workout provided by Mr. Finewine; staggering home, actually no kidding staggering.

Monday: stiff muscles, lots of coffee, no blogging.

In honor of our pals Mark and Amy, who are getting wed this Sunday, I thought we'd make this week's Quiz a Bloomsday-themed event. And because I haven't eaten yet, it's also a culinary question.

In Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom lunches on a Gorgonzola sandwich, but what does he eat for breakfast?

Leave that dogeared Modern Library edition on the shelf, no Googling, and, if you don't remember, guess with Joycean brio. The first correct answer, posted to comments, wins a gorgonzola sandwich, on me, the next time we meet.

By the way, why don't they have a literature geek on Beat the Geeks? All right, I suppose I know the answer to that, but I prefer to think it's just a bizarre oversight on the part of the producers.

Jogging again through the convoluted housing development near my parents' place, I passed a parked car with a yellow bumper sticker I've seen before:

"WARNING: In the event of Rapture, this car will be unmanned." This is hardly a new example of born-again wit, of course. And it's been dutifully mocked in turn ("When the Rapture comes, can I have your car?"), which is not what I propose to do here.

Christian fundamentalism, particularly in its St. John of Patmos mode, with its Rapture and its Beast, its diabolical Antichrist and its UPC-code Marks, has always been a particularly attractive target of scorn among the geek set in which I've spent so much of my time. The ostensible reason for this is that the whole thing is just so preposterous and silly, routinely pitching to the young nerd obliging slow pitches with which to practice his or her argumentative swing. Serve up Biblical authority as the linchpin to a non-churchgoing eighth-grader with a penchant for reading and computers, and you're going to get whacked right out of the park. (Not that the Christian in the transaction sees this as what's happening at all -- but the experience is rewarding to the Agnostic-in-Training).

But to see the apocalyptic Christian mythos as one which your average sci-fi reading youngster simply opposes is perhaps to overlook a potentially more profound thing which fundamentalists offer up: an incredibly detailed, deliciously scary imaginative vision of the future. When I see a sticker like the one above, my spine tingles in a way that the X-Files, at its best, could only approximate. Like a lot of kids growing up in the South who don't come from a fundamentalist family, my first exposure to the whole narrative of the Rapture, Armageddon and the Second Coming was roughly synchronous with my reading of Tolkien and Susan Cooper, and only a year or so prior to my exposure to the world of fantasy role-playing games. I began to notice and quietly read the pamphlets that were on the coffee tables of several school friends' families.

The apocalyptic fantasy of good and evil in a secret, preparatory battle which will then culminate in a superheroic struggle characterized by the clouds opening up, people flying around, monstrous dystopic one-world governments imposing their will, angels and evil wizards in battle, is a pretty captivating one, and it's surprising that more of your swords-and-sorcery types don't acknowledge its pre-eminence as an American myth of redemptive destruction and hidden, transformative significance. In the world of apocalyptic fantasy, the ordinary world is a rather drab veil over the exciting landscape of a struggle both spiritual and material. Harry Potter, for all his appeal, doesn't face anything like the multitude of adventures that an ordinary Christian must undertake to survive in this Jerry Bruckheimer-esque version of Pilgrim's Progress. That's a hook that's been captured shrewdly by a few insightful creators from both the believing and the atheist camps.

Running past that bumpersticker on a manicured street that remains, whenever I am there, almost empty of people (no children at play in the yards, no one washing their car in the driveway: the lawns of Northern Virginia are more for display than for use), I feel a delicious and tangible chill. Somewhere a secret fraternity plots the rise of Antichrist. Somewhere else a dedicated Biblical scholar races against the clock to master the coded significance of the vision of St. John and predict the terrifying events to come. God bides His triune time, waiting for precisely the right moment to press [ENTER] and run the ENDOFTHEWORLD.EXE program.

The adolescent contours of such fantasy are for me a nostalgic distraction from the really scary shit that is happening now, which fits into no myth, and can't be dismissed with mockery. And of course, the horrible irony isn't lost on me: part of the problem in today's global nightmare is the way these myths (or very similar narratives) are considered, by people both elsewhere and in our own goverment, more like an advance copy of next week's Times than a lost episode of Buffy. More's the pity.

My lesson in the proper schedule for engaging the ordinary American in commerce came this past Saturday morning at 7:52 A.M. We were all having breakfast at my parents' house, one week before they were due to leave behind the artificially smoothed landscape of Fairfax County for good and retreat to the ancestral Pacific haunt of my forbears. It was my final visit to the cookie-cutter tract house which they have admirably beautified over the course of a couple of decades -- wood floors replacing wall-to-wall beige carpet and a surrounding yard which has year by year become less and expanse of grass and more a system of interlocking flower beds. The back isso well shaded by forty-foot trees one almost forgets that it was not long ago an uglier-than-usual Northern Virginia slash-and-build housing development. The whole place bears little resemblence to the house I spent my last couple of years of high school in; it's a damn sight nicer now.

Changing house -- especially to a place without a basement -- requires the jettisoning of a lot of stuff, and hence a Garage Sale* was in order. Theresa and I came down to toast their farewell and to help with the proceedings. When we got in on Friday I asked Mom when she thought things would get going in the morning. "I put eight o'clock in the ad in the Post," she said. I asked her why she had committed herself to starting the bloody thing at the crack of dawn, figuring that, like me, most people want to sleep later on the weekend than they do on a working day. She smiled indulgently and told me that I'd understand the next day.

Wanting to be helpful, I hauled myself out of a positively drugged sleep (those suburban silences! There's nothing to wake you up in the morning -- no cars, no screaming, no street fairs, nothing) around 7:30 and padded upstairs for coffee. Slumped at the table with Theresa, the folks already chipper, I figured Dad would throw open the garage at 8 (referring to my father as "prompt" is like calling Oprah Winfrey "moderately well-off") and then stand around rearranging the tchotchkes until the countryside had time to wake up an hour or so later.

At 7:52, the doorbell rang. My mother sprang up. "They're here!" she said! A moment or two later, a crowd burst into our garage full of stuff that my original estimate put at about a seventy-dollar total resale value.

Ninety minutes and two hundred dollars later we were a plucked chicken. A done deal. The only thing left was a curling poster of Yes's Relayer album cover, a terrifying faux-china doll, and a wobbly desk chair dating from the Johnson administration. In a swirl of dollars and quarters the detritus of my parents' lives had been swept into minivans and SUVs to be redistributed across the county. The latecomers (and there were few) found that the early birds had been pleased to gorge themselves on the many inexpensive and questionably valuable worms my family had put forth.

I stood there with a half-empty cup of coffee, and was educated.

*some uncultured types refer to these as Yard Sales, but it's that kind of nonsense that you have to put up with in a democracy.

In case you were wondering, according to their maker, Jila mints are "the ideal modern personal accompaniment in work and social situations."

Another invention quiz this week; an intrepid American and an unlikely episode in the history of cinema.

In 1866, John Wesley Hyatt discovered that when he spilled in his workshop a bottle of a synthetic substance called collodion, it hardened into a tough but still pliable material which, it struck him, would be ideal for the production of something necessary for a pastime which was at that time rapidly growing in popularity in the U.S. (and is still popular today, though not to the same extent). Until this point, the objects in question had to made from an expensive, natural substance that could not, in fact, be obtained in North America. A shortage of the natural substance left widely felt need, among players and manufacturers, for a cheap alternative.

Hyatt eventually created synthetic versions of this object, out of a substance called nitrocellulose resin. The results were impressive -- the cheaply produced objects were every bit as servicable as the ones made from the rare natural substance. The only problem was, these objects had a tendency to throw off sparks and a bang when struck, which was a constant and inevitable aspect of the their use. Eventually the formula was refined, and the substance Hyatt had used went on to become the basis for celluloid film.

What were these in-demand objects Hyatt wanted to use nitrocellulose to make? Bonus points: what was the natural substance which he hoped to make unnecessary?

If you're new to the quiz, our only rule is that you rely on your intra-cranial search engine only. First correct answer to comments wins a satisfyingly heavy pen decorated handsomely with the logo of a not-quite-deceased tech consulting firm.

I once read the New York Press with some frequency. Sure, it was always a sloppily edited, strangely cantankerous weekly, oddly mixing shrill punk-scene dedication with the self-indulgent conservative bloviations favored by Russ Smith; a friend of mine once said that reading Smith's weekly inventory of restaurant visits and political pronouncements afforded the same category of pleasure that one gets from picking at a scab. But there was some good crankishness in there as well -- William Bryk on strange NYC history, Armond White's iconoclastic film reviews, and "Dirty Sanchez", a hilarious weekly free-association riff on the lower depths of the rock-critic world.

More importantly, it was free lunchtime reading material, as easy to swallow and about as nutritious as a street vendor hot dog. If the week's Voice (at a time when one might find, say Mim Udovich riffing brilliantly on American Psycho) was already read through, one could turn to the Press's collection of first-person rants and crankly restaurant dissections with a certain amount of temporary satisfaction, especially if one turned right past the literary toy-train wreck of Amy Sohn's column.

This was pre-Web, of course; now it's almost impossible not to find better things to read at lunch -- and most of the readable writers the Press had have departed for better gigs. But, following a link a mention in Romenesko, I found myself returning to pages I hadn't glanced at in years, reading David Itzkoff's apologia for his lad-days at Maxim; nothing piques interest like a behind-the-scenes story, so I was sufficiently moved to read the news from "inside the sausage factory," as the writer put it. Upton Sinclair meets Stuff? Men behaving, one had to figure, very, very badly.

Sadly, Itzkoff provides no details of scandalously awful things said or done in the editorial meetings or on photo shoots. But hold onto your hats, though, fellow lads, because what Itzkoff (now on staff at Spin) does reveal is so breathtaking that you may not be able to fully grasp it. The horrible thing about Maxim is...that they have no ideology. That's right, Itzkoff was shocked -- shocked! -- to discover in the course of his tenure there that there was no editorial strategy or philosophy other than the commitment to feature a scantily clad celebrity body on every cover (he hints at the very small universe of recognizable starlets willing to grace a Maxim cover, which might have been the kickoff to an interesting discussion of the economy of fame as it intersects withthe sub-softcore world...but, unfortunately, that didn't occur to Itzkoff). Can you imagine? He reports that the magazine is only produced according to a cynical "formula" -- it turns out they've never intended to do path-breaking journalism at all! That isn't, of course, to say there isn't quality in the magazine -- Itzkoff insists that, despite editorial negligence some "actually thoroughly researched and reported, and often well-written" true crime pieces are published. Too bad he can't provide an example of a single one.

The worst crime Itzkoff was witness to, however, was the fact that "Itís all one big tease, except underneath those frilly undergarments there ainít nothing to show." We'll pass over the fact that in the case of a "big tease" there's no "except" -- the very definition of the tease, be it sexual or commercial, is that the anticipation all that you get. What's mind boggling is that the editor, after years in the "sausage factory" finally figured out what any college freshman could tell you after a flip through the pages of Maxim or any of its clones -- the clever headlines and splashy girlie pix don't announce satisfyingly libidinous content or libertarian prose, they replace it. The notion that it took editorial experience at Maxim to discover this elementary fact is a headslapper -- as is, of course, the idea that any sane person thinks of Maxim as more than a the modern version of pinup photos. Who, exactly does Itzkoff think he's clueing in?

OK, forget that question. A better one: can't even the Press do better than this for a cover story?

Writer? Successful writer? Getting an author photo taken?

Get your hand away from your face.

You'll thank me later.

We could have had the decency to explain, post-Friday's Quiz, that there'd be a general quietus hereabouts. Weddings here, last-ditch visits to an about-to-be abandoned parental home there: an increase in toil at what we too-revealingly call the Day Job. With all of this incident, one would think that there would be so much raw material for entertaining narration* that we would fill pages and pages, upon our returns from these sojurns, with the delightful and colorful details, such as the way older people can be really badly behaved in a poorly organized buffet line, or how the Omni Hotel in Richmond made us think quite a bit about this.

But honestly, we're just tired. Tomorrow, we promise. Something better than what you're reading now.

*For example, we met, this past weekend, our first-ever Civil War Re-enactors, in the precints of Richmond, VA's Museum of the Confederacy. We saw their bags of parched corn, hefted their replica muskets, and chatted about John Ellis's The Social History of the Machine Gun. Then we went downstairs and looked at amputation instruments.