You may note that hyperlinks no longer work in the comments. My apologies, but the war on comment spam has taken a casualty in this regard -- at least until I install an update to Movable Type that can do a better job of pest control.
Was anyone else here watching the Kerry speech on CNN? After the speech, it was time to drop the balloons and the balloons clearly didn't work. CNN for some strange reason was broadcasting the voice of the convention's Balloon Master or whoever desperately begging his minions to release the balloons. "More balloons! More balloons! Jesus! What are you guys doing? Where are the balloons?"
Anyway..another Friday, another head-hurtful passel of unsurprising-but-true facterines. Put on your Quizzing Ties (the summer ones please -- the ones printed with the little wombats sipping lemonade):
In 1935, the one-eyed pilot Wiley Post, who had previously made a solo flight around the world, died when the plane he was piloting crashed near Point Barrow, Alaska. He was flying with a single passenger, who was also killed. According to newspapers, Post and his companion were on an “aerial vacation.” Post had planned to fly as far as Moscow, but his passenger was undecided about accompanying him farther than Nome. President Roosevelt was immediately informed about the accident.
Who was the passenger?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a package of Mock Ramen noodles (made with textured vegetable pseudoramen). No Googling or mewing over and over until all right, all right, I’ll throw your goddamned catnip mouse already. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you’d like.
We have written in this space before of the many treasures to be discovered in the Home Decorators Collection catalog. But, innocents that we were, we had not until today stumbled upon the Motherlode.
Think you've seen bad ideas for home decor? Think again. Marvel as you behold the bustulus charms of the "Goddess of Halwan"©, the "gentle, almost human eyes" and lawn-watering utility of Tiny the Elephant, or the shapely gams of this classically proportioned table.
Not enough for you? How about nose-picking gargoyles, Renfair-ready capes, or floor lamps in the form of decapitated women? Or maybe you'd like to return to the glory days of Imperial conquest?
If you like your cheese in a cakier form, of course, there are oodles of vaguely naughty objays d'art.
We notice that your eyes have by now gone quite blind from the dazzle. So there's no need to continue.
Just watched the Clinton speech at the convention. Damn. I am so voting for him.
We approach the doggish days of summer, when the cerebral matter swells up in the heat and yelps for relief. I can only hope that the quizzes of the next few weeks will constitute a soothing mental compress, a mind-cooler for the overheated brainpan. This week's synapse-relaxant:
In the year 1897, Bram Stoker published Dracula, forever altering the course of history by making inevitable the film Love at First Bite. In that same year, another novel with a long-lasting cultural impact, also featuring blood-drinking monsters, was serialized (although neither George Hamilton nor Richard Benjamin, to my knowledge, directly benefited from it.)
What was the title of this second sanguine fiction?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a CD of REO Speedwagon's monumental record You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tune a Fish which was inexplicably lying around the office. No Googling or interviewing Susan St. James. One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as often as you like.
One is tempted to respond with a flourish of neo-Seussian neologisms to Ann Hulbert's not-bad analysis of how the Cat in the Hat ushered in a reign of monitored, it's-fun-yet-also-healthy reading for kids.
But only tempted -- I lost all of my desire to Geisel when I beheld the title of the spin-off to the shark-jumpery of Oh, the Places You'll Go. The up-with-fuzzy-footed-people attitude of the first one was cloying, but after all of the disturbing whimsy of his other books, you could forgive Dr. Seuss a little bit of treacle. He'd earned it, and then some. But the combo of bad meter and a catchily irritating triple rhyme in title to the sequel -- ouch.
What Hulbert's discussion of the Cat's cultural iconicity raises for me -- besides my codgerly response to those two late-career books -- is some thought about something that really has little to do with her larger argument (suckers! You thought I had something to say about the article I linked to? When, when will you learn?), and more about my own response to the Dr. Seuss canon, which is one which I rarely catch a glimpse of in the writing of the many thoughtful people who have discussed their young experience reading the Geiselian oevre.
That response in a nutshell: I don't like him, and I never did.
Now, just a minute. This is going to require some explanation. Seuss was a thoroughgoing genius. Not many artists in any medium create an instantly recognizable style, iterated and developed so completely that a whole subcategory of visual expression gets more or less subsumed in it. Modern dreamscapes either avoid Seuss or imitate him. And although his range was more limited as a writer, the frenetically dextrous play with phonemes and near-phonemes that was his stock in trade made somebody like Ogden Nash look fussy and dilletantish by comparison (OK, that last is unfair: I'll probably retract that in the morning, but just let it pass for now, wouldja?).
No, I mean to shortchange neither the brilliance nor the prolific energy with which that brilliance got refined and put between covers.
What I mean is this: my memories of Seuss's books are not particularly happy or nice ones. Those color-saturated skies. Those tumorish houses and trees sprouting hairy tufts and tentacular branches. Those floppy, flipperish feet and upturned snouts on the faces of various Everybeings. Holes in the ground which disgorge grinning foes and lurkers of all kinds. A dreamland indeed -- as far as I was concerned a fever-dreamland. Was I fascinated? Absolutely, particularly by some of the more Rube Goldberg arrangements Seuss staged (I believe that in The Sleep Book there's a particularly engaging mechanism used for tallying up the current global total of snoozers).
But even as a child, I viewed Seuss with a degree of suspiscion, which has not quite left me to this day. His books, to a one, have overtones which if not sinister, at least resonate in harmonies not entirely easily resolved. The melancholy of the faceless Once-ler is not merely didactic -- it's chillingly existential. The Lorax's forest carried doom in its saplings. Going on beyond Zebra is not for the faint of heart. The Cat in the Hat is a classic trickster demigod, and mortals as a bunch do not come out ahead in encounters with his peers. The Grinch has been dislocated by Chuck Jones (to say nothing of Jim Carrey) from his original Seussian context, and so can't really apply here. But I even find The Foot Book a little creepy. "Here come Clown Feet" is not a statement that ought to bring an unambiguous smile to anyone's face.
I don't suggest this is a flaw, nor do I mean to imply that books for children should not contain the power to disturb the imagination. Seuss is worthy of his status. But when I encounter yet again an adult who remembers reading his books with an uncomplicated fondness, I wonder: does anyone else in this world remember their smaller selves, at bedtime, trying rather diligently not to think about that goddamned nightmare road to Solla Sollew.
Or is it just me?
After last week's political think-fest it's time for a quiz that represents some appropriately leisurely concerns. I'm thinking a cruise; the refreshing tang of the ocean breeze, the romantic cry of a seagull, and $12.95 Pina Coladas on the fantail. Hence, a nautical theme for today's question.
All good-hearted folk cherish nautically-themed songs-- who among us doesn't enjoy a good sea-chantey over a glass of grog? -- but only a select few hit the debased modern pop charts.
What nautical term describing the disposition of a sail supplied the title to a chart-topping hit more than ten years after Eliot Lurie and his Rutgers buddies wrote "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" in a New Jersey barn?
First correct answer to comments wins a packet of Bartender Pete's Instant Rusty Nail and an airline bottle of Captain Morgan. No Googling or using your sextant. One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as often as you like.
Since the media is all awash this week with Kerry's decision to go with John "Dreamboat" Edwards, we thought it would be a good time to unleash a Vice-Presidential question for the many political-history lovers in the audience. See if you can follow the convolutions behind this week's head-softener:
In the 20th century Since 1928, only four Vice-Presidential nominees from the Democratic party or the G.O.P. have had no experience serving in Congress. The list includes McGovern running mate Sargent Shriver, Henry Wallace (FDR's veep in 1940, dropped for Truman in 1944), and Spiro Agnew. The fourth nominee is not widely remembered as a vice-presidential candidate, but well known for another role.
Who is the fourth figure on this list? Bonus: who was the Presidential nominee with whom he ran?
The first correct answer posted to comments wins a copy of Ric Flair's To Be the Man. No Googling or calling up Dick Cheney's Party Bunker. One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as often as you like.
More excuses for my Wombat File slackitude, in the form of some recent photos:
Helena Claire in "The Summer Wind".
It was originally created in Whitechapel, London. It bears a quotation from Leviticus, chapter 25 (which among other things tells us "And if a man sell a dwelling house in a walled city, then he may redeem it within a whole year after it is sold; within a full year may he redeem it.") In 1915, half a million Californians signed a petition, asking that it be brought to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific Exposition (it was).
What is it?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a slighty chewed up Baby Heisenberg DVD (like "Baby Einstein," but focused more on early acquisition of the basic paradoxes in subatomic physics). No Googling or opening up that big coffee-table bookof Great Moments from the Panama-Pacific Exposition you got for your birthday. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.
