Out of the frying pan and into the Shire--

The thing about Seattle is, they tell you it rains there all the time. They learn it as kids and they grow up and travel the world and perpetrate this as platitude wherever they go. And one day—my guess would be the early nineties, what with the Portland/Seattle grunge axis—there came a tipping-point when the burden of bearing this fact shifted from Washingtonian to outsider. No longer did the former offer it in response to the query: What’s it like there? Instead, it was the New Yorker or the Chicagoan or the Suburbanite who proffered it in conversation, called up from the same socially distributed databank of small-talk potpourri as gems like: Wasn’t Mark Twain’s real name Samuel Clemens? Or, Now, is it true that they circumcise their women? So, the outsider asks, almost by reflex: Rains all the time, eh? And the Seattlite responds: Sure does. The thing about Seattle is, it isn’t true. The winters can get dreary enough, for certain, but I’ll be goddamned if the other nine months of the year aren’t somewhere between San Francisco and Shangri-La. They tell you, you see, to keep you away. Having sent forth Starbucks into the world to keep their coffers filled, they laugh and sing and skip around in nothing but fig leaves, in the resplendency of the Pacific Northwest.

The thing about Oxford is, it really does rain all the time.

If Verbing Weirds Language, what does Adjectiving do?

Article at CNN claims that 31 people have committed suicide form the top of the Empire State Building. Wow. That's a classy/famous/awesome way to go. You'd think that they'd be pulling them down, or chaining them to the floor, or something. But no. According to the same article, 3.8 million people visit each year. Pulling numbers and arithmetic operators out of my ass, that means that 1 out of every 7 million people who visits there dies there. I mean, technically not even there. Where else could you take 7 million people and only have one die? And let's not forget the bomber
that crashed into that building. Man, if every place were made as well as the observation deck on the Empire State Building, we'd all be Methusalean.

And Now for Something Completely Different...
Three Lymericks about Sex...

I.
On account of the Clintons' good will
Was I asked to their copulative drill.
Bill handled foreplay
in a sensuous way
Penetration was provided by Hill'.

II.
O! Would that I were Nick Lachay
And wed to fair Jess for one day.
I'd bind her with rope
and jerk off on the dope
'Cuz I'm sure she's a miserable lay.

III.
I chanced upon Spears on the street
And did drop my drawers to my feet.
"Fortune favors the bold",
or so I was told
By her guard as he Tazered my meat.

d.r.f.cummings. (tehee)

A Transcendental Tractate of Caustic Casuistry

Recently was I in receipt of a castigatory epistle from Bentley, something to the effect that my posts are too recondite, or else that they demand of their audience a certain savoir faire which they seem, inscrutably, to lack. "Too high brow" he said; "nobody likes to feel stupid when they read our blog" he said; "most people just don't know who Jacques Derrida is". Suffice it to note that I became both splenetic and dyspeptic as a result of this reproof. Nevertheless, I found myself reconnoitering through my recent posts in an effort to, if you'll forgive the colloquialism, catechize the veracity of his averments.

Alas, my analysis, though prosecuted with all fealty and ardor, produced little in the way of punctilious proof. It seems to me that nothing to which I affix my appellation approaches the bravura or frippery for which I am vituperated. A fortiori, I would deign say that nothing of my oeuvre is beyond the reach of the paradigmatic abecedarian or catechumen. One most certainly need not be of the ranks of the cognoscenti or learned mavens of acroamatic, orphic discourses (most of whom, to be completely laconic, I find more often associated with a kind of specious chicanery than with unalloyed erudition) to make immanent within one's ken precisely that which I try, with all obsequiousness and self-abnegation, to so guilelessly rehearse.

What would Bentley have me do? Reduce my already meager belletristic fruitage yet further still, to the point where it consists in nothing but apophthegmatic bon mot or badinage? Would he have me, for instance, affect the phraseology of so many of the nescient Rationalists? Does he have some baser velleity to see me, compunctious and chagrined, reduced to contriving a précis on Liebniz's dubious theodicy or, worse still, his monadology? Am I to be relegated to producing disquisitions on the immaterialist metaphysics of Berkeley's Alciphron or, God forbid, Ockham's ontological nominalism? Surely not.

Thus, I can only implore Bentley to osculate my fundament.

--D. Richard Foster IV, Esq.

Times of our Lives.

If you don't read the New York Times, you should. Some people may criticize it for a liberal bias. Others for over-intellectualism. Some may dislike its better-than-thou attitude when it comes to journalism. And yes, of course, they're all right. But it's still a damn fine paper. Below are a few gems I have found in it in the last half-week. Where else can you get such constant awesomitude for free?

"Data on Deaths From Obesity Is Inflated, U.S. Agency Says"

This is just a title, but can't you see the reporter just wanting to change it to: "... Is Inflated [Just Like the Obese], U.S. Agency Says"?

From an interview with Robert Downey Jr. on the release of his new album (I know, I know, him singing is about as crazy as Harry Connick Jr. acting!):

"The truth is, most people have realized I'm less a liability on a set than people who get loaded on weekends and might get a D.U.I. and don't want to hear anything about getting sober. I'm a pretty easy read. I'm either doing well or I'm having a sidebar conversation with the valet at your party and we disappear and come back 45 minutes later looking very alert."

And finally, from an article about computers writing:

"On the Internet, the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator (http://user.tninet.se/~ecf599g/aardasnails/java/Monkey/webpages/) generates random keystrokes and matches them against a database of Shakespeare's plays. The record, last time I looked, was 21 consecutive letters and spaces from - aptly enough - 'Love's Labour's Lost.'"

OK, I'll be honest: LLL, not my favorite Shakespeare. But I could never write that in as assumed knowledge to an audience of millions and hope for a knowing chuckle. These guys, the New York Times, they have balls.

It is not the spork that bends, it is you that bends.

:::Knocks on Door:::

Dan: Yeah?
First-Year: Hey man, working on an essay?
Dan: Yep.
First-Year: What's it on?
Dan: This week, the topic is free will vs. determinism.
First-Year: Oh, man...was it optional?


And while I'm at it, I'll go ahead and link to some of my hometown heroes, the boys at Greyfade Media. They do some good film/music/other work and the website's pretty slick. A lot of it appeals to a sort of self-parodying soft-and-hazy existential angst, to which I can't exactly relate, but all things considered the production values and talent are there, and the two seasons of "Boston Place" are priceless. Two "Enfranchised-Iron-Fists-of-Absolute-Power" way up.

Full Faith and Credit

Two nights ago, my roommate and I went to dinner. I paid with a credit card, and after emptying his wallet of dollars, he still owed me $9. All he had left in his wallet was a £5 note. It took us both a moment of soul-searching before realizing that if he handed me the bill... our debt would be clear. I mean, it's in pounds, how am I going to use it in the US?

It's scary to think how fragile our monetary system is. It's all just based on faith. The worst kind of faith: faith in the common man. Sure, Mr. Goodenberger and I know the exchange rates for common currencies. But what if I need to buy gas? Of course I'm out of luck if I'm trying to invoke Her Majesty's Royal Currenfy[sic] of Pounds Sterling and Incestuous Families. But how about the 2 dollar bill? See this description of someone not taking a 2 dollar bill. So does that mean that when you factor in the difficulty of using it, it's really a $1.78 bill?

Leave a comment if you'd accept a debt of $9 in Poundian format.