My wife MaryElizabeth says the shortest distance between two points is the one that keeps you moving. Whatever Einstein meant by space-time, my wife has a definition all her own.
She says it’s all laid out in pig paths, alternative routes to the most commonly used (and most congested) ways of getting around town.
The way MaryElizabeth sees it, space and time are not separate entities; the point of the game is not to eat up a given amount of space in a set amount of time. Rather, space and time are all one hunk which shrinks as time stranded in traffic diminishes, and expands with every second that ticks away as you sit idle, anywhere along your route. The winners in life are the ones who hold it all to a minimum.
What this has to do with pigs is for MaryElizabeth to know and the rest of us to meditate on, as she steers her way down side streets, across church parking lots, down one-way alleys the wrong way, hopping onto the freeway at one exit and back off at the next, then doubling back a block to her destination.
As most of us measure time, this trip might take more minutes and seconds than just driving down the straightest route and stopping dutifully at the stoplights.
For MaryElizabeth, though, the pig path holds resting in place to a minimum, and in doing so redeems any extra time or effort involved. Getting there isn’t half, or three-quarters, of the fun. What matters is getting there without having to hit your brakes.
I ride shotgun on the pig paths, which is fine with me. If I were driving I’d waste space-time right and left, and ME would be driven nuts. Plus, as the bemused observer, I get to watch her scurry down the paths babbling to herself and emitting little pig grunts. On the road, I feel like Hopalong Cassidy playing sidekick to Gabby Hayes.
Can you imagine what a joy it is to sit back, drop the leading man poses, stalwart demeanor, and straight-arrow lines, and just careen down the road with a wacko who knows what she’s doing? What a delight it is to be George Fenneman to a Groucho Marx?
This is my kind of traveling. For me, on the pig paths, getting there is all the fun.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Macbeth, Tolkien, and My Geekster Son, At One Fell Swoop
So what in the hell does “fell” mean, anyway, and what does it have to do with swooping? Is this English?
Well, it is, and it comes from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the scene where Macduff finds out that Macbeth’s killers have murdered his whole family:
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
First time I read this, my sophomore year of high school, I was so familiar with the turn of phrase (euphemism for cliché) that I read right over it. Only recently did I look it up at the Phrase Finder site and realized out that because Shakespeare coined or popularized more clichés than maybe God in the King James Bible (not just phases but words; if Shakespeare couldn’t come up with the right word on a playwright’s deadline he just threw together some syllables that sounded right), I missed the whole point.
The kite is a bird of prey, and the image is of this killer bird swooping down and taking out the chicks and their momma in, well, in one fell swoop. So what is now obviously the only way to express the idea was originally a pretty nifty metaphor that this showoff came up with out of the blue--and the first time I read it, what I took for lazy writing was in fact a genius making something out of nothing (see King Lear; really, it’s like this pushy know-it-all bastard Shakespeare is inside our brains whispering the ways to end our own sentences).
As for “fell,” that’s an old word meaning “terrible, horrible, awful,” that would have long ago gone the way of “avast me hearties” if Shakespeare hadn’t pickled it in formaldehyde for the rest of time by using it in “one fell swoop.” (I’ve read that Elizabethan English generally sounded like Wallace Beery as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, which is neither here nor there until you start thinking of Moses in the King James, Queen Elizabeth I, or Edmund Spenser talking like drunken pirates, in which case it’s kind of fun.)
I was talking this over with my son Sam, a college kid, gamester, and self-described nerd who reads and writes fantasy stories, and he tells me that “fell” is used all the time by fantasy writers, who (again because of overbearing whims of a trailblazing genius) are driven to cram old-sounding words into their books.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a Middle English scholar at Oxford who came by his tick of using archaic language in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings honestly. This was his academic turf, and though I’ve never been able to get far in his stuff, and I pretty much hate what strikes me as the cuteness of the language in the books, I don’t begrudge his use of it, since that was the world he chose to write about, an imagined archaic landscape.
As for everybody else these days who uses this meaning of “fell” outside of “one fell swoop,” I they should pay me a dollar for each time they fall.
Well, it is, and it comes from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the scene where Macduff finds out that Macbeth’s killers have murdered his whole family:
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
First time I read this, my sophomore year of high school, I was so familiar with the turn of phrase (euphemism for cliché) that I read right over it. Only recently did I look it up at the Phrase Finder site and realized out that because Shakespeare coined or popularized more clichés than maybe God in the King James Bible (not just phases but words; if Shakespeare couldn’t come up with the right word on a playwright’s deadline he just threw together some syllables that sounded right), I missed the whole point.
The kite is a bird of prey, and the image is of this killer bird swooping down and taking out the chicks and their momma in, well, in one fell swoop. So what is now obviously the only way to express the idea was originally a pretty nifty metaphor that this showoff came up with out of the blue--and the first time I read it, what I took for lazy writing was in fact a genius making something out of nothing (see King Lear; really, it’s like this pushy know-it-all bastard Shakespeare is inside our brains whispering the ways to end our own sentences).
As for “fell,” that’s an old word meaning “terrible, horrible, awful,” that would have long ago gone the way of “avast me hearties” if Shakespeare hadn’t pickled it in formaldehyde for the rest of time by using it in “one fell swoop.” (I’ve read that Elizabethan English generally sounded like Wallace Beery as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, which is neither here nor there until you start thinking of Moses in the King James, Queen Elizabeth I, or Edmund Spenser talking like drunken pirates, in which case it’s kind of fun.)
I was talking this over with my son Sam, a college kid, gamester, and self-described nerd who reads and writes fantasy stories, and he tells me that “fell” is used all the time by fantasy writers, who (again because of overbearing whims of a trailblazing genius) are driven to cram old-sounding words into their books.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a Middle English scholar at Oxford who came by his tick of using archaic language in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings honestly. This was his academic turf, and though I’ve never been able to get far in his stuff, and I pretty much hate what strikes me as the cuteness of the language in the books, I don’t begrudge his use of it, since that was the world he chose to write about, an imagined archaic landscape.
As for everybody else these days who uses this meaning of “fell” outside of “one fell swoop,” I they should pay me a dollar for each time they fall.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Can a New Brand Save Chrysler? The Dodge Fallopian
All right, my wife agrees that the Dodge Ram truck logo looks exactly
like a diagram of a uterus and fallopian tubes. Did gender confusion
play a role in the fall of Chrysler? Is it Ram Tough or Fallopian
Tough? Should Fiat drop macho and go feminist? I believe
MaryElizabeth would buy a Fallopian pick up just to make a political
statement--would anyone care to join her?
like a diagram of a uterus and fallopian tubes. Did gender confusion
play a role in the fall of Chrysler? Is it Ram Tough or Fallopian
Tough? Should Fiat drop macho and go feminist? I believe
MaryElizabeth would buy a Fallopian pick up just to make a political
statement--would anyone care to join her?
Friday, July 3, 2009
The Price of Breath Is Inhaling
Driving up the Carolina coast for Fourth of July at the beach, we passed miles and miles of Camp Lejeune, home of the U.S. Marines.
This stretch of road is truly Marineland--marquees on churches, grocery stores, dry cleaners, and hamburger stands repeated the same reminder: "Freedom is not free."
This notion first entered my consciousness in the rowdy junior high school I attended in my hometown in Kansas, where our beleaguered principal's motto, warning, and repeated incantation warding off the spirits of disorder was "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
In junior high, I could see the usefulness of this idea, just as I can see how people born without any bones in their body would need to wear a straitjacket to be able to stand up. If you have no self-discipline, I can understand how something like the Marine Corps could provide the exoskeleton you'd need to survive while you were getting your act together.
And six decades of life in America has taught me the light and dark sides of how freedom plays out in this country.
The price of Thomas Jefferson is Sally Hemings.
The price of Abraham Lincoln is the Civil War.
The price of Mark Twain is Ernest Hemingway.
The price of John Ford movies is Wounded Knee.
The price of Fred Astaire is the Great Depression.
The price of the Marx Brothers is the Three Stooges.
The price of Jon Stewart is Dick Cheney.
The price of the Sixties is having to listen to Lee Greenwood sing "God Bless the U.S.A." for the 40 years thereafter.
All in all I believe it's been worth it. But even now, after all these years, I still object to the notion of a trade off for freedom. When Greenwood whines that he's "proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free," it's like the old fart in Hard Day's Night stuck in the train car with the Beatles, grousing about having to have fought the war for punks like them. Says John Lennon, "I bet you're sorry you won."
There is no price to pay for real freedom. It is inherently priceless. In a slave society it's possible to buy your freedom; in a free society you get it by waking up each morning.
If you listen to Bob Dylan and think "Like a Rolling Stone" is about how hard it is to lose everything, rather than how absolutely liberating it is, you haven't got a handle on what freedom is about. He's not just asking a snide question. He's having an orgasm:
How does it feel
How does it feel
Oh, how does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone
Have a happy Fourth.
This stretch of road is truly Marineland--marquees on churches, grocery stores, dry cleaners, and hamburger stands repeated the same reminder: "Freedom is not free."
This notion first entered my consciousness in the rowdy junior high school I attended in my hometown in Kansas, where our beleaguered principal's motto, warning, and repeated incantation warding off the spirits of disorder was "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
In junior high, I could see the usefulness of this idea, just as I can see how people born without any bones in their body would need to wear a straitjacket to be able to stand up. If you have no self-discipline, I can understand how something like the Marine Corps could provide the exoskeleton you'd need to survive while you were getting your act together.
And six decades of life in America has taught me the light and dark sides of how freedom plays out in this country.
The price of Thomas Jefferson is Sally Hemings.
The price of Abraham Lincoln is the Civil War.
The price of Mark Twain is Ernest Hemingway.
The price of John Ford movies is Wounded Knee.
The price of Fred Astaire is the Great Depression.
The price of the Marx Brothers is the Three Stooges.
The price of Jon Stewart is Dick Cheney.
The price of the Sixties is having to listen to Lee Greenwood sing "God Bless the U.S.A." for the 40 years thereafter.
All in all I believe it's been worth it. But even now, after all these years, I still object to the notion of a trade off for freedom. When Greenwood whines that he's "proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free," it's like the old fart in Hard Day's Night stuck in the train car with the Beatles, grousing about having to have fought the war for punks like them. Says John Lennon, "I bet you're sorry you won."
There is no price to pay for real freedom. It is inherently priceless. In a slave society it's possible to buy your freedom; in a free society you get it by waking up each morning.
If you listen to Bob Dylan and think "Like a Rolling Stone" is about how hard it is to lose everything, rather than how absolutely liberating it is, you haven't got a handle on what freedom is about. He's not just asking a snide question. He's having an orgasm:
How does it feel
How does it feel
Oh, how does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone
Have a happy Fourth.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
The Trees Know Where Your Children Sleep
The old woman was paranoid. When they would pass a flatbed truck carrying goods protected by a tarp, she'd tell her daughter, "There's poison under there. Radioactive poison. They don't want you to know what it is."
Taxes were part of the conspiracy. "Why do they make us pay these taxes? It's not their money, it's our money. Who do they think we are their personal bankers skablanker money not theirs gabearus not fair to us badonkus worked for it and we should get to keepitkabeepit. I don't want to pay for all this stuff and it makes me mad doesn't it make you mad?"
"No, I'm not mad, because my money is going to pay for the national parks and I like the national parks."
"What?!"
"My money is all going to the national parks and that's where I want it to go."
"It doesn't work that way! They take your money and they use it the way they want to."
"Not mine they don't. Mine all goes to the national parks."
"You can't say where it goes. They take the money and do what they want with it."
"Not mine. I say mine goes where I want it to go."
"But you can't do that!"
"Yes, I can, and I'm happy doing it. You're the one who's sitting there having the heart attack, not me."
Was your dad as paranoid as your mother?
"Daddy worried all the time. He worried about us when we rode our bikes in the street. He worried when we climbed trees that we would fall out. He worried about things that logically might happen. But he didn't think the tree was going to suck us into its innards."
It's all part of their plan. The trees inhale the children, and then they fall on the house.
"That's how mother would have seen it--'That damned tree didn't fall on the house, it snuck over and jumped on it.'"
Taxes were part of the conspiracy. "Why do they make us pay these taxes? It's not their money, it's our money. Who do they think we are their personal bankers skablanker money not theirs gabearus not fair to us badonkus worked for it and we should get to keepitkabeepit. I don't want to pay for all this stuff and it makes me mad doesn't it make you mad?"
"No, I'm not mad, because my money is going to pay for the national parks and I like the national parks."
"What?!"
"My money is all going to the national parks and that's where I want it to go."
"It doesn't work that way! They take your money and they use it the way they want to."
"Not mine they don't. Mine all goes to the national parks."
"You can't say where it goes. They take the money and do what they want with it."
"Not mine. I say mine goes where I want it to go."
"But you can't do that!"
"Yes, I can, and I'm happy doing it. You're the one who's sitting there having the heart attack, not me."
Was your dad as paranoid as your mother?
"Daddy worried all the time. He worried about us when we rode our bikes in the street. He worried when we climbed trees that we would fall out. He worried about things that logically might happen. But he didn't think the tree was going to suck us into its innards."
It's all part of their plan. The trees inhale the children, and then they fall on the house.
"That's how mother would have seen it--'That damned tree didn't fall on the house, it snuck over and jumped on it.'"
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Downsizing Lucky
We've got our two dogs and five cats moved into the cottage. They all fit in 800 square feet, but moving from one room to another is complicated, particularly for the kittens.
These two are maturing, but have not outgrown chasing each other pell mell across the floor plan, which in the big house posed no problem, but in the cottage requires planning beyond these guys' capabilities.
Lucky is the big furry oversensitive fly in their ointment. Like most of our animals, this dog is a rescue from the pound, picked off death row by my wife with no regard for his past history. We know Lucky is scared of thunderstorms and that he, for whatever reasons, can't abide large black dogs.
We believe that somewhere in his private past he was captured, taken to an undisclosed location by terrorist cats, and tortured within an inch of his young life. He has been marked forever by some such horrible experience, because any time one of the cats gets within 20 feet of him he curls his lip and snarls viciously. Every time he does it we tell him to get over it, but he never has.
In our big former home the two kittens on a tear had plenty of room to move, but in the cottage, every chase path invariably leads right over the top of Lucky, who explodes in a paroxysm of rage, panic, and barking.
Doesn't faze the kittens a bit. They scramble over him as if he were one of the better special effects in a horror movie.
For poor Lucky, though, this is real life, so, rather than yelling at him, we give him whatever comfort we can.
These two are maturing, but have not outgrown chasing each other pell mell across the floor plan, which in the big house posed no problem, but in the cottage requires planning beyond these guys' capabilities.
Lucky is the big furry oversensitive fly in their ointment. Like most of our animals, this dog is a rescue from the pound, picked off death row by my wife with no regard for his past history. We know Lucky is scared of thunderstorms and that he, for whatever reasons, can't abide large black dogs.
We believe that somewhere in his private past he was captured, taken to an undisclosed location by terrorist cats, and tortured within an inch of his young life. He has been marked forever by some such horrible experience, because any time one of the cats gets within 20 feet of him he curls his lip and snarls viciously. Every time he does it we tell him to get over it, but he never has.
In our big former home the two kittens on a tear had plenty of room to move, but in the cottage, every chase path invariably leads right over the top of Lucky, who explodes in a paroxysm of rage, panic, and barking.
Doesn't faze the kittens a bit. They scramble over him as if he were one of the better special effects in a horror movie.
For poor Lucky, though, this is real life, so, rather than yelling at him, we give him whatever comfort we can.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Luckymuck
I just brought the dogs in from walking.
At the walking trail where I take the Sophie and Lucky some asshole kids had dumped the garbage can into the creek. I crawled halfway down the embankment and hauled the can up out of the ravine, just so I would have somewhere to dump Lucky's shit.
Lucky is the poopmeister; he lays out about three loads per walk, great big bulky handfuls of it. I say handfuls, because the best way to deal with this stuff is take a plastic bag, turn it inside out, pick up the shit with your hands, and then turn the bag inside out. This approach gives you the heft, warmth, and smell of the shit without having to squish it through your fingers.
So Lucky just by himself is a three-bag dog. Happily, Sophie is good for only one dump a walk, and she takes them back in the bushes where no one will notice, so I don't bother to pick hers up.
Lucky lays his out on sidewalk (all he's lacking is his own personal logo and brand, something like "Luckymuck" with little handcrafted signs saying "Stomp your Nikes in this pile!") and so I'm obligated to pick up after him. Then I throw the bags of shit in the garbage can, and then the kids dump the can in the creek. In East Tennessee, where I live, this is called "recycling."
At the walking trail where I take the Sophie and Lucky some asshole kids had dumped the garbage can into the creek. I crawled halfway down the embankment and hauled the can up out of the ravine, just so I would have somewhere to dump Lucky's shit.
Lucky is the poopmeister; he lays out about three loads per walk, great big bulky handfuls of it. I say handfuls, because the best way to deal with this stuff is take a plastic bag, turn it inside out, pick up the shit with your hands, and then turn the bag inside out. This approach gives you the heft, warmth, and smell of the shit without having to squish it through your fingers.
So Lucky just by himself is a three-bag dog. Happily, Sophie is good for only one dump a walk, and she takes them back in the bushes where no one will notice, so I don't bother to pick hers up.
Lucky lays his out on sidewalk (all he's lacking is his own personal logo and brand, something like "Luckymuck" with little handcrafted signs saying "Stomp your Nikes in this pile!") and so I'm obligated to pick up after him. Then I throw the bags of shit in the garbage can, and then the kids dump the can in the creek. In East Tennessee, where I live, this is called "recycling."
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