Permanent Qui Vive

Wherein I imitate and flatter

Hugh — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:47:54 +0000

pace Ken’s “Best Line of the Day, so far” and Eric Zorn’s “Fine Lines“

Speaking of “Memorial Stadiums” and their relationship to the First World War:

That is a concept easy to forget in a time when stadium names change with the expiration of a business deal. It used to be that they named a stadium to honor the dead. Now, they name a stadium to honor whoever shows up with the dead presidents. – Ivan Maisel

Posted in Alumni Affairs, Commerce, Memes, Sports I know little about

Wherein I return to the fold

Hugh — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:42:03 +0000

Now that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0 for the iPhone, I might as well use it to post something.

Today was devoted to the leaves. We seem to have about twice as many trees in our backyard as anyone else in the neighorhood. Because I’m such a softy, and don’t require my daughters to help me with the raking and bagging, it falls to me alone to fill as many bags as I can as quickly as I can.

But first, it was time to get some lawn bags at the local Home Depot. I was a lot more focused on the task at hand than I usually am upon entering a home improvement store. It also helped that the front was filled with Christmas junk, which is the easiest thing in the world for me to avoid. However, it is not that way for everyone: I saw a family picking up a plastic tree. How do you countenance that whe it is seventy degrees outside, and not even the Fifteenth of November? I wish that I could report that the family seemed so full of Christmas cheer, that it was obvious why they were carting around a tree that won’t degrade for the next 150,000 years. But I cannot. The dad had a thousand-yard stare, and the boy was whining about not being able to help carry. Merry Christmas.

For those of us still living in the fall season, it was back to finding those elusive bags. Aha! There they are. Wait – those are the ones I want, but they’re clear. Who needs clear lawn bags? Are they for display purposes for your neighbors? To impress the trash pickup crew? To assure all and sundry that there are no body parts in that garbage can? Whatever. I will stick with the traditional opaque noir version with orange extendible handles.

Having blown the majority of the leaves into little russet continents a couple of days ago, what remained for me was to break out the leaf sucker. It being electric, it is not powerful enough to quickly pick up anything but the lightest of leaf-like objects. I ended up stopping after conquering North and South America, and wishing that I was a better Risk player.

Because our subdivision is full of rugged Libertarians, there is no street leaf sweeper. That would be too much like pinko-commie socialism. The residents with fewer trees would be constantly at my door, taking me to task like a welfare cheat. So, my replacement activity is stacking full leaf bags as high as my neighbors, so he doesn’t see me as a complete slacker. Fat chance.

It’s supposed to be generally dry this week, and 90% of the leaves are on the ground. I should be able to face the winter with confidence. Eek.

Posted in Holidays, MeMeMe, Things that I'll start and never finish

Wherein I traipse about the musical leaves

Hugh — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:28:31 +0000

There’s been a great coincidence this week: the major leaf-fall in the backyard has coincided with what, apparently, is going to be a string of cool and sunny days. This means that I can get the leaves up before the final slide into the cold and wet of what passes for late Fall around these parts. And, like Angus Podgorny, I don’t have to do it all in one go.

I’ve had Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” in my head for most of the morning. Everyone has a song to which they think they know the lyrics, but upon further examination, it turns out that they are wrong. [the technical term for these are mondegreens.] I have the opposite thoughts about the chorus to this song. The actual words are

Hey, hey, hey,
Ba de ya, say do you remember,
Ba de ya, dancing in September?
Ba de ya, never was a cloudy day.

For years, I thought I was missing something in those first three syllables (“party on”?) I guess not, it could be a “reverse mondegreen.” BTW, I love Pomplamoose’s cover of the song. WARNING: Once you click on the link, you will be forced to listen to the song at least a hundred times, then seek out EWF’s original, with maybe a detour into Kool & the Gang. Or so the doctors tell me.

Posted in Music

Wherein I summarize this year’s Hallowe’en

Hugh — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:41:50 +0000

And now it’s November.

The family spent the weekend in Ohio catching up with friends. I want to thank Jeanne and family for hosting us as we attempted to close out a quite surreal portion of our lives. I hope that most of the candy wrappers were mine and not my childrens’.

The kids went as a bat and Athena. The Bat was pretty easy to recognize, though she did remind me of Dracula in that Bugs Bunny cartoon (“Abraca Pocus!”, “Hocus Cadabra!”, “Newport News!”) Daughter #2 as the Greek Goddess had to be explained to people, especially as she was the one who thought of the costume: toga, plastic helmet, and stuffed owl. They trick-or-treated in a great, historic, neighborhood: close-together houses all near the street made for very convenient movement. We started late, and many of the houses had run out of candy, so the haul was less than in previous years, but the girls are old enough now not to be completely focused on the swag.

Actually, the Wife was the one who took them around, allowing me to get caught up, and not be completely anti-social. [Note to Self: You have to see Rocky Horror Picture show one of these days.]

We passed on to a second party, from which we had to depart early (girls’ exhaustion), but wish we could have stayed longer: the house is in a neighborhood populated with Seventh Day Adventists, and so almost no one trick-or-treats. This family makes up for it by going overboard: Christmas-level decorations on the outside, double digit tiki-torches on the front lawn, and very realistic body parts scattered about the house. [Note to Self: Actual costume next year, buddy.]

On a parallel note, the Girls have fallen in love with the parts of the Assassins cast album that we played in the car on the way home. The Wife, not always successfully, had to keep her hand on the volume button to edit out, “Shit, I shot it.” We blithely talked about the Kennedy assassination and counterfactual novels while bumbling along on OH-605. In addition we spent last night thumbing through Wikipedia learning about Charles J. Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz. We like to keep it light in our house.

Posted in Alumni Affairs, Arts and Entertainment, The Girls

Wherein I fail to see the logic

Hugh — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:47:52 +0000

The nearest McDonald’s to us was just levelled and renovated. I haven’t been inside yet, but today I went through the drive through, since I was hungry and had $2.25 in change. As I get to the point where I am the next person in line, I notice a sign directly in front of me: “Please have your order ready”. At this point, I cannot see the big menu listing all of the items for sale. So, how can I have my order ready if I can’t see the menu before I get up to the squawk box? And if I have my order ready, why do I need the full menu?

Posted in Glorious Food

Wherein I lament the deaccessionary process

Hugh — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:33:32 +0000

Why do I think that [with] every book that I throw/give away, I become a less interesting person?
As the Wife and I are both recovering academics, we have a lot of books between us. Since we’ve moved back to Indiana, a concerted effort has been made to cull the things that we really don’t want. I don’t say “need”, because none of these books do we need.

But how can you throw away the five-volume “A History of Private Life” that we gathered over the course of years and three different purchases? I have yet to read even one of the chapters, but giving it to the local rummage seems such a waste. I don’t regret the money spent as much as I mourn the loss of the person that I really wanted to be at one point in my life.

Others have written far more eloquently than I about their relationships to their libraries. Those tomes are found in the “books on books” section of your local librairie.
Posted in Books, MeMeMe, Things that I'll start and never finish

Wherein I opine on Baseball

Hugh — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:50:46 +0000

Wandering through the library yesterday, I happened upon Ken Burns’ Baseball series, which I haven’t watched in years. Its (original?) broadcast was one of the signal events of our early married days in Hyde Park, even though I would consider myself a marginal fan of the game, and the Wife not at all. I noticed that none of the episodes were checked out, so I picked up the first four innings.

The first thing you notice is how much of a historical artifact it already is. The Coke-bottle glasses and mid-80s fashions on Daniel Okrent, for example. More importantly, the tone of all the talking heads seems a world away. They talk about the game as if it is a self-evident fact that baseball is the pre-eminent game, how it is a shared experience for the country, how professional ball players “don’t look that different from the rest of us.” ["The only game where the defense has the ball"? Cricket, anyone?] However, some things never change: cheating players and venial owners. I wanted to show the documentary to my girls, and they looked at me as if I was going to show them “Burmese Financial Accounting: A Canadian View.” So much for having another Doris Kearns Goodwin on my hands.
Posted in Arts and Entertainment, The Girls

Wherein I contemplate arboreal action

Hugh — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:33:22 +0000

Since the Wife has already begun to cycle Christmas songs through her iTunes account, I might as well post something before the Fall ends.

Over our den there is what appears to be a black walnut tree. It tells us the Fall is coming because it starts shedding golf-ball-sized green orbs with a spongy outside and a hard walnut inside. In practice, this means that we have a slow-motion hail storm whenever we gather together as a family, lasting from the middle of September until Thanksgiving.

I assume that, were I crafty, I could do something with several hundred fruits and make a killing on etsy. But the things are heavy, and therefore can only fit in the trash can in groups of twenty or thirty at a time. Ergo, they end up being a real pain in the tuchus. On the other hand, cutting down the tree entirely is expensive, and will make an eyesore not in keeping with the goal of selling our house in the next year. So we live with it, as it slowly destroys our new roof.

However, now that I look up the black walnut at The Bane Of Teachers Everywhere, I find that I may have a gold mine on my hands, both for now and later. The fruits, once the husks are removed, are edible, and the wood itself is highly prized. In fact, the way to easily remove the husk, is to bang it with a hammer through a hole in a piece of plywood. This bears thinking about.

I think what it comes down to is time. I could either keep up with the mowing and the raking OR get all Little House on the Prairie. But not both. [Hmm. Is there such a thing as sugared walnuts, and if so, would they make a nice Christmas gift?]

Despite the never-ending outdoor chores, which, luckily, I am doing at the same rate as my neighbors, this has been a very nice Autumn. The lack of employment is very troubling, but I have a couple of prospects. The kind of thing that, if I get the interview, I’ll be a leading candidate. But the interview is the difficult part. I’ve gotten offered my two previous jobs in the fall, so the time of year is full of good karma. Which is odd, Autumn being the season of dying leaves and colder temperatures and all.

The parents come for a couple of days tomorrow, to give us a little break, as it is the kids’ break. I hope to bear down and focus on the month ahead, or before I know it, it will be Thanksgiving.
Posted in Glorious Food, SCIENCE!, Things I don't know anything about

Wherein I grasp at straws

Hugh — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:05:36 +0000

One of the awful things about having that little calendar widget on my blog, is that everytime I look at it it shows me in vivid detail all of the days that I haven’t blogged, not even a little. Not even just posting an article I’ve read, adding “huh” or “hmm” or “meh”. Actually, those articles go directly to my Facebook page. Luckily, my tweets are now cross-posted to your my left, your right, so I can convince myself that I actually did accomplish something on a day-to-day basis. And I know that the most boring thing on the internet is reading someone’s apology for their posting/non-posting. So, enough of that.

The following sentence, coming from the Wife, should at least be the start of a post.

There is no “g” in Protestant.

Hmm. Let me think about that.
Posted in Things that I'll start and never finish, Uncategorized

Wherein I break in my first meme

Hugh — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:52:55 +0000

Yow, this is going to be tough. As important as books have been in my life, even to the extent of managing two different bookstores and two stints in graduate school, my life hasn’t been a bookish life. Tomes that I tended to read as a youngster tended to the non-fiction side of things, trivia in particular. The Book of Strange Facts and Useless Information, The Dictionary of Misinformation, and The Bathroom Almanac were formative experiences. Books have tended to be means to an end (sorry, Jeanne!) rather than a process of “read, mark, and inwardly digest”. That having been said, I’ll try to cleave as close as I can to the spirit of this meme, if not the letter, which I received from harri3t.

1. Most memorable place/experience reading a book?

Aha! I just thought of this one. I must have been either 10 or 11 years old. My family was vacationing in Switzerland during the week between Christmas and New Year’s(which is a topic for another post entirely). At that time I was a big spy novel freak, especially Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum (before he started issuing novels from beyond the grave.) I must have been given a copy of Forsyth’s The Shepherd, a slight bit of a short story about a pilot flying home on Christmas Eve. Not something you would expect from the writer of The Odessa File, and other classics of that now-outmoded genre.

The descriptions of the quiet that the pilot, who is running out of fuel while flying over the snow-covered landscape, are arresting. And as I was reading this, looking out of the hotel window over the similarly-coated German Alps, I was as close to a narrator as I believe I’ve ever gotten. Then my gaze would move to the drum kit of The Varadi Trio, the band that provided the nightly entertainment at this hotel, and I’d “come in from the cold.”

The hotel also had a visit from Der Weihnachtsmann who came with a little black Moor helper whose name I’ve forgotten. Despite my years, the American in me shuddered just a little bit, almost as if he was in blackface. Christmas Night the hotel staff brought baskets of fruit to all of the children’s rooms. The little American brat wondered, “Damnit, we’re in Switzerland! Where’s the chocolate??!” I think I even peeled an orange to see if it was a chocolate orange.

We went to Midnight Mass in German in this shoebox church at Rigi Kaltbad and, being a snotty 11-year-old American, I kept on thinking “Why are we going to Mass, when I can’t even understand the words? How is this a good thing? THERE ARE NO COGNATES!” As you can tell, I was a fascinating youngster.

There are also some funny memories which I’ll save for another post. The book, however, I completely associate with that time and that place. Pick it up this Christmas.

OK, it’s late, and I don’t have good stories at hand for the other three questions. I’ll come back to it later.
Posted in Books, Memes, Other Blogs Other Rooms, Personal History