Dumpster Diving Etiquette

To all you modern-day gleaners out there:

There's not a whole lot I can do to stop you from rooting through the boxes I put out for the trash pickup, short of sitting on my porch with a shotgun full of rock salt, which I ain't gonna do. I would request that you fucking clean up after yourself, though. I've already packed those boxes once, okay? I don't want to do it again and again. Don't leave the shit spread all over the yard; you're like a fucking dog going after a bone.

And here's another tip: those electronic items sitting out there? Yeah...those are broken, you dumb fuck. I would think that if you knew how to repair a modem, you wouldn't have to resort to digging through other people's trash. And I noticed you ignored the books. God forbid you might accidentally be exposed to some sort of educational materials and end up with some unwanted self-reflection. You might even become embarrassed! Can't have that.

I sure hope I remember to disconnect the car battery from the next shiny metallic object I put next to the curb. You're lucky I'm not using the boxes as bait, asshole, or you'd be on a hook in my garage while I headed to the store to get the other ingredients for my barbecue.

Keep your fucking paws to yourself.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

You a Go-Gos fan? Oh, well.

So we were on the road this weekend along with all of the other vacationers – or as I like to call it: the parade of assholes, because no one else drives exactly like I do. I do a steady four miles-per-hour over the posted speed limit for several reasons: I get there a little faster; it tends to keep me in between the packs of Sunday drivers and NASCAR wannabes; I’m not going to get pulled over for doing 59 in a posted 55.

The more I travel, the more I realize that speed limits are completely subjective. I’ve been on highways with a posted speed limit of 70 that dropped to 45 for no other reason than it happened to intersect the border of some podunk little settlement out in the middle of nowhere. Just because we happen to tangentially enter your economic prosperity zone should not give you the power to arbitrarily cut the speed limit by almost a full half. Nothing else has changed, you morons! The road surface is the same, the sight lines are the same, and you have nothing so complicated as a cloverleaf intersection to negotiate. You have one exit with two ramps. Just extend the off-ramp a quarter mile towards oncoming traffic so those that are forced to visit your Town That Time Forgot can get over, slow down, and start plotting their getaway without inconveniencing those of us that have real destinations to get to. Similarly, you may want to install a steam catapult on the on-ramp so those lucky enough to find their way back out of your ‘burg don’t have to strain their cylinders in achieving escape velocity.

Similarly, the last time I lost the workplace lottery and had to visit Alabama, their Department of Transportation had just finished a beautiful six-lane highway between Birmingham, which we flew into, and Tuscaloosa, where our home office was. It was quite possibly the most perfect road I’ve ever driven on. Three outbound lanes with abundant lighting, clearly-marked lanes, comprehensive and helpful signage, plenty of merging leeway on exits, and nary a chuckhole in sight. What was the speed limit on this marvel of motoring? Fifty-fucking-five. It only added to the rankling that I had rented a brand-new Dodge Charger and couldn’t open ‘er up (I eschew my usual four-mile-over rule when I have an absurd amount of horsepower).

In other vacation news, we recently made our way over to Wilmington, NC so I could revisit the USS North Carolina. My grandfather served on that battleship in WW2, and was very instrumental in 1) saving her from the scrap-yard and establishing her in Wilmington as a Memorial, and 2) presiding over the group that organized the reunions of her veterans, so it’s very close to my family’s heart.

A few random military facts:

She is a fast battleship of the NORTH CAROLINA class, with nine 16-inch/45-caliber guns, and twenty 5-inch/ 38-caliber guns.

She participated in every major Pacific battle, earning 15 battle stars, and only lost ten men.

She stayed afloat even after a torpedo blew an 18x39 foot hole in her port side.

She was built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and often returned there for adjustments during her shakedown period. During this time, Walter Winchell gave her the nickname “The Showboat” after a ship in a popular Broadway musical. She was in port at the yard on December 7, 1941.

A few personal observations:

The most-heard comment from new visitors has got to be “I couldn’t have served on this ship; I’d always be lost!” No, you idiot…you wouldn’t. First of all, the tour has been laid out so you see as much as possible. That does not necessarily mean it’s the most direct or easiest route between any two areas. Two: you’re only going to be here for a few hours. If you’d lived on board, you’d’ve learned your way around in a hurry.

Battleships are no place to serve if you’re fat. The hatchways are small and mounted in the middle of the bulkhead, the access tubes are about the size of a bendy straw, and many of the work-spaces are the same dimensions as an old telephone booth. Most of the “lost” tourists could not have gotten around the ship at all if new doorways hadn’t been cut here and there.

The North Carolina was a floating city in that she was outfitted to spend months at sea. In addition to the expected magazines, crew spaces, and officer quarters, she had a laundry, tailor, cobbler, barber, dentist, and a full machine shop (among other duties, she acted as Destroyer support, and was expected to be able to make repairs to all but the biggest or most delicate equipment).

The tour has signs posted to let visitors know what they’re looking at, and these signs include official information along with relevant comments from former crew. As happens so frequently in large organizations, they are often at odds. For example, the sign at the Master At Arms’ station informed us that one of the duties of the MAA was to make sure there was no “brewing, selling, buying, or drinking of alcohol,” while the sign at the dentist office had an offhanded comment from a former dental assistant about how they had set up two stills to turn the dentist’s denatured alcohol into booze.

One concern that had been addressed (that hadn’t even occurred to me) was how to prevent these “floating cities” from leaving a trail of garbage wherever they went (not only unsightly, but easily spotted by enemy planes). To address this, the North Carolina had a giant grinder that mulched garbage into tiny bits, then shunted them out under the propellers to be dispersed. That impressed me. I expected the incinerator (though I pity the crew that had to bunk beside it!), but not some huge Dispose-all.

I enjoyed the visit, and was especially excited that they had at last made the CIC (Combat Information Center) a part of the tour. My grandfather was a radarman, so I finally got to see where he worked. The North Carolina was (and still is) an amazing ship.

'pon My Oath

I have recently been reading a series of books written in a very fanciful, idealized manner - somewhat in the style of Dumas - and have come to the conclusion that some new oaths are needed. By way of example, several of the characters in the story use “Blood of the Horse!” as an expression of great surprise or agitation. Now this is a wonderful phrase, but can’t really be used effectively outside the scope of the novels. So I began to speculate about what makes for good oaths.

To begin, then, it must be a common referent. It would be all well and good for me to adopt “Cracks and Shards!” from the same novels, but while others may be able to infer the depth of feeling, they wouldn’t understand the reference, so it loses efficacy as an oath.

A friend of mine once conducted an experiment in which he used “Cows” as his oath – as in “Oh cows! The server crashed again.” The purpose of the experiment was to see how long before he heard someone else use it (it was a few months). Cows are, indeed, a common referent, but as an oath, it lacked a certain something. On reflection, I decided that the something was an element of action.

Upon this realization, my first instinct was to append a suitable adjective to my friend’s oath. While “exploding cows” meets the requirements, it is far too silly to be of any practical use. This led me to modify the second requirement thusly: it cannot be just any action; there must be some momentous event that is encapsulated by the oath. Regarding the examples from the novels, “Cracks and Shards” portends a certain powerful magical sphere being broken, the effect being that the entire society would be cast into chaos. Momentous, indeed.

There is no shortage of significant events to choose from, but “by Katrina!” would quickly become dated, and also would not necessarily bring to mind the hurricane, particularly if you had a friend named Katrina, and used it in her presence.

So not only does it need to be a common referent alluding to something significant, it must also withstand the test of time – a generation at least, I would think. In this, oaths are very similar to catchphrases. “23 skidoo!” was popular in the 20s, while “Where’s the beef?” resonates with those of us of Gen X. Both were quite common in their time, but were hardly earth-shattering.

I think this is why the profane has always been fertile ground for oaths. The utterance of a profanity is, by definition, a momentous event, in that it is invoked outside of societal norms. Using a god’s name in your oath is a good way to let the listener know that you are quite serious. I am sure Plato used “By Hera’s tits!” on occasion, and if he didn’t, he should have. I think it would have spiced up the allegory of The Cave tremendously.

Elizabethan oaths included many references to God, ranging from the polite “So God mend me” to the scandalous “‘zounds”, or “God’s wounds.” Our own use of “God damn it” is in the same vein, where we want in some manner to shock the listener, in order for them to understand the depth of feeling that we are ascribing to the event that precipitated the oath.

The difficulty is that profanity is limited. According to George Carlin, there are only seven words that you can’t say on broadcast television: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits. While true when he formulated the list, it’s being winnowed down as sheer repetition blunts the edges. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity.

Now, I certainly have no problem with cursing. Indeed, I enjoy using words effectively, and will not hesitate to use a curse word if I feel that it is most applicable. One can always aspire to these quotes from A Christmas Story:

- “In the heat of battle my father wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan.”

- “My father worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium, a master.”

Alas, very few people can curse this effectively. I’ve posted elsewhere how flexible the word “fuck” can be, and I recall some trial movie where a sidebar was called to determine what, if any, word was an appropriate substitute for a defendant being characterized as an “asshole” (none was found), and I have actually parsed out the various ways of saying “shit,” such as a slow “shhhiiiiiiit” to indicate general apathy or disbelief, as opposed to a very clipped “oh shit!” when I spill hot coffee on my leg. My absolute favorite curse word is “chucklefuck,” because it’s fun to say, and an English friend of mine is fond of “fuckwit.”

Considering other cultures brings up another question on what makes good oaths: Should they be trans-national? The word “fanny” in America is considered to be okay for use in mixed company, while to the English, it is the equivalent of the word “cunt.”

I like perusing flame wars online to see what people come up with. Unfortunately, most people quickly revert to such erudite displays of nuance such as “Fuck you!” “Oh yeah? Well fuck you, too!” Cursing at people, however, while related, is different from using oaths to indicate your own level of surprise, fear, or dedication to a particular course of action or ideal. It should reflect on the speaker rather than the audience.

To that end, “Fuck me” satisfies all of the requirements, but again, it’s been worn rather thin. “On my honor” was useful when people still believed in honor to the point where they would duel over it, but now a charge of libel will result in lawsuits being drawn rather than sabers or pistols.

In David Brin’s novel Earth, natural resources are scarce, and people use the term “Dumpit” as an oath, reflecting the throwaway mentality of prior generations. I like that. I would suspect that the next generation of oaths will be most-influenced by the Internet. I have already heard of the term “404” being used to describe someone’s mental state, much as we now say “The lights are on but nobody’s home.” It would be a very small step to turn something like that inward, and swear “By the blue screen of death, I hate HTML!” Yeah…that’s a little goofy, but you see where I’m going with it.

Perhaps I’m wishing for a return to those adventurous times, at least as presented in fiction, but Cracks and Shards!, it’s a fun exercise nonetheless.

Schlock, Stock, and Two Choking Ferrells

Saw some interesting articles over at IMDB recently. One of them reported that MGM is courting Wall Street investors to raise $600 million to finance their upcoming features. Noted films included Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings prequel, The Hobbit, which should gross at least half of the total investment all by itself. The film is going to be split into two parts, which means that Jackson is taking the time to do it right, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

After dangling that bit of bait, however, MGM listed some other upcoming films, including additional Pink Panther comedies and a remake of the 1980 musical Fame. Now I love Steve Martin, and I love the Pink Panther. Kevin Kline and Jean Reno are always fun to watch, too. But I avoided that movie like Beyoncé Knowles avoids acting lessons. And looking at the box office records, I wasn’t the only one. Why do we need more of these?

And why in the name of all that’s holy does anyone think we need an updated version of Fame? Musicals generally don’t do well at the box office to begin with, and so far, no one has demonstrated any sort of competence in repackaging those films and TV shows we Gen-Xers remember fondly (Miami Vice, anyone?). Who do you think will see this? The way things are now, you could film the auditions and put it up as a reality show – sort of a real-life A Chorus Line - and make more money. Show the finished production as your season finale, then tapdance off to the bank.

MGM spokesman Jeff Pryor is quoted as saying: "In the past, movie studios haven't offered Wall Street the opportunity to participate in their biggest and best films." According to the list you gave us, Jeff, you still aren’t.

In other movie magic news, Advanced Micro Devices recently released their new Ati Radeon graphics card. According to their spokesman, Neil Dessau, “the card will permit directors to control not only the lighting, staging, and dialog of movies digitally but also create virtual actors and easily manipulate their facial expressions.” Jules Urbach, founder of an animation firm says that it is now "possible to bring back actors from the past and realistically put them in new films."

I imagine most people, on hearing news like this, think about seeing their favorite dead actors in new movies without the director relying on spliced in footage, as with Humphrey Bogart in Steve Martin’s comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid), or the flickering “holographic” images of Sir Lawrence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (I thought it was nice that he got a credit). I’m sure that somewhere, some director is already planning a movie starring James Dean, River Phoenix, and Heath Ledger.

As cool as all that would be, I’m fairly cynical about the motives of the studios. They will squeeze every last penny out of a movie, and keep squeezing long after everyone involved in the production has been paid off. That’s why we’re still seeing Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind sixty-nine years after they were first released; they’re still profitable for the studios. But what if it’s an actor or franchise you don’t like?

Let’s take some D-grade actor like Pauly Shore. Yes, he’s still alive. Even more disappointing, he keeps getting movie roles. I bet you that if some studio boss went to him and said “Paulie? We’d like to offer you $100,000 for the rights to use your likeness in perpetuity,” he’d jump on that faster than you can say “Fox cancelled me after only five episodes.”

Or think about the execrable teen “comedies” forced on us every year. Hire a bunch of unknowns for a flat fee; make increasingly-awful sequels; profit. (Come to think of it, that’s the American Pie formula.)

I like new tech as much as the next geeky fanboy, but I would also like some assurance that if Will Ferrell gets a chicken bone lodged in his throat, there will never be another Semi-Pro.

Bull-tiot

I saw recently where a Dr. Ken Smith, a criminology professor at Bucks New University in the UK, is tired of seeing rampant misspellings in his students’ coursework. Rather than insist the University raise its standards for admission, or generally decry the poor educational methods used to teach these students before they reached University, Dr. Smith (who has a ridiculously easy name to spell) has proposed that his fellow professors just ignore the misspellings, and classify them not as wrong, but as acceptable variants.

I’ve actually seen two separate articles about this idiot, and surprisingly, the second one didn’t relate the tale of the English professors at the same university attempting to give him a semi-colon with a letter opener.

Dr. Smythe provided a list of some of his students most commonly-misspelled words. Among them are February and Wednesday. How the fuck do you make it to college without knowing how to spell these? Smeth suggests that we accept ‘Febuary’ and ‘Wensday’ as perfectly fine alternatives. Never mind that February takes its name from a Roman rite of purification called februum, which was held at that time of year. Similarly, Wednesday is Woden’s day, not the day of the cebaceous cyst.

I think Dr. Smiff is just being lazy. He gives an example of a question he gets from his moronic students: “Why is there no ‘e’ in ‘truly’?” His answer? “Well, I don't know. ... You've just got to drop it because people do.” Thanks, asshole. I’m wondering if you would accept “just because” as a legitimate answer on your quizzes.

Here are the rules for appending endings to words with a final “e”, as a three-second Google search could have found for the good Docter:

When adding an ending to a word that ends with a silent e, drop the final e if the ending begins with a vowel – A E I O U:
• advance/advancing judge/judging distribute/distribution

However, if the ending begins with a consonant, keep the final e:
• advance/advancement involve/involvement

If the silent e is preceded by another vowel, drop the e when adding any ending.
• argue/argument argue/argued true/truly

Speaking to Smittttth’s comments, Jack Bovill, chairman of the British-based Spelling Society said “People who have trouble with spelling are punished when it comes to applying for jobs or even filling out forms.” Oh boo-fuckin’-hoo. Sorry, Jack, I just can’t work up a whole lot of sympathy. Next you’ll be telling us that the whole written form of communication is harsh to the illiterate, so all applications should be given orally, with a stenographer on hand to transcribe the answers onto the appropriate line. Or maybe we should dispense with the written word altogether. I’ll meet you in Alexandria; you bring the gas can, and I’ll bring the matches.

I tend to agree with Barbara Wallraff, who writes the Wordcourt column for the Atlantic and King Features Syndicate. "People who spell a lot of words incorrectly either aren't paying attention or don't care. Why change our language to accommodate them?"

And of course, Doktore Tsmithe trots out the new standard cop-out for the intellectually lazy: "In the 21st century, why learn by heart rote spelling when you can just type it into a computer and spell-check?" To which I offer the standard rejoinder: “Because spell-check will knot catch homophones.” God! Can you imagine the bleating this fucker would give out over the bad grammar he’d encounter when all of his students only used spell-check? (And apparently, they’re too lazy to use it even now, since he’s finding so many mistakes.)

Every time there’s an article like this, spelling reformists crawl out of the bookshelves to propose unnecessary schemes and plans to “make English easier.” English is the international business language, and most ‘furriners’ speak it. If it were so difficult, why isn’t Esperanto the international business language? Why not Chinese? Or Basque?

And what scheme should we use? Phonetic? Whose phonemes should take precedence? Is that famous highway Root 66 or Rout 66? Did the three wise men travel a great distance, or were they fighting a conflagration? Because my family in the mountains pronounce them both the same way – afar.

I know that someone who thinks they’re clever will post that fucking ‘ghoti’ crap again. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s supposedly an alternative spelling of “fish,” using the “gh” from “enough,” the “o” from “women,” and the “ti” from “nation.” Let me address this now.

There is no word in English beginning with “gh” where “gh” is pronounced as an “f;” it is always a hard “g.”

Vowels are pronounced long before an intervocalic consonant – that is, a consonant between two vowels. The fact that the “o” in “women” is pronounced as a short “i” is a leftover from Old English, when the word was actually spelled “wimmen.”

Pronouncing “ti” as “sh” only happens when the “ti” is followed by a vowel, as in “action.”

Therefore, “ghoti” can only be pronounced as “goatee.”

I notice that the same proponents of “ghoti” never mention that, by their logic, we could also have "ghoughpteighbteau," where:

P hiccough
O though
T ptomaine
A neigh
T debt
O bureau

Makes English seem a little more elegant when you follow the damn rules, now, doesn’t it?

Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha - THRUST!

There’s a lot going on in the world today: Russia seems determined to egg us onto yet another battle front; people who failed business math, and don’t understand profits as a percentage of investment, get all worked up over oil companies’ 10% “record” profits, while ignoring …say…Microsoft’s 30%; Americans are preparing to hold their noses and vote for a candidate from either of two increasingly similar political parties; China’s hosting of the Olympics keeps exposing the country as one huge Potemkin Village, despite their laughable efforts to hide anything from the media. With this rich buffet of topics, I’d like to wax indignant on something near and dear to my heart…cartoons.

Now, just so you know where I’m coming from, I think the Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons are the apex of animated entertainment. I think The Wall is overrated, and Ralph Bakshi is underappreciated (I liked Cool World, even if Brad Pitt does scrub it off his résumé). I hate the Big Eyes/Small Mouth school of anime, and would pay good money for front row seats to a Heavy Metal vs. Akira showdown, just to watch Den and Taarna rip into the Capsules and Clowns.

So that’s where I stand.

There’s a cable channel called Boomerang that shows classic cartoons. We recently watched a whole lot of this when we visited family, because it kept the kids entertained. To the wee ones, it was simple entertainment; to me, it was a dumping ground for all of the execrable Hanna-Barbera and a.a.p. cartoons ever made. With the single exception of Hong Kong Phooey, I loathe H-B cartoons. They are annoying garbage with idiotic plotlines and vapid characterization. It’s like the creators came up with a list of catch-phrases, then built entire series around them. Or they ripped off popular live-action shows by turning The Honeymooners into The Flintstones, and morphing the Three Stooges’ Curly into Jabberjaw. And does anybody in the world like Popeye? I’ve never met anyone who would cop to liking that cartoon, yet it has its own dedicated block of time on Boomerang.

Don’t even get me started on Scooby-Doo. Yeah yeah…Shaggy’s a stoner and Fred’s useless. Velma is a lesbian and Daphne is a diva. I don’t care. We didn’t even see the ‘classic’ versions; we saw the Scooby-Doo movies with the special guest stars. This tickled me, too: in the opening credits, Scoob and the Gang are shown encountering Batman and Robin, the Harlem Globetrotters, Laurel and Hardy, the Addams Family, and other fairly fun franchises. So who did we get as our special guest star? Jerry Fuckin’ Reed. Don’t get me wrong, I like Smokey & the Bandit as much as the next guy, but come on.

The other kids’ channel we see a lot of is Noggin, because we have a preschooler in the house. So we get treated to soft and fuzzy cartoons like Max and Ruby and Oswald. For the most part, these are okay. They set out to teach values in an easy-to-follow format, with simple characters and uncomplicated plots. That’s fine. I don’t even mind Dora the Explorer (though I’d love to see someone shoot Boots the monkey and mount his head on the wall of their hacienda). The spin-off from Dora, Go, Diego, Go, annoys the shit out of me, though. The only cool thing about the show is Rescue Pack, which can transform into boats, gliders, skateboards, or what have you. That’s a handy gadget with a great geek factor. Supposedly, Diego can talk to the animals, but the creators must not be too sure about this ability, because he never uses it to find out what the hell is going on. The animals he rescues have got to be the stupidest ones on the planet, too. I have seen no less than four episodes where a bird had to be rescued because it got its wing stuck in a rock cleft. One in particular irritated me because a puma or something was creeping up on this poor trapped bird, and Diego drove it away. I was surprised that the next episode wasn’t him having to find the poor starving puma something to eat. What a meddler. The other annoying thing about this series is that the creators keep increasing the drama. They’ve started putting on special episodes on the weekends where Diego has bigger adventures. The first of these was a trip back in time to rescue a dinosaur. How does this make sense? He has to travel back to a time when these creatures weren’t extinct in order to save one of them so he can return to his own time when they’re still extinct? Huh? Didn’t the writers ever read A Sound of Thunder? (And don’t bring up that movie, please.) The “amazing” adventure this weekend involved newly-hatched sea turtles who couldn’t find their way to the ocean because the moon had been struck by a comet and fell out of the sky in pieces.

Really?

Diego has to put the moon back together?

Because of sea turtles, and not the cataclysmic destruction the loss of the moon would cause?

Really?

I just wonder how they’re going to escalate it from here on out. I mean, once you’ve repaired and replaced an orbiting body, helping a tapir stuck in a termite mound isn’t going to be as thrilling, you know? I fully expect to see a preview where Diego takes on the entire Norse pantheon as he attempts to rescue the ravens Hugin and Munin, who have gotten tangled in the ropes binding Odin to the world tree.

Is it too much to ask to get a little classic Warner Brothers every once in a while? I mean, they only have four of their cartoons in the National Film Registry, in addition to having five Academy Award winners (as well as an additional twenty nominated). This compared to none for Hanna Barbera. Most people can’t tell you the name of any one of the Snorks, but everyone can sing ‘Kill the wabbit’.

That’s all, folks.