Come friendly bombs » Backstory

A thousand words about a dumb decade

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:31:22 +0000

As contractually obligated as a blogger, I have found my thoughts turning to the decade just ended and with it the state of things ten years ago today. I doubt it’s unusual that I can recall exactly what I was doing as Y2K failed to deliver any sort of dramatic mayhem, but I count myself lucky that the memory I have is so fond: with some very good friends I rarely see but still treasure I was hiking into the White Mountains of New Hampshire in frigid but bluebird weather for some winter camping. An auspicious beginning to the decade. I seem to recall — I always only seem to recall — that the mood was heady, not only in general but on an individual level; I had recently dug myself clumsily but definitively out of a long-term relationship which had been a serious mess for a long time, and I could see the light at the end of the graduate school tunnel. I had plans. Vague, half-baked, un-gelled plans, most of which would go nowhere, but they were mine.

It must be the rare decade that one can gaze upon retrospectively and think well not much changed in those ten years, but I think any ten-year span, particularly the one in which you finish school, somehow expatriate yourself, marry a Pole, father some simians, and spend it in South America and Slovenia and Bulgaria must be worthy of a lazy look back.

And this is going to be lazy, not only because that is the way that this macro-blogging thing has been trending in the closing days of the zeros (or whatever term we are going to settle upon to refer to these years), but because I am attempting, and mostly succeeding, to write this blog post on my telephone. While I realize that to be saying this in 2010 does not make me all cutting edge or anything, or even probably as pretentious as it makes me feel, it does seem emblematic of something, and I certainly wish the me of January 1, 2000 could have read that sentence written by the me of whatever day this is.

As 2000 dawned my computer, a hand-me-down Mac notebook upon which I would never write a blog post, or indeed visit a website, let alone use to search via Dogpile or employ Napster, was somewhat less capable than the phone upon which I now type. RAM was in shorter supply by a factor of 64; my PowerBook’s hard drive was 20 MB, compared to the 800 times more storage in this telephone, most of which is taken up by music in a format I would not even be aware of for another year. Speaking of mobile phones, I had just acquired my first, a Motorola whose battery was twice the size of the phone I’m telling you about it on.

Last night I scrolled through the music at hand to find something I would have been listening to ten years ago, and the pickings were slim. Plenty of music made it through the Y2K barrier, and in fact many of the compact discs upon which one used to purchase music legally are extant still, boxed up in my Bulgarian basement for no apparent reason, but still I found it difficult to find much that felt emblematic of those days. Beginning in the summer of 2000 and continuing for the next two years or so I underwent a renaissance of music acquisition — almost entirely unrelated to the changing technology, oddly enough — that changed my musical landscape like an ice age clearing a landmass. This was almost certainly related to the wrapping up of that insalubrious relationship, during which music was one of the few areas where we actually got along.

In early 2000 and the months that followed I discovered or had thrust upon me Belle & Sebastian (essentially the soundtrack for the first half of the decade for me), Dan Bern, Camera Obscura, Cinerama, Death Cab For Cutie, The Flaming Lips, The Go-Betweens, Hefner, Low, The Lucksmiths, Magnetic Fields, The New Pornographers, Pulp, what Radiohead was really for, Sigur Ros, Travis, The Wedding Present, Weezer, and the deeper genius of Brian Wilson. Looking at the music I listen to most, there are certain uneroded peaks left behind the receding upheaval that the early part of the decade wrought, but I can’t imagine the landscape without all that rich glacial flour ground out under the pressure of Stuart Murdoch et al.

At New Year’s 1999 I was exactly two years away from obtaining a digital camera and only dimly aware of the proto-existence of such a thing. I would be persuaded by the expense of film and processing in Argentina 18 months later during a particularly formative year in which I took, comparatively, no photographs at all.

A year in advance of that Argentina episode, meaning just a few days after I hiked out from Carter Notch, my father would take me shopping for a Brooks Brothers suit I would wear to a job interview in Japan. My father had precisely half a decade left with us at the time of the suit-buying expedition.

(The suit still fits beautifully, and the two neckties my father chose to go with it remain among my most elegant and favorite ties. In addition to the job interview, I would wear the suit to an all-night Argentine wedding the day after I arrived in the country, which is emblematic of something, too. I would not be married in the suit.)

At the beginning of 2000 I had never visited (nor in most cases particularly thought much about visiting) Argentina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Malta, Poland, the Republic of San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, (possibly?) Switzerland, Turkey, or Uruguay.

All of these omissions amaze me now, but of course the most glaring is that ten years ago Adam did not exist, Alek did not exist — I mean actually DID NOT EXIST, which may seem weird to you, but is almost literally unthinkable for me. For that matter, as far as I was concerned Magda did not exist. Which means that I did not exist ten years ago — that is, so many of those things that define me and my existence now, trivial and profound, did not obtain a simple (and by most accounts, dumb) decade ago.

This situation makes me feel exactly ten years old.

It all makes me think it might be worth sticking around to see if the next decade turns out to be at all interesting.

Wallet poem #1

sgazzetti — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:19:01 +0000

[Poem]
If memory serves, and I usually assume that it does (but am always open to being contradicted), I clipped this poem, one of several still idling aound in my wallet as mentioned below, from Harper’s Weekly in January or February of 1991 while, literally, and I know that ‘literally’ sounds misplaced but really, watching on CNN as Bush the Elder’s tanks rolled into Kuwait and I, as a (reasonably) young soldier myself quite personally was wondering if I would soon be, in person, rolling with them, the fact that my so-called studies of Arabic were still so woefully unfinished notwithstanding.

A year later, with a little more Arabic, after the tungsten/depleted uranium dust had more or less settled, I gently dredged this creaséd poem from a cloudy photo pouch intended for pictures of loved ones if any from a flattened wallet in some wrinkled desert BDUs in row 28 of some 747 leased by some airline to some branch of the U.S miliary to read it as we approached what turned out to be, I recall vividly, Rome, en route to Kuwait City, all of us, Rashid-al-Akbar and Rajul-al-Sharq and Tariq Lueck and myself with our stupid clattery M-16s jammed between our knees because god forbid our dumb guns, sorry, WEAPONS, go as checked luggage.

Oh, and you guys with the dumb guns between your knees? That’s a no smoking section. Yeah. Soldiers smoke. Why should they ever not?

CARGO CULT OF THE SOLSTICE AT HADRIAN’S WALL

By George Starbuck. From Grand Street, No. 36, a quarterly published in New York City. Starbuck, the author of eight books of poetry, live[d] in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

*This form is recommended for beginners. It is as simple as it looks. Fourteen characters to a line. Difficulty arises only when a footnote is required. Then the poet must contrive a thirteen-character line in place of the canonical fourteener, so as to leave room for the asterisk. Most poems in the form evade the difficulty by doing without footnotes, save for poems like this, which are designed to be put in textbooks.

One thing cheese will not improve

sgazzetti — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:32:03 +0000

For any who never had the joy of working in the food service industry, a “sheet tray” or “sheet pan” is a heavy-gauge aluminium rectangle with a high lip and far more uses than simply turning out large, flat cakes, the function for which it was designed. A “full sheet”, at 18 x 26 inches (45 x 66 cm) is rather enormous and unwieldy, but the “half-sheet” is easy enough to handle and indispensable for many kitchen tasks.

The summer following my tenure as Salad Boy I graduated to Head of Food Preparation at the same seafood restaurant on Block Island. This was a good job as restaurant jobs went. I had daily tasks to perform at my own pace within banker’s hours, and I was almost entirely insulated from the frenzy of weekend dinner rushes and unpredictable crises that working on the line inevitably entails. I could enjoy my shift drink at the bar at a decent cocktail hour rather than gulping Long Island Iced Tea from a soggy paper milkshake cup while mucking out the Frialator^® at 1.00 am. For these perks I traded beach time, but it was a good job.

I spent my days stocking and portioning. Through the morning I’d be up to my elbows in fresh haddock and sole, portioning it into baking dishes and ladling drawn butter over it before dusting it with paprika to prepare it for cooking. The completed prepped fish, ready for broiling that evening, would go onto half-sheets and be covered with plastic wrap before being refrigerated within easy reach of the broiler (name of both appliance and operator). For the cook assigned to saute I would portion scallops to top linguine, make seafood stuffing for gigantic shrimps, and garlic the holy hell out of scampi. Anything fried, which I also spent long hours portioning out, would leave the kitchen accompanied by a glop of cole slaw dumped from an ice cream scoop onto a bed of lettuce by any of my various replacements in the role of Salad Boy, so in the course of that summer I also created one hell of a lot of cole slaw from endless cases of fresh cabbage. About 16 tons of cole slaw, by my calculations, of which only the smallest fraction was ever consumed.

But this is not the story of cole slaw, or of scampi, nor even of scallops, that most noble of bivalves. This is the story of a sandwich.

I give you the BLT.

I was responsible for opening the kitchen in the morning, before any cooks or salad personnel arrived. The first order of business was a matter of debate; should I T.C.B. or nourish the body with a BLT? Fortunately, the two were not mutually exclusive.

As I write this I cannot recall what it was that called for so much bacon in that kitchen. We did sell an enormous number of burgers, many of which were apparently of the bacon-cheese- variety, but there must have been some other reason I spent the first half hour of every day cooking off half-sheet after half-sheet of bacon in the broiler. The bacon came in a large, flat box (the same size as a half-sheet) on layered waxed paper, about 20 slices per layer. I would cook a few hundred slices of bacon, scooping them out of their own golden grease and layering them up on absorbent paper pie plates until the stack of bacon/pie plate/bacon etc. was in danger of collapsing. Once the bacon-cooking was in train, I would toast some whole wheat bread lightly, and then repair to the walk-in to seek out the nicest-looking head of iceberg lettuce and the ripest tomato in the place.

The BLT is a model of synergy, a perfect example of ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. All of the ingredients in the BLT are humble, but it’s the commingling of them that makes the sandwich, the way the tomato’s juices combine with the grease of the bacon and the mayonnaise, the give of the toast and the crunch of the lettuce, the tang of the tomato and the salt of the pork. In the best BLT each element is sublime, but gives itself over to the whole. The BLT is the chamber music of sandwiches. I ate one every morning of that 16-ton summer and never grew tired of the beautiful marriage of bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

Sometimes I added cheese.

This entry is part of The Sandwich Party

Other sandwiches at the party:
Simon’s chip butty
Ham and macandcheese
Erik’s eggy Spanish goodness

[UPDATE]
That’s as far as I got before lethargy took over, and now it seems unnecessary to link to each sandwich individually when the organizers have already done all that lifting here and here. These ladies know how to throw a party.

Nostalgic for lunch

sgazzetti — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 11:04:48 +0000

Today the car is in the shop and I am not going home for lunch, a change in routine which I do not welcome. Each day I go home to find that Magda has prepared a delicious quick meal for me, and today there is none of that and this makes me cranky and somewhat nostalgic for lunch, the lunch I am not eating today and all the lunches I have enjoyed in the past, in this hemisphere and others. The salad days. Actually, the salads were particularly delicious. Maria would make them massive, apparently from ALL the vegetables in the kitchen in whatever combinations and proportions seemed to strike her that day — her daily chance to be creative. Beets, celery, diced onion, slices of cold potato, hard-boiled egg, grated carrot, and so on, all in a large steel mixing bowl and drizzled with a simple vinaigrette.

In San Jorge, Argentina the high point of my day was usually lunch. I would cycle slowly home in the midday heat. “Home” was the Hotel Jardín, where I lived for nearly a year in room #14. There were only 14 rooms. Mine was at the end of the upstairs hall on the left. Immediately next to my room was the door that opened onto the very large terrace, all white stucco with a thick, low parapet and no railing. I would often spend the long hours of siesta on this balcony, napping in the sun, occasionally immersing myself in the knee-deep pool of tepid water that was kept there for pretty much my exclusive use.

But before going up to the terrace, or to the dim small confines of my coolly shuttered hotel room, there was the languid ritual of lunch. It would begin when I entered the small dining room/bar on the ground floor. This room managed to be both cozy and bright, with big mullioned windows opening onto the Ford dealership across the street and a low ceiling that Maria and Silvia kept completely free of cobwebs. These two were full-time chambermaids and they pursued any trace of impurity with a relentlessness you don’t see in so many chambermaids anymore. They also shared the cooking duties in the small kitchen behind the bar, and the more serious scullery in an outbuilding across the back garden. I loved them like sisters and they treated me like a child, based no doubt upon my syntax.

The ritual began like this, day-in day-out, rain-or-shine, River-Plate-or-Boca-Juniors, in lazy Argentine Spanish:

Maria: Child, what are you going to eat?
Me: Oh, I do not know, Maria, what is there to eat?

Maria would then list the perhaps four things to choose from. These things varied almost not at all. Occasionally she would surprise me by telling me that her son had shot a hare just for me, but usually the list was woefully limited:

Bife de carne = grilled steak without embellishment
Bife de pollo = grilled chicken with lemon wedge
Pa’ta = pasta with an elided pre-consonantal /s/
Ñoquis = gnocchi with a post-alveolar sauce

These things, as noted above, did not vary. In addition to the fabled hare, which Maria would do fantastic things to, occasionally there would be home-made raviolis in place of the ñoquis, for example. All of the food was wholesome and delicious, particularly those salads, but a year is a long time with no variety. Nostalgia relies for its existence upon our ability to strip away the mediocre and disappointing and to focus only on the memorable and positive. Why it may require five years of hindsight to be able to consider our existence in such favorable yet sad light is a mystery. During my year in Argentina I often grew weary of the same food day after day, the lack or even distrust of seasoning. I grew manically frustrated by the small variety of food available in this small town marooned in the vast flat pampas. I missed many flavors, notably the hot, the tangy, the extreme spice. I longed for the scalp-tickling thrill of wasabi.

But none of that is important now, because I am feeling nostalgic for those lunches, and for the one I am not eating now. Forget that with every lunch we eat comes the chance to be nostalgic for something else.

What it sounds like inside my head when the hair is being removed from the outside of it

sgazzetti — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 06:55:32 +0000

Yeah, as usual: quite short on the sides and front, with something kind of like this, you know?

Maybe even a little bit shorter. Sure, that’ll be good.

I’m a little overdue for this. I hate it when I put it off too long, then it gets all poofy and crazy, and if I put gel in it the day I do finally make it to the frizer it gets all sticky when she mists it. Magda gives me shit if I use gel, “I didn’t know you were one of those guys”, but it gets all out of control at the end of the cycle if I don’t stay on top of it, I need to use a little gel during the last week. When I was a kid my mother gave me virtually every haircut right up til I went away to school. First barber chair I ever sat in was Joe’s in Lawrenceville. Had the complete Time-Life set of World War II books, what was that about? I sit in these chairs and come up with stupid theories, for example, you can judge the quality of the barber’s work by the magazines they have available: the older and drier the reading material, the snappier the haircut you’re going to end up with. Like most theories, it’s got a fatal flaw: Bob the Navy Barber behind the Custom’s House in Portland. Always had that day’s Boston Globe, New York Times, the Sunday magazine sections, lots of borderline pr0n, but he still gave a damn good cut. One of the few barbers I could make small talk with, too. I hate small talk, especially guy small talk — the assumption that I give a flying fuck how the Sox’re doin’. Bob’s conversations were memorable whether I was participant or Maxim-reading eavesdropper. I recall my haircut of August 2000:

Bob: You take any summer vacation this year?
Haircuttee: I’ll go downeast for a coupla weeks. You?
Bob: Yeah, matterafack I just got back from France.
Haircuttee: Oh, no kidding. How’d you like it?
Bob: You know somethin’? Didn’t like it.

I think Bob was slightly offput by my coming regularly once a month and then disappearing for years at a time. I still make a point of getting in there for a cut when I’m back in Maine visiting. Christmas 2001:

Bob: Hey, how’s that house a yours comin’ along? That thing finished yet?
Haircuttee: They’re hanging the drywall now.
Bob: Oh, yeah, drywall. Comin’ along.
Haircuttee: G.C.’s a pretty good guy.
Bob: Now, what kinda a house is that exackly?
Haircuttee: Ranch.
Bob: Ooh, yeah, a ranch. I like a nice ranch.

I can get my hair cut in Slovene, but I can’t make small talk. I can eavesdrop half-decent, but have yet to find a haircutter in Nova Gorica the conversational equal of Bob The Navy Barber. In Argentina I used to force myself to make small talk, and could manage, I liked the barber, and my haircutting vocabulary was the better for it. I never did become terribly fluent in sporty Castellano small talk despite being infinitely more interested and invested in local football there than I ever have been about the Sox since like 1972. So my English sporty small talk is weak anyway.

No, no need to cut those, they’re okay.

In college I went to that French Canadian place tucked in behind the K-Mart. Seemed appropriate. No small talk there. Later I was always able to find a girl friend (the space is critical) to cut my hair. Trish would do it in her room at the top of that building that used to be Phi Delta Theta. No. Lamda Chi? Something with a Delta, the hockey frat. Lacrosse frat. Whatever. Hmmm. That is going to bug the hell out of me… She had one of those weird chairs with no back and a sloping seat, like Lisa Simpson has, supposed to be good for your posture. It was really good for the haircutting purpose, made you sit up all straight. She cut my hair one night in Boston, too, summer of 1984, that apartment she was renting and she had a kitten that would run laps around the place and vault out the open window onto the porch roof, using the small of my back as a launch pad. Not a good night’s sleep. I can’t remember what the quid pro quo was for a Tricia haircut, but in Florence Heather used to cut my hair on the balcony overlooking Piazza Savonarola. The hair would just blow away over the piazza, in theory anyway, and I’d buy her a bottle of wine in payment. Good haircuts. On All Saints weekend in 1984 Bill and I went to Caen to visit Nathalie and she cut both our hair and that was probably the most ass-kicking haircut I’ve ever had. I’ve got a blurry picture of myself with that particular haircut, I’m walking through the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. But that can’t be right, because Nathalie cut my hair after we left Amsterdam. Hmmm. That’s weird. Maybe it’s a Heather haircut in that picture…

I hope my sister finds that journal. I’d like to figure this out. I wonder if I can google that frat-house question. They shut them down before there was an internet.

Of course they cut our hair in basic. Shaved our heads right down to the skull, and little-known fact? You have to pay the guy. You don’t have to tip him, though. That obviously wouldn’t work. Then the sons of bitches shaved us again a week before we went home at Christmas, just to be spiteful. Our hair had grown out and we were just looking human again, not like a bunch of interchangeable baby birds. I got to like it short. The cut I had at Huachuca was pretty extreme. That one was by choice. “High-and-tight”, a mohawk, basically. Good for the heat.

I always kind of wonder what makes a person decide to become a barber. It seems like a nice enough way to earn a living, I suppose. I think it’d make me crazy, though, always having other people’s hair on me, in my nose, blowing around. When it’s really hot in the summer I can barely stand to get my hair cut, let alone imagine doing it all day, it’s a million degrees and you’re all sticky and clotted with itchy hair. I guess in a lot of cases it’s a family thing. This woman is obviously her daughter. And that place on Main Street in Missoula I ended up going to pretty regularly was a father-and-two-sons operation. Pretty good place and I swear to god that shop hadn’t changed in any way since Norman frickin’ Maclean got his hair cut there. Except for the Field and Streams. Probably still hasn’t. What was the name of that place? ‘Main Street Barbershop’, maybe? That’d be predictably creative. Near the Grizzly Hackle…

Man, what is she doing? Didn’t she already do that? This is taking forever.

Why do I get so impatient in the barber chair these days? Does it really take twice as long as it used to?

Ned was legendary. He was probably the most sought-after barber I’ve encountered, only cut hair by appointment, no walk-ins except for like Thursday mornings or something. I actually liked that, because you could count on getting in and out of there fast, you just had to plan ahead. And if you did try to go the walk-in route, you’d be in there for two hours because he was so popular and guys in Ellsworth don’t plan ahead. Ned’s reading material was, like, exploded diagrams of Pratt & Whitney turbines, medical journals from 1957, that kind of stuff. You’d die of boredom waiting for a Ned cut, but it was worth it. I knew guys who’d drive an hour to get a Ned cut. And the old riddle about how the barber with the worst haircut himself is the guy to go to? Because the other barber must’ve given it to him, and you don’t want him cutting your hair? Wrong in Ned’s case: he was the best-coifed man in Ellsworth. I swear that man cut his own hair in the mirror every single night of his life.

He might’ve been a little psychotic. He was like George McFly. Good haircuts, though.

No, no gel, no need. Mmm hmm, looks fine. Yes, back looks good, thanks.

No, the change is for you.

Now let me outta here. I got some stuff I gotta go google.

List of Grievances

sgazzetti — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 04:55:14 +0000

A friend writes: “Hey, do you have the list of grievances [...] anymore? If not, why not?” She’s referring to some notes I kept back in school about one particular fellow student who seemed to register for every damn class I was taking. I was easily annoyed during those years. Regard:

List of Grievances

Category I--Extensive Personal Grooming--Hair: Combing Braiding/unbraiding Ostentatious twirling Waving about, shaking loosely Deep sniffing of hair Category II--Extensive Personal Grooming--General: Applying Oil of Olay™ with Q-Tips™ to bags under eyes; smearing left-over Oil of Olay™ over already-amply-greased visage Copious utilization of cosmetic products of indeterminate origin Boisterous, flapping application of apricot scrubbing lotion to arms, elbow calluses, other extremities Brazen flossing of teeth during lecture on Great English Vowel Shift. Category III-- Lecture Feeding Behaviors/Inappropriate Insinuation of Food/Beverage into Classroom: Twinkies™, bagels, Rice Crispies Treats™, honey-roasted peanuts, caramel popcorn, Drake's Crumb-Topped Coffee Cakes (Mini)™, struedel, cotton candy(!), oranges, bananas, paw-paws...For exhaustive inventory see Annex 1. Loud and distracting crinkling of food wrappers during lecture on Donne. Spilling of coffee; lame, ineffectual attempts to clean up; breezy remarks about custodial staff. See also MILK. Category IV--Inappropriate Familiarity with Professors ("Hail-Fellow-Well- Met-Gladhanding"): Crass personal questions Unnecessary references to relationships with professors outside of class Offering Twinkies™ to old-school Mitteleuropean professor (see Category III) Uncalled-for jokes and gibes "Humorously" needling professor about return of exams being overdue. Failing to do assigned work, prostrating self on desk, screeching, "Doctor Hradetsky, I throw myself on your MERCY!" Category V--Lack of Attention to Material: Day-dreaming/wool-gathering during discussion of Georgian poets, then insisting Yeats was modernist Tangential, unrelated question-asking Extensive, pointed consultation of chronometer Premeditated sleeping, prop-camouflaged subterfuges Claiming "Um, I must have been sick the day you discussed clitics" Category VI--Projection of Self Outside Reasonable Personal Space: Sweeping and/or flouncing into/out of classroom Close-sitting/crowding of others Ostentatious fiddling with unnecessary fountain pen Draping, flipping hair onto neighboring desks (see Category I) when leaning over to retrieve dropped fountain pen and on numerous other occasions Wilful soiling of adjacent students' clothing with filth-laden feet Wearing of annoying broad-brimmed felt hat à la Kim Carnes Flamboyant sneezing, with relish; looking pointedly about for acknowledgment of achievement in form of highly unlikely wishes for her health or blessing Excessive large-mouth-bass style yawning. Gratuitous/dangerous wearing of Spandex™ Rook-like rummaging through depths of voluminous bag loaded with food and personal hygiene supplies (see Categories I, II, III) Uncalled-for, inexplicable hilarity during grave social moments Having surname 'Plucker' Gratuitous/pretentious use of unnecessary umlaut on surname-initial vowel Singing Monty Python's "Philosophers' Song" to no one in particular Constant wearing of annoying chiffon scarves, fluttering about, frenetically twisting, toying, flipping, flopping, never ceasing to tease and tweak! Responding to lecture about second-language acquisition with long-winded, pointless, random whining about personal humiliations "overseas" Whining, wheedling tone whenever mouth moves Refusing to cease strident prating even when professor interrupts her saying, "yes, yes, we understand you, we UNDERSTAND!" Deep cramming of gaping maw with struedel, open-mouthed cud-chewing (see Category III) Slapstick bumbling into classroom bottleneck propelled by inertia of overladen filebox (sharp-cornered) bearing legend: "LESSON PLANS" Exceeding classroom luggage allowance Habitually departing class three minutes early with great rustlings and gathering of personal goods strewn far and wide, leaving food wrappers, fruit rinds, puddles of beverage, exfoliated dermal material in wake...

Unfortunately, the annexes have been lost to the mists of time.

1 trillion links and you're coming here for colostomy pictures?

sgazzetti — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:00:10 +0000

I’ve just learned that even the U.S. president is getting in on the act now, and by ‘act’ I mean ‘using The Google’. Early adopters will already know that The Google is a ‘search engine’ that can help you find ‘pages’ on the ‘internets’. Some ‘web surfers’ even use it to find their way here, in focused search of specific reading material, no doubt for vitally important research projects. Here, without further preamble, is the Autumn 2006 version of the

Inexplicably Obligatory Intermittent The G o o g l e Search String Follies:

“A few questions…”

Does isoglossia perchance feature girly vomit videos?
Where should I direct my browser for spambot nightmarishness?
How can I solve the puzzle of the Samorost sleeping taxi?
Can I read about two tone bandicoots on isoglossia.com? wondered a searcher in Mexico

twix market share
meaning of the word segundus
circus efemera [sic] Did you mean: circus ephemera
objects that hold about 500 milliliters

drop a coin ask if your [sic] pregnant
pictures of kids eating and getting dirty (how can I express my deep sense of honor that isoglossia is the #5 hit on The Google, in the same exalted company as The BoingBoing and The History Place: Child Labor in America?)

A reader in Valparaiso, Indiana was interested in finding Gross pictures of steaming pile of shit (with isoglossia ranking #3 of an alarming 105,000 results)
Starting around 15 October, numerous people searching The Google for images (IMAGES!) of “colostomy bag” (WHY? WHY?) began to be referred to this picture here. This makes me unaccountably happy. Also to see that at least some people out there, even if it’s just colostomy fetishists, know that The Google loves “The Quotes”.
copulating monkeys pics = isoglossia in The Google UK’s number 5 spot

And speaking of copulating monkeys,

“‘Sweet monkey Jesus!’ I thought to myself. ‘You’re on stage making out with Jane Goodall! Roll with it!’ But the translator failed to roll with it at all. He stared down at his sheaf of papers as if he were trying to ignite them with his mind. The audience, of course, was going nuts.”

“(YouTube is essentially the Great Alexandrian Library of Weird Al videos.) ”

“I may have intended to build a wall, but it was shaping up more like a tower of trash. Like a great number of weblog authors, I had started a mental recycling project.”

“New Years Eve 1998, Chuck Norris and I were at a party, when the clock struck twelve, instead of kissing someone, Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked everyone at the party. He then proceeded to roundhouse kick everyone on the street, and the whole city. He has been doing this ever since.”

“Kevin Kelly noted that the web currently has 1 trillion links, 1 quintillion transistors, and 20 exabytes of memory. A single human brain has 1 trillion synapses (links), 1 quintillion neurons (transistors of sorts), and 20 exabytes of memory.”

Previous meta entries: June 2006; February 2006; December 2005

Perritos Veracruzanos jugando al poker

sgazzetti — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 09:12:56 +0000

Typical scene in Veracruz, Mexico

Apropos of nothing:

In the winter of 1995 I met up with my sister, her husband, and a handful of their loser friends from Montana, and we flew to Mexico to climb some volcanoes. The second peak on our itinerary of three was inconveniently active, so we changed our plans and made our way to the coast. I remember eating lots of shellfish. I can’t recall much about the hotel where we stayed in Veracruz, other than that the decor in our room included dogs playing poker.

Dogs playing poker.

'The pinchy kind'

sgazzetti — Wed, 31 May 2006 14:24:38 +0000

We went camping a lot when I was a kid. My parents had five kids right in a row before they figured out what was causing them. This was bad for them but great for us; it’s amazing how efficiently little kids can construct the perfect society when there are so damn many of them, and being so close together in age meant that we were pretty good company for each other most of the time. Small conflicts did erupt from time to time, especially as we spent a lot of time packed into the car on the way to campgrounds — “Mahm, she’s breathing my air!”, “He’s vomiting on me!”, “She started it!”, that kind of thing. But mostly we looked out for each other.

When we arrived at a campground, the single most important piece of information concerned the possibility of swimming: was there, within a two-mile radius, a lake, river, canal, reservoir, swimming pool, kiddy pool, horse trough, dog-dish, hog-wallow, anything we could get wet in? That was priority one.

The second thing everyone needed to know was: is it the pinchy kind?^[1]

The origins of this term are lost in the mists of time, but the pinchy kind referred to a non-flushing toilet, what normal speakers of English would call an outhouse. I am sure that the genesis of our name for it lies in some colorfully humiliating event suffered by one of my many sisters, and if any of them can recall it they are strongly encouraged to comment.

Just as the first child to catch any whiff of water, salt, fresh, or brackish, was duty-bound to immediately report it to the rest, so was the first to succumb to nature’s call required to deliver the news, ordinarily with a sort of grim stoicism, “It’s the pinchy kind“.

The reasons for shunning the pinchy kind are legion. My gravest fear as a small child was ‘spider bite on ass‘, or even just plain ‘spider on ass‘^[2]. Flies. Sometimes the wet ziggurat of strangers’ effluvia approached the rim of the latrine. The smell of such mounds was not something we relished^[3], lack of plumbing usually went hand-in-hand with no electric light in the toilet, they tended to be farther from the campsites than plumbed washrooms, and so on. Rarely, though, was actual pinching a real fear, at least as far as I remember — again, sisters are welcome to make corrections to my imperfect recollections.

I am moved to remember all this in part because this term the pinchy kind is yet another flapping owl (as that term is used by me), but also because toilets have been on our minds lately. Yesterday I installed yet another new toilet seat. In each of the three apartments I’ve occupied since arriving in Nova Gorica four and a half years ago, I have at some point had to replace the rooster-interface due to breakage. Assuming some base-line of average serviceability of the seats upon my taking occupancy of the apartments, rather than extraordinarily bad luck in inheriting extremely aged and decrepit seats, this works out to a dismal average of 18 months of service life per seat^[4]. I am not here to impugn the quality of Slovenia’s toilet seats^[5], but I had never had to replace a toilet seat before moving here. Toilets, sure, but just the seat? Where I grew up they were famously robust. Well, they had to be.

On Monday I arrived home and was invited by one of the members of the household^[6] to examine ~~her~~ their bottom. “The toilet seat pinched me!” ~~she~~ they explained in a tone of the highest possible pique. I had previously noticed a hairline crack in the seat before which under body weight had shown the possibility of pinching. Indeed, there was visible damage to the skin. “That’s it,” I said resolutely. “I’m replacing that toilet seat.”

Because I will be goddamned if we’ll have the pinchy kind in our own bathroom.

You're it, Carrot Top

sgazzetti — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:55:54 +0000

I have been ‘tagged with a meme’. This word’s popularity originally came from a book I admire, but has since morphed into a prime example of the tortuous geeky terminology of the self-publishing rage that I ~~loathe with every fiber of my being~~ am not such a big fan of. Just in case you’re not all hep to the new dizzle, to be ‘tagged’ with a ‘meme’ is like receiving a chain letter: respond or risk an improbably long run of bad hair days. Also like the dumbassed chain letter, you are supposed to exponentially pass on the ~~nightmare~~ game at the end of it. The logic goes that if the chain is unbroken, eventually every human on the planet will have answered the ~~junior-high bullshit~~ gripping questions contained in the ‘meme.’ Apparently having the entire planet writing about the same topic is considered by the internet to be a good thing. ‘Netiquette’ demands that you complain about being ‘tagged’ with a ‘meme’ no matter how you actually feel about it, whether the ‘meme’ gives you an interesting opportunity or, like this one, ~~makes you want to gouge out your eyes with a grapefruit spoon~~ contains less imaginative writing prompts.

So, since my ~~bastard deadbeat moron~~ esteemed colleague in Nashville of all places has ‘tagged’ me with this ‘meme’, I will grudgingly play along. I stress the ‘grudgingly’ part. And I reserve the right to violate both the letter and the spirit of the original questions, as well as to answer them as incompletely or obliquely as I see fit. First, the prompts, each of which calls for a list of five items:

5 JOBS YOU HAVE HAD IN YOUR LIFE
5 MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER (and probably have)
5 PLACES YOU’VE LIVED
5 TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH
5 PLACES YOU’VE BEEN ON VACATION
5 WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY
5 OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS
5 PLACES YOU WOULD RATHER BE
5 ALBUMS YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT
5 PEOPLE YOU’D TAG TO PLAY THIS GAME

I find the number five completely arbitrary and will not strain myself for any arbitrary goal. Besides, I’ve answered many of these questions before on this site, and see no reason not to refer the ‘meme’ police to those entries. Finally, much as I like lists, this one just pisses me off, so I prefer to address this ~~invasion of my quiet time~~ challenge in disjointed paragraph form.

The summer I was eighteen, the first summer I lived [3] on Block Island, I had this job [1] title, which is the one of all the many more than five jobs I’ve had of which I am most proud: Salad Boy. I know, I know, it sounds like a superhero rather than an occupation, and in that spirit I decided that I would be the best damn Salad Boy that ever was, even learning to fly if necessary. Instead, over the course of that summer I managed to slice off all of my finger-tips. (This did not confer any special powers, unless you count the ability to gross out the Chowder Girl). Only one of my fingertips went unrecovered. To this day I am sure that it wound up in the cole slaw, but nobody ever actually ate the cole slaw anyway, so no harm, no foul.

Okay, a little bit foul, if my theory is correct.

One day, it was almost surely a Sunday if you think about it, I watched “Remains of the Day” [2] five times in a row. Then I drank an entire bottle of bleach and slit my wrists, but it didn’t take. Oh, like you’ve never done exactly the same thing.

As I mentioned quite recently, this is our second apartment in the same building. It’s a bit surreal to move without actually going anywhere but upstairs. One positive aspect of this is that our mailing address did not change one iota, so there was none of that hassle with the post office. Then again, this is the third place I’ve lived [3] in this town, and my original apartment is just down the street. A week ago an old friend wrote from Japan using the ancient address, and the postman still got the letter to us without any forwarding formalities, and despite the fact that she uses my mobile phone number in place of our post-code. I have now lived in this small town in Slovenia for over four years, longer than I have lived in any place since I can remember — an idea which still sort of surprises me. Before these three addresses I was in Argentina [3], and I’ve already mentioned Block Island [3] back in my salad days.

As a means of entertainment delivery, television [4] is dead. And if it weren’t, my answers would be so predictable that it would annoy even me. However, this may be the time to admit that Magda and I are all about “Razočarane Gospodinje“, which means “Disappointed Mistresses of the House”. I believe it is known as “Desperate Housewives” in English, and the local TV is a season behind so don’t go spoiling.

Vacation [5] stuff has been discussed here plenty. Pay attention, internet.

The next item [6] amuses me greatly. It assumes that I have the time to look at five websites every day. Ah, how merrily I laughed when I first read that!

Food [7], now, on the other hand, that’s a topic that does hold some allure. I have thought long and hard about this, and I am pretty sure that I could live on nothing but olives for as long as it took. Provided there were five different kinds of olives, just so I didn’t get bored.

Food entries: here and here and here and here and here. Now with the olives that’s SIX. That should get me some extra credit with the ‘meme’ people.

The next query [8] is, if you’ll forgive me, fuckwitted. First of all, if there were a place I’d rather be, wouldn’t I be there? It only stands to reason. Second, five places? If there were FIVE places I’d rather be than here, that would be a pretty sad excuse for a life. As I interpret it, the question is meant to provide frustrated cube-dwellers with an opportunity to bust out with their raddest rebellionia along the lines of “I would be motoring down Route 66 in my candy-apple turquoise double-hemi panhead snatch-dazzling vintage ’66 Corvette, cranking the Hagar.” Not that I wouldn’t, but you can see that I object to this line of questioning. In all seriousness, Slovenia is my favorite place I’ve ever lived, and if I wanted to be elsewhere I would be.

Like television [4], the album [9] is dead. And if I had to, like really had to, list the albums that I “can’t live without”, they would be any works by Oxygen, Water, and Food (preferably their greatest hits).

The final question [10], the one that invites you to perform the moral equivalent of sneezing in the food of five friends just because you’ve got the flu, is one that actually warms my heart. This is because the wording leaves a loophole. It doesn’t ask for the people you will ‘tag to play this game’, but for who you ‘d tag. That’s a critical distinction. So, following the reasoning of the syntax in the question, if anything were possible I would tag John Quincy Adams, Mungo Park, Sir Kenneth Clark, Carrot Top, and Carl Weathers.

[Dusts hands, walks away]

Notes:

For a more comprehensive waste of time, consider the Memepool.
The Oxford don who started it all.
This person does nothing BUT form lists of five things that, while arbitrary, are at least entertaining.