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=v= I called up a business today and got a company directory system, which told me, in the standard American phone menu woman's voice, to spell out the name of the party I'm trying to call. It instructed me to press 7 for Q, and then, "Press 9 for Zed."
Most Americans would say "Z," but not this phone menu. Curiouser and curiouser, as of a minute ago, Google searches for "press 9 for zed" and even "press nine for zed" came up empty.
Things you can’t mail to Germany.
OK, my unannounced blog sabbatical is over. I’d tell you all about it, but I’m a big believer in: Never apologize, never explain.
In other news, I’m returning to comedy improv performance for a Platypus Jones show on Saturday, May 1 at 8 PM at Cafe Eclectica in Albany, California, just north of Berkeley. It’s $7 or $5 for students, or, what the heck, $5 if you say you heard about it here.
Flannery O’Connor famously said “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”
San Francisco’s Academy of Art University has taken this to heart. A student was expelled for writing a graphic serial killer story and the instructor was dismissed for her part in the affair, namely for having assigned the reading of a violent story that was off the syllabus.
Michael Chabon replies in a New York Times op-ed :
The imagination of teenagers is often — I’m tempted to say always — the only sure capital they possess apart from the love of their parents, which is a force far beyond their capacity to comprehend or control. During my own adolescence, my imagination, the kingdom inside my own skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of solitude, at times my prison. But a fortress requires a constant line of supply; those who take refuge in attics and cellars require the unceasing aid of confederates; prisoners need advocates, escape plans, or simply a window that gives onto the sky.Like all teenagers, I provisioned my garrison with art: books, movies, music, comic books, television, role-playing games. My secret confederates were the works of Monty Python, H. P. Lovecraft, the cartoonist Vaughan Bodé, and the Ramones, among many others; they kept me watered and fed. They baked files into cakes and, on occasion, for a wondrous moment, made the walls of my prison disappear. Given their nature as human creations, as artifacts and devices of human nature, some of the provisions I consumed were bound to be of a dark, violent, even bloody and horrifying nature; otherwise I would not have cared for them. Tales and displays of violence, blood and horror rang true, answered a need, on some deep, angry level that maybe only those with scant power or capital, regardless of their age, can understand.
(And how can someone who so obviously gets it have written this , to which sentiment I’ve previously responded ? Ah, well.)
To no one’s surprise, prison does an even better job of stifling writers .
Prison officials destroyed computer files containing inmates’ personal writing days after a prisoner won a national writing award, best-selling author Wally Lamb said. Lamb, who teaches a creative writing workshop at the York Correctional Facility in East Lyme, said Wednesday that 15 women inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the prison’s school ordered all hard drives used for the class erased and its computer disks turned over.
(Via Neil Gaiman’s Journal , Amygdala , Boing Boing )
According to the Onion’s poll :
9% — Swerving to avoid guy on recumbent bicycle
I appreciate it.
(Thanks, Geoff!)
=v= After being woken up by somebody's car not being stolen, I wrote a honku. The Honku phenomenon (signs put on lamposts, a blog, and a book) was started by Aaron Naparstek a few blocks away from me. Car horns and car alarms are perhaps the main drawbacks of living in Brooklyn.
Aaron and I are both on Transportation Alternative's Brooklyn Committee, and that organization is trying to ban car alarms in New York City. You are invited to help.
Horse colors are weird. All these years I’ve read about chestnut mares, I thought I was reading about brown horses. Turns out a “chestnut” horse must be reddish. And a bay horse looks nothing like a bay .)
Itsy-bitsy spider has a significant regional variation, eensy-weensy spider — Google shows itsy-bitsy leading eensy-weensy 33,600 to 7480. ( Googlesmack claimed 13,100 to 3100, a difference so suspiciously round that it prompted me to check manually.)
This resulted from conversation with Pocaontas. Shortly thereafter, I listened to a CD by a favorite group of mine, an Australian duet called the Velvet Janes , and their lyrics referred to “eensy-weensy spider.”
Both the American Heritage Dictionary and Kenyon and Knott admit three different pronunciations of tiara .
CNN maintains a Coalition casualty page with brief info on all of the Coalition casualties in the Iraqi War. As of this writing, 843 dead, 737 of them from the U.S. Nearly all of them men, most of them young. How much can you read before going numb?
It also notes that 3,864 U.S. soldiers have been wounded in action, without details. You’ve got to figure a certain number of them are relatively trivial, like, say, spraining an ankle jumping off a Humvee, or the like. But that a lot of them are more like what’s happened to B.D. And much as I’d hate to go through what he will be, there’s worse .
While attention remains riveted on the rising count of Americans killed in action — more than 100 so far in April — doctors at the main combat support hospital in Iraq are reeling from a stream of young soldiers with wounds so devastating that they probably would have been fatal in any previous war.More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes — injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.
For months the gravest wounds have been caused by roadside bombs — improvised explosives that negate the protection of Kevlar helmets by blowing shrapnel and dirt upward into the face. In addition, firefights with guerrillas have surged recently, causing a sharp rise in gunshot wounds to the only vital area not protected by body armor.
The neurosurgeons at the 31st Combat Support Hospital measure the damage in the number of skulls they remove to get to the injured brain inside, a procedure known as a craniotomy. “We’ve done more in eight weeks than the previous neurosurgery team did in eight months,” Poffenbarger said. “So there’s been a change in the intensity level of the war.”
And even as our troops are undergoing craniotomies, there are people lambasting Trudeau for his unpatriotic fictitious portrayal of an injured serviceman. One presumes these people never ceased considering covering their ears and going “la la la la la! I can’t hear you!” to be an effective strategy. (The comments printed there are overwhelmingly positive, though, many of them from people in the military, including many who note their disagreement with Trudeau’s politics.)
Meanwhile, legislation has been introduced in the Senate and the House to reinstate the draft .
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a Vietnam War veteran and an influential member of the Foreign Relations Committee, wants the United States to consider reviving the draft as part of a broader effort to ensure that all Americans “bear some responsibility” and “pay some price” in defending the nation’s interests. […] His main interest, he said, is to make sure that some kind of mandatory national service is considered so “the privileged, the rich” as well as the less affluent bear the burden of fighting wars of the future.
‘cause, after all, the draft has worked so well to ensure the privileged and rich don’t evade the burden of fighting wars. (Hagel didn’t introduce the Senate bill — both bills were introduced by Democrats.)
And Billmon has yet another illuminating compare and contrast , this time between U.S.-occupied Iraq and Japanese-occupied Manchukuo.
Hey, there’s an official Stanford Prison Experiment website !
And an unofficial re-enactment by the U.S. Army !
The Army investigation found serious problems behind the scenes. The Army has photographs that show a detainee with wires attached to his genitals. Another shows a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner. Frederick said that dogs were “used for intimidation factors.” Part of the Army’s own investigation is a statement from an Iraqi detainee who charges a translator — hired to work at the prison — with raping a male juvenile prisoner: “They covered all the doors with sheets. I heard the screaming. …and the female soldier was taking pictures.”
(latter link via Amygdala )
