Congratulations, Denmark!

According to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, Denmark has passed Disneyland as the happiest place on earth.  Seriously!  When asked to comment, Denmark's leading citizen remarked:

"I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth. . . .  This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors."

Sheesh!  Seriously, how happy can a country be when its most famous resident is fictional (and died over 400 years ago)?

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Also, the Solipsist was puzzled by some advertising copy for make-up.  This make-up promised to increase moisture by 48%, to reduce wrinkles by 53.5%, and to increase firmness by 62% (we don't remember the exact percentages, but this was the gist).  Now, we can more or less imagine the methodology for measuring relative increases in moisture and decreases in wrinkles.  But how does one gauge an increase in firmness?  Does one bounce a quarter off a model's face and see how much higher it goes after make-up application?  Just wondering.

More Dathonian English

Yesterday, YNSHC came close to winning concert tickets.  It was a radio contest, and somehow we were actually able to get through to the DJs.  This in itself is a rare occurrence, but it was at least partially due to the particular hoops through which contestants had to jump in order to win the contest.

The theme was literary references in rock songs.  The DJs played snippets from three songs, each of which contained the name of a fictional character(s).  The caller had to identify the book being referenced and the author.  The snippets were:

Bruce Springsteen singing about "The ghost of Tom Joad."

Someone that sounded like the Cure (although it turned out to be The Bravery) singing something unintelligible.

And someone whose name we forget singing, "Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Kathy, I've come home."

Now, as we've probably mentioned, the Solipsist was an English major.  He knew the first and third references, and he was wagering that, if he got through, the DJs might be sporting enough at least to tell him what the second singer was saying.

Well, the phone actually rang!  The DJ picked up!  We were close!

"OK, well, the first reference is John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath."

"Right!"

(Duh!)

"OK, now, the second one, I can't quite make out the words.  Could you just tell me what he's saying?"

"He's saying, 'Never had a Cherry Valance of my own.'"

What?  Who?

Well, folks, YNSHC was stumped.  He probably should have just guessed V by Thomas Pynchon (which would have been wrong anyway), but, as it was, he didn't even get to tell them what song number three was (Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, again, duh!).

It apparently took forever for them to get a winner because, after we had gotten in to work and googled "Cherry Valance" (The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, of all things!), we turned on the radio and they were just THEN getting a winner.  The sad part, for us, was how many people didn't seem to know either the Steinbeck or the Bronte reference.

Still, this got us to thinking again about "The Guide to Dathonian English."  Since these references are, at least in theory, meant to be understood by the songs' audience, it seems we should be able to link the references to universal ideas.  Hence:

Tom Joad--One who stands up for the little guy.

Cherry Valance--????  An ideal love?  Could somebody who's read or seen The Outsiders recently help us out here?

Heathcliff and Kathy--Passionate romance.

Keep those entries coming folks!

Play for Mr. Gray?

We were struck the other day by a couple of new ads for "Just for Men." You're probably aware that this is a hair-coloring product, and, in the past, it has been hawked by such retired sports legends as Keith Hernandez and Walt ("Clyde") Frazier.

In these commercials, Hernandez and Frazier portray sports commentators, watching omnipotently in, say, a singles bar, as a hapless graybeard attempts to ingratiate himself with an unapproachably gorgeous woman. Inevitably, he is shot down. Hernandez and Frazier wince and exclaim, in perfect basketball-play-by-play cadence, "Rejected!" Frazier (presumably providing color commentary) then summarizes what we have just witnessed: "No play for Mr. Gray!" Of course, after hapless graybeard has combed in the JFM miracle formula ("Just five minutes!"), the unapproachable beauty quickly melts into a puddle of pheromones, and the commercial modestly ends.

Now, the Solipsist always found these commercials in, at best, questionable taste. Sure all men, regardless of age or hair color, want to be found attractive by attractive women (or, y'know, men if that's their thing). But we always felt that these commercials, by portraying the men as such pathetic horndogs, were counterproductive. What man, after seeing this commercial, would willingly enter a store, pick up a box of JFM, and go to the counter, knowing (or at least strongly suspecting) that the cashier (who could quite likely BE a young, attractive woman working a part-time job to put herself through college) would, although smiling politely and saying "Will that be all, Sir," be thinking to herself: "Ah! No play for Mr. Gray"?!?

Seriously, buying Depends undergarments would be less embarrassing.

And seeing as how the Solipsist, while having no desire to try the product, is certainly within its target-demographic (i.e., dashingly handsome sophisticates with more than a little salt in their pepper), the good people at Just for Men would seem to have a problem on their hands. Alienating a target-demographic is never a good thing.

Which brings us back to their new commercials: They seem to have gotten this message. Their new commercials are decidedly less raunchy. In one, a man does change his hair color at the suggestion of an attractive young woman--but the woman is about 13 and is his daughter. And she's encouraging him to dye his hair so that he doesn't look too old as he heads out on a job interview. Now THAT's marketing: JFM isn't for aging horndogs; it's for responsible father figures who NEED this product in order to get a job to feed their adorable kids. You see, college-student-working-as-a-cashier-to-earn-tuition-money, I'm a good, responsible provider-type! (So, what are you doing after work? Nudge-nudge, wink wink.)

Not that JFM has abandoned its appeal to men's sex drives. But in another commercial, introducing a new (?) product, a graybeard is encouraged not so much to conceal his gray hair from the fair sex, but simply to modulate it. That's right, this new commercial for "Touch of Gray," suggests that, while there may be no play for Mr. Gray, there may be play for Mr. Some-gray. Good to know. Also good to know that women are not quite as shallow as they had been portrayed in the earlier commercials and that they can apparently find something at least tolerable in gray-haired men.

Good news for George Clooney. We were worried about him.

Some Pseudo-philosophical Rambling

So you have a job.  And you want to do that job to the best of your ability.  You arrive on time.  You work the whole day.  You take a short lunch.  You complete all your tasks thoroughly and professionally.  And you do this five days a week, fifty weeks a year (two-weeks off for vacation), for ten, twenty, thirty, FORTY years.  And then you retire.  And then someone else takes your place and it just goes on and on and on.

The question the Solipsist is pondering today is, When are you done?  That is, not so much, When are you done.  That takes care of itself through death, retirement, or occasionally indictment.  But when are you done?  It occurred to us today that virtually all jobs are cyclical in nature.  They just go on and on, onward into the future, and when one cog (i.e., person) moves on, another just takes its place.  This isn't meant to be depressing, although we'll admit it is; rather, it's sort of a philosophical question: At what point can you slap your hands together and say, "All done"?

It really makes us envy movie stars--and not for the obvious reasons.  When a movie star (or even an extra) finishes a movie, that movie is done!  It's in the can!  Finito!  How many of us get to experience the same sense of completion at our jobs?  Sure, we teachers enter our final grades at the end of the term, but then there's a whole 'nother class waiting 'round the summer break with the SAME problems as that class we just finished!  When one report is completed, it only raises questions that a subsequent report will need to answer.  How many things does your average president accomplish completely?  (Well, actually, GWB did manage to utterly gut several precepts of individual liberty, as well as demolish America's image abroad, so, y'know, Bravo, Mr. Bush!)

The point, dear Sloppists, is, take pleasure in your small accomplishments.  In the end, that's probably about all you'll be able to look back on and honestly say, "Well done!"

Grammar in the News

The Solipsist would like to give a shout-out to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer for illustrating the importance of adverbs in everyday life.

In Flores-Figueroa v. United States, the question before the court was whether the government could charge illegal immigrants with aggravated identity theft (a serious crime) if they present an employer with a false social security number that, unbeknownst to the accused, actually belongs to a real person.  In other words, is the simple fact that the number does belong to a real person grounds enough to charge someone with an offense that is usually associated with criminals stealing social security numbers for the purposes of, say, running up credit card bills.

The court found that it was not, that these immigrants had no intent to defraud the people whose social security numbers they happened to use.  From today's Times:

"Justice Stephen G. Breyer, in his opinion for the court, said the case should be decided by applying 'ordinary English grammar' to the text of the law, which applies when an offender 'knowingly transfers, possesses or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person.

"The government had argued that the 'knowingly' requirement applied only to the verbs in question.  Justice Breyer rejected that interpretation, saying that 'it seems natural to read the statute's word "knowingly" as applying to all the listed elements of the crime.'

"He gave examples from everyday life to support this view.  'If we say that someone knowingly ate a sandwich with cheese,' Justice Breyer wrote, 'we normally assume that the person knew both that he was eating a sandwich and that it contained cheese.'"

In grammatical terms, Breyer is stating that adverbs modify not just verbs but entire predicates.  Grammarians can debate the correctness of this conclusion.  But we are impressed by the amount of weight that the adverb carries in this case.

Adverbs, you see, are an often derided part of speech.  No less an authority than Stephen King has exhorted aspiring writers to avoid adverbs whenever possible, and this is good advice.  Consider all the empty "very"s we employ on a daily basis, to say nothing of the "really"s, "generally"s, "actually"s, and (a personal bugaboo) "basically"s.  Excessive adverb use also leads to redundancy: We have all-too-much experience of writing students who think they're being descriptive when they explain that someone "whispered quietly" or "crept slowly."

But today, the Supreme Court of the United States has upheld the virtue of a well-placed adverb.  There is, they say, a fundamental difference between acts committed "knowingly" and "unknowingly."  And whether the law's writers intended for the act to be interpreted this way, once they committed that adverb to paper, they--knowingly or not--limited the crime that a person could commit.

You Gotta Have a Gimmick

Here's an interesting story.

A mentally-ill, illegal immigrant from China has been detained in Florida for over a year.  She has been in this country since the late 1990s.  In China, she was forcibly sterilized after giving birth to a second son, in violation of that country's one-child rule.  In the US, she held various low-wage jobs and was essentially no different from thousands of other law-abiding, if under-the-radar, illegal immigrants.  She was arrested in December 2007 and has been in detention ever since, despite the efforts of her family.  Her prolonged detention has contributed to her mental deterioration.

So what makes her special?  Why does this story merit front-page placement in The New York Times?  The woman's name: Xiu Ping Jiang.

It probably doesn't mean anything to you, nor, really, should it.  It is, however, the same name of the wife of Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant who went on a shooting rampage in Binghamton, NY, last month.  This Xiu Ping Jiang is apparently not Mrs. Wong, nor is she any relation.  Still, internet searches for the gunman's wife brought up the Florida detainee's records.  And once a reporter stumbled onto her story, it was presumably to juicy a human interest piece to pass up.

We think again about the need for gimmickry.  A homeless advocacy organization needs to package itself through soccer.  A hapless, mentally-ill immigrant only attracts attention because she happens to share a name with the wife of a mass murderer.  One would think there has to be a better way.

Sunday Paper Recap

Nothing gets a Sunday off to a creakier start than opening the door and not finding that blue plastic bag on the threshold.  Now we have to put on pants and go out in the rain to the supermarket for the New York Times.  And to make matters worse, upon returning home, we realize that we're missing the Week in Review!  What's a Sunday without Frank Rich's fulminations?  (Yes, yes, we could always read it online, but that goes against the whole Sunday vibe.)

Anyway, the following struck us as commentworthy.  We (re)report, you decide:

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On Not-Swine Flu:

"The news [about confirmed cases of swine flu among pigs in Canada] changes things.  But it has a somewhat unexpected twist: a person appears to have spread the disease to the pigs. . . ."

Remember, this is The New York Times, not The Onion.

Now, after the minor chastisement we received from our FFB Emi Ha, far be it from us to speculate on the activities of our friends to the Great White North.  But still, you've got to wonder:

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On Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka:

"Some of the game's greats have been honored with plaques in Yankee Stadium's Monument Park.  Others have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame, and a rare few have statues in their likenesses erected in front of stadiums, or even rotundas built in their memory.  For Matsuzaka, the great honor is warm and soothing toilets. . . ."

See, before the Red Sox could sign Matsuzaka, they had to pay the Seibu Lions, Matsuzaka's Japanese team, a "posting fee" for the right to negotiate with the star pitcher.  They paid slightly over $51,000,000 (and that was just what they paid the team--they signed Matsuzaka for another $50,000,000 or so).  The Lions spent this money on various upgrades, including to the dilapidated stadium bathrooms, which now constitute an attraction in and of themselves: state of the art urinals (whatever that means), high-tech hand dryers, and, in the stalls "TotTo's Warmlet seats" (the name seems self-explanatory).  One potential area of concern: The women's stalls feature something called a "Washlet," which is a combined toilet and bidet; does this strike anyone else as risky?

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On the National Homeless Soccer League:

This sounds like something Dave Chapelle would have come up with, but it's real.  Street Soccer USA is a 16-team league, comprised of homeless teens and adults.  Teams are organized in homeless shelters, and they compete with other local soccer clubs (often corporate teams).  The goal (no pun intended), according to the Street Soccer website, is to "use sport as a tool for personal development among homeless teens and adults."  Their programs report "upwards of a 75% success rate in helping clients connect to jobs, housing, treatement [sic] or further education."  So, an apparently worthwhile program (although they should proofread their informational PDF more carefully).

One cannot help but wonder, though, why this kind of program would be more advantageous than a more traditional approach to helping the homeless.  In other words, does the funding that must go into things like purchasing equipment, hiring coaches, promoting the events (and/or supporting outreach to corporations who might donate these things), etc., achieve more than would, say, supporting a traditional job-training program?  Look, in today's economy, non-profit groups need a "hook," and this is a good one--heck, it got them into the New York Times and, more impressively, The Solipsist!  But it's disappointing that programs to help people who really need help have to resort to what could be considered stunts in order to attract attention.