Random Thoughts from Saturday Afternoon

. . . .So, Keith Olbermann gets suspended from MSNBC because he made a couple of donations to Democratic candidates? Why? It's not as if Olbermann has made any secret of his political leanings--it's why the people who watch him, watch him! Does Bill O'Reilly not make contributions to Fascist--uh, sorry, Republican candidates? Or does providing them with constant advertorial support not count? Perhaps he does donate to the GOP, and Fox News (no, we will not link to them) just has looser regulations about its on-air personalities' political activities than MSNBC. . . .

. . . In other news, don't wear a red shirt in Target. Unless you want to fuck with people, in which case knock yourself out. "Sponges? Yeah, they're in aisle G-47. Between the clocks and men's underwear. Hey, I just work here, I don't design the displays.". . .

. . .Oh, and don't wear a red shirt on "Star Trek," unless you want to die. Or unless you're on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," in which case you're in upper management. . . .

. . . .Seen in Oakland's Chinatown: a Chinese take-out and donut store, perfect for Jewish cops and those who love them. . . .

. . . Also seen in Chinatown: Mr. Yick's Emporium. Suggested slogan, "You won't go 'Yuck!' if it's from Yick's!". . . .

(Image from MSNBC)

It's Gonna Be a Long Two Years

We've reached the end of another week. In the spirit of the Sabbath (which provides as good an excuse as anything for laziness), we just have a couple of final (?) thoughts on this week's elections.

We wonder how all those anti-healthcare Teabaggers will feel when their heroes fail to overturn this year's healthcare legislation. The chairman and president of "Freedomworks," an Orwellian-named Tea Party umbrella group, have warned the incoming Republican congress that a repeal of the legislation is "non-negotiable" as a baseline accomplishment. Have these folks never heard of a veto? What exactly do these people think will happen? (A) The still-Democratic senate will never pass such a repeal, and, even if they did, (B) Obama would never sign it (well, we imagine he would never sign it--he's let us down before).

At the same time, it will be interesting to see how much actual governing gets done by a Congress whose Senate Majority Leader has said that the primary goal of the Republican Party (YOUR governing party, now, folks) should be to make Obama a one-term president. Admirable goal, that--never mind those pesky citizens whose interests you've supposedly been sent to Washington to represent. Still, we suppose McConnell is to be commended for his honesty. And, of course, if they DO get their wish, they just may be able to repeal healthcare reform, after all.

At which point, we hope those Teabaggers enjoy the benevolence of insurance conglomerates everywhere, who will no doubt reward their citizens' army with exquisite service at perpetually affordable prices.

We're going to start making amends to Canada. We may want to move there someday soon.

How Much Effort Is Too Much Effort?

The other day, we read a review of a book about brilliance. The author and title elude us, but the gist of the book was that "talent" is not some innate god-given gift but rather a process. Essentially, this author claims, any of us could compose like Mozart or hit a baseball like Ted Williams as long as we put our minds to it and commit to practice practice practice until reaching the desired level. We must not only accept failure but welcome it, for only through failure will we discover what it takes to achieve success.

OK. We'll accept that to an extent. We doubt everyone has an inner Mozart squawling to get out, but we believe that, with effort, people can achieve some qualified success and improve whatever skill or talent they set their minds to mastering. What struck us about the review and inspired today's post was the author's attempt to encourage his readers by pointing out that he, himself, revises sentences 20 to 30 times before deeming them satisfactory.

20 to 30 times? How many different ways are there to say "I revise my sentences 20 to 30 times until I find them satisfactory"?

It put us in mind of Camus' The Plague. A character, Joseph Grand, aspires to write a great novel, but, because he spends so much time wordsmithing and tweaking, he can never get past the opening line. Is it worth the effort?

Robert Klein used to do a bit about speed-readers: He lamented their implied disdain for the author. They just zoom along a page, whereas the poor writer agonized over every "a" and "the": "The 'a' is grammatically correct, but the 'the' just has a certain je ne sais quoi!" We assure our readers that we almost never put that much thought into the definite vs. indefinite article. Or anything else, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of monkeys.

It's statements like the above--the one about revising sentences 20 to 30 times--that make us think we must be doing something either phenomenally right or appallingly wrong. Sure, we revise: We go through every blog post looking for typos, grammatical slip-ups, and the occasional racial slur (inadvertent, we swear!). We run through some mechanical exercises and rituals (minimizing use of "to be"; replacing bland, vague, or unnecessary pronouns with more interesting verbiage; smoking a single cigarette before a psychotic groupie-nurse comes along and shatters our ankles). But that about does it. Are we being lazy? Could we scale Olympian heights of writerly craftsmanship if we devoted more time to tweaking and revising?

How many times did Gabriel Garcia Marquez revise the opening line of One-Hundred Years of Solitude:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

And how many times did Gregory Rabassa have to revise that translation?

(The last line's none too shabby, either:

"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.")

Did Robert Penn Warren go through 20 or 30 drafts before coming up with this closing for All the King's Men?

"But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

How many times would we have to rework a sentence to come up with something even close to this, possibly the most beautiful closing line in all of English literature:

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

See, if we knew James Joyce wrestled with that sentence for a week and a half, we'd have a better sense of how much effort is too much effort. Without that information, though, we're just left to wonder whether we've done the best we could or if we've just opted for a relatively easy way out.

You Say ""Governor Moonbeam" Like It's a Bad Thing. . .

. . .or, "Election Reflections."


--At least locally we did OK. Senator Boxer goes back to Washington; Jerry Brown goes back to Sacramento; and SF Mayor Gavin Newsom moves up in the California political hierarchy. As to Brown's lunar nickname, we frankly don't see it as a denigration. We like the thought of voting for "Governor Moonbeam": It's like voting for Luke Skywalker. We overcame any misgiving we might have had about voting for someone who sounds like a character from "Star Trek" awhile back (cf., "Barack Obama").

--Speaking of which, we'd rather vote for the guy whose (nick)name sounds like it belongs to a "Star Trek" character than for the lady whose major contribution to modern society was giving people the ability to buy "Star Trek" bobble-heads online from disreputable merchants.


--And, of course, better a "Governor Moonbeam" than a "Senator Wacko Opthalmologist Who Wants to Repeal Civil Rights Legislation." (We're looking at you, Kentucky.)


--At any rate, we take solace in the fact that, if nothing else, we don't have to worry about our mailboxes imploding under the weight of campaign mailings for another two years or so. And we got through the voting itself, which is no mean feat.

If you've never voted in California, we suggest you move here just to have the experience at least once. We don't know how it is in your state, but, compared to voting in New York--a breezy two minutes in a booth, flipping a few switches and pulling a lever--voting in the Golden State is a veritable Bataan Death March of civic participation. In addition to the "top of the ticket" items (governor, senator), you have the mid-level folks (lieutenant governor, attorney general), the "Enough Already!" offices (supreme court judges running unopposed, school board), and the "Really?" brigade (Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Sanitation Transportation). Then come several pages of propositions, referenda, measures, and jirgas--the pros and cons of all of which a conscientious voter must deliberate on. Or you do what we did and just alternate "Yeses" and "Nos." We noted that at least one of these measures was to repeal a measure that had been voted on in the LAST election. (Tough noogies, losers! You wanted it? You got it!) We think the strategy is to wear down the electorate so that, by the time they get to the end of the ballot, they're so groggy that they approve things like free lapdances for city-councilmembers.

--And now, we head into the next two years, looking forward to a Congress that gets nothing done; an increasingly angry electorate ever-more divided by partisan rancor; and our nation's slow, sad decline into malaise. . . .

So, yeah, nothing's changed. Kind of a relief, really.

(Image from eBay, obviously.)

Any Way You Look at It, You Lose

This morning, shortly after leaving for work, we looked down in horror and realized we had insufficiently stickered ourselves! Talk about feeling naked! (No, really, talk about feeling naked, Sloppists--especially you hot ones!) Utterly disoriented, we spun out of control, crashing the Slopmobile into a fence; the impact flung us from the car. Dazed but unhurt, we staggered through the first open door we came to. Turns out, we had serendipitously wrecked ourselves right in front of sticker distributorship! We didn't even have to pay! We just had to fill in some bubbles (we made a neat turkey-shaped pattern) on a sheet we received from an extremely old lady, give the sheet to an to an even-extremelier old lady, and receive our free sticker!

Sure, we would have preferred something with a duck on it (it being Tuesday and all), but still, stickerless beggars can't be choosers.

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Seen on the Yahoo! News feed: In new book, Bush says he considered replacing Cheney. He was going to do it, too, but Cheney decided it wasn't a good idea.

(Image from willisms.com)

Congratulations

Just a brief post to congratulate the San Francisco Giants on winning the World Series. The ultimate blue-state squad thoroughly dominated the ultimate red-state team. Could this portend good things for tomorrow's elections? Well, probably not.

But good job, orange and black!

Some of Our Best Friends Are. . . .

The biggest non-story news story of the past week--a true candidate for Mr. Irrelevant had it not appeared prominently on Yahoo!'s homepage--was about how the majority of our nation's soldiers could care less whether openly homosexual troops served in the military.

(DIGRESSION: We've heard people use "could care less" and "couldn't care less" pretty much interchangeably. Logically, we've always felt it should be "couldn't care less," implying that people couldn't care LESS because they don't care AT ALL; at the same time, though, "could care less" just scans better. What's you opinion? We'd like to know. EOD)

We hasten to point out that when the pollsters first asked soldiers how they felt about the possibility of homosexuals serving in the military, a large proportion did, in fact, express opposition--until the pollsters pointed out that this opened the door for lesbians, as well. Serving together. . . . Showering together. . . . Comforting each other on those long, lonely, Arabian nights. . . . Where were we?

Seriously, though, can anyone be surprised by the non-deafening lack-of-outrage expressed by the typical servicemember? Sure, when the Solipsist went to high school in the mid-1980's, homsexuality hadn't been discovered yet. When we went off to college--as a drama major, no less--we sat through our first "coming out of the closet" speech and thought, "Wow, we know a gay person now. Huh. . . . Does that mean we're gay?!?" (It didn't.)

But today, everybody knows gay people. The generation currently enlisting in the armed forces was born at most a year or two before Ellen came out of the closet and dashed the erotic dreams of every young man who had a thing for average-looking funny blondes (yes, we'rer still bitter). Having a gay friend today is about as avant-garde and noteorthy as. . . . well, as having a friend!

As far as we're concerned, the only real drawback to eliminating "don't ask-don't tell" comes from the fact that now people who want out of the army will have to come up with a different excuse. We guess they can always just claim to be Canadians.