We Can Haz Trends

Writer's block, schmiter's block! What's trending today?

10. CORLEONE MAFIA: Police in Italy arrested Gaetano Riina, the boss of the Corleone crime family. Yes, as in THAT Corleone crime family. Mr. Riina's attorneys are encouraging their client to plead not-guilty by reason of fictionality.

9. EMERGING MARKETS: Nervous about the global economy? Fearing the imminent demise of the American financial system? Well, move your money into two hot new emerging markets: Malaysia and Indonesia! Trade in your dollars for. . . let's say mokmoks and cowrie shells. (We made up one of those currencies. Can you guess which?) Look, we're all for poor countries becoming richer, but isn't this part of the reason that the US economy, to cite Jon Stewart's analysis, sucks: the fact that multi-gazillionaires shovel their money into low-wage principalities. How about a little domestic investment? We know, we know: How can investors make money as long as American workers insist on being paid enough to, y'know, live.

8. PATENTS: The big news here is that patents held by Nortel, a bankrupt telecom firm, have been snapped up by Apple and other companies for billions of dollars, proving that the best ideas come from those with, apparently, no idea how to put them into practice successfully.

7. GRACE KELLY: Her son is getting married. No word on whether she'll be attending.

6. BROOKE SHIELDS: She will play Morticia in the Broadway production of "The Addams Family. Is that still running? Producers were won over by her hilarious performance at this year's Tony Awards. Apparently, they thought it was intentional.

5. FRACKING: The Solipsist has already said everything he has to say on this topic (see "Frack This"), proving once again that we are even trendier than "Trending Now."

4. LINDA EVANGELISTA: Now it can be told: The New York Post reports that the father of her 4-year-old son is French billionaire Francois Henri-Pinault. The shocking part about this is not the revelation, nor the fact that Evangelista kept this quiet for so long. It's that Henri-Pinault went five-plus years without bragging about knocking up Linda Evangelista.

3. RYAN DUNN: The late, somewhat-lamented star of "Jackass," who died a few weeks ago in a DUI incident, is being memorialized by his castmates in an online video highlighting some of his greatest Jackass moments. We should take a moment to commemorate the passing of a man who died as he lived: moronically.

2. STEVEN TYLER: Aerosmith frontman and paraffin dummy Steven Tyler will return to "American Idol" next year. Somewhere in music heaven, Jam-Master Jay is shaking his head and thinking, "We resurrected the man's career for THIS?!?"

And, the number one trendiest topic of this moment is. . .

1. LINDSAY LOHAN: Today is the 25th birthday of the troubled ex-starlet. Personally, we hope she gets her act together. That Linda Lovelace biopic can't suck itself. (Yeah, we have no idea what that means either; we just thought it sounded good.)

Hootie Bin Laden?

The Obama administration has a plan, folks. Not a plan to get us out of our various Middle-Eastern embroilments. Not a plan to balance the federal budget. Not even a plan to get rid of this persistent itching in the back of our solipsistic throat (we should never eat apples). No, they have a plan to save the spotted owl.

Not for nothing, but haven't we been saving this owl since the 1980s? It seems to us that, any owl that can't be saved after decades of government intervention probably doesn't want to be saved. Has anyone checked their little owl wrists for knife wounds?

We're all for saving wildlife, especially when said wildlife is all cute and feathery, but one major element of the plan troubles us. You see, one of the existential threats facing the spotted owl is aggressive competition from the equally adorable barred owl. Thus, in order to save the spotted owl, the government may go in with both barrels blazing. That's right, the Feds are contemplating a proverbial turkey shoot. But with owls.

Now, we can understand government intervention to protect nature from the ravages of man and technology. But should we really be choosing sides in what seems to be a fundamentally Darwinian struggle? If one species of owl is kicking the ecological crap out of another, who are we to take sides? What kind of lobbyists does the spotted owl have that it can get the federal government to favor it over its equally charismatic cousin?

Our liberal interventionist tendencies often encourage us to support efforts to protect the weak from the predations of the powerful. But it seems like we're talking about the Circle of Life here. This isn't Libya; it's the Lion King. We must tread carefully before taking up arms in support of one faction over another. Look at what happened in Afghanistan. We provided military assistance to adorable spotted Afghans against the barred Soviet Army. Our allies won, but we're still suffering blowback today. Today's endangered species could become tomorrow's Owl Qaeda.

SOLIPSISTOGRAPHY:

"Plan Issued to Save Northern Spotted Owl"

Forgotten Any Good Books Lately?

Awhile back, we read an essay by James Collins in the New York Times Book Review. In the essay, Collins makes a damning admission: Despite being a professional writer and prolific reader, he has immense trouble remembering the details--and sometimes even the grand arching themes--of many of the books he reads. When we read this piece, we were shocked, appalled. . . and thoroughly relieved. "Thank God!" we thought. "We're not the only one!"

The fact is, despite the fact that YNSHC majored in English in college, receiving both bachelor's and master's degrees, we, too, have immense difficulty recalling even the broad strokes of many of the books we have read. In some cases, this is because the books were lethally dull or written by George Eliot (yes, we know: same thing). But even when we enjoy the books we read, we very often have great difficulty remembering much of anything about them. We remember distinctly READING the books; in many cases, we explicitly remember ENJOYING the books; yet if someone were to quiz us on even the most basic facts, we would often have to smile, shrug, and come up with a very good excuse--or just make sweeping, critically-astute-sounding comments. "Ah, yes, well. . . Ulysses. . . Magnificent book. . . .Joyce's radical experiments with narrative form are just. . . great."

On Facebook, we often see lists of "Great Books" or "Top 100 Books of All Time," and we enjoy checking off the ones we've read. Of course, the number of books read far outstrips the number of books remembered. Here, therefore, in no particular order, is an extremely partial, more-or-less random, but ultimately honest list of some classic and not-so-classic books we've read, divided into three sections. How does your own personal list measure up?

BOOKS THAT WE'VE READ AND CAN ACTUALLY DISCUSS IN SOME DETAIL
Hamlet: Maybe it's because this is a play, or maybe it's because we've literally had to read it about ten times for different classes, but we can discuss the Melancholy Dane with barely conscious ease. The same goes for things like Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, and several other Shakespeare plays.

[DIGRESSION: Speaking of, we've been watching reruns of "Dexter" lately. Watch season 4 (the one with John Lithgow). It's a total homage to Hamlet. EOD)

Plays are often memorable: A couple of others that stick with us are Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and The Iceman Cometh. We actually wrote our master's thesis on the latter, so we SHOULD be able to remember it.

Catch-22
Slaughter-House Five
The Fortress of Solitude
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Most anything written by Stephen King or Harlan Ellison

BOOKS THAT WE CAN REMEMBER BITS AND PIECES OF, BUT FOR WHICH THERE ARE MAJOR GAPS
This is a considerably longer list:
Moby-Dick: The first 100 pages and the last fifty are terrific. It's those 600 pages in the middle about penguins that'll kill you. (We did, however, write a nifty paper on the chapter called "The Cabin Table.")
A Tale of Two Cities: Great opening line, great closing line, and that lady with the knitting needles.
Bleak House: Speaking of Dickens, we had to read and write about this book in grad school. So. . . Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. . . .And our paper was about the theme of altruism, so we imagine that comes up somewhere.
Gravity's Rainbow: "A pig is a jolly companion / Boar, Sow, Barrow, or Gilt / A pig is a pal / Who'll boos your morale/ Tho' others may topple and tilt. / / Though your friends may bamboozle and hoodwink you / Though they'll turn on you, Tory and Whig / Though you may be thrown over / By Fido and Rover / You'll never go wrong with a pig / A pig! / No you'll never go wrong with a pig."
Infinite Jest: Tennis academies, wheelchair assassins, corporate sponsorships of entire years. . . .
The Name of the Rose: Actually, we remember this one pretty well--better than Foucault's Pendulum, about which we mostly remember something about the Knights Templar--but we put it here because we STILL have no idea why it's called The Name of the Rose.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay: Something about a golem.
1984: We love Big Brother
Crime and Punishment: The "Columbo" scene.

And many more.

And now, the most embarrassing. . .

BOOKS WE KNOW WE'VE READ BUT ABOUT WHICH WE DRAW A PRETTY MUCH TOTAL BLANK, including:
Madame Bovary
Vanity Fair
Sons and Lovers: We think we rooted for "Lovers."
Anna Karenina
War and Peace (For God's sake! We just read that!)
Anything by Virginia Woolf. . . .

OK, this is just getting depressing.

We take some comfort in the fact that, according to a psychologist quoted in Collins' essay, even if you don't remember a book, it still had an effect on you, shaping your neural pathways and building up your stores of knowledge and insight. At least that's what we THINK she said. We really don't remember the article that well.

Solipsistography:
"The Plot Escapes Me"

A Hairline Runs through It

In case you missed it. . .

The hottest trend in the fashion world comes not from the banks of the Seine--more like the banks of the Susquehanna probably. Fashionistas have adopted fly-fishing lures as the new must-have hair accessory. There's something charmingly "Green Acres" about the whole thing. We eagerly await Michael Kors' inevitable "Rural Bohemia" line: Trendsetters will sport oil filters from John Deere tractors as jewelry come the fall.

Solipsistography:
"When Fashion Meets Fishing, the Feathers Fly"

XBox Not X-Rated

The Supreme Court ruled against a California law that banned the sale of overly violent video games to children. We think the majority got the ruling right but the reasoning wrong.

At any rate, the majority opinion, written by Antonin Scalia, relied on a correspondence between video games and other forms of media, such as books, movies, songs, etc. Scalia noted that the government has never previously regulated depictions of violence, so video games should not be subject to such regulation.

Now, when it comes to personal, privacy-of-one's-own-home issues, the Solipsist is pretty libertarian. If kids want to play ultra-violent video games, and their parents are OK with them doing so, who are we to judge? Unless of course we're judges. Like on the Supreme Court. . . . Wait, we just confused ourselves.

Scalia says violent video games shouldn't be regulated by the government because depictions of violence never have been regulated by the government. But just because something never has been done doesn't automatically mean it should never be done, especially if there is some compelling societal reason for doing it. Prior to last Friday, government officials in New York had never conferred legitimacy on same-sex marriage, but that, thankfully, didn't stop them from taking such action. And we suppose a case could be made that the government has a legitimate role to play in preventing children's exposure to insanely violent stimuli, especially if, as some fear, such games encourage children to behave violently.

We had different objections to the legislation.

For one thing, it's utterly pointless. The fact that a store can't sell violent video games to children will hardly prevent children from getting them. Again, if parents don't object to their children having such games, then parents could simply buy the games for them.

The more important problem with the legislation is its lack of specificity. The law in question

defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that was “patently offensive,” appealed to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacked “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value."

Who decides what is "offensive"? How does one know which of minor's interests are being appealed to? How "serious" does the literary, artistic, political, or scientific value need to be? These are terms that we would reject in a student's topic sentence. We strongly object to their presence as legal benchmarks.

We realize this puts us into agreement with Justice Samuel Alito, who suggested that a more carefully worded law might withstand judicial scrutiny. Rest assures, we are as troubled by this as you are. But even a paleoconservative clock is right once a Supreme Court term.

English teachers of the world unite! No vaguely worded statutes!

Representative Exchange

Today, we administered our midterm. Students must write a well-organized paragraph on a topic provided by the instructor. One option we gave the students was, "Discuss one advantage or one disadvantage of owning a cellphone." Experience has taught us, however, to issue the following caveat:

NOTE: If you choose to write about an advantage, you cannot choose "communication" as a main idea; that's too general.

STUDENT: Mr. Solipsist, I know we can't write about "communication," but can I say, "One advantage of owning a cellphone is to be able to communiCATE with people?

SOL: No, that's the same thing.

STU: Can I say "to talk to people"?

SOL: How is that different from "communicating"?

STU: Oh, OK. . . OH! I know, could I say, "One advantage of owning a cellphone is that it helps you connect with people?

SOL: Well, what does "connect" mean?

STU: You know, connect. . . .like, talk to or. . .or. . .

SOL: Communicate?

STU: Yeah! Oh.

SOL: Yeah. . .

We look forward to grading.

We're Very Disappointed

Let's see, how can we put this nicely?

You all suck.

Today we read about a site called Klout.com, which gathers information from one's Facebook and Twitter accounts to measure one's "influence" in the world. Those with higher scores are considered "influencers," i.e., people who have some "pull" with others, and who, as a result, are often showered with gifts from corporate sponsors who wish to be associated with centers of influence. At any rate, the Solipsist thought he should check out exactly how wide-ranging his no-doubt considerable influence on the world is.

Now, the average Klout score falls in the high teens (out of a possible score of 100). Those with scores in the 40's probably have a "strong but niche following." Conservatively, we assumed our score would fall in the upper 90's. Imagine our surprise--nay, our shock--nay, our appalled dismay--to find that our score was.. . . 10!

Did we mention that you all suck?

Now, in order to up our score--without resorting to the desperate ploy of creating a Twitter account--we must somehow show that our followers are a small but fanatically loyal bunch. We've thought about calling on all of you to throw yourselves off a cliff, but we realize that--while this would certainly cause a sudden spike in our ranking--the long-range effect would probably be negative. Call it the Reverend Jim Jones Effect.

We've decided, therefore, simply to require all faithful members of Solipsist Nation to don feathered caps. Any size or feather-type will do. Please photograph yourselves wearing these feathered caps and post the pictures to Facebook--or better yet, just send them directly to Klout.com! If a massive mail-in campaign can get New York State to approve same-sex marriage, surely we can also inflate the Solipsist's influence numbers into at least the respectable teens!

Don't make us sign up for Twitter!

Solipsistography

"Got Twitter? You've Been Scored"