Woefully, I am Letting the Woeful Go

Each Bloguscript posting follows several rules. One is the use of the word "woeful" every time. I have kept it up for three years, but, woefully, even I grow bored with this awesome inside joke. So, goodbye my friend. You may reappear again sometime, but you are off the protocol.

PS -- Maybe I will select another word to obsess over. Watch for it. Oh, and this Thursday seems like an appropriate time to recommend Thursday by Morphine; now playing on iTunes.

Fellow Travelers

Recently, I was on a plane trip from DC to San Francisco. I am on planes a LOT now-a-days for my job. Most of the time, the trips are uneventful. But, this time I was seated next to a, how you say in America, character.

I sat in the aisle seat in the first exit row on one of those big ole 777s and for a while it looked as though I might get the two-seat side row to myself. However, a well-but-sloppily-dressed and heavy-set middle-aged fellow eventually showed up and said, "That's me there," pointing at the window seat. I started to get up to let him in but he demurred. He made it clear that he'd just do a few things first.

In order: He tossed his Jack Spade man bag across me onto his seat where upon it rocketed off and into the wall space between our row and first class. He shrugged sheepishly and next tossed his glasses onto the seat, where upon they, too, bounced off and ricocheted under the seat in front of us. He laughed awkwardly, took better aim, and proceeded to caroom his book off the seat cushion, seat back, and tray table and onto the floor. He shrugged. Then he tried to put his luggage in the overhead rack three different ways (wheels in, wheels out, sideways) before adopting the original wheels in approach. He continued to insist that I not bother getting up and just scooted by me into his seat -- like a well-heeled but unkempt bear trying to be polite in an unfamiliar social situation-- affording me a gratis close-up view of his posterior.

Once seated, he retrieved his scattered belongings with much huffing, puffing, and grunting. After take-off, he opened his glasses case to pull out a brand-new pair of reading glasses complete with price tag. He unfolded them, placed them on -- price tag still hanging Minnie Pearl style --  and started reading approximately two billion newspapers. With each, he carefully hand-tore out any article that caught his fancy, folded it into a neat square, a careful rectangle, or other geometric shape and added it to an increasingly tall stack. This process took about two full hours. The bulk of these papers, which did not merit personal rending and collection, were added to a growing rat's nest of newsprint that littered the airplane floor at his feet.

Woefully, interspersed with the paper rustling, tearing, and folding were a continuous, irregular but prolific set of burps, farts, and yawns. The yawns, in particular, deserve their Boswell. Tired, I had endeavored to catch some shut-eye so, at first, I did not realize what was happening. But, as I emerged from the disorienting fog of war that is sleeping on long-haul air travel I realized that my seatmate was making an odd series of noises that indicated enthusiastic agreement, a kind of laconic orgasm, or a successful itch scratching. The man would periodically say, "yeahyeah," with a drawn out first "YEAAAH Yeah." It took me a while to realize that he was, in fact, yawning.

Now, the odd thing is that this man was obviously quite well off. His rumpled clothing was high-end stuff. I checked the price of Jack Spade bags when I got home and they run to $400 a piece. He was perhaps the eccentric scion of some industrial age fortune? An odd but brilliant dotcom founder? A well-funded performance artist secretly videotaping my reaction for a planned MOMA installation? Who knows?

I was particularly grateful to the "flight deck" for their announcement that we would be landing soon.

PS - Naturally, as we landed I needed to go to the restroom to relieve myself of the copious amounts of water and Coke I drank on the flight. But, I was sufficiently traumatized by our time together that I deliberately let him precede me off the plane and waited until he veered into a Men's Room before I made my selection of a lavatory much further down the hall. I am as sure of this as anything I have learned in my life: I did not want to find out what peculiarities accompanied his ablutions. Oh, and while my fellow traveler was clearly well off, both Aloe Blacc and I Need a Dollar; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Heat Rises

I have been watching ABC's "Castle" since it premiered and -- while it will not win any awards -- it combines puns, crime drama, romance, puns, New York City, puns, and charismatic Canadians Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic...so I am happy.

The general gist: Richard Castle is a famous mystery novelist and divorced father raising his teenage daughter along with his live-in Broadway diva mother. When a copy-cat serial killer parrots the plots of his books, he meets NYPD Detective Kate Beckett, a no-nonsense hottie struggling with the lingering loss of her mother's unsolved murder. After they work together to solve the Castle copy-cat killings, Rick Castle ("Rich Asshole?") and Kate Beckett pair up to investigate homicides in New York along with a team of engaging background players on, and off, the force.

ABC has won my heart forever by publishing three best-selling mysteries as if they were actually written by Rick Castle, complete with acknowledgements from Rick, readers' guides, and author's photos. In them, Castle chronicles the adventures of a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Jameson Rook, and his paramour and no-nonsense hottie, NYPD Detective Nikki Heat.

In Heat Rises (a better title, suggested by his editor, Castle admits, than his woefully bad original Heat Heat Heat), our heroes are investigating the seemingly tawdry death of a Catholic priest. Events lead them to interrogate an attractive and single member of the priest's flock, whith whom he has been working to fund a potentially shady human rights group. Killer puns abound. To wit:

"Emma Carroll was quite attractive in what some would call a cougarish way, but the skin was swollen around her eyes, which had a dullness from medication or despondency, or both. 'I'm still reeling,' she told them as soon as they sat. 'Father Gerry was a great priest and a great man.'

'Were you close?' Heat surveyed her, wondering if there was any forbidden romance lurking, but she couldn't tell, which usually meant there wasn't any. Nikki prided herself on having finely tuned lay-dar."

- Heat Rises. Castle, Richard. New York (NY): Hyperion, 2011. P. 69 of 451.

Ahh, puns. Yay.

PS - You can read Heat Wave and Naked Heat, too, if you like. I did. Oh, and "Night Train" by James Brown is hot, hot, hot; now playing on iTunes.

Do It: Watch the Muppet Show Theme Song

Sometime in, say, 2000, I went to a concert at the Black Cat in Washington, DC. Back then, the neighborhood was woefully sketchy -- not the kind of place you might be hoping to start a cool bookstore or buy a condo. When you went, you brought plenty of people with you, moved swiftly, and exuded a sense of purpose. My purpose was to see a young straight-ahead rock and roll band named OK Go.

They were good. Not earth-shattering, but fun. So I signed up for their email list when I left. I have been getting posts from them ever since and it has been interesting to watch their meteoric rise as they harnessed the power of kooky videos in a viral age.

Anyhoo, they have been tapped to perform the new Muppet Show movie theme song, and--as per usual--the video is a blast.

So do it: Watch the Muppet Movie theme song, which recapitulates the past OK Go videos.

PS - Arghhhhhhhhh! Man, we most posolutely can NOT close this blog entry without recommending the video that really put the boys on the map: "Here It Goes Again" by OK Go, now playing on iTunes.

Return of the iMac

When my iMac woefully died a brutal, total head-crashing hard drive death after just 5 months of service, I was sorely disappointed. So I packed it up and went to the Genius Bar and they replaced the drive. Fortunately, I had been backing everything up onto a G-Drive Mini. I reloaded all my bad poetry and poorly-recorded acoustic guitar songs as well as my carefully collected iTunes library and all was right with the world again.

But it would have really, really sucked not to have a back up copy of everything. If you are not taking similar steps, do so immediately.

PS - While it is kind of a rip-off, get the AppleCare protection plan, too. Oh, and "Return of the Mack" by Mark Morrison is smoother than a Steve Jobs pitch; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Our Kind of Traitor

John le Carre (nee David Cornwell) has gotten more play from a five year stint in the British Foreign Service than anyone has a right to. He is also in an odd situation: he is both a past master of the novel and a struggling new writer. As a student of the Cold War and the author of the "Karla trilogy" and its predecessors, le Carre is an odds on favourite (as he might spell it) for the best genre writer of his generation worldwide. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People, he transcended his niche into full-on social critique, narrative mastery, and stylistic genius. No one has gotten it so right for so many pages since -- and many have put forward admirable efforts. Yet, the woefully troubling slide into the post Cold War era that saw le Carre put out such subsequent books as The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama (Graham Greene needs a cover band about as much as The Beatles did), and Single & Single, revealed nothing so much as a precocious young writer trying -- and failing -- to hit his stride.

I am pleased, therefore, to announce that -- although I swore at one point to never buy a le Carre again -- his recent Our Kind of Traitor hints at a return to form. All the basic framing is there: British spies, class warfare conducted through trade craft even more occult than that of the Secret Service at its height, exotic and depressing locales, spare tension leeched through laconic and detached men who ghost through their lives and careers as unacclaimed soloists, and -- ta duh! -- Russians. All this solid bone structure lets le Carre's book look pretty on the runway no matter what today's mode. The student of the Cold War has returned to teach us that everything old is new again.

A case in point taken from the scene where long-serving intelligence maven Hector Meredith is recruiting career washout Luke Weaver to join his newest division, the Counterclaim Focus Group:

"'What's the most dire, fucking awful thing you've ever seen in your life? Anywhere? Apart from the business-end of a drug lord's Uzi staring you in the face. Pot-bellied starving kids in the Congo with their hands chopped off, barking mad with hunger, too tired to cry? Fathers castrated, cocks stuffed in their mouths, eyeholes full of flies? Women with bayonets stuck up their fannies?'

Luke had never served in the Congo, so he had to assume Hector was describing an experience of his own.

'We did have our equivalents,' he said.

'Such as what? Name a couple.'

'Columbian government having a field day. With American assistance, naturally. Villages torched. Inhabitants gang-raped, tortured, hacked to bits. Everybody dead except the one survivor left to tell the tale.'

'Yes. Well. We've both seen a bit of the world then,' Hector conceded. 'Not wanking around.'

'No.'

'And the dirty money sloshing about, the profits of pain, we've seen that too. In Columbia alone, billions. You've seen that. Christ know what your man was worth.' He didn't wait for the answer. 'In the Congo, billions. In Afghanistan, billions. An eighth of the world's fucking economy: black as your hat. We know about it.'

'Yes. We do.'

'Blood money. That's all it is.'

'Yes.'

'Doesn't matter where. It can be in a box under a warlord's bed in Somalia or in a City of London bank next to the vintage port. It doesn't change colour. It's still blood money.'

'I suppose it is.'

'No glamour, no pretty excuses. The profits of extortion, drug dealing, murder, intimidation, mass rape, slavery. Blood money. Tell me if I'm overstating my case.'

'I'm sure you're not.'

'Only four ways to stop it. One: you go for the chaps who are doing it. Capture 'em, kill 'em or bang 'em up. If you can. Two: you go for the product. Intercept it before it reaches the street or the marketplace. If you can. Three: collar the profits, put the bastards out of business.'

A worrying pause while Hector seemed to reflect on matters far above Luke's pay grade. Was he thinking of the heroin dealers who had turned his son into a goalbird and addict? Or the vulture capitalists who had tried to put his family firm out of business, and sixty-five of the best men and women in England on the rubbish heap?

'Then there's the fourth way,' Hector was saying. 'The really bad way. The best tried, easiest, the most convenient, the most common, and the least fuss. Bugger the people who've been starved, raped, tortured, died of addiction. To hell with the human cost. Money's got no smell as long as there's enough of it and it's ours. Above all, think big. Catch the minnows, but leave the sharks in the water. A chap's laundering a couple of million? He's a bloody crook. Call in the regulators, put him in irons. But a few billion? Now you're talking. Billions are a statistic.'"

- Our Kind of Traitor. le Carre, John. New York (NY): Viking, 2010. p. 131-2.

Today's new normal apparently requires the same old skill sets, it's just that now the expenditures need annual budget justifications. But once the op is approved, the men and women who execute it still sweat it out in safe houses, stumble through opaque ethical murk, and cobble together teams of odd personalities with fringy skills. And John le Carre has always had a pretty good feel for that kind of thing. Welcome back, Kotter.

PS - Hector's my kind of guy. Oh, and "Tightrope" by Janelle Monae is my kind of song; now playing on iTunes.

The No. 3 Pencil

I am completely flummoxed by the No. 3 pencil. I have one -- goodness knows how it even found its way into my life -- sitting in the pretty, orange Fiesta juice cup I bought at an antique store to hold pens and pencils on my desk.

It is a FaberCastell "Mongol" 482. Aside from its vaguely mysterious ethnic and historic ambiance--did Genghis use this pencil line to efficiently tick off the names of the towns his horde would next destroy-- it has a cool ferrule. But it is a hard, scratchy bastard in actual use and produces a super-light graphite mark on the page. Why would I want that? I am not an engineer. I am not a draftsman. I am not an 18th century Italian artist. I want a pencil that shows up. I want a pencil that is far less likely to be brandished as a defensive weapon. I want a No. 2 pencil. Full stop.

My idea of a stunning No. 2 pencil, should you be wondering, is the gorgeous and effective Koh-I-Noor "Mephisto" 465. Ahhhh. This is the pencil of choice for National Geographic Board meetings. This is a pencil deserving of the allusion to a diamond of great worth. It is a devilishly good tool. I have a cherished box of twelve (only 10 remain!) given to me with appropriate solemnity by a colleague at the Society as a bequeath upon his departure. I felt honored and genuinely touched and a little geeky that the gift mattered so much, not just personally but acquisitively -- I wanted my own stash. (I am not sure Koh-I-Noor even makes the Mephisto any longer except as a mechanical pencil.)

In conclusion, the No. 3 pencil: why? Just woeful. I'll keep the FaberCastell just in case Damien Hirst needs it, but I doubt I'll ever use the damn thing. That is all.

PS - If you are very good, sometime later I will bore you with my feelings that the Cristal clear Bic ballpoint pen -- blue ink cartridge -- is the supreme writing instrument and one of the pinacles of Western civilization. A man needs two items to write, period: the classic Bic pen and the Koh-I-Noor pencil. Oh, and another indispensable thing is "You I Want" by Tegan-and-Sara-sounding Jesse Thomas; now playing on iTunes.