Sixteen Tons

Donagh Mac Donagh

sledpress — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 02:02:54 +0000

Has anyone else even fecking heard of him? There was a slim volume of his poems in my college library, the year that I decided Salome was my favorite opera bar none (I have wavered back and forth, but it is still in the top five), and I skipped in a little circle when I read this:

Saint John was a man with a mission,
He lived in a very poor way,
He ate locusts I’m told for his breakfast
And drank water neat for his tay.

He was preaching hellfire and damnation
And company-keeping he banned,
No Dance Licence ever was granted
While Saint John was abroad in the land.

For dancing he thought was unholy,
A shocking occasion of sin,
He advised the young men of the country
To avoid anything feminine.

Now there was a young one called Salome,
A divil to dance and to sing
And she took a great liking to Saint John
And she went to her father, the king,

“If I dance, will you give me a present?”
Says she, and the old lad agrees,
So she started to dance like an angel
And the king sitting back at his ease.

“Very nice,” says your man, when she’s winded,
“Very nice, and now what will you have?”
“Oh daddy,” says she, “give me Saint John,
That lovely young man for my slave.”

“Fair enough,” says the king, “you can have him.”
But Saint John, being a saint, said “No fear.”
So Salome was mad, and her father
Said “Right, you can cut off his ear.”

“No, No,” says Salome, “his head please!”
So she danced with the head round the Court,
And bonfires on John’s Eve remind us
That dancing is dangerous sport.

My late and ex’s birthday was on Saint John’s Eve, June twenty-fourth as is. I don’t know what that tells us.

Chats du Jour

sledpress — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:17:24 +0000

Upstairs: it is only my bed when they allow me to use it.

Downstairs: it’s not my footstool, either.

(Well, to be fair, it started life as a cat condo, but he’s rather too big for it.)

I guess I’ll go do a few sets of pushups.

Juiced

sledpress — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:16:26 +0000

I have been infecting one of my clients — we go back over twenty years — with my long-cultivated taste for Quirky Liquors, and this Christmas my efforts at debauch were rewarded beyond all expectation when he appeared for his appointment with a small, resealed bottle that had once contained some awful Coconut Aloe Juice concoction.

“Fifty-year-old Chartreuse,” he said. “I saw that movie The Bucket List, and decided there are some things I better just go ahead and experience. Tell me if you think it’s different from the regular kind. Do you know there are five kinds of Chartreuse…?” A geek at heart, he went on at some length while — not being under any obligation to operate a motor vehicle for the rest of the day — I poured a teaspoon of the stuff and investigated. It was woodier than everyday Chartreuse, a little bitterer, just as exhilarating. Possibly only worth the hundred-dollar-plus price tag — over double its younger sibling’s — to someone with plenty of dough to throw around, but then, Rafael is a bachelor with no dependents and a Federal pension waiting for him. He is on a quest for cloudberry liqueur – a Finnish specialty that he drank once, overseas — and has been surfing sites like The Whisky Exchange for oddities.

(I can tell you, as someone who regularly does arithmetic to be sure the mortgage will clear, that the standard green Chartreuse is worth the price. Exotic gardens bloom in your olfactory bulbs when you drink it. Wormwood essences as suave as silk taffeta wreathe your synapses. It is worth it.)

We drank it over the Christmas season, even offering to share with Miss Nickel Catmium, whose reaction to volatiles — all cats loathe them — is especially adorable: she sniffs the glass and does a double flinch. In the case of the Chartreuse she actually jumped back a foot.

Tonight Rafael turned up with something new for me.

That is a plastic — PETE — bottle of Pinnacle Imitation Whipped Cream Flavored Vodka. I have had my concerns about plastic water bottles in the past, at least in hot weather. Acid fruit juices apparently leach more antimony from PETE than water. I can’t imagine what happens with alcohol. Rafael regularly swaps health information with me — cutting-edge, out-of-mainstream stuff about toxins and hormone disruptors and nutrition. I have no idea what came over him. It was a present; what in the fuck do you say?

Whipped Cream?

I am the world’s foremost expert at accepting a questionable gift with an enthusiasm tailored to the intent. Someone, somewhere, may still have a pair of matted landscapes printed on blue foil that I got for a birthday thirty years ago. I hope no one spent too much money framing them.

It’s a two liter bottle.

I ran right to the kitchen after I finished work and juiced eight stalks of chard, two apples, four ounces of lettuce and a beet.

A New Lease On Vocabulary

sledpress — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:47:25 +0000

It is bad enough when people who bloviate for a living, especially to the press, become addicted to magic words. You know the ones I mean: the recycled windy phrases that might have expressed something useful once or twice, but now get dragged in whenever someone wants to look sage and authoritative. A “multi-pronged” approach to some problem, a group “comprised of” several lesser units.*

It is worse when the speakers (or writers) clearly do not even understand the words they are uttering.

“This is one of the few unforced errors of the Romney campaign to date,” said one senior Republican strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Voters demand transparency, and what they saw as a sideshow became a central tenant of an unhelpful discussion that cost them.”

Okay, did the guy they interviewed actually say that (ignoring, to start with, far simpler constructions like “the focus of”, for a term more appropriate to the foundations of a philosophy or a religion, then using the wrong fucking word even for that)? Did the guy who took the quote write it down that way? And are there any copy editors anywhere at the Washington Post any more?

I shouldn’t let it rent space in my head, but I can’t help it.

_______________________

*This must drive other people crazy too. That post is my all time greatest hit, surpassing even the ones with “porn” in the titles.

The Benefits Of Literacy

sledpress — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:29:19 +0000

Since back in the summer, the Cute Engineer and I have been working our way through the Marcus Didius Falco series by Lindsey Davis — noir detective novels set in the Rome of Vespasian, with a keen eye for historical accuracy and an arch satirical tone. I picked these up years ago but put them down at about the sixth installment; Davis is now up to about twenty. I did always enjoy narrator Falco’s references to his gymnasium and his ruthless trainer Glaucus, who employs a heavy-handed Cilician masseur.

We have reached an episode featuring Glaucus’ son, an aspiring Olympic competitor with a tireless training regimen.

“Is Young Glaucus going to compete at the Games?” Cornelius asked me. He did not ask Young Glaucus, because Young Glaucus never said much. At the moment he was carrying out an exercise where he crouched on all fours, slowly raising and holding his opposite arms and legs; it would have been straightforward, had he not been supporting one of our larger baggage packs on his huge shoulders at the time. As his sinews flexed and trembled, I felt myself wince.

It sounded delicious. As soon as I could get the Engineer into the gym with me I got down quadrupedally on the floor matting and, to grasp the form, had him set a twenty-five pound plate on my back while I extended alternate arms and legs. The move made refined demands of that cerebellar pivot that maintains one’s center of gravity, while promising considerable honing of the triceps and hip flexors. Even more serendipitously, the effort pointed up an unsuspected evil spirit lurking in my left hamstring, when for weeks I have been trying to exterminate a pain that I thought originated in the adductor group a quarter turn inward.

I felt an enormous urge to contact Ms. Davis somehow and ask what other Olympic calisthenics she could recommend, but it seemed politer to finish the novel first, and the time zones were all wrong besides.

I think I’ll try a forty-five pound wheel next time, if I can get anyone in the morning posse to deposit it on me.

Cox And Box

sledpress — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 05:01:29 +0000

We are in a condition of diplomatic stalemate. I am still having to Cox-And-Box Torvald and the Home Team of Nickel and Mr. Ferguson, rotating closed doors in the house twice a day so that everyone has some time with Mom (that’s me). Torvald is conspicuously alpha-cat, in a gregarious, non-combative way; he just won’t get out of Fergie’s face, and Fergie, who had to contend with some really tough cats when he was a vagabond, hasn’t got the equanimity to deal with it. He hunkers and moans. Nickel Catmium, surprisingly, shrieks and then hides under furniture. And all the time Torvald is just sitting on his hunkers, or reclining on the carpet, trying to figure out what all the fuss is about. He’s a big, klutzy, head-butting, amiable goof.

I never expected this hostility from the gallant Fergie, who has hitherto been a compendium of feline virtues, grooming his girlfriend, burying smartly in the litter box, adoring his human Mommy. In fact, since Torvald’s advent, he adores her even more. He sits on me. He purrs loudly. He mews winsomely. He is a neurotic, Woody-Allen-like bundle of insecurity.

When he is not annexing me he pointedly stakes his claim to his girlfriend.

Me? I just live here.

I Can Haz Sunbeam?

sledpress — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:19:18 +0000

It’s been one of those weeks that turn your brain to tapioca by the end of the day, so all I have to share with the world at the moment is the kind of spectacle that gets me through.

Soak Your Platypus

sledpress — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:06:29 +0000

So in last night’s — or more precisely, this late morning’s — dream, I found myself in the apartment house where my late and ex husband retreated to live with his mother, staying over with him in the apartment she had left him (not quite a correlation with real life), and making a visit to a bathroom down the hall, British-hotel-style, wherein one of the commodes was wholly occupied by a platypus belonging to one of the other residents.

Because apparently, a platypus needs to be soaked regularly. At least in my dream world.

Whether or not this has anything to do with attending a screening of the Song of Bernadette, involving the miraculous healing waters of Lourdes (which emerged in what was originally the municipal dump), is up in the air. Or down in the commode, depending.

Must. Reach. Mirror. Cat.

sledpress — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:56:58 +0000

I have no idea what exactly she expects to happen.

No, But I Know Where I Am

sledpress — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:53:18 +0000

There is an MIT joke about how Werner Heisenberg, the physicist, gets pulled over for speeding through Cambridge and the officer says “Do you know how fast you were going?” Heisenberg answers, “No, but I know where I am.” This is a riff on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: “In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known.” [Wikipedia]

Don’t ask me about the behavior of quanta. My vision is crappy on a good day and they are dinky little buggers. Still, I can see a lot better than the two legally-blind friends I was ferrying back to their digs in a nearby “senior village” after a pleasant Thai lunch, and I knew where I was, so I should have been a little more on top of things. A man in a uniform, aiming what I at first thought might be a bar-code reader, leapt in front of me as I coasted up to a stop sign with my foot floating above the accelerator pedal, and began saying something made unintelligible by his island accent but out of which I gradually sieved the information that he had clocked me at twenty-seven miles an hour and I needed to pull over, please.

His partner, a good-natured woman with a radio at her hip and a Security patch on her jacket, wrote my name and license plate number up on a citation informing me that the incident had been recorded and habitual violation would result in my being banned from driving on the campus, where the posted limit is twenty.

I guess I was just unlucky enough to hit speed-trap day but I felt quite the desperado; normally I am the person stubbornly driving the speed limit, whipped around and honked at by drivers in a rush to get to the next stop light. My friends are probably still laughing. I just hope they got the son of a bitch in the Lexus that tailgated me into the place two hours earlier when I arrived to pick them up, hugging my bumper at 45 for the last quarter mile I spent on the Fairfax County Parkway. And I’m glad they didn’t check my breath for strong green tea.