Category: And now for something completely different…

And now for something completely different...

Suspicious Serendipity

daelnorwood

Or, This Cabal Meets in a Pseudo-Starbucks

Are you ever suspicious of serendipity? I don’t mean the junky ice-cream place (that goes without saying), I mean the kind of random (and usually happy) occurrence that seems just… not quite random enough.

You see, I used to notice this pattern. Back when I was a regular reader of newspapers and magazines, every so often I’d notice a curious repetition of the same unusual word, the meaning of which I did not know — gormless, fabellation, or pantoglot — all clustered within the things I read that week. The word would appear in a New York Times Magazine story on disabled football players, a New Yorker review of a new German opera, a Newsweek article on Jesus, and the Harper’s index, related to some statistic about Etruscan poetry.

This happened frequently enough to convince me that someone was trying to improve the vocabulary of all voracious mass media readers, albeit obliquely, one word per week. I always figured there was some kind of competition among New York journalists and columnists to use the word in a story, arranged each week at some kind of swank cocktail party, or at lunch in a hotel restaurant that named a salad.

Anyway, it hasn’t happened in a while — until yesterday. I noticed it just after engaging in some shopping therapy at the local Barnes & Noble. In both the (highly recommended) books I bought, the same clichéd John Lennon quote was trotted out. And as it turned out, the order I read them in was quite important.

Here’s the first:

In short, it’s been incredibly useful in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I started it in the hopes of getting a column. It is a prime example of something that John Lennon once said: “Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans.”
~John Scalzi, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 (Tor, 2010; orig. 2008), 16

And the second, read about an hour later:

I gave him the honest, depressingly typical answer, which amounted to “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” That led to a discussion about John Lennon, which led to a discussion about The Beatles, which led to a discussion about Yoko Ono, which led nowhere.
~Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 7-8.

Here’s the thing: until I read the Scalzi, I had no idea that quote was commonly attributed to John Lennon; and if I hadn’t read him first, the Grahame-Smith line would have passed me by completely.

This secret cabal correspondence course in pop-culture trivia that I’m apparently signed up for is beginning to freak me out.

daliborlev, “The Cabal,” Flickr, CC License

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Time Out to Grow Some Chops

daelnorwood

Chops
My apologies for the extended hiatus, dear readers. The spirit of blogging has been temporarily driven out of me by travel, work, and despairing at the state of my apartment/dissertation/facebook wall. Fear not, though! I will return. (But in a more “funny archival stuff” kind of way, not like re-invading the Philippines or anything).

In the meantime, some links:

Prof. Hacker
Lifehacker meets Crooked Timber. Recommended by the Digital Campus guys (who do a great and useful podcast; as informed commentary on important issues, like the Google Book Search controversy, as you’ll find in the New Yorker, for example).

“Is There a Future for Journals in the Humanities?”
Short answer: yes, but only because of the fcuk’d economics of humanities publishing. Robert Townsend reads a Mellon Center report so you don’t have to.

“Angels and Octopodes”
Is it a coincidence that both the Great Old Ones and Ma Bell were both depicted as be-tentacled monstrosities? Rob McDougall thinks not. Also: sentient telephone networks.

Joe Kennedy and Stephen Douglas
History comics are historical. Also: before you quibble, read the alt-text.

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British Broadsheets, Brilliant!

daelnorwood

Totally Makes Up For The “Coffee,” “Empire”

pink-grasshopper

One of the many joys of doing research in the UK is the opportunity to read, in print, some truly delightful newspapers. I don’t know if the UK newspaper industry is doing any better than the America’s (though I suspect so), I do know that their product is always, always much more fun to read.

Whether it’s doing a better job of uncovering corruption and holding political officials feet to the fire, writing grade-A bitchy snark, or printing cute, hopelessly local quirk stories, the London press has you covered.

I think they keep the old spirit of newspapers alive in a way no American publications can touch.

Take, for example, today’s Daily Telegraph. Between the usual (political and business news, tepid conservative op-eds, big pictures of the POTUS with British pols) stories, there was quite a bit on gin (today was sponsored by Gordon’s, bit of an odd choice for a paper called the DT), and even more on weird animals. To wit:

“School votes to kill pet sheep”
(“His meat will be raffled to raise funds to buy pigs, who will be in turn be slaughtered to make sausages”)

“Going strong at 20, dog that’s had most days”

“Ticked pink: Schoolboy finds rare grasshopper”
(“The insect … was discovered by Daniel Tate, 11, who thought it was a flower until he saw it jump”)

“Scamp’s tale has a happy ending”
(“pedigree dog ” returned to family)

“Long vacation over”
(“A 50-year-old tortoise has been found two years after it went missing…”)

“Curse of the parrot”
(owner of bird that appeared in Curse of the Black Pearl pulled over for driving with parrot on shoulder, arrested for driving without a license)

“Polar bears ‘extinct by 2080’ “

“Infected oysters and poor hygiene, a recipe for sickness at The Fat Duck”

“Wing beats web in South Africa”
(carrier pigeon transmits data faster than national ISP)

“Vicious fish parasite found near Jersey”
(“‘ Really quite large, really quite hideous. If you turn it over its got dozens of these really sharp nasty claws underneath and I thought ‘ that’s a bit of a nasty beast.’ ‘”)

What American broadsheet provides that kind of content? Certainly not the Gray Lady. The DT’s tv critic put his finger on the problem, I think, in a review of the final season of The Wire: “The show captured the bow-tied ponderousness and politically correct nitpicking ot the Sun as neatly as the jargon of the drug ghettos. My God, these guys take themselves seriously. No wonder their venerable newspapers are going down the tubes.”

Indeed.

But it didn’t used to be that way! Though most things were not better in the 1840s, at least American newspapers had a sense of humor.