Uncanny

As I huffed and puffed in the gym a while ago, watching the close-captioned MSNBC news on the TV in front of me and half-listening to the music on the speakers, I hit a freaky little juxtaposition. Just as the news switched to a “story” on the carnage on Wall Street, the opening lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “Cover Me” came on: “The times are tough now, just getting tougher/This old world is rough, its just getting rougher.” The talking heads yapped at each other for a few seconds, and then the Boss sang, “Well I’m looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me” over a picture of Sarah Palin and the GOP’s economic plans. Blah blah blah, and then, as the images switched to the damage of Hurricane Ike, Springsteen again: “Outsides the rain, the driving snow/I can hear the wild wind blowing.”

I’ll have to listen to the rest of Born in the USA to see what else the Boss can tell us about Decision 2008.

Palin in the Ear

I’ve had one or another funny American accent my whole life – Yooper twangs until my twenties, now a pronounced Minnesooooodah thing – so this is pretty much throwing stones from my glass house, but my god, I hate Sarah Palin’s accent. I hope I’d find it just as annoying if she was reading an Obama speech aloud.

McPain

My friends, I listened to the radio today. I listened to John McCain’s acceptance speech on the radio today. I listened to it! I listened to it against my will! It was terrible. It was terrible, my friends, because he’s boring. It was terrible because he told the same old stories of his imprisomnent. Of his impisronment. Of his incarcerarceration – of being a guest of the North Vietnamese! <crowd roars>

But he is not just boring, my friends! <crowd roars more> He also delivered a speech, my friends, which sounded as if it were a middle-school civics essay. A bad essay! A very bad essay! <crowd roars again> There were cliches! There were slogans! There was pandering! There were no subordinate clauses. And it was all delivered, my friends, with an affect flatter than the great plains of this great land, the best land in the world!<crowd switches from roaring to chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.”>

And this, my friends, is why we need change. <crowd roars again> We need change at the top! We need change from four more years of the same discredited policies. We need change in our politicians. We need change in Washington. Maybe Martha would have been better. We need to change our clothes! Our hairstyles! And, my friends, we need change for our twenty-dollar bills! Correct change! In ones, fives, and silver! <deafening roar> Thank you and God bless harmonicas!<applauding, cheering, more chanting of <U.S.A., U.S.A.”>

Cold and Snowy

Bring it!

The Farmers’ Almanac predicts below-average temperatures for most of the United States this winter. According to the publication, “numb’s the word.” The 192-year-old publication has an accuracy rate of 80 percent to 85 percent for its forecasts and is prepared two years in advance.

The almanac’s 2009 edition, which goes on sale Tuesday, says at least two-thirds of the country can expect colder-than-average temperatures this winter, with only the Far West and Southeast in line for near-normal readings. The almanac predicts above-normal snowfall for the Great Lakes and Midwest, especially during January and February.

From the Chicago Tribune.

Oncoming Autumn

September seems to have slammed the door on summer like a toddler experimenting with the door to her room. This morning when Shannon headed out for her day o’ presidenting, it was about 75 degrees F with 95% relative humidity. At about 10:30 or 11:00, the temperature dropped more than 15 degrees, and – I think – fall began. Not only the weather suggested this. For their morning snack, the girls and I went to the downtown coffeeshop, where a group of middle-aged women at the next table oohed and aahed over them (partly because Vivi wouldn’t take off her sunglasses) and then mentioned that they were celebrating-slash-mourning that they had just sent the last of their girls off to college. Traipsing around town and then playing at the park after snack, we crunched through plenty of fallen leaves. We got home just in time to catch Julia’s favorite PBS.kids show (Dragontales), which is on at a new time for the school year. At 3:30, I drove to an appointment and passed a score of high schoolers running (or, actually, walking) through their cross-country practice. After the girls went to bed, I headed out for a run that was pleasantly chilly and that ended in the dark (even though it was only 8:20!). Friday is Julia’s first day back at preschool! It should be a great autumn…

Call Me, Cineplex Moguls

I have a million-dollar idea for you. (I mean it’ll cost you a million dollars to buy it from me, not that you’ll earn a million from it. You’ll clear a million in the first ten minutes of using it.)

Take your average cineplex lobby. Rearrange things so that I can walk up to the box office and not only purchase a couple tickets to Clone Wars II: We Try to Break Even, but also buy the “family” popcorn deal or the nacho-like chips or a crate of Junior Mints or whatnot, all in one transaction. Ka-chung ka-chung, the tickets print up and on them appears an order number. I stroll around the corner and there awaits my order, all ready except maybe for a jot of butter (no less than three tbsp) and some salt. The kid behind the counter checks my order number against his screen to make sure I’m not taking fare paid for my the Dewy-Eyed Teenagers, and I’m off to my seat for a few thousand pre-movie calories.

This would be much better than the current arrangement in every theatre I’ve visited in the last five years, where you have to make two transactions (for tickets, for refreshments) and wait in long lines to do both. Maybe you put drive-in style menu boards up outside the box office so that the ravening hordes can decide how to stuff their gullets while they wait in the queue. That’s up to you. You’re the one who own the cineplexes, after all.

You’re welcome.

First Book

As Julia edges toward being able to read on her own, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own reading history. In an IM conversation the other day with a friend whose son – both bookish and newly bespectacled, so you have to like him – read the first Harry Potter in one day – I suddenly remembered reading my first Hardy Boys book in what must have been the first week of Mrs. Bauer’s second grade class.

I had been disappointed in Mrs. Lesperance’s first grade class when I could only choose books from a certain section in the library (I’d read all the Richard Scarry books already: the Man was keeping me down even then), and I had really wanted to read the books that my friend Mark’s older brothers were reading, like the Hardy Boys. So when, early in second grade, the librarian said we could choose any book we wanted, I zoomed over to the long shelf of blue-and-black Hardy Boys books. I checked out The Secret of the Lost Tunnel, perhaps because it was the first one I saw, perhaps because I liked the cover art, perhaps because I was mildly obsessed with a weird little root-cellar thing we had at our house, or perhaps because I had an early love of the double entendre.

Secret of the Lost Tunnel
Secret of the Lost Tunnel

I read the book in the time it took to wait for the bus, ride the bus home, and walk up the driveway. It was a long bus ride, and a long driveway, but still – I had that shit down: I remember being able to correctly finish sentences that my dad read out from the book.

God. Nowadays I can barely remember to read a book, much less what I read.

That being so, the aforementioned friend (he of the readery son) and I are engaged in a little parallel-reading exercise that might interest certain readers of this blog – mostly the literate ones, but also lovers of Victorian fiction who may or may not be red-haired. We’re making our way, three chapters a week, through G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, available in a snazzy Vintage paperback ($8.95) or at Bartleby.com. The book is described as “a zany mystery story filled with often surreal twists that turn more traditional thrillers on their ear,” and it’s certainly that, so far. (One of the main characters has red hair, Rob!) You’re welcome to pick up the book and read along with us, perhaps making a comment of two. You can find our amateur lit-crit at The Blog Who Was Thursday.

No Need for Parody

As the Olympics show over and over and over, Americans as a group are prone to inadvertent self-parody. Blogging offers a wide field for this kind of dubious accomplishment, but it’s easy to find other examples. Athletes, for instance: on Wednesday, I laughed as two American hurdlers held up “we’re number 1!” index fingers during an interview after the 110m final in which they finished second and third.

A certain kind of Christian comes up close behind the grandiose athlete, and even overlaps him to some extent:
Xian TKD
Someone smarter and meaner than me can figure out a funny way to combine turning the other cheek while clad in sparring equipment.

And then there are the real-estate developers. Worst of the lot.

Exhibit 1: The only “shores” are the sides of the cement-lined drainage ditches. Nice big-sky views, though…
Horizon Shores

Exhibit 2: “Now Renting”? Really? Don’t you mean “Now Accepting Deposits on Which We Hope to Earn Enough Interest That We Can Prevent Foreclosure on This Half-Completed Pile”?
Really?

Carouselers

Shannon and I are packing up for our night out and away from the girls, which will start pretty soon now. The four of us had a nice morning at the Red River Valley Zoo. Here are my better three-quarters in front of the rather grand carousel there, having seen the camels, the llamas, the baby goats, and assorted other creatures.

Carouselers
Carouselers

This will be my first-ever night away from the girls when not on a business trip, and as far as I can recall, Shannon’s first-ever night away from Julia except when in the hospital delivering Genevieve. It goes without that this really doesn’t count, and that she’s never spent the night away from Vivi (or both girls, for that matter). I imagine that the two of us will manage the sleeping all right (hotel bed, no infernal baby monitors humming), but I’m a bit worried about whether we’ll remember how to eat dinner without the distraction of monitoring two toddlers. We’ll soon see!

Mystery Coil

In my numerous walks and couple runs around Moorhead, I’ve noticed objects like this in the overhead lines.

Mystery Coil
Mystery Coil

I naturally wonder what the hell it is. Some options:

  1. It’s part of the city’s (decent and cheap) municipal wi-fi service.
  2. It’s a way to manage the civic problem of the many, many people who are sticking their bare feet up on the dashboard of vehicles using Moorhead byways.
  3. It’s an attempt to make the grass grow on any, some, or all of the incredibly patchy lawns in this town.
  4. It’s a public-health effort to prevent suicides among the readers of the horrific stories on the front page of the Fargo Forum. (Thankfully, the paper requires registration to read the articles, so I can avoid hyperlinking to the gore.)
  5. It’s a means to try to help the city’s coffeehouse baristas remember more than one item in an order. On three different occasions, I’ve had the barista need me to repeat a two-item order two times; on one of those occasions, I had to say it a third time. Gawd.

What’s that? People are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan? Perhaps that’s related to these mystery coils, too…

(Update, 8/22: According to a well-informed commenter, this is a “fold-back” created with “extra fiber optic cabling that has been relooped on that strand” to make repair or replacement easier later. I LOVE THE INTERNET.)

Cashless Economy

I spent a couple hours this afternoon finishing the grading for my online course, a task which became slightly less onerous when I was able to do it at a nice little coffeeshop here in Moorhead. Though the people-watching wasn’t as good as it is in Northfield or in Minneapolis, there were some good moments. For instance, the author of some crazy-seeming “political” books stopped in and surfed on one of the public computers for a good hour. (His van was parked across the street.)

A few minutes after that, a young-ish woman came in with two cute kids. She went up to the counter and loudly asked how about the price of a certain (complicated, girly) drink. When the barista told her, she energetically hunted in her purse for some money, only to discover she didn’t have enough. Throwing the expensive-looking bag on her shoulder and clutching a big Blackberry-type smartphone in one hand, she trooped back out with the kids. I guessed to a friend that she must have all her money in bonds; he snarked back that she probably blew all her cash filling up her Tahoe or Excursion.

Strange Day

I’m just back from some lunchtime errand-running, during which I saw

  • a third of the Northfield Police Department crowded around a big road-construction site (I hope nobody’s been hurt),
  • a man pop up rather spryly from a butch-looking motorized wheelchair,
  • four people cleaning one small bathroom at the grocery store, and
  • what must have been a big bag of cheese popcorn, scattered in the gutter along the better part of a block.

Ahh, Northfield.