Scraps of Mid-September

Sept 13, 2012

Some rain, some sun, hot some days, cool others. After dryness and more heat than usual, this September is turning out to be fairly ordinary, at in terms of the weather outside my door.

The gas bill came today. For the period August 10 to September 10, the charge for the natural gas itself was $7.50 – 19.22 therms at 39 cents each. The FAQ section at the U.S. Energy Information Agency reminds me, because I’d forgotten, that a therm equals 100,000 Btus. So we used nearly 2M Btus over 30 days to heat our water and cook some food. For some reason, the thought of using a few million of anything makes me smile.

That’s not the majority of the bill, however. Delivery charges were $14.40, or nearly twice as much as the gas charge. Guess it’s worth it. Natural gas would be a little tricky to pick up and take home yourself.

On the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, I had jury duty. I have a receipt now to prove that I showed up, as summoned, at the downtown location of the Circuit Court of Cook County on August 29, 2012, and received $17.20 for my trouble. (Almost enough to pay the gas bill.) And what did I do? I read a book and worked on an article on my laptop.

I got a panel number and sat in the non-TV side of the large waiting room and waited. As the morning stretched on, other panel numbers were called and people left the room to report to their judges, but my number wasn’t called. I read 1493 by Charles Mann, an engrossing book about the Columbian Exchange. I worked on my monthly CRE tech article. I waited.

Lunch came and went – there’s a really good pita place, aptly called Pita Express, in the food court of the State of Illinois building (Thompson Center) – and by about 3, only a few of us were left uncalled. The woman in charge of the room then said, “You’ve done your jury duty, come collect your checks.” That was that.

A quote from The New York Times a little while ago, in the obit for actor William Windom:

“While stationed in Frankfurt, during the postwar Allied occupation, [Windom] enrolled in the new Biarritz American University in France and became involved in drama there. ‘To be honest, I signed up because I thought it would be an easy touch,’ he told The New York Times in an interview for this obituary in 2009, ‘and we had heard that actresses had round heels.’ ”

Round heels. There’s some slang you don’t see often any more. Maybe that's just as well, but I still enjoy running across old slang in new articles.

Item From the Past: Everywhere a Sign

I've read speculation that someday outdoor signs as we know them will be quaint relics, or be gone all together, because your GPS cloud gizmo is going to tell you all the information you need about a particular place in granular detail. In this country, anyway, here's how it would play out: as complete connectivity spread down the income scale deep into the middle class, budgets to install and maintain physical signs would shrink and disappear, since only poor people and eccentrics would need physical signs.

The infrastructure of signs would, decade by decade, disappear. Much would be lost, and only poor people and eccentrics would care. Which means, in practical terms, that no one would care.

Fortunately, I don't expect to live to see such a nightmare. For now, I'll take notice of signs. The more unusual, the better. Last year in Washington I snapped pics of a few odds ones. Such as this one at a parking lot not from from the U.S. Capitol.

This one warned thirsty passersby that the water of the Tidal Basin would do you wrong if you drank it, and I don't doubt it. I suppose the Tidal Basin counts as a finger of the Potomac, hence "river."

And this is one of the more imperious signs I saw in the city, at the pedestrian crosswalk on Connecticut Ave., just in front of the National Zoo.

How would a sign like this work in a world in which people depended on GPS gizmos to know where they were at all times? Would it blare out a DANGER, DANGER, WILL ROBINSON sort of warning? That might be amusing. Once.

Die, Hormigas, Die

The ant highway (see January 30) was practically deserted today. A few stragglers made their way, but it was a lonely trip for them -- provided ants have any such concept. Only a day ago, I was ready to call the ant traps a failure, since the bugs were still numerous, and I couldn't see any of them entering the traps. But they must have.

So I'm now ready to call the traps a success: Raid brand, as it happens. Kills Bugs Dead.® Everyone knows that, because Foote, Cone & Belding taught us so. This product Kills the Colony (Mata a la Colonia), the box says, but not Kills the Colony Dead, Sows Their Fields With Salt, which I would have put on the box. Or Kills Them Dead as Crassus at Carrhae. That's why I'm not a product copywriter.

And they aren't traps, but "ant baits" (cebos para hormigas). Nice to learn that hormiga is Spanish for ant or worker ant. It's got a sinister ring to it. Do not trifle with the hormiga, my friend. He will kill you.

The Name Salad

Got an e-mail from Americans for Gary J today -- how did I get on that list? -- and the subject said: Gary Johnson is Angry! Find Out Why. I have a pretty good idea. He's asking himself, why isn't it my turn? Even the pizza guy got a turn.

We attended the Rosa Luxemburg Junior High Winter Band Concert this evening, in which Lilly participated as a trombonist. For anyone worried about the "winter" in that name at the expense of Christmas, I can report that the program included no fewer than four songs with "Christmas" explicitly in the title, plus others with obvious Christmas associations. Some tunes I wasn't familiar were "Santa at the Symphony," "Funky Ol' Saint Nick," and "Rhapsody in Red & Green."

I looked at the lists of kids in the bands (7th grade, 8th grade, the district junior highs' jazz band) and I'm pleased to report a multi-ethnic salad bowl of names, out here in the homogeneous suburbs. A selection: Avila, Begbaaji, Freiburger, Gonzalez, Hirjoi, Jones, Khokari, Kim, Li, McCoy, Nagorzanski, O'Connell, Patel, Popovic, Rizvic, Scalafini, Schmaus, Stribling, Takizawa, Walker, Woo. As for first names, the likes of Ann, Alex, Caroline, Jessica, Jonathan, Kevin, Lilly, Mike, Patrick, Rebecca, Sarah, Thomas and William are represented, but so are Aya, Ena, Jemi, Koryana, Malik, Mumbua, Reena, Sergio, and my own favorite, a kid named Vlad.

12/8/41: A Strong Passive Tense

I played the Pearl Harbor address, so easily available online, for Lilly today. At the moment she happens to be studying World War II in her social studies class (please never to call it "history"), but her teacher didn't play it in class, despite today being a perfect time to do so, and the fact that it's one of the most famous speeches ever given by an American president.

Listening to it again myself, it occurred to me that the very first sentence belies the idea, advocated with unreasoning vigor by some editors and English teachers, that the passive voice is a mark of namby-pamby or evasive writing. It can be used those ways, of course ("mistakes were made"), but so what?

I've seen editing guides that discourage the passive, and no less a writer than George Orwell discouraged the construction in the famed "Politics and the English Language." But Orwell wasn't right about everything, and nor are editors and English teachers. FDR knew how to create a powerful passive. There it is, in the first sentence.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date that will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

Now, imagine that a narrow-minded editor had gotten ahold of it.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date that will live in infamy -- naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately attacked the United States of America."

In this case, the active is weak and the passive is strong. The president wasn't trying to deliver a news report. Emphasizing what happened to the United States of America was what he set out to do, and he did it.

The Day of the Flapper

The chain inside the upstairs toilet broke this morning, so after everyone else had left for school or work, I made my way to the hardware store formerly known as Ace (now it just says the generic "Hardware"). Toilet chains are sold only in combination with toilet flappers, and I got one.

It made my day just to learn that name. I've seen the part in operation over the years, of course, but never thought about its name. I also today learned even toilet flappers have a web page, as everything seems to: "All the flap on THE FLAPPER." Read and learn.

It didn't take long to replace to flapper-chain combo. The old flapper, with its bulbous front end and two prongs sticking backward, could be a small model for a Romulan or Klingon ship or the like. That is, a sinister-looking Enterprise sort of model.

For all my grousing about Halloween, I am looking forward to some parts of it, such as accompanying Ann and her friend on their rounds. It won't be many more years before I won't do that any more, as Ann wanders in a pack with her friends, just as Lilly does (even though I chide her that she's too old for trick or treating -- but we both know that attitudes have changed since I was in junior high).

Lilly never wore the costume to the right for Halloween activities, but she did pose for a picture. I think I took it 10 years ago. The costume came as a special section to some Japanese magazine. We unfolded the section and did some re-folding and presto, some child-sized space armor and a helmet emerged, ready to wear.

The Lucille Ball Translation Chain

I Love Lucy was never a favorite of mine, but I did watch a fair number of episodes as a lad, mostly after school, when it tended to be paired with the likes of The Honeymooners. One scene that has stuck with me all these years involved Lucy getting into some scrape in Paris, through a typical hi-larious Lucy misunderstanding, and being hauled in by a gendarme. But the police at the station had no English, and of course Lucy had no French.

Ricky shows up and asks if any of the police speak Spanish. None do, but they bring out a fellow obviously arrested for public drunkenness who speaks German and Spanish. One of the cops can speak German as well as French, so they set up a translation chain: from the monolingual French sergeant to the French/German policeman to the German/Spanish drunk to Spanish/English Ricky to monolingual English Lucy. Even as a kid, I appreciated the comic inspiration of the setup.

Naturally, the clip is on YouTube, and information about the episode is freely available elsewhere (original air date: January 12, 1956). Lucy had paid for something with counterfeit money, it seems. I'd forgotten that detail. But for something I hadn't seen in at least 40 years, I remembered the gist of the scene almost exactly. Guess it made an impression.

I thought of that scene recently when using Google Translate to gather information from some German and French web sites. I wondered what would happen if you ran some famous text through a translation chain. As someone familiar with English signs written by Japanese speakers, I know that human translation can be drop-dead funny. But what about machine translation?

So I ran the Gettysburg Address through a Lucy chain: English to Spanish to German to French and then back again to English. Not as funny as Macho Business Donkey Wrestler, but interesting for its rough spots, and also for the things that came through exactly, such as the famed last phrase. Maybe the equivalent phrase is almost as famed in other languages. Anyway, this is the translation.

For 87 years, our ancestors on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We met on a great battlefield of that war. We arrived at a part of the field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live to pay. It is only right and proper that we need to do this.

But in a broader sense, we can not consecrate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hallowed above our poor power to add or delete. The world will little note nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, but now the unfinished work which they fought so far so nobly dedicated. It is rather for us to be is the big task ahead dedicated - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last and devotion - to solve that this high dead have not died in vain - that this nation under God, then a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

And the original, for reference.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Summertime Salmagundi

Back again on Tuesday. Time for meat, beer and colorful explosions.

Finally it feels like we're at the doorstep of high summer. Professional weather-watchers say it'll be pushing 100° F. here in northern Illinois tomorrow, and I say it's about time. Naturally, it won't last. This isn't South Texas.

What's the collective for dragonflies? Swarm, maybe, but that isn't very interesting. Other insects get collectives such as army, cloud, flutter, intrusion (cockroaches), plague and scourge, among others. One source suggests a "dazzle" or "levitation" of dragonflies. Not bad. The question comes to mind because dragonflies are in force now, seemingly more than in other years. Dragonflies arc and dive by day; fireflies make their traces in the twilight.

Saw an ad for the new Captain America movie recently, which was the first I'd heard of it. At least he seems to be fighting cartoon Nazis, his proper function, but it made me wonder: haven't there been enough movie adaptations of super-hero yarns already? Haven't they all been done? Guess not. This cartoon still offers the possibility of a gritty, live-action reboot. Or this one.

Received ten dollar coins from a bank teller not long ago. I was glad to see that the presidential series has gotten around to Andrew Johnson and U.S. Grant. I can't find a citation for it right now, but I seem to remember that, when asked why he'd run for president, he said, "I needed a job." Apocryphal, maybe, but a likable quote.

Somehow I'm in possession of a little pamphlet produced by a well-known sect -- known for their aversion to blood transfusions, for one thing -- entitled "All Suffering SOON TO END!" I can't say that I've actually read all of it, but I did note a money quote: "Soon God will intervene in human affairs by destroying this entire unsatisfactory system of things," meaning, it seems, all the works of man.

But that's not why I like it. The cover features a painting of a happy man and woman in the foreground, sitting next to a collection of pumpkins and big apples in a field of flowers. In background is a mountain, some pine trees, some fall-foliage trees, a house and a couple of horses, one with a rider. Right behind the man and woman is a moose. A huge bull moose with huge antlers.

Look at the painting long enough and it seems that the moose, not the happy couple, is the focus of the image. What's going on here? Does the moose have some significance in this religion that most of us don't know about? If so, I'd think more highly of them for it.

Billy Murray, the Bee's Knees

No posting until Monday. Got a lot to do till then. I may not even have time to enjoy the new National Jukebox, though I did take a few minutes today to listen to some Billy Murray. After all, who doesn't like Billy Murray?

Otherwise it was day of small surprises. At about 3:30 on a very warm and sticky afternoon, a small dark cloud positioned itself over my house. That's what it seemed like -- there were clear skies elsewhere, but it looked liked a cloudburst had come to see me, personally. After a rumble or two, BOOM! The house rattled. Then clatter BING! The distinct sound of metal crashing to the floor.

But where? Some critical component of my house? So I did a quick walk-through. Nothing. But I know I heard something. I started a less-quick walk-through, and sure enough, discovered that the main towel rack in the downstairs bathroom had loosened and clattered to the floor, by way of the toilet. But that isn't a first for the rack. Each effort to secure it to the wall eventually fails, but usually not so dramatically.

Later, more clouds appeared, and it looked like we were going to have a full-fledged thunderstorm. But it ended up being a weird thunderstorm. A fair amount of thunder and some lightning throughout the late afternoon, even a visible bolt not far away, but as of now no rain.

Another small surprise: I happened to see a TV commercial today for some McDonald's confection made from lemons. It featured an anthropomorphic lemon, or rather a talking lemon head, as its spokesman. At first, the lemon complained about being unappreciated. Now, because of the new confection, he felt appreciated, and in passing he said lemons were the bee's knees.

I don't think I've ever heard that phrase before on TV. Kudos to some copywriter somewhere. We need to bring it back in time for the next decade called the '20s.

A Sleigh of Santas & A Drove of Elves

Early Christmas Warning: Unlit Christmas decorations have started appearing on houses around here, except for one demented place a few blocks away that's already lighting their festive lights. No householders have inflated holiday inflatables just yet, except for the occasional turkey wearing a Pilgrim hat. The decor is much more advanced at retail locations, of course.

I'm glad to see the return of the Maximum Light Display at a house near a major intersection about a mile from where I live, even if it hasn't been switched on after dark yet. The place sports two or three dozen lighted figures, including a long row of wooden soldiers, a Nativity scene, a number of Santas plus their minion reindeer, a drove of elves, candy canes and lots of other glowing holiday oddments.

I was at a loss to think of a collective noun for elves just now, but help was no further than a Google search away, leading quickly to this vastly entertaining list by a fellow called David Malki ! The list also features the collective -- apt for the looming holidays -- "a sleigh of Santas Claus."

Slate-Gray November

The weekend was classic November: slate-gray skies, intermittent rain, cold wind, mostly bare trees. A thin sheet of ice formed on the windshield and windows of both cars in wee hours this morning, only to melt later under the feeble November sun. The slate-gray was gone today, replaced by November blue.

I wondered about that color, "slate gray." Is it really descriptive for days like Saturday and Sunday? So I looked into it and decided that it's close enough, especially if there's no need to be literal. I also found this table called "shades of gray," which also happens to be the cliché used when talking about nuance. Are all those colors really part of the gray clan? "Glaucous" seems blue-like to me, and the various "taupes," except for taupe gray, seem more aligned with brown.

But it is Wiki, after all. Take your glaucous and taupe with salt.

Around sunset on Friday, I noticed something new up in the branches of our back-yard honey locust: a nest. The last of the leaves finally fell only a week or so ago, exposing it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there last year, so some birds moved in during the spring. Or maybe squirrels. Now I need to figure out a way to charge them rent next year. Trouble is, birds might want to pay in earthworms, and squirrels in nuts.

I took a picture of the nest on a whim, and caught the waxing moon too. Invisible to us under the clouds, it was half full the next day, and is headed for full on the 21st. The Farmers' Almanac quaintly claims November's full moon is the Beaver Moon, and maybe it was in 1818. In our time, the Almanac ought to consider selling naming rights to the full moons (or would that be the prerogative of the International Astronomical Union?). November, for instance, could be the Walmart Moon, in honor of the beginning of the holiday shopping season.

Sputnik

Fall is in the air. It better be, since it's October. Early Sunday morning, the heater kicked in, and did so again in the small hours this morning as frost gathered outside. The trees are now a mix of green with yellow and brown added, but yellow and brown are going to be the majority in a week or so. Late last week I even saw geese fly by in standard V formation, heading south. How much more autumnal can you get?

Naturally, at this time of year my thoughts turn to Sputnik. Apparently the 50th anniversary a few years ago inspired the creation of a documentary called Sputnik Mania, which has interesting trailer at least. Once upon a time, my eighth grade English teacher, Mr. Allen, challenged us kids to name a word that had come into the English language in a single day. Some smart aleck (maybe me) suggested "quiz," but he said that story of street urchins writing the word all over Dublin sounded like blarney, and I'll go along with that.

No, he said the word was "sputnik." On October 4, 1957 -- only 17+ years earlier, but impossibly long ago for 13- and 14-year-olds -- suddenly everyone knew what a "sputnik" was. Briefly, it seems, it was a synonym for "satellite." That can be seen in the Sputnik Mania trailer during a moment that shows English-language newspaper headlines reporting the explosion of the rocket meant to carry the U.S. Navy's Vanguard satellite into orbit on December 6, 1957. OH DEAR!!! screams the (UK?) Daily Mirror U.S. SPUTNIK BLOWS UP ON THE GROUND!!! Other headlines tell of Flopnik and Phutnik.

That usage didn't last, of course. English speakers weren't about to cede such an important word to the Russians, not when the Latinate satellite was available (note also that "artificial moon" has gone by the wayside, too). My American Heritage New College Dictionary tells me, curiously, that the root meanings of satellite and sputnik are about the same. The Latin satelles means "attendant, escort" (and is probably Etruscan in origin, of all things), while sputnik is generally translated "fellow traveler" -- of the Earth, not of the Communist Party -- with Indo-European roots ksun ("with") and pent ("tread," "go"). But let's not get too pedantic. No one is considering subscribing to sputnik TV as an alternative to cable these days.

In case that's not enough sputnik, there's always the unlikely combination of rockabilly and space in the song "Sputnik" by Jerry Engler and the Four Ekkos, which includes lyrics along these lines: "Oh! We're gonna get our kicks/ On a little ol' thing called a sputnik/I said spoo-spoo-spoot-a-nick-a-chick!" The song is here, complete with a video featuring of a rocket program unrelated to the first satellite. More (there's always more) about the song and songwriter is here, at a site promising "Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security."

Or, you can listen to the beep-beep-beep.

What Was That Again?

Received a press release recently with the title, "DÉJÀ VU: Home Raffle Drawings are Gaining in Popularity." It began: "Home raffle drawings [are] popping up across the country, in the trough of a global recession. The contests were last popular in the early 1980s, when the U.S. economy was similarly suffering -- high unemployment, a credit crunch and a bottomed-out real estate market."

How is this déjà vu? Déjà vu is an individual experience, for one thing, not the collective experience of the housing market. More importantly, the term refers to a situation that seems strangely familiar, yet which you know is not. Home raffles might last have been popular at an earlier time, but merely recalling that fact seems like accessing a straightforward memory, not experiencing an eerie false sense of familiarity.

Most of us have language pet peeves, and this is one of mine: the misuse of déjà vu simply to refer to "something that has happened before." English has plenty of ways to say that, but none to describe the real sensation of déjà vu. The borrowing from French has the added bonus of sounding slightly mysterious. It would be too bad to lose its genuine meaning.

You don't have to look very hard to find other examples of the misuse. I googled the term and on the first page was directed to a squib about the weather in Oregon: "[On Saturday], the National Weather Service predicts a repeat of Friday's conditions, with rain likely in the evening and a low around 40 degrees. Sunday is the same again, with the chance of precipitation pegged at 90% and overnight temperatures that will feel like deja vu."

Interestingly, there's a related term that's not being misused, probably because it isn't widely known yet: jamais vu. Called the "opposite" of déjà vu, it refers to not recognizing a familiar situation.

Grawlixes

But for an aggravating event this morning, I might never have known the meaning of grawlixes, unless my old friend Geof Huth told me, because it’s the kind of thing he would know. Last night snow fell in earnest, filling in some of the lawn’s bare patches. Also last night, air leaked out of one of our tires in earnest, presenting a sad sight on the snowy driveway in the morning. A sight that had to be dealt with. I put on the spare, in the snow.

Later, I wrote this: “Those @#$%&* tires have been nothing but trouble since I bought them about two years ago.” That isn’t entirely true, since it’s an example of how product failure lingers in memory much more vividly than months and even years of reliable use. But it's partly true, since I’ve had more than one problem with them in two years, which seems like too many problems.

Never mind. Since I prefer not to include any profanity at this site stronger than ‘sblood or maybe gorblimey, I used the string of symbols above – grawlixes, they're called. Wiki offers the following definition, taken from The Lexicon of Comicana by cartoonist Mort Walker: "Typographical symbols standing for profanities, which appear in dialogue balloons in the place of actual dialogue."

If you want to split hairs, grawlixes used in standard text like this, as opposed to word balloons, might not really be grawlixes. But I'm not going to put that fine a point on it.

Apparently Walker coined the term about 45 years ago. Fun to know, and as usual that bit of information led to other information, namely that Mort Walker is still alive and is still drawing Beetle Bailey after nearly 60 years. I don't think I've seen it in about 20 years, but I'm fairly certain that if I did, it would be about the same as it ever was. It isn't something that's going to be updated. So it's unlikely that there will be a story arc about Beetle in Afganistan (poor Lt. Fuzz, taken out by an IED).

Item From the Past: The Bayeux Tapestry

Google News ran this tag line for an ABC News story this morning: "Shortly after making his first ever spacewalk, Bresnik, 42, experienced another first: His wife gave birth to a baby girl back in Texas while he orbited 200 feet above the earth."

I clicked through to the story itself, and of course the text read the correct "200 miles." But I had to laugh at the thought of the new dad astronaut floating by office buildings and over treetops. You'd think he could have come to Earth from only 200 feet to be with his wife at a time like this.

That's another thing. Regarding the capitalization of Earth, as in the planet Earth, the AP Style Guide says, "Capitalize earth only when using it in association with the names of other astronomical bodies that are capitalized," which seems to imply that if referring to the planet to by itself -- say, "Major Tom never came back to earth" -- lower case it. That's never made any sense to me. When talking about dirt, lower case. When talking about the orb on which we live, upper case, same as the continents, countries, states, cities, towns and streets on which we live. What do the other planets have to do with it?

Fifteen years ago we visited Bayeux, France, which I remember being a delightful little town. We went for three reasons: ultimately to catch a ferry across the Channel from Cherbourg, but before that to see D-Day beaches and other related sites, and to take a good look at the Bayeux Tapestry. I can't remember when I first heard of it. Maybe it was from Paul Freedman, formerly a professor at Vanderbilt, now one at
Yale, from whom I learned a great many things about medieval Europe, some of which I remember even now.

The Bayeux Tapestry is exhibited in a revamped 17th-century seminary, now a museum entirely devoted to it. Note the ticket refers to Queen Matilda's tapestry; Matilda, William the Conqueror's wife, is sometimes associated with its creation. No doubt school groups and the like show up from time to time to see the tapestry, along with some tourists in the summer, but on a weekday in November, I was the only one there besides a guard (Yuriko wanted to rest, and hadn't come). It's behind glass, or probably sturdy clear plastic, illuminated in a way that doesn't harm the fabric, I suppose, but which still makes it vividly easy to see. Bishop Odo himself probably didn't have such good lighting.

It's an astonishing, intricate piece of work -- actually an embroidery, despite the name -- made even more so for being a 900-year-old graphic novel. One that continues to inspire:

The link to the animated Bayeux Tapestry, for Facebook readers.

Item From the Past: Boot Hill

Back in the summer of 2005, I wrote about Mt. Moriah (Boot Hill), in Deadwood, SD: "[It's] a lovely wooded hill, covered in pine, dotted with stones of all sorts, from nearly worn-away to large, handsome, newish monuments. A light mist was falling, and it was fairly cold for the third of August, about 55° F. I think.

"Wild Bill Hickok came to Deadwood in the summer of ’76, died famously, and now reposes at Mt. Moriah. In recent decades, admirers erected a bronze bust to mark his grave, which is surrounded by an iron fence. Calamity Jane rests behind the fence as well, reportedly by her own request nearly 30 years after Wild Bill was stashed away."

As I've said before, acknowledge the famous, but don't ignore the obscure. Not far from Wild Bill is a stone for Grace Lela Trebilcock, born December 10, 1902, died April 27, 1909.

According to the on-line records of Mt. Moriah at least, she's the only Trebilcock in the cemetery. Maybe her parents were passing through Deadwood, or resident for only a few years. A sad story lost to time.

Trebilcock's an interesting name, though. The Internet Surname Database offers this information about the name: "Recorded as Trebilcock and Trebilcocke, this is a Cornish and English surname. It is, like the vast majority of Cornish surnames, locational, and in this case from a place called Trebiloc near the village of Roche. It is first recorded in the annals of the county in the year 1302. The place name and hence the later surname, is believed to mean 'The home on the cookoo's hill' from the Cornish medieval phrase 'tre-pyl-cok', although other explanations are possible."

The Villa

As words, luxury and luxurious have been beaten to death by copywriters, at least as they apply to destination properties, though in hotel industry parlance "luxury" does still describe the topmost class of expensive hotel and resort properties. Too bad luxury has been drained of meaning, since the word has such an ancient pedigree--all the way back many thousands of years to the Indo-European leug-, to bend, turn, wind: referring to the bending, turning and winding of luxurious plant growth, which turned up as luxus in Latin, with the completely recognizable meaning of "excess, extravagance."

In any case, I luxuriated at one of the villas managed by Four Seasons Punta Mita for three nights and parts of three days. The villas are arrayed on a landscaped hillside lush with flowers and palms, and are connected by narrow, twisty roads and even narrower paths used by hotel golf carts. I stayed with three other writers in a five-bedroom villa with a view of the ocean split by a couple of small promontories sticking up from a rocky shore below.

Published sources put the villa's size at 8,000 square feet, at most. I didn't have any measuring equipment, so I can't vouch for that, but I will say that each day I discovered another room or two I hadn't noticed before. About an hour before I left for the airport, for example, I found the laundry room and the connection to the garage, just off the kitchen. Maybe I'd missed that because I dallied too much in the kitchen, which included all the usual upscale suspects, such as Subzero, Viking and Krups.

The sturdy wooden front door opened up into an open-air courtyard. It also took me a day or two to realize that there were three separate water features in this courtyard, the combined effect of which was to make me believe for a moment, in the middle of the first night, that it was raining. Most of my photos of the courtyard suffer from awkward lighting, even though it seemed pleasant enough to the human eye, with sunlight reaching its pastel yellow walls, offset by dark wooden pillars and iron accents.

This one turned out all right, though. Stone fish in rock pond.

The fish was only one of many mostly Mexican objets d'art throughout the villa, including ceramics, driftwood art and wall hangings. Potted palms and ferns also figured in the interior design scheme. Under everything was a limestone floor, hard but pleasant under foot, and pock-marked by small shell impressions.

Short corridors branching from the courtyard led to the various bedrooms, which by themselves (mine anyway) were much like well-appointed hotel rooms, with certain added touches. Such as a doubled-door shower. One sliding glass door led into the shower from the main part of the bathroom. On the other side of the shower, another sliding glass door led to a small, roofless room whose only purpose was to be a small, roofless room next to the shower.

The villa's living room was large enough to include an L-shaped modular couch, a round dining table for 10 -- with a lazy Susan large enough to do Aztec sacrifices -- various chairs, end tables and lamps, and a square coffee table outfitted with coffee table books. The room also sported a large flat-screen TV, mounted on a wall, but it could hardly compete with the visual treats of the next "room" -- a partially covered outdoor patio as large as the living room that also included a couch and a round breakfast table, but with the addition of a full view of the ocean.

The pool was out there, too, essentially an ocean-ward extension of the patio. Elsewhere were sunbathing recliners and umbrellas, plus flowers in pots. It all sounds cluttered, but it wasn't remotely cluttered. Clutter wasn't in the interior vocabulary of this place, and it would have taken weeks of sustained effort by me, an expert at unorganized accumulation, to make it that way.

Did I mention that the villa faced west? It would have to, of course, to overlook the ocean, since it was the west coast of Mexico. But it's worth mentioning again. We managed to time things to be at the villa to see two out of the three sunsets that occurred when we visited.

Gov. Putz

Sometimes Yiddish is just the thing. As in the case of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a putz with an oversupply of chutzpah. Unfortunately, we're likely to hear more about him and from him in the months and years ahead, since impeachment and removal from office is only Part One. A criminal trial is next, and there's certainly a book deal for Blago after he does his minimum-security time, and probably a career for him on daytime TV too. Maybe that's what he should have done all along.

During my Japanese days, a Jewish acquaintance of mine once explained to us the difference between "schmuck" and "putz," which have the same literal meaning. If you were kidding around with a close friend, he said, you could call him a schmuck. But never a putz, if you wanted to remain friends.

It occurs to me that I'm a stone-cold philistine when it comes to American literature written after a certain time. Roughly, say, within my lifetime. I knew a girl in college who was fond of John Updike, or at least the Rabbit books. I saw the film version of The Witches of Eastwick years ago, but only recall bits and pieces now, such as what Jack Nicholson liked after lunch. But otherwise Mr. Updike's opus has made a light impression on me.

But it's not too late to buckle down and read the mid- to late-20th century titans of American literature that I've neglected, whose achievements will surely, uh, illuminate the centuries ahead. Maybe they'll will change my worldview! Spark my own personal intellectual renaissance!

Naaah.

I speak from ignorance, of course, but something about gushing posthumous praise for an artist, or anyone really, makes me skeptical. I felt the same way with the passing of David Foster Wallace. A regrettable suicide in his case, but somehow praise for him as a literature god makes me think that he was only lucky enough to be fashionable, and fashion passes. Fame isn't only fleeting, it has a half-life whose span isn't clear to contemporaries.

Mrs. Byrne's & I

Not only is my cheapo 1984 paperback edition of Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary yellowing with age and cracked in the spine, it's fairly well obsolete, considering on-line references. Or is it? I'm going to keep it anyway, since not everything dwelling in the world paper-mass has migrated to the digital realm.

I have more books than bookshelf space, and so some items have been tucked away for a while, Mrs. Byrne's among them. I was doing a little rearrangement work over the weekend on one of these hidden piles recently -- reorganizing, no, since that assumes a prior organization -- and unearthed the book for the first time in a few years. So naturally I had to stop moving books around and browse through it for a while. Its full title: "Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words" (1974) by Josefa Heifetz Byrne, daughter of the violinist Jascha Heifetz. (See the Groucho Marx quote in that entry, under "Career.")

I would share some of Mrs. Byrne's selections here, but no need. Someone has already done it, and better than I could, unless I wanted to take more time than I do to get it done.

Oddly enough, I also discovered a couple of fine word sites over the weekend: World Wide Words and the straightforwardly named A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia. What better on a still-winter weekend?

Winter Salmagundi

Back after "Presidents Day," technically known as "Washington's Birthday, Observed."

Till then, see the presidents in song.

I like that word, salmagundi. Don't have the opportunity to use it nearly often enough. According to various sources I consulted, it appears to be from French, as many food-originated words are, or maybe Italian. Not, as it sounds like, a relic in English of the British Raj, like pundit or pajamas. Sounds like the President of India, really. His Excellency, Rashtrapati T.K. Salmagundi.

Actually, these days it's Her Excellency.

Here's another usage I like: bum for butt. Lilly asked about it the other day. I don't remember how she phrased the question exactly, but essentially she wanted to know if the British had another word for butt that sounded something like it. Something she heard on television, certainly, since that's how Americans typically hear about the usage. Good to know that she's (1) paying attention to a nuance like that, and (2) seeking clarification from a trustworthy source. Me, that is.

Right now it would be a silly affectation for an American to say, "I slipped on the ice and fell on me bum." But I'd like to see it imported, and these things do change. All it might take is for some otherwise worthless hip-hop star to use the word that way for the importation to begin.

Actually, on Wednesday, I did slip and fall on my bum. I got off easier than the US Secretary of Defense, who broke a bone last week after an encounter with a Washington DC ice patch. All that happened to me was a sore bum. It was the result recent weather patterns: snow, meltage, a re-freezing, then snow on top of the ice. It's a wicked combination. It brought me down in a parking lot. Luckily no other cars were around to run me over, or witness my spill. It seems to happen to me only once a winter, which is fine for now, but not if I stay in northern Illinois another 30 years.

Here's a sentence I wrote professionally this week: "According to Inland American Lodging, the properties are in markets with strong barriers to entry and which are less sensitive to the slings and arrows of economic misfortune, including Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, DC." You just never know when that college education is going to pop up. Except that I'm pretty sure I heard "To be or not to be" in high school, and in fact I remember the Fonz discussing the meaning of the soliloquy in an episode of Happy Days.

Speaking of the Fonz, it seems that he's to be a bronze in Milwaukee. Only the humorless would be against such public art. More by serendipity than design, I've managed to see the statues of Ralph Kramden (New York), Mary Richards (Minneapolis) and Bob Hartley (Chicago) in recent years. I'd be more than willing to look up Arthur Fonzarelli when in Milwaukee.

One more ingredient to the salmagundi, also along video lines: this clip. Somehow, rendering this show in German doesn't make the ersatz German characters any less ersatz, especially considering the poor dubbing.