Chicago has everything, except . . .

Barack Obama -- anymore -- and it may well have him back in another three years.

Copyright Matters

My article on copyright is here, on page 13.

It opens with my "copyright scruples" -- if you've got scruples of any sort, you may as well make the most of them before you manage to get rid of them.

Latent Terror of the North

Hillary Clinton says the situation in Pakistan is:

as though on our Canadian border there were terrorists who were coming across the border and we let them have Washington and then we let them have Montana and then we said, well, you know, not very many people live in the Dakotas, they’re not near Chicago or New York . . .

While I was wondering whether to be offended by this, I read this article on Rakesh Saxena, a wheeler-dealer whom Canada finally managed to extradite to Thailand yesterday:

He also managed to embarrass us internationally by plotting a military coup in Sierra Leone while in custody at the police lock-up at 222 Main Street. After news of the planned coup leaked to the media, which forced him to cancel his plan, he cheekily told reporters there was nothing in the terms of his detention preventing him from plotting coups in foreign countries. The embarrassing part was that he was right.

Okay, so maybe it's not Canadians Madam Secretary is worried about so much as all the other people in Canada, who are let in with relative ease and sometimes hang around for years. I know, I was one of them.

Still. She could have picked a less stable country bordering the U.S. I really don't think there are many people here, no matter how fanatical, who want to conquer the Dakotas.

Sap of Yesteryear

"Cane sugar and Vermont maple syrup"? But I thought that, in the good old days before I was born (the 50s and before, in other words), everybody feasted on pure maple syrup that cost scarcely more than tap water. And it came in bigger bottles, and the Revenue cutters were slow -- wait, that was rum.

From Dover.

Forget that old Lorelei . . .

Watch out for the treacherous Radiana Maidens as they lure you into the fatal world of cigar smoking.

Yes, it's a cigar label.

Phish Phry with a side of Spam

I seem to be getting less spam since Operation Phish Phry wound up, but a few spammers out there are still trying to scare me into opening their messages. Sadly for them, I don't scare easily; I get nervous easily, but that's different.

Let's see:

• "You're in blacklisted IP lsit (sic)". Coming from someone like you, that's a good thing.
• "Unpleasant news". I know -- you're not going to stop this till I open one.
• "Big deal". Here we have something that may be trying to scare me, or just convince me that this is, you know, a big deal.
• "Terrifying kid". I'll put my two up against him anytime.

I knew it wasn't just because I was the oldest

Some things haven't changed since I was a girl:

by the time they're 10 years old, girls are doing more chores around the house than boys . . . girls in this latest study spent an average of 50 minutes more on chores each week than boys.

Supposedly, I was "better able" to do challenging tasks like dusting our ugly end tables. Well, I'll admit that, as the big sister, I thought I was the only one who really knew how to do anything right. Still, some things don't have to be done exactly right -- they just have to be done.

It goes on:

"We expected that as a generation or two of women have gone out into the labour force, the gender differences would have faded in their children, but that's not happening."

No, it takes more than a generation or two to get over the deep-rooted idea that the males have to save their energy for plowing the fields, chopping down trees, and doing anything that involves getting shot at.

Not quite in time for the Day of Atonement, but . . .

We live in an unlikely world.

Awhile back, Jon Stewart said the story of "el presidente Gutterball" going bowling on his birthday was about as believable as President Ahmadinejad spending his birthday seeing Fiddler on the Roof.

Now we get this.

Okay, he still probably wouldn't go to see Fiddler on the Roof.

But, to paraphrase Barbara Kay, "please don't call him a self-hating Jew; he adores himself."

Photo: Office of the President of Indonesia

Lost and found

Meant to be read in side-by-side columns, but I think it's okay anyway:

LOST

1200 block Wasteland St, Thursday, FAKE “threatening” letter, handwritten, slightly soiled paper. Pls call if found – was just a JOKE, btwn FRIENDS, still shouldn’t fall into wrong hands.







DOG, large brown and white mongrel, skinny, pointy ears, answers to Bud, missing Weds night. Will reimburse finder for dog food.


SKETCHBOOK, green cover, has a few diagrams of nothing in particular. URGENTLY NEEDED! Generous reward – even more if you can prove you didn’t look inside.










FOUND

On my doorstep, Wasteland St, a filthy scrap of notebook paper partly covered with incoherent scrawls apparently threatening me (by name) with being rendered “so dead”. If the legal guardian of the child or mental patient who obviously “wrote” this text wishes to see it, please contact me before Monday morning, when I plan to take appropriate action.

DOG, wire-haired Ibizan hound, healthy appetite, probably wants to get back to winning medals at shows? Call to ID.



SKETCHBOOK, green cover, with detailed plans for car engine that runs on tap water (?).

Few people are aware of . . .

. . . the 19th-century origins of the Teletubbies. But here's proof they do go back that far.

(from Dover)

"Animal hoarding? No, we're not being hoarded . . .

. . . Not yet."

eRejection

"We cannot bring you aboard at this time."

It sounds like an announcement in an airport departure lounge, but it's actually from an email turning me down for a writing job.

(At first, I took it more dramatically and had a picture of myself, on a makeshift raft, getting turned away from a passing ship.)

Yes, I took a risk, and it could have turned out a lot worse. There was a guy who got his first submission to some syndicate mailed back unopened, with a note on the envelope: "I told you to stop sending us your ****!"

Still . . .

Liberty, Equality, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Now Président Sarkozy wants to measure France's success by its happiness, not its production.

One country already does:

So far, Bhutan is the only country to put happiness at the heart of policy. The government of the remote Himalayan kingdom must consider every policy for its impact on “Gross National Happiness.” This has led to a ban on ads, wrestling channels, plastic bags and traffic lights.

Things that would make me happier by disappearing:

• spam
• lame legacy comic strips
• school-issued combination locks that kids can't figure out (let alone parents)
  
• the becoming-an-annual-tradition confidence vote in the Canadian Parliament
• the use of the word "inappropriate" as a substitute for "wrong"
• fluoride rinses after teeth cleaning

This is only the beginning.

Sorry, gotta laugh

Porcupine Man Pleads Guilty to Mailing Threatening Letters

What did he threaten to do, shoot his quills? Not that he could really do that . . . I know, I know, the situation's not funny at all. But the headline is.

Phone woman returns (perhaps for the last time?)

If it's too small to read (and it is, at least on my machine), click on it.

The next-to-last incident actually happened to me -- except my phone asked me to deposit 25 cents.

Ad Orientation

Learned at Parents' Orientation today:

1. New this year: Swine flu policy.
2. If road cones are placed across the school driveway, parents should not remove them and drive through.
3. The school is not a peanut-free zone, but a peanut-aware zone. ("We are aware peanuts exist.")
4. The kneeling test for girls' skirts is still with us.
5. So are portable classrooms. Sigh.
   

You're welcome -- I think -- but . . .

This guy says his dog loves back-to-school time because he finds plenty of tossed-away sandwiches in the bushes near the school, and adds:

On Fido's behalf, thanks, Moms, for making such great food.

But I don't make school lunches -- the kids do. (Well, one of them does, and the other is about to start.)

It cuts down on unpleasant surprises, on both ends. Besides --

No one under the age of 19 is going to waste time and effort making a sandwich he doesn't like just to keep his mother happy, then throw it into the shrubbery or feed it to a dog. Only adults can make the mental contortions that might make that seem like the right thing to do.

I could say more, but writing about not feeding people food to animals is something I do for pay, and this is a holiday weekend.

Stuck Tune Syndrome

Here are "the top ten offending tunes" found in a study of 1000 university students.

1. "The Macarena"
2. "I'm a Little Teapot"
3. Theme from Gilligan's Island
4. Chili's baby-back ribs jingle (we seem to spared this in Canada)
5. "1812 Overture"
6. "The Gambler"
7. "YMCA"
8. Two Dr. Pepper jingles
9. "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik"
10. Themes from The Andy Griffith Show and The Odd Couple

The study was done in 2001 by James Kellaris of the University of Cincinnati and is reported by Larry Dossey in The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things. Which is not to say that earworms are healing -- just that music has power we don't understand.

Kellaris found three traits in the "stickiest" songs:

1. excessive repetition
2. musical simplicity
3. incongruity ("the beat or lyric defies the listener's expectations).

Dossey says, "One unfortunate individual claimed that a tune from an Atari 260 video game had been humming in his head since 1986."

Don't get me started on Roddy McCorley . . .

Possibly not the lamest comic strip ever . . .

but I'm working on it. Click on the image to get a legible size.

One more Cézanne

Here's one of his favourite places to paint (well, two of them, counting Mont Ste-Victoire): The Chateau Noir.

Not a castle. Not black.

Montagne Sainte-Victoire and Chateau Noir

Giclee Print

Cezanne, Paul


Buy at AllPosters.com

Gotta watch those ESL teachers

From the FBI:

This defendant obtained approval from the Department of Homeland Security to operate an English language school by submitting a fraudulent application. He then used the school as a front for manufacturing and selling fraudulent immigration documents to hundreds of unlawful aliens who were not entitled to remain in the United States.

. . .

SHIM [the defendant] maintained document labs with computer equipment and files, first in an apartment in Alpharetta and then at an apartment in Duluth, where the fraudulent documents were manufactured. Although Humana Language Learning Center reported to DHS that it had enrolled hundreds of students, the vast majority of the aliens who obtained F-1 status never attended Humana Language Learning Center. SHIM charged the aliens thousands of dollars, purportedly as “tuition,” but actually for the fraudulent documents he provided them for the purpose of obtaining F-1 status.

So much more lucrative than the losing battle to teach irregular verbs to non-native speakers.

And more spam

The watch spammers are back, with their empty promises:

With our watches boring time will go faster

An elegant watch will make you act more confident


And one just not making sense: Is the apostrophe in "don't" supposed to trip the spam filter?

Don-t wait until you become rich v get a designer watch now


Speaking of not making sense:


Ted with; and so she took to the chil


How about this one:


Western Union transfer is available for withdrawal


Ooh, and I bet you want me to cash it and send you part of the money.


Don't expect me to open either one of these:


Are you silly, writing it?

If you’re reading it:

Next time, tell me in the subject line what "it" is.

Why didn't they issue me one of those in the service?

"Over her full drawers, on one leg, she wears a lady's pistol strap (for easy access under her hoop skirt, not shown) . . .

From Dover.

The R&D Department of Life

The front page of the Post tells me "your baby is smarter than you think"; well, when the boys actually were babies, I always suspected they were smarter than me, anyway. What I had on my side was experience-based cunning.

The difference between teaching children and teaching adults, I'd been taught, was roughly the same: Children learn more easily, in fact without even meaning to, but adults make up for it (almost) with background knowledge and motivation.

A researcher at Berkeley has concluded that the kids, even in babyhood, have the advantage:

Ms. Gopnik argues in the book [The Philosophical Baby]that babies' brains are far from a blank slate, and are instead more highly connected than adult brains -- more neural pathways are available to babies than to adults.

She thinks this is why we humans have

"this long period of immaturity, much longer than any other creature . . . It seems babies are meant to spend that time learning. They're like the R&D department and then we, as adults, put that knowledge to use."

Not that this means you should go the superbaby route, with constant flashcards and extra classes. As I said a moment ago, kids learn almost by accident. And when they're motivated -- which can't be forced -- they can learn at a rate that would drive an adult brain crazy.

Alison Gopnik herself "went to an ordinary public school and attended neither enrichment programs nor special summer camps", and look where it got her.

Not So Shaggy After All

Looks as if they've caught the Shaggy Bandit.

But he was riding in "an older-model red Bronco", not a multicoloured van. And his "accomplice" wasn' t a Great Dane, or a girl with short hair and glasses, or a girl with long hair and . . . no glasses, or even a guy with an ascot.

More Objectionable Subject Lines

I'm totallt high right now

Is that why you can't spell?

Get strong act even if drunk

It's insulting of you to presume I ever get drunk (though it wouldn't take much), and what does "get strong act" mean, anyway? Never mind, I don't want to know.

Our watch will look great even on any loser.

So now I'm a loser.

get in touch with reality, you know you need to treat yourself better, its free

Just who's not in touch with reality here? You're the one who seems to believe there's a chance I'll open this.

10 advices for you

They'd better not be on English usage.

Photoshop of Horrors

The Telegraph tells of a gruesome airbrushing accident:

While his body and head were successfully removed, the photo editors forgot to erase one of his legs, which was left dangling at the back of the boat.

And speaking of disembodied limbs and digits, a picture of the 2008 US Olympic team showed:

. . . three black fingers resting on the shoulder of swimmer Maritza Correia. The identity of their owner, who had been erased from the picture, was never made clear.

You don't suppose they belonged to the man who was pasted into the photo on the front of the Toronto Fun Guide? After all, they only used his face, so maybe one of his hands was left somewhere else.

It's one thing to dismember people photographically -- it's another to change their race to something more "acceptable".

Just Heard About This

Lesley Fountain, RIP.
Lesley was the owner of Friends in Business, one of the first online communities I stumbled across. She had started it to expose scams, but it grew into much more, including, eventually, a business that produced much of her income.

I lurked there, mostly, on and off for years, taking in a lot. Lesley (or Maa-Maw, her alter ego) was devoted to her home and family, but had time for dozens of online friends. She had her online enemies, too, and she took no sass from them. You couldn't be obnoxious at FIB and plead "free speech" -- as Lesley once said, "This isn't 'the Internet', it's somebody's house."

Possibly the best way to honour her here is to post her Rules for her board:

1. No ads.
2. No drive-by articles.
3. No multiple personalities.
4. Be nice.
5. Don't mess with Maa-Maw.

Fighting Back

The controversy over the unnamed woman who told her son he could use his martial arts training on a school bully is still raging in the Canadian papers and blogosphere. And it seems to me most people are siding with the woman, as I tend to do.

I noticed the original article was big on what not to do (hit back, expect the school to do anything about it), but short on solutions that would really work.

"Walk away"? The bully, and the crowd that gathered in hope of seeing a fight, will be right behind you.

"Talk your way out of it"? I once asked a tiresomely aggressive schoolmate what exactly would get her to stop tormenting me. She said, "I want you to get the h*** out of this school!"

Uh huh. This was in the 1970's, too early for homeschooling and too late for child labour.

I bet she wanted a flying pony, too.

You're not dealing with an adult here, or even a child mature enough for his age. He wants to hurt someone because it makes him feel good in some stupid way. You're not going to cut it off by saying, "Wow, you sure humiliated me! Let's stop now, shall we?"

Looking at it as a mother makes it a touchier subject. One of my sons is learning martial arts, and they've both got into fights at school from time to time without any "green light" from me. I don't think they were actually being bullied so much as, well, just getting into fights. If anyone attacked them physically, then yes, I'd want them to defend themselves.

Hard to believe there's a difference of opinion on this.

Because your Big Day should include as many of the sponsor's products as you can squeeze in

Awful Library Books discovers there's nothing like dyeing your hair for your wedding.

Yes, let him marry the real you.

If life were a novel

Red Cardigan, who probably doesn't even know I read her blog, posted an interesting idea the other day: Answer a set of questions to describe your life as it would be if you lived in a novel.

I took a while to get to it -- I couldn't decide whether I wanted to live in a novel by Madeleine L'Engle or P.G. Wodehouse, so I ended up doing both.

Ladies first:

1. If my life were fiction it would be set partly in my large, comfortable old house and partly in other worlds

2. Right now I would be wearing my sweater, just in case I have to travel across dimensions unexpectedly

3. The biggest crisis I would be facing would be saving the universe without anyone noticing.

4. My biggest joy would come from getting that over with.

5. The most frustrating daily challenge would be balancing family life with my career as a work-at-home internationally renowned expert on something or other.

6. Looking out my window, I would see either my orchard or the six moons of some other planet.

7. The other characters in the story would be children and aliens.

8. An essential element of a happy ending would be getting home.

And then, in a lighter genre:

1. If my life were fiction it would be set in a castle in the 1920's.

2. Right now I would be wearing a twinset, tweed skirt, and maybe wellingtons if I planned to go inspect the sheepfold.

3. The biggest crisis I would be facing would be something like keeping my cousin's brother-in-law from finding out his godson is secretly engaged to a girl whose father cheated him at whist during the Boer War, while I simultaneously hosted a ten-course sit-down dinner for 34 using only the produce of the home farm.

4. My biggest joy would come from seeing everyone's problems resolved by unlikely coincidences.

5. The most frustrating daily challenge would be keeping the servants from realizing the upper class is clueless. Oh, forget it, they already know.

6. Looking out my window, I would see miles of countryside that had formed a small part of my dowry.

7. The other characters in the story would be harmless eccentrics, one or two annoying but non-threatening antagonists, and a large household staff.

8. An essential element of a happy ending would be having the place to myself again.

Spam, spam, spam, spam

Subject lines that guarantee I'm not going to open the email:

SOLDOUT -- I selling rolexes, do you want one?

Call right now for your degree.

Changeclient, please

wtf?

I'm about to sue you

But my all-time favourite is:

Open it you Jew

Somewhat more flattering painting of Mme. Cézanne

Just as expressive as the coffeepot portrait, in its way.

Portrait of Madame Cezanne with Loosened Hair, 1890-92

Giclee Print

Cezanne, Paul
Buy at AllPosters.com

Non-Review (Semi-Review? Quasi Review?)

This is just going to be a few quick notes on a book I'm reading: Lost Earth, by Philip Callow. No, it's not about a luckless group of space travelers stranded out there after the earth explodes, it's A Life of Cézanne, as the subtitle tells us.

The title may come from what Callow calls Paul Cézanne's "incessant effort to paint the earth's virginity". Below, one of his many paintings of the mountain outside his hometown, Aix.

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1904-06

Giclee Print

Cezanne, Paul


Buy at AllPosters.com

(Yes, it's an affiliate link. For one thing, that lets me post the picture without any copyright issues. For another, anyone who wants a copy of the print can click through, order it, and earn me a little commission.)

Not that Cézanne was what today is called an "outsider artist". As Lost Earth says, "an abiding sense of history and a deep awareness of his cultural predecessors meant that he could never see himself as being educated by nature alone". Good for him; we could use more of that sense and that awareness today.

Though not an outsider artist, Cézanne was in many ways an outsider -- mostly because of his fears and aversions. He hated being touched unexpectedly and was afraid of women. (Maybe the idea of wanderers with no world to go back to isn't so unrelated after all.) How he got together with the eventual Mme. Cézanne is a mystery. She may have started out as one of his models, which would have been a part-time job in addition to the bookbinding she did for a living. She certainly modeled for him often after they moved in together.

Woman with a Coffee Pot, c.1890-95

Giclee Print

Cezanne, Paul


Buy at AllPosters.com

I'd like to show a closeup of her face -- you can almost hear her thinking, "Finish the ******* painting, Paul, I want my coffee!"

Woman with a Coffee Pot, c.1890-95 (detail)

Giclee Print

Cezanne, Paul


Buy at AllPosters.com

Who killed civility? Seventies commercials.

I don't remember quite so far back as the commercials where people called friends from the drugstore, asking what they'd recommend for "occasional irregularity", but I remember ones that were nearly as contrived. After all, that's what it takes to launch characters into an intense conversation about the qualities of some product. You need to make them say something people in real life would never say.

By the early seventies, what set a lot of commercials' dialogue apart from real talk was its plain old rudeness.

Three words: Ancient Chinese secret.

Does anyone old enough not remember the laundry owner's wife, a small Asian woman with a voice that seemed too big for her, blowing her husband's cover in front of a customer by bellowing, "We need more Calgon!"?

Then there was the aged woman who, coming back from a shopping trip with her granddaughter, whined to the kid's mother: "If I'm wrong, it's Lisa's fault. She said buy Cling-Free."

And there was one that began with the end of some community theater production. The star, in 1890's costume, bounces offstage into her dressing room to be greeted by a frumpy attendant: Her volunteer dresser, or maybe her understudy. The woman's manner is cringing, but her words are an insult: "Diane, before the party, do you want to use my mouthwash?"

Poor Diane, about to be humiliated at her moment of triumph because she used the wrong alcohol-based solution (or none at all!) to rinse her mouth. But that's not how it plays out. Diane is not hurt at all, her confidence is unshaken, because, as she explains, she uses a long-lasting brand whose name I've completely forgotten.

Is she deluded in trusting it? No, because some guy appears and starts smooching with her, perhaps as a way of putting the dresser in her place.

So why did the dresser make the offer in the first place? Only so that Diane, who could not reasonably be expected to have such things on her mind, could make her mouthwash pitch. In real life, nothing, from the first line onward, would've been uttered.

My generation grew up watching this kind of . . . stuff. While our parents worried that we might be damaged by the violence on reruns of The High Chaparral, we took in the message that this was the way grownups talked to and about the people close to them.

So. If I'm rude, it's the commercials' fault.

"Second-hand rudeness"

It seems being a jerk to your underlings or whomever affects their cognitive abilities -- and those of the people around them.

Here:

The psychologists gathered volunteers to perform cognitive tests (rearranging scrambled letters to form words) and a creative test (thinking of unusual uses for a brick).

The person supervising the test was rude to one volunteer who was secretly part of the plan.

"What are you, stupid? Get on with it!" he snapped, and called the volunteer unfit to hold a job in the "real world."

After this, the rest of the volunteers had trouble unscrambling words and thinking of creative uses for a brick.

Worse, their dark sides took over.

One of the scrambled words was "demure," but several volunteers rearranged the letters to spell "murder" -- even though the letters weren't quite right.

And the new ways to use brick? "Kill people," one suggested. Trip someone, said another. Throw it through a window, or beat people up, said others.

There's a message here for parents who berate their kids over schoolwork: You're actually lowering all your kids' marks. (And maybe, if you're loud enough, the neighbours' kids' marks.)

I have my own idea where the epidemic of incivility started -- 70s commercials. But that's another post.

Forever Plaid

The paper tells me, not in so many words but in a photo (there's no version I can link to), that plaid skinny jeans are big for back-to-school this year.

We've come a long way from my adolescence, when we wore . . . plaid wide-legged pants.

Anyway,these days our family's back-to-school clothes are all uniforms, so the only issue is whether they fit, not whether they're cool. They're not. You're all going to be uncool together and like it. It's a life skill.

So is money management. One way to teach this is to raise the kids' allowances when they hit high school, and tell them they have to buy all their own school supplies. Amazing how this helps them figure out that they already have most of the stuff on the list.

Fixed

The problem went away just after I posted about it. Hmm . . .

It only applied to sites hosted on Blogger, anyway. So I was still able to pay the bills online. Yay.

At least they apologize in large font . . .

Google says:

We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

Automated queries? I didn't think I could type fast enough to be mistaken for those.

Google Help says, further, that the Sorry page "likely" has a captcha so I can prove I'm a human. Well, it doesn't.

It mentions the possibility of malware. Grr.

We'll just have to see if there's more trouble down the road.

Home Alone

One of the things my adult ESL students always wanted to know was the legal age for leaving kids alone. But there isn't any -- or, to put it more clearly, the law is based on the risk of harm instead of the child's age. As this story says:

Hovering over parents is what many believe the law says about leaving any child under 10 home -- or anywhere else -- alone. The Canadian Criminal Code (section 218) refers to those situations where the child under 10 is in danger or the likelihood of danger, police sources say.

Whether there's a "likelihood of danger" is left to the parent's judgment, based on their knowledge of the child. Judge badly, and you're in trouble. If anyone ever finds out.

It's hard to trust your own judgment sometimes. Like the mom in the story, who now teaches a Home Alone course, but started out being afraid to run out to the store because she kept thinking of "what-if disaster scenarios".

I think the thing to remember here is that we know our children better than anyone. We know how they'll react, if they have to, to those statistically improbable disasters. If anything, we probably underestimate what they can handle, because everyone tends to go a little more helpless when Mommy's around.

The story makes another good point: A child who can take care of herself is not necessarily ready to take care of younger children. It reminds me of a video I've used, where a 10-year-old girl is interested only in sitting and reading a magazine while Mom works extra hours. Good way to stay out of trouble, terrible way to babysit your preschool brother.

The bottom line is that parents are on the hook for a lot of responsibility -- but we always have been, anyway.

"I don't care if it's snowing, you can't wear hats! THESE ARE THE SIXTIES!

I remember the Sixties -- I was just too young to be there.

(From Everyday Fashions of the Sixties as Pictured in Sears Catalogs)

When Ads Were . . . Hallucinations?

From Dover's Old-Time Trade Cards:

Cherub brings little girl a vision of her future.

(You can tell she's a girl because her dress is pink. Boys wore dresses in nice masculine colours, like white.)

But the other one? Cherubs in togas taking photo of corset with cacti growing out of it? What's that about? Something you might see after a few relaxing hours at the opium den?

Also Knowns

Suspects hauled in by the FBI seem, as often as not, to be "also known as" something -- especially if they're accused of drug dealing, fraud, or mailing pipe bombs to investment firms in an attempt to drive up stock prices.

Some of them form their aliases simply by dropping most of the letters in their names. In one case, there were a "G", a "Fat A", and two "D"s. (How did they tell them apart? Was one of them "DB" and the other "DS"? Did people start calling DB "Cooper"?)

Anything's possible. There was a male drug suspect called Mimi.

Then there were the ones who went by presumably descriptive nouns: Slim, Dawg, Rags, Shorty, and Pig. Also Whispers and Monk.

This one's easy to understand: Joey Williams, aka "Joe". This one, not so much: Daryl Gibbs, aka "Ralph".

Little-Known Fact

At the turn of the last century, the average woman was actually taller than the average man!

Here's the proof: Some Charles Dana Gibson drawings from the Dover sampler.


"Precious, can you reach me down the pomade from the top shelf of the armoire?"
This stalwart lady is obviously not about to let that (literally) shady character get his misshapen hands on the hard-won egg money in her reticule.


"Pray do not loiter, Papa. I wish to marry in haste."

Yes, women were the larger and therefore the more important sex. They left silly pastimes like voting, wearing pants, and owning property to their little men. It was only after the mysterious Dwindling Epidemic of 1913 that they began to show any interest in such trifles.

(C'mon, haven't you ever noticed there are no photos of the Czar and the Czarina standing together? How can anyone have missed that??

Anyway, it's because she was taller than him. As Czar of All the Russias, however, he couldn't let this show, so one or both of them always sat down for picture-taking.

The ordinary, middle-class American men in these Gibson drawings didn't get to hide the fact that the women in their lives towered over them -- but they didn't run the risk of being shot during a revolution, either.)

In Your Own Words

Robert Fulford does not approve of ghostwriting -- well, few of us do when it involves a doctor's name being slapped on an article written by someone at a pharmaceutical company. But he says it's harmful even in less outrageous cases:

Ghosting points us toward a world of counterfeit personality where all prose will be written in the same down-trodden, down-market language, public utterances will be uniformly colourless and individual voices will be deadened or eliminated.

In TESL training, I learned about the "idiolect", the unique way in which every individual uses his language -- and everyone does have a unique way, though the differences from other people's usage may be very subtle. No one has quite the same vocabulary or pronunciation as yourself. (I just recently realized that I had never used any expressions like "pass away" and wasn't about to start - I was going to have to blurt out to a stranger that someone had DIED.)

So if you get someone else to process your raw thoughts into coherent prose, they won't be using your idiolect. Fulford seems to be saying they won't be using their own, either, but some sort of generic, and therefore dull, language. If this becomes common practise, all language will grow dull.

I don't know. As long as there are still adults learning English, there will be idiolects that produce word combinations that don't occur to us native speakers. (How many anglophones, for example, would say, "It's cheap, sad, and disgusting"? Yet there's no grammatical reason not to.)

Just so they don't get so self-conscious about it that they get everything ghost-written.

(Full disclosure: I once wrote out a letter for a couple of my students to copy so they could establish residency to enrol their kids in school. They had no lease to show, and their landlord couldn't write a letter saying they lived in his building because he couldn't write at all, except to sign his name. So I composed the letter, scrawled it out, and as far as I know one of them copied it and gave it to the landlord to sign.)

So I don't think the death of the idiolect is upon us, but I think we do have to be careful to use our own words.

The Good Old Days

"Awww . . . why didn't I tell the iceman to wait till I trimmed the lamp wicks?"

Video of the week (aka the only video made this week with an appearance by a member of my immediate family)

Caustic Bonding

The inimitable (and that's probably just as well) Steve Murray observes:

A bad movie experience is such a wonderful opportunity to showcase your caustic wit and bond over how much better the both of you are than the jerks that put that trash on the screen.

Yes, and the daily comics page is a much more affordable alternative that works for the whole family. Mine, anyway.

If you see this man, or his lamp . . .

The FBI reports a bank robbery in Philly:

The robber was wearing a tan canvas hat which resembled a women’s straw beach hat.

It looks more like a lampshade to me. Take a look yourself.

Also:

This individual is also believed to have robbed the same bank on May 7, 2009.

And never got caught? No wonder he came back for more.

Zingers from the bench

Two guys went to court over a winning lottery ticket -- had they or had they not agreed to split the winnings, if any? The judge delivered:

a written judgment that flits from disgust to mockery, exasperation to sarcasm, and occasionally rises to glee at the pathetic human foibles on judicial display . . .

"During this trial, truth was only an occasional visitor," Mr. Justice Joseph W. Quinn wrote. "If the [lottery] ticket were a child and the parties vying for custody, I would find them both unfit and bring in Family and Children's Services."

. . . Mr. Miller did not work, having left or lost a number of general labour jobs because he "did not like them," found them "way too physical," could not get a ride, or because "it was winter."

. . .

They also met a woman at Wendy's whom Mr. Carley called his "girlfriend," but whose name he could not spell, and who was forced to wait outside in the parking lot as Mr. Carley ate a hamburger in the car.

"Did I mention it was February?" the judge quipped . . .

It occurred to me a long time ago, watching PM Mulroney in Question Period, that being a lawyer gives you some practise in making your adversary sound stupid. That's what's on display here, I think.

And no, the judge ruled, they had not entered into an agreement to split the winnings.

Another clipart sample

Lion vs. unfortunate little 18th-century woodcut guy. Wonder who's going to win.

Well, it worked -- sort of . . .

Dover sent some "Christmas in July" samples, among others, and the temperature's gone back down into the eighties!

What do you do when you need some beer foam . . .

early in the morning?

This morning, I wanted a photo to illustrate a post (elsewhere) about what Stephen Colbert is calling "Thursday's post-racial beerfest".

Despite what you might think, I

1. did not have any recently used beer mugs lying around, and
2. was unwilling to pour a cold one before starting my work.

So what did I use? Baking soda and vinegar.

When it was through fizzing, I poured off the liquid and took a picture of the mug with the foam clinging to it.

I'd post it, but it was done for hire and doesn't belong to me.

True Story Based on a Major Motion Picture

Let's start with the headline of this story about a bank robber in Monroe, WA:

Former High School Star Athlete Sentenced to Prison for Armored Car Robbery

. . . Klutz Who Was Always Picked Last in Gym Lands Job Writing FBI Press Releases. Well, I'm just guessing.

Now the subhead:

Defendant Used Ad on Craigslist and Flotation Device to Make Escape

This isn't quite what it sounds like. He didn't post an ad saying GETAWAY DRIVER NEEDED @ BANK OF AMERICA and give the time and date.

He posted an ad for landscapers, telling them to show up in their work clothes. Being a landscaper himself, he put on a similar outfit and pretended to be spraying weeds around the bank grounds. He went on to spray an armored car driver with mace, grab some money, and disappear in the crowd of landscapers. (It seems he got the idea from a movie.)

And yes, he tubed away.

The rest of the story is sadly predictable. Alcoholism, spending, cheating on his pregnant wife with a teenager. Vegas with "friends".

Six years.

"Our emotions were as raw as the chicken in the fajita I was served at the restaurant."

A family's drive from Vancouver to Disneyland with two small kids is recounted by their dad, James Kwantes, in an article called (what else?) "Are We There Yet?"

In Carmel, California:

a man dressed in a shirt, tie and dress pants walked by in his bare feet, talking on a cellphone.

He hardly looked out of place.

That guy probably doesn't realize he's a Discalced Carmelite . . .

That's Entertainment

Soon to be a major motion picture: The Hardy Men, about the adult lives of the Hardy Boys. Ed Solomon, the screenwriter, says, “It's about guys who are now completely screwed up, who don't speak to each other anymore, who live in different parts of town and have to deal with their own complicated psyches. It's a comedy."

Critic Robert Cushman tells us what he really thinks about Noel Coward’s play Fumed Oak: “The play is snobbish, misogynist, one-sided and undoubtedly expresses deep, and deeply discreditable, impulses in its author. I loved it.”

Familia Values

Cult-like drug cartel gives to the poor, slaughters rivals

. . . and it's run by a "purported Evangelical Christian" who doesn't let his drug runners drink or, well, do drugs. Plus:

La Familia uses Bible scriptures and self-help slogans to inspire its traffickers

From self-help slogans, deliver us, O Lord!

Where even to start with the questions on this one?

Is this guy an Evangelical gone bad, or a cynic who seized on Evangelicalism as a way to build support, keep his minions out of the merchandise, and stand out in the crowd of Mexican crooks?

Why Evangelicalism instead of Catholicism? (Because you can't tell Catholics not to drink?)

Does he really think financing drug rehab centres cancels out enabling the addictions that put people there?

That drinking alcohol is worse than shooting policemen?

That he's a practising Christian?

Who knows? After all, he calls himself "El Mas Loco".

Please Do Not Feed the Ducks

Earlier, doing research for an article on why feeding bread to waterfowl is an even worse idea than feeding French fries to yourself, I tried to find a news story I remembered from a few years ago, about three old ladies in Britain being arrested for persistently feeding ducks in a park.

I never found it, but I found plenty of similar stories. It usually is an old lady who's had up for these offenses.

In Florida, this is a hot-button issue, and having seen how the Muscovy ducks there follow people around in search of a handout, I almost understand why. But just almost. I mean, arresting a woman for "harbouring ducks" because she left her garage door open? She was accused of leaving food for them in there, but said the door was open simply so her cats could get in and out.

The other side can be ruthless too. I also read about a couple who were pretty tired of ducks hanging around their condo complex, so when they saw a stranger feeding them, they asked her to stop. She said, "I'm a police officer, I can do what I want." It was true. She had the man arrested.

Feeding waterfowl is serious stuff in Florida.

Walter Cronkite, RIP

The hero of Lizard Music is a devoted fan of Walter Cronkite, and while he wishes him no harm, of course, he imagines suitably dramatic death scenes for him, always leading up to the last words, "And that's the way it is . . . "

Forget "Houston, we have a problem"

My favourite lines from Apollo 13 all come from James Lovell's mother:

"Blanch, this is Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin."
"Are you boys in the space program, too?"

Later, she tells her granddaughter not to worry:

"If they could make a washing machine fly, my Jimmy could land it."

Persian design reminds me . . .

I never posted anything about Michael Jackson.

See, what I first thought of when I read he had died was Persepolis -- because there's a bit where teenage Marjane is stopped in the street by the Guardians of the Revolution (women's branch) for her decadent Western appearance, including a Michael Jackson button.

Thinking quickly, she tries to tell them it's Malcolm X (who was, at least, a Muslim). But even they know better than that.

All this, plus OVERNIGHT PARKING

What more could you want? A playground, a chapel, a cemetery, etc., etc. -- oh yes, and the Blessed Sacrament.

Looks like I've hit it big

Now all those hoards of people with the same last name as me will be hounding me for loans.

There's just one thing I'm wondering about: Why would anyone who knows I'm on the brink of getting rich think I'd be interested in 53% off a magazine subscription?

Hark, the Heraldic Angels . . .

This one's a little . . . busy. An angel holding a severed head on a platter, lots of bunting or maybe leaves, something that looks like the neckpiece from a suit of armour -- where's the shield? Oh, there it is, hanging crookedly off the bottom of the assemblage, with the device barely visible.

This must belong to the St. Michels . . . or maybe the Angells?

Signs that you're just *dreaming* you're back in high school (or what I wish I'd remembered last night)

• Your carpool mates are your teenage son and someone you knew in the Air Force 25 years ago
• The carpool driver is someone who's been dead for seven years
• When your mom, who lives 3000 miles away, worries that you're going to miss your ride, you say you can drive yourself in your ancient Toyota Camry
• When you get to school, you don't remember your schedule -- but that's okay, because all they want you to do is iron costumes for the school play

Don't try this at home or abroad

Disclaimer: THIS IS DELIBERATELY BAD ADVICE! It's also probably impossible to follow -- I certainly haven't tried.

So don't try to take me to court because your mucus membranes were damaged by leftover coffee.

What am I talking about? Read on:

Summer’s here, which means:

• Sultry breezes are beckoning from the great outdoors
• School’s out
• Coworkers disappear, leaving mounds of undone work
• And the uppermost concern on your mind is: TANNING!

Not the real kind, of course. You know better than to lie out in the sun, exposing your body to hazardous (and worse, wrinkle-causing) UV rays. But you want to look as if you had done it. So you reach for the self-tanner.

No matter what kind of self-tanning product you use – cheap or expensive, lotion, spray, towelettes, dollar store makeup in a dark shade, or leftover coffee – if you don’t apply it correctly, you may as well stay inside all summer.

Getting the perfect self-tan means:

• No streaks. Apply your product, inspect the results, and if the color isn’t perfectly even (and it won’t be), apply more. Continue till perfect. You’ll probably need to set aside at least a week of your vacation for this.
• Not missing any spots. Remember to get the inner rims of your nostrils (your mucus membranes will adjust), the part in your hair, and your eyelids. You blink up to 20,000 times a day – that’s 20,000 chances to show the world you’re too clueless to put on self-tanner the right way.
• Changing your hair color, if necessary, to complement your tan. If your hair’s blonde or red, leaving it that way will make your fake tan look like an obvious fake tan. Ask yourself: Did your old Malibu Barbie look like a real woman? (Hint: Leftover coffee works on hair, too.)
• Constant touch-ups. Be ready to spend at least an hour a day fixing spots that seem to be fading. Remember what you have to do if you find any streaks!
• Stocking up on self-tanning product so you can do it all over again next winter and tell everyone you spent Christmas in the Bahamas.

Take the time to self-tan the right way, and I promise you your summers (and winters) will never be quite the same again!

Stories Maybe Better Left Untold

Now, you know there's got to be a story behind a coat of arms with a giant ram (?) in a crown, bursting out of a castle. (There seems to be a recurring theme of animals escaping.)

The other one -- the severed arm holding a sword with an animal's head and a heart impaled on it -- must have a story behind it, too, but I really don't think it's one I want to hear.

Elephant and -- what is that, anyway?

This came in the Dover Sampler a couple of weeks ago -- from a book of heraldic clipart.

Heraldry, which has absolutely no connection with anything I do in real life, is nonetheless sort of intriguing to me. Where else could you find something like this?

Supporters: A black and white elephant, covered with cross-like designs, who's apparently broken the chain on his collar and escaped; and a green cougar-like animal with a beaver's tail, a crown for a collar, another broken chain, and a stuck-out tongue.

Actually, they're the most interesting part of this coat of arms. The lion on top is almost a cliché, the motto is something unimpeachable about strength and truth, and the device itself is, it seems, a plain old red bullock standing on some wavy lines.

The book doesn't tell the reader whose arms they are, or anything else about them, but that would take it beyond clipart.

Review Backlash Chill

The Post says Alice Hoffman, annoyed by a review that said her latest book wasn't so good as her earlier work, vented on Twitter, calling the reviewer a "moron" and asking, "How do some people get to review books?"

Well, I got to write this review simply by offering. But maybe I should have been less scorchingly critical. "May be too challenging", for example -- I could have shown more restraint there. Maybe I should have been more grateful to the publishers who sent me a free copy of the book, more fearful of the wrath of the three authors, who, for all I know, have been tweeting angrily about me since the newsletter came out . . .