Man of La Manga. From a Radio Derb listener in the Big Apple:
Speaking of real candidates: Have you noticed something superb about Perry? (I mean something else — he’s our man.) Unlike the other, and fake, men of the people running (this issue doesn’t apply to the women), he doesn’t roll up his damned sleeves. All the others put on this moronic costume of rolled up shirtsleeves — even worse, often when they’re wearing ties — and expect us to think . . . I don’t know what. That they’re Men Of The People Ready To Fight For Us? That we will elect them on the basis of their attractive forearms? That they don’t know how to operate buttons or cufflinks and should therefore get handicap points for disability?
Bonus: Perry seems to use cufflinks a lot. The last guy I remember keeping his sleeves down and fastened by cufflinks was Reagan, and that wasn’t too shabby. Message: I’m an adult, and I think you are too.
Personally I’m okay with them rolling up their sleeves; but if they start with the trouser legs, I’m outta here.
Advertisement
Showbiz news. The immortal Al Bundy, impersonated by actor Ed O’Neill, has been given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame . . . outside a shoe store.
Richly deserved; but I wish that after that very touching and gentlemanly speech he made, Al had given us a few bars of “Psycho Dad.” My kids grew up hearing me sing that; with what long-term psychological consequences I would not hazard to speculate.
Hurricane Irene. Irene was a bit of a flop. The forecasts on Saturday showed her passing directly over us here in Huntington. By the time she got here, though, Irene was nothing but a bad storm.
I’ve been in a real hurricane in the Far East (where it was of course a typhoon) — have stood at my taped-up 13th-floor window watching big sheets of corrugated iron from someone’s roof bowling along the street below like scrap paper. Irene wasn’t anything like that, just a lot of rain and wind. I’ve been to GOP fundraisers that were more exciting.
The main effect on our lives was, we lost power for three days, and phone and Internet service too.
The kids coped very well. They spent Sunday playing their way through the family stock of board games: Parcheesi, Life, Stratego, Monopoly. All four of us used to play as a family event when they were little; but then they got social lives, homework, and computers, and the weekend family games went by the board (as it were).
We had successfully planted the idea of board games in their silly heads, though, so there they were when I went up to my study on Sunday morning, playing Parcheesi; and there they still were when the dinner bell rang at 6 p.m., haggling over rent on a hotel.
There were trees down all over, but our own little homestead came through the tempest nearly unscathed — just some fence damage from falling branches. My treehouse is of course perfectly intact. I build for the ages.
Rediscovering old pleasures. My usual morning drill is to read the New York Post over a breakfast of porridge and prunes, then check my e-mail. With no Internet service, I was therefore at a post-breakfast loss. What to do?
Idly turning the pages of the newspaper, hoping to spot something worth reading in the badlands beyond the editorial page, where I normally never venture (business, fashion, sports, . . . ) I spotted the crosswords. The Post runs two crosswords every day: one of those childish synonym things (33 dn. “River of Hades,” four letters), and a real cryptic crossword — actually the one that runs in the London Times, which 30 years ago I did every day, finishing it more often than not.
Mmm...the middle-aged Hitler's sex life with Eva Braun may have been boringly conventional. But didn't the 30-something Hitler have a controlling and abusive affair with his own teenaged niece that ended in her suicide? Plenty of ammo for the "sick and twisted" crowd there.
As for Derb's point, yes, it is surprising to see "normal...heterosexual" and "perversions" being contrasted. Question: At what point did such once-unexceptional usage become noteworthy? 1995? 1990? Certainly this passage in a book review in 1985 or 1980 would not have excited comment, while by 2000 it would have.
I find the contrast unsurprising when you get away from the two coasts. Atmosphere can affect judgement much more than argument.
More importantly, expand your boardgame line!
Games WorkShop's Talisman(4th Ed.) will hold the interest of older grade schoolers and college students alike. Get a copy and see.
Also, Reiner Knizia's
Lord of the Rings has a combo of elegantly simple design, strategic subtlety and ability to re-create a whole world that is just awesome. Compulsively re-playable. And there are expansions...
Lots of info at boardgamegeek.com.
Not there is any thing wrong with yr mix, except for the rather unthinking spin-and-see-what happens Game of Life. Our gaming group once tried to add an element of stratgey and liven it up a little by putting in sniper rules, but girlfriends were upset, so the whole thing was dropped.
"Edited short article with headline"? If one takes a short version of "edited" (EDIT), adds a "short article" (AN), and tacks on the "head" of the word "line" (L), the result's "edited" anagram yields ... TAIL-END.
I strongly protest the idea of eliminating summer vacation. In fact, it's already been whittled down wrongly, as well as Christmas breaks. Kids are experiencing *too much* time in those bureaucratic child-factories anyway, and rather obviously more time spent in them doesn't result in any more learning.
One of the great joys of my *adult* life is the wonderful feeling of freedom and possibility that the arrival of summer still fosters in my heart -- and that was promoted by long, lovely summer vacations.
The fact that *some* children don't have anything to do doesn't mean they're poor -- it means they lack imagination, which is a problem that crosses socio-economic boundaries. But anyway, we shouldn't be modifying a wonderful tradition for most children just because some children are bored. That attitude is one of several reasons why our educational "system" has failed in the first place.
Glad Derb does not mind the applause between movements in a symphony.
In Mozart's times, symphonic movements were meant to stand alone as well as be performed one after the other. Each movement would be heard individually (quite often, actually) interspersed among other items in a program--and if that was OK for men like Haydn and Mozart, it should certainly be OK for today's jerks who want to shush the applauding public.
Also, it often happens that a conductor's decisions and taste cause him to nail one movement, while totally botching another (tempo being the most frequent culprit). So I reserve the right to clap for a movement and to sit on my hands for another.
Bottom line: a real man knows when a minuet is played like a minuet, and when it isn't--and he claps accordingly.
I have to agree, at least in part, with Derb's suggestion to cut down summer vacation. I don't think it should be eliminated by any means, but it is too long. When you're 8-years-old, three months is an eternity. By the start of August, I was always clamoring for the start of school.
Rather than just adding the extra time to the schedule, however, I'd move the break around. The best school schedule I ever had was a summer vacation that was a little under 2 months, but then 3 week fall break at the end of the first quarter, the traditional 2 weeks off at Christmas between semesters, and then a 3 week spring break after quarter number three. Every time I was getting burned out on school, I got a vacation, every time I was starting to get bored at home, school started up.
Even though there is historical precedent for clapping between symphonic movements, by the mid-20th century (in the US at least), it was verboten. The phrase "please do not applaud between movements" was so common in concert programs, that when I was at music school in the 70s, it was often scrawled amidst the graffiti in men's bathroom stalls.
I take umbrage at your disparagement of US-style crosswords. The first crossword was published in the New York World (even though the author was a Scouse). American crosswords are based on symmetry, and the rule that all squares should be accessible both vertically and horizontally. The unnecessarily complex "cryptic" crosswords, which are asymmetrical and are very limited in how many words actually "cross," look like what would happen to the American version if it had been adapted by a government committee.
Applause between movements. I don't do it. But there was one performance...
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was performing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with our local Alexandria (Virginia) Symphony Orchestra. Throughout the orchestral introduction, she stood flexing her arms and shoulders, shifting from one leg to the other, looking for all the world like she was getting ready for a 100-yard dash.
Well, it appears she was. She took the movement at an incredibly fast tempo; you wondered when the whole thing would hurtle off the tracks and over the cliff, but, miraculously, it didn't. It was the most thrilling performance of that movement I had ever heard. When the final notes of the movement had crashed through the concert hall, instead of the usual scattered, half-embarrassed claps, the entire audience erupted in a sustained ovation.
When the applause had died down, Salerno-Sonnenberg addressed us: "I'm sorry to have to tell you, but there are two more movements."
"Edited short article with headline"? If one takes a short version of "edited" (EDIT), adds a "short article" (AN), and tacks on the "head" of the word "line" (L), the result's "edited" anagram yields ... TAIL-END.
"Back home (she’s commuting) from the first day, she reported that the very first words spoken to her by a classmate (male, South Asian) were: “Hi! Say, you’re mixed, aren’t you?”"
Well we at least hoped that for America racial distinctions would become unimportant and we have succeeded to some extent - racial distinctions are far less important in American than they used to be. A lad who grew up in southern Asia, however, most likely did not have the benefit of American culturalization about race.
I've spent over an hour wrestling with your cryptic crossword problem. Here's my answer: edited (i.e., you should edit) "articl (made short by dropping e) headline" = tail-end Charlie = chap shooting... This is a reminder why I broke my addiction to these things--they eat up too much time. I love them, though, and I always try to snag a Times, Telegraph, or FT on a flight. At the height of my madness, I got to the point where I could usually finish the Telegraph, but only rarely the Times.
When I was in high school in the 1970s in the back woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Our one and only field trip was to a concert by the Detroit Symphony, which was traveling through the area to culturally enrich us. Some in the audience applauded when the music first stopped. We were rewarded with a 5-minute diatribe by the conductor of what ignorant backward hicks we were to applaud between movements. We didn't applaud any more during the concert.
