American Madness

I’m so busy lately that I can’t even meet friends for lunch (though I did manage that today). So, when a friend suggested we meet tomorrow, we ruled out lunch, dinner or coffee.

She asked, “How about a cigarette break without cigarettes.” Just walking around the block seemed less than productive, so I suggested we both bring a poem to read.

She said fine as long as we wrote the poems ourselves. I’ll admit to being a bit rusty at this, but here’s my contribution: a Shakespearean sonnet in ababcdcdefefgg form.

It’s about a long-distance relationship in which at least one partner is unwilling to admit that there’s no love, because to do so would require making difficult choices.

To Profess or Lust
Don’t knock the distant paramour, he said,
With trembling hand, the coffee cup held near.
A daily dose is lost, but still the bed
Is lit; the lust, from longing, ever clear.

When he, the night before, surveying ’round,
Felt pull the pulchritude within his ken:
Numbed with drink, the quiet voice sought, he found,
That stifled choice, and killed the question “when?”

Love can with hangover intrude, but worse
Finds those who, with love’s absence known, stay meek,
Let stressed smiles prevail, and, guilt-filled, rehearse
The bitter end to lies, and penance seek.

Denying lack of love, choice is dispelled
What true love is deferred, what future felled?

Slow day, eh? Everyone’s already in holiday mode.

I went on a LOOOOONG lunch today and got to talking with a new friend about the follies shows we put on (most recently I posted about the Bloomberg parody video and Gawker picked up on it, too).

She asked how long it took me to write the song parodies we do each year. This year I think I spent a total of five hours, maybe less (for five songs).

But the longest I’ve ever spent on a single song was getting the concept of the housing bubble to work to the tune of O, Fortuna from Carmina Burana. Not that you care, but here were the lyrics to that.

Staccato bursts of words (versus multi-syllable words) are definitely harder to replicate with modern English than one would think.

Wish I had the video of this. It was pretty well done. At the end, we had a journalist come out wielding a huge drum and crashing head first through a cardboard brick “house.”

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So, it is here, November is upon us. And while usually that means that fall is in full effect (just ignore the 60 degree temperatures outside), apparently it also means that it is National Novel Writing Month.

If you participate in NaNoWriMo (as those in the know call it), you are taking the month of November to attempt to write a 175 page novel (about 50,000 words). The idea is not to turn out the next great-American-novel, but rather just to write something, as they say on the site:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Which is totally my writing style. What works nicely is that this is totally deadline oriented, you have 30 days to pump out 175 pages, that comes to 5.83 pages a day, or 1666.67 words a day. You can take comfort in knowing that you are not alone in this endeavor though, in 2006 there were close to 80,000 participants, though only about 15% actually reached the finish line.

You can read about the history of NaNoWriMo on their site and also chat with others on their forum who might have the same writers block you are suffering (and it is only day one, tsk, tsk)… Just don’t end up like Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Hunter Thompson… Come to think of it, maybe writing isn’t such a great idea.

So, 10 x 10 is a pretty interesting website/blog.

Basically they trawl the web and find the most popular and newest news content represented by a single word and image. It is all then displayed in a 10 x 10 grid of thumbnailed images. When you click on one of the images the top head lines related to the word pop up. It is all refreshed hourly so you can actually track stories and words and see if the gain in popularity or lose it from one hour to the next. It is a a nice visual representation of the news in an easy to use interface. The site defines it self as:

10×10™ (’ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

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Jiggy was bad enough.

The Eleventh Edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary has 100 new words and re-definitions of words added to it this year. A lot of the words were added because they have become part of our vernacular and are used on a regular basis. Some of them, on the other hand, seem to be pop terms that have already faded and come this time next year will seem dated (like ‘Jiggy’, ‘Phat’ and ‘Bling-Bling’). To this years dictionary we can now add the word CRUNK (for all of you Scrabble players, crunk will be worth a hefty 11 points).

Other words you can now lay down on the Scrabble board include:

chaebol (worth 14 points)- a family-controlled industrial conglomerate in South Korea

nocebo (10 points)- a harmless substance that when taken by a patient is associated with harmful effects due to negative expectations or the psychological condition of the patient

ginormous- extremely large : humongous

agnolotti- pasta in the form of semicircular cases containing a filling (as of meat, cheese, or vegetables)

While some of these words have been around since the 1940s (ginormous) others, like crunk, DVR and sudoku are all new from this millennium.

Finally, I have a hater. A recent comment by “Steven” on my post about a recent Pizza Bar debacle left me pondering the utility of the ad hominem attack. “You need to grow up,” he wrote. “Your behavior was childish, and your blog post underscores your immaturity.”

Sandwiched in between that high praise was Steven’s point: that my gripe was ill-founded for x and y reason. I can agree with Steven’s point, but I do wonder what his real purpose was. If he wanted to change my mind, his method was curious. If he just wanted to make me feel bad, he should probably find a better hobby.

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So, American Heritage makes dictionaries. They do a good job at it, listing the word, followed by pronunciation, part of speech and definition. Pretty straight forward, like most dictionaries. But now they have put out a book “100 Words Every High School Student Should Know.” I have posted the words after the jump. In the meanwhile, let’s discuss what a load of bullshit this book is.

Sure, some of the words on the list are important to know, like nanotechnology (by the way, the spell checker does not know that word, oh and it is defined as the branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of less then 100 nanometers). That’s a good one, especially with new really really small technological innovations happening everyday. But when was the last time you were having a conversation and someone threw out the word “enervate” (cause {someone} to feel drained of energy or vitality) or jejune (naive). This book seems more like a ploy to sell more American Heritage products and expand their market. It just seems fatuous (pointless) to me. (more…)