felixwas

I was stopped behind a car at a traffic signal today when the light switched from red to green. The car sat there. Then it inched forward. Then it stopped. I don't do this very often, but I gave my horn a little "get moving" beep.

Immediately, an arm extended from the passenger window to give me the finger. Then the arm withdrew. I beeped again. Another arm, another finger. I beeped again. Another finger. We kept this up for about 10 blocks. Finally, the response was a thumbs-up.

We both were headed for an intersection where the traffic was long-lined up for a right turn, so as the other car kept going, I turned right a block before the intersection, then turned left at the next intersection. The timing was perfect. The light turned green for me, and the first car in line at the red light was the car I'd been following.

I beeped again. The guy gave me another thumbs-up with a big smile. I returned the smile and flashed him the peace sign.

That whole episode could have turned out a lot differently. But this outcome left me thinking that maybe the world has a slightly better sense of humor than I previously thought.

Willard Romney, as quoted by Charles P. Pierce in his political blog at Esquire.com:

"I stand by what I said, whatever it was."

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/#ixzz1vBNBwhd3

I teach journalism/communications students at St. Bonaventure University. The local newspaper closely follows St. Bonaventure's basketball program—in fact, it's the paper's biggest local sports beat.

Today's newspaper had what we newspaper types call a skyline: a headline at the very top of the front page that refers to a story inside the paper. The headline was about an agreement the basketball team reached with a 6 foot 10 inch player from the Netherlands.

Many people, including journalists, incorrectly break communications into two categories: written and verbal. But they are using "verbal" when they should use "oral." The word "verbal" is used to compare types of communication: say, an oral agreement vs. a written one. Whoever wrote today's skyline was aware of that distinction—sort of.

I say "sort of" because of what the skyline said:

6-foot-10 forward from Netherland verbals to Bonnies

I don't know if I've ever seen an adjective turned into a verb. But "verbals" is a word with a sense of humor, don't you think?

I have never asked anyone to connect with me on LinkedIn, but having just accepted another invitation from someone whom I know marginally, I see I'm up to 257 different connections.

I started accepting requests for connections thinking that perhaps someone would call for a reference on one of my connections and I would be able to say good things about that person and help her or him land a job. I also completed my profile with the faint hope that maybe a writer would get in touch about an editing job for a book, or a magazine article, or something along those lines.

Neither of those things have happened. The only time my account is active is when somebody asks for a connection.

So, tell me: What is the point of LinkedIn? Has anybody ever had anything real happen besides connection requests? Has anybody ever landed a job? Been asked for a reference? I just can't figure LinkedIn out.

"Things we like" is another new feature at If the Six. (The title comes from a Jack Bruce album of the same name released in 1970.)

This is a poem I read in seventh grade. For some reason, it always has stayed with me—to the point where I always have been able to recite it up to "electric bells."
( Reeking smoke, and more )

I was having lunch with an old friend once, and when our conversation turned to the state of life in America, he had three words for it: louder, dumber and meaner.

The louder, dumber and meaner report is going to become a regular feature here at If the Six. Here's today's dispatch:

(How low can you go?)

Deep down in their cold, cold hearts, perhaps all vampire stories are really about how human memory breaks down time and renders death something of an absurd joke. The older we get, the less we find ourselves able to release the past, or so it seems for quite a few of us twisted souls. Certain people, places, and things, once thought dead and buried, return—so vivid! just there!—to haunt us, not only in our dreams but in our waking moments as well.

— Jim Windolf in the April edition of Vanity Fair, writing about the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp movie Dark Shadows.

The May edition of Esquire contains a fascinating piece by Chris Jones about Robert Caro, who has written four hugely acclaimed books about Lyndon B. Johnson. In one paragraph, Jones writes about how Caro gets ready to write—and why he gets ready in this way:

Before he writes, however, he sits at his desk and he looks out his window at the glass building across the street, and he thinks about what each of his books is to become. In those quiet moments, he remembers the words of one of his professors from when Caro was a young man at Princeton, studying literature. The professor was the critic and poet R.P. Blackmur, and Caro, who always wrote his assignments in a hurry, under the pressure of deadline, and who usually received good grades for his rushed work, thought he had fooled him. Blackmur was not fooled: "You're not going to achieve what you want to achieve, Mr. Caro, unless you stop thinking with your fingers," the poet said.

Over the past year, people in a house I drive by each day have been selling cars from their side yard. The most recent was an ’80s-era Chevrolet Monte Carlo in a color resembling electric lime slices. “Mean Green Machine” shouted a decal in green letters along the top of the windshield.

This house is a typical out-on-the-country-roads house in this poor corner of New York state. It is sided with rolled asphalt the color of pine needles. A dusty driveway leads down to the road. Grass grows thigh-high on the steep roadside bank. Across the road is a dirt lot where the people who live in the house chop tree carcasses into piles of firewood the size of two-car garages so they can sell it.

A few weeks ago, I spotted a blood-red car parked where the Mean Green Machine had been sitting. First, I noticed how the car looked like it was moving 100 mph just sitting there. With its low profile, it looked as if it could slice through the air with barely a wisp. The second thing I noticed were black letters stretching between the wheel wells. The letters said “errari.”
( An object of desire )

This semester probably was my most satisfying, but even so, I faltered down the stretch.

During a class last week, students and I discussed George Orwell and his essay "Politics and the English Language." Orwell wrote in 1946: "[a] mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse."

As an example, he presents readers with this sentence:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

What Orwell has gummed up in his example of the concrete melting into the abstract is a verse from the Bible's book of Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

We had a good discussion, but then my train of thought derailed, spectacularly. I asked the students if they could name any books Orwell had written. The first response, the predictable response, was 1984. Then, surprisingly, the class balked.

When I realized no one else was going to answer the question, I decided I would, but my brain misfired, much to the delight of the students, because instead of the title I meant to say, I said something that was, in the words of my friend Billy G, "the same thing but different."

I told the students Orwell had written Animal House.

It's a good thing classes ended last week.

Who really pays the costs of war:

(A veteran's death, a nation's shame)

A headline from today's local newspaper:

Texting in class may distract college students from learning.

I like the use of the word "may." Gotta leave a little wiggle room, after all.

The U.S. government spends uncounted (because secret) millions of dollars spying on its citizens, whether they are criminals or not, and uncounted millions of dollars spying on bad guys, real or imagined, but all of this information-gathering might is helpless to crack the case of two months of bomb threats at the University of Pittsburgh.

This one is courtesy of my friend bmoritz:

(Long live rock)

I spent the night in front of the television watching my defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins play the Washington Capitals in the opening game of their playoff series. The game was scoreless at the end of regulation time. Sudden death was next. I went into my office to pay a few bills, went back into the TV room when the overtime started, and thought I needed to do something to change the Bruins' luck. So I turned off the lights and moved to the opposite end of the couch. Five seconds after I sat down, the Bruins scored to win the game, 1-0. Coincidence? I don't think so.

I wake up with a song in my head every morning. It's usually something I know and have in my collection, but on days like this, I have long forgotten about the song but frequently have to buy it anyway. This morning's don't-have, gotta-buy selection: "It's Your Thing," by the Isley Brothers. "It's your thing/Do what you wanna do."

Occasionally I feel the need to unplug my brain in front of the television set. Watching a hockey game generally does the trick. My guilty secrets, though, are shows like "Destroyed in Seconds" or "When Vacations Attack"—anything that involves explosions, car wrecks, carnage and chaos.

My wife has different tastes. She watches a lot of HGTV (and I watch a lot of it with her, to tell the truth), figure skating and "Dancing With the Stars." In fact, she's watching the dance show now in the other room. A few minutes ago, I went into the kitchen to grab something to drink, just in time to see a couple dance a tango to Alice Cooper's "School's Out." The band was a vanilla version of Cooper, but still ...

I'm guessing the next contestants will dance a cha-cha to Black Sabbath's "War Pigs."

Yesterday I rode my off-road bicycle a few miles along an abandoned railroad bed. I pedaled north, then back south, riding roughly parallel to one of western New York’s better-known trout streams. The stream meandered along the rail path, sometimes flowing close to it, other times wandering away.

Where the stream ran closest to my path, I noticed the water curving here, rippling there, deeper in some spots, shallower in others. I immediately started to “read” the water, looking for places where I would fish if I still fished for trout.

That’s the key phrase: “if I still fished for trout.” ( Read more... )

"If what's happening now in America had happened in the sixties, we would have protests like you've never seen before. But in 2011, people can name every player on the football team, but they can't tell you how badly they're being taken advantage of and by whom. They know what Gaga's doing, but they don't know what the government's doing. Everyone's on Facebook and Myspace and Yourspace and Theirspace and Twitter and Tweeter. Great, fantastic! But anybody paying attention?

— Lionel Richie, quoted in the April edition of Esquire

For my money, the most obnoxious pitch man in the television commercial universe is Denis Leary in Ford pickup truck commercials.

I have two bicycles: an off-road bike (they used to call them “mountain” bikes) and a sleek road bike. The off-road bike is a bike-tech dinosaur, but it’s as much bike as an out-of-shape 58-year-old guy needs.

I ride it each spring to get my legs back before I begin riding my road bike. The road bike is most assuredly not a dinosaur. If it were a car, it would be a Porsche. It has a carbon-fiber frame, which makes it ridiculously light, and it has 30 speeds to make the most of that lightness. But I need to be in reasonably good riding shape to get the most out of it.

Over the years I have abused the mountain bike. One year I raced it on a soupy trail course, and by the time I hit the finish line, the bike had enough mud stuck to it that it weighed about as much as a Harley-Davidson. These days I ride it along abandoned railroad beds, on dirt roads leading into the hills, and along the river dikes in town. It makes me feel like a little kid again because riding it is so much fun. It’s play. If you’re reading this, chances are you don’t have enough “play” in your life.
( Dirty stuff follows )

What does the "ideal" woman look like? It depends on when you ask the question.

(Is plump pleasing or is thin in?)

June 7, in Buffalo—the best hard rock band I've ever seen in concert, The Cult. These guys fall into that rare category of "see 'em every time they come around." Thanks to Cmac for introducing me to these guys a couple of years ago. The last time The Cult toured, we saw them in Buffalo on a Friday night and then drove to Cleveland to see them the following Monday night—they're that good.

Go here to download a song from their upcoming CD:

http://thecult.us/main/shows/

It is necessary to wait until the boss’s eyes are on you
Then simply put your work aside,
Slip a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter,
And start to write a poem.

Let their eyes boggle at your impudence;
The time for a poem is the moment of assertion,
The moment when you say I exist —
Nobody can buy my time absolutely.

Nobody can buy me even if I say, Yes I sell.
There I am sailing down the river,
Quite happy about the view of the passing towns,
When I find that I have jumped overboard.

There is always a long swim to freedom.
The worst of it is the terrible exhaustion
Alone in the water in the darkness,
The shore a fading memory and the direction lost.
— Edward Field