Month: June 2010

The same old doggerybaw

Today’s Forgotten English is “doggerybaw,” meaning nonsense. I’m just going to toss that one out there without comment.

It was a pretty ordinary day, actually, fairly light on the nonsense. We had a guest speaker at work, at one of our monthly “brown bag lunches,” Drew Levinson formerly of CBS News. He talked about his career and some behind-the-scenes stories about reporting on Jack Kevorkian, Afghanistan and Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina. It was actually really quite interesting…which these lunches are not always guaranteed to be.

Beyond that…well, I started reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, needing a break from the nonfiction kick I seem to have been on recently — and also with an eye to maybe being able to make some kind of informed vote on this year’s Hugo Awards. At Frederik Pohl’s suggestion, I bought a supporting Worldcon membership recently, getting with my fifty bucks not only the right to vote, but also access to this pretty amazing voter packet, with electronic copies of pretty much all of the work nominated this year. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to get through it all by the end of July — of the novels, the only one I’ve already read is China Miéville’s — but so far I’m quite enjoying Bacigalupi’s book.

So it seemed almost like fate when I read today that he (along with Jon Armstrong, whose novel Grey I quite liked, and Scott Westerfeld, of whom I’m a big fan) is going to be doing a reading in New York tomorrow evening. Alas, I think I’m going to skip it. I’m not sure I feel like hanging around in Manhattan for several hours, and trekking all that way downtown, for an hour’s event and some possible autographs. I haven’t exactly made up my mind yet, but I’m leaning towards just coming home after work.

We’ll see what kind of doggerybaw tomorrow brings.

Song of the day

It’s taken me a while, I think, to really become a fan of Tom Waits. As a singer, he can be a little off-putting to the newcomer, and that voice — so famously described as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car” — is definitely an acquired taste.

But the man is easily one of the greatest songwriters I’ve ever come across, and it’s not tough to see why he’s been covered by performers as varied as Tori Amos, Rod Stewart, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and even Scarlett Johansson. I’ll admit, sometimes I do still prefer the covers to the originals, if only to better appreciate the lyrics sometimes hiding underneath the trademark growl. But sometimes there’s just no substitute for the real thing.

Here’s “Hold On” from Mule Variations.

Tom Waits – “Hold On” video from Anti Records on Vimeo.

I don’t know, though. I think you meet plenty of nice girls in coffee shops.

I would gladly pay you Вторник for a hamburger today.

First of all, I just want to start by saying to all my readers that I am not, nor have I ever knowingly been, a Russian spy. I just wanted to make that known.

In other news…it was pretty much just your average Tuesday around these parts. No televisions on the lawn this morning, and nothing much more exciting than a quick birthday celebration for a co-worker — seriously, just a card and some cookies at his cubicle — at the office.

I did finish reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America this evening, the first full book I’ve actually read on my iPad. I liked it, although I think it works best as the story of one woman’s individual experience, with some interesting economic facts, than as an in-depth examination of what it means to be working poor in this country. There’s plenty of food for thought in the book — even if it does hover on the edge of feeling dated, now that it’s almost a decade old — but I found it interesting more as a narrative of a social experiment than anything else.

I did like her closing thoughts:

But now that government has largely withdrawn its “handouts,” now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy’s — well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what outlook makes sense?

Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame — shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.”

Someday, of course — and I will make no predictions as to exactly when — they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better for it in the end.

Song of the day

It’s time for “The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana),” as covered by Liz Phair with Material Issue, off of the 1995 Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits compilation.

I’m a big fan of that album, even when I wasn’t a big fan of the shows the theme songs came from. (I don’t think I had even heard of The Banana Splits Adventure Hour before this.) And this is a wonderfully silly and fun song to kick it off with.