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.