A South of Park, by Trey R. R. Parker

Excerpt from page 846

"Timmy!" said Timmy.

Firewhiskey Recipe 2011 - How to make Firewhiskey

Because the top search term leading people to this site the past month was "firewhiskey recipe," I will gladly reprint an update in a simpler, less wordy fashion, than the recipe from my essay about alcohol in the Harry Potter books:

-Slowly warm up half bottle of scotch on low heat, DO NOT BOIL!
-In a separate small pot, add various spices to about a cup of water (which can be heated to a near boil.) I recommend ample amounts of various hot chili sauces, cayenne pepper, chipotle, turmeric, nutmeg, and anything else in your spice cabinet that may have a kick.
-Mix the pots and poor into shot glasses. (Make sure it's not so hot to burn your mouth when you take the shots!)
-Chase with butterbeer.

In my original version, I used Dave's Insanity Sauce, which is a hot sauce so hot that it needs to be diluted. Since you may not be using this, there might not be any reason to dilute the spices in the cup of water, and if you wish, just add them directly to the whiskey. I'd appreciate feedback in comments!

Note on the spelling: In my original post on firewhiskey & butterbeer recipes, I spelled it "firewhisky." However, most everywhere else on the internet spells it firewhiskey, so I assume they're correct. (Generally, "whisky" is the Irish spelling, and "whiskey" everywhere else.) I don't have the books in front of me to look up how Rowling spells it, but I just noticed, in the Harry Potter Wiki, both spellings are used there for different brands: "Popular brands include Ogden's Old Firewhiskey and Blishen's Firewhisky."
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Special Comment: Salman Rushdie should be more flexible with his grudges

The Daily Beast reported today that Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie criticized Jonathan Stuart Liebowitz for having Steven Demetre Georgiou sing at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last Saturday. (I use their real names, not for political or racial reasons, but for silly reasons.) Jon Stewart had the artist former known as Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam has apparently dropped the 'Islam' because five of the five letters spell 'Islam', and some Europeans & Americans have islamic allergies) sing his beautiful song "Peace Train" before it was interrupted by Stephen Tyrone Colbert ("I will not ride that train") & John Michael "Ozzie" Osborne singing "Crazy Train."

Yusuf, when he was a fresh convert to Islam in the '80s, stupidly said he'd support the fatwa death sentence placed on Rushdie after he published The Satanic Verses. (As a side note, did you know book stores in Berkeley were bombed because they carried that book?) (Also, if you haven't read it, The Satanic Verses is a pretty dense postmodern novel containing many positive Muslim characters, and the scenes inspired by the life of the Prophet are in a feverish dream by a delusional character, not at all a simple direct criticism of Mohammad.) Today's 62-year-old Yusuf is a different man than the enthusiastic convert thirty years ago, and he's become a face of moderate peaceful Islam, and one of the handsomest beards on Earth or beyond. Witness this lovely performance of Peace Train at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring Muhammad Yunus in 2006:

Sir Salman, as someone who still has a fatwa on your ass, you should know better about holding grudges!

Lapidary Verbiage

A summary of this article in the Guardian: Jonathan Franzen publishes yet another Great American Novel. The New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani praised its "visceral and lapidary" prose. Jodi Picoult tweeted "NYT raved about Franzen's new book. Is anyone shocked? ... Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings." This gave everyone some nice controversy to discuss for awhile, and the rest of us can feel slightly guilty every time we're enjoying a modern white male author. What bothered me about Picoult's criticism of the critic wasn't that she herself liked the novel, or that Franzen is a tool, or that she's a novelist using Twitter. It's this follow-up tweet in re Kakutani's use of the word lapidary: "Did you know what [it] meant when you read it in Kakutani's review? I think reviewers just like to look smart."

If you can't use juicy words like 'lapidary' in a New York Times book review, where the hell can you use them? Lapidary, by the way (I looked it up), means "pertaining to gems and precious stones, or the art of working them." So, yes, thank you Ms Picoult for suggesting I look up that gem of a word.

On a related topic, I'm working on a novel about angst & ennui behind the façade of the American middle class family.

Horny Drunk Guys Invent Philosophy (Plato's Symposium)

A classic from the blog Better Book Titles, for Plato's Symposium:

A big welcome to "Refudiate", Sarah Palin's new word in the English Language!

I was just reading at Mediaite.com about Sarah Palin's invention of the word "refudiate" (which she tweeted yesterday afternoon), and the tweetosphere's subsequent mocking embrace of her malapropism.

This was taken down by her people & a correctly spelled one was quickly put up. "Refudiate" was already a big hit tho, & her response is endearingly both self-deprecating & aggrandizing:

She was mocked for comparing herself to Shakespeare. The headline at Mediaite was "Sarah Palin 'Refudiates' Criticism, Declares Self Shakespeare on Twitter". Okay, that's a masterpiece of a headline, but slightly false advertising, because comparing yourself humorously to a great writer is a different bird than Declaring Self. (Somewhat unrelatedly, John Lennon actually said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, but he didn't mean he wanted them to be. He was just making an interesting point that resulted in a lot of Beatles burning parties. When he later sang "they're going to crucify me," he actually was Declaring Self, but again with a wink. Luckily, bardophiles aren't generally into book-burning, and have a subtler appreciation of celebrity metaphor, or there'd be a lot of "Going Rogue" bonfires.)

I want to urge the blogosphere to back off from defending Shakespeare against Palin's comparison! She's absolutely right! And she even makes an important point that Americans especially of all English-speaking nations shouldn't forget. In France, there is a committee that makes sure no foreign words creep into their pure tongue. And they ended up with a very silly language! English has always been mostly the opposite, letting itself evolve naturally, and gladly welcoming slang, foreign words, incorrect foreign words, mistakes, malapropisms, portmanteaus, nonsense, & coinages from all corners. I think that this makes English healthier, more chaotic, more fascinating, and more honest about the nature of language than faux [sic] French puritanism. Palin was also dead-on to compare it to "misunderestimate", because a number of Bushisms were lovingly adopted by a world that hated him & are now used widely even in contexts which contain no reference to Bush. (Another word, "strategery ", was invented by Saturday Night Live in 2000 to parody Bushisms, & not only became a real English word, but was adopted by the Bush administration itself; they had an official Department of Strategery. Stephen Colbert's word "truthiness", coined in 2005, is included in the latest American dictionaries.) .

If you want to read a good book which discusses the debate between keeping English a controlled language versus letting English be an organic language, I recommend Simon Winchester's easy read The Professor & the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. On the losing side of this argument was 18th century Irish author Jonathan Swift, here's an excerpt from his treatise "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue".

There is another Sett of Men who have contributed very much to the spoiling of the English Tongue; I mean the Poets, from the Time of the Restoration. These Gentlemen, although they could not be insensible how much our Language was already overstocked with Monosyllables; yet, to same Time and Pains, introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses; and this they have frequently done, so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure: They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid. This was a Pretence to take up the same Custom in Prose; so that most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations. Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.

That is right, under Swift's proposals, we would not or should not be allowed to contract or abbreviate words, lest English be difficult to utter. It cannot be! Swift also had grievances about many 'slang' words entering the language, like "banter" & "mob", which he accused of being "invented by some pretty Fellows" & "now struggling for the Vogue." Heaven forfend! Since the beginning of time, every generation has groaned about newfangled words becoming trendy. The word "lengthy", for instance, was once thought to be a horrible American abomination.

I think the archtype for an American nonsense word becoming common in languages around the world, is "okay." The etymology of "okay" is shrouded in academic controversy, probably because some academics have trouble accepting that it could have originated in a dumb joke. To sum it up, incorrect acronyms were popular jokes in New England newspapers in the 1830s, and "O.K." (meaning 'All Correct') came to being during the presidential campaign between Andrew Jackson (who was supposedly a bad speller) and Martin van Buren (who maybe tried to re-define the acronym to stand for his nickname, Old Kinderhook.) According to the wikipedia, "The country-wide publicity surrounding the election appears to have been a critical event in okay's history, widely and suddenly popularizing it across the United States." But there you go, political humor leading to the creation of a word that's now ubiquitous all over the world. It's alternately been attributed to Greek origin, Native American (Choctaw), & African slaves, each of which is a more tidy & rational explanation, but language isn't tidy or rational.

Anyway, the speed with which trendy words or political jokes can become language has increased with the internet, so that Sarah Palin can coin a word on Sunday & I can write an essay defending it on Monday. Welcome to the English language "refudiate", whatever the fuck it means.

(PS, to prove it wasn't a typo, and actually a word that Sarah Palin thought existed, here's the archive video of her actually saying it earlier this year.)

From the Lewis Carroll Blog:"Happy Snark Day"

From the blog at www.lewiscarroll.org:

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Thanks to Mahendra Singh for reminding us that 136 years ago today Lewis Carroll began his composition of The Hunting of the Snark, "and thus, in a semiotic and hypermetaphysical manner, began decomposing the non-existence of The Hunting of the Snark." Read more at his excellent blog.

In celebration of Snark Day, here is the full text the first edition, published by Macmillan and Co. in 1876.



In lieu of a rendition of "Happy Birthday To You," we suggest listening to Billy Connolly as the Bellman in the 1987 April Fool's Day performance of Mike Batt's Snark musical. When the musical was originally released as a concept album in 1986, the part of the Bellman was sung by Cliff Richard, possibly the only time Billy Connolly and Cliff Richard have proved substitutable in popular culture.



Finally, Mr. Singh (an LCSNA member and Knight Letter editor) is publishing his own beautiful Snark illustrations, coming out November 2nd, 2010, from Melville House, and it's already available for pre-order on Amazon.com here. Only $10.08! (Don't be fooled by Amazon's "look inside," it links to another edition.) Previews of many of Singh's illustrations can be seen on his blog, and I've reprinted one below.

Art: This man has illustrated every page of Gravity's Rainbow

Speaking of quixotic Pynchon projects, this artist Zak Smith has created an illustration for every page of Gravity's Rainbow. (That's a dense, difficult 760 page postmodern novel, often displayed unread on college dorm room book shelves.) Here's Mr Smith's writer's statement:

So I illustrated Gravity's Rainbow-- nobody asked me to, but I did it anyway. Most of the pictures are drawings-- ink on whatever paper was lying around, but there are also paintings (acrylic), photos I took, and experimental photographic processes. I tried to illustrate the passages as literally as possible-- if the book says there was a green Spitfire, I drew a green Spitfire. Mostly, I tried to make a series of pictures as dense, intricate, and rich as the prose in the book. The entire project was shown in the Whitney Museum's 2004 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art and is now in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The index for the illustrations is here. For instance, page 666 is called "a chess bishop if you have seen him, running across the wet meadows in very early morning, with his red vestments furling and fluttering .a barbecue...got married...the lights failed...electrical tidal wave...a ceilingful of sooty, sterile eggs...lightning bolts...a whispering silhouette...homosexual prison-camp inmates."

The Cover of Jonathan Safran Foer's book "Eating Animals"

I accidentally bought a new hardcover copy of this book while attempting to Christmas shop for other people. It's a beautifully written book about vegetarianism, but sadly, I have to report, I don't think he's doing a very good job of including non-vegetarians within its ideal audience. Still, he's one lovely author, & it's lovely just to be curling up in the sun beneath my Christmas tree reading his words (Jonathan Safran Foer hasn't published anything since 2005's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, one of my favorite books.) And isn't the cover art kind of Christmasy?

Book Review: The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) by Brian Selznick

I love this children's book that my nieces were reading, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It's 500 pages, hundreds of which are luscious black & white pencil drawings, meant to imitate the feel of early silent film. Many of the drawings are very abstract - there's some which are just curtains, or just a movie projector light, or just blackness. It has a sophisticated premise with dark themes, intricate metaphors, European angst, ennui & frustration. But it always flows with intrigue & wonder appropriate for its age-group: my eight-year-old nieces were already re-reading it for the second time, having read ahead of their class. And their uncle snatched it away & spent most of Thanksgiving weekend reading it antisocially in the corner.

Here's an interview with the author where you can see some of the illustrations, & an explanation of the premise:

(I un-embedded that video, because it played automatically, but it's here: http://www.expandedbooks.com/video/view/150 -spoiler alert.)

Also, the book's website, with more links, is here: www.theinventionofhugocabret.com

Clever Gyuro with Clever Friends

I was reading this story by the great Bulgarian writer Elin Pelin. Because it's written in a certain dated conversational style (I think. Help Bulgarians?) I was having some trouble on a few points. So I decided to plug it into Google Translate. I am now more confused:

Stravnitsa bear appeared, and the girls in wells izpoyala, outbreaks of grandmothers, the elders in the taverns, the children in the streets. Nobody is not hired to kill the bear, the village from evil to escape.

Hired to be clever Gyuro mighty smart. Gyuro led them in forest green on varhishta and valleys, led them, swore them - to bear captured, alive or dead in the village to bring.

Gone, wandering, falls, becoming - Mechata hole reached.

Delighted to be clever Gyuro mighty smart.

- Hey you you, metsano Todor - shouted Gyuro - come to dine!

Bear Zarena stravnitsa hole in condensers. Rhubarb and does not go.

- Wait, I'll teach you! - Smart Gyuro cried also, and said to his comrades smart: - Tie me around the waist with a strong rope, pa me out the sword hole, bears live stravnitsa ear to download.

Heroes tied smart and clever Gyuro hole he placed the sword.

Nutty metsana Todora clever head and Gyuro Zarena.

- Oh, catch it! Here, Gyuro! - Smart and cried zadarpali rope.

They pulled outward, pulling the bear inside. Bear pulling inward, outward, they pull!

At one time - just to see! Made use clever Gyuro headless ...

Chudom wonder smart heroes.

- Well, de Gyuro his head?

- But you know he had a head?

- I think he had.

- Pa. I think it would.

- There.

- None.

Broil smart heroes and can not decide - I had a clever head Gyuro or not! And they went to ask the bride Gyurovitsa. Knocked, knocked on the door:

- Come, come, wife Gyurovitse, tell us - I had Gyuro head or not!

Gyurovitsa bride gone, scratched out thought, PA said:

- I know!

- Ka-would not you know? Think! ...

- Well, you know ... For Easter Gyuro buy their cap, and had to have head.

From the Lewis Carroll blog: "The Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil all over this series of tubes"

As you might already know, I've been blogging for the Lewis Carroll Society of North America at lcsna.blogspot.com--, an extension of the "From our Far Flung Correspondents" section of Knight Letter, the society's magazine, which Mrs Eley & myself have been hired on to help edit. I would like to occasionally re-post some of the Lewis Carroll blogging over here on itwaslost.org, if that's alright with you, it's alright with me, as these two websites get different traffic. And this one should interest our lovely seguidores brasileiros:

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Attention Portuguese-speaking Lewis Carroll readers! The Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil has several colorful blogs and websites with a bottomless rabbithole of books, links, art, tudo Alice. Look at all of these edições Brasileiras de Alice no país das Maravilha listed on the dizzying alicenations.blogspot.com. (The groovy cover to the left is from a 1974 edition with ilustrações by Brazilian artist Oswaldo Storni.)

Their second blog, for "deeper research with more articles and images", is at brasillewiscarroll.blogspot.com. This one is also expansive, and both sites have some English (always demarcated by stylish italic pink text). I've long been a fan of reading websites in translation using the various cyborg cyberspace interpreters at our disposal, and the Sociedade has provided an occasional easy link to do so. For instance, if you desired to read Myriam Ávila's Alice e Macunaíma, you could feed it thru Google Translate like so. This occasionally creates interesting sentences like: "Such people, the girl significantly calls 'obnoxious' (meaning 'antipodal'), are Anglophones, even though they walk 'upside down'." (Both websites, unfortunately, include all or most of their posts on their homepage, so they can take a long time to load on slower computers.) There is also an impressive cache of art and illustrations on these two blogs, like the large one that I'm putting at the foot of this post, which comes with the following pink italicized explanation:

Marina Peliano once was my little sister. But she ate any strange cookie and so suddenly she grew turning trapeze artist, sweet maker and art student, artist growing too. I asked her to do some drawings inspired on Alice and she followed the adventure. I found really beautiful her Alices who look like her. I remember now the letter of the writer Paulo Mendes Campos to his daughter when she was fifteen: "This book is crazy. The meaning is in you."

From the Lewis Carroll Society Blog: Portmanteaus on This American Life

Mrs Eley & I are slowly starting our new gig as editors for one of the sections at the Knight Letter, the magazine from the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. I'll also be blogging for them at lcsna.blogspot.com. Here's a re-print of my inaugural post over there:

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Lewis Carroll was not mentioned by name, nor was the word 'portmanteau' ever dropped, but Humpty Dumpty's spirit lurked around the September 13th, 2009, episode of This American Life (#389 Frenemies). Starting at 29:45 in the episode, Ira Glass interviews lexicographer Erin McKean, whom he had asked to research the word 'frenemy'. She found the first attempted coinage by gossip columnist Walter Winchell in 1953, who wrote "how's about calling the Russians our 'frenemies'?", although the word didn't really take off till decades later.

Their conversation, transcribed, starting at 32:00 in the episode:

Glass: Wait, are there other words like this, where they sound alike, and then they get smashed together into one word?
McKean: Oh, it happens, like, all the time. I mean, think, there's, like 'guesstimate', right? And that's from 1936.
Glass: Do you have another one?
McKean: I love this one, and people say this one all the time with a little thrill of thinking they're the first person ever to say it: You know, that someone is entering their 'anecdotage.'
Glass: I've never heard that. So you get old, and then you start telling your anecdotes, and that's it?
McKean: Right, and I think the central part, is that you start telling the same anecdotes over and over again.
Glass: Right. You got another one?
McKean: Lots of people think that they are the first person to create the word 'linner'.
Glass: Linner?
McKean: Linner is that meal you must have between lunch and dinner.
Glass: That just makes me feel mad at somebody, hearing that...

(They go on to discuss the word 'slanguage' and lexical gaps.) The lexicographer and the radio host condescend a bit to these enthusiastic amateur wordsmiths, but they're far from being the first people to think they've coined a clever portmanteau. Mark Burstein quotes from James Atherton's The Books at the Wake, when he discusses the creation and later development of word-smashing techniques from Carroll to Finnegans Wake:

It must have astonished [James] Joyce, that avant-garde innovator, proud of his Irish nationality, contemptuous of the Church of England, and confident of his own originality, to find that he had been forestalled in so many of his discoveries by a mid-Victorian Englishman in minor Anglican orders.

Of course, Humpty Dumpty doesn't claim to have invented the practice, nor any of the portmanteaus of which he is the master. And back to Ira Glass, it's a shame they didn't get into the history of "smashing together" words, but it's interesting to learn that part of a lexicographer's job is to let people down when they learn they didn't invent words like 'anecdotage'.

-originally posted here.

About the new Emoji Dick (Melville's Moby Dick; or, The Whale, told in Emoticon Images)

At least the creator of Emoji Dick has noble intentions:

I’m interested in the phenomenon of how our language, communications, and culture are influenced by digital technology. Emoji are either a low point or a high point in that story, so I felt I could confront a lot of our shared anxieties about the future of human expression (see: Twitter or text messages) by forcing a great work of literature through such a strange new filter.

First, I needed a public domain book that I could get the plain-text version of easily. The Bible seemed too obvious. I then wanted something very large and long, so that I could demonstrate the scale possible with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Moby-Dick seemed to fit those criteria, so I just went for it, and assigned the first couple chapters as a test run. The results were fantastic. I then realized that the story behind Moby-Dick is about this huge, seemingly insurmountable challenge, told using metaphors and stylized language, and in a way, that’s what translating a book into emoji is—a weird, huge challenge told in metaphors and stylized language.

--From The New Yorker's Book Bench Blog interview with Eyebeam's Fred Benenson

From All Forgotten: Tolstoy's Brain

From Mr Quill's All Forgotten Blog:

For those of you who were bored reading Tolstoy's ramblings in War & Peace, perhaps this will help you appreciate just how crazy one can go thinking too much. I'm sure we've all had such conversations with ourselves in various states of sobriety.

Three Years Ago: Essay on Distance

Our continuing series, a yearlong celebration of the three-year anniversary of this blog, we reprint what I wrote exactly three years ago, to the minute. This essay is interesting because I still feel similarly; & I've made drinking friends in Berkeley, some of which are the Brooklyn friends who slowly realized I was on to something by moving to Berkeley.

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After college, many of my friends settled in Brooklyn, the only place in America I have no interest in living. I went away to one boarding school for four years & one college for four years (including one year abroad in England). Relationships are, of course, measured in both time & space. During my eight years of education, I developed many close friendships, all of which were displaced every spring. Few people, when they are deciding where to go after school, would take into much consideration where their friends will be moving. Ambitions, art scenes, employment opportunities, desire for travel, love – these preside over keeping “the gang” together. Drinking companions are best found around the corner, anyway, & are easily replaced. Still, some friendships are more mystical, inspiring, collaborative.

Look what happens to the average “long-distance relationship.” Either the couple is together, then moves to separate locations, & there is a gradual idealization & growing apart, resulting in catastrophe; or, they move apart, & then move back together after a time, & the gradual idealization & growing apart results in an awkward period of disillusionment. This is an extremely generalized over-simplification: some long-distance relationships have ended in the happiest marriages. What about friendships in the age of e-mail, cellphones, & MySpace? Perhaps, because there is no pressure for ceaseless love & daily communication, one can make these connections in college, for instance, & continue to receive the mystical collaborative elements thru e-mail, whilst receiving his drinking-companion needs around the corner (if around the corner offers no conversations about Bartók or Thomas de Quincey.)

My high school & college friends have settled in a startling plethora of locals – New York, London, Liverpool, India, Hainan, Alabama, Massachusetts, L.A., Brazil, & even Texas. I was saddened that few of my close friends visited me when I was living in Tahoe, a place I wanted to show off, but who can blame them with travel so inefficient & expensive. I've moved to the bay area to increase the feeling of community, & already surprising people have visited & plan to visit. I'm not having much luck establishing regular drinking companions, tho, but that comes with patience & employment.

The book I am reading is by William McDonough & Michael Braungart, a chemist & an architect who propose redesigning how things are made. Valuable technical materials & chemicals are regularly mixed with natural materials, & disposed in land fills where both are useless. They suggest that everything can be made to be infinitely recyclable or immediately biodegradable, separating the biosphere from the “technosphere”. Newspapers, for instance, are made from recycling things things that were not meant to be recycled, & are printed on with toxic inks, & bleached with more chemicals, & are useless after one or two cycles – everything is always “downcycled.” This book, Cradle to Cradle, is not made out of a tree, but of high quality plastics & safe inks. It is extremely durable & waterproof; but when it is thrown “away”, it can be washed & melted to create another equally high quality book. They suggest that current methods of recycling are merely “less bad”, & often placate the liberal masses with righteousness; however, it is possible to a create a system that is “good.” Slowing down the current destructive industrial system could actually be worse in the long run; & preaching “efficiency” & being conservative with resources just pisses off capitalists obsessed with growth. It pits environmentalists against industry. In nature however, growth is good. (Their example is of a cherry tree, whose excess blossoms & fruit are not “waste” but nourishing & beautiful.)

I just got to a part where they suggest that all sustainability is local. Diversity, adaptability, culture, dialect: these are successful reactions to location for both nature & human society. And this Earth offers an almost infinite variety of locations, all of which life has adapted to inhabit. Sustainable local systems nourish your community, & add up to a fully nourished macrocosm. Liberals often point out that Super-Walmarts in sprawled suburban areas hurt every aspect of society: “Main Street” culture, the local economy, the quality of your neighbor's jobs, lack of support for local agriculture, the quality & ethics of distant agriculture, the amount of fossil fuels burned to transport the products, all the unnecessary packaging waste, and the list goes on. I would never imply that long distance friendships are the Walmarts of Modern America. But, your average white post-college American liberal tends to be semi-nomadic, befriending people everywhere, & settling in a baffling array of places. I would like to see a statistic for how many settled where they grew up. Conservative Midwesterners, as a stereotype, are much more family & hometown oriented.

Plato often evokes love for God by discussing love between humans, & mystics use the language of the natural world to describe the subtle heavens. Human connections – a web of nourishment, waste, & sustainability – can perhaps be understood with a model of community, agriculture, energy flows, and Walmarts. Or, more likely, they are a synecdoche (an inclusive metaphor, a metaphor which is included in what it stands for.) Friendship & love are as much a part of a balanced, healthy society as the politics, food cycles, architecture, & everything else. Indeed, this spiritual interconnection can be seen as the soul to a town's body. The Electoral College in a huge county deprives local communities of an actual democracy (in California, for instance, I know we'll get the democratic presidential vote, so there's no reason to campaign or canvass or even argue with my neighbor.) Could the combination of cheap travel, easy relocation, the Internet, and sprawl add up to a modern civilization where friendships are like the disposable diapers that fill up our landfills?

Department of Beards: John Steinbeck's Peacock Beard

On the famous mug of American author John Steinbeck we usually picture a thin private-eye mustache. But I've been reading his later non-fiction Travels with Charley, & in a section where he is describing his camping costume ("utilitarian if a bit bizarre"), he has a fine paragraph in praise of beard:

My face has not ignored the passage of time, but recorded it with scars, lines, furrows, & erosions. I wear a beard & mustache but shave my cheeks; said beard, having a dark skunk stripe up the middle & white edges, commemorates certain relatives. I cultivate this beard not for the usual given reasons of skin trouble or pain of shaving, nor for the secret purpose of covering a weak chin, but as pure unblushing decoration, much as a peacock finds pleasure in his tail. And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

It's a little hard to find photos of Steinbeck's beard. For such a public figure, why is it so hard to find pictures of his bearded phase - is the anti-beard establishment deliberately repressing them? Here's one of Steinbeck lurking behind his son, John Steinbeck IV, a journalist in Vietnam, meeting President Johnson:


Charley is also a fine hairy man. We think of manly Steinbeck, roughing it around the continental United States with his camper & his dog, an American archetype. But Charley is not only a poodle, but a large black French Poodle born & raised in France. (His nationality especially shows in his skill with romance.) With his peacock beard & his French poodle, there's a nice redefinition of American masculinity.

This huge ambergris that she found on the beach fifty years ago...

Pele's new twitter name is anbargris, & I recalled this picture of a humongous piece of ambergris that an old lady found on the beach in New York. From the Times in December 2006:

In this season of strange presents from relatives, Dorothy Ferreira got a doozy the other day from her 82-year-old sister in Waterloo, Iowa. It was ugly. It weighed four pounds. There was no receipt in the box.

Inside she found what looked like a gnarled, funky candle but could actually be a huge hunk of petrified whale vomit worth as much as $18,000.

“I called my sister and asked her, ‘What the heck did you send me?’ ” recalled Ms. Ferreira, 67, who has lived here on the eastern tip of Long Island since 1982. “She said: ‘I don’t know, but I found it on the beach in Montauk 50 years ago and just kept it around. You’re the one who lives by the ocean; ask someone out there what it is.’ ”

-"Please Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk", by Corey Kilgannon, New York Times, December 18th, 2006

The chapter on ambergris in Herman Melville's Moby Dick; or, The Whale is here.

Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in blasting rocks. [...]

Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.

Firewhisky Recipe! Butterbeer Recipe!

The movie Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince has gotten teenage drinking in the news. And it's true, after they point it out, there is a bunch of booze in the sixth movie. In the earlier books, there was always a bit of ambiguity about butterbeer, it was not really clear if it was even alcoholic. By the later books, it's more implied that it does definitely loosen the students up. And another drink appears in the later books called firewhisky, & I recall there being a funny scene when they go to The Hog's Head, the sketchier pub in Hogsmeade. Ron is excited that they might serve him firewhisky, but Hermione shoots him down. At some point, in the last book, doesn't Harry actually drink a shot? They're toasting the memory of a fallen member of the Order of the Phoenix, & I think she describes the burning feeling you get when you first sip whiskey.

Okay, prepare yourself, because these quotes from the New York Times might make you more nauseous than a butterbeer firewhiskey carbomb:

Hermione is tipsy. Neville is serving drinks. Ron is sipping mead and Harry is partying with his professors.

Does Hogwarts have a drinking problem?

This article pretends to present the issue unbiasedly, but the concerned parents they quote are definitely weighed heavier. And by taking the drinking out of their context in the school & the other potions & spells, it might make it more alarming to paranoid parents that Hogwarts is a bad influence.

Liz Perle, a mother of two teenage boys and the editor in chief of Common Sense Media, which reviews books, movies and Web content aimed at children, said she was bothered by so many scenes showing alcohol as a coping mechanism.

“Hermione is such a tightly wound young lady, but she’s liberated by some butterbeer,” she said. “The message is that it gives you liquid courage to put your arms around the guy you really like but are afraid to.”

Seriously, Liz Perle!? Come on! This article actually transitions from the quotes of concerned parents to newsy pseudo-science like: "Even accounting for variables like friends’ drinking habits, the researchers found that children with high exposure to alcohol in movies were nearly three times as likely to binge-drink as those with the lowest exposure."

In Harry Potter, after Harry has been attacked by a dementor, Professor Lupin gives him chocolate to restore him, not exactly advanced magic. All thru-out the books, Rowling understands that there are simpler magics & emotional forces more powerful than some of her sillier spells. What exactly is a potion but a brewed beverage with transformative properties? Alternately, when Ron is recovering from a strong potion, Professor Slughorn gives him a shot of mead which turns out to be laced with a powerful poison - not exactly the positive metaphor for drinking that parents fear. And there's of course two much more potent beverages in the Half-Blood Prince book - love potion & felix felicis (liquid luck). None of this fictional magic is far-fetched from what any teenager or adult has experienced from well-timed libations.

My friend Jenny Ruth came up with a simple recipe for butterbeer, but it involves a beer you can only get in Western America - New Belgium's 1554 Black Ale from Fort Collins, Colorado. Just add a dash of butterscotch schnapps to the top of a mug & it's extremely delicious & tastes exactly like I imagined in the books. The Black Ale is an old Belgian recipe - neither porter nor stout, but a very dark mild ale - and I'm sure the butterscotch will taste fine on top of any mild, dark ale; or any dark beer that's not hoppy.

I'd like to note that the other recipes for butterbeer on the internet sound DISGUSTING. One involves melting butter into cream soda & butterscotch-flavored syrup. And other variants on that. I guarantee these will have no magical properties except in the WC. Please drink butterbeer with real beer, and for the sake of American Society, have a mug with your 16-year-old friends & neighbors, especially when they are dealing with real 21st Century problems or celebrating something worth celebrating. They might need some liquid luck.

When we made firewhisky a few years ago, I used one of the most powerful hot sauces on the market, Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce. It's not a hot sauce you can just splash on your food, it has to be heavily diluted for any recipe. I boiled a small pot of water & basically added every spice in the spice cabinet, some fresh herbs, & some of this terrifying Dave's sauce. Then I slowly heated some bourbon in a separate pan (the Half-Blood Prince warns not to boil alcohol lest it become impotent). Then mix them when they're hot, gird up your loins, & take a shot. In retrospect, it makes more sense to use scotch or Irish whiskey, & I'm sure this recipe can be finer tuned or made with any variety of potent spices or chili sauces. But I do recommend the hitting-it-with-everything strategy & serving it very hot. Other recipes on the internet have ways to ignite the shot, but this seems cheesy & unnecessary, & Rowling does not mention the firewhisky actually being on fire. Don't be so literal! The fire's supposed to be in your belly & soul.

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The Interrobang & The Irony Mark & Mr Lincoln's Emoticon

I asked my brother why he had changed his facebook name to "Lee ‽ Welsch". He said, it's an interrobang - a combination question mark & exclamation point. Here's the wikipedia on the history of the interrobang:

American Martin K. Speckter invented the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark. He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks. Speckter solicited possible names for the new character from readers. Contenders included rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest, but he settled on interrobang. He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: interrogatio is Latin for "a rhetorical question" or "cross-examination"; bang is printers' slang for the exclamation point. Graphic treatments for the new mark were also submitted in response to the article.

I'm against it! Interrobang sets brother against brother. And besides being ugly, it's not like it's difficult to write "!?" or better "!!!?!??!?!?!?". And as for Martin Speckter inventing the interrobang & coining such a silly portmanteaux, well done old man. I'm impressed that it's made it's way into unicode for many modern typefaces, U+203D, & html language as &#8253 or &#x203D, which is why I've posted today using Calibri font.

I far prefer the irony mark (unicode U+2E2E), "point d’ironie; also called a snark or zing", which is about as necessary as a Duchamp artist statement:

This mark ؟ was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt) at the end of the 19th century. It was in turn taken by Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l’Oiseau (1966), in which the author proposes several other innovative punctuation marks, such as the doubt point () certitude point (), acclamation point (), authority point (), indignation point (), and love point ().

Its form is essentially the same as the late medieval , a percontation point (punctus percontativus), which was used to mark rhetorical questions.

Serious, Bazin, a doubt point & an indignation point‽ I find myself torn between their silly conceit & their irresistible stylish good looks. I'm also impressed that Bazin's love point is a combination question & irony. And how does one indicate that one is using the irony point ironically? We wouldn't want our readers to miss anything. I'd like to commission a few more, if anyone (Lee, Grainne, Olaf, Pele?) would like to design them - & we have succeeded only when there is standard unicode, html, & a unique wikipedia entry - even if the square-arse publishing world will never accept them into the mainstream. I propose:

-Patriotism mark

-Outgribation point

-Incantation point

-Galvanic mark

-Bloviation point

-& for sentences which are neither full-stopped nor ongoing, we propose the quasi-stop.

In related news, there is evidence that Abraham Lincoln, a bearded president, invented the emoticon. In the transcript of an 1862 speech is the first discovered use of a semi-colon next to a parenthesis to indicate a winking smiley-face. So, not actually Lincoln, but whoever was typing up his speech, like the Fourth Earl of Sandwich's chef. Still, it is not incorrect to say that the first emoticon was a caricature of Lincoln's smile & wink