Tiny Money Land

IT'S SHAKE AND BREAK, AND I HELPED!: Most of you know about Project Gutenberg, the home of (mostly) copyright free e-texts, and a few of you might have heard of the Distributed Proofers arm, which takes the OCR scans and lets hundreds of volunteer proofers check them for errors. This weekend I joined in, in a small way, to help push them over the edge of a monthly record, because last night they reached a record 200,000 proofed pages for November. Anything after this is just gravy...

And for those of you who think it's mostly stuff from before 1922...well, you're mostly right, but they're getting the Warren Commission Report through, so there's fun aplenty to be had...

AND FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO WERE WONDERING: Thanksgiving this year was turkey, ham, two casseroles (green bean and squash), oyster dressing and plain, devilled eggs (I didn't partake), yams (ditto), a few other side dishes that I can't remember right now, crescent rolls, and a bit of spinach dip with Triscuits for an appetizer.

For you jackasses out there, we only ate for an hour that day. No ambulances were on standby, and no stomach pumps or liposuction machines were positioned at the table.  

JFK: Where was I when Kennedy was shot? Well, not born yet...but there's a special real-time stream running today from the original monitor tapes of KLIF Dallas from one of the worst days of modern history. If you miss it, the fateful hour is part of the regular Reel Radio on-demand streams.  

WORST CASE SCENARIO: Here's a paranoid fantasy that came to me in chat a few nights ago about why they chose this moment to collar Jacko and how it "coincidentally" pushed the anti-Bush protestors in England off the front page. The scene is a month or so ago, when Bush the Younger swung through California to meet governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger on his way to a mystery tour of Asia. Arnold has just cracked a beer, since "milk is for babies", and from the way the president is wringing his hands, it's obvious that something's on his mind. Finally, he speaks.

Dubya: "I hear they're gonna take down Jacko..."

Arnold: "Maybe."

Dubya: "Can you put a hold on it until I say the word? I might need a distraction if somebody starts a massive protest against me."

Arnold (does a cartoony double take, then strokes his chin, sounding remarkably like a Robert Smigel impersonation): THAT MIGHT BE CRAZY ENOUGH TO WORK!

Bush and Arnold share an evil laugh, then Arnold gets the Cuban cigars out of the humidor.

Of course, there's always somebody to knock you off your game, and Max (oooooo, Mister FREELANCE) pointed out two important things (if you can call ANY of it important, of course): that my scenario would work better with Rumsfeld or Cheney as the administration's point man instead of Dubya, and that the real conversation was something along the lines of "Remember when you killed the robot in Terminator 2? That was cool." And dammit, I have to agree. I guess that's why he's the freelancer and I'm writing for free...  

THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART: I haven't been watching the MSNBC coverage of the "breaking Michael Jackson story" because it's news; you should know me well enough by now that I don't consider most celebrity cattle business "news" except in extreme cases. I make no excuses for myself...I was rubbernecking at a disaster in the making.

It's always amusing to see the news channels try to make a static longshot of something that isn't moving seem more interesting than it is. The second false alarm (I missed the first one, dang it) was interesting to see, hearing the on-air talent vamp for time, prattling nonstop about what we were seeing would be if it was actually Jacko. Then the real Jacko jet parked halfway into the hanger (because they were obviously watching the coverage, too), and we were treated to yet another camera shot of nothing going on, followed by a caravan, which everybody at the desk was paranoid enough to think might have been a decoy until the Jackson team unpiled at the police station.

(Sidebar: Before I fired up the browser, a woman from Court TV said that Jacko shouldn't be insisting on special treatment, and be walking around in his "regular clothes" like a run-of-the-mill criminal. The only proper response: You mean to tell me Michael Jackson HAS regular clothes?)

Which brings us to 3:29PM: An intensely grainy digital zoom on a still from the video of Jackson entering the Santa Barbara Police station. The zoom is on his hands, close together and behind his back, and the reporters are speculating as to whether they handcuffed him or not. At least three minutes of this journalistic masturbation was my limit. Time for cartoons to clear my head.  

THE VAGRANCY OF MEMORY: For those of you just joining us on the trivia train...



Yeah, I know...GAH, A PICTURE, but the crux of it is that I scored 122 points. Considering that my listening habits in the 80s leaned towards album rock and British Invasion (coughcoughBEATLEScough), it's a startingly high score. I mentioned in a message board post how every time I say I have a bad memory, something like this comes along to remind me that I have a great memory, it's just not geared in the right direction. Instead of higher math and my mother's birthday, things which would actually come in handy, my brain box yields up endless song lyrics and REM interviews.

When I think of the bent magic of the mind, I think of Marcel Proust. He's a guy that more people have read about more often than they've actually read. Rememberance of Things Past is definitely on my list, although as long as it is, it'd take quite a while from start to finish, but Proust the man is fascinating, too. As a man coming from money, he never had to work a day in his life, and circulated around the Parisian intelligensia most of the time. Health conditions forced him into a cork lined, vapor filled room, where he spent most of his later life. In these conditions, he hammered out his formidable six volume work on the nature of time and rememberance.

What the hell does this have to do with a goofy trivia quiz? Proust believed that since we were constantly reliving the past in our heads, comparing it with what is in front of us now and coloring our perceptions, that the only way to truly understand a moment is a complete evocation of the past. Only then can we even begin to approximate any moment in time. This isn't as hard as it would appear for those of us who lived in any part of the last half of the 20th century, since thanks to endless recycling, we're never allowed to forget anything like the taste of a Twinkie, the smoothness of the filling as it compares to the grainy texture of the less popular knockoffs, the sponginess of the mouth feel. Likewise, with very little prompting, you can probably remember every lyric of the Eagles' "Hotel California", since the classic rock station you hear it on every day hasn't changed a single song on their playlist since 1988. Of course, that triggers memories of drinking parties in high school, the girl you were with, and so on. When the radio gets people into that state, it's easier to sell you water park passes and herbal Viagra replacements. Get you weak, then knock your pins out; it's marketing at its most brutally effective.

Okay, out of the ramble, back into the bramble... If Proust had come of age in the 1980s, his books would be filled with run-on sentences about the colors of his cousin's leg warmers that last three pages. Either that, or instead of traditional publishing, he'd be writing the most heartbreakingly intricate blog on the face of the earth. Most likely, everybody would be ragging him out as an "emo fag", which, looking at his bio again, would be at least half right.

(Oh yeah, I blame Scott Keith for pointing the quiz out...of course, I got more mileage out of it than he did...)  

ERRATA: On Sunday, I mentioned there were only two novels that I finished for English class in high school. My memory being what it was, I had completely forgotten about Of Mice And Men, which gave me some rich material about one football player keeping a "soft hand" for his woman. Sorry, Mrs. Yow, didn't mean to let you down.

Don't let this give the impression that I wasn't a reader in high school; I just chose my own fights. Kurt Vonnegut was a favorite at the time, and I've already told some of you the story about how I got bogged down in Atlas Shrugged one summer for a fair-haired lass before junior year. When worse came to worst, there was always Douglas Adams and Rolling Stone before it really, really started sucking. So there ya go.  

WATCH THIS SPACE: This is one of those days I feel like writing just for its own sake, but I don't think I have anything in particular in mind. I've still got a book on the burner, but of course I don't talk about books I haven't finished because that might jinx whatever forward momentum I've got going. I'd talk about music (which I just realized I very rarely do on here) if I was actually listening to something at the moment. Haven't cracked the paper yet. The junk mail wasn't too inspiring today...the fake Capital One card packed with another application reminded me of how they used to send unsolicited pre-approved credit cards in the junk instead of "pre-approved applications", so all you had to do is sign the card, take it to the mall, and wreck your credit rating. It was something the postal authorities cracked down on way back in the day, and it stuck with me all these years, but as you can see, I've finished with it in under two sentences, so I'm stuck again.

Oooooo, a paragraph. And now two. Anyway, they say the best way to be a writer is to write, and the way I figure it, I'll have gotten all this drivel out of my system so I can move on to something else later today, or tomorrow.

I have an itch to say "this all reminds me of something that happened one time (at work/at school/at the mall/while I was chopping up a drifter)", but the only thing this reminds me of was the last time I started typing just to fill space. As I remember, it didn't end so much as it just stopped, so while this isn't a proper ending by any means, it looks like as good a place to stop as any.  

JUST FINISHED: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This was a revisiting of a novel that I was supposed to have read end-to-end in high school and chickened out on the commitment. I think out of all of them, I managed to slog through at least On the Beach by Neville Shute and Orwell's Animal Farm (although in junior high, and of my own free will). The rest of them I leaned into with all the hopefulness of somebody doing the right thing, but conked out after about 20 pages or so. To add insult to injury, when we were tested for On The Beach, the kids who only skimmed the book for the answers to the study questions got higher marks on the final test than I did. I remember being prouder of that mark at the time, since I earned it was a certain amount of honesty; they thought I was out of my mind, and looking back, I can't say I blame them.

Hopefully, you can see I'm fighting years of knee-jerk conditioning to finish any of these books at all. I'm still looking at that 1150 page copy of Tale of of the Genii which was one of my QPB membership selections with a bit of trepedation. Over the past few years, though, I've been warming up to Mark Twain. His cynical view of the world, moreso as he got older, gets more and more appealing all the time. Do a web search for "The War Prayer" if you really need proof.

Everybody knows the outline of this story, about how runaway Huck and escaped slave Jim hit the river on a raft and, in the process, develop a fast friendship. There are a few less friendly things you probably already know about this work, mainly that Twain has Huck drop the "N-bomb" at least 211 times in the course of the story. That's a whole essay in itself, but kids talk like the people closest to them--family, other adults, friends--and if that's the word a kid was raised on, it's dishonest to represent his world any other way. Having said that, I still wouldn't put the original version of this book in kids' hands until they had a better idea of the world they live in. With some of the current crop, that means they'll be denied for quite some time, but it's probably for the best. I also have to agree with the folks who say the "evasion" section is a bit of a letdown, and maybe more than a little mean (if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's better not to go into it, except to say that it's just like Tom Sawyer to make a simple plan excruciatingly complicated). Still, there's plenty of good material and genuinely human moments to make the story worth your time.

I went in for the Annotated edition edited by Michael Patrick Hearn, which is a steal and a half if you can find it on the bargain table at Borders like I did. It's a coffee-table size book, which makes it a bit harder to take to work with you, but still a nice one for the bookshelf. Not only does it have copious footnotes supplying biography, culture, context, and skimmings from 120 years worth of criticial thought on the story, but also two "suppressed" passages from the original manuscript as extras, all the first edition illustrations, and (God help me) a 150 page introduction. I skimmed it before I jumped into the meat of the book, and I'm sure I'll get back to it before I die. The whole production screams, Cartman-style, "YOU WILL RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!" and so I do. If you go with another edition, and there are several floating around right now, the University of Virginia's site on Huck is a great supplement.  

CAPTAIN'S LOG: Monday, 3:00pm: After hours of scanning the frozen horizon, the Ensign thought he found a glint of another ship on the horizon. I ordered him to shoot off a ping, and in a moment, the other ship sent up a pong in response. Our ordeal, it would seem, was at an end.

Sadly, a few members of the crew had been stranded in the frozen tundra too long, and one had eaten most of a newspaper. It was a stunning and strange sight, watching his ink-stained lips moving insensibly, trying to comprehend the return to a world he had abandoned. I looked over the corpse of his victim, pieces of columns scattered in disarray. It nearly broke my heart to shoot the poor wretch, but he could never walk straight in the world of men again. At least he left "Peanuts" untouched...

(Translation: No DSL today until just a half an hour ago. I spent some time continuing my writing and (mostly) reading. They've gotten a lot better about fixing the service since the Summer of Dial-Up...)  

GOOD START TO THE DAY: Looking in Nickelodeon's "best of" Slime Time Live this morning, I found the most improbable celebrity guest: "Macho Man" Randy Savage. If you've never seen STL (and with that constant wall of screaming children, who can blame you), the show usually ends with two "teams" of three kids each sitting onstage as a sort of living scoreboard for two kids called at home. Whenever the home kid gets an answer, one of the kids on their "team" gets a pie in the face. Three pies mark a winner, and that team gets green slime. There's usually an adult type in a dunk tank, and if they don't guess which side wins, they get dunked, too. They also spray the audience with water, just because they can. The junior-high-and-under kids eat this stuff up, I'm sure.

Now get this...the Macho Man was given two choices, the kids dressed in orange or the kids dressed in blue. "I'm choosin' the silver and the black!" Then he starts flexing while the host diplomatically explains that those aren't the choices.

In the end, he chooses the losing side and gets dunked. He loses the hat, exposing his shiny pate, and they hand him a rubber duckie. A proud moment in any man's career, and probably the highlight of Macho's year. The host, who had escaped all the mess unslimed, made his way to the tank.

"Macho Man, any final words?"

"HULK HOGAN! BE A MAN! OHHHHHH YEAAAAAAAAAH!"

I guess it's his shtick now to challenge Hogan everywere he goes, but that's a hell of a thing to be screaming on a Nick show, especially immediately before Dora the Explorer. ("Mommy, what did the Macho Man mean when he said 'Be a man'?" "Ummmm, he meant that Hulk Hogan should help the needy and be kind to others..." "Why did he scream it like that?" "Because Hulk Hogan can't hear very well anymore...have some raisins, honey.") Savage fits this type of show, since he makes a lot of noise without really saying anything, but I wonder how his agent figured a kid's show would be a great place to promote his gangsta rap album?

It makes me miss Bozo the Clown that much more. And that goes triple for Captain Kangaroo.  

SKA WIMPED OUT: Our own Matt "Ska Boom" Etling had a plan for this month...he was going to make it to the top of the pile in his favorite gambling site's "$2,000 Pyramid". He was going to prove it to himself and others that with the right bankroll, he could really run with the big dogs.

How did it turn out? Look at the frickin' frackin' title, bud. Tonight, the gambling man cashed out $550 of his winnings and, as the song goes, bravely turn his tail and fled.

Even though he came out with considerably more than he started (and with other people's money, yet), he didn't hang in for the big payday, and because of this, I'm sure he'll be crying all the way to the bank. Good on ya, pally.  

A MOMENT TO REMEMBER: When I was driving home from an abortive second shift last night, I found something I remembered with nostalgia from a distant pre-war summer. In fact, I'm putting this amazing discovery on its own line so you can relish it with me.

Regular unleaded gas was $1.34 a gallon at the Citgo a few miles down the road from the university.

Yeah, I know, gasoline prices make for pretty weak nostalgia. It's not the smell of my great-grandmother's Sunday chicken dinners, but some days you take what you get. It seems like it was only a few summers ago that it was breathtakingly easy to find gas at 99 cents a gallon. Even though the price didn't last very long, it's something that still haunts my dreams...at least the ones that aren't about getting kicked in the face by strangers.

I realize that I'm taking a big risk by exposing such sensitive information to the people who don't usually hit this road, since it's on one of the regular routes I travel and the streets will probably be crowded with gawkers once the word travels. Pretty soon we'll have all sorts of rubberneckers jamming up the four-lane, some to actually buy gas, others to take pictures so their grandkids will have something to remember. Maybe a few will have an 8x10 print made to send to their relatives in other states, with nasty notes asking why they moved again. I'd add a hot dog vendor for the spectators if they didn't already sell franks inside the station, so we'll just have to settle for facepainting and Citgo the Clown making balloon animals for the kids.

Of course, when I think of gloating about anything, karma pops up like the shark from Jaws and bites me on the ass. For some reason, two of the three westbound lanes on the avenue I take to get home were closed off, and the sign that told us this was at least two miles from the tail end of the inevitable traffic jam. I decided at some point to take an alternate route, but had to figure out how to get around bumper-to-bumper wall of cars, which meant it took almost an hour and a half to make what's usually a 30 minute trip. I probably burned off any perceived savings in the process, which made my mental happy dance a moot point.

Still, when I winged the gas price bit into chat, Josh shot back with "Me and my 1.61 for midgrade both tell you to go f*** yourselves," which made it worth everything.  

OBLIGATORY "I'M STILL ALIVE" UPDATE: I slept way too much this weekend at all the wrong times, so it's safe to say this weekend was a wash (except I started another book to alternate with The Republic over the next week or so). For those who have asked and/or have forgotten already, I decided at the last minute not to participate in NaNoWriMo because I'm thinking instead of finishing a few of my shorter pieces with an aim to actually get published. Of course, it's only the third day of the month, so I might change my mind and tear it up. Don't be incredibly surprised if it happens, and ditto if it doesn't happen.  

TRICK OR TREAT? DEFINITELY TRICK: Brief and painless follow-up to "Today's True Story": MY check finally came in the mail on Halloween. Instead of changing my phone company, this check would've signed me up for a $4,000 loan from HFC if I'd cashed it. All things considered, it probably would be a bad idea.

My new meditation mantra: money in the mail, NO STRINGS ATTACHED. Come on, Fates, don't let me down...