Here is a delightful and hilarious video. I hope it makes your day. While you are at it, see also my entry "O Albele Panchhi. . ."
18 July 2009
Sic Transit Gloria Sticker
Two hundred sixty-two days.
That is 262 days.
Or 8 months and 21 days, depending on how you figure it.
That is how long my "Obama/Biden '08" circular magnetic sticker lasted on the driver's door of my car.
The numbers here are approximate, since I do not remember the exact date I put it on, but it was about a week before election day last November.
Strange thing, this magnetic sign. It looks just like a sticker, but is, in fact, a sign with a magnetic backing. In other words, anyone could have taken it off my car at any time.
It was handsome, mostly blue, with lettering in white. There may have been some tiny details in red, also.
I tried putting it on the back of my Ford Focus. But there was not a single flat space big enough for the circular emblem. So then I decided to put it on the driver's side door.
More than one person remarked that it looked like I was driving the Obama/Biden staff car.
Because it was just a magnetic sign, I thought from the beginning that someone would swipe it. In the few days before the election, I thought it might fall victim to some zealous John McCain supporter.
So, whenever I came back to my car, I wondered if the sign would still be there. It always was.
I remember parking at my polling place on election day. Surely this would be the day when some wise guy would take the sticker. Or maybe it would disappear in the hands of a too-enthusiastic Obama voter? But no! When I returned to my car, there it was, as always.
And so it has been, ever since.
Or had been.
My car lives out on the street in front of my place at night. And I live by a popular corner bar. There is lots of foot traffic all day and all evening, and many happy or disgruntled drunken people issue from the bar every morning just after 2am. And they all walk very close to my car.
Granted, most of these giddy or angry drunks are on the sidewalk, with the Obama/Biden sticker necessarily facing the street, instead.
But in any case, the sticker had lasted all this time. That's something like 8.69 months, depending.
Last week I was sitting in the front window of Whole Foods, with a good view of my car, which was parked right there in the first row of spaces. As I sat there eating my dinner and computing, a car pulled into the space right next to mine. I had backed into my space, so as the blond woman got out of her car, she was facing my driver's side door.
She looked down at the sticker. She reacted with her whole body, even out to her frizzy, pouffy hair, with some kind of shuddery disapproval. She looked around her for a moment, looked down at the sign on my door again.
I was watching her from maybe 30 feet away, and she did not see me. I really wondered if she was going to peel off the sign. For just a moment her whole body seemed to say "I'm gonna peel off this sign! How easy it would be!"
And what would I do? Would I run out and confront her? Follow her around the store and nail her that way? Intercept her as she checked out? Or just let the incident go as a piece of fascinating quotidian drama?
All this ran through my mind in somewhere like 0.476 seconds. And then the lady turned and came into the store.
So once again, the sign was safe.
Over the months of living with my sign I had come to realize that most people are not going to even think of removing such a thing. Many people would not give it a second thought. Many others take it for a sticker, and so the idea of removing it is even further away from their minds. Who is going to remove a sticker? And of the people who actually know it is an easily-removed magnetic slap-on sign, how many would think of taking it off. . .and for what reason?
Imagining who might actually go to the lengths of reaching down and taking a magnetic sign off of another person's property becomes an exercise in one's personal definitions of values. It is an odd thing to think about. Right off hand, I would rule out 99 out of 100 people. Maybe even a higher percentage than that. It just seems so unlikely. Would you do it, reader? Under any circumstances??
You'd think it would be taken, if taken at all, by an Obama hater. Some deeply teeth-grinding individual who cannot stand to even see our president's name displayed in public. Someone who, further, feels they have a mission, and that that mission makes it alright for them to cross the line of another person's property.
But I can see it being taken by an Obama devotee, as well. Just an Obama devotee who is a collector, and one who has a rather cavalier conception of boundaries.
Or maybe just a drunk from the bar across the street who comes out and says "Hey, look! This comes off!!"
Whatever their political affiliation, personal values, and blood alcohol content, this person by chance or design encountered my car sometime Friday.
I had spent a few hours at the Central Library, with my car in the Cultural Facilities Parking Garage. When I got back to my car, I did not notice if the sticker was there or not. The garage is dark, and I possibly could have missed its absence. I had long since given up obsessively checking to see if it was still there.
From there, I drove home for a brief stop. I parked a few spaces down from my place, right across from the bar. I was inside no longer than 15 minutes.
And when I came out, the sign was gone. The silver door showed some dirt circles where it had been for so many months, moved slightly a couple of times.
I did not look for it around the car or in the street, where one hypothetical type of person might have sullenly hurled it. I did not go over to the bar and ask the patio patrons if they saw anything.
I did wonder, of course, what very specific type of person would have done such a thing.
And I did entertain some half-baked wonderings about where the Obama presidency is at this particular point that someone would unceremoniously rip the emblem off my car.
But the world is a big and hugely multifaceted place. Things happen for any number of complex intersecting reasons, or for no reasons at all, or for ones we might not be able to figure out.
I liked my sign, and I'll miss it.
Sic Transit Gloria My Obama/Biden Circular Magnetic Sign!!
That is 262 days.
Or 8 months and 21 days, depending on how you figure it.
That is how long my "Obama/Biden '08" circular magnetic sticker lasted on the driver's door of my car.
The numbers here are approximate, since I do not remember the exact date I put it on, but it was about a week before election day last November.
Strange thing, this magnetic sign. It looks just like a sticker, but is, in fact, a sign with a magnetic backing. In other words, anyone could have taken it off my car at any time.
It was handsome, mostly blue, with lettering in white. There may have been some tiny details in red, also.
I tried putting it on the back of my Ford Focus. But there was not a single flat space big enough for the circular emblem. So then I decided to put it on the driver's side door.
More than one person remarked that it looked like I was driving the Obama/Biden staff car.
Because it was just a magnetic sign, I thought from the beginning that someone would swipe it. In the few days before the election, I thought it might fall victim to some zealous John McCain supporter.
So, whenever I came back to my car, I wondered if the sign would still be there. It always was.
I remember parking at my polling place on election day. Surely this would be the day when some wise guy would take the sticker. Or maybe it would disappear in the hands of a too-enthusiastic Obama voter? But no! When I returned to my car, there it was, as always.
And so it has been, ever since.
Or had been.
My car lives out on the street in front of my place at night. And I live by a popular corner bar. There is lots of foot traffic all day and all evening, and many happy or disgruntled drunken people issue from the bar every morning just after 2am. And they all walk very close to my car.
Granted, most of these giddy or angry drunks are on the sidewalk, with the Obama/Biden sticker necessarily facing the street, instead.
But in any case, the sticker had lasted all this time. That's something like 8.69 months, depending.
Last week I was sitting in the front window of Whole Foods, with a good view of my car, which was parked right there in the first row of spaces. As I sat there eating my dinner and computing, a car pulled into the space right next to mine. I had backed into my space, so as the blond woman got out of her car, she was facing my driver's side door.
She looked down at the sticker. She reacted with her whole body, even out to her frizzy, pouffy hair, with some kind of shuddery disapproval. She looked around her for a moment, looked down at the sign on my door again.
I was watching her from maybe 30 feet away, and she did not see me. I really wondered if she was going to peel off the sign. For just a moment her whole body seemed to say "I'm gonna peel off this sign! How easy it would be!"
And what would I do? Would I run out and confront her? Follow her around the store and nail her that way? Intercept her as she checked out? Or just let the incident go as a piece of fascinating quotidian drama?
All this ran through my mind in somewhere like 0.476 seconds. And then the lady turned and came into the store.
So once again, the sign was safe.
Over the months of living with my sign I had come to realize that most people are not going to even think of removing such a thing. Many people would not give it a second thought. Many others take it for a sticker, and so the idea of removing it is even further away from their minds. Who is going to remove a sticker? And of the people who actually know it is an easily-removed magnetic slap-on sign, how many would think of taking it off. . .and for what reason?
Imagining who might actually go to the lengths of reaching down and taking a magnetic sign off of another person's property becomes an exercise in one's personal definitions of values. It is an odd thing to think about. Right off hand, I would rule out 99 out of 100 people. Maybe even a higher percentage than that. It just seems so unlikely. Would you do it, reader? Under any circumstances??
You'd think it would be taken, if taken at all, by an Obama hater. Some deeply teeth-grinding individual who cannot stand to even see our president's name displayed in public. Someone who, further, feels they have a mission, and that that mission makes it alright for them to cross the line of another person's property.
But I can see it being taken by an Obama devotee, as well. Just an Obama devotee who is a collector, and one who has a rather cavalier conception of boundaries.
Or maybe just a drunk from the bar across the street who comes out and says "Hey, look! This comes off!!"
Whatever their political affiliation, personal values, and blood alcohol content, this person by chance or design encountered my car sometime Friday.
I had spent a few hours at the Central Library, with my car in the Cultural Facilities Parking Garage. When I got back to my car, I did not notice if the sticker was there or not. The garage is dark, and I possibly could have missed its absence. I had long since given up obsessively checking to see if it was still there.
From there, I drove home for a brief stop. I parked a few spaces down from my place, right across from the bar. I was inside no longer than 15 minutes.
And when I came out, the sign was gone. The silver door showed some dirt circles where it had been for so many months, moved slightly a couple of times.
I did not look for it around the car or in the street, where one hypothetical type of person might have sullenly hurled it. I did not go over to the bar and ask the patio patrons if they saw anything.
I did wonder, of course, what very specific type of person would have done such a thing.
And I did entertain some half-baked wonderings about where the Obama presidency is at this particular point that someone would unceremoniously rip the emblem off my car.
But the world is a big and hugely multifaceted place. Things happen for any number of complex intersecting reasons, or for no reasons at all, or for ones we might not be able to figure out.
I liked my sign, and I'll miss it.
Sic Transit Gloria My Obama/Biden Circular Magnetic Sign!!
10 May 2009
UH, I HONE ANAGRAM LAB?
I watched the wonderful bollywood comedy Lage Raho Munna Bhai this past Saturday night. A deliciously funny film with heartfelt deeper meanings--and great production numbers!
The film's overall plot and deep emotional honesty reminded me very much of a Frank Capra comedy.
After finishing the film, past one in the morning, I emailed friends to tell them that they have to see this film. Jon rightly chides me about "overselling" things with too much enthusiasm. So I tried to play this one down with a simple offer of a loan of the DVD.
Somewhere in the short flurry of emails between Jon, Donna, and I, Jon remarked that the film title looked like an anagram of a movie title.
And that started it. There in the middle of the night. The Lage Raho Munna Bhai anagram contest!
Jon's very next email came in two minutes later. It read:
"I Am Rough Banana Hel".
I was juggling letters around. Another message from Jon:
"Aha! Large Numb Hanoi!"
Not bad! A bit more coherent than the first one. At least all the words were actual words, spelled correctly!
Still working on a worthy reply, when this came in:
"Hi On Alabama Hunger".
I liked that one a lot. And it further got my fury of letter-scrambling in gear, at now nearly 2am. Finally, I spluttered out:
"BAN A HUN, OH REAL MAGI!".
I was pretty proud. Thought that was a pretty good one. It hung together as good anagrams can: it made a kind of sense, evoking a mini-story in the reader's mind. I expected some comment on it.
But when I opened Jon's next email, it contained this dreaded confession:
"Bean Hour: I Hang LA Ma"!
A headline ripped directly from the tabloids!
OK, OK, I had to reply. I was using my email's compose space to use and discard letters. Just as I was nearly ready to hit SEND, another came in:
"Aloha in Hamburg Lane".
Whoa. Prodigious. Impressive. Hard to beat.
I fired mine off:
"A BRAIN HUNG LAME AGO".
After Jon's previous one, a veritable Mickey Spillane kind of title, this one did look, indeed, lame. But somehow I enjoyed its cockeyed riff on English grammar. Read straight out, the grammar doesn't work. But the phrase "lame ago" acts in a funny way, since it evokes the common "long ago. And once you've thought of "long ago," "lame ago" starts to sound right. So that brings a little more sense back into the whole. The grammar starts to hang together. What could this odd formulation be conveying? It could be describing the state of my own brain here in mid-anagram creation fury at past 2:00 in the morning!
And this is what I love about anagrams. One thing, anyway. They show a picture of our brain working. Specifically, our craving for order and sense in language. Faced with a string of words like "A BRAIN HUNG LAME AGO," we desperately want sense to come out of our encounter. We want it to mean something. And we are willing to suspend the usual rules of grammar and work by association to get there.
Look at the one I sent next, then, fired off to Jon and Donna at 2:11 am:
GRAB AN UN-HOME, A HAIL!
What do you make of that? Not brilliant. Pretty nonsensical. And yet not entirely without sense, again. Or rather, watch how your brain tries to make a coherent story out of the semi-nonsense string.
First, what is an "UN-HOME"? That's what we need to know before anything else can follow. So we decide that an "UN-HOME" has, maybe, something to do with homelessness. It is where a homeless person spends the night, maybe. An UN-HOME.
And once we've decided on that (or whatever other meaning you've fixed on) then the rest of the main clause rushes in to sense as well, with sudden magnetic force. It is as if any part of the nonsensical string gaining meaning quickly infects and converts the parts around it, too! So, "GRAB AN UN-HOME" evokes images of a homeless person finding, or maybe suddenly allocating or taking, a place to sleep for that night. Or it could.
But, as written, we are left with a dangling "A HAIL!" No problem. That just makes the first part into something that is yelled, maybe from one bum to another, "Hey, Mac, GRAB AN UN-HOME!" That is the hail that's being talked about here.
So, it would have been better stated as:
"A HAIL: 'GRAB AN UN-HOME!'"
Still, there in the middle of the night, I definitely felt that most of Jon's anagrams had an edge of sense over mine. I mean, that last one was really stretching it, let's face it. But of course stretching the possibilities of language is one of the joys of this game of anagrams.
As I was thinking about this, and working on perhaps a more coherent, somewhat more grammatical figuration, Donna piped in. She had been following the whole contest, of course. My emails went to both Jon and Donna.
At 2:13, she said:
"I declare "Aloha in Hamburg Lane" the winner."
The winner?! Well. I liked Jon's anagram a lot. Yeah, it was really good. But "the winner"? OK, maybe it was better than any I had yet sent along. . .but I was not done! I couldn't stop anagramming.
Things were trailing off a bit, true. Lots of time between emails now. Probably Donna had had enough and wanted to go to bed.
I was getting a bit drowsy, true. But I couldn't stop. Gotta come up with a really good one.
At 2:25 am, I sent:
"ON A RAMBLE AGAIN, HUH?"
Less than two minutes later, Donna again:
"Jon's just been dethroned."
"Dethroned"?? Well, I felt kinda bad about that, to tell the truth. And kinda good, of course. Mostly, I wasn't ready for the game to be over. And, truthfully, I felt that Jon's anagrams were mostly more imaginative than mine.
Drowsy. Half-falling asleep and waking up to face a screen with a half-constructed anagram. Figuring out that we had 17 letters to work with in this particular anagram game.
Tired as I was, I was not coming up with anything brilliant. And Donna's judgment of winners and dethronements niggled me into thinking that I should definitely put honor where honor was due. I should look through the list of anagrams hurled back and forth so far, and see what my favorite was.
Doing so, I had to admit that "Aloha in Hamburg Lane" was really really good.
And I was just composing an email to say so when I chanced to count the letters in Jon's anagram.
Uh-oh.
Eighteen letters.
I had just started to turn this all into a formula, and had counted the number of letters we had to work with. I had come up with 17.
Better count again.
Yeah, the original title, "LAGE RAHO MUNNA BHAI" had only 17 letters. . .
. . .and "Aloha in Hamburg Lane" had 18!!
Looking quickly, I could see that this formerly brilliant and still quite imaginative anagram had two Ls. The original title had only one.
This woke me up a little bit.
I sent an email pointing out the error, and continued thinking about anagrams!
Working on anagrams!!
3:13 am, I said:
"Ah! Glamour inane? Bah!"
Donna replies, almost instantly:
"Stop while you're ahead, Jim. You can't beat your "on a ramble again, huh?"."
But now the thing had taken on a life of its own. It didn't matter if I could or couldn't beat my own former anagram. It didn't matter who was best. All that mattered was moving little letters around, coming up with new words, new sentences.
Jon: "I HEAR LAUGH, BAN MOAN."
Another really good one from Jon. I had to admit, Jon was really good at this!
Just before four in the morning, my brother Roger in Germany came on the Instant Messenger, and I told him about the anagram storm we were in the middle of. And he took the bait. He started anagramming, and injected a new energy into the somewhat flagging phenomenon.
His first one was a good effort, but problematic:
"Hah! A large ambo in UN!"
I had to ask him what an ambo was. I did so, via the IM.
Rog: "One of the two raised stands in early Christian churches from which parts of the service were chanted or read, it stands to reason, of course."
Oh. Natch.
Roger's enthusiam brought new energy to our overnight flurry of letter-juggling and word-flinging. I had been flagging at this point, begging off, saying I was going to "go to bed." Can you imagine?
But Roger was quickly warming up to the challenge.
Shortly after his arrival, I flung out:
"BREAM LUNG? AHA!: HANOI",
explaining, parenthetically, that this depicted a traveling connoisseur finally locating a delicacy he'd been searching tirelessly for.
Roger's next few entries proved imaginative, wacky, fun:
"Re-hang a bum in a halo."
"Hear a bug in loam? Nah!"
"Hug a Herm? Banana oil!"
That last one amazed and delighted me. I quickly pegged that one as the winner of the night, at least in my heart.
Somewhere in there, my next one came as a question of the efficacy of the entire anagram thing. Also, it sprang from the fact that often, especially with this letter set, one ended up throwing in words like "ah" and "uh" and "hah!" and "nah!" to complete the anagram. So, questioning the very form in which we were composing, I offered:
"Uh? 'Hanoi Barn Agleam'?"
And Jon showed us that he was still indeed awake and following, with:
"O ANNA HEAR LIMBAUGH!"
Me: "HAIL MARGE, AN HUN BOA!"
The four o'clock hour was changing to five now. I definitely had one foot on an anagrammatic banana peel ("A PLANE BANE"?) and the other firmly in bed. I had to redeem myself from that last one. Not so great.
I worked on it and came up with a bit of grotesqerie that made me laugh outloud, there at past five in the morning:
"HA HA!, A BLUE GROIN MAN!"
Jon was gone. But Roger still had a couple of zingers to present:
"A hun home? Nab a grail!"
and
"BOIL A HUMAN? AH, ANGER!"
I went to bed.
But oh, my friends, a mere stint of repose cannot dampen the anagrammatic nerve!
Indeed, when I woke up, my mind was churning with it.
Here's what the churn of my mind produced:
"OH, BEAR HUG AN ANIMAL!"
Roger, too, came up with one, a variation on his last, some hours later:
"Ah! Human Anger Aboil!"
Finally, Roger carried the game on to his class of English learners in Berlin. I was fascinated what a group of English students would come up with.
Their entries end this article.
"HI! BEGAN AMUN-RA HALO!"
"HI! LOAN MANAGER A HUB."
"HI NOAH, BLUE ANAGRAM."
(Roger explains that these first three originally had an extra, illegal A included. You can see how another A would have made these more grammatical.)
and then:
"BRING MAE A HULA, NOAH."
and
"AH, GINA: BLUE ROAN HAM."
And Roger ends his email with three words which I think would describe how all of us, Jon, Roger, Donna, and I, felt about this overnight flurry of anagrammatic diversion:
"We had fun."
NEW FAD, UH??
The film's overall plot and deep emotional honesty reminded me very much of a Frank Capra comedy.
After finishing the film, past one in the morning, I emailed friends to tell them that they have to see this film. Jon rightly chides me about "overselling" things with too much enthusiasm. So I tried to play this one down with a simple offer of a loan of the DVD.
Somewhere in the short flurry of emails between Jon, Donna, and I, Jon remarked that the film title looked like an anagram of a movie title.
And that started it. There in the middle of the night. The Lage Raho Munna Bhai anagram contest!
Jon's very next email came in two minutes later. It read:
"I Am Rough Banana Hel".
I was juggling letters around. Another message from Jon:
"Aha! Large Numb Hanoi!"
Not bad! A bit more coherent than the first one. At least all the words were actual words, spelled correctly!
Still working on a worthy reply, when this came in:
"Hi On Alabama Hunger".
I liked that one a lot. And it further got my fury of letter-scrambling in gear, at now nearly 2am. Finally, I spluttered out:
"BAN A HUN, OH REAL MAGI!".
I was pretty proud. Thought that was a pretty good one. It hung together as good anagrams can: it made a kind of sense, evoking a mini-story in the reader's mind. I expected some comment on it.
But when I opened Jon's next email, it contained this dreaded confession:
"Bean Hour: I Hang LA Ma"!
A headline ripped directly from the tabloids!
OK, OK, I had to reply. I was using my email's compose space to use and discard letters. Just as I was nearly ready to hit SEND, another came in:
"Aloha in Hamburg Lane".
Whoa. Prodigious. Impressive. Hard to beat.
I fired mine off:
"A BRAIN HUNG LAME AGO".
After Jon's previous one, a veritable Mickey Spillane kind of title, this one did look, indeed, lame. But somehow I enjoyed its cockeyed riff on English grammar. Read straight out, the grammar doesn't work. But the phrase "lame ago" acts in a funny way, since it evokes the common "long ago. And once you've thought of "long ago," "lame ago" starts to sound right. So that brings a little more sense back into the whole. The grammar starts to hang together. What could this odd formulation be conveying? It could be describing the state of my own brain here in mid-anagram creation fury at past 2:00 in the morning!
And this is what I love about anagrams. One thing, anyway. They show a picture of our brain working. Specifically, our craving for order and sense in language. Faced with a string of words like "A BRAIN HUNG LAME AGO," we desperately want sense to come out of our encounter. We want it to mean something. And we are willing to suspend the usual rules of grammar and work by association to get there.
Look at the one I sent next, then, fired off to Jon and Donna at 2:11 am:
GRAB AN UN-HOME, A HAIL!
What do you make of that? Not brilliant. Pretty nonsensical. And yet not entirely without sense, again. Or rather, watch how your brain tries to make a coherent story out of the semi-nonsense string.
First, what is an "UN-HOME"? That's what we need to know before anything else can follow. So we decide that an "UN-HOME" has, maybe, something to do with homelessness. It is where a homeless person spends the night, maybe. An UN-HOME.
And once we've decided on that (or whatever other meaning you've fixed on) then the rest of the main clause rushes in to sense as well, with sudden magnetic force. It is as if any part of the nonsensical string gaining meaning quickly infects and converts the parts around it, too! So, "GRAB AN UN-HOME" evokes images of a homeless person finding, or maybe suddenly allocating or taking, a place to sleep for that night. Or it could.
But, as written, we are left with a dangling "A HAIL!" No problem. That just makes the first part into something that is yelled, maybe from one bum to another, "Hey, Mac, GRAB AN UN-HOME!" That is the hail that's being talked about here.
So, it would have been better stated as:
"A HAIL: 'GRAB AN UN-HOME!'"
Still, there in the middle of the night, I definitely felt that most of Jon's anagrams had an edge of sense over mine. I mean, that last one was really stretching it, let's face it. But of course stretching the possibilities of language is one of the joys of this game of anagrams.
As I was thinking about this, and working on perhaps a more coherent, somewhat more grammatical figuration, Donna piped in. She had been following the whole contest, of course. My emails went to both Jon and Donna.
At 2:13, she said:
"I declare "Aloha in Hamburg Lane" the winner."
The winner?! Well. I liked Jon's anagram a lot. Yeah, it was really good. But "the winner"? OK, maybe it was better than any I had yet sent along. . .but I was not done! I couldn't stop anagramming.
Things were trailing off a bit, true. Lots of time between emails now. Probably Donna had had enough and wanted to go to bed.
I was getting a bit drowsy, true. But I couldn't stop. Gotta come up with a really good one.
At 2:25 am, I sent:
"ON A RAMBLE AGAIN, HUH?"
Less than two minutes later, Donna again:
"Jon's just been dethroned."
"Dethroned"?? Well, I felt kinda bad about that, to tell the truth. And kinda good, of course. Mostly, I wasn't ready for the game to be over. And, truthfully, I felt that Jon's anagrams were mostly more imaginative than mine.
Drowsy. Half-falling asleep and waking up to face a screen with a half-constructed anagram. Figuring out that we had 17 letters to work with in this particular anagram game.
Tired as I was, I was not coming up with anything brilliant. And Donna's judgment of winners and dethronements niggled me into thinking that I should definitely put honor where honor was due. I should look through the list of anagrams hurled back and forth so far, and see what my favorite was.
Doing so, I had to admit that "Aloha in Hamburg Lane" was really really good.
And I was just composing an email to say so when I chanced to count the letters in Jon's anagram.
Uh-oh.
Eighteen letters.
I had just started to turn this all into a formula, and had counted the number of letters we had to work with. I had come up with 17.
Better count again.
Yeah, the original title, "LAGE RAHO MUNNA BHAI" had only 17 letters. . .
. . .and "Aloha in Hamburg Lane" had 18!!
Looking quickly, I could see that this formerly brilliant and still quite imaginative anagram had two Ls. The original title had only one.
This woke me up a little bit.
I sent an email pointing out the error, and continued thinking about anagrams!
Working on anagrams!!
3:13 am, I said:
"Ah! Glamour inane? Bah!"
Donna replies, almost instantly:
"Stop while you're ahead, Jim. You can't beat your "on a ramble again, huh?"."
But now the thing had taken on a life of its own. It didn't matter if I could or couldn't beat my own former anagram. It didn't matter who was best. All that mattered was moving little letters around, coming up with new words, new sentences.
Jon: "I HEAR LAUGH, BAN MOAN."
Another really good one from Jon. I had to admit, Jon was really good at this!
Just before four in the morning, my brother Roger in Germany came on the Instant Messenger, and I told him about the anagram storm we were in the middle of. And he took the bait. He started anagramming, and injected a new energy into the somewhat flagging phenomenon.
His first one was a good effort, but problematic:
"Hah! A large ambo in UN!"
I had to ask him what an ambo was. I did so, via the IM.
Rog: "One of the two raised stands in early Christian churches from which parts of the service were chanted or read, it stands to reason, of course."
Oh. Natch.
Roger's enthusiam brought new energy to our overnight flurry of letter-juggling and word-flinging. I had been flagging at this point, begging off, saying I was going to "go to bed." Can you imagine?
But Roger was quickly warming up to the challenge.
Shortly after his arrival, I flung out:
"BREAM LUNG? AHA!: HANOI",
explaining, parenthetically, that this depicted a traveling connoisseur finally locating a delicacy he'd been searching tirelessly for.
Roger's next few entries proved imaginative, wacky, fun:
"Re-hang a bum in a halo."
"Hear a bug in loam? Nah!"
"Hug a Herm? Banana oil!"
That last one amazed and delighted me. I quickly pegged that one as the winner of the night, at least in my heart.
Somewhere in there, my next one came as a question of the efficacy of the entire anagram thing. Also, it sprang from the fact that often, especially with this letter set, one ended up throwing in words like "ah" and "uh" and "hah!" and "nah!" to complete the anagram. So, questioning the very form in which we were composing, I offered:
"Uh? 'Hanoi Barn Agleam'?"
And Jon showed us that he was still indeed awake and following, with:
"O ANNA HEAR LIMBAUGH!"
Me: "HAIL MARGE, AN HUN BOA!"
The four o'clock hour was changing to five now. I definitely had one foot on an anagrammatic banana peel ("A PLANE BANE"?) and the other firmly in bed. I had to redeem myself from that last one. Not so great.
I worked on it and came up with a bit of grotesqerie that made me laugh outloud, there at past five in the morning:
"HA HA!, A BLUE GROIN MAN!"
Jon was gone. But Roger still had a couple of zingers to present:
"A hun home? Nab a grail!"
and
"BOIL A HUMAN? AH, ANGER!"
I went to bed.
But oh, my friends, a mere stint of repose cannot dampen the anagrammatic nerve!
Indeed, when I woke up, my mind was churning with it.
Here's what the churn of my mind produced:
"OH, BEAR HUG AN ANIMAL!"
Roger, too, came up with one, a variation on his last, some hours later:
"Ah! Human Anger Aboil!"
Finally, Roger carried the game on to his class of English learners in Berlin. I was fascinated what a group of English students would come up with.
Their entries end this article.
"HI! BEGAN AMUN-RA HALO!"
"HI! LOAN MANAGER A HUB."
"HI NOAH, BLUE ANAGRAM."
(Roger explains that these first three originally had an extra, illegal A included. You can see how another A would have made these more grammatical.)
and then:
"BRING MAE A HULA, NOAH."
and
"AH, GINA: BLUE ROAN HAM."
And Roger ends his email with three words which I think would describe how all of us, Jon, Roger, Donna, and I, felt about this overnight flurry of anagrammatic diversion:
"We had fun."
NEW FAD, UH??
05 April 2009
The Nature of the Dot
I just came back inside from a satisfying viewing of the International Space Station.
It was a good apparition. Since the trajectory for this night's sighting was basically a line across the northern horizon, all I had to do was step out my front door and look up above the row of shops across the street. There was the initial panic and uncertainty in me, the crowd of questions: did I really get the time right? Is it going to be bright enough to see? Is there some haziness or clouds in the NW, where it is supposed to appear? Where is the damn thing?
Moments pass, and more long moments stretching out, and still nothing.
And then, a minute or maybe more after the predicted time, there it is! THERE IT IS! says my whole being. I might even point up at it, just in case anyone strolling by oblivious to this joyous, amazing sight would like to know. Hey, I'll tell them.
And what does it look like? Essentially a dot. A dot, at first murky and ruddyish, then shedding any color and burning brighter and brighter white as it calmy slides across the uncomplaining sky.
It does not look like any plane up there. No plane could possibly follow the speedy but steady trajectory of this high-flyer. And of course, it is just one bright dot, no blinking sidecar accompaniment. A bright white dot moving in a confident but not smug or strident line across a corner of the sky.
I use the verb "moving" in that previous sentence because other verbs don't seem to fit. I riffled through mental verb cards for quite a while before neutralizing it down to just plain "moving." That's because others seem inappropriate: it is certainly not "flying," as this describes what an airplane does. An airplane's action is energetic and motor-driven. Nothing is driving the International Space Station. And though I used "sliding" in the previous paragraph, it is not "sliding" across the sky, either, because something that slides might be in danger of slipping. The ISS's action is completely steady and continuous. It does not slip nor slide. I thought of "trailing," but that suggests that it is following or being pulled by something. No. "Soaring"? Heavens no. "Sailing"? Maybe. Close. But this also suggests that some cosmic wind is pushing it.
I realized during this mental verb hunt that part of the sighting's interest and fascination and strange joy is in its uniqueness.
Why do I like to go out and view this thing? What makes me cajole my workmates into coming out to the parking lot and seeing it fly over? What makes me call my stepmother and my brother, Bill, to make sure they get out to see it? Why do I share the secret joy of sightings with my brother, Roger, in Germany? What is so special, really, about a dot going across the sky?
Our night skies are full of moving dots. It would be unique and preternatural, as it was in the days following 9/11, if NO dots were to be seen up there at any one moment.
Is it the fact that, as I like to remark to people I share this experience with, "there are people in that dot"? It can't be that, as most of the dots we see whizzing across our day and night skies are full of many more people than this singular white one is.
Well, OK. Then what is it? Why is this, for me at least, a consistently exciting thing to see?
It is because it is, in its very nature and true essence, unique.
It is not a plane. It is not flying. It is not in our atmosphere. It is a spaceship!
It is something new in the world. There is only one of them up there, and you can't see it all the time. Sometimes you can see it twice in one evening, and when you do, you get a sense of how damn fast it is truly traveling: it comes around again a mere hour and a half after its first sighting! Around the entire world in an hour and a half!
And all of this, somehow, is captured in the unique look and feel of its motion. It needs a verb of its own. It somethings across the sky. It whatevers across the sky.
It moves in silent steady line across the accomodating sky.
It ISSes across the sky.
It was a good apparition. Since the trajectory for this night's sighting was basically a line across the northern horizon, all I had to do was step out my front door and look up above the row of shops across the street. There was the initial panic and uncertainty in me, the crowd of questions: did I really get the time right? Is it going to be bright enough to see? Is there some haziness or clouds in the NW, where it is supposed to appear? Where is the damn thing?
Moments pass, and more long moments stretching out, and still nothing.
And then, a minute or maybe more after the predicted time, there it is! THERE IT IS! says my whole being. I might even point up at it, just in case anyone strolling by oblivious to this joyous, amazing sight would like to know. Hey, I'll tell them.
And what does it look like? Essentially a dot. A dot, at first murky and ruddyish, then shedding any color and burning brighter and brighter white as it calmy slides across the uncomplaining sky.
It does not look like any plane up there. No plane could possibly follow the speedy but steady trajectory of this high-flyer. And of course, it is just one bright dot, no blinking sidecar accompaniment. A bright white dot moving in a confident but not smug or strident line across a corner of the sky.
I use the verb "moving" in that previous sentence because other verbs don't seem to fit. I riffled through mental verb cards for quite a while before neutralizing it down to just plain "moving." That's because others seem inappropriate: it is certainly not "flying," as this describes what an airplane does. An airplane's action is energetic and motor-driven. Nothing is driving the International Space Station. And though I used "sliding" in the previous paragraph, it is not "sliding" across the sky, either, because something that slides might be in danger of slipping. The ISS's action is completely steady and continuous. It does not slip nor slide. I thought of "trailing," but that suggests that it is following or being pulled by something. No. "Soaring"? Heavens no. "Sailing"? Maybe. Close. But this also suggests that some cosmic wind is pushing it.
I realized during this mental verb hunt that part of the sighting's interest and fascination and strange joy is in its uniqueness.
Why do I like to go out and view this thing? What makes me cajole my workmates into coming out to the parking lot and seeing it fly over? What makes me call my stepmother and my brother, Bill, to make sure they get out to see it? Why do I share the secret joy of sightings with my brother, Roger, in Germany? What is so special, really, about a dot going across the sky?
Our night skies are full of moving dots. It would be unique and preternatural, as it was in the days following 9/11, if NO dots were to be seen up there at any one moment.
Is it the fact that, as I like to remark to people I share this experience with, "there are people in that dot"? It can't be that, as most of the dots we see whizzing across our day and night skies are full of many more people than this singular white one is.
Well, OK. Then what is it? Why is this, for me at least, a consistently exciting thing to see?
It is because it is, in its very nature and true essence, unique.
It is not a plane. It is not flying. It is not in our atmosphere. It is a spaceship!
It is something new in the world. There is only one of them up there, and you can't see it all the time. Sometimes you can see it twice in one evening, and when you do, you get a sense of how damn fast it is truly traveling: it comes around again a mere hour and a half after its first sighting! Around the entire world in an hour and a half!
And all of this, somehow, is captured in the unique look and feel of its motion. It needs a verb of its own. It somethings across the sky. It whatevers across the sky.
It moves in silent steady line across the accomodating sky.
It ISSes across the sky.
02 March 2009
A Tale of a Tie
I went to the opera a week and a half ago. Saw Opera Colorado's colorful production of Bizet's "The Pearl Fishers."
I wore a relatively boring navy blue pin-striped suit. I originally bought the suit to attend a funeral.
As I was dressing for the opera, some imp or devil crept into my mind. When I went to pick a tie for the evening, a wicked gleam sparked in my eye.
I didn't want to wear just some boring old tie, some sameness of a silk. I suddenly got the urge to wear something catchy and unwearable. Something you would NOT wear to the opera.
I thought of Jon and some of the ties I had seen him wear. Maybe to the opera, maybe just to other events? No, definitely to the opera. He had worn some pretty wild ties. I think.
So suddenly the event became for me more than a mere opera. It was an Ugly Tie Contest.
And, looking through my tie rack I found it: the winner!
No. Now I could not wear THIS tie, could I? To the opera?
What I had found was a joke tie. I had picked it up in a thrift store in the 1980s sometime. It was 4 inches wide at its widest point, and had a busy repeating geometrical pattern of shit brown, French's mustard, and lime Jell-o green. Uhhh-glee!!
This was a tie you just did not wear. It was a gag. Last time I wore it--let's face it, the ONLY time I ever wore it--was as part of a Halloween costume. I was going as one of the undead, a zombie straight out of the ground. I wore really arresting ghastly grey-skin makeup, the worst old hobo torn-up clothes I could find. . .and this tie. I even went outside and smeared dirt on my outfit!
So here was the tie I decided to wear to the opera. It looked like a tight, busy, geometric vomit job.
I put the tie on. I repeated to myself my line about this being not just an opera but an "ugly tie contest."
And I hied myself to meet Jon and Donna at dinner before the opera.
They did not notice my tie. I had to point it out to them.
Jon made a half-hearted show of saying the tie was ugly, but his basic attitude was that I was making something out of nothing. Donna didn't think the tie was so bad, really.
It was dark there in Little India restaurant, and I told them that it must be the lighting. You really had to see this tie in some light. This is what I said.
But in the light of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, the distinct lack of buzz about my tie continued. Swells streamed past. No one gave my tie a second glance. Donna still said it really was not that bad. Kind of good, actually.
And that is when it hit me: things change. Fashions change. It hit me like a fist. This tie, which had been nothing but a Halloween joke hanging in my closet for all these years, was now acceptable to wear. In public.
To the opera, for goodness' sake!
I thought of my fashion-conscious friend Jennifer. Thought she would love this story, how the Tie of the Living Dead was now acceptable opera wear.
What a wacky world!
I wore a relatively boring navy blue pin-striped suit. I originally bought the suit to attend a funeral.
As I was dressing for the opera, some imp or devil crept into my mind. When I went to pick a tie for the evening, a wicked gleam sparked in my eye.
I didn't want to wear just some boring old tie, some sameness of a silk. I suddenly got the urge to wear something catchy and unwearable. Something you would NOT wear to the opera.
I thought of Jon and some of the ties I had seen him wear. Maybe to the opera, maybe just to other events? No, definitely to the opera. He had worn some pretty wild ties. I think.
So suddenly the event became for me more than a mere opera. It was an Ugly Tie Contest.
And, looking through my tie rack I found it: the winner!
No. Now I could not wear THIS tie, could I? To the opera?
What I had found was a joke tie. I had picked it up in a thrift store in the 1980s sometime. It was 4 inches wide at its widest point, and had a busy repeating geometrical pattern of shit brown, French's mustard, and lime Jell-o green. Uhhh-glee!!
This was a tie you just did not wear. It was a gag. Last time I wore it--let's face it, the ONLY time I ever wore it--was as part of a Halloween costume. I was going as one of the undead, a zombie straight out of the ground. I wore really arresting ghastly grey-skin makeup, the worst old hobo torn-up clothes I could find. . .and this tie. I even went outside and smeared dirt on my outfit!
So here was the tie I decided to wear to the opera. It looked like a tight, busy, geometric vomit job.
I put the tie on. I repeated to myself my line about this being not just an opera but an "ugly tie contest."
And I hied myself to meet Jon and Donna at dinner before the opera.
They did not notice my tie. I had to point it out to them.
Jon made a half-hearted show of saying the tie was ugly, but his basic attitude was that I was making something out of nothing. Donna didn't think the tie was so bad, really.
It was dark there in Little India restaurant, and I told them that it must be the lighting. You really had to see this tie in some light. This is what I said.
But in the light of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, the distinct lack of buzz about my tie continued. Swells streamed past. No one gave my tie a second glance. Donna still said it really was not that bad. Kind of good, actually.
And that is when it hit me: things change. Fashions change. It hit me like a fist. This tie, which had been nothing but a Halloween joke hanging in my closet for all these years, was now acceptable to wear. In public.
To the opera, for goodness' sake!
I thought of my fashion-conscious friend Jennifer. Thought she would love this story, how the Tie of the Living Dead was now acceptable opera wear.
What a wacky world!
20 January 2009
By Heart
About a month ago, I memorized John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV," the one that starts, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God. . ." You can find the full poem here. It is a violently dramatic poem that uses sexual imagery to convey the speaker's painful, conflicted relationship with God.
The poem grabbed me when I viewed John Adams' opera "Dr. Atomic," about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. The first act ends with Oppenheimer alone on the night before the world's first atomic bomb test, and he sings this fantastically dramatic aria. The text is "Holy Sonnet XIV."
This is the first poem I have memorized in a while, perhaps a year. The last one I "got by heart" was "Fern Hill," by Dylan Thomas. That one came as a kind of dare or challenge, since Jon W. had declared at one of our reading parties that he had tried to memorize that poem, and failed, as there is so much repeated imagery and language from stanza to stanza in the poem. The moment the words left his mouth, I knew I had to memorize that poem.
Jon was right about the subtle changes in the repeated language in the poem, though. Its six nine-line stanzas all follow the same pattern of irregularly long or short lines, with the logic of the relation of the lines the same in each, also. Where the second stanza has "In the sun that is young once only," stanza five echoes, "In the sun born over and over" and the last stanza shifts to "In the moon that is always rising." It gets far more subtle and complicated than that when such repetitions and changes come in many lines, and the poem becomes a tapestry of imagery about the change of seasons and of the seasons of a life.
That was a fun one to memorize, I have to say.
I first started memorizing poems in my later days of college. I took a Shakespeare class where the professor, Elihu Pearlman, offered a strange challenge to his students. Instead of taking his rather tough final exam, any student could choose to opt out by performing a particular feat of memorization. If you memorized John Milton's "Lycidas" and presented it one-on-one to the prof. in his office, you did not have to take the final exam.
I started memorizing the poem, but did not really take the intriguing challenge seriously. At 193 lines, "Lycidas" is somewhat daunting. I memorized the first three sections of the poem, about 36 lines, and took the exam.
But after I graduated, I remembered Professor Pearlman's challenge. So I took up "Lycidas" again, working on it day after day, going through the lines in the car, in the bathroom, before I went to sleep, all throughout the day. And I finally got it all down.
"Lycidas" is an intricate and beautiful poem by John Milton, whom Elihu Pearlman puckishly referred to as "the second-best poet in the English language." In it, Milton reinvents a classical form, the Pastoral Elegy. Milton is ostensibly mourning the death by drowning of his Cambridge classmate, Edward King. But he uses the poem as a platform to severely criticize "our corrupted Clergy, then in their height," as the poem's extended headnote has it.
Typical with Milton, the poem is a wild mixture of classical and Christian, with references just exploding out the seams. He throws in Greek gods next to Christian saints, with the center of the piece a funeral procession whose riot of figures reminds me of Fellini's outrageous ecclesiastical fashion show in Roma. Saint Peter shakes "his Miter'd locks" and bellows like a bull while "Camus, reverend Sire," a personification of the river Cam, that runs through Milton's Cambridge, goes "footing slow," an ancient, plodding, seemingly senile figure.
Memorizing this complex poem was a deep experience for me. I found that, in order to properly memorize the poem, I had to understand the subtleties of language and have at least a footnote or annotation's understanding of the dizzying array of references Milton threw in.
Working on "Lycidas" this way, it was astonishing how deeply the process took me into the poem. I learned things about meanings and relationships and sheer grammar in the poem that I could not have done from just deep analysis.
This was the start of a whole new era of memorization for me.
Since then, I have memorized dozens of poems, and I always find the process enlightening and exciting. Most of my memorization projects are much shorter than "Lycidas." They are usually somewhere between sonnet-sized and maybe 60 lines or so. I have tackled a few long ones, though. Once, I memorized Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey."
Memorizing poems takes me, in a strange way, inside the head of the poet who composed them. I have to understand the poem and its intricacies at a fairly subtle level, and I always feel like I am somehow being possessed by Milton, or Robert Frost, or Wordsworth.
In a future blog entry, I'll talk more about the process itself. Yes, I have a lot to say on this subject!
The poem grabbed me when I viewed John Adams' opera "Dr. Atomic," about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. The first act ends with Oppenheimer alone on the night before the world's first atomic bomb test, and he sings this fantastically dramatic aria. The text is "Holy Sonnet XIV."
This is the first poem I have memorized in a while, perhaps a year. The last one I "got by heart" was "Fern Hill," by Dylan Thomas. That one came as a kind of dare or challenge, since Jon W. had declared at one of our reading parties that he had tried to memorize that poem, and failed, as there is so much repeated imagery and language from stanza to stanza in the poem. The moment the words left his mouth, I knew I had to memorize that poem.
Jon was right about the subtle changes in the repeated language in the poem, though. Its six nine-line stanzas all follow the same pattern of irregularly long or short lines, with the logic of the relation of the lines the same in each, also. Where the second stanza has "In the sun that is young once only," stanza five echoes, "In the sun born over and over" and the last stanza shifts to "In the moon that is always rising." It gets far more subtle and complicated than that when such repetitions and changes come in many lines, and the poem becomes a tapestry of imagery about the change of seasons and of the seasons of a life.
That was a fun one to memorize, I have to say.
I first started memorizing poems in my later days of college. I took a Shakespeare class where the professor, Elihu Pearlman, offered a strange challenge to his students. Instead of taking his rather tough final exam, any student could choose to opt out by performing a particular feat of memorization. If you memorized John Milton's "Lycidas" and presented it one-on-one to the prof. in his office, you did not have to take the final exam.
I started memorizing the poem, but did not really take the intriguing challenge seriously. At 193 lines, "Lycidas" is somewhat daunting. I memorized the first three sections of the poem, about 36 lines, and took the exam.
But after I graduated, I remembered Professor Pearlman's challenge. So I took up "Lycidas" again, working on it day after day, going through the lines in the car, in the bathroom, before I went to sleep, all throughout the day. And I finally got it all down.
"Lycidas" is an intricate and beautiful poem by John Milton, whom Elihu Pearlman puckishly referred to as "the second-best poet in the English language." In it, Milton reinvents a classical form, the Pastoral Elegy. Milton is ostensibly mourning the death by drowning of his Cambridge classmate, Edward King. But he uses the poem as a platform to severely criticize "our corrupted Clergy, then in their height," as the poem's extended headnote has it.
Typical with Milton, the poem is a wild mixture of classical and Christian, with references just exploding out the seams. He throws in Greek gods next to Christian saints, with the center of the piece a funeral procession whose riot of figures reminds me of Fellini's outrageous ecclesiastical fashion show in Roma. Saint Peter shakes "his Miter'd locks" and bellows like a bull while "Camus, reverend Sire," a personification of the river Cam, that runs through Milton's Cambridge, goes "footing slow," an ancient, plodding, seemingly senile figure.
Memorizing this complex poem was a deep experience for me. I found that, in order to properly memorize the poem, I had to understand the subtleties of language and have at least a footnote or annotation's understanding of the dizzying array of references Milton threw in.
Working on "Lycidas" this way, it was astonishing how deeply the process took me into the poem. I learned things about meanings and relationships and sheer grammar in the poem that I could not have done from just deep analysis.
This was the start of a whole new era of memorization for me.
Since then, I have memorized dozens of poems, and I always find the process enlightening and exciting. Most of my memorization projects are much shorter than "Lycidas." They are usually somewhere between sonnet-sized and maybe 60 lines or so. I have tackled a few long ones, though. Once, I memorized Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey."
Memorizing poems takes me, in a strange way, inside the head of the poet who composed them. I have to understand the poem and its intricacies at a fairly subtle level, and I always feel like I am somehow being possessed by Milton, or Robert Frost, or Wordsworth.
In a future blog entry, I'll talk more about the process itself. Yes, I have a lot to say on this subject!
16 January 2009
Apologia
The holidays have come and gone in a whirl of turkey and wrapping paper.
And I have been untrue to you, O my blog!
It is nice to see you again, I have to say.
I have thought about you a lot. I have one largish entry in mind. And so I always think I don't have time to tackle that whole big thing right now.
But you know and I know I do. I do have time. I can write just a little bit on it, come back to it later, if it comes to that.
Well. Here we are.
You have been waiting here for me patiently. Nice to know.
Now I hear your gentle voice: "Welcome back."
And I have been untrue to you, O my blog!
It is nice to see you again, I have to say.
I have thought about you a lot. I have one largish entry in mind. And so I always think I don't have time to tackle that whole big thing right now.
But you know and I know I do. I do have time. I can write just a little bit on it, come back to it later, if it comes to that.
Well. Here we are.
You have been waiting here for me patiently. Nice to know.
Now I hear your gentle voice: "Welcome back."
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