clerihews

I'm reading Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History [Amazon], which, like his earlier book on Cod, is a wealth of facts, somewhat facts, and trivial information so trivial even I have not previously learned it.

Random example. In the section on the discovery of sodium, the first point Kurlansky makes about Sir Humphry Davy, said discoverer, is that he had the first clerihew written about him. A clerihew is "a pseudo-biographical verse of two rhymed couplets in which the subejct's name makes one of the rhymes." As in: "Sir Humphry Davy/Abominated gravy./He lived in odium/Of having discovered sodium."

Importantly, the definition does not say anything about good verse.

Kurlansky also relates, charmingly, that at a young age Davy was offered "a job researching medical uses of gasses, which may have been a twenty-year-old's dream job."

Anyway. Having learned what a clerihew is, I of course had to take some time out of my day to compose one. And I've come to the important preliminary conclusion that very little rhymes with "Laszlo." Here's a shot:

Joseph Laszlo
Happy? Alas, no.
A brain as large as a mid-size planet
And a heart that's made of solid granite.

Perhaps I'll stick to haiku.

one sentence review: steamboy

Steamboy: In a life thus far filled with more than its share of disappointments, "Steamboy" was not nearly the least of them.

piercing observations

I recently obtained my first deliberately introduced, aesthetically purposed, jewelry-bearing hole in my body. At 33, it's somewhat late to be starting doing this kind of thing. But better late than never.

While the experience of getting said hole installed was exciting, and may be worth a story or two another day, also interesting has been my reaction since then. For instance, although it's not in a place readily visible in my day-to-day life, for the first couple of weeks at least I felt somewhat compelled to tell people about it. Not strangers on the street or anything, but at least certain friends who probably, truth be told, were happier not knowing. It's one of those tree falls in the forest things, though: if a man does something radically out of character, and no one sees it, has he really done anything radically out of character at all? Answer: not unless he tells everyone he knows, and proves it to certain strategic people who can vouch for him to others.

Generally speaking, the conversation goes like this:

Someone Else: "...So, what else is new?" [Note: This can be a dangerous question.]
Me: "Oh, not much. Work's going okay. Taking a Japanese class. Oh, got a piercing…"
Someone Else: "WHAT? WHERE did you get pierced?"
Me: "Oh, Boston."
Someone Else: "No, no, WHERE on your body?"
Me: "Oh. You should have specified that… Left nipple."
Someone Else: "Did it HURT?"
Me: "What do you think?"
Someone Else: "Why the hell would you do that?"
Me: "It's a manifestation of my recently embarked upon desire to spend more time as a physical person rather than purely living a life of the mind. I see it as a permanent bodily change symbolizing a momentary intensity of feeling (i.e., pain) that in turn reminds me that my being is comprised of both body and for lack of a better word spirit, though of course I'm still not convinced of the existence, or non-existence, of an immortal soul, regardless of which I do believe that ignoring either of those aforementioned parts in favor of the other results in a less than complete whole."
Someone Else: "I just remembered…um…I have to go someplace far away now."

Actually that last bit is a joke. I know enough about human interaction not to say that sort of thing. Mostly I say "Oh, I just think they look nice is all" and leave it at that.

By the way, having what some friends consider somewhat Howard Hughesian phobias where germs are concerned, the only place I'd do something like this is Tribal Ways in Boston. They were great; Aaron is very, very good at putting holes in people.

the best ideas are stolen

One of the things I'd previously published to this site's former incarnation that made me most happy was the following graph, which I swear I believed I thought of entirely on my own.

I was somewhat disconsolate when, a month or two ago, I caught a rerun of the Simpsons episode where Homer gets the crayon removed from his brain and becomes super-intelligent, only to discover how much life sucks for those of us who are. He asks Lisa how she copes, and she produces this graph, adding, "I make lots of graphs." So, okay, apparently I stole this idea, and so completely internalized it I thought it was my own. Lisa also says that her other coping mechanisms include "Chai tea...T'ai chi..."

I also recommend building very mopey websites, and occasional outbursts of irrational violence.

katamari davinci

Okay this is pretty inappropriate for this space, which really should focus on me me me, and melancholy, sad, grumpy, or miserable things. But for a good chunk of time in the past year Katamari Damacy has provided a small, welcome ray of very weird sunshine in my life, and this wonderfully clever and slightly blasphemous take on the Prince's adventures is worth a nod here as well. Yay.

When, oh when, will some clever soul build a Flash video with the Prince rolling through Great Art of the Ages? Some clever soul that's not me, that is.

creation myths

I wonder sometimes (okay, constantly) why I am the way I am. These arguments, as they always do, boil down to nature versus nurture. And I tend to assume the answer's nurture. I mean, what wacky womb-bound chemical imbalance leads to one being born with a sort of sophisticated, gloomy, gothic streak?

And yet, in some ways, I go way back. When I was a kid I never wanted to be something cute or funny for Halloween. Scary was where it was at for me. I can remember my parents making me some great costumes, too. A spider one year, a skeleton...they were super.

My vampire fascination is really old too. Aside from the inevitable Halloween costume, when you're the only kid (sisters aside) in your hometown with a Central European last name, there's not much heritage to claim kinship to besides Dracula. I can remember when I was very small my lower canines were pointy and I would go around with my lower jaw thrust out thinking I was scary. I think the effect was probably more bulldog than night creature, but bless my little heart, I was trying. Favorite muppet: The Count (in a very close race with Oscar the Grouch). Favorite cereal: Count Chocula. Really, if you look for them, the pieces were all there very early on.

I remember when I was in, probably middle school, they used to show reruns of the Addams Family and the Munsters after school, and I quickly decided the dark, urbane, weird Addamses were far more to my liking than boring, suburban Herman and Lily and kin. It was in high school that I discovered Charles Addams, and I had our local library interlibrary loan any collections of his cartoons that it could find.

Maybe the weirdest premonitory thing about me when I was a kid though was my discovery of Spy magazine when I was, oh, in 9th grade or so. I don't recall what did it, probably it was the old annual 100 most annoying people places and things issue...but for whatever reason I'd always seek out Spy when we went anyplace with a bookstore (that is, not my home town. Or the town after that. Or the town after that.) God knows back in the day I didn't know the New Yorker from New York Magazine, and my exposure to popular culture was limited to network TV (and this was when there were 3 networks, kids). But something about being cleverer than the rich and famous, and spiteful about it, ah, it spoke to me from across all the thousands of miles between Manhattan and Middle of Nowhere, Hawai'i. That I might someday move to New York wasn't even a glimmer of a dream then--I didn't even think about Columbia until the summer before my senior year of high school. And yet, again, the child is father to the somewhat immature man, and really, maybe how I turned out isn't all that surprising after all.

sellout

I suck. To my credit, I fought against this blogging thing. I did. I held out a good long time. My pal Cormac gave in long ago.

But I bow to inevitability, and embrace my suckitude, and abandon my lovingly crafted, delicate, HTML-coded stylings for...a blog.

In the hope that this becomes a place of more than just very occasional updates and mostly barren emptiness. Although, to its credit, in that form at least it did indeed accurately reflect my life.