August 6, 2008
I dream I foresee my bald head and it has on it a profusion of disgusting moles. I am glad I still have hair to cover it. In the meantime, I am at a bodega in New York purchasing a coffee before I meet Gail, and the man behind the counter sells me two naked lady playing cards in addition to the coffee. Because of the shallowness of my pockets, the tops of the playing cards stick out and undoubtedly Gail will see them. I think of my excuse-I bought them for camp value and not for prurient reasons. [Read more →]

Tags: Fred's dreams // 1 Comment »

If you had asked me, a couple of months ago, what I thought of models and modeling, my response would have been to sneer.

Models were those vacuous, anorexic, self-absorbed girls whose only claim to fame was the ability to cake chemicals on their faces and strut down a runway, secure in the belief that the world revolved around them.

[Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment // 2 Comments »

It’s time for a few quick observations about the 2008 Olympics.

Michael Phelps is of course the story of these games, setting 7 world records as he won 8 gold medals, the most golds ever for any athlete in a single Olympics.

He brings his lifetime haul to 16 medals (14 gold and 2 bronze). The only person to ever have more medals is Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina, who earned 18 total medals (9 gold, 5 silver, 4 bronze) over the course of three Olympics (’56, ’60, ’64). Expect Phelps to eclipse her mark in 2012, as he is only 23 years old. If you’d care to see his astonishing 12,000 calorie-per-day diet, you can find it here.

[Read more →]

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I have, on occasion, impetuous bowels. Sometimes when I’m minding my own business, nature calls. Urgently. Nature doesn’t care if I’m stuck in traffic on I-95 or in IHOP. [Read more →]

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These cell phone companies are going to be in for some trouble one day when someone doesn’t receive a voice mail message on time. Can you imagine waking up one day to receive some big, potentially life changing news, only to realize that the news is a few days old?  Depending on the circumstances, things could get messy.

Here’s a harmless example of that. I had off this past Thursday, so I called my mother to see if she would let me hang out at her place for a bit. A few hours passed and I didn’t hear from her, so I decided to just drive home anyway to beat traffic and hope things would be ok. As I was driving by my apartment building searching for a place to park, I saw my mother walking in, so I knew all was well. When I got upstairs, mom told me that she had just left me a voice mail saying that it was, indeed, ok for me to visit. She left me that message around 4 PM on Thursday… I received it around 11 PM on Saturday.

To my knowledge, my mother doesn’t have any special powers that would allow her to manipulate the AT&T network, so I’m chalking it up to the company’s error. Think about it though — down the road, someone could miss out on important, time sensitive information like an illness in their family or a potential job interview. It sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit to me.

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In a transient, mobile, pseudo-egalitarian society such as modern America, it makes sense that the population would self-segregate by interest and familiarity to some degree. It’s not wrong. It’s human nature.

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The growing misuse of the apostrophe is reaching catastrophic proportions. Sometimes they’re common errors — it’s for its. Although the distinction between the meaning and use of these words is clear enough, they’re both real words, so we’d expect some people to not know which is which, just as some people apparently don’t know the difference between there and their and lose and loose. 

Some apostrophe errors are wild and bewildering, and we’re seeing them more and more. For some reason, people are putting apostrophes before the ’s’ in plural words: “Just wait till the boy’s come home.” I don’t know why anyone would think an apostrophe is needed when a word is made plural. One time, at a pizza place, on a scrolling electronic sign, I was informed that french fries’ were on the menu. Although most of us would never make that particular error, we all make mistakes when typing quick e-mails. However, many of these errors are showing up on printed material and painted signs. Look around for a couple of days and you’re bound to find some egregious examples of catpostrophe, on the sides of trucks, newspaper ads, and brochures. Aren’t there proofreaders looking for work somewhere?

Anyway, you’d have to search far and wide to find a catpostrophe as bad as this one, painted on the side of a building on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland, the letters two feet high:

Photo credit: Jared Boshnack

Tags: sticks & stones // 2 Comments »

I haven’t seen the movie Tropic Thunder, so can’t say whether it’s any good. I also can’t say whether or not the jokes involving the ‘Simple Jack’ subplot, about which I know nothing, degrade ’intellectually disabled’ people, as Tim Shriver claims, or whether they actually parody Hollywood and actors, who exploit retarded people in order to have a chance at winning awards, as Neil Miller claims. What I think about the term ‘intellectually disabled’ and the prospects of ‘retarded’ disappearing as an insult can be gleaned here.

What I can say is that the following Shriver statement is batshit insane: 

Mockery in any form, or for any purpose or directed at anyone, especially those least able to defend themselves, is neither funny nor acceptable. We must work together to bring it to an end.

Got that, folks? Remove the “especially those least able to defend themselves,” as that is merely the worst kind of mockery (hence the ‘especially’), not the meaning of the sentence. Tim Shriver wrote this column for cnn.com — this is not an off-the-cuff remark or an out-of-context quote. He had time to consider it and phrase it as he desired. He knew that many thousands would be reading it. So we can take it as Shriver’s considered opinion that “mockery in any form, or for any purpose or directed at anyone, is neither funny nor acceptable.”  

Tags: art & entertainment, sticks & stones // 4 Comments »

August 6, 2006
I dream I am in a truck that transforms into a gurney, and I find myself in a combination Home Depot and Jewish Community Center. I am slowly ascending staircases and heading towards a door. When my gurney hits the door I don’t make it through. A nearby gurney suddenly flies straight up into the air and I fear that my gurney is going next. Fortunately, my gurney tries the door again. On the other side of the door I am high above a huge indoor warehouse space filled with corded wood, water heaters, and boxes of large appliances. While there are no tracks, I fly up and down through this environment as if it were a roller coaster. I find I have limited steering ability.

[Read more →]

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For some casual sports fans, the Beijing Olympics can be hard to get into. Sure, we’re down with the mainstream sports like basketball and softball, but swimming, rowing and the like? Yes, it’s easy for some people to get up for them every four years, but not all. In those cases, it takes a little extra to pique the interest of the masses … like the good ol’ patriotism that can only be engineered by some foreigner talking smack about Americans. Leave it to a French swimmer to shoot his mouth off.

“The Americans? We’re going to smash them,” said Alain Bernard before being fed a steaming pile of crow by the United States 4×100 relay team, specifically comeback kid Jason Lezak, who earned every bit of that nickname on the last leg of the race despite being 32 years old. Bernard and his teammates can act like losing by a “fingertip” wasn’t a big deal, and really, a silver medal isn’t anything to sneeze at. But when you’re thisclose to victory … that kind of pain translates into any language.

The loss wasn’t for naught though — it motivated at least one bar full of karaoke singing, beer drinking patrons to stop their activities to cheer for the U.S. in unison. I never thought I’d say this, but thank goodness for the French.

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Robert: I’ve been thinking about the amazing number of online sites and magazines out there. Do you think people who write for these sites actually read the work of others on those sites? I’m sensing we’re in the “I write for it but don’t read it” era of writing and publishing. Perhaps it has always been thus. I don’t know if most contributors to academic publications read most of the work in the publications they write for … am I wrong? Yet now the proliferation of sites makes the imbalance between writing and reading more pronounced. And of course there is the question of whether there is anything wrong with this emphasis on production and writing as opposed to reading? As a teacher, I too am emphasizing writing more than reading, trying to get my students to write their way into engaging a subject. Any thoughts on this?

  Paula: You raise a point that does have application to myself. I write for lots of journals, both print and online, and I certainly don’t read everything in those journals. [Read more →]

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May 25, 2008
I dream I am sleeping in my old bed in Northeast Philadelphia and I wake up to see a man I don’t know in the house. I am not angry or scared, but I want to know who the man is. He answers politely, though evasively. This basic situation happens three times with different people in different versions of my old house. Eventually, I run wildly looking for secret entrances to discover where these people are coming in. Later in the day I meet one of them in a deli line, and beat him with a lighting fixture that I wield like a mace. I can see on the television that Conan O’Brien is preparing to play the male lead in a post-modern production of Gypsy.

[Read more →]

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Some things speak for themselves:

In 2001, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2008 games to China, Wang Wei, the leader of China’s bid told reporters: “We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China.”

But for many reporters there now, it’s still unclear how free they will be able to report or not, as the restrictions and red tape seem almost endless, and they never know whether they’ve covered all their bases. “We already have to tell the Chinese everywhere we want to be in August, and what time,” one TV broadcaster, who preferred to remain anonymous, recently told the Associated Press. “We have to provide a list of the guests who will be interviewed and the content of the interview.”

That is, some things speak for themselves where permitted. [Read more →]

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A recent John McCain television ad attempts to depict Barack Obama as a “celebrity” on the order of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, who make brief appearances in the ad, long enough — the McCain admen hope — for the average American, never a too discerning individual, to formulate somewhere in his often numbskull brain a few blurry equations. If these ads did not actually “define” candidates, as the admen intend (in this case that Obama is an “elitist,” whatever that means and whatever effect it has on his ability to govern), they would be laughable for the adolescent perspective from which they emerge. Not that history hasn’t shown that such ads don’t work; they apparently do: think Willie Horton and John Kerry. 

Political campaigns as played by the Republicans is a pretty nasty business; no tactic is low, cynical or pernicious enough as long as it can sway a voter away from the opposition. [Read more →]

Tags: his & hers, rulers & ruled // 5 Comments »

Every serial killer biography begins with a kid in the forest torturing squirrels.

When I was 13 and 14, I would go to the Poconos with my friend Eric, his older sister, and their parents. They had a house. We’d usually stay for two nights. [Read more →]

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June 30, 2008
I dream I am in graduate school doing a class presentation on an elaborate circus set. I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I make it all very obtuse and ironic as I swing from one piece of apparatus to another. There is a competitor who is swinging, but his irony is not as good as mine. Later on, I am teaching a seventh grade class in which I insist that all lessons are to be taught while singing. My teaching assistant, Kevin Cooney, is not thrilled with my edict, but he acquits himself well. I find that the kids are getting overly excited. [Read more →]

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We are pleased to announce that Mean Martin Manning, a novel by our very own Scott Stein, was reviewed yesterday by the American Spectator:

Crafting a breezily subversive, funny narrative out of a barely hyperbolized modern American zeitgeist, Stein spins perhaps a bit too-timely-for-comfort cautionary tale.

Read the whole thing.

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I had an opportunity, recently, to reflect on the nature of man’s search for unique ways to express his creative drive in socially acceptable fashion.

My, that sounded pretentious, didn’t it? The truth is that I got frustrated and didn’t have a clue why. This led to one of those moments I, like most people, avoid like the plague.

Self-evaluation. [Read more →]

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(Warning: Plot spoilers ahead)

Paula: The movie Hancock, starring Will Smith, recently opened in theaters to excellent reviews. Smith plays a surly superhero who gets “reformed” through the intervention of a good-hearted PR guy played by Jason Bateman. Bateman is married to preternaturally blonde Charlize Theron, who it turns out has been keeping under wraps the fact that she is a superhero, too. Most of the hype and resulting reviews claim the movie is no ordinary superhero movie but a kind of allegory about the problem of being human. I’m frankly puzzled. The movie struck me as an unsettling and unsatisfying amalgam of possibly racist motifs. [Read more →]

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Plenty has been written about humans bonding with dogs (Old Yeller, The Call of the Wild, The Voice of Bugle Ann) or with horses (National Velvet, The Black Stallion), but not much about humans bonding with birds. Which seems strange, since falconry certainly has an ancient pedigree (the earliest evidence of it dates to the eighth century B.C.).

Nowadays birds are pretty popular. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, nearly 48 million Americans have taken up bird-watching as a hobby. Throughout the pleasanter months of the year a good many of those millions will take to field, forest and wetland to renew their acquaintance with the feathered flocks.

Most will engage in just looking at them, hoping to add another name to the list of those they’ve seen. But avian encounters can prove a good deal more profound than that, as two books in the outstanding NYRB Classics series conclusively demonstrate. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, wild things // 1 Comment »