Blame the Messenger

I particularly love the second paragraph of this ode to the semicolon.  It's from the Financial Times (excerpted by Amygdala):

I saw the documentary "Winged Migration" on DVD, and it got me to thinking a lot about magic and how breathtaking, uplifting miracles can become so disappointing (and worse than that -- actually negative, or an experience of spiritual diminishment) when one discovers the secret of how the trick works.  If you've seen the film, you know what truly magical moments were caught on camera.  Most of the scenes seem "impossible," so extraordinary are they.  I wasn't so much asking "how did they do it?" (because I knew they must have been in airplanes and holding cameras!), but more "how could they possibly have captured so many rare, once-in-a-lifetime occurrences?")  It was one of the most striking movie experiences of my life, and I have seen a lot of films (well-over three thousand films over the last decade alone).  Alas, I began watching the "making of" featurette on the DVD, and I was totally devastated.  The "secret" of the filmmakers was far more diabolical than I could have possibly imagined.  All of the magic drained away, and I was left feeling tricked (the bad kind of tricked -- as in swindled by con-men).  When a magician does something miraculous on stage, you've paid to be entertained and you delight in being fooled.  When a documentary filmmaker dupes you, it's a whole different story.  I found myself feeling outraged over and over again as I learned about the astonishingly elaborate methods the filmmakers employed to secure their footage (though they didn't put strings on the birds' claws and fly them like kites, such a method wasn't beneath them).  I actually had to shut off the DVD player after the worst revelation -- they crated up the pelicans and flew them in an airplane to Africa so as to record that leg of the birds' migratory "journey."  I would have far more enjoyed watching a cartoon about birds, or a LucasArts digital rendering of birds, because neither would have pretended to be a legitimate documentary.  Of course, it all boils down to packaging, doesn't it?  Had the sham-documentary filmmakers stated upfront that this film was an artistic depiction of how birds fly, and explained that all the birds in the film were actors (which is actually quite true, as the birds had been raised and imprinted by the filmmakers from eggs, then trained to fly on cue alongside the aircraft and to follow the sound of the squeeze horn), then I probably would have been quite amazed and delighted by so elaborate an endeavor!  As it was, they presented a fantastic illusion, then turned around and showed how they did it, leaving the viewer feeling gullible.  Had they been real wonder-workers instead of con-artists, they would have left the viewer feeling amazed, not duped.

SONG: Dime at a Time
ARTIST: Norma Jean

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

Two dollars in the jukebox...
And I'll put in the jukebox a dime at a time

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

Two dollars in the jukebox...
With each song on the jukebox I'm a quarter shorter

SONG: I Love Rock 'N Roll
ARTIST: The Arrows (covered by Joan Jett)

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

I love rock n' roll
So put another dime in the jukebox, baby
I love rock n' roll
So come an' take your time an' dance with me

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION-RESISTANCE:

I love rock n' roll
So drop another token and let's get smokin'
I love rock n' roll
The juke's not broken so dance with me

(Thanks to Gordon for suggesting this song)

Literary humorist Jonathan suggests that one day jukeboxes might accept only card-swipes,
a la Kinko's self-serve machines.  Just in case that happens, he suggests the following adjustment:

Big Three Gambit

I dreamed I was a comma (after having corrective surgery to remove my period half).  At last I indicated a slight pause separating two related but distinct terms!

Then I dreamed of a small stall advertising "The Wonders of Punctuation and Spelling," with a sign that said "The Mystery of the Semicolon Revealed!!!" and "See the Ampersand! (Small Extra Charge)," just as in THE WEE FREE MEN by Terry Pratchett.

Saint Flauntus
Patron of Blatant Disregard.

Abundant evidence of risk?  Light a candle to Saint Flauntus, so the tradition goes, and blaze forward!  Flauntus oversees gross recklessness, wanton desires, insubordination, willful misconduct, criminal negligence, off-road escapades, and pop art.

"Are you looking for trouble?"  Yes, because the philosopher Hegel said that with the end of conflict will come the end of history.

Believing One’s Own Press

Gregory proposes the establishment of a semicolon appreciation day.  He confesses:

I was walking through a college campus when I realized that I was late for a class (I believe it was Philosophy) that I had totally forgotten about.  I vowed then and there to totally drop the class, as I couldn't muster up the energy to deal with it, and I decided to spend the hour taking a very long walk around the perimeter of the campus.  Not long into my walk, I spotted a young woman up ahead doing a little dance by herself in a wide expanse of walkway.  She was dressed in a vaguely Middle Eastern hooded cape, with the hood a lighter shade (perhaps light blue) than the rest of the cape.  I stood several yards away (while typing this, I initially wrote "years" instead of "yards"... perhaps a Freudian typo) and watched her do an Arabesque dance with a sword.  At one point she thrust the sword forward and it flew through the air toward me, but in slow motion.  I easily dodged it and said, "You almost hit me!" to which she merely gave a Mona Lisa smile.  Then she thrust another sword toward me, and as it finally skidded to the ground (again in slow motion) I saw that the blade was covered in clear plastic, as if it were factory sealed.

SONG: Dime Piece
ARTIST: Nick Cannon (feat. Izzy)

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

are you a dime?
(it's drivin me outta my mind)

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

be a quarter?
(that's what I say when I court her)

There's a very funny piece entitled "The Punctuation Hunter" on the "Unremitting Failure" blog.  It concerns some people being cornered by a 48-point semicolon:


In other semicolon news, James J. Kilpatrick recently wrote a funny diatribe against the "obnoxious" semicolon, calling it "sissy" punctuation:

"Do I look like I'm made of money?"  Yes.  If money can mean assets, then your organs alone look like tens of thousands of dollars.

I dreamed I was a "semicolon butterfly" (polygonia interrogationis).  My wings were mottled with various shades of red and brown, and their tips were violet.  I floated off the page and lighted on an inkwell.  I uncurled my tongue and dipped it into the blue-black nectar.

Later that night, I dreamed I was listening to a financial report on the radio: "Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty-eight points off the TomJones Index."  It was uncannily like something out of THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS by Jasper Fforde.

Belief that Another is Being Fooled

Examples of Automotive Haiku from Car Talk:

Pardon me for yawning.  I’m just so bored with this trivial charade that I forgot what we were talking about.  And thank god for that, because I don’t think I could stay awake through another moment of such mindless droning.  Now if you’ll excuse me, whatever you said your name was, I have some comparatively challenging things to do with my life, like watching Wheel of Fortune.

SONG: Homeboy
ARTIST: Coolio

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

If I got a quarter then you got a dime
And you can call me up no matter what the time

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

If I got a dollar then you got a quarter
And you can leave a message on my tape recorder

Husbands and Knives:
Twenty Shocking Parallels in the Lives of
Yukio Mishima and Woody Allen

1. Residents of Westernized islands.
2. Short male persons.
3. Directors shunned by Hollywood.
4. Existentialists.
5. Commited public "suicide."
6. Expressed nostalgic yearning.
7. Avidly absorbed the culture of the East (or the Upper East Side).
8. Withstood vulgar curiosity about biographical anecdotes.
9. Obsessed with social disgrace.
10. Strong feelings about raw fish.
11. Involved with Asian women.
12. Interested in masks and disguises to express facets of their personality.
13. Fascinated by their own celebrity.
14. Recounted traumatic episodes from youth.
15. Attended tea ceremonies (or at least the Russian Tea Room).
16. Brandished phallic symbol representative of their art (sword/clarinet).
17. Forged in the smithy of their souls the uncreated conscience of their race.
18. Resisted fulfilling the role of son, husband, and father, yet desired to preserve ancestral tradition.
19. Wore costumes of period which they believed themselves to personify (Samurai robe/trenchcoat).
20. Died in their thoughts every morning.

Being What People Need You to Be

I dreamed I was late for class and couldn't find the room.

Later that night, I dreamed of having tea with Lewis Thomas again.  He said the most lovely things: "Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath."

"Is that a fact?"  That is not a fact, but is either a pronoun or an adjective.

Saint Widerwille
Patron of Irrational Aversions.

Saint Widerwille preached that "In the eyes of God, there is nothing irrational in an aversion to (fill in the blank) provided that one is prepared to accept the consequences."  Saint Widerwille himself was said to suffer irrational aversions to untoasted bread, gypsies, politicians, snakes, polystyrene cups, and people from New Jersey.  In his memoirs, he confessed that his greatest recurring nightmare involved taking communion from a wandering former Jersey statesman named Copperhead: "The moment he thrusts that unbaked wafer and plastic cup of wine toward me, I wake up screaming."

Beautiful Woman

Last night I fried an egg for dinner, and I dreamed about it that night.  In the dream, I intended to send my brother a picture of that egg with the caption "This is not god, nor the priesthood.  I will send you articles on it."

Ben Macintyre of The Times is against the bid to flush semicolons out of our prose — what he calls "semi-colonic irrigation."  He makes the following lovely point:

The heart doesn't simply open.  It continuously opens, like a fractal bloom.

Staring At the Sun




The biggest drawback to mirrorshades is that they simulate a state of permanent solar eclipse, a twilight world in which colors are distorted and shadows are deeper.  The sun has been both feared and revered throughout human history, but only a handful of people have actually had the courage to look it in the face.  Granted, the naked eye will sustain impairment if exposed to direct sunlight for too long.  Therefore, cyberpunk author Paul Di Filippo recommends optical implants as a solution.  “By stepping down the ratio of photons to electrons,” he suggests, “you can do such things as stare directly at the sun or at a welder’s flame without damage.”

But why stare into the sun in the first place?  Because it's dangerous.  Because it's deviant.  Because so few are man enough to try it.  Because radiation is natural.  Because it looked at you first.  Perhaps the best reason of all is that the sun frees us from the simplistic dogma of dualism.  Photons of light have no antiparticle.  That means that in the world of light there is no division between body and soul, good and evil, seer and scenery, past and future, man and fellow man.  In the world of light, 1 + 1 = 1.

Photographs of the sun are typically taken through telescopes.  Such photographs are pale substitutes for actually looking at the sun.  As naturalist Annie Dillard notes in an essay about witnessing a total eclipse, "The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience.  Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty and sensible picture, like something on a Christmas card."  Scientific instruments, then, limit our perception even as they extend the range of our vision.  No matter what apparatus we use to view the sun, at some point we will encounter a "blind spot."  Clearly, the naked eye (capable of detecting a single photon of light) or naked implant is the only way to go.

There are two steps to proper sun-staring.  First, stare at the sun with the eyes open.  This is not an easy thing to do.  Rochefoucauld, the Benjamin Franklin of France, once said that "Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye."  He was correct.  In his novel Staring at the Sun, Julian Barnes warns that "You can't stare at the sun for too long--not even the setting, quiet sun.  You would have to put your fingers in front of your face to do that."  So don't have any preconceptions that it's going to be simple or pleasant.  Try not to blink.  Try not to look away.  Shield your eyes with your fingers at first if you must, but then slowly spread your fingers to reveal the awesome light of the sun.  If you must look away then do so, but slowly bring your eyes back to the sun.  If you find yourself involuntarily blinking rapidly, hold your eyelids open with your fingers.

Second, stare at the sun with the eyes closed.  The sun's afterimage will remain under your eyelids, indelibly etched into your cornea.  James Patrick Kelley describes this phenomenon in his cyberpunk story "Solstice":  "Cage shut his eyes and still he could see it: blood red, flashing blue, veins pulsing across its surface."

What is the significance of this afterimage?  No doubt each person must find his omn answer to this question.  In her novel Century 21, Ewa Kuryluk attempts a philosophical answer.  She says that "We must preserve the sun's afterimage under our lids" because it forces us to confront "ideals, abstract beings which are neither bodies nor forces dwelling in bodies."  Perhaps she means that we can harness the sun's forces, snatch them from the physical body of the star, and carry them with us--literally within our eyelids.  In any case, Kuryluk seems to be touching upon a deeper truth about the perception of reality.  

The French poet Paul Claudel agrees with Kuryluk that we can carry the body of a star within our eyelids, making us the center of our own private solar system.  "We can see in the eye a sort of scaled down, portable sun," he says, "and therefore, a prototype of the ability to establish a radius from it to any point on the circumference."  The German poet Yvan Goll describes such a private solar system:


The Maja-Ratri, a Sanskrit text, says that light is the source of all thought, since light is a combustion of star evolution.  That star evolution exists in the inner dimensions of your mind as a phosphene explosion.  Psychologist Carl Jung once wrote that "when our senses react to real phenomena, sights, and sounds, they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the mind.  Within the mind they become psychic events, whose ultimate nature is unknowable."

If you're eventually going to have your eyes replaced anyway, why not burn them out in a single blaze of glory?  Besides, the combination of sunglasses and a walking stick is a timeless fashion statement.

From The Which Punctuation Mark Are You Test:

"Congratulations! You are the semicolon! You are the highest expression of punctuation; no one has more of a right to be proud. In the hands of a master, you will purr, sneering at commas, dismissing periods as beneath your contempt. You separate and connect at the same time, and no one does it better. The novice will find you difficult to come to terms with, but you need no one. You are secure in your elegance, knowing that you, and only you, have the power to mark the skill or incompetence of the craftsman. You have no natural enemies; all fear you. And never, NEVER let anyone tell you that you cannot appear in dialogue!"

Baiting a Hook

Speaking of semicolons, I stumbled upon the most marvelous poem by Matt "World's Best Writer Ever" Getty, entitled "Inside the Semicolon (Draft)."  Here's the first stanza:


To read more (you'll be glad you did), see the poetry section of Matt's website.

After six years of determined searching, Lars Rasmussen, a purveyor of fine used books, collected a complete alphabet of books with one letter for titles (including Scandinavian letters).  He was inspired by this quotation from James Joyce's Ulysses:

Have you read his F?
O yes, but I prefer Q.
Yes, but W is wonderful.
O yes, W.

Here's a strange dream:

I dreamed I was among a group of people being tortured very viciously.  Our assailants were cutting off hands and feet, using sharp metal rods for impaling, and so on.  I noticed that one of my fellow victims, a woman, had a tiny round bandage on her forehead.  I recognized this as evidence that she had been impaled through the head, and I deeply dreaded such a fate for myself.  (In retrospect, I associate this small circle with the Hindu "bindi" representing the Third Eye, but in the dream this didn't occur to me.)  At some point during my torture, I gained enlightenment.  I felt the music of the universe enter my body through my root chakra, and I felt myself "puffing up" like a balloon being filled, especially in my belly.  I floated in bliss for a while.  When my awareness focused back on the physical plane, I saw two Hindus holding up their hands in prayer and bowing to me reverently, acknowledging my holiness.  I returned the honor.  One of them opened a book to show me which deity was my overseer or lord in the greater hierarchy of things.  I don't remember the god's name, but I remember reading these words: "This god is associated with endings and beginnings."  I scoffed slightly, thinking that the description was too generic.  "That's what they're ALL associated with," I thought to myself.  (In retrospect, I realize that my overseer is Agni, the Hindu two-headed god of fire who rules over the digestive fires in the belly.)  I only vaguely recall subsequent scenes of my dream in which I was operating as an enlightened being and interacting with my followers.  I certainly felt happy bestowing benevolence.

Bait and Switch

SONG: Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)
ARTIST: Jim Croce

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

Thank you for your time
Oh, you've been so much more than kind
And you can keep the dime

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION AND CULTURAL TRENDS by Jonathan Caws-Elwitt:

Thanks for listening hard
On a cell phone in your yard
There goes my calling card

What makes a great story?  Marketing expert Seth Godin suggests that "The best stories don't teach people anything new.  Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place."  (Thanks, Gordon!)

In English:


Translated into Zoinx:


The Zoinx language (invented in 1993), does not have a fictional population of speakers or a corresponding history, yet "quite a bit of cultural information can be gathered from the language itself."