Photo of the Week

These are some jellyfish that I photographed in Long Island Sound during the scuba-diving class I take from the Learning Annex. The instructor assured us that there weren't a lot of jellyfish in the area, but obviously there were. I was afraid of being stung, but more afraid of the shark that swam by....

Actually, I just made that up. I snapped this photo at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, New Jersey, yesterday. Click it for a closer view. I took a lot of other photos there, too, of colorful fish and anemones.

Word of the Day: legatee

legatee (n)

A person who receives a legacy (a bequest, an inheritance) in a will.

"You don't," said Mr. Pecksniff, with a melancholy pressure of his hand, "quite understand my nature yet, I find. No, Sir, I am not a legatee. I am proud to say I am not a legatee. I am proud to say that neither of my children is a legatee. And yet, Sir, I was with him at his own request. He understood me somewhat better, Sir. He wrote and said, 'I am sick. I am sinking. Come to me!' I went to him. I sat beside his bed, Sir, and I stood beside his grave. Yes, at the risk of offending even you, I did it, Sir. Though the avowal should lead to our instant separation, and to the severing of those tender ties between us which have recently been formed, I make it. But I am not a legatee," said Mr. Pecksniff, smiling dispassionately; "and I never expected to be a legatee. I knew better!"
--Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

Dickens was a genius at making up odd, rather comical Anglo-Saxon names: Martin Chuzzlewit, Mr. Pecksniff, Mr. Pickwick, Alfred Jingle, Augustus Snodgrass, Mr. Bumble, Vincent Crummles, Wackford Squeers, Dick Swiveller, Mr. Toots, Betsey Trotwood, Uriah Heep, Honoria Dedlock, William Guppy, Joshua Smallweed, Mrs. Jellyby, Herbert Pocket, Nicodemus Boffin, and of course, Ebenezer Scrooge. (These are all from here.)

How would you like to go through life with a name like Wackford Squeers or, heavens, Dick Swiveller? Imagine the playground teasing.... I wouldn't mind having a distinctive name like Nicodemus Boffin, though, instead of the common one I share with thousands across the nation, some unsavory.

(Legatee, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)

I Write Like...David Foster Wallace?

I Write Like is a website that purports to tell you what famous scribbler you write like, by analyzing your word choice and writing style and comparing them to those of famous authors. I plugged my "Long, Strange Trip" blog post below into their analyzer, and the celebrity scrivener I most write like turns out to be David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, which I've never read. Interesting. I like the words he circled in his dictionary (see "Word of the Day" posts below) and that article about David Lynch he wrote. According to Wikipedia, "Wallace's writing voice is a postmodern mixture of high- and low-brow linguistic traits. He juxtaposes, often within a single sentence, colloquialisms and polysyllabic, obscure, or esoteric words."

Here is some DFW writing I admire. Pity he offed himself.

(via The Presurfer)

Brain Dump

WEATHER SUMMARY FOR SOUTHEASTERN NY, NORTHEASTERN NJ AND SOUTHERN CT MENTALITIES
U.S. EAST COAST WEATHER SERVICE
359 PM EDT TUE JUL 13 2010

A DEVELOPING DEPRESSION AND ASSOCIATED MOPING WILL CONTINUE TO BRING DESPONDENCE AND FEELINGS OF NON-EXISTENCE THIS EVENING AND OVERNIGHT. ANGUISH AND BLUBBERING MAY BE HEAVY AT TIMES...ESPECIALLY IN AREAS WHERE DISAPPOINTMENTS OCCUR. SUICIDE RATES WILL BE IN THE UPPER 60S TO MIDDLE 70S.

SOME SPIKES IN THE DESPAIR AND A PASSING UPPER LEVEL PANIC ATTACK ON WEDNESDAY MAY LEAD TO SCATTERED ANGST AND WAILING. HIGH RATES OF ANXIETY WILL RANGE FROM THE MIDDLE 80S TO NEAR 90.

LIGHTHEARTEDNESS RETURNS FOR THURSDAY.

Much Ado about NOTHING

A Long, Strange Trip

The weekend car trip from Jersey City to upstate New York had been uneventful. Leaving the Thruway, I turned onto Route 28, a two-lane country road, which eventually connects to Route 20, which takes me directly to my mom's house. Route 28 makes its winding way several miles up a long hill, past farms and fields, and it's rare to see more than a few other cars while driving it.

So I was surprised when I had to stop for a long line of traffic ahead of me. "There must be an accident," I thought, "a bad one if there's this many cars stopped dead on old Route 28." I thought maybe a truck had lost its brakes while coming down the hill and struck a car. Maybe the state police had stopped traffic while the wreckage was being removed. Maybe they'd start directing traffic around it in a minute or two. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

After about 45 minutes, the cars ahead still hadn't moved more than a few feet, and now there was a line of cars behind me, too. I began to notice something peculiar about the other drivers. Some were getting out of their cars and talking to each other as if they were friends. And most of them didn't look like rural upstaters but instead like hippies -- long-haired, tie-dyed, multi-generational hippies -- a class of people I thought had pretty much vanished decades ago. This was beginning to feel like a bizarre dream.

"What the hell is going on," I thought. I rolled down the window, intending to ask one of the passing "freaks", a guy in sandals wearing a yellow T-shirt that said "Play Dead", if he knew what the hold-up was. Before I could say anything, he flashed a grin and asked, "You going to the Dead concert?"

"Uhh, no..." I said, feeling confused. The Dead? The Grateful Dead? Weren't they...dead? Hadn't I heard that their leader, Jerry Garcia, had died? This was starting to make sense, though. There was no accident. This was a traffic jam -- a hippie traffic jam of people trying to get to a rock concert. Woodstock Nation, or the 21st-century equivalent, was keeping me from my mommy. "How much further is it to the concert?" I asked. "Five miles!" the guy said, still smiling. "You might want to get off on one of the side roads."

There was indeed a side-road turn-off just a few feet ahead. I had no idea where it might lead, but I decided I might as well try it. It felt good to be moving again, but after a few twists and turns the road brought me right back into the line of cars on Route 28 again.

I decided to be stoical and just observe the slow-moving caravan. Some people had abandoned their cars and were apparently walking to the concert, which I guessed must be in some farmer's field. I noticed that some of the local residents along Route 28 had signs in their driveways offering ten-dollar parking. So they knew about this huge upstate concert -- why was it news to me?

Gazing at the car ahead, I could see that it was full of partiers, including a girl with blonde dreadlocks who had her bare feet sticking out of the window. She was laughing about something. After a while, she got out of the car and strolled into some tall reeds by the roadside. The people in her car were shouting something at her. She turned and gave them "the finger." Then she squatted down into the reeds. "When you've got to go, you've got to go," I thought.

Eventually, the line of cars ahead of me began to go, too -- inching at first, but then at about 10 miles per hour. We came to another side-road turn-off that must have led directly to the concert site. There were two state troopers directing the cars to turn there. They seemed amused when I indicated that I wanted to go straight, but they motioned me forward.

Suddenly, I was on the open road again, cruising along at 60 mph with Route 28 all to myself. Truckin'....

I later found out that the concert was by former members of the Grateful Dead (formerly Dead members?), and that it was held on the grounds of a dead millionaire's country estate, which had been turned into a concert venue. Apparently, the concert hadn't been publicized much, if at all. I guess the Deadhead cult network doesn't need mainstream media to announce its plans.

Moral of the story: as Stephen King once said, "When you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses."

Photo of the Week

This is the mysterious medieval arch whose presence in dear old Jersey City (Heights), at Pershing Field, has never been fully explained. Carbon dating indicates that it dates from the 13th century, and the cut and arrangement of the stones is said to be quite similar to those used in Exeter Cathedral in England. Archaeologists have theorized that medieval British explorers visited the area but then realized that they were not, in fact, in Gibraltar, and left before finishing the construction of their castle or fortress.

Actually, I just made that up. This arch was part of Jersey City's old (but not that old) medieval-style Armory building that once stood at Montgomery Street and Bergen Avenue. It was destroyed (burned, I think) in 1927. The arch survived and was moved to Pershing Field. The turrets are inhabited by pigeons, as I discovered while taking this photo. Click it for a closer view, my lords and ladies.

Word of the Day: kohl

kohl (n)

A cosmetic used to darken the eyelids. (Think Cleopatra or Jack Sparrow, not a former German chancellor)

"A girl like Claudia could make Eagle Scouts steal from their grandmothers. She wore makeup with the brand name Urban Decay. She had bottle red hair and kohl-deepened eyes, and she was as seductive as Spanish fly on Cody's defenseless adolescent libido."
--Susan Wiggs, The You I Never Knew

Hmmm, "Urban Decay". You can see the photos I've contributed to the Urban Decay group on Flickr here. Pretty pictures of ugly things.

(Kohl, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Saw a black guy on a motorcycle wearing a Nazi-style helmet today. Seemed odd.... Got stuck in a five-mile hippie traffic jam last weekend on a country road in upstate New York. They were all on their way to a Dead concert (or a concert by formerly Dead members, or something). Frustrated by the delay at first, then decided it might make a good basis for a short story, if I can figure out how to end it.... Played a clarinet (well, got some notes out of it) last Monday, for the first time since high school. My nephew got an old one from someone and wants to learn to play, and I showed him how to get something other than squeaks from it. My feeling: he should forget the horn and get a bass guitar.... Hot, steamy day... that revolving door... The sudden 30-degree difference when going from outside to inside makes me queasy....

Random Sequence

Scenario 16 (excerpt 1)

The Qualification Gazebo, or Crank It Up

Arthur, a professional retiree, was an arm-chair intellectual. His primary concern (which his psychiatrist secretly considered an hilarious pathology) was "analysis smog". This he defined as the silly, mistaken interpretations of significant trends and events by what he called "minds from beyond" -- the class of out-of-reach, out-of-touch, ivory-tower pundits whose opinions "polluted" the pages of elite newspapers and websites, and the windy chat shows of the cable networks. He considered their collective views to be the "oblivious vista" of a of cabal of cranks, whose minds had turned to gelatin.

Determined to provide an alternative to their "jelly zone" of commentary, Arthur wrote letters to the editor and posted in the comment sections of websites. Both means of Arthurian expression were almost universally ignored.

Frustrated, Arthur constructed an elaborate "Qualification Gazebo" in his front yard, where passers-by could sit and hear his refutations of daily editorials and CNN transcripts. Few did, although some stopped by in the summer months when he began to offer free piña coladas. They would feign interest, nodding politely while they sipped. Otherwise, Arthur simply talked to himself, conveyed his opinions in random phone calls, or shouted at whoever happened to be walking or driving past his house.

Arthur's long-suffering wife tolerated this activity, though she could be seen ruefully shaking her head at times in the picture window behind the gazebo, as Arthur pontificated. "I just humor him," she told anyone who inquired. "He's such a tension godzilla when he hears or reads anything he disagrees with. Let him blow off his steam." Arthur's psychiatrist fully agreed.

Fish Food for Thought

Agree? More clip-art philosophy by me (and C.S. Lewis). Click here for the BIG fish.

Photo of the Week

Happy 4th of July weekend, or Independence Day as it's actually called. Somehow, this picture (that I snapped a few years ago) symbolizes, to me, the state of the nation these days. The picture is in focus but the flag is fuzzy. Things are out of sync. Click it for a closer view, but don't expect clarity. Here's something to think about: What do we need independence from today?

Quotations from Aunt Betty

Below are some quotes from Aunt Betty, the member of the extended in-law family who died recently. She was quite an amusing conversationalist and enjoyed sending us witty postcards filled with charming non-sequiturs, nonsense, and other bon mots.

"Would love to see you but have no excuse as my crucial non-cooperative light bulb was replaced Thursday."

"I have large mole hills overlooking greenery in back. What to do and be good environmentalist?? At least they are architects of sorts."

"Richard has selected a lovely refrigerator that does not depend for a living on BLUE ICE."

"Whether it's a poem, a jingle, a verse, a charade, an advent window or a watchacalit, I welcome it or grabbit for my Holiday Loquat tree with loving pause (paws?)"

"Hi from the land of recalls where the Terminator has just held his press conference. I'm going to the dental surgeon to be cheered up." [Aunt Betty lived in Kahleefornyuh.]

"Escargot is disappointed, as he expected to be honored on the new stamp, as indeed he should have been."

"Holly Davis sometimes leaves a note asking me if my 'fixer upper' house is for sale. She has given me a free pad (to suggest I find another pad?)"

"I have wisely learned over the years to be paranoid."