Tuesday August 19 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
Is this a famous painting? I don't know. I know even less about art than I do about postcards. She looks like someone's least favorite high school English teacher.
Sunday August 3 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
This 1910 Easter postcard of flowers with faces foreshadowed the equally unsettling images of Anne Geddes. I worked in a bookstore during the heyday of Anne Geddes. Her photographs of babies posed as non-baby items were all over the place. It didn't make for a pleasant working environment.
Tuesday July 28 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
Here are scenes of devastation from the 1906 earthquake and ensuing fire in San Francisco. Nothing cheers one up like reaching into the mailbox and pulling out some devastation.
Thursday July 17 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
No, I won't wait for you. What are you, some kind of human volcano? Some things from 1905 just don't translate into the modern world.
[LATER]
I've concluded that he's not saying "I will blow (i.e. explode) in about _____". He's saying "I will blow in (i.e. arrive) about _____". Nevertheless, the grey-streaked
yellow pants remain a questionable choice.
Thursday June 26 2008
Sunday June 15 2008
Tuesday June 10 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
Here are more postcards of very young children acting like adults. The first is from 1910, the second undated.
Tuesday June 3 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
Before the invention of the Segway, the ostrich cart must have looked like the future of transportation.
The back of the card contains the following warning:
IN THE SPACE BELOW MAY BE WRITTEN SENDER'S NAME AND ADDRESS
(NO OTHER WRITING AND COMMUNICATIONS AFTER MARCH 1st 1907.)
March 1, 1907, was the date on which the US Postal Service first allowed the "divided back" postcard, in which half of the card's back could be used for a message, rather
than the entire back being reserved for the address. I think that they should have written "No other writing and communications before March 1st 1907."
Wednesday May 28 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
This 1937 card is not at all weird, but I include it for historical interest. The subject is the RCA Building at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. The RCA Building was built in 1933;
today it is known as the GE Building. It is currently the home of the NBC Nightly News, Saturday Night Live,
and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Even the address has become famous.
Here is a more modern view of the same scene, with the addition of freaky spider sculptures.
Thursday May 22 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
"The Initiation of the Tenderfoot" is the title of this card from Montana in 1911. I don't know what's happening here, but I can't imagine it ending well.
Monday May 19 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
Drawings of supposedly cute young children were a popular theme for postcards at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. A technique to supposedly enhance the cuteness
was to have the children act like adults, as seen in these two cards, one from 1909, and the other from 1916.
I hope that the boy in the second card sees himself as a Don Juan, and not a Ted Bundy.
Monday May 12 2008
Friday May 9 2008
Postcards From Bill's Edge
My maternal grandmother amassed a large collection of postcards over her lifetime, particularly while she was attending a boarding school in Switzerland, from age nine to fourteen.
Most of the cards depict what would be expected—buildings, scenery, flowers, dogs. But there is a small portion of the collection that can only be described as deeply weird.
I don't know much about postcards, but I know weird; I have scanned the weirdest of the cards (mostly from about 1905 to 1920) and will be presenting them on the blog.
Scanning old postcards and displaying them on a blog feels very internetty, like something James Lileks would do.
We start out with an undated card showing ... something that evidently made sense a hundred years ago. Or maybe I am wrong, and carting a humongous egg through a moonlit
landscape is a timeless pleasure.
Wednesday April 2 2008
Bill & The Kid, Part Two
The night after my Kid Rock dream I had another dream about low-brow rock.
I dreamed that I was in a mall in New York State. How and why I went there were explained in the dream, but they are not important. What is important is that KISS was
performing in the mall, in full makeup. And, in what might seem blasphemy to the true KISS fan, there were two other members in addition to the standard four, also in full KISS makeup.
One played a synthesizer that produced a swooshing, flanged sound. The other had two metal sheet-music stands. He
banged the stands together like a pair of cymbals in time to the song. This new, expanded KISS played, swooshed, and banged. They sang only one line, over and over:
I wanna take on the rock and roll of mysterious man.
As I stood there, the voice of a music critic somehow appeared in my head, saying that the song was "nine minutes long" and "unlistenable." I was glad that the song was nine minutes long,
because that would give me time to go out to my car in the mall parking lot. But sadly, as I started walking toward the exit, the band concluded its epic.
As soon as I woke up, I wrote down the strange lyric. In fact, I wrote it down twice, once to record the words and their pitches, and again to record the meter. It turns out to have
quite a strange meter. The "I" is three beats long; the whole thing works out to two measures, the first with six beats, and the second with eight.
"Mysterious Man" might sound to some like a forgotten Forties comic book superhero. But in the dream it seemed obvious to me that "man" was being used to mean "the human race."
The song was a metaphor stating that KISS wanted to understand the mysteries of humanity, of the human experience.
I am not much of a KISS fan, but even I can tell that (despite the shared phrase "rock and roll") there is quite a conceptual difference between, on the one had, rocking and rolling all
night and partying every day, and, on the other, taking on the rock and roll of mysterious man. I suspect that my dream was influenced by an article that I once read in a guitar magazine
about Music From the Elder, KISS's failed 1981 art-rock story album. I have never heard Music from the Elder. In researching this blog entry, though, I did come across the lyrics, and they
are terminally awesome. Check. It. Out.
Monday March 31 2008
Bill & The Kid, Part One
It would be nice if every day I could walk into a Subway restaurant and be mistaken for a native of Bangladesh.
But it doesn't happen. To find a subject for blogging, I have to look back again to Christmas vacation, in this case a dream that I had.
In the dream, I was alone in a room, looking at drawings of numerous recently discovered species of ankylosaurian
dinosaurs. The pictures were oddly cartoonish, and they showed the ankylosaurs as bipedal. As we all know, ankylosaurs were not bipedal. I hope that we all know that. Maybe
we don't.
Suddenly Kid Rock walked into the room. I felt that I should say something to him.
"What do you think about this dinosaur?" I asked Kid Rock, pointing at one of the ankylosaurs.
If I were to try that in real life, Kid Rock would probably offer to fight me at an IHOP. But in the dream, he asked if a model of that
species would soon go on display in a nearby museum. I remembered (as one in dreams will remember things that never happened) that indeed it had been announced that that
particular species would be showcased as a life-sized model in a museum display, and so answered affirmatively.
Kid Rock then began a discourse on why the model would fall apart because it hadn't been properly constructed, and the different parts didn't balance. I was impressed by his relative erudition.
It turned out that both Kid Rock and the ankylosaurs had surprises for me.
Thursday March 6 2008
Bill v. Bill
I have the suspicion that the following conversation is going on right now somewhere, somehow:
Person A: What are you thinking about?
Person B: That episode of WKRP in Cincinnati where Herb
Tarlek accidently spray-paints his daughter's frog, and it dies.
A: Why did he spray-paint it?
B: Well, it was an accident.
A: So he spray-painted it?
B: I don't think he used a roller.
A: Did he try washing it off?
B: I don't remember.
A: Isn't that the first thing you should try if you spray-paint a frog?
B: I don't know.
A: I think he should have at least tried it.
B: He didn't really spray-paint a frog. It was a TV show.
[Pause.]
A: What about Les Nessman?
B: Yeah, Les Nessman. He won the Buckeye Newshawk Award ... or how about Gary Sandy.
A: Gary Sandy?
B: Yeah, he was the actor who played the main guy.
A: What was his name?
B: Gary Sandy.
A: No, the character.
B: I don't know if he had a name. He was just the main guy.
A: Why are we talking about this?
Monday February 25 2008
Titanic Bill
I was out driving on the Martin Luther King holiday when I noticed the following hellish vista. It was the T.C. Williams High School
building in the midst of demolition. (A new building has been built to replace this old one.) This is a view from the west; I took the picture from Woods Avenue.
T. C. Williams is the public high school for Alexandria, Va. I didn't attend it, but it was a big part of the environment in which I grew up. T. C. Williams was also the subject of the
2000 movie Remember The Titans. I have not seen this movie, but from what I have heard it is not an accurate
depiction of Alexandria.
A close-up of the intervening fence reveals that someone has blacked out the word not on the THIS IS NOT AN ENTRANCE sign.
Fortunately I wasn't fooled.
Thursday February 21 2008
Where The Wild Bills Are
We return to the What I Did on My Christmas Vacation series. In another unexciting adventure, I discovered a Beanie Baby frog in the branches of a
tree in the middle of a pond.
Those keeping count will know that this was my third mysteriously stranded stuffed animal of 2007.
Here he is in long view.
It is worth noting that this is the same pond where I found the penguin. In these
two cases, at least, it seems clear that someone had put the toys out as some kind of joke.
To paraphrase an Ian Fleming character:
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a deliberately positioned Beanie Baby."
Monday February 18 2008
Bill Makes Earthfall
I am not a sports fan. But as I live in the Washington area, I cannot avoid talk about the Redskins. The big news is that Jim Zorn has been named the
new head coach.
Since I am not a sports fan, the only comment I can make is that someone named Zorn sounds as if he should be from space. I heard some of
Zorn's first remarks to the public on television, but what he said did not live up to my expectations. I think that his speech should have run something
like this, spoken in a voice that is not just unnatural, but impossible to produce with a human larynx:
I am Zorn of the Seventh Vector. For millions of years I traversed the Andromeda Galaxy in suspended animation, waiting for my starpod to make
earthfall on your planet. Now the interstellar eons are ended. I am free to pursue my master plan, which is to take control of the Washington Redskins,
and make them my tools of universal annihilation.
He would then have gone on to detail his strategy, which would have centered around the offensive line unleashing huge amounts of antimatter on
the opposing team.
Maybe I am confusing Jim Zorn with the Zarn.
Sunday February 3 2008
Bill Ventures Farther Downstream
During my Christmas vacation, I also went to another park, this one in Fairfax County, where I ran into this tuft of fluff.
Zooming out, we see swirling cirrus shapes on the forest floor.
Zooming out more, there is a less impressive impression of torn cotton balls among the oak leaves.
I saw a small herd of White-tailed Deer in the park. These hairs look consistent
with the fur on the underside of a deer. I don't know how they ended up detached on the ground; there was no accompanying skin, blood, or bones.
Maybe someone kidnapped Santa Claus and shaved his beard.
Friday February 1 2008
Bill Ventures Downstream
I had some unexpected use-it-or-lose-it leave at the end of last year, so I ended up taking an extended Christmas vacation. I had planned to use the time to get a lot of
important things done, but I ended up mostly just sleeping.
One thing that I did rouse myself to do was explore the African American Heritage Park
in Alexandria, Va. I had driven by the park before, but never knew what it was.
The park is built on a former cemetery. Some of the gravestones still stand in the park.
The park is very well landscaped, featuring a wetland and a sluggish stream. A sign across the street informed me that the stream is named Hooff's Run. The Hooffs are
described as a family of long-standing presence in Alexandria. I may even have known one of them.
It all looked very nice, until I came upon this sign:
Monday December 24 2007
Another Christmas Memory
Once again Christmas is here, and once again we have time to ponder the many things associated with the holiday.
There is mistletoe, the beloved yuletide tree parasite. I don't think that I've ever seen real mistletoe, and I don't think that I ever will see it anywhere, as it would cause way
too many lawsuits.
And then there's eggnog. What is eggnog, anyway? I suppose that I could look up the recipe on the internet and post a link. But I am feeling too lazy. I will let eggnog remain
a mystery.
And then there are treasured childhood memories. Here is another of my Christmas memories, to follow the one from last year ...
The memory floats in my mind without context, but I estimate that I was around ten years old. It was a few days before Christmas, or a few days after Christmas, at around
8:00 at night. I was sitting in the living room with my parents, doing nothing worth remembering. The doorbell rang. My father got up from his chair and went to the door.
"Who is it?" he asked.
"It's Santa Claus!" responded a loud, low-pitched, rurally-inflected and possibly intoxicated voice from outside.
"Santa Claus!" added a second, similar voice. We had not been expecting Santa, or any of his elves. Their appearance left us uncertain. My father did
not open the door.
"Who is it?" he asked again.
"Santa Claus!" insisted whoever was on the front porch.
(I must note that it is difficult to convey the full effect of the story in written form, as I cannot offer an imitation of this Santa's voice. However, I can attempt a rough comparison
for the contemporary audience. First imagine Larry the Cable Guy. Then imagine his voice about two octaves deeper
than normal, and also hinting at a background of felony convictions, possibly involving alcohol.)
My father was not persuaded. He kept the door closed on the supposed travelers from the North Pole. By this point my mother was getting exasperated.
"Just open the door and see who it is," she said.
But I was getting terrified. I was young enough that lessons about the dangers of inviting a stranger into one's home were still freshly imprinted in my consciousness. The arrival of
this strange Santa stood out as the first steps in some horrible holiday home-invasion scenario, leading to robbery and probably murder.
"Don't let them in! They'll kill us and take our money!" I said.
I don't know if the people outside heard my objections, or if it finally dawned on them that we had no idea who they were. In any event, they figured out that whatever their
Christmas mission was, it should not have led them to us.
"Wrong house! Wrong house!" they exclaimed, trying to sound reassuring.
And with that, drunken redneck Santa and his drunken redneck helper got into their sleigh and flew off into the night. They were never heard from again.
And everyone had a merry Christmas.
Monday December 17 2007
Holiday Message From Bill
Don't forget! Christmas is coming! It would be hard to forget, with all the music, decorations, and advertisements that show up this time of year. But if you do forget, this scary, insane Santa from the Duluth Trading Company will remind you. So don't forget!
Wednesday December 12 2007
What Became Of Bill
Here's something along the same lines as my last post, also from the summer.
I came upon this stuffed penguin perched on a dead branch in a pond in the woods. What appears to be foliage in the first picture is mostly the reflection of nearby trees
on the water's surface. (This location is only a few paces from where I later found the orange tree fungus.)
So how did the penguin get there? It was much more than an arm's length from the shore. This particular pond will dry up during drought. I suspect that in drier weather,
when the water level had been lower, someone had been able to walk out to the branch and place the penguin.
He seems resigned to sit there and await his fate. I don't know what became of him.
Sunday December 2 2007
Beyond The Bill
I thought that I would post a photo, as posting a photo is easier than actually writing something. I was going through my iPhoto library, and
came upon this shot from the summer. It has to be the weirdest of the more than 1200 digital photographs that I've taken.
Take a few moments to sit back and consider what this might be.
I took the picture while standing on a foot bridge over a large pond. The planks and railing of the foot bridge are visible in the lower part of the
picture. My foot is in the bottom left corner. An abandoned Beanie Baby teddy
bear floats in the pond, surrounded by fish and turtles. To the left of the teddy bear, I am reflected in the water's surface, superimposed
over a mass of water weeds. Reflected clouds in the upper left seem to spread through the water like white ink.
Let's consider that key sentence again:
An abandoned Beanie Baby teddy bear floats in the pond, surrounded by fish and turtles.
When you got up this morning, did you expect to be reading that sentence? How many times have you found yourself abandoned and floating
in a pond, surrounded by fish and turtles?
Wednesday November 28 2007
Bill Don't Cry
In light of my last two entries, I should write something that's not related to Halloween, so that people don't think I'm some Halloween-obsessed freak with a pumpkin
for a head.
Thanksgiving is possibly the most restful of holidays. Not only do we have Thanksgiving itself, but we also get to look forward to Christmas, and then New Year's Day, before
January comes along to kick us in the stomach. But Thanksgiving doesn't give me any blogging material. And it's too early to blog about Christmas, even though
WASH-FM 97.1 has been playing nothing but Christmas music for over a week.
I'll have to look to the past.
One night back in September I downloaded a freeware subtractive softsynth that was compatible with Audio Units. Then, once I got it installed, I hooked up my Casio HT-700
keyboard via a USB MIDI adapter ...
Okay, nobody cares about that stuff.
I'll talk about something that people might care about. I'll talk about what I did the next day. I'll talk about going to the mall. People seem to like the mall. If people didn't
like the mall, then malls probably wouldn't still be around after all these decades.
I don't go to malls much. And when I do, I go to the nearest one, Landmark. Yet, for no good reason, I
developed an urge to explore the glittering jewel of the Northern Virginia retail landscape, Tysons Corner Center.
I drive by it all the time. But I hadn't set foot inside for twenty years or more.
(The last time that I had been there, I happened to randomly see one of my classmates, and he said "hi" to me. But he was one of the cool kids, and I was one of the
pathetic, hopeless nerds, so we didn't stop to talk.)
I set out on a Saturday afternoon, because Saturday mornings are better spent asleep. I got to the mall, and drove around until I found a parking space at the back of
one of the garages. And the adventure was underway.
As soon as I got through the doors of Tysons, I was surrounded by bright colors and bustling multitudes. It was like being taken to a movie theater for someone's birthday
party as a child, when I didn't know where I was going, but knew that it would be exciting—the warm thrill of confusion, that space-cadet glow.
But soon the feeling passed, and I set to the serious work of appraising the mall. It had stores that were upscale and trendy, that I had only heard of and never seen,
stores like Bebe and Wet Seal. These are the kind of places where Christina Aguilera shops. Landmark, for comparison, has Sears and a dollar store.
I think that I would be a better writer if I enjoyed causing trouble. I could provoke all sorts of wacky situations and then write about them. I could go into Wet Seal
and ask to see their complete line of seals. I would say that I was looking for a Harbor Seal, but
I would be even more delighted to find a Caribbean Monk Seal, which is assumed to have
been extinct since 1952.
But I don't enjoy causing trouble. So I quietly threaded my way through the high-income suburban crowds, and checked out the theater, the food court, and the all-Legos
store that I would have loved when I was in third grade. Then I retraced my path out to the dismal parking garage, where the ceilings were barely higher than my head
and seemed to be sagging down as if about to collapse on me. I got into my car and maneuvered it through the cramped darkness toward sunlight. The radio played the
Cure's Boys Don't Cry. It was almost an Eighties mall moment, without the big hair.
Sunday November 11 2007
Oh, That Bill!
After my extended Halloween discourse on children's ET costumes from 1982 and other topics of great importance, I thought that I should give everyone an update on
how my own Halloween went.
Most of the day went normally. In fact, things were pretty quiet until late that night, when I realized that I had been careless enough to leave some important papers at
work. I needed to have these papers fully reviewed by the start of business the next morning. I got into my car and set out for the office in the hope that there would
be someone working late to let me into the building. Out of idle curiosity, I chose a route different from the one that I normally take; that night I traveled back roads in
less-populous areas.
One stretch of road, owing to the lateness of the hour, was completely devoid of traffic. But strangely there was a car parked along the street, though there were no
houses nearby, only woods. As I drove closer, I was surprised to see that the windows were shattered; the window on the driver's side door appeared to be completely
broken out. I slowed, and as I pulled alongside the car I found something more alarming still, a shape resembling the lifeless body of a human being hanging limp out the
broken window. Was it a Halloween prank? Or was it the true remnant of some hideous accident?
I pulled my car in front of the stopped vehicle and turned off the engine, wishing that I had brought my cell phone. But before I could get out to inspect the scene, my
attention was diverted by movement amidst the trees at the side of the road. What appeared to be four or five dark-clothed people were streaming out from the woods.
The figures ran onto the road and encircled my car. Now I could better discern their appearance. They were covered not by dark clothes, but by dark fur. They stood
bent sharply at the waist, in a posture between that of two-legged man and four-legged animal. I saw them for what they were—werewolves, lycanthropes, beastly
howlers at the moon. Their growls filled the air, and then so did a worse sound, hideous, shrill scraping as claws scratched at the outside of my car. Vile canine faces
pressed up against the windows all around me. Saliva dripped from open jaws onto the glass.
I shuddered as one slammed its body against the front passenger's side door. Soon they would be breaking in through the windows as they had done to the other car.
The key was still in the ignition. I turned it, and readied the car to depart. But just as I accelerated, one of the wolfmen leapt onto the hood, grasping at the windshield
wipers to hold himself in place. Only the windshield separated us; his bloodshot eyes stared into mine. I jerked the steering wheel to the right. The werewolf slid off the
hood. I heard a thud as the creature hit the asphalt, and I drove on toward the main roads without looking back.
Okay, none of that really happened.
Nothing interesting has happened to me at Halloween since the last time that I was invited to a Halloween party. That was in 2001.
I did notice that, in comparison to years past, Halloween had very little presence on the radio in the Washington area. The Globe 94.7,
which recently changed from a classic rock station to a classic rock station that plays some modern music, featured an hour of Halloween songs at noon. But I didn't hear
anything else anywhere else. It's hard to imagine October 31 without the Ghostbusters theme or the Monster Mash.
The next day, WASH-FM 97.1, which I like to think of as the local 'soccer mom station', played its first
Christmas song of the season. I enjoy Christmas music, but I can't say that I want to hear it when the pumpkins haven't even started to rot.
Wednesday October 30 2007
Halloween = Bill + Greenspan + Yoda
I like Halloween. Or, at least, I like Halloween in theory. Halloween is our only holiday that's scary. Or, at least, it's scary in theory. Ghosts, ghouls,
goblins, and gullywumples aren't any more real on October 31 than on any other day. Fun fear, therefore, is out of the question. But there has
been a history of unfun fear surrounding the occasion. For years children were told to worry that crazy neighbors would put needles, razors blades,
and other contaminants into candy. At one point I remember a local hospital even offered to X-ray bags of treats before children ate them. A later
idea was that masks would so severely restrict the vision of trick-or-treaters that they would wander out into the street and get mowed down by
traffic. The prescribed remedy was for children to use make-up instead of masks. I haven't heard too much of this idea in recent years, perhaps because
someone realized that most ten-year-old boys wouldn't be too keen on wearing make-up.
(It turns out, by the way, that almost every alleged case of poisoning
or razorifying of trick-or-treat candy was a hoax of some sort.
This fits in with my theory that anyone who would want to put needles into children's candy, and who would be indifferent to the legal consequences
of doing so, would be in a mental institution, and not living quietly in suburbia.)
Halloween also has cool costumes. Or, at least, the costumes are cool in theory. They don't always work out in reality. A costume is like a joke: if you
have to explain it, it doesn't work. If, for example, you wear a big box around your waist, and the front of the box is cut out, and inside the box are
two overweight, tattooed Barbie dolls wrestling while an overweight, tattooed Ken doll in a trucker's cap looks on, don't bother to explain that you
are dressed as a television showing The Jerry Spring Show, just say that you are dressed as a bad idea, because that would describe both your
costume, and The Jerry Springer Show.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Halloween is not the second biggest retail
holiday in the United States, nearly on par with Christmas. This makes sense, as on Christmas people give each other really nice gifts, like jewelry and
electronics, whereas on Halloween people give each other candy bars so small that they might not be legally classifiable as food. Halloween has a long
way to go to catch up. Still, it is amazing how big it has gotten as a merchandising opportunity. Stores now stock aisle after aisle of spooky paraphernalia,
not only costumes, but props and decorations—plastic swords and scythes, animated skeletons, smoke machines, and giant rubber rats and
cockroaches. (I hope that they are rubber, and not evidence of a sanitation problem in the store ...)
When I was a child, I would go into a store, and there would be only two Halloween costumes on the shelves. One was the Yoda costume. It consisted
of a plastic Yoda mask, and a white trash bag with a picture of Yoda and the words The Empire Strikes Back emblazoned on the front. The
other was the ET costume. It consisted of a plastic ET mask, and a white trash bag with a picture of ET and the words ET: The Extraterrestrial
emblazoned on the front.
I understand that talking about how different things were in my childhood puts me well on my way to becoming an old man who sits on a park bench
and beats young people with my cane. By that time, though, it will not be a cane but an iCane, which will hold 500 Gb of music, movies, holograms,
artificial personalities, and neurally-invasive cybersoftware that allows one's brain to interface directly with YouTube, MTV, and the Federal Reserve.
Tuesday October 16 2007
Beautiful Tree Fungus
What did I do on Columbus Day? That is the question that is on no one's lips. But still, what did I do on Columbus Day?
In the spirit of bold experimentation and innovation, I used my holiday to try things that I had never tried before ... well, really, to watch some TV shows that
I had never watched before.
First I watched Two and a Half Men. It made me lose all hope for western
civilization.
Then I watched Rules of Engagement. It made me lose all hope for
David Spade.
All was not bad for Columbus Day, though. Earlier in the day in a wooded park I happened upon a beautiful tree fungus. You might think me to be joking. Indeed
the very phrase beautiful tree fungus sounds self-contradictory. Yet beautiful it was—lush, leafy, orange and yellow.
I took several pictures. None really worked out. The focus was off, and the colors were muted. These are the two best:
But even an out-of-focus tree fungus compares favorably to Charlie Sheen.
Friday September 7 2007
Bill Will Never Go Back
Labor Day is over. Summer is over. All the kids have gone back to school.
I haven't gone to school in years, but I still feel sorry for the children who have to go back. Sometimes I'll be out driving in the
last few weeks of August, and I'll see a 12-year-old boy walking on the sidewalk, and I'll know exactly what he feels. The
realization has sunk in that summer vacation won't last forever, and he's desperately looking for some way to dig his nails into August
and keep himself from sliding into September, but he knows that there's nothing he can do.
In the first few years after I graduated from college, I had a hard time finding a permanent job. The work that I could find was
mostly sporadic and temporary. It gave me a lot of time to walk around. Sometimes, I would be walking to nowhere in particular on
an early fall afternoon, and the sunlight would slant in at just the right angle ... and I could feel myself standing on the edge of a
soccer field, wearing a red sweatshirt with ST STEPHEN'S emblazoned on the front, waiting for the
last hour of the school day to end so that I could go home. And for just half of a second, I would think, It's getting time to be
heading back to school. Then I would walk a few more steps, and that world would be gone, back to the place where it
forever hides.
Saturday August 25 2007
Politicking Bill
Normally I don't like to talk about politics, especially when anyone can hear me. But politics is now hard to avoid, as the 2008 presidential
campaign has been in full swing for at least the past six months, despite the fact that it is only summer 2007. I fear that, given the ever-accelerating
political schedule, the 2012 campaign will start in mid-October of this year.
Some might question if we even need the 2008 election. The succession of presidents for this era of American history would seem to be
well established. First we had George HW Bush, then Bill Clinton, and then George W Bush. Next up will be Hillary Clinton, followed by Jeb Bush,
followed by Chelsea Clinton, followed by Billy Bush (from Access Hollywood). In order to maintain the pattern, it may be necessary at some point
to enlist presidents who are, strictly speaking, not part of the Bush or Clinton political dynasties, including actress Sophia Bush, musicians George
Clinton and Kate Bush, and the entire town of Clinton, New York.
The big news now stirring up the presidential race is the possible entry of lawyer, politician, and actor Fred Thompson, who for several years has
played District Attorney Arthur Branch on the original version of Law &
Order. A Fred Thompson candidacy stands to alter the dynamics of not only our political landscape, but also our television landscape. Federal law
mandates that television networks must give equal airtime to each presidential candidate. Should Thompson make his run official, repeat episodes
of Law & Order featuring him presumably could not be aired.
A better solution would be not to embargo Law & Order reruns, but rather to give every one of the candidates a speaking part on the show.
John McCain would play a tough-talking homicide detective. John Edwards would play a bleeding-heart defense attorney. Hillary Clinton would play
a woman suspected of murdering her philandering husband. And Rudy Guliani would play the mayor of New York City. Devoted Law & Order
fans will notice that he's already done that.
Monday August 13 2007
Saturday June 23 2007
Avril Lavigne Is Not A Lizard
A few weeks ago I went to Leesylvania Park along the Potomac River in Virginia. Years earlier I had seen some Eastern Fence Lizards there,
and I have been wanting to locate and photograph them. It turned out to be a cool and cloudy day, bad for seeing reptiles. But I did find
a tree that teenagers had targeted for vandalism. Mostly it was this kind of thing:
But on the back of the tree I discovered something else:
Yes, that's right, it says:
PUNK
CBA
Avril Lavigne
And thus has someone etched a testament not to fleeting young love, but to the enduring punk power of Avril Lavigne. (The meaning of
the abbreviation CBA remains unknown.)
Incidentally, Avril has, for the first time, released a song that I can stand—her new single, Girlfriend, in which she sings like a twelve-year-old
girl who's eaten way too much sugar. I would imagine that most of the song's fans are in fact twelve-year-old girls who've eaten way too much
sugar. I envision a group of them at a slumber party, jumping up and down in time to the song continuously from 8pm until they pass out at around
4am.
Friday May 25 2007
Yes, She's A Skink
I don't normally take the photographs that accompany my blog entries. Marc pulls the images out from sources unknown. But I did take today's
photograph.
This is the first skink of spring. Well, actually it is the second skink of spring. The first skink of spring was a male that ran away before I could take
its picture. The skink pictured is a female Five-lined Skink (Eumeces fasciatus) on the foundation of a building, with most of the tail hidden
in shadows. It is possible to identify the skink as female because of the longitudinal stripes, which are absent in the adult male.
This is also one of the first pictures that I've taken with my new camera. The old camera went out of service when it was dropped in the mud during
a vain attempt to find Six-lined Racerunners along a railroad track. (That's another striped lizard, by the way.) I got a new camera that wasn't just a
replacement for but an upgrade from the old model. The new camera has an 18x optical zoom, as opposed to the 10x optical zoom of the old camera.
The new camera also allows the user to set the 'optimum aperture value'. I don't even know what those words mean.
Saturday March 10 2007
Ah Me, It's Bill
Years ago I was browsing through a book on Saturday Night Live. The book listed the musical guests for each episode. An episode in 1987 featured
two musical guests, the second of whom was Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. (The first performer was, anomalously enough, Buster Pointdexter.)
Gilmour was shown as performing a track entitled 'Ah Robertson, It's You'. This caught my interest, not only because of the Robertson part, but
also because I am a huge Pink Floyd fan, and I didn't remember any similarly-titled song in the Gilmour solo catalog. Recently I decided to find out
more about the performance using the Internet, society's most powerful tool for research/time-wasting. I quickly discovered that, like every other
piece of video footage on our planet, the clip is up on YouTube.
The mystery of the title is preserved by the fact that the song is an instrumental. It is rather Floydy in the middle section, when Gilmour plays a guitar
solo over organ chords, but the opening and closing sections with the horns are not very Floydy.
I have been unable to learn anything else about 'Ah Robertson, It's You', except that it is also, perhaps more correctly, known as 'Song For My Sara'.
I am left with the impression that the music itself does not reflect the mood evoked by either of the alternate titles. 'Song for My Sara' sounds as if it
would be a treacly love song. 'Ah, Robertson, It's You' is harder to pin down, but it calls to mind an old man wearing tweed, sitting in a cottage on a
moor in the north of England, thinking back over his life, when he is interrupted from his reveries by the appearance of someone named Robertson,
who is also old and wearing tweed.
~
While doing research related to this blog entry, I came upon a clip of my two favorite guitarists, David Gilmour and Mark Knopfler, collaborating ... in
sketch comedy.
~
After further research, I find that what appears to be a comedy sketch may actually have been a
chapter meeting of the Guardians of the Protectorate of Rock, though the guy from Level 42 was probably just an associate member.
Sunday March 4 2007
Biker Bill
I wonder about a lot of irrelevant things when I should be doing something useful. One thing that I've been wondering about recently is the motorcycle helmet. I know next to nothing about motorcycles. But I have noticed that, over most of my life, a motorcycle helmet has been a thick, bulky, visored contraption that protected, and concealed, everything above the neck. Some time in the last year or two, motorcycle helmets suddenly turned into small black soup bowls that cover only the top of the head. If the trend continues, in a few more years we will be looking at the motorcycle yarmulke. Was the shift in styles strictly a matter of fashion? Or was it discovered that the old helmets didn't offer any significant advantage in skull protection? I suppose that I could find out by using the all-knowing, all-seeing Internet, but I don't really care all that much.
Tuesday February 6 2007
Bill Gets Lost
I don't watch much prime time television anymore. Back in the late Nineties, the evening airwaves were full of great programming—Seinfeld, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, NYPD Blue, and half a dozen more. But gradually it all went away.
Now the networks are dominated by the unregulated cloning of reality shows and police procedurals. I can't stand reality shows at all. I still watch the original version of Law & Order,
but nothing similar. I can only handle one hour per week of investigations and autopsies.
I also enjoy King of the Hill, but that's my only contact with animation. I don't watch The Simpsons because, blasphemous as it may sound to the ears of Generation X, I got sick of
that show years ago. And I don't watch The Family Guy or American Dad because, for one thing, I have trouble telling them apart. The only way to distinguish the two is to remember
that the family on The Family Guy lives with a talking dog, and the family on American Dad lives with a space alien who is also an aging, alcoholic homosexual. If the Fox network ever
needs to cut costs, it could combine both into one show called Family Dad, and likely no one would notice.
The sole series in the last few seasons that has generated any excitement in me is Lost. Creative, intricate, and bizarre, Lost is like nothing currently on television, and like almost
nothing that has ever been on television. (The only things that come close are The Prisoner and Land of the Lost; Land of the Lost holds the advantage in dinosaurs, and The Prisoner
holds the advantage in paranoid Sixties psychedelia, but overall Lost takes the pre-packaged, air-dropped Dharma Initiative cake.) I'm continuously surprised that such an "out there"
show could become such a big hit. I'm also surprised that such an "out there" show would be broadcast on ABC, and not on Fox or what used to be the WB network.
Lost has been on hiatus for a few months. It returns on Wednesday, February 7. I will watch this new episode, but I may have to stop watching the show soon. For most
of the show's run, it was based around exploration and adventure, visions, hatches, a monster, and all kinds of cool strangeness. But, starting with the end of the second season,
the entire focus of the story has changed to the survivors being kidnapped and tormented by the Others, and being entirely powerless to resist. This grim tale of capture and captivity
was starting to give me nightmares. Normally I am not the sort to be driven easily to nightmares. (I do, though, still have nightmares about some people from my class in high school,
which is why I don't go to the reunions.) But the helplessness and hopelessness of the survivors' struggle with the Others has gotten into my head, and led me to several unpleasant
dreams.
In one harshly vivid incident, I dreamt that I was a survivor on the island, and I was captured by the Others, and imprisoned in their compound. I knew that I was in a dream, but
couldn't get myself out of the dream. The only way that I could find to resolve the situation was to convince myself that I wasn't the character who had been kidnapped, but rather
the actor playing that character, and that filming was ending for the day. But even as the nightmare concluded I was filled with dread that I would be returning at some point to
resume shooting the scene. Lost is still a quality show, but it's no longer much fun to watch.
A few months ago I was at work and I needed some information on the finer points of tapir taxonomy. Being too lazy to get up from my desk and look in a book, I checked the
internet. During my web search, I inadvertently discovered that there is a legend in Asian countries that the tapir will eat one's dreams.
Here was a mythological answer to my Lost nightmare problem. And here was a perfect device to tie up a blog entry about my Lost nightmare problem.
Oh, dream-eater
I believe you can get me through the night
Oh, dream-eater
I believe we can reach the morning light
Everything seemed to be coming together for my strange musings on Lost. But a question remained: When a tapir eats dreams, does it use its mouth, or its trunk? I prefer the trunk
option; I like to imagine a man suffering in a fitful sleep, beset by nightmares, until a tapir enters the darkened room, and moves the end of its trunk like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner
across the man's cranium, gently inhaling the phantoms troubling his nocturnal mind.
My question inspired me to search further, where I found that someone had already blogged
about using tapirs to eat dreams. It's a small blogosphere after all.
Thursday February 1 2007
Bill's Seventh Blog
It was late on a Saturday night in early 1974.
The phone rang.
My father answered it.
"This is the White House calling. May we speak to Jeane Dixon?" asked the voice on the other end of the line.
"I'm sorry, Jeane Dixon's not at this number," my father responded.
Now, almost thirty-five years late, this strange event has been placed in its proper context in the annals of presidential freakishness by an MSN / MSNBC / Newsweek report
that Richard Nixon did in fact receive frequent advice from psychic Jeane Dixon.
Friday January 19 2007
Bill's Sixth Blog
I just saw a televised ad for a tax preparation service featuring Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider is a Marvel Comics character who has a skull for a head, and is on fire.
When I was young, I read Ghost Rider's comic book a few times. From what I can remember, he was a demon, or maybe his dad was a demon. There was a
demon in there somewhere.
Ghost Rider could also shoot flames. He would ride his motorcycle around the Southwest looking for bad guys, and when he found them he would shoot flames
at them. I used to work in tax preparation, and at no time did we have a Marvel Comics character as a client, let alone a flaming skull dude.
In the commercial, Ghost Rider gives his W-2 form to the tax preparer. The W-2 is used to report income from employment. So who employs Ghost Rider, and
for what?
Unlike more popular comic book characters like Superman or the Hulk, Ghost Rider has not seeped into the popular consciousness to any significant degree. I
would imagine that most viewers didn't understand the ad at all. Some people asked, "Why is that skull dude on fire?" And other people just ran away from
the TV screaming.
Saturday January 13 2007
Bill's Fifth Blog
The New Year is here. The Washington Post Style section has printed its In and Out lists, an accounting of faddish and passé items of
popular culture, all of which are invariably current and trendy enough to be legitimately considered In. The holidays which cheer us through the
dark solstice days are over.
The vacations, celebrations, and decorations that accompany Christmas and New Year's Eve detach us, to some extent, from the world's larger
concerns. We don't fully return to these concerns until the ornamented trees start coming down and the offices start filling up again in early January.
This year we returned to a world that is subtly changed, missing some of the people who influenced it, for good and for ill.
Or, to put it less solemnly, Gerald Ford went to heaven, Saddam Hussein went to hell, and James Brown is getting funky in purgatory.
Sunday December 31 2006
A Christmas Memory
Christmas is a time for many things. It is, for example, a time to ponder the strange congruence between the song Sleigh Ride and the theme to Three's Company.
Consider:
Come on it's lovely weather
For a sleigh ride together with you
vs.
Where the kisses are hers and hers and his
Three's company too
But, more than that, Christmas is a time for tradition. Some might say that tradition is nothing other than compulsion with a better public relations firm. To me, though, tradition
has always been important, and it was hugely important when I was younger. One of my favorite traditions consisted of the twin holiday meals of Thanksgiving and Christmas—the
golden-skinned turkey, the stuffing that wasn't really stuffed into anything, the cranberry sauce that retained the cylindrical shape of its can when sitting in a bowl on the dining
room table. (I never ate the cranberry sauce, but its tubularity impressed me nonetheless.)
Feeling as I did, I was shocked when, many years ago, my mother declared that she wanted the family to eat Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at a restaurant. Years of preparing
the holiday feast had left her sick of doing all the necessary work. I understood her complaint. In fact, I suggested that we could go out to eat on every day of the weeks before
and after Thanksgiving, and before and after Christmas, but not on the holidays themselves. She insisted, though, and my father was inclined to agree with her. After much arguing,
we reached a compromise. We would eat Thanksgiving dinner at home, and Christmas dinner in a restaurant.
The search for such a restaurant was harder than expected. The only place that my mother could locate was a hotel serving dinner at 4:30, two hours before we usually ate.
Christmas came, and we set out, at mid-afternoon, on one of those dispiriting December days when the world is cold and grey, but not cold or grey enough to signal the coming of
snow. The hotel served an extensive buffet, with multiple side dishes and entrées, and a prime rib, and perhaps even a special guy with a special knife and sharpening rod
to cut the prime rib. Despite the quality of the repast, it had a desultory feel ... and still I wonder, who eats Christmas dinner in a hotel dining room? Stranded business travelers?
People whose stoves explode?
And so the meal went on, unremarkably enough, until Santa Claus entered the room, and approached our table. He drew me close, and asked, "Was Santa good to you this year?
Did he give you a lot of presents, or just whips and switches?"
Given that I was seventeen at the time, I wasn't too happy with this development.
Tuesday November 21 2006
Bill's Third Blog
Friday saw the release of the PlayStation 3 video game system, demand for which was so great that violence erupted at retail outlets across the
country. All this excitement is foreign to me. I don't play many video games, and when I do, I prefer games of the archaic arcade style. Modern
video games are too complicated and time-consuming. With arcade-style games, I can spend a half-hour or so blowing up alien spaceships for
relaxation, then forget the whole thing for the next two weeks. Modern video games might be good if I had nothing—absolutely nothing—else
to do, and I could play for ten hours straight, but I do have something else to do, which is to write a blog entry about how I have something else
to do.
The kingdom of the Eighties video arcade was ruled by the Pac-Man dynasty. First there was the groundbreaking Pac-Man. Then came the
bold follow-up, Ms. Pac-Man, which was exactly the same game, except that Ms. Pac-Man had a red bow on top of her head. Well, that's not quite
true—in Ms. Pac-Man, the fourth ghost was named Sue instead of Clyde. ("Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Sue" does sound like a good name for a law
firm.) And there may have been other differences as well, differences in things that I don't understand, things with names like the graphic interface.
Further, weirder Pac-Man variants appeared later, but I lost track of them as the dynasty went into decline. And where is Pac-Man now? I would
guess that Pac-Man has retired to Florida, where he engages in many of the same recreational activities that other senior citizens there enjoy. But
he has to stay off the golf course, because every time that he sees the ball, he tries to eat it.
Thursday November 16 2006
Bill's Second Blog
This entry was intended for publication on October 30, but was delayed due to editorial difficulties. Now cast your mind back to the pumpkin days of October ...
Several years ago I put together a mix tape of songs that would be good for Halloween, but that is another story, or part of another story. Along the same lines, I have been
thinking of albums that would be good for Halloween. The list so far is as follows:
> Anything by The Doors
> The Cars, Heartbeat City
> Genesis, A Trick of the Tail
> Pink Floyd, Meddle
> King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King
One can see that the list leans heavily on the art rock end of things. This is partially explained by the fact that my musical tastes lean heavily on the art rock end of things. But,
more importantly, art rock bands are among the few bands who make music that is weird and spooky, music where things are a little bit off. Some people would prefer
chainsaw-massacre heavy metal for their Halloween listening. Even more people would probably prefer dance music. These are the people who view Halloween as a time to get
dressed up like a pimp with those big furry pink hats that pimps almost certainly don't wear but that we've convinced ourselves they do, and go out to party. I view Halloween
as a night to sit alone, read some HP Lovecraft, and suddenly, without explanation, the lights go out. Then, from deep in the distance, comes the chilling sound of an unearthly
scream ...
Wednesday November 1 2006
Bill's First Blog
By way of brief introduction, let us say this: We've known Bill since preschool. He is extremely wise in the ways of dinosaurs and reptiles
and birds. He is our first guest blogger, and for that we are thankful. Now, without further ado, the world according to William DeWitt Robertson ...
Several weeks ago I went to Subway. Whenever I go to Subway, I get the same thing—a twelve-inch turkey sub on white bread with
lettuce, tomatoes and olives. The Subway olives are never any good, and I always end up replacing them with olives that I have purchased
elsewhere. Maybe I should stop ordering the olives, but hope springs eternal. The simplicity of my order is usually confusing and even distressing
for the Sandwich Artist, who can't understand why I shirk the wide array of condiments and strange vegetables.
On this particular occasion, the man behind the counter prepared my sub, and as he was ringing it up he asked, "Where are you from?"
"Alexandria," I said.
"Where are you from originally?" he asked.
"Alexandria," I said again.
The man told me that as soon as I had walked in the door, he had identified me as someone who likely came from somewhere else, as
he put it. He said, specifically, that I looked like his cousin, who is an engineer in Bangladesh. I said that it was interesting that I should look like
his cousin in Bangladesh, but that I had no connection with any other country.
If I had had my wits more about me during the conversation, I could have further cleared things up by explaining that three hundred years ago
my ancestors came here from Scotland and the Netherlands and places like that.
I was glad to hear a few days later that a man from my new homeland had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
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