4.28.2003


I've pretty much replaced my usual web-surfing with reading the Mimi Smartypants archive. It's taking me a long time to get through, because I get distracted and have to work or I follow a link somewhere and forget to go back. Plus, if you figure that each entry is about a thoudand words, give or take, then reading the 500+ entry archive is the rough equivalent of reading Dryden's translation of The Aeneid five times.

I wouldn't actually recommend reading Dryden's translation of The Aeneid even once, but it's the only version that seems to be wholly online. That makes sense as it's old and unprotected by any kind of copyright. I was looking for a particular passage in The Aeneid a week or two ago and couldn't find it because of Dryden's crappy, rhyming, florid prose, even though I knew roughly where it was. Here's what he does with the first six lines (this isn't what I was looking for -- I can totally find the first six lines of The Aeneid whenever I want):

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town;

I'll ignore the fact that won and town don't rhyme, and that this is only four lines in the original*. I can't over get the fact that he just adds a bunch of adjectives willy-nilly. Also, the ten page Aeneas-Dido explicit sex scene is just in really bad taste.

*[TOTAL MIMI SMARTYPANTS RIPOFF CONSTRUCTION HERE -- GO GO GADGET PLAGIARISM!] I'm not a stickler for retaining the meter of the original in translations (this is the first thought I've ever given to it -- I don't sit around fuming about stuff like this (OK, that's a lie)), and in the case of The Aeneid, dactylic hexameter is impractical enough in English that I'd give more license than usual even if I were a stickler. Is there even any English poetry in dactylic hexameter? I mean, Virgil only used it because Homer did. It's not like there's a ton of Latin poetry in it.

(Further digression: Virgil wrote The Georgics at a rate of one line a day. Can you imagine?)

(Further, further digression: I just learned that the dactyl (long short short) was named that because it's supposed to resemble a finger -- a long section followed by two short sections. All of my finger sections seem to be pretty much the same length, but I'll just chalk that up to some kind of fancy poetry-specific micro-evolution on my part.)

OK, so, back to the fact that I've been reading the Mimi Smartypants archive. I got to this part about riding a camel around in India and about how it hurts after a couple of hours. This is completely true -- it's really painful. When we went on our Rajasthani desert camel three day safari thing, Patrick and I basically gave up with the camels after the first day and just walked alongside them (camels move pretty slow except when you -- and by you, I mean everyone but me, because I could never make the camel do what I wanted* -- make them run, then they go pretty fast). Somehow, our (female) friends managed to ride the whole time.

*[AGAIN WITH THE MIMI SMARTYPANTS THING? YES!] My friends' camels' names: Rocket, Speedy, and Lalu. My camel's name: Bulldozer. Majorly unfair.

We were instructed to ride the camel with one leg over each side, like you'd ride a horse. The first day, when I was still riding, I discovered that if you put one leg around the holding-on-post thingy (I don't know what it's called) and placed the other leg over it, it made the severe pain slightly less severe. I still didn't do this much, because it wasn't what the guide told us to do and I was worried about getting yelled at or something.

I'm getting to my point, such as it is.

Last week, I went to see Lawrence of Arabia at the Brattle. (It was totally, unbelievably great -- I'd never seen the movie all the way through at one sitting and it blew me away). During the camel riding parts, all of the people rode the camel the way that I did when it was slightly less uncomfortable. Here are my three possible conclusions about this:

1. They ride a camel differently in India than in Saudi Arabia, or

2. All of the actors had no experience on camels and they got sick of being really sore, so they decided to ride more comfortably, or

3. Our guide was paid off by some radical organization advocating population control.

I took a long time to make that joke. I'm sorry.
..:.:2:21 PM:.:..

4.25.2003


You know how The Onion does that thing where they ask a million celebrities one question and then have a big list of all their answers? (They're always like, "Could you beat up God?" and the first answer is from Penn of Penn and Teller: "I don't know if I could take God, but I could totally wreck Jesus. That guy's skinny." Cue laugh track.) Anyway, you can do these for yourself with the help of Google. I tried "How do you prepare for a show?"

Wayne Static: Number one I always brush my teeth, and sometimes number two, I will stretch.

I have no idea who Wayne Static is, but if I had that name, I would make people introduce me as "Wayne Hcccxxcchhheehhhh," with that "Hcccxxcchhheehhhh" being the noise people make when they're imitating static.

Ozzy Osbourne (from 1998): I do boxing...I punch the wall for about 500 times...that gets my upper body going. Then I warm up on my life cycle for five or ten minutes. Believe it or not, after many years of trying, my wife got me to have singing lessons. Two years ago. She's given me a CD....this warm-up thing. Which is a great help. I used to go on stage and attack the mike and blow my voice out all the time. Then I go in with the band and do a couple of songs to get my voice warmed up. I'm a sucker for a habit...to break one of my habits is hard. Sharon said that opera singers warm up for an hour and I said, "Fuck! I'm not going to fucking warm up for an hour before going on singing." But I do it enough to get it working. If I do too much singing I'm afraid that I'll be burned out by the time I get to the stage. Then I do a little prayer...it's not a satanic thing...I don't butcher a fucking cow in the dressing room like everybody thinks. And then I just go on and it's in the hands of God.

This interview would have been way more interesting before the whole Ozzy mythos got exploded by his reality show. No wonder our parents are pissed. Alice Cooper is an articulate golf nut and Ozzy isn't an actual person -- he's just Sharon Osbourne's id come alive.

Damon Che (ex of Don Caballero): Make sure I haven't eaten too much and make sure that all of my stuff is set up perfectly. Try to keep myself in a good mood, I try and not let something that is a disappointment turn out to ruin my night. Sometimes you will be launched into the set, and you realize that the crowd is just not into it as the average crowd or the one you played for last night. And you cannot let that bring you down, because many times you can build them up and wake them. When a crowd inspired you, they really do become a member of what you are doing. You play so much better if the crowd is into it, and they get what they are hollering for when that happens.

Did you see that thing on Pitchfork about the Damon Che-Bellini blowup? That's some good stuff. I was yelling, "I'm stupid! I'm stupid! I'm stupid!" to everyone for a week after that. You'd be surprised how effective that is as a work-avoidance technique.

Figure Skater Paul Wylie: At [the] hotel I like to relax, listen to music and read a little. Once I get to the building, I stretch and warm up to make myself aggressive.

A roommate in college played high school football and he would describe their pre-grame ritual which included the phrase, "Get your mean on." Imagining a figure skater doing this is a good way to hate figure skating less.
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4.23.2003


It took me fifteen minutes Monday night to figure out that the oddly banana-like smell was coming not from the quesadilla I'd just made, but from the overripe bananas sitting on the table directly in front of the quesadilla.

I'm positive that I've been getting dumber recently. There's no chance that radon smells like bananas, is there?

ADDENDUM: I was bored at work when I wrote this just now, so I thought it would be a fun excercise to write about this banana-quesadilla mystery in the style of Mickey Spillane. I deleted it because it was the worst thing anyone has ever written, but I thought I'd share my favorite part:

"Where's the fire, Anderson?"

"Under the frying pan, copper."

Vacation, please!
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mark@markand.com
aim: mdanderson45