Congratulations, Lol!

My good friend Lol gave birth to little Keegan Patrick yesterday. He's 7 lbs, 9 oz, and he's certain to be the good sort of nerd if I have any influence (and I will, Ray and Lara, I will).

Awesome.
-cK

The Future of America

Now, now, now: what a silly absence that was!

Right! Back to it:

It's the little adventures that interest me most, I think. The casual exchange. The coffeeshop eavesdrop. Calling my cat's name every time the poor beast has just closed her eyes.

Yesterday, the phone rings. As I don't recognize the number, and even though it's local, I let it go to message. A woman named Jamie has left a message for someone named Deb. Jamie hopes this is the right number--it isn't--and that Deb should know it is NOT okay to come later, that if she doesn't show for the planned session she'll receive, at best, half credit.

She also hopes Deb has a good day and that she (Jamie) will see her (Deb) soon.

After about 10 minutes, I call the number, having decided it's a simple nice thing to do and it does seem like it's a message of value to someone, or at least someone's class grade.

Someone named Jenny or Lyndsey or something ending in y answers. Apparently this is a front desk, perhaps of a philosophy or English or mathematics department of one of Saint Paul's many small colleges.

I tell her I'm returning a call that was just placed to me. I'd like to speak to Jamie.

"I'm sorry," she says, "you have the wrong number. There's no Jamie here."

"I just hit the call back," I said. "It was a woman named Jamie from this number."

"There's no Jamie here."

[pause]

"She was looking for a Deb," I say.

"There's no--WAIT," she says. "Looking for Deb? Hold on."

I'm on hold. I'm holding. Now someone picks up.

"This is Jamie...."

What I should have said is, "That's impossible. There's no Jamie there." Alas, I simply told her who I was, who she left a message for on my phone, and that indeed it was the wrong number. We matched the numbers and found she'd misdialed the last one.

No worries. Problem solved.

And one hopes that in the future the desk help learns that not all instructors share the first names of "Ms." "Mr." "Mrs." or "Professor."

Updates

Sunset outside my sister's house in Elk River, Minnesota

I was back in Swedish class this morning, happily so. Only two of us showed, unfortunately. It's the third tier of the beginning level course. Tier two was bruising for a few class members who seemed not to study save for class mornings. They were just frustrated, I guess, and didn't sign back up.

Otherwise, the timing was just poor. People are traveling for March or have schedule conflicts during our weekly Tuesday morning timeslot.

So we have officially 8 people in the class--I think--but it seems we'll only have 5 or 6 each session. Today we only had two. Alas, that's not so bad. I pick it up quick enough and never mind making an ass of myself by revealing how much I don't know. That's really the secret of studying a foreign language. Just accept you're going to look foolish and enjoy it.

It's a lot like living with someone.

(I'm the foolish one, in that scenario, dear Muse.)

TOO CLEVER?

* The Swedish word for married is gift, pronounced "yift."
* The Swedish word for poison is also gift.

Han är gift. So is he married? or poison? I suppose it depends on whether one asks him or his spouse.

An ornament Suzanne gave us after an
excellent Easter dinner at her place.

iPHONE IT IS

I'm getting an iPhone. I'm hoping dearly they ship it this week by Wednesday, as I'll be away next week. I don't know why I paid the extra $10 for 2 to 3-day delivery. I certainly would not have done so had I known they might not ship it for a full 10 days from the time of order. Why didn't they give some warning?

For all of Apple's vision and for all of their intuitive technologies that really help people along, the company fails to understand that most of us expect shipments for online orders to ship quickly. Like, 24 or 48 hours later.

That's really standard now. C'mon, Steve Jobs. At least tell us upfront the delay in shipment might be a week or two.

THAT REMINDS ME

I know the casual office thing is big, and I really like that. But Mr. Jobs you really should wear a suit ONCE. The black turtleneck scene is starting to get very Sprockets. True, the thought of receiving my iPhone makes me happy as a little girl, but no sir I do not want to touch your monkey.

Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!

THE SAFETY DANCE

One of my all-time favorite lyrics misunderstandings is for the song "Safety Dance." In it, Men Without Hats sing, "And I can act like an imbecile." But someone--I won't say who, E____--heard as "...act like I'm in Brazil."

Not only is that line funny, but as 1980s' songs go, it fits. Why not act like you're in Brazil? After all, I've never once given thought to how or why "Motorin'" becomes a fitting refrain piece for a song called "Sister Christian."

Undoubtedly someone has studied all this. It just seems that the pseudo-poetics of a mid-1980s' song's narrative made sense within its time, if only that it attempted to tell a story even if it didn't make a lick of sense. Whereas, the songs of the 1990s seemed oppressively self-aware and embarrassed about it all and used mishmashes and nonsequitters as a way to destroy meaning. For example, that whole "aqua seafoam shame" in Nirvana's "All Apologies." Or anything by Pavement.

The 1990s, I think, wanted to be meaningfully unmeaning. Whereas the 1980s were unmeaningfully meaningful.

I think I just made up words. So that must be what the oughts are about: absolute, unimpeded bullshit.

How else do we explain Gwen Stefani's lyrics? How else do we explain having such a crappy president?

Awe and Agony

AWE

JPMorgan has offered $236 million for Bear Stearns, a firm that a year ago traded for roughly $150/share. JP's offer was for $2/share. And it may be a good offer.

The Yankees paid $275 million for a 10-year contract with Alex Rodriguez.

AGONY

I really need a more business-oriented phone. The cost is tough to swallow, but it's necessary and is a write-off next year.

But I can't decide whether to go with the Blackberry or the iPhone, the latter of which is not only cool outside of business but is adapting to become a more competitive phone to RIM's Blackberry.

Ugh.

Sunny

Man is it nice out! Sunny, about 50 degrees. The sun coming through the window is almost intolerable, it feels so warm after winter.

Still, I can't help but post this frosty clip (as have so many other bloggers) in which Dick Cheney spells out in a 1994 interview all the reasons the first President Bush's Iraq War could NOT go into Baghdad. His exact words: "It's a quagmire." Everything he predicted would happen then happened with Bush II: the Revenge.



So if Dick is the most powerful vice president in history--and it really has seemed that way--what the hell has he actually been doing if not advising the president? Or did he just lose it over time the way chess masters and scientists and sports coaches are depicted doing in the movies during their twilight years?

And because one needs release, I pass along to you the Christopher Walken stare page that Johnny G. sent to me today.

By the way, that Walken page has sound to it: Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." I highly recommend opening two windows, starting the Walken page (for the sound) then clicking back to this window and playing the Cheney clip. "Moonlight Sonata" is a brilliant soundtrack to Cheney's words.
-cK

Spring Arrives in the North

The sudden arrival of both sunshine and even temperatures in the 40s lifts a great weight from us all up here in the North. Winter will eventually end. We now enter a tenuous window in which precipitation of various forms--for the temperature will fluctuate much--may color the sky a shade of wet newsprint, but it's no longer really winter. Not really.

In Halldor Laxness' sprawling masterpiece Independent People, he describes in the middle portion of the book the agony of the people living on the harsh terrain of Iceland's moors. They are waiting for winter to yield. They are losing hope.

Then, without warning, spring arrives and delivers that feeling they had all given up on. Spring is something, he writes, you never believe in until it is already upon you.

This morning I was reminded of all that not only by the weather we are having now, but by the following, glorious quote from Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, "The Geese Return":

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

Credit to Mike for sending along those paragraphs. Thanks, friend.
-cK

The Gang's All Here

Over at the OMB Watch blog, where I'd gone to read a reaction to a Wall Street Journal article on potential late Bush administration plans to lessen regulations on animal waste lagoons--I'm not kidding; that's actually why I went there--I found the following quote:

"[P]eople acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about." - FDR

I need to look that quote up, if only to puzzle out the use of brackets on only the p of people. Is this to suggest that President Roosevelt uttered a different letter? Did he actually cry out "Feople"? Or did he stutter or something?

P-p-p-people...

I understand the quote and I do appreciate it. I very much like FDR's speeches. But what perhaps amazes me about that quote is its neutrality in its decontextualized presentation.

Is this to be a hopeful statement? Are we to believe that in numbers we can accomplish great things?

If that's the case, Barack Obama's campaign is proof. People eating yogurt with the pink lids and mailing in the tops for securing charity donations is proof. Hell, even the way my family and relatives get together to clean up the common property and cabins each year is proof.

But there's also a rather grim side to that quote. Mob mentality has never, to my knowledge, been used as a hopeful thing. And, as such, the actions that the many can achieve over the individual can be pretty ugly.

Examples:
* Lynchings
* The development of the nuclear bomb.
* The election of George W. Bush. TWICE.

Not long ago I reread Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle about the endlessly competing aspects of science and relgion--how they compete with one another and within themselves. Atomic energy is both awe-inspiring and horrific. Religion is both inspiring and unforgivably capricious.

More than 2000 years ago Socrates said he was smarter than everyone else because he at least knew that he knew nothing, whereas the rest of us fools went about believing we had at least real knowledge about something.

I don't think we've ever found a snappy comeback to that old dog's thought. No wonder we made him drink hemlock.
-cK