Hiatus

I am bored with this blog. Suspended until, you know, next year or something. I am blogging over here though.

Diction

I want to use "diuretic" as an adjective to describe people more often.  For example, "that guy is a diuretic little snot."  I am not sure what it implies--maybe that he makes my kidneys expel water or my bladder to fill up with urine.

Also I just thought of it, but ursine urine (both pronounced like ursine) would be good to use in a rap song, maybe a Canadian rap song.

The last of this diction hat trick is "sexual congress." You know, like "the dyspeptic Senate and House aides united in bicameral session of sexual congress."  Maybe using it as a verb would be good--"the righteous young couple waited until after their marriage to sexually congress."

Cormac

Interview with Cormac McCarthy:

Wall Street Journal: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

Cormac McCarthy: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

I am putting Blood Meridian on my reading list.

Glee

Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee, says on this Fresh Air that this amazing youtube video of a Burbank high school show choir inspired, in part, the writers. Last year's top forty down in country-western style. Pretty lol-worthy.

The Bad Thing About Blowing up the Middle East...

...it just doesn't inspire pop songs like the Cold Car did. Major Tom, 99 Luftbalons, Final Countdown... If the only thing we got out of the Cold War is a sea of cultural references to use in TV sitcoms in a time when Kruschev's "we will bury you" speech seems laughable, I say it was still worth it. Give me a hair-trigger doomsday machine threatening the existence of the human race that prompts an 80s hair band to cash in on massive cultural paranoia that can later be recycled into background music for a magic trick on Arrested Development or give me death!

Discoveries

So as I finished up my book tonight, I realized that I just finished what is pretty much a military history. I never thought I would be into that genre. I feel like King Bidgood playing with battleships in the bathtub. (Reading that phrase as a kid seems normal. Writing that phrase as an adult seems laden with euphemism.) Also, at key points in the narrative, usually when the pompous British author was making some obvious point about the evil of Hitler and the complicity of the German people, all I could think of was this dubbed youtube video. NINE! NINE! NINE! NINE!

Though I definitely like narrative and story and action, sometimes I underline the little details, even in library books. Amidst descriptions of atavistic rape on the Eastern front; 13-year old Hitler youths trading candy and killing Russians; Mongol comrades crucifying women to barn doors; women clutching long-since frozen babies walking bare-foot in a brutal Hungarian winter; and, what was very surreal to read, large herds of cows mooing desperately to be milked as they roved among 2.5 million ethnic Germans fleeing the Russian advance--amidst all this Doctor Graf Hans von Lehndorff stopped to write of his East Prussian home:

Whoever lived these last months with receptive senses must have felt that never before had the light been so intense, the sky so lofty, the distances so vast.

Somehow, seeing it at its worst makes me want to visit it so much more. Next summer. My European trip. I will hit the towns and villages where my family came from. In a cursory search, I couldn't find any alive during this period, although it seems I have some relatives that died fighting the French in WWI.


View Ancestors in a larger map

Prussia

Nothing like a bowl of Corn Chex and a history of WWII to keep me up until 3 AM. Max Hasting's Armageddon on the 1944-45 history of WWII (the companion volume to Retribution, the history of the Pacific War) feeds my interest in Eastern Europe and Russia these days. I just don't know what to make of "them" over there. One anecdote from last night's reading:

For fun, a soldier in Valentin Krulik's unit of the Sixth Guards Tank Army dressed himself one day in a German smock and helmet, then dashed into his section's bunker waving a Schmeisser [a German machine gun] and crying "Hande hoch" [hands up]. This was agreed to be extremely funny. But one of his comrades shot the cross-dresser before he was recognized.

Now, out of all the depravity of WWII, this is no where near the most cruel, but it is the most poignant for me. I would be that idiot dancing around in a dress with a machine gun. For that comedic genius born of desperation I would earn a bullet between my eyes.

So its the middle of winter on a giant flood plain between Poland and Germany (East Prussia, birthplace of several generations of my ancestors), you are some poor kid in a frozen wasteland in front of a professional German uber-army with a rifle to share with several other malnourished wretches from across the Soviet empire with tanks deployed behind you by Uncle Joe to mow you down if you run away. I just don't understand it. Why didn't their hearts just start beating like a hummingbird and explode from anxiety? I guess I am all the more curious because I feel like somewhere my family was caught up in the horror of it all.

Best Decade

I am ready for the 90s to come back.  Specifically, bad diva hip hop and R&B.  It was a good few years.  High school, Nepal, clubs with cute Tibetan girls, good times.

Apparently, I was raised on BET.

Alert System

Attention, this is the Stanford "please freak out" system. I mean I am all for being on top of things--granted, sketchy men watching you shower is not ideal--but I am pretty sure they sent this email to at least everyone who lives on campus, guessing like 5,000 people.

Subject: Campus Timely Warning - Prowler in Branner Hall Shower Room

On Monday night, November 16, 2009 at approximately 8:30PM, a female student was the lone person showering in the second floor shower room of Branner Hall. She heard someone enter the shower room. About one minute later, she looked down and saw someone looking up at her from the adjacent shower stall. Because the person was looking at her from under the adjacent shower stall divider, the student could only see part of the suspect's face. The victim called out and the person quickly left the shower room.

The suspect was described as having medium colored skin with black hair to the collar and no facial hair. It is unknown for certain if the person was male or female.

The Stanford Department of Public Safety reminds you to secure all perimeter doors to your living areas and to report suspicious behavior to the police immediately.

Stanford Department of Public safety

Revolution 1989

I remember sometime in 1988 or 1989 -- I was in second grade -- I learned a joke with the punchline involving the line "puppy ceausescu." I told it to everyone who would listen. I thought it was hilarious. That was all I could think of as I read Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebestyen.  I picked it up on a library at a whim.  (Ironic syntax, yes?)  Great book, but then I like my histories and this one traces the disintegration of the Soviet empire superbly.  For example this quote:

American monopolistic monsters believe that their domination of the world would offer the best solutions to the problems of international politics.  They consider war a peerless catalyst to achieve this goal.  The weapons makers and the brass hats have formed an alliance with death ...  postwar American leaders have always behaved like fighting cocks with nuclear talons, straining to fight Communism and the Soviet Union.  

Sebestyen points out the exact moment when the Romanian people realized that Ceausescu was not a iron-willed dictator, but a peevish old man.  You can find it on youtube.  Jeers come up from the audience.  He stutters, he stops, he raises his hand.  But it's over.  He takes off in a helicopter, the army turns on him, tries him before a kangaroo court, and then executes him against a cement wall.

The internet is amazing.  But it has it's limits.  I still can't find that puppy chow joke.      

The Tiger's Wife

I normally don't like New Yorker fiction, but I picked up a June issue in the weight room to read in between sets.  "The Tiger's Wife" (unfortunately I couldn't find it reproduced anywhere) is a cross between Life of Pi, Slaughterhouse Five, White Fang, and any one of Dostoyevsky's tomes that I have never finished.  She's going on my reading list though.

Bad Moods Make You Smart

I knew it. Article here.

Positive mood is not universally desirable: people in negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages.

Remember, negative attracts positive and repels negative--double win!

High IQ? Psshaww.

Cool New Scientist article:

IQ tests measure an important domain of cognitive functioning and they are moderately good at predicting academic and work success. But they are incomplete. They fall short of the full panoply of skills that would come under the rubric of 'good thinking'.

Some tests:

If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? (PS only 17% of 3400 college students got it right.)

Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? Choose between yes, no, or cannot be determined.

Answers are somewhere in the article, I won't spoil it for you.