Speed Bracer

Saw SPEED RACER. Best reunion of the Osmond Family look-alikes I’ve ever seen. Including Chim Chim. Didn’t Susan Sarandon once play Jane Goodall? No, that was Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey. The bad guy looks like Tim Curry, but isn’t. Still, you know he’s the bad guy by virtue of the resemblance. I tell you what, though, if my car breaks down, I’m taking it to John Goodman Tire. He can build a car in 32 hours! From scrap!

For a fast-paced car, it sure is a slow movie. The slipstream editing leaves you wondering if someone forgot to press “compile”. I’m not sure it was meant for human consumption; though I’m positive a computer could understand it. The first third of the movie is presented as if time does not exist. Director Wachowski pushes lack of chronology past the margin of artistic, and into confusing. The movie is incorrectly rated PG, when it should have been PhD for cognitive ability required.

Go go see SPEED RACER! Nice Mormon family like that with five kids, including a chimpanzee and spittle in the trunk. And Susan Sarandon doesn’t look a day older than her plastic surgery.

Lift

I've been thinking of having a mental breakdown. Seems like a nice time of year for it. My great grandfather had one, of course he was in Micanopy at the time. Preaching. Leading a prayer meeting when his young son burst in, announcing he'd found a nest of baby rattlesnakes. It just wasn't that kind of church.

Tina Fey's got nothing on me. She makes 30 ROCK look like 3RD ROCK. And really, Alec Baldwin and John Lithgow could be interchangeable. With Denny Crane. "I was once a spaceship captain!" William Shatner exclaimed in realistic clarity on an episode of BOSTON LEGAL.

All elevators in the state of Florida are inspected in August. Signed by the Governor, the updated certificate has to be displayed in public view for its users, same as a Certificate of Occupancy—something the fire marshal can easily find when he doesn't want to fill out paperwork.

I worked for a boss who managed to disconnect the emergency telephone in the service elevator. He did it inadvertently. Nearly. In an effort to make gains toward greater economic efficiency, he was reviewing the phone bill, trying to cut unused lines. To be honest, I didn't know what that number was for either. My boss picked up his phone and dialed the number. One of the employees answered.

"Where are you?" my boss said.

"I'm in the elevator, sir."

My boss looked at me.

"You can't cut that line," I told him.

"Couldn't we group it as one of the roll-over lines?"

No.

The slowest elevator is in Sanford, Florida. It is laughably slow. I had to visit a trophy shop on the second floor. The building only has two floors. When I called the trophy shop to ask for directions, they warned me that a ride on the elevator was well worth the wait. It was comically inconceivable that any piece of modern equipment could move so recklessly lacking in speed. I thought I was in a dumb waiter, the emphasis here being on DUMB. I could have walked up and down the stairs twice and still beat this elevator to top. Yes, I was smiling when the door opened. "See, didn't we tell you?" said the man behind the counter.

You endure by enduring, but in an elevator, you have a choice of going up or down. Taking the elevator is the very process of elevating, or alleviating, if you double the “l” and change the vowels. I figure I'm in the subbasement now, so there's really no other way but up.

Universal Noise

Fifty-seven octaves below Middle C, a black hole resonates on B Flat. And it is the only note on the tuba that agitates alligators. B Flat is the key to the universe. The world may be round, but the universe B Flat.

British women speak English at a higher pitch than American women. American automobile horns are tuned to the key of F. “Air ball!” begins on F and drops to D, chanted in total and rhythmic mass unison. What sounds are universal and what are national? What are the implications? What are the explications? Clearly I need more fiber in my diet.

Universal tones and intervals exist. People overuse an expression because something in it appeals as cosmic dialogue, like “woo hoo”. The expression “uh oh” is the only glottal stop in our language. Is it a vestigial expression left over like an appendix from Middle English? Where did it come from? Why do we keep it? Will it be added to the Oxford English Dictionary? Certainly fads shape what we use, as well as our own physical evolution. There is evidence that cavemen did NOT say “ugh”. That deep back sound was a physical impossibility by the way the jaw was mounted. We are social animals. The need for dialogue at the broadest level may be why we seek God. It could explain the need to write blogs, and the hope for personal response from complete and total strangers.

Perhaps these sounds and expressions imply the limitation of language. Some emotions may be beyond what we can utter in recognized words, or do we create hyperbole of emotion by speaking outside of language? Is this a radical breakthrough in cosmic theory? Or is it cosmetic noise?

Provincial Knowledge

I'm going to call it St. Ives device; whereby, I begin talking about one thing, then I'm going to feed you a whole bunch of information which is factual and interesting and will make you forget where I started, until I return to my original topic, at which point I’ll pull it all together as a clever drawstring bundle. I'm sure there's a name for that already, but it is very like the riddle of traveling to St. Ives, where on my way I met a man with seven wives, seven cats, seven kittens, etcetera, but in the end, only I traveled to St. Ives. I myself for real have never been to St. Ives, but it is a provincial seaside town, and just north Penzance.

In my own provincial seaside town, we have a light house, a three hundred year old fort, dolphins in the bay, a breeding colony of artists, twenty-one miles of beach and the rest is history! No, my town does not have the volumes I was accustomed access to at the University. And yet, even in our tiny provincial collection, especially tiny and especially provincial at the branch library, I was trolling around one day and found a copy of the Popol Vuh, which is the exact book of Mayan mythology I needed for my language and culture class at college to draw similarities between the ancient story of crossing into the afterlife and the current situation of Mayan immigrants into the US. My Professor talked about the Popol Vuh, but its very existence at the University library seemed mythological, yet here it is, in my own little town. (Could be the original copy.)

Bangladesh has had digital TV for over 20 years. They didn't have any TV before then, but when they did get it, they got it with the best current available technology infrastructure. Which was digital.

I don't know what I'm going to do in 2009. I've pioneered the non-digital age of electronics to its end so it seems. I think my TV's out of focus now, but I can't really tell. I don't watch very much, and when I do, I'm usually drinking something, especially if I have to endure the Disney Channel. I could have picked up satellite years ago, but I didn’t. Mostly I just watch movies.

My VCR is stuck on French. When you press "play" it says "lecture", and "rewind" is "rebobinage." I'm passively learning a second language while I enjoy movies. It is the French revolution against the English channels.

Pirates of Penzance opened in 1879, five years before the Prime Meridian was set at Greenwich. France and England were both vying for the zero longitude line, each for their own national observatory, but England won out, with the proviso that everyone would adopt France's unit of measure as the world's standard--the meter, which was actually accurately based on the Earth's circumference given in calculations by Eratosthenes in Alexandria back around 100 B.C. (Significantly NOT the measurement of Earth's size used by Columbus, who judged the Earth to be a great deal smaller and thus bumped into the Americas unexpectedly on his way to India.) So England got the Prime Meridian and immediately reneged on using the French metre--England absolutely put her foot down...until recently. And recently we have overcome the Y2K problem (which Alan Greenspan admits to having contributed to by entering computer code in the Sixties in double zeros to indicate 1900). Starting in Greenwich and circling the globe we managed to keep airplanes in the air and financial markets on the ground (which now has reversed itself but not through the cause of computer miscalculation). Yet Unix code today may still create a Y-2K38 problem because of its inability to handle leap seconds, which is the exact same problem young Frederic has in Pirates of Penzance. His contract with said pirates holds him indentured until such time as his twenty-first BIRTHDAY, and NOT his twenty-first YEAR. As Frederic was born on the day of leap year, he will not celebrate his twenty-first birthday until 1940. Obviously this creates a most ingenious paradox, as 1940 was over sixty-eight years ago, and yet that is how the play is still scripted. The funny thing is, is that it's still funny, it's maybe even more funny with this built in vintage humor that no one's likely to remove. Perhaps you have a greater chance at success if you write something not for all time, but for your time, and then see how it endures.

For the time being what it is, we have Google. Thank God for Google. Even in the provinces we have Google, and Google can take you to a nice little ditty ripped off from Gilbert and Sullivan and retitled “Modern Major Googler.” If all goes right, simply paste this link into your browser and enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp9KHc6qLXQ

If the link doesn’t work, ask Bill Dovany what he’s getting paid for.

Truck Nuts

I am all in favor of testicles. They are a gender issue, not a neutered subject. Just because your dogs and cats may go around without any balls doesn’t mean you have to have your truck fixed. Though they may look like man’s attempt to accessorize, to put a ban on truck nuts is to castrate the whole democratic system. By nabbit, you should have the right to keep and bear truck nuts. They are an inalienable expression of: “I have the horse power of a stallion (and I’m leaving you geldings in the carpool)!”

I’m going to put a set of truck nuts on my Jetta. If they’re prohibited, then I’ll get a bumper sticker that says “GO NADS!”