A Thousand Times No

Paris Review deputy editor Matt Weiland opens a Slate piece today with a lyrical paean to Minnesota place names that damn near made my eyes water:

On frozen winter nights in Minneapolis, I used to lie in the dark and listen to the high-school hockey scores. They were read out on the radio—hockey is always news in Minnesota—but I didn’t much care who won. I was 10 or 11 years old, a little bit lonely and a little bit bored, and for some reason I found comfort and distraction listening to the names of towns and cities around the state. Hibbing, Cloquet, Eveleth: the pinch and chap of the Iron Range, with traces of the Finns and French who settled there. Crookston, Warroad, Thief River Falls: the dark romance of the forested northwest. Moorhead, Brainerd, Saint Cloud: the dull thud of the flat and unlovely middle and its Norwegian bachelor farmers. Pipestone, Owatonna, Blue Earth: the dreamy vowels of the riverine south. Did I want to go to these places? No more than I wanted to go to Narnia or Middle-Earth. But I found in their names a kind of secular liturgy, beautiful and full of promise.

I was once at a reception here in Philadelphia chatting with a strapping blond chunk of a man decked out in a tuxedo.  He was, I discovered, a former high school hockey player from Minnesota.  We reminisced about people’s reverence for the state tournament, and agreed that the phrase “ice hockey” was anathema to sensible sports fans everywhere.

“There’s no room for bullshit, that’s why I love the game,” he said fondly. “There’s a bunch of guys with knives on their feet and clubs in their hands, moving with the speed of cars.  If you mess with someone for no good reason, you’re toast, plain and simple.  People will see to it.”

Roseau, Bemidji, Lake of the Woods.

I watched the four-hankie weeper “Atonement” this weekend, prompted by an interest in seeing more of James McAvoy.  Can someone please tell me what it is that they put in the water in Scotland that produces the likes of McAvoy, Ewan McGregor, Craig Ferguson, Robert Carlyle, and Sean Connery?  If they could put that stuff in a bottle…

(or “How To Tell Which New Hit Movie Is Which”)

It has come to our attention that numerous similarities between two of the summer’s biggest films — “WALL•E” and “Wanted” — both of which opened yesterday, may create confusion among movie-viewing audiences.  Consider:

Our humble hero leads a mundane, utterly unheroic existence marked by repetitive tasks and mind-numbing routine.  Then, one day, out of the blue, SHE drops into our hero’s life — sleek, sexy, otherworldly, guns ablaze.  Our hero feels compelled to follow her into an unknown corner of the universe, and thereby fulfill his destiny.

Since this could describe either flick, here’s some helpful cues that distinguish one film from the other:

If the film contains:

• Cockroaches
• Our hero handling a brassiere
• Characters devoted to obsessive cleanliness
• No dialogue during the first half-hour

…then you are watching “WALL•E”

If the film contains:

• Rats
• Actual cleavage
• Characters engaging in recurrent bathing
• No meaningful dialogue during the entire film

…then you are watching “Wanted”

We hope you enjoy the summer blockbuster(s) of your choice.  Please remember to turn off all cell phones and pagers, and to keep the movie theater afloat financially by patronizing the exorbitantly priced concession stand.  Thank you!

Last week, the online magazine Slate ran a piece about the disappearance of the certain punctuation from present-day writing that asked, “Has modern life killed the semicolon?“  As its author Paul Collins noted, “The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support.”  True enough, I thought to myself, which I why I only use them once in a blue moon.

Or so I thought.  With my curiosity piqued after reading excerpts from reader responses to the Collins piece, I decided to see just how completely I had dispensed with the semicolon.  It turns out I’ve already employed it 22 times since the beginning of the year on this site alone, while the frequency of blue moons (the second full moon in a single calendar month) averages out to around once every 19 months.

A more apt description of the role of the semicolon in my writing, then, is PWB: Punctuation With Benefits, uniquely suited to certain hookup needs.    How very modern!

Guess what piece of tableware makes a cameo appearance within the first ten minutes of the new Pixar film, “WALL•E“?

Hint: Not a spoon.  Not a fork.

That alone was worth staying up after midnight.

But wait, there’s more! WALL•E is a solar-powered robot.  When he needs to be recharged, he sits out in the sun, unfolding a threefold panel that looks uncannily like the face-frying devices used by ardent suntanners.  As he reaches full charge, he gives off a loud chime, warming the Pavlovian cockles of my heart:

 

 Charge!: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Functional air conditioning.  Blockbuster action films.  Ice cream.  Free laundry.

Yes, through a quirk in the system, I have access to free, high-efficiency (HE) washing machines and voluminous dryers for the remainder of the summer.   After I declared laundry bankruptcy (and had the delightful experience of using a fleet of brand new appliances), I decided to start boycotting the sorry coin washer and dryer in my own building.  I haven’t looked back since.

I could tell you more, but then I’d have to send a secret society of assassins after you, armed with quiescently frozen confections…

Guess what I will be doing at 12:05 am on Friday (June 27)?

Hint: Apple’s lead industrial designer, Jonathan Ive, had a hand in some of the design.

In a last-ditch effort to analyze and address the problems with my beleaguered air conditioner, I pulled the unit out of the window and began taking it apart.  Off came the back housing of the unit, and into condenser coils I went.

What awaited me there was not pretty.  The inside fins were completely caked with dirt and detritus.  So much so that when I began drawing stuff out using the edge tool on my vacuum cleaner, I sent the poor sucker into a coma.

I continued cleaning out the coil fins and the rest of the interior by hand for well over an hour, then carefully reassembled the entire air conditioner and placed it back in the window.  I turned on the power — and was rewarded with an icy blast of air.

My triumph was short-lived.  After no more than a few minutes, the window unit paused, and then reverted to blowing room-temperature air for the next hour.  According to RepairClinic.com, this was indicative of a fatal compressor overload issue.

Final scores — [BBC presenter voice] Air conditioner: Nil.  Vacuum cleaner: Nil.

While the tributes are rolling in for the late comedian George Carlin, who died yesterday, the New York Times is running a story entitled “What’s Obscene?  Google Could Have An Answer.”

Somewhere, a copy editor is smiling anonymously.

For no apparent reason, today has been an unusually international day for visitors to this site — particularly odd, since it’s a Sunday.  Readers outside the U.S. have dropped by from:

• Japan
• Canada
• Chile
• England
• Germany
• Australia
• Portugal
• Brazil

Hello, world!

(If the dollar weren’t so weak right now, I would be visiting you…)

 

 Sweet Georgia Brown: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download