Man Martin's Blog, page 152

Famous Quotations Explained by American High School Sophomores

"We are all already dying, and we will be dead a long, long, time." - Salvatore

Basically, this means you have to believe in yourself and keep trying no matter what, because you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.

"Hell is other people." - Sartre

What this is trying to say is, you have to be nice and kind and always show respect.  The magic words are "please" and "thank" you.

"I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."  - Einstein

Basically what this quote means is that new things are being developed all the time, and technology really is amazing.  Like just last year, we finally got a flat screen tv.

"I'm quite deaf now.  Such a comfort." - Waugh

This is basically trying to say you should be grateful for what you have and always count your blessings.

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Acton

This basically means that you have to go for your dreams if you want to accomplish anything.  Don't be afraid to aim high, and it's amazing what you can accomplish.

The Ultimate Personality Test

Do you have an unusual personality?  Do you have a personality at all?  Actual scientist researchers at a name-brand institution of actual scientific research took time off from their busy schedules of poking lab rats with pencils to devise this personality test.

What do you see when you look at the picture below?

1. A mother pyramid feeding its baby.2. A boat arriving too late to save a drowning witch.3. A rocket ship flying way too close to the Washington Monument.
If you answered 1, you are a person with finely-honed skills of dithering.  You have definite priorities, but they are probably the wrong ones.  You have dreams and aspirations which so far you've never acted on.  This is probably for the best.
If you answered 2, you're the sort of tough, no-nonsense person who's not afraid to demand extra ketchup packets at McDonalds.  You tend to shoot first and ask questions later, which makes you a poor choice to work for the Census Bureau.
If you answered 3, you're a person that others like and trust immediately.  What a bunch of chumps.  You have a wide range of hobbies, which prevent you from becoming truly good at any of them.  Narrow down your personal pursuits to just a couple of things: Pac Man and scooter maintenance; you won't be better at those, but at least your wife will know where to find you if she needs you.

Other Architectural Menaces

Bright light reflecting from a unfinished skyscraper in the City of London is so intense it has melted part of a Jaguar car, it has been reported. Developers of the "Walkie-Talkie", so-called for its distinctive shape, are investigating reports of the damaging glare, while a number of nearby car parking spaces have been suspended, City A.M. said. - Press AssociationThe Penwark Skyscraper, known to Cincinnati residents as Mr. Potato Head because of its peculiar appearance is so ugly it has been blamed for numerous psychotic breakdowns and any number of nightmares.  "Lord, that thing is repulsive," a city-dweller who refused to give her name said, "I have to keep my eyes turned away every time I go past it.  The architect must've hit it with the ugly stick."A twenty story building in Freemont, Dakota, is so bland-looking, people fail to notice it.  Broken noses, contusions, and one concussion have been reported from people who simply walked into the side of the building "forgetting it was there."  When  asked for a comment, City Manager Dick Purvis said, "Skyscraper?  What skyscraper?" A misguided Baton Rouge architect modeled his most ambitious masterpiece on the Sears Tower in Chicago; however, he did not allow for the soft substrate in Louisiana.  The result was an eight-story tall building with a 100-story deep basement.The Yanner-Nanner-Nanner Towers in Detroit, Michigan may be one more reason the city is in such trouble.  The high concept skyscrapers were inspired by the childhood taunt, "I'm rubber and you're glue."  Workers have been unable to leave the Glue Building, and in the Rubber Building, an unfortunate mail clerk fell twenty stories down an elevator shaft, then sixteen stories, then twelve stories, nine stories, seven stories, five stories, three stories, before finally bouncing to a stop.

Cleaning Up, Cleaning Out

Yesterday Nancy and I went through our stuff, getting rid of everything we didn't need.  We filled three large boxes for Good Will.  If wealth is measured by the amount of crap you own that you can do without, Nancy and I are indecently rich.

Some things, such as our three containers of ground mustard, are merely incidental.  You need ground mustard, can't find it, and buy more.  Of course the reason you can't find it in the first place is because your spice cabinet is jam-packed with extra containers of turmeric and allspice.  Other things, however, are harder to account for.  For example, what does anyone need with two citrus juicers?  I suppose this trait goes back to our pioneer forbears who, if they discovered they had an extra citrus juicer would've said, "Keep it.  You never know when one of our citrus juicers will break down, and if there's an Indian raid or we get snowed in, we'll run out of citrus juice."

I once had a French teacher who'd lived through privation following World War II.  When he moved to America, he was delighted to with his first visit to the grocery store.  "Look at all these wonderful and useful jars the food comes in!"  After he'd eaten whatever pickles or tomato sauce the jar contained, he carefully scrubbed it out and put it in his garage.  When his garage was stacked to the rafters with empty jars, he realized his obsessive frugality was out of place in the states.

So Nancy and I have culled our possessions, at least a little.  We didn't get rid of everything, naturally.  We still have three cocktail shakers, but each of these is vital to the Martin household.  I use one for mixing martinis, and Nancy sometimes uses another in case wine has to be chilled on an emergency basis.  And one might be in the dishwasher.

Just because you're trimming back, doesn't mean you have to live like savages.

Official Labor Day Celebrations

In Commemoration of Labor Day,
I Shall Refrain from Drawing an Illustration
for Today's BlogAt 8:00 AM, the Somnolent Corps of America will demonstrate waking up, looking at the clock, realizing it's a holiday, and rolling over and going back to sleep.  (Various locations).

In a colorful kaleidoscope of blue, local law enforcement agencies will pull over motorists for speeding, weaving through lanes, and in some cases striking down pedestrians on the sidewalk.   Tickets will be given to some and others will receive free lodging from their city or county.  (Highways, especially that stretch between Dothan and Cumberland.)

The annual Switching of the Colors will commence at twelve noon when the Association of People Who Care About These Things officially put away their summer wardrobe.  (At a closet near you.)

All pants will be worn at half-mast.  (Home)

The Young Adult Workers Parade (YAWP) is an ad-hoc free-form happening staged at locations throughout every major city wherein twenty to thirty-somethings will walk the streets, cross busy intersections, and stroll congested public spaces all while performing essential work-related activities they do all day on their jobs: texting friends, talking "selfies," and posting to facebook.

George Singleton: If I'd Known Then What I Know Now

Each month a published author will hold forth on the above topic.

This month, it's George Singleton, whose work I first read in Half Mammals of Dixie.  He has published seven other books, including his latest, Stray Decorum, and a craft book to end all craft books, Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers.  His fiction has the sublime knack of hitting that pinpoint intersection of madness, heartbreak, goofiness, and poetry. Sometimes writers you admire on the page, are a let-down in person.  Not so, George.  Talking to him is exhilarating, hilarious, and a little scary.  Just like reading him.  He teaches at the Governors School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina.  They are fortunate children.  They are probably also a little shell-shocked.  Here's George.
So I spent the years 1979 until 1986 writing novels.  Big bad fat novels.  The first one ran 450 pages.  The next--which I used for an MFA thesis--hit 250 pages, and then I wrote another while still at UNC-Greensboro that ended up 300 pages.  I need to mention that somewhere along the line I had a professor or two tell me that it would take 1000 pages of writing before I was ready.  Being the smart-ass punk malcontent that I was--and still am--I thought, “Fool--it ain’t going to take me 1000 pages before I’m ready.”
            450 + 250 + 300 = 1000.
So I started writing short stories in 1986.  Boom!  The first one I wrote got accepted at Sou’wester.  Within twelve months I had stories come out in the Crescent Review, the Georgia Review, the Quarterly, Fiction International, and so on.  Hot damn, I thought.  This is so much easier spending a couple weeks to a month on a short story, sending it off, and getting it published in nine months, when compared to grinding on a bad novel for a year or three, then knowing that the thing was so bad that I had no other choice but to shelve it.  Plus, I didn’t actually know how to send out a novel.  No one told me how to write a query letter.  No one told me the importance of agents.
Here comes agent Nat Sobel, grand reader of places like the Crescent Review,  the Georgia Review, the Quarterly, and Fiction International.  He’d noticed my name, he asked if I had a collection, he asked if I had a novel.  I said, of course, “No, I’ve written three big bad fat novels, but I don’t think they’re publishable.”
He wrote back--this was 1988 or thereabouts, pre-email--“Write another novel.”  I did.  He hired a Lear jet to send it back to me on the same day.  He wrote, rightly, “This one is no good.  Write another.”
I have this terrible genetic condition wherein I don’t like people telling me what to do.  It’s bad.  If I were to be thrown into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and someone said, “Swim, swim, swim!” I’d choose to dive deep and dig, or flap my arms trying to fly, et cetera.
Anyway, after “Write another,” I chose to write short stories only.  And I did so for the next dozen or so years.
Now.  I don’t know how many agents and editors since this time have said to me, “Write a novel.”  I’ve published two.  They’ve sold a grand total of about pi copies.  Meanwhile, I’ve published five collections of stories that have sold okay.  It doesn’t seem to matter.  A few years ago, after the Kindle fiasco, I had a story collection that got sent around to a number of big NYC Houses.  Most of the editors responded with “Okay.  If he promises to write a novel...”
WTF?--as the kids might say today.  WTGDF?
In keeping with Man’s rules of What I Wish I Knew Then, let me say this: I wish that I’d’ve known that some people in publishing might not know when disposable diapers sell better than the cloth variety.  Would I have never ventured off into the Land of Short Stories?  Would I have settled on a less-hair-tearing vocation, something like Day Trading?  Would I have ever come to realize that it’s better to plain write, and not worry about what wet finger publishers raise into the air, looking for wind direction?

Getting Hammered

I, as the saying goes, hammer like lightning.  I never strike twice in the same place.  Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Seriously, many is the time I missed the nail - the head of that sucker is so small! - and brought the hammer down firmly on my thumb.  If you've ever done this yourself, you know the experience is not a pleasant one.  And once you've done it, the thumb becomes at best a reluctant recruit in further hammering activity.  It goes along, yes, and takes its place beside the other fingers, but it does not do so with a glad heart.  It hangs back.  It cowers.
Trying to switch hands does no good.  The hammered thumb is even more useless swinging a hammer than steadying a nail.  
The rub is, that the thumb, which is the one object you're most likely to hit with a misfired hammer, is essential to the whole business.  You never hit another part of your body which, while being painful, would not so incapacitate you.  Your nose for example, is hanging out there in empty space, as tempting a target as ever there was, and yet it never gets hit, not once.  "Tra-la-la," the nose says mockingly, "I don't see what you thumbs are complaining about.  Hammers look perfectly safe to me."
I believe the same thing may apply to the human heart.  In this metaphor, the heart will be the thumb and the world will be the hammer.  When we are young, we put our innocent hearts out there, hopes and dreams, trust and belief, and blammo!  The hammer of the world, sooner or later as hammers do, misses its intended target and crashes full force against our heart instead of hitting the nail which represents...  Well, I don't know what the nail represents.  
It does not take many such experiences for the average heart to grow fearful.  This is not helped by nearby noses who laugh callously, "Tra-la-la, serves you right!  What a chump!"  (For the role of noses in this scenario, re-read the fourth paragraph.)
It is a terrible shame when the heart is cowed in this way because just as the thumb is needed to steady the nail, the heart is needed to steady the human soul.  (How was that for a figure of speech?  Pretty slick, huh?  And you thought I'd lost control of the metaphor.)
Therefore, as you go out in the world, tap lightly.  Consider your words before you speak - never "definitely" or "obviously" but always "maybe" and "perhaps."  Be hopeful, yes, but humble too.  Be grateful but take nothing for granted, so when the hammer falls, it won't fall so hard.  And if you find yourself a nose, an unscathed witness to someone else's misfortune, don't be smug.  Your turn to be the thumb is coming soon enough.

Secrets of Magic Revealed by Mister Whizzo

First of all, my real name is not Mister Whizzo.  I'm just using that name because a lot of guys in the business get pretty upset when you go around spilling their secrets.  And they get plenty rough, too, I can tell you.  Take me old friend, Stretch.  Before Amazo the Incredible got hold of him, everyone called him Shorty.  So anyway, you might say I got kind of an ax to grind, so I'm about to spill the beans on some of the biggest tricks in the book.

The Sunrise: This one has been an audience pleaser since forever.  Who doesn't love a gorgeous sunrise?  People say, "Amazing," "incredible," "I can't believe it."  The whole secret behind this trick is the sun isn't rising at all!  It's just an illusion caused by the rotation of the earth.  Simple right?  Like a lot of tricks, it's obvious once you know the secret.

A Single Perfect Flower: This is kind of a small-scale trick compared to a sunrise, maybe, but it still gets plenty of audience reaction.  People go on and on about how amazing it is that the flowers come back in the spring.  Rubes.  I mean, how many times can you get some people with the same trick.  So how's the flower thing done?  Look, the whole thing's gimicked up with anthocyans - that'll give you almost any color you want: red, blue, you name it.  Then you use plain old chlorophyll for the green parts, that gives it contrast.  Then for the scent, a lot of times it's just short-chain ketones or something like that.  You want to use something that's pretty volatile and will disperse when exposed to air.  Some trick, huh?

Childbirth: Oh Lord, every time I hear some yokel rave about the miracle of childbirth, I just about split a gut.  Miracle shmiracle.  The whole thing comes down to nucleic acids, can you believe it?  They got to be twisted up, right, so it's like a spiral staircase going down on one side and up on the other.  Then you just got to encode it with these nucleobases, but what makes it such a snap is you only need four different nucleobases to do the whole job - I mean anything from a tree shrew to an elephant, just four different nucleobases.

Time: Okay, so how about this one.  Summer seems to last forever, right?  I mean June, the July, and August, and it just goes on and on, and suddenly bam!  It's over.  Betcha can't guess how it's done.  Well, the thing is...  What you do is...  Well...  Fact is, I haven't figured that one out either.

***
Watch this space - tomorrow I kick off the new feature, If I Only Knew Then... with guest blogger, George Singleton!

Let's Get a Few Things Straight

Is this any more absurd than claiming
roosters go "Cock-a-doodle-doo"?Like a lot of people, I used to have a free-and-easy attitude when it came to onomatopoeia.  "Live and let live," was my motto. "In America cows moo, and in England they low.  Different strokes for different folks, I guess, tra-la-la."  I now realize this sort of woolly-headed thinking is heading the world straight for destruction and the time has come to put my foot down.
This realization was brought about when last night, Zoe said, "Woof."  This may take some explaining.  She did not bark, she clearly and distinctly articulated "woof" with a "w" at the start, a "f" at the end, and a mellow diphthong along the middle.  This made me realize a good onomatopoeia is not just a matter of taste or someone's personal opinion but a strictly objective account of an actual noise.  Is that clear, or do I need to repeat myself all over again?
Take for example the British superstition that cows "low," a belief which, I believe if we looked into it, would prove to have been instrumental in the loss of the empire.  To make the "l" sound, you must delicately press the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth just behind the teeth.  Go to a delicatessen and ask for a look at their beef tongue.  If you think a cow curled that slab upward to touch the roof of her mouth, you're clearly in need of medication.  No, cows moo, and that's all there is to it.  They press their flabby cow lips together and after a brief consideration, let out with an "oo."
As for baby chicks, the Spanish believe they go "pio pio."  This clearly indicates Spaniards are insane.  The "pi" part is allowable, but where are they getting an "-o?"  This is not a matter for dispute, people.  You can listen to a bushel of chicks for a week straight and they won't utter a single "o," not even by mistake.
Lest you think I'm being xenophobic, I don't let Americans off the hook either.  As an innocent child, I was told roosters go "cock-a-doodle-doo."  And we wonder why America's farms are in such trouble.  I don't know what perverse jokester spread the rumor birds make this ridiculous sound or how he got others to believe it, but we have to correct this mistaken impression at once or the country's done for.  Dear Lord, can we seriously ask people to believe any bird says "doodle?" You might as well say penguins go, "Buzz-gurgle-wump, buzz-gurgle-wump."  To come up with a good onomatopoeia for a rooster cry, admittedly, is no easy task, and perhaps we should appoint a panel of experts to look into the matter.  My own suggestion, "Ar-a-rar-a-rar!" while accurate somehow fails to capture the real essence of the thing.  Some sounds may simply be unreproducible in print.
This brings us back to the noises dogs make, one of which is unmistakably woof.  On this we can all agree.  Dogs are common domestic animals, and we have all heard their articulations.  And yet.  Somehow the outrageous lie has gotten around that dogs go "bow-wow."  Perhaps this injustice is no longer perpetrated on the young, but I distinctly remember childrens' books informing me that the doggy goes bow-wow.  The doggy goes nothing like that.  The damage done to our nation's youth by this sort of nonsense is incalculable.  Being told by a trusted authority figure that dogs go bow-wow leads the growing child to have a reckless disregard for truth and ultimately to distrust all authority.  Next thing you know, he's an atheist.  I believe if you carefully polled our nation's prisons, you would find that every one of the inmates had at one time or another been told dogs go "bow-wow."  Coincidence?  Maybe.  I merely present the facts and let you decide.
These are extreme sentiments, I suppose, but we live in extreme times and extreme measures must be taken.

I'm Appalled!

Maybe it's time some writers
got out there and twerkedI have noticed that after Miley Cyrus twerked that guy at the music awards, a great number of people have posted on blogs and Facebook decrying it and how vulgar and tasteless it is, and so forth and so forth, and yet...  Each person who posts such a comment - and I am making no judgments - also appends a picture of Miley mid-twerk.  Sometimes they even attach videos.

Had they not done so, I, myself, who do not watch music awards, would have been entirely unaware the event had occurred, or at least would not have had recurring visual images of Miley in a vinyl bikini stuck in my head.  One thing you have to give Miley is she certainly can stick out her tongue.  How does she do that?  Is it meant to look sexy or just deranged?

Celebrity culture has morphed to the point that entertainers finding they've drained the last drop from their meager pool of talent can set out to deliberately offend their audiences and be even more famous for that.  I have never watched Honey Boo-Boo, but no one living in this hemisphere can be unaware such a creature exists; she and her white-trash family seem the target of universal contempt, and yet she thrives, she thrives.  Or that other guy who sang "We Saw Your Boobs" at the Oscars.  Everyone agreed this had no place in the popular culture, and talked about it incessantly online for a month.

There was a time - and can't you just hear the Old Fogey in my voice as you read those words - there was a time when shocking or inappropriate behavior ruined stars instead of being a shrewd career move.  Fatty Arbuckle comes to mind as just one example of a star whose career and personal life were sunk by his involvement in a Hollywood sex scandal.  Of course, Fatty's escapade resulted in a woman's death, and no celebrities have resorted to murder to stay in the limelight.  Not yet anyway.

The Decatur Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and it occurs to me published authors might benefit from Miley's example.  If readership is flagging, maybe a few writers could do a sexually suggestive dance together?  Maybe during a reading there could be a "costume malfunction" and someone's boob is "accidentally" exposed?  Maybe a sex tape could be released?

I only offer these thoughts as a reader and writer myself, a man devoted to the written word.

Maybe a few of us should get on camera and twerk.