I don’t know about all you fine folks out there in InternetLand, but as far as The Girlfriend and I are concerned, midnight can’t come soon enough. Not to be a drag or anything, but the past twelve months have been a real suckfest for the two of us. And no, I’m not just grumbling because 2010 is ending without a second sun in the sky, as we were promised back in the ’80s.
One of the more amiable examples of Salt Lake street life is a man by the name of Eli (pronounced “Elly”) Potash. With his scruffy beard and missing-teeth grin, he basically looks like any other homeless guy (although my understanding is that he’s not quite homeless; he may spend lot of time out on the streets, but he apparently does have some place to go at night). However, there’s one very noticeable difference between Eli and the riffraff that hang out in the downtown core: Eli is never seen without a beat-up cello at his side.
I’ve heard that Eli was once a professional musician who studied at a prestigious music school and recorded with a philharmonic orchestra. But then something happened to him… a mental illness, or maybe it was a problem with drugs. Nobody really seems to know for sure, at least nobody I’ve ever talked to. Whatever the cause, though, he lost his old life, and now he makes music for passersby in front of the Broadway Centre movie theaters on 3rd and State, or the Capitol Theatre on 2nd South, or sometimes on the plaza in front of Energy Solutions Arena before a Utah Jazz game. He’s a strange cat, to be sure, and his playing isn’t always up to his former standards; sometimes he seems to just be noodling around instead of actually playing anything, but he doesn’t seem to be aware he’s not really playing anything, if that makes sense. Even so, he’s generally pretty entertaining, and I enjoy the flavor he brings to a city that doesn’t have much urban spice.
At some point, Eli made the acquaintance of the Daniel Day Trio, a jazz group that plays at a martini bar near Eli’s usual haunts. And this year for Christmas, the Daniel Day Trio did something incredibly kind for a scruffy guy that most people walk past without giving him a second thought. They captured everything on video, naturally. The audio is a little dodgy because of an inconvenient wind that blew up right at the wrong time, but it’s still worth a click:
In a season that’s so often defined by saccharine sentiment and phony good cheer, it’s a joy to encounter something genuinely heartwarming. Hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did…
So, I’ve been taking four-day weekends ever since Thanksgiving in an effort to burn up some unused vacation time. My corporate overlords subscribe to the “use-it-or-lose-it” philosophy, apparently buying into some misbegotten notion that if you forbid your overworked, stressed-out staff of type-A personalities (and the type-B drones who support them) from rolling unused vacation time over to the next year, you will somehow force people to actually, you know, take vacations. Sounds great in theory, but in real-world application, we in the advertising industry still don’t take as many vacations as we’re theoretically entitled to. There’s always this implicit (and sometimes an explicit) message that it’s just not a good time, because the current project is too big and/or too critical, or the deadline is too near, or management simply can’t spare us right now. Basically, we all suffer from delusions of indispensability. And because of that wholly unhealthy way of thinking, we always end up, as December looms, with a whole bunch of people trying to schedule time off around everybody else’s scheduled time off. The result is a short-staffed agency for the final six weeks of the year, and, for me personally — this year, at least — a string of long weekends to accommodate all my coworkers’ vacation plans. Yeah, I’m a good guy that way.
(For those who would remind me that I did, in fact, take a vacation already this year, you are correct, I did: my Great Pennsylvania-Ohio Road Trip. However, I’m in the perverse position of having enough leave time available — but so little opportunity to actually use it — that even after taking a vacation, I’m still forced to do the end-of-the-year calendar dance with the drudges who never go anywhere.)
Anyhow, as fate would have it, I’ve spent most of these free Fridays and Mondays on various chores and errand-running, so they haven’t really felt like days off per se. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve been very productive and much appreciated, as I’ve finally gotten on top of a lot of stupid crap that needed doing. But I haven’t simply lounged on the couch and read a book, or watched a DVD from beginning to end without interruption, or killed the afternoon in a coffee shop enjoying the feel of a warm cup in my hand — in short, the relaxing things that people usually do when they’re not at work. (God, could I actually be turning into one of those workaholic type-As who doesn’t know how to unplug and simply be? That’s a terrifying thought!) This past Monday, however, an intestinal complaint of some kind left me feeling distinctly not in the mood to leave the house or do another chore. And so I finally sat down and put on a movie. And that’s when it all got interesting…
Here’s a NSFW-ish but very funny song that does away with all those tedious metaphors and slang and just says what every other pop song is trying to say:
And it’s catchy, too! I could make some kind of over-intellectualized case for how this is a snapshot of the state of American pop culture at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, but really, all that matters is that it’s catchy, right?
One of the hardest things about being “not of The Body” when it comes to the Christmas season is feeling like you constantly have to explain why you’re not as hap-hap-happy as everybody else is this time of year. It doesn’t matter that you — by which I mean I, of course — have already explained it; you (I) still feel misunderstood and somehow obligated to keep on trying to explain until you (I) get through to your (my) Christmas-loving loved ones. Okay, sure, you (I) have explained your (my) lingering childhood traumas, and everybody gets that and has expressed sympathy and such, but maybe there’s still the matter of your (my) performance anxiety (for lack of a better expression) when it comes to gifts, or the myriad ways in which traditional holiday activities fail to generate that warm glow in the dessicated hearts of we sad, emotionally dead grinchy types.
Thankfully, there are articulate people out there who share my feelings, and from whom I can borrow for illustration purposes. Case in point: Monica Bielanko, a.k.a. The Girl Who, a fellow Salt Laker who writes sharp, funny, profane, often painfully honest blog entries about, well, everything. And I do mean everything. Her blog is not for the faint-hearted, as when she’s discussing the physical discomforts that accompany pregnancy, for example. I have trouble relating to those entries, obviously (although I still enjoy reading them), but today’s post really could have been written by myself, we’re so simpatico on this Christmas stuff:
…for me, Christmas feels like I’ve accepted a part-time job that begins right after Thanksgiving and ends on New Year’s Day. Buying, wrapping, shipping, keeping up with expectations. God forbid some well-meaning acquaintance gifts you with a little something you weren’t expecting. MUST RECIPROCATE! Not only do I feel pressure to make each Christmas The Best Christmas Ever! but the whole spending money thing just makes me sick.
And it isn’t just buying the gifts that weighs heavy. I hate being asked what I want for Christmas. I know people want to get me something I like but even that feels like a job. Like, if I don’t list items then I’m not helping you out? Who feels comfortable listing off items they want/need? I feel like I’m adding to someone else’s Christmas stress. And is that what Christmas has come to? Your loved ones call and you tell them what you want and that’s it? This exchange of Christmas commodities?
Keeping up with expectations. God, that one turn of phrase is so poignant for me. I think maybe that’s the key to my holiday pathology, more than childhood damage, more than any philosophical high-mindedness about consumerism or personal weirdness about the retail industry blurring the seasons by pushing Christmas buying earlier and earlier into the year. What it really comes down to for me is the fear of disappointing somebody I love, either because I get them the wrong thing (or I don’t get them anything at all) or because I don’t unequivocally love something they’ve gotten me (I have an incredibly difficult time taking things back, no matter that I already have twelve of them or whatever). Expectations lead to fear of disappointment, fear of disappointment leads to anxiety, anxiety leads to unhappiness… powerful with the Dark Side is the Christmas season. At least for me.
This year has been a little better than the last several, though. That’s really due to my lovely Girlfriend making an admirable effort to understand my feelings and keep the scheduling under control, and I really, sincerely thank her for that. But even when we’re not overbooking our social calendar, nothing ever seems to make a dent in the damn anxiety…
Anyhow, go read the rest of Monica’s take on all this. As I said, she really tells it like it is, while acknowledging that how it is, isn’t necessarily how we scrooges want it to be.
ED. NOTE: Incidentally, that “not of The Body” thing is a Star Trek reference, just in case it went over your head. Specifically, it’s a reference to the classic episode “Return of the Archons,” which was the first of many in which Captain Kirk destroys a computer that has ruled over a stable but stagnant society for centuries. Dang computers, anyhow.
On the original Star Trek, Captain Kirk seduced the alien babes with the help of his trusty Universal Translator. The Colonial warriors of the Battlestar Galactica (1978 vintage, of course) carried a gadget called the Languatron while on patrol, just in case they ran into non-English-speaking creatures. And in an inspired bit of silliness, Douglas Adams came up with the miraculous — and unexpectedly deicidal — Babel fish for the heroes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Well, the new iPhone app Word Lens won’t exactly turn your phone into a Languatron or a Babel fish — it works with text only, not spoken language — but it’s pretty damn incredible nonetheless. Check it out:
This is not a hoax. It’s available at the iTunes app store and I’ve found reviews for it in a number of places. And even though the reviews appear to be mixed — the app’s literal approach leads to a good percentage of Engrish-style misunderstandings, apparently — the thing does work, if not quite optimally. One reviewer says, “Word Lens will work well enough if you need to read a street sign or specials in a restaurant.” And I can attest from my own experiences as a monoglot wandering alone through Germany that understanding street signs and menus is often all you need to get by.
As my Loyal Readers have probably figured out by now, I’m not a real cutting-edge guy, and I resist hopping on most bandwagons just on principle… but this app is almost enough to make me want an iPhone. Almost. Maybe when my five-year-old Nokia flip-job finally gives up the ghost and I have a practical incentive for buying a new phone…
(Via Andrew Sullivan, a political blogger who is often at his most interesting when he’s not writing about politics…)
Kids, I really hate to do this, since interacting with readers is one of the primary pleasures of having a blog, but I’m at my wit’s end. After several months of constant and steadily increasing comment-spam, I have decided to just shut the damn commenting feature off. You win, you grubby little spam-bot bastards.
Earlier this year, the spam seemed to be on the decline, causing me to naively think maybe it was finally going out of fashion, but it then it came back with a vengeance, with more of it flooding in than ever before. And just to make a bad thing even worse, the programming code that generates this crap has gotten more clever, using commenter names that look like something human beings might actually call themselves, and tailoring the body copy of the comments to my actual blog entries so they almost look like the real thing. This, of course, demands more of my attention when I’m sifting through them looking for the small handful of legitimate comments I still get, which equates to even more of my precious discretionary time being wasted. (Notice I didn’t say “free time,” since such a thing no longer seems to exist for me except as an abstract concept.)
The final straw was the several hours — no shit, hours — I’ve spent today eliminating 4,114 new spams. Let me repeat that for emphasis: four thousand and fourteen spam comments, received after only about 48 hours of not monitoring this blog. I just can’t keep up with that kind of volume anymore, not if I’m going to do anything else with my life. And that includes writing blog entries.
For those helpful souls who would ask why I don’t just set up more robust security, I’ve tried. The Movable Type software that runs Simple Tricks and Nonsense supposedly has an authentication feature to help deal with this nonsense, but my skills have proven insufficient to actually make the thing work. So, until I can chat with my webmaster Jack and figure what to do, I’m afraid I have no choice but to just close the spigot.
I’m sorry, Loyal Readers. I’m going to miss our conversations. Although, to tell the truth, the conversation has tapered off so much in the last year that I’ve been wondering lately if anybody is still reading my little ramblings, at least on any kind of regular basis. Jaquandor said something similar recently, about how his traffic is down and how discouraging it can be to spend a lot of time working on the perfect blog entry, only to receive a deafening silence in return. I guess Facebook is eating up a lot of the casual conversation that used to occur on blogs, as sad as that is.
Which reminds me, if you really want to chat with me while the comments are disabled, I am active on Facebook, and you can also email me at jason-at-jasonbennion.com (substituting “@” for “-at-“, of course). I’m hoping the commenting hiatus will be short-lived, but Jack’s a busy guy, too, so this problem may well take a back seat for a while. In the meantime, though, I’ll keep hammering out the content, so I hope you’ll all keep reading…
Congress has just voted to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Good.
It was a stupid and short-sighted policy from the start. Honestly, it really doesn’t matter what you think about gay marriage or gay people generally. If someone is willing to wear the uniform and carry a weapon, and they’re physically and emotionally capable of doing so, what does it matter who they choose to love or what they do with their genitalia?
A couple days ago, I mentioned that the novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a wisecrack about my hometown of Salt Lake City. (Actually, I guess SLC is better described as the urban core of my home region, as opposed to my actual hometown, which is a little burg called Riverton several miles to the south of SLC proper. But I digress. As usual.) I was pretty sure I remembered the generalities of the joke well, but because I’m essentially an insecure and obsessive-compulsive wreck, I had to spend part of my day off today rummaging in the basement for my copy of the book in order to prove a point to myself. I am delighted to report that my memory had not failed me, even though it’s been years — not since high school, now that I think about it — since I read Dirk Gently. Here’s the exact quote:
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.
As I said the other day, I thought this was incredibly funny when I was a teenager. Seeing it again, I think much of its impact derived from it being the first time I ever saw Salt Lake mentioned in a book published for a wide (i.e., non-Utah-specific) audience, amplified by the fact that the novelist was from the UK. That a British man had even heard of Salt Lake — a British man I already idolized for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — was mind-blowing. That he correctly identified one of the most distinguishing characteristics of your average Utahn — our sweet gullibility — and so blithely poked fun at it… well, I’ve remembered this joke for over 20 years, haven’t I? Simply incredible.
Yeah. Dirk Gently. I probably ought to re-read that one of these days…
I wasn’t planning on writing anything on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I figured there would be plenty of other voices on the InterWebs this week paying tribute and remembering, and anyway I honestly didn’t think I had much to say about the subject because, as crappy as this is going to sound, John Lennon just doesn’t mean that much to me.
Please don’t start sharpening your pitchforks and lighting up the torches. I really don’t mean to be offensive or insensitive. John’s murder was a horrific act that hurt thousands, if not millions, of people, and there’s no question that he was a talented man who wrote some genuinely great and immensely popular songs. But when it comes right down to it, I respect the music of John Lennon and The Beatles far more than I actually enjoy it. It’s been overexposed to such a huge degree that the only emotion I experience when I hear most of it is weariness. I don’t really dislike The Beatles. I’m just tired of hearing them every time I turn on the radio, not to mention hearing about how damn great they were.
However, at some point while I was reading all those other blog posts about what happened 30 years ago, I had a sort of epiphany. I remembered something related to John Lennon that does mean a great deal to me, something he did not create directly but which depends on his best-known solo recording, “Imagine,” to achieve its impact. I’m talking about — and this may sound a little strange — one of my favorite episodes of the old TV series WKRP in Cincinnati.