Today in Menlo Park, who should walk by but Bill, principal of the firm where I’ve been working lately (in San Francisco). Our eyes met, I raised a hand in greeting, and he stopped; so I approached, and said:
“Hi! I’ve just been having lunch with my mother, who used to work near here.”
“That’s great. My name’s Larry, by the way. Have a great day.”
The burritos at Mextogo, incidentally, were quite satisfactory.
Swen quotes Phil Ochs’s “Love me, I’m a Liberal”, which reminds me of this from The National Lampoon’s White Album Gold Turkey: National Lampoon Radio Hour/Greatest Hits:
I wish I was a Negro, with lots of Negro soul,
so I could stay true to my ethnic roots and still play rock and roll.
If I was a funky Negro, eatin’ soul food barbecues,
I wouldn’t have to sing the middle class liberal Well-Intentioned Blues.I wish I was an Indian, a grown-up Sioux papoose,
so when I get drunk on a beer and a half I have a good excuse.
I’d be a noble savage, wouldn’t ever wear no shoes,
and I wouldn’t have to sing the middle class liberal Well-Intentioned Blues.I wish I was a wetback on a strike in a lettuce patch
or a slant-eyed peasant with Viet Cong stashed underneath my thatch.
I only ever cross a picket line to pay my union dues
to keep on singing the middle class liberal Well-Intentioned Blues.But I am not a Negro (come on!), not a red man nor a Mex. (Join me, kids!)
I’m a member of the oppressing color, language, age and sex.
I sympathize with the Arab cause; I feel for the put-upon Jew.
And I keep singing —
the middle class liberal —
humanitarian —
meaningful dialogue —
we are all responsible Well-Intentioned Blues.
(And again I wish I knew how to display this with hanging indents.)
The morning mail brings me a new issue of The Economist, whose news roundup begins:
Two bombs went off in Istanbul on November 20th . . . .
. . making me wonder where it was printed.
Certain other weeklies would have said “Thursday” rather than “November 20”. Used to drive me nuts wondering which Thursday they meant.
Further down:
Kathleen Blanco [of Louisiana] . . . becomes the first ever female governor in America’s “Deep South”.
That can’t be right. Wasn’t it once common for wives to succeed their husbands as governor when the latter could not seek another consecutive term? Wallace of Alabama comes to mind. [2007: Looks like I overestimated the frequency of the phenomenon.]
The Head Heeb: The Sovereign Democratic Republic of Pitcairn. The most astonishing detail of this item is a correct use of the phrase eked out. (Cited, on other grounds, by Chris Brooke (The Virtual Stoa).)
Piltdown Plot — includes ‘prosecution’ and ‘defense’ of seven leading suspects
we understand each other worse, and it matters less, than any of us suppose.
[Which goes well with this item.]
This item was found by Jim Bisso (Uncle Jazzbeau) and discussed at more length by and with Languagehat.
One of Nunberg’s examples is: The pool is deceptively shallow. Some take this to mean the pool is deeper than it looks, some the opposite — but I wouldn’t use it either way; to me it means that the pool both is and appears shallow, but one who infers from that lone fact that one can safely wade in it would be dangerously mistaken (because it has alligators or treacherous currents).
If you like my mathematical doodles you’ll like BIT-101 ActionScript Laboratory — hundreds of little exercises in Flash, by Keith Peters. (Found on Joshua Schachter’s muxway by Dan O’Neill)