Hot Midnight Coffee, Oil City

Who would like some horrible early '90s PSA rap?

You would!

Wendy's training video -- "Grill Skill"

The Software Publishers Association -- "Don't Copy That Floppy"

What popery is this?

This may be old news, but were you aware that the Pope has an iPod?  I was not.  He was given it by Vatican Radio, who filled it with their podcasts and with classical music.  Do you suppose he actually listens to it?  If he does, has he gotten tired of it yet, and looked for a new selection?  I have a mental image of some relatively young cardinal, the Vatican equivalent of Ponder Stibbons, discreetly requested by an elder to check iTunes for some Bach or Handel.

I suppose I should disapprove of the Pope's red shoes, but they're really quite striking.  They hark back to the days, which lasted thousands of years and ended only about two centuries ago, when men wore colors.  Imagine!

Recent reading

Sweets, Tim Richardson.  This British journalist found that there was no social history of candy, and set about writing a cheerful and effervescent one.  This book is a treasure trove of neglected information.  In medieval times, sugar, which came at great expense from India, was seen as a cure-all, banishing melancholy, bad breath and other such ailments.  Those who kept a store of sugar often had a special little casket for it, as if it were jewelry.  Later, apothecaries sold sugar, often made into comfits (candied pieces of citrus peel or seeds, Shakespare's "kissing comfits") and sucket (fruit-flavored sugar jellies).  Any candy that you could suck on was sold as medicinal, because the saliva would ease the throat; an actual medicinal ingredient was not required.  Nowadays, the only remnant of that ancient tradition is Luden's Wild Cherry Throat Drops, which contain not a drop of medicine.  Modern cough drops are sold alongside the candy, just as in olden times, but they contain actual effective ingredients, such as camphor and menthol, and no one will mistake a cough drop for candy -- at least, not twice. 

I was particularly interested to read about how localized the market often is for a certain flavor of sweet.  Americans are unique in their fondness for spicy cinnamon candies; in Britain, the release of cinnamon Tic-Tacs met with "general bemusement."  Australians like their coconut, which makes sense considering how close they are to fresh coconut from Southeast Asia.  (In America, coconut is the poor cousin of candies -- the lonely piece of bitten-open coconut candy in the empty chocolate box is almost proverbial.)  There's also a taste in Australia for musk-flavored candy, which I can't begin to imagine; it must be like sucking on the cap from a bottle of Brut.  Scandinavia and the Netherlands love licorice, a thing sadly neglected in America in the past two generations.  India and the Phillippines enjoy a culture of candy-making that is almost completely alien to the Western, and I really hope that I can try some milk-based Indian sweets at some ethnic market soon.

Maia, Richard Adams.  I had a hankering to read Watership Down.  Finding it gone from the library, I checked out this instead, knowing full well that I would probably find there's a reason Watership Down is Adams' only famous novel.  Maia is annoying, pretentious, and above all too damn long, but I hacked through it anyway, skipping chunks here and there, because I felt it had something to teach me by example.  What it shows is the dangers of worldbuilding, of listening to yourself make up names for empires and cities and goddesses until you are drunk on your own poetry, and never stopping to ask yourself why anyone should care about which king or baron rules your pretty empire.  It also cautions against allowing yourself to believe that you understand the sexuality of young girls when you yourself have never been one, nor touched one since Vera Lynn was on the wireless.  The title character loses her virginity to her stepfather and loves it, because she's just so beautiful and sensuous and sexual and sex is good, you see.  Shortly afterward, she goes on to enjoy a fulfilling career as a high-placed sex slave, and gets pitched into interminable political intrigues. 

Every page of Maia is just so jeweled and decadent and incense-fumed and bronzy and tiresome that I wanted to suggest: guys?  Don't you want to have a Renaissance or something?  Hold some truths to be self-evident?  Open a window up in here.  As it happens, one of my all-time favorite novels, Ursula K. LeGuin's Always Coming Home, has a storyline not too far removed from Maia -- in a richly invented and inventive world, one girl must rely on herself to make a better life, even though she has been reduced to a commodified body.  The difference, of course, is in everything else.  LeGuin, for a start, understands actual human beings, and her deep anthropological background beats Adams' rehashed Sumerian myths hands-down.  Too bad my copy was badly bound, and broke apart at the seams; I wonder if I could find it at the library.  I really want to wash the taste of Maia out of my head.

Oh, and go Packers too, but mostly BURN THE WITCH

I saw Silent Hill today, and I'd like to address an open letter to the screenwriters of Europe, Japan, and this very country:

It's true, we have some hideous history over here in the Heartland of America, but we never burned witches, okay?  We hanged a good few of them, which is what all the Salem business was about, but that was just the one time and we apologized very shortly afterwards.  Even Cotton Mather was sorry, which is no mean feat for the forces of reason. 

So, in the future, please refrain from relying on dramatic devices featuring Dark Secrets in the form of burnt witches in the buried past of small American towns.  It doesn't point up any deep wrong in American history, any blood crying out from the ground.  All it does is nudge the audience and say, fundamentalist Christians are supposed to be holy but you know what they're actually really creepy, which, yes, they are, but any fourteen-year-old in Hot Topic can tell you that.  It's not news, and it doesn't exactly impart a frisson.  All that Ezekiel 25:17-type business, ministers chanting dolefully about the Faithful and the Blood of the Innocent, is just a big plate of country ham for a scenery-chewing actor, dished up by a screenwriter who probably did his research by rereading The Crucible and visiting godhatesfags.com.  It is, in short, no longer scary.

(Silent Hill did have some pretty damn scary moments, though, and none of them were from any attempts at storyline-based horror.  They were all from OH SHIT WHAT IS THAT THING which is exactly the appeal of the games to me, and that was quite well translated.  It also has the best villain-slaughtering of any movie I have ever seen.  I recommend it, by way of fun.)

GLOOM

I got a diagnosis today.  I don't exactly want to discuss it on the blog, because it's a. gross and b. will be taken care of by medicine soon enough.  Suffice it to say, I am currently qualified to speak of myself with the royal "we."

The Rowsdower of rap

Blazin' Hazen wants you to understand he's just an average homeboy.  He's a middle-class white guy trying to make it in the world of rap, and he wants you to enjoy his phat beatz and the frequent shots of his ass. 

(thank you, SomethingAwful forums, today and every day)

Maybe I need to watch Adult Swim again now that Brendon, Melissa and H. Jon are back

Brendon Small is bringing us DETHKLOK.  "We will make everything METAL . . ."

H. Jon Benjamin is the Devil in Lucy, Daughter of the Devil, and Melissa Bardin-Galsky also has a role.  It's about the college-age daughter of Satan who'd rather lead a normal life than be the Antichrist. 

"She would have been a good woman if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life"

My uncle was down from Brooklyn today, and he wanted to see some of the family's old property in Carrollton, Webster County, Miss., so off we were in the car for a day trip.  My grandmother packed us a picnic, and my dad and I came along for the ride.  I was kicking myself every inch of the way for not having a camera at hand.  This, though, is the house that we visited, my great-grandparents', Mamaw and Papaw.  Papaw built it, and lived there the rest of his life; Mamaw spent all but her last failing year there.  You will note, of course, that a roof isn't exactly supposed to sag.  And the floor inside has a distinctively wavy quality.  Nevertheless, it's standing.  It's been used as a hunting club by some handy relatives, who keep it up.  I wish I could show you the terrifying old heater, the tiny bathroom with one of the first showers in Carrollton, the spot just outside the back door where I bathed in a tin tub when I was a tiny girl. 

After we ate lunch there, we went up to Edgeworth Cemetery, a little place up in the high woods next to the tiny Baptist church of the same name.  It's hardly an acre in size, but it's got all my father's family -- at least, those that were still speaking to each other when they died -- and a good many of the people they knew.  There was Lafayette "Fate" Brown, an old crank who came near to shooting my young father in the '70s -- a dispute over a pig, I can't tell you what exactly.  He had to swear out a peace bond against Fate eventually.  This course of action turned out considerably better than Mamaw's prediction -- "You're gone have to kill him, son.  You're just gonna have to kill him."  Of course he didn't, and Fate Brown died in his own time, and Mamaw too, and she lies next to Papaw and both of them not fifty feet away from Fate and his wife, all things forgotten and all just as well.  At the other end of the cemetery, one of the two new graves bears the dates 1978-2004.  This young man grew up at the same time as I did, he played the same games and heard the same news of the Challenger and the Berlin Wall and 9-11, he got a good job and married and started a family, and then he died and now he is in that hot silent earth with Fate Brown and my grandfather and my Mamaw and Papaw, next to Mary Ola Hightower 1894-1903 and Zuella Williams 1880-1906, where the ants make red clay hills over the best-tended graves and the poison oak comes closer every day.*

I mentioned Fate Brown's grave to my dad.  "Too bad I don't have to piss," he said. 

That opportunity for entertainment wasted, I passed the time by reading epitaphs.  You get a lot of "Not dead, but sleeping" on your early 20th-century graves, which is a bit unsettling to me personally.  There was a great deal of "She was the sunshine in our home," which suggests a stock phrase of the local monument shop.  My grandfather died suddenly and relatively young, so while his memory was fresh my grandmother selected the cemetery's one epitaph that was no platitude: "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." 

It surprised me to realize that, as morbid as I am, I never gave thought to an epitaph of my own, but the title of this post came to mind pretty quickly.

-----
* Warning: do not visit small wooded Mississippi cemeteries with any frequency.  Paragraph formation and sentence construction may be severely impaired.

YOU GOT

The Protomen: A Mega Man Rock Opera.

Really, is there anything more deliriously delightful than a good rock opera?  It defies you.  It defies you to laugh; it defies you to be unmoved.  There is grandeur in even the ridiculous film version of Tommy.  Even the densest among the American public were moved by the shameless sorrow of Freddie Mercury in "Bohemian Rhapsody."  Brendon Small understands the mystique of rock opera, at once hilariously cheesy and brashly emotional, and that's why Home Movies was such an awesome show.

I wish particularly that I could see the Mega Man show, because -- well, to be shameless myself, I want to honor these guys.  They have accomplished something that I had even forgotten that I dreamed when I, too, was a "diminutive Mississippi child."  I saw broken fragments of ignored stories everywhere, in cartoons and particularly in video games.  Grownups, even the ones who made them, didn't seem to care about the stories at all -- about Link and Zelda, Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea, any number of others.  No one thought about them, talked about them, loved them like I did.  Then, of course, there was that whole "puberty" thing.  Afterwards I remembered about the stories, yes, and it made me smile, but I never believed they were important.  And now other people my age come forward to say: yes, those stories were important.  They were important to us.  It is enough to make one cry out with awesome. 

Now I wish I could write a rock opera about my favorite Nintendo game.  Even if I could, that wouldn't leave me with too many options.  When I was a kid, I played a lot of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, but thanks to Anne Rice and everyone writing after her, vampires are pretty much ruined for everybody.  The Magic of Scheherazade?  Forget it, you couldn't afford security.  Then there was Life Force, about a lone spacefighter pilot (or two lone spacefighter pilots if you had a friend) who had to fly inside of a giant intergalactic organism that had just eaten his planet and destroy its internal organs and immune system.  There's something in that, possibly my lunch, but not music.

"They Tried to Kill Us, We Survived, Let's Eat"

That's what my Jewish friends have always told me is the basic premise of every Jewish holiday.  And now a band by name of What I Like About Jew has recorded a Passover song with that very title.  It's on Fresh Air today.