More spring cleaning

Oh, I'm just getting all kinds of spiffy here. (Well, not that many kinds, really, but spiffier than I've been.) I had to put up a link for my RSS feed, so people know it exists and can find the darn thing; I did some discreet, in-between-boss-walking-by Web searches for a button, couldn't find one I liked, and made one in Photoshop during my Official Afternoon Break. While I was at it I put in some external-link buttons I'd been gathering from other blogs, and while I was at that, since I was mucking about in the sidebar, I figured it was time to put in a "What the heck is 'zhaba'?" link in the "about me" section. (Short answer: It's the Ukrainian word for "frog." Long answer: see the About "zhaba" page. [Which isn't the same as the About Zhaba page.])



Maybe one of these days I'll get really spiffy and get me some moxification—as soon as I get past the "I'm not worthy!" feeling I've acquired from posting extremely irregularly, with days, weeks, sometimes months in between. (On the other hand, I get the impression they're swamped, so maybe I should get my name on the waiting list.)

The sex, the city, the style, the sniping

I've been watching the syndicated, sanitized-for-your-protection "Sex and the City" episodes on TBS, and I'm really liking it; I might even buy the DVDs of the original show so I can get all the racy dialogue and, um, interesting images. (It's still bolder than most stuff on cable: when Samantha has a nude portrait session, there's just one very brief very-low-light image of her standing there nekkid, but just the shape of the entire body of an entirely naked woman is damn sexy. [I dig chicks. I'm married and monogamous, but I dig chicks.] [Or, to be more politically correct, I like attractive women.])



Anyway, I've gotten my first glimpse of the fashions that the show made popular, as they appeared on the show; and people, we've got to talk about nameplate necklaces. What exactly is the point supposed to be? The only reasons I can think of to have a piece of jewelry with your name on it are if you expect not to be able to remember your own name—in which case a necklace wouldn't make sense, because you couldn't see it except in a mirror, and in a mirror you'd have to read it backwards—or if you expect to be having sex with someone who won't remember your name. (Which, I guess, is why they're useful for serial-dating and one-night-standing and generally-around-sleeping single women, which is why they wore them on the show to begin with.) But if you're not an amnesiac or a major skank, what's the point of a prominent piece of jewelry with your name on it? Do you really want everyone who sees you to immediately know your name? Do you just want to broadcast your Miss-Thang-ness to every non-blind person you encounter? It reminds me of a verse from that eminent-non–self-promoter Emily Dickinson:

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one's name—the livelong June—

To an admiring Bog!

(Or, in the case of the aspiring Miss Thangs I see in this city, to a SEPTA bus or a subway car or the guys who lean against service entrances on South Street. Your bog may vary.)

How to solve all the world's problems

Flipping through late-night basic cable while waiting for my absurdly-slow home computer to download the latest eighteen or so Windows security updates, I assembled the perfect combination of news stories: Terrorists kidnapping Scott Peterson. I mean, terrorists always seem to kidnap perfectly nice people, while exceedingly scuzzy people are always sitting around courtrooms watching their lawyers cleverly argue them out of murder charges. Let's just combine the two, okay?



(This isn't my only brilliant idea on how to solve all the world's problems. For instance, last spring, when SARS and the U.S.'s first WMD searches were all over the news, I came up with this one: "If SARS is really spread by cockroaches, and the chemicals they found in Iraq are really just pesticides, we can send those over to China and kill all the roaches and neatly tie the week's two biggest news stories into a satisfying conclusion, just in time for the Sunday talk shows." I thought it would also work out nicely if someone could take the huge crop of illegal opium poppies in Afghanistan and turn them into painkillers for the under-supplied hospitals in Iraq. No one ever asks me, though...)

In the news, world and local

I really wish terrorists would stop kidnapping people from New Jersey and southeast Pennsylvania. I mean, of course I wish they'd stop kidnapping and killing everybody; but I'm really getting tired of all the local news coverage following the template "A man from the [whatever station] viewing area has been kidnapped by [whoever], and the [station] news team is at his house, where his family is holding a prayer vigil, and our own [annoying reporter] was able to talk to the man's [tearful relative] before having the door slammed in his face..." (Well, they don't usually have that last part.) And of course they run the story at least four times a day (morning, noon, 6 o'clock, 11 o'clock), usually several times per newscast, and they interview every extended family member and neighbor and high school teacher and gas station attendant who will talk to them ("Yeah, he used to fill up his truck here and buy beef jerky at the counter, always seemed like a nice guy"). I mean, jeez. Give the people some privacy, or at least don't block their driveway with your news van all night. And we can do without the updates-that-aren't-updates, too. ("Area man [name] is still being held by [whoever], and while there's no word on his condition, we're sure his family is still praying for him, as we saw in [annoying reporter]'s story on Monday night"—which they then replay, in case you missed it the last four times they showed it.) Man, I almost wish we had some winter storms or playoff-bound sports teams for them to obsess over.

Philadelphia

Somewhat apropos of my last post and the comments on it, I dug up my "You know you're ________ when..." for Philadelphia, which J. and I came up with a year or so ago. This isn't one of those lists that's been e-mailed all over the Internet since 1997; we thought of all of the items independently, although some of them may turn out not to be unique. And I decided that "You know you're from Philadelphia when..." didn't really sum up the spirit of the city, so I gave it the title



You've been in Philadelphia too long when...

• You use a red light as a left turn signal.
• You know the difference between the gayborhood and Queen Village.
• At a sporting event, you consider throwing things at the halftime entertainment a legitimate form of music criticism.
• Even if the halftime entertainment is Santa Claus.
• You know what's in scrapple and you eat it anyway.
• You know what you're getting when you order your cheesesteak "Cheez Whiz wit'."
• You say "youse" without irony.
• You can pronounce Schuylkill, Conshohocken, and Passyunk, although you can't necessarily spell them.
• You think any mayor is doing a good job if he hasn't actually bombed the city.
• You see nothing silly about hundreds of middle-aged blue-collar men wearing sequins and feathers, playing banjos, and dancing in the street to celebrate New Year's Day.
• You think New York is for sissies.

States and songs

Hearing about Ray Charles's death got "Georgia on My Mind" stuck in my head, which led me to wonder: why do only Southern states seem to have songs written about them? Not just official state songs, but songs you actually hear on the radio. "Georgia on My Mind," "Sweet Home Alabama," "My Old Kentucky Home," the ones I forget the titles of with the lines "going to Carolina in my mind" and "Almost heaven, West Virginia"—seriously, West Virginia has a positive song written about it and no state north of the Mason-Dixon line does? (Well, not that I can think of, anyway.)



Maybe it's because country and blues singers, who seem to be the main writers of that kind of song, are mostly from the South (well, from the South and from Canada); or that Southern states tend to have multisyllabic names ending in "a," which better lend themselves to sustained notes and melisma. It's hard to croon "Massachusettttttttsssss..." or sustain a sweet soprano "Maaaaaiiiiine..."



(Non-Southern cities have songs written about them; New York, obviously, Chicago, San Francisco. [Heck, San Jose.] Philadelphia seems only to have negative songs written about it; Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" isn't something you'd use as the backup music for a tourism commercial. And the musical "1776" contributed the immortal line "Foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia.")

Non-intelligent criminal

This doesn't fall under the classic amusing "dumb criminal" category, since it does involve an officer getting shot and the criminal being dead; but it's definitely not an example of a criminal with any degree of forethought. Parole officers were trying to serve a warrant to the guy, so, naturally, he fled down an alley, then shot one of the officers. (The other officer, quite reasonably, shot the suspect, who later died.)



Now, clearly, this was not a wise course for the suspect to take. "Hm, this guy is trying to serve me a warrant. Hey, I've got a good idea! I'll shoot him! That'll keep me out of prison!"



Not.



(I mean, even if he weren't currently dead, shooting an officer is about the surest way to get to jail. And one of the surest ways to get shot. "Officer down" are two words that get every person in law enforcement's blood up.)