The video above is quite old now, but I don’t think I’ve ever shared it here. Fits our topic, and it’s in my wheelhouse, too, as the language is Norwegian. It comes from the Norwegian national broadcast service. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s pretty clever.
Today was another of those clear, bright, bitter cold days in Minneapolis. I’ve mentioned the word “apricity” before – it means the warmth you feel when the sun shines on you, warming you a little on one of these polar days. This was an apricitous day.
I went to the gym (8 below) and then went to my tax preparer (about zero). Those two things are the sum of my achievements thus far, but I still felt worn out. Taxes will do that to you. My return is on hold, since it turned out a couple forms I need haven’t arrived in the mail yet. Next year I need to make a later appointment.
Now I’ll try to work on the novel. This thing is kicking my fundament. Every time I do a revision, I find more that needs fixing. I just discovered that in one story line, I put an effect ahead of a cause. This will have to be fixed.
I think it’s a good story, but it’s like a black hole. I like to think the book is smarter than I am, and I just need time to catch up with it.
Periodically we note great outcries in the media about “book banning.” The banning of books is indeed a serious issue, when it actually happens, but what these scares are about is almost never real banning. Banning means a book is declared illegal, and its publication and possession are forbidden by law. The closest thing to that that’s going on these days is when conservative books get cancelled by publishers. Which isn’t real banning, either.
Let me divulge (once again, because people keep forgetting) a secret from the forbidden world of librarians – librarians are not actually against banning (in their own sense of the term) books. They call it banning when parents want books kept out of libraries, or at least out of their children’s hands. But the fact is, librarians keep books off the shelves all the time. Deciding what books to acquisition, and what books to reject, is part of a librarian’s job.
The librarians aren’t against books being “banned” in that (erroneous) sense.
They’re against the peasants doing it.
Librarians believe that they themselves, as the anointed priesthood, have the sole right to “ban” books. They go into a snit when mere parents and concerned citizens violate their turf.
I used to be a librarian, but I’m out of the racket now. If I mysteriously disappear, you can be sure the Enforcers of the ALA have abducted me, and I probably sleep with the discards, for violating the Unwritten Code.
Nansen’s ship “Fram,” frozen into the polar ice, 1893. Photo from the Fram Museum, Oslo.
It was a nice quiet weekend, just the way I like it. I continue reading Fridtjof Nansen’s interminable book on his Fram expedition. It’s not boring – I’d have dumped it if it was. But it’s suitable to its subject – grim and dark and uncomfortable. It correlates well to the weather we’re experiencing. I can’t resist tailoring tonight’s post to the pattern of his daily journal entries:
January 10, 2022: The day dawned bright and cold. I made my way to the gym again, after skipping most of last week due to my temporary attack of an unspecified ailment. I don’t believe it was Covid; the symptoms seemed wrong. But if it was, all the better; in that case I’m over it now. The temperature was -6 Fahrenheit as I drove; it reached a high of 3 above during the afternoon. Tomorrow looks to be warmer. When shall spring come? Will I live so long? Ah, for the warm zephyrs and green grass of June! It seems so far away in these dark days.
It appears most of the people at the gym are wearing masks again now. For some time they’d become rare. I’m still going barefaced. I believe the vaccine has some benefits, but I think I’ve become a mask skeptic.
At lunchtime I tried to get into Arby’s again, and again the dining room was closed, in spite of a big sign saying the room is open as a general principle. I hold no grudge; no doubt they’re doing their best to recruit workers. But once again, as has happened so often of late, I ended up at Perkins, which is nearby and where I can count on a table to sit at in comfort. The manager actually mentioned, as I paid my bill, that he’d been seeing me a lot lately. I had to confess I hadn’t set out with his restaurant in mind. Perhaps I should have let him believe he’d won a devoted fan, but that would just have left him with an illusion sure to be shattered. My meal was jumbo shrimp, which Perkins does pretty well, though I noticed the shrimp aren’t as jumbo as they used to be. Restaurant management is a tough business just now – I don’t begrudge them a few economies. The place is warm, the food is good, and the help is friendly.
This afternoon I girded up my loins and addressed a job I’d been putting off – filing and paying my Minnesota sales tax for books I unloaded during my summer adventures. I’ve never had any serious problem with the process, and yet I always approach it with fear and trembling. Great was my relief when I got the job done (online) and printed out my receipts (duplicates, because you can never be too careful). My only regret was that the money I transferred doubtless works out to sunk costs.
Yeah, that’s about the right town. Winter in Minnesota / dead reckoning trekking on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. Essentially the same thing.
Fridtjof Nansen and crew members download Windows 1 from the Cloud, 1894.
A notable day this was. Finally got something done I’d been wanting to do all week. It cost me money, but if ‘twere done, then ‘twere best ‘twere done quickly, as the bald guy said.
I decided I needed a new laptop on Monday. The keys on the old one were stuttering, doubling random letters, which means your work load rises about 50% when you subsist by the keyboard as I do. But I got sick, as I’ve mentioned, and languished at home, doomed to work (work still came in) on my desktop computer, which really isn’t that bad. But I hate messing up my procedures, you know? It’s one of the perquisites of old age, being stuck in your ways.
Today I felt better, and decided this would be it. It was one of the coldest days of the year (the year being six days old), but I figured that would keep the other shoppers at home (I was mistaken, of course. This is Minnesota, where people jump in icy lakes for fun). My reading of Fridtjof Nansen seemed fitting, because just getting ready to leave the house on a day like this is a little like outfitting an Arctic expedition. (OK, just a little, but sometimes our temperatures are comparable to temps Nansen saw in the pack ice. In summer.)
The Norwegians have a saying – “Det finnes ingen dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær” (“There is no bad weather, just bad clothing”). This is one of the reasons I expected to find non-Scandinavian DNA when I joined an ancestry site. The fact that I found almost none indicates I must be a mutation – my father did visit Hiroshima while in the army in 1946, after all.
But at last I reached my favored computer store, eventually attracting a salesman’s attention. My plan was to spend a certain amount on a refurbished one, which has been my custom for a while. The salesman persuaded me I could get a new one for the same money that would be much more powerful and have a much longer life expectancy. It meant buying a brand I’d planned to avoid, but I saw reason at last. (Update: I’m working on it now, and I’m actually quite pleased. The keyboard action is good, and I haven’t had trouble with any apps [yet]). I notice, looking around, that I actually have a fairly tall stack of crashed laptops sitting around the house, so maybe the refurb strategy wasn’t as shrewd as I thought.
It did come with Windows 11. No doubt I’ll live to regret that, but what’s done is done, as the bald guy also said.
At least I didn’t have to retype half my words on this post.
Above, a clip from Buster Keaton’s “The General,” one of the funniest, most creative, and genuinely terrifying movies ever made. No CGI there. Keaton put himself into real peril with those stunts. That was his business.
(By the way, if you’re a Democrat, you’re not allowed to laugh at this. He’s playing a Confederate railroader, and THAT’S NOT FUNNY!)
Anyway, I posted the clip because I feel kind of like Keaton’s character right now. Run ragged, just barely surviving. The comparison’s absurd of course. I’m in no real peril. But I do feel ragged as I run. Or waddle. Come to think of it, Fatty Arbuckle would make a better comparison. But I don’t know his work.
The translation jobs keep coming. This is reason for thanksgiving. There are retired guys out there who don’t know what to do with their time. I weep for their meaningless lives. Me, I wonder where I’ll find the hours for all I have to do.
I’ve got a cold, on top of it. I’m pretty sure it’s not Covid, because I retain my exquisite connoisseur’s palate. (Unless it’s the new Omigosh variant, but it seems too soon for that.) I generally get a cold every winter, and sometimes it lasts me the whole season. Last year, probably because of the Levitical sanitation measures, I got no cold at all. But I have one now. And it’s making me tired.
But someone on the translating team in Norway has Covid (mild, I’m told, thank the Lord), so I must do my part and put my shoulder to the wheel. The shows must go on. And, I must not forget, I get paid for this.
But things keep popping up to steal my valuable time. Had to do the whole mortgage refinancing signature dance all over again today, for some reason I don’t quite understand. Some t not crossed the last time, I guess. A prescription to pick up. Bill-paying day, with an associated cash flow problem. And I need to find a new internet service provider before the end of the month.
I really need a valet. Jeeves would handle all this stuff, freeing my time up for translation and witty repartee. And he’d no doubt have a secret concoction whose ingredients would include honey, lemon, turmeric and Bombay gin, to make me feel better.
I could have been a great financial success, I’m pretty sure, if only I’d been born rich.
Merriam-Webster added 455 words to their dictionary last month, both new terms and new definitions. Because gets a new meaning as a preposition, “often used in a humorous way to convey vagueness about the exact reasons for something,” as in, “She drove all night because Daryl.” A new word is copypasta, something that has been spread around online.
Also new are deplatform, digital nomad, Oobleck, zero day, fluffernutter, and ghost kitchen.
Michael De Sapio describes the moral imagination of Graham Greene’sOur Man in Havana, a spy comedy. “Dana Gioia writes that Catholic fiction, contrary to what a secular reader might expect, ‘tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent.’ This is true of Our Man in Havana, which jostles us through brothels and nightclubs and striptease houses, conveying the dinginess of a decaying city side-by-side with the sanctity of the Church. The comic juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane points up the duality of human nature in the most visceral way possible.”
Speaking of Cuba, playwright Garcia Aguilera, who has been promoted by the government in the past, is now calling for political reform and peaceful protest. He has become what Cuban officials call a “counterrevolutionary.”
“In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines smile as ‘a slight contraction of the face.'” Yeah, but there’s more to it than that.
Allergies of the Gondolier, as told by Damian Balassone “From the monstrous canals of his nose a tsunami of mucus arose.”
Marvin Olasky summarizesJohn Frame’s A History of Western Philosophy and Theology. “In discussing early Christian philosophers, Frame criticizes those who have an insufficient sense of antithesis between Christian and Greek philosophy. Frame states that ‘the attempt to make Christianity intellectually respectable, and therefore easy to believe, is one of the most common and deadly mistakes of Christian apologists and philosophers throughout history.'”
Photo: Texaco gas pumps, Milford, Illinois, 1977. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress.
The ever helpful and occasionally funny Babylon Bee has published a guide to being woke in a world eager to know what that and other new labels mean. Mark Marshall has been equally eager and reviewed the book for his blog.
We can all think of excellent humor writers and comedians who excelled in short formats but flopped in books or movies. Maintaining humor beyond a few pages or a few minutes is no easy task.
In the case of The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness, my skepticism was unfounded. Just about every page had me laughing . . . hard. In fact, I alerted friends I was in danger of dying laughing just in case I had a joyous demise.
One example he provides comes from the chapter on making your life as woke as Jesus’s was. He raised Lazarus from the dead to vote for Democrats, and the DNC has followed that example from their beginning.
If this looks like your thing, then I’m sure the Bee’s Guide to Wokeness can be found wherever Babylon Bee merch is sold.
This clip from “A Night At the Opera” includes one of my favorite Groucho lines: “When I invite a woman out to dinner, I expect her to face me… That’s the price she has to pay.”
Reading another long book right now, so I guess I’ll dig myself further into a hole by elaborating on my puerile theory of humor. Basically, my theory is that humor is just telling the truth, but lobbing it in from an unexpected direction.
The truth in question doesn’t have to a big Major Truth. It could be a banal truth – the fact that you put one sock on before the other in the morning, or that the big box store always has about ten check-out stations, though never more than 2 of them are open. Puns, of course, depend on the most pointless of truths – that some words sound the same as others. It’s the surprising angle of approach, not the subject matter, that makes it funny. Groucho employs stream of consciousness in his dialogue – what he says makes sense, but only if you disregard context. Result: constant surprise. A roller coaster of illogic.
Every witty person has his own style. I think that’s what makes wit possible. One learns a particular angle of approach to the truth, and finds ways to apply it in lots of different situations. I once wrote on this blog (whether in this iteration or the original version) that I sometimes think I learned one joke when I was a teenager, and have been repeating it in various forms ever since.
The above clip from the Marx Brothers’ “A Night At the Opera” is provided for no other reason than to pad out the rest of this post, which doesn’t currently look promising in terms of thought or ideas. (The joke at the beginning about the “kids in Canada” is a reference to the Dionne Quintuplets, who were one of the big human interest stories of the day. Fertility drugs hadn’t been invented yet, so multiple births of that magnitude were pretty rare. If they’d had reality TV back then, the Dionnes would have had a show.)
Bee-yootiful day in Minneapolis today. Bright sun, temperatures in the mid-70s. I opened the sun roof on Miss Ingebretsen, my PT Cruiser, recently restored to me, then rolled the windows down and pretended I was driving a convertible.
Just before that, though, I had a shock to the system. I opened my garage door, and my car was MISSING!
(Cue scary orchestra chord: DUM-DUMMMMM)
Who stole it?
Who would steal an old PT Cruiser anyway?
How did they get in? The door isn’t damaged.
Don’t touch anything! There might be DNA evidence!
Then I remembered I’d parked it on the street when I got home from the gym, because I’d be driving it to lunch in a couple hours.
Am I getting Alzheimer’s?
(Cue scary musical chord: DUM-DUMMMMMM)
That’s possible, of course – witness my post about losing my keys not long ago (I forget exactly when. Don’t look at me like that).
But my memory is good enough to remember that I used to do the same sort of thing in my 20s. I am known internationally for my brilliance, my talent, my impeccable taste, and my irresistible charm. But I’ve never been known for my presence of mind.
First, the obligatory Old Man’s Reminiscence. By the time you get to my age, you’ve got a reminiscence for pretty much every situation. But usually only one, and people are sick to death of hearing it.
When I was in high school I took a Public Speaking class. I think it was there that I figured out I was good at public speaking, or at least that I enjoyed it, whether anybody enjoyed listening or not. I did a speech one week on Humor. I forget what I said – something about humor being related to truth. My teacher gave me a good grade, and said she’d like to see me develop it into an Original Oration, for district competition.
I thought about it, and wanted to do it. But I gave it up, because what I’d already said (little as it was) was pretty much all I could think of on the subject. And all I could find written on the subject seemed to agree that nobody knew how humor worked.
Well, more than fifty years have passed. And I think I have a theory. If it’s any good, it’s probably been said before. If it’s original, it’s probably twaddle. So I can’t really win with this. But I don’t have a book to review tonight, and I’m arrogant enough to post the theory here.
As I was saying in high school, before I was so rudely interrupted by time, humor is about truth. Doesn’t have to be a major, serious truth. It could be a small truth. All it needs to be is something we all recognize and share as part of our common life on this planet.
The humorist, instead of just stating bald fact, plays with the truth. It’s like a game of… Dodgeball, I guess. In Dodgeball, you have to keep on the lookout, because the ball might come at you from any direction. The humorist lobs the truth at you from a direction you don’t expect. You see it in a new way, you’re surprised, and (here the Dodgeball analogy breaks down), you’re amused. You laugh.
Or perhaps I could put it more crudely. Humor is the truth mooning you. Showing its backside.
“But,” you might say (especially if you viewed the clip above, the funniest scene from possibly the funniest film every made, “Duck Soup”), “that doesn’t apply to anarchic humor like the Marx Brothers or Monty Python.”
True, but I am prepared with an equivocation. Anarchic humor is the obverse of the same game. Here the truth does not surprise by its appearance, but by its absence. It’s made conspicuous by said absence. Ultimately, it declares the truth too.
(That, by the way, is why Monty Python generally didn’t offend me. People spoke of their humor subverting rationality. But I thought it emphasized rationality. Monty Python’s world was what we’d live in if the Postmodern philosophers were right. But the fact that the world isn’t like that – that Monty Python is funny, not a documentary – seemed to me to reinforce rationality.)
This theory is available for purchase by any large, wealthy, soulless corporation, in return for extravagant sums of money and the services of a valet.
I’ve been reading Lord Peter Wimsey stories, and I’m relatively sure I need a valet pretty badly.
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