Charles Barkley recently referred to Ron Artest as “Dr. Phil’s worst nightmare,” but he’s kept a cool head during this series with the Lakers. Mostly. I mean, he’s only got, what, three T’s? Anyway, he’s intense on the court, but I think that even Dr. Phil would be impressed with his ability to separate his work persona from his life persona. At last night’s post-game press conference: “‘Five Dollar Foot-Long’ is one of the best songs ... That’s a hot song. You’ve got the FreeCreditReport.com, and then ‘Five Dollar Foot-long’ comes on. When ‘Five Dollar Foot-long’ comes on, they should play that in the club.” I feel you, Ron. For the last three weeks, this has popped into my head: “Five. Five dollar. Five dollar foot loooong. G-g-g-goin on. At Subway.” Again. And again.
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Question: Is there a better litmus test of 1980’s celebrity than a guest appearance on Love Boat? Wikipedia’s master list includes Corey Feldman, Pat Morita, Rich Little, Menudo, the Village People, and the Pointer Sisters. Also included: Lorne Greene, Shecky Green, Pam Grier, and Andy Warhol. Surprisingly omitted: The Harlem Globetrotters.
Sarah brought over an excellent old book called The Trees of California, by Willis Linn Jepson. It was published in 1909, and it had some amazing photos of the redwoods up north.
The caption reads: “Fig 15. REDWOOD (Sequoia sempervirens Endl.) Making the “undercut”, which determines the direction of the fall, on a tree 16 feet in diameter. Humboldt woods.” Photo: A.W. Ericson.
Amazon sells Trees of California for $75, but you can read it for free at Google Books. Cool.
Doug LeMoine is puzzled that the construction of Facebook status updates requires me/him to refer to myself/himself in the third person. This format gives structure to the News Feed, but it also encourages the updater to craft the update as a sentence beginning with his/her full name. The forced third-person would seem to create myriad grammatical problems as people try to construct meaningful sentences, but pretty much everyone ignores grammatical correctness (not surprising). The surprising thing is, grammatically incorrect status updates don’t really seem weird (to me) anymore.
(It’s possible that I’m taking this all far too seriously).
When I first joined Facebook, I dutifully wrote all of my status updates in the third person, as the format dictates. Because I am both a grammar snob and a rule-follower.
Rule-abiding: Doug ... his
This construction is appropriate for the feed, but it’s also terribly awkward. Statuses are usually personal, “microblog-ish” bits of content, and it just sounds weird when personal stuff is written in the third person. Recently, I started to lapse into the first person in the body of the status, and while doing so, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable condemnation.
Rule-bending? Rule-breaking? Rule-adapting: Doug ... my
But so far, there has been no condemnation forthcoming. Why? Maybe we all quickly become blind to the totally obvious disagreement? Or maybe it just makes cognitive sense that the content of the status will be in the first person? If the latter is true, how soon will we be updating Fowler and Strunk & White to reflect this new kind of usage?
What I know about the inner-workings of politics I learned in The Power Broker, and therefore I don’t claim to know much other than the sausage-making involved in building the Triborough Bridge. Still, I was struck by the following passage from Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The first budget, [Robert Nabors, an OMB veteran] told me, “was being designed with an eye toward what do we need to do to put the economy back on a more sustainable path? What do we need for economic growth? And what do we need to do in order to transform the country? Those were our overarching principles.” The budgeteers took a hyper-rational approach, attempting to determine policy and leave the politics and spin for later. He went on, “One of the things that would probably surprise people is that this wasn’t an effort where anybody created a top-line budget number and said, ‘This is the number that we have to hit, and that’s just that, and we’ll fit everything else in.’ Or, ‘We can’t go higher than x on revenue,’ or, ‘We can’t go higher than y on spending.’ It was more of a functional budget than anything else: ‘This is what we need to do. These are our principles. These are our core beliefs. And as a result this is what our budget looks like.’”
This is probably the kind of thing that gives nightmares to the teabaggers, but I love the idea of goal-oriented budget creation. Why not try to keep your eyes on the prize of actual tangible outcomes like sustainble economic growth when you’re wrangling the world’s most complicated spreadsheet into submission?
In a field / I am the absence / of field. / This is / always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing — Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole”
