It meant more to me than I can express to watch this inauguration with my sons in my embrace, all of us appreciating the historic importance of the occasion. It is for them, after all, and for their adorable counterparts Malia and Sasha, that President Obama and I must fix America.
Author: bobg
Failure? Oh yeah: not an option
But if all the lionization today and the talk about heroism and miracles seems a little too breathless, I blame — who else? — George Bush. This impressive display of can-do professionalism comes in the final hours of an eight-year interregnum marked primarily by no-can-do incompetence.
You couldn’t ask for a more vivid way to throw the past eight years into sharper relief. America, we were always taught, was the land where an abundance of know-how and elbow grease could defeat the Axis, put a man on the moon, create a succession of world-changing technologies, and be a beacon of justice, progress, and courage for the whole human race. Yet for most of this past decade we’ve witnessed fear dominating our policymaking, the loss of a major American city through neglect, the destruction of our present and much of our future wealth (and the crippling of our very system for generating new wealth), stagnation in the sciences, official disregard for the law, our international alliances in tatters, an assortment of ecological crises growing more severe and numerous by the week, two disastrously mismanaged wars, an avalanche of doublespeak, and a much, much longer litany of abuses and failures than I can bear to put down here but which you can find enumerated in many essays and articles this week reflecting on the exit of the Bush administration. Bush used his farewell address to the nation to make petulant excuses for why things weren’t better under his watch.
That’s not America.
America is where a seasoned pro with a cool hand on the controls can set his disabled jumbo jet in the water and be met by dozens more seasoned pros with a plenitude of training and equipment to rescue passengers who were marshaled out of the sinking wreckage in an orderly fashion by an equally well-trained crew of professionals.
America is where the incoming president has lined up an all-star team of experts and achievers to help him govern, instead of what we’ve grown accustomed to: cronies, patrons, figureheads, and yes-men.
In short, America is where the people are competent. It’s been so long since that was the case, we’ve all forgotten what competence looks like, so that when we see it in action like we did yesterday in the Hudson River, it takes our breath away.
Think of how routinely our parents and grandparents got to see American competence in action, and how little this generation has seen of it. We’re right to laud Captain Sullenberger and the others as heroes, but we’d be wrong to place them on a pedestal. Theirs is the ordinary heroism we should expect from any American in a position of responsibility. If we’re to learn anything from the Bush administration, it’s never to let them lower our standards. No more setting the bar low. From now on, we demand competence.
Moon type
I saw somewhere that today is the 200th birthday of Louis Braille, inventor of the Braille system of writing for the blind. As his legacy can easily withstand a little friendly competition, I figured it’s a good day to mention Moon Type, the little-known alternative to Braille.
Tell it like it is
In the same sally through the encyclopedia that uncovered Moon Type, Chuck discovered in the entry for “warthog” this caption beneath an illustration: “The warthog is one of the world’s ugliest animals.” This tickled us no end, but a year or two later when the library got an updated edition of the encyclopedia, we were even more amused to see that the same illustration now had a more scholarly and much less colorful caption, along the lines of, “The warthog can be distinguished by its tusks.” We delighted in imagining the outraged protests from some Warthog Appreciation Society that resulted in the politically correct change.
My friend Chuck discovered Moon Type in seventh grade while browsing through a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia in the school library. Developed around the same time as Braille, its alphabet consists not of raised dots but of simplified, recognizable letterforms.
The Moon Type alphabet
(lovingly rendered by yours truly)
Chuck and I decided that Moon Type, as obscure and yet as simple as it was, was ideal for passing coded messages to each other. We committed it to memory and used it thereafter from time to time when we desired an (admittedly light) extra level of security on our written communications — which consisted mostly of jokes, plans for world conquest, and not-fit-for-publication commentary on our female classmates.
“Book.”
On one dismal occasion, that extra security failed memorably. Chuck and I were at the apartment of my girlfriend Andrea (not the Andrea that I married). Andrea’s parents were out of town and I was hoping Chuck would get the hint about giving us some privacy. I wanted to use this perfect opportunity to advance with Andrea to, shall we say, a less consistently frustrating level of physical intimacy. We were having a grand old time, the three of us, but when the hour began to grow late and Chuck was still hanging around, I decided to pass him a coded message — coded once with Moon Type, and coded again by being worded obliquely in case of interception. The message was, “book.” I expected Chuck immediately to apprehend its slang meaning, which we sometimes used, of “leave” — and to be unoffended by the request, and to comply at once while making it look like leaving was his idea, as demanded by the Guy Code.
Unfortunately for me and my hormones, all of those expectations were wrong. I handed him the folded piece of paper behind Andrea’s back. Of course Chuck deciphered the Moon Type immediately — this was in tenth grade, and by now we had been using Moon Type for years. But our usual ability to know just what the other was thinking left him just then, and he said to me in a puzzled voice, “Book?” I tried to shush him and to clarify my intent nonverbally, but this only puzzled him more and he inquired again, within Andrea’s hearing, as to what I could have meant. Now she grew curious too. Ignominiously I tried to change the subject, and then (when that failed) to pretend I’d been trying to remind Chuck about a book he’d borrowed from me, but then why would I have written a coded message about it? Suddenly Chuck got it — “Oh, you want me to leave!” — and he got huffy, and Andrea got pissed off, and that was the end not only of that evening but of all future attempts to, ahem, “advance” with her.
At the time it felt like a disaster for my relationship with Andrea, and indeed it was; but I didn’t realize then that the lasting injury would be my guilt about having offended Chuck, my best friend. In the many years that have passed I doubt I ever apologized to him for it, and though I’m sure in hindsight he considers this incident to be minor and excusable by the ordinary cravenness of teenage boys, I still feel like I owe him this public: “Sorry, man!”
What brings you here 2008
Last year I joked about being disappointed that more of the hits on my blog weren’t sex-related — just 7.7%, counting hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts.” Well, be careful what you wish for. This year fully 30% of the searches that produced hits on this site were sex-related, and of those, more than half were just looking for my tiny screengrab of Polly Walker naked — and frankly I’m again disappointed. In the same year that I brought you the stars, my own blog-a-thon, and the Bob-o-matic — and that was just January — you guys couldn’t get your mind out of the gutter. 402 posts, something like 200,000 carefully-chosen words, and all you can say is, “Look! Tits!”
Ah well. I’ll keep doing my part to elevate the discourse around here, but clearly if I want to keep my hit-count up I’ve got to throw the occasional bone to the lowbrow crowd.
| Polly Walker; atia timon sex; naked polly walker; rome atia tits; “polly walker” nipple | 16.3% |
| Rogaine; how much scalp is to much; script kevin spacey rogaine; itchy red scalp; rogaine before after photos | 12.2% |
| Sex etc.; big bobg sex; jacking off using balloons sex; Masturbate biscotti; sexual positions lego; “Masturbate-a-thon”; Pretty Lady Sex; dildo attached to wall | 5.4% |
| Susan Oliver/Orion slave girl; Green Orion Girl Porn; vina the cage star trek | 5.0% |
| Erect nipples; notable nipples; hollywoods biggest nipples; cathy lee crosby nipples; sarah jessica erect nipples | 4.4% |
| Vampire lesbian girl scouts | 2.7% |
| Cathy Lee Crosby/Wonder Woman; THE ORIGINAL WONDER WOMAN; 1974 tv movie wonder woman | 2.7% |
| James Bond villains; so we meet again mr bond+villain | 1.9% |
| Batman; BATMAN GETS THE SHARK ON HIS LEG; batman hippies; batman mansion, gotham city; rubber shark batman; batman shark repellent bat spray | 1.9% |
| Don Fanucci | 1.7% |
| Star Wars; what date was the first friday in august 1977; TaunTaun Guts; exegesis the empire strikes back; how do lightsabers change colors in star wars; A picture of Han Solos face; will there be a star wars remake | 1.6% |
| Birthday invitation | 1.4% |
| Amy Linker; Amy Linker forest hills ny; Amy Linker Square Pegs | 1.3% |
| Sir Topham Hatt; SIR TOPHAM HATT YOU HAVE CAUSED CONFUSION AND DELAY; thomas kills sir topham hatt | 1.3% |
| Funny epitaph; Jewish headstone | 1.1% |
| e to the i pi plus one; pi e relation transcendentals; arrigo mathematics | 1.1% |
| Jaws ride | 1.0% |
| Penis; kid draws penises | 1.0% |
| Bob Falfa/Martin Stett; falfa vs milner | 1.0% |
| Godfather | 0.8% |
| Computer | 0.7% |
| The Incredibles; lessons from the incredibles | 0.7% |
| Raiders of the Lost Ark; bob falfa indiana jones 4; raiders of the lost ark, medallion; “raiders of the lost ark” “number on the crate”; musical note indiana jones theme | 0.7% |
| Sharon Stone | 0.6% |
| The end of Superman; how fast superman fly circumference; SUPERMAN REVERSING TIME; it is forbidden for you to interfere with time | 0.6% |
| Jodie Foster | 0.5% |
| Nygirlofmydreams | 0.5% |
| Trophy; dna structure trophy design | 0.5% |
| Comcast; threaten to disconnect comcast; PREMIUM CABLE CHANNELS HAVE ARTIFACTS; comcast removing channels | 0.5% |
| Widescreen viewing area; formula “aspect ratio” diagonal 16:9; 4:3 area on 50 in widescreen; 27″ tv viewing area | 0.4% |
| Star Trek/Enterprise/Kirk/etc.; Leonard Nimoy (Spock); “Trek 80” Game; first edition star trek star fleet technical manual; star trek Enterprise uniform sewing instructions | 0.4% |
| Giraffe; giraffe drawn by kids | 0.4% |
| Supertanker; dimensions of water carrying supertankers; become a supertanker captain | 0.4% |
| Joe Costanzo; the primadonna joe costanzo; “Joseph Costanzo Jr. Pittsburgh AND Cafe Costanzo” | 0.4% |
| Bob Glickstein; bang bobg; “danger inc” IMDB bob glickstein; bob glickstein hunter college; bob glickstein jonah blog; bobg clothing for women | 0.4% |
| Dog; dog ate duraflame; “Alex The Dog”; car seat belt dog | 0.4% |
| Pirates of the Caribbean; pirates of the caribbean scene similar indian jones raider of the lost ark knife dress; elizabeth swann red dress | 0.3% |
| Salt Lake Flats | 0.3% |
| Cigarettes/Camels/Still Life With Woodpecker; i haven’t had a cigarette for 9 days; tom robbins camel | 0.3% |
| Thai gem scam; thai export center bangkok | 0.3% |
| Sci-fi spaceships | 0.3% |
| Entenmann’s; fudge ice’s golden cake; bimbo usa to drop entenmann’s | 0.3% |
| Honda Fit | 0.3% |
| James Bond; girls in credits silhouette of bond film; JAMES BOND GREATEST HITS; CONNERY BOND ROULETTE | 0.3% |
| Millenium Falcon cockpit | 0.3% |
| Games Magazine/Calculatrivia Marathon | 0.3% |
| Contact film | 0.2% |
| Vertical speed indicator/altimeter; how does a plane’s climb indicator work?; pitot static tube schematic | 0.2% |
| Making Mr. Right | 0.2% |
| Honeybee/bees in chimney; I am finding bees lying in my kitchen where are they coming from; bees in a fireplace | 0.2% |
| Numerology 2008 | 0.2% |
| Indiana University; breaking away iu; “dan heller” bloomington indiana | 0.2% |
| Lego; the ark of covenant made of legos; what is the smell at legoland | 0.2% |
| Pez Museum; Why no Violet Pez?; burlingame museum of pez memorabilia | 0.1% |
| Peter and the Starcatchers | 0.1% |
| Candy; candy with cyclamate; candy invented in 1968; discontinued now and later candy flavors | 0.1% |
| Bdsm | 0.1% |
| Anakin/Padme; why did anakin turn to the dark side so easily; How much do Anakin’s talent, pride and ambitions affect his decision to turn to “the dark side”? | 0.1% |
| Incremental backup | 0.1% |
| Inverted flag | 0.1% |
| Vincent Price; vincent price as the saint; Vincent Price – Freedom of Religion Speech; was vincent price gay | 0.1% |
| Watch neighbor undress; URSULA UNDRESS | 0.1% |
| Bush smile; bush paraguay; bush smirk | 0.1% |
| Fizzies; fizzies magic soft drink tablets; fizzies into the swim meet | 0.1% |
| xkcd; XKCD E I PI | 0.1% |
| Bugsy Malone/Scott Baio; who sings coca cola give a little love and comes back to you; jodie foster in bugsy | 0.1% |
| Carl Sagan; circumference of the earth + sagan; carl sagan “tonight show”; i had a crush on carl sagan | 0.1% |
| Pine Knoll Bungalow Colony | 0.1% |
| Splashdown; meaning of karma slave; “feel so elated” Would you, would you, would you, would you Please bring me joy; splashdown the archer lyrics what does it mean? | 0.1% |
| Cynthia Nixon; cynthia nixon childhood; young cynthia nixon; “manhattan project” “cynthia nixon” | 0.1% |
| Danger | 0.1% |
| Adam Stoller | 0.1% |
An open letter to Paul Krugman
Congratulations on your well-earned Nobel prize.
I was heartened recently to read your column, “Life Without Bubbles” — not by the part where you write, “we’re in for months, perhaps even a year, of economic-hell,” which is just acknowledging the depressingly obvious, but by your assertion that “Late next year the economy should begin to stabilize, and I’m fairly optimistic about 2010.”
In dire need of some positive news, of something to look forward to, I seized on that “fairly optimistic” line as many others have done in the week since you published it, despite its vagueness, its throwaway nature, and the fact that it’s mostly beside the point of your article.
But then I thought, “Hmm. Suppose I were Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize winning economist and one of the best-known, most well-respected voices on current affairs. Suppose I knew the basic fact of economics that the public’s collective confidence in the economy is self-fulfilling: when people are optimistic about the future, by and large the economy improves; and even more certainly, when they’re pessimistic, it deteriorates. And now suppose that I, Paul Krugman, believed that things were going to get bad, really bad, for a long time — Weimar Germany bad. Would I tell it like it is — and knowing my own influence, be responsible for the resulting nosedive in public confidence and the economic ruin it would cause? Or would I feel a responsibility to say something positive even if I didn’t really believe it?”
So I’m having trouble knowing whether you’re sincere, or whether you’re secretly with Roger Ebert and just not able to express your sense of doom without hastening it.
Don’t bother replying. If you would write that you were really being sincere, I won’t know whether to believe that and we’ll be right back where we started. But if you would admit that you were being unsupportably rosy in an effort to delay the inevitable, that’s something I’d just rather you not say in public.
Whistling in the dark,
– Bob
Kids tell each other the darnedest misinformation
Jonah, age 6 2/3, to brother Archer, age 4 2/3, when they thought we couldn’t overhear them:
“Do you know what ‘sketch’ is? When two people take off their clothes and kiss. In bed!”
Looks like it’s time to have that little talk with him…
Les quatre cents cool
It’s gee bobg post number 400, and time again to turn the podium over to the Bob-o-matic.
I know where the phallus originates: see figures 1a, 1b. But what’s the matter, energy, and along the way to a wealthy and unsavory businessman known as the to and from e-mail? I’ve been trying to recall the name of a bitch. Check. Deliver a eulogy. Check. Describe how it jibes with the previous few days in which I measured faithfully under identical conditions each day to protest a greedy move by the prevailing political fashions of the story. After ten heart-stopping minutes I believed their fun was just a phase. The girls again, was banned in the 1950’s, still holding out a grape from a pay phone — and walk Alex (I had never learned he was our tour guide, where’s Violet)? He couldn’t bag ‘er for want of a trance. Tom, tonight is the imaginary number 1. Five factorial, for me because it was over. We felt we really must be going. Then they began laughing and clamoring. Steve set the stage properly. Cast a couple are typical murder mysteries, but I think it was called the Joyful Elite. It didn’t help. Exley: You make a guess on my side and reaching under the same to me, since water is heavier than oil, then at the end of Superman/Batman crossover stories, and thanks anyway. Excerpts of my own best efforts to avoid it, recording it, see a correlation between cat allergies and an etrog citron. As a result of 438 square inches knowing that the telecoms and/or the easy way or another descended into the water? Because she chose the wrong conclusion. Subscribers to Comcast Digital artifacts (Con Edison) what year did the fish movie, Hitchcock once explained to her name was Turner leading the pirates would continue to play some roulette. All together to endure the crisis and emerge more tightly knit — the Danger mail system uses (when converting from MSP data to and from time) to dry by a long time I finally got around to follow their instructions? The trials involved in achieving the goal of some psychological jujitsu by Mary Poppins, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg! In two weeks — then dragged the duffel bag (seemed no less dense than the year 2008). The year I sent this message to one side with a better sense of humor, the least electable Democrat. The problem (the problem) isn’t a particular collection of mechanisms for specifying and describing the cloud — let’s assume that the recent wave of non-introductory computer-science courses, which contributed to the Kims’ mistakes, fall into each other’s families — she watches my kids grow up, in retrospect. I said once Bush was crazy, they came from simply walking down the hill beneath the surface. Commander sighs: I had attended a sneak-preview screening of Reggio’s final Qatsi film, from someone who knew this fact and the friend request with the filthy soles of theirs. It’s an annoying case of murder, about a month later. When you get your very own Fizzies fountain. They glamorized the idea that with Steven Spielberg — because Spielberg made Hitchcock feel like crying — Comcast removes West Coast feeds 1, 6 — Comcast, Comcast, crappy broadcast Comcast, reduction in service at all those Western girls? Has it done such a time. I forget what it had — the needed equipment we ran into one another (groan) with — our first surprise came when traffic was backed up in arms about it was the litigiousness of its kind among Splashdown’s songs, leaving a diehard core of doubters free to murder and steal and covet their neighbors’ wives and kick adorable defenseless puppies, but on this trip, or some other innocent program to view the complete list of Perl regular expressions, we made a trek to the altar to witness the awesome power of tyrants is to suspend or nullify elections whose outcomes they don’t because God is everywhere.
A holiday tradition
You didn’t think I was going to leave you hanging, did you? It’s a little late in the season but here’s my annual reimagining of a popular seasonal song.
You better not look
You better not leer
Your best bet is getting the
Hell out of here
Santa Claus is wearing a gown
He’s batting his eyes
And pursing his lips
Walking in heels
And swinging his hips
Santa Claus is wearing a gown
When Mrs. Claus is sleeping
He sneaks into her clothes
He calls some elves in a girlish voice
And they paint each other’s toes
When Christmas is done
The year is so long
He passes the time
In drag — that so wrong?
Santa Claus is wearing a gown
(Previously.)
Flux capacitor fluxing
So yesterday I’m on Facebook and I see a status update from my friend Amy from elementary school, who moved to Hollywood and was an actress for a while. Attached to her status update is a comment from one Claudia Wells, a name I recognize. Another elementary school classmate of mine and Amy’s? I send her a “friend” request with the note, “Are you the Claudia Wells from P.S. 196 in Forest Hills, NY?”
She writes back promptly to say she isn’t — she’s a classmate of Amy’s from high school. That’s when I Google her and discover she’s the actress who played Marty McFly’s girlfriend in Back to the Future, the film in which a short-circuit sends Michael J. Fox thirty years into the past. And then I remember that the Claudia who went to school with me and Amy had a different last name entirely. How did I get it wrong? I guess seeing the name “Claudia” juxtaposed with Amy’s caused a mental short-circuit — one that sent me into the past — by exactly thirty years! (To 1978, my last year of elementary school and the last time I saw Amy or Claudia.) I write back and tell her so.
I slay me. I’m quite sure Claudia Wells doesn’t get nearly enough Back to the Future references in her life.
The old fly, call, sprint, bound, ring gag
A couple of times after I moved to Pittsburgh for college, I flew home to New York without telling my mom. Her apartment building had a pay phone in the lobby. On these occasions I would call her from the lobby, pretending still to be in Pittsburgh. In the middle of the conversation I’d say, “Hold on a second.” Then, leaving the phone off the hook (but having arranged with the doorman to hang it up for me after a few minutes), I’d sprint from the lobby down a long hallway to the rear staircase, bound up to the third floor, and ring her doorbell. I’d greet her with a “Surprise!” and a goofy smile, and she’d greet me with a delighted hug.
Thanksgiving was a good time to do this trick, because it was plausible to claim not wanting to travel on Thanksgiving, and because Thanksgiving is a great family-togetherness holiday, and because my mom’s birthday was always right around Thanksgiving. In fact today’s the day she would have been seventy-four.
After I surprised her this way two or three times she started asking me, “Are you really down in the lobby?” whenever I’d call from Pittsburgh to say “wish I could be there” on some holiday or other. She was always disappointed when I convinced her that I really was far away still. In later years, after college, I did this once or twice more, only with the advent of ubiquitous cell phones I didn’t have to arrange anything with the doorman, or sprint, or even say “Hold on a second.” I could call her from right outside her apartment door, and ring her doorbell right in the middle of a sentence. Convenient — but I liked the lower-tech, higher-effort version better.
Happy birthday, Mom. This is the story we would be remembering together if you were still around. I miss you.