Joe Biden & Song Lyrics

Joe Biden seems to be the early front-runner to win the Democratic nomination for 2020, but Joe is burdened by quite a few handicap pounds under his saddle—his age, the Anita Hill business when he didn’t treat her fairly in 1991 in the hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and the charge of inappropriate touching and hugging that arose recently. Will the Democrats overlook this baggage and make him their favorite to oust Trump or will he get dropped along the way? Will women voters forgive him for his treatment of Anita Hill and his penchant for touching people inappropriately? I don’t know, but I do think in his case the #Metoo Movement may have moved too far. Let me repeat what I’ve already said in one of my earlier blogs about hugging. Hugging is therapeutic. I don’t mean the kind where two people bend at the waist and pat each other on the shoulder. I mean full body hugging. More therapeutic than a kiss, especially the kiss on the cheek or forehead. Most men don’t feel comfortable hugging another man, but I do. The hug is comforting, saying by the act how sorry we are at the bad news the other has just received. Or how much the hugger loves the huggee. The world would be a much better place if we all gave each other a hug occasionally. So, dear reader, please assume that I just gave you an internet hug. There, don’t you feel better?

What else will be at the center of debates leading up to next November? Well, obviously, the wall and its effectiveness at preventing or at least slowing down the flood of asylum seekers; the necessity of dealing with climate change; gun control, gun control, gun control (it bears repeating at least three times); tax reform; our failing infrastructure; and, of course, the results of the investigations into Trump’s finances. These should be an interesting and revealing twelve months.

# # # # # # #

          I just listened to Jackie Allen sing an old Rogers and Hart song, “You’re Nearer,” and couldn’t help but notice how simple, yet how lovely, the lyrics were.

You’re nearer, than my head is to my pillow,
Nearer, than the wind is to the willow.
Dearer, than the rain is to the earth below,
Precious as the sun to the things that grow.
You’re nearer, than the ivy to the wall is,
Nearer, than the winter to the fall is.
Leave me, but when you’re away, you’ll know,
You’re nearer, for I love you so!

          I may be old-fashioned, but I still most admire lyrics I can hear and understand, lyrics carefully constructed and balanced, unlike too many song lyrics being written today. Even Taylor Swift, a singer/writer I admire, writes lyrics that don’t have real balance. “White Horse,” for example, is a great song, but it depends for the most part on her singing it, her delivery, her personality. Then there’s the insanely popular Justin Bieber. I think he could sing the yellow pages and his female fans would go berserk. But the lyrics themselves are certainly not up to any of Larry Hart’s. He begins “One Time” with “Me plus you, I’ma tell you one time, / Me plus you, I’ma tell you one time, / Me plus you, I’ma tell you one time, / One time one time.” Catchy, right? And he goes on with “When I met you girl my heart went knock knock, / Now them butterflies in my stomach won’t stop stop. / And even though it’s a struggle love is all we got / And we gon’ keep keep climbing to the mountain top.”

All right, so I’m picking on the Beebs and his lyrics. He seems to be a fine young man / With a great future in musical art, / But I’ma tell you one time, one time, / He ain’t no Larry Hart.

Electoral College

         2020 is rushing at us like a runaway political freight train, cars loaded with hats in the ring, Tweet wars, enough gray guilt to paint the entire White House, Mueller reports, and so many other investigations I can’t keep track of them all. And once again we’ll revisit the debate about the Electoral College. Not that anything can or will be done about it by next November.

      According to a Gallup poll in 2013, 62% (more Democrats than Republicans) of American voters are in favor of an amendment to do away with the Electoral College and to use the popular vote to decide who should be president. Granted, most winners with the 270 electoral votes have also had a majority of the popular vote. But five times in our history, people were elected who did not have the majority of the popular vote: Andrew Jackson in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016. Bush, with that strange Florida recount, beat Al Gore but lost the popular vote by 543,816. Most lop-sided of all was the amount by which Hillary Clinton beat Trump by almost four million yet lost by way of the Electoral College. Gore had a valid argument then and the voters in 2016 have an equally valid argument against this outdated method instituted by the Founding Fathers as a compromise between those who wanted Congress to select a president and those who wanted it decided by the people.

          Besides the unfairness of the above five examples, there’s another reason why we should use the popular vote: In states that seem to be already decided based on past voting (non-swing states for either nominee), too many voters might be discouraged from voting simply because they’d feel their vote wouldn’t matter. And it wouldn’t. The electoral votes in California, for example, are already decided ten months ahead of time. A vote for anyone other than Barack Obama wouldn’t matter. Might as well tear up your vote and throw it to the wind, maybe even skip voting entirely. A vote in South Dakota for anyone other than a republican wouldn’t matter. Throw that one to the wind as well, maybe even skip voting entirely. But, you say, they’d have other races to decide on a state and national level, so they’d still come out to vote. Yes, the dedicated and politically aware voters would still vote. But what about the millions of not so dedicated or not so politically aware, the semi-apathetic? Hmmm, the argument would be that we don’t want those millions deciding anything so important anyway, an echo of our Founding Fathers’ reason for not wanting a popular vote to decide such an important matter, their fear of giving too much power to the riffraff. Or as Ron Paul said in his 2004 essay The Electoral College vs. Mob Rule: “The Electoral College system represents an attempt, however effective, to limit federal power and preserve states’ rights. It is an essential part of our federalist balance. It also represents a reminder that pure democracy, mob rule, is incompatible with liberty.” So, Ron, who decides who the mob is? So, Ron, we should keep an elitist system for making this decision and not put it at least partially in the hands of the mob, the riffraff, the rabble, the great unwashed . . . the people? I don’t think so.

          In the next few blogs, I’ll visit some of the other concerns that will be discussed, debated, and fought over in the coming flood of political ads and interviews leading to the choosing of nominees and the final voting in November 2020.

Puns & Other Clever Bits

           I have no idea where these came from (probably from one of my e-mail buddies, most likely you, Jim). And I know I’ve stuck them in one blog or another over the years, but here I go again.

1. Two vultures board an airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at them and says, "I'm sorry, gentlemen, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

2. Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina. One went to Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other stayed behind in the cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one, naturally, became known as the lesser of two weevils.

3. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft, it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it, too.

4. A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West. He slides up to the bar and announces: "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."

5. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

6. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why?" they asked, as they moved off. "Because," he said, "I can't stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer."

7. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named "Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, "They're twins! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."

* * * * * *

I can’t prevent the birds of sorrow from passing over my head, but I can keep them from building a nest in my hair.

Going to a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

The most abundant elements on earth are oxygen and stupidity.
Quondo Omni Flunkus Mortati (When all else fails, play dead.)
I became a teacher for the money. The power and fame were just a bonus.
If it moves, it’s biology. If it stinks, it’s chemistry. If it doesn’t work, it’s physics.
Always remember, you are unique, just like everyone else.

Being a good writer is 5% talent and 95% not being distracted by the internet.
My train of thought just derailed. There are no survivors.
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from many, it’s research.
My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.

A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.

Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.

Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.

By the time you can make the ends meet, they move the ends.

Tragedy

So much sadness in the news these days, too much tragedy and not enough comedy, too much insanity. Still too much war in the world, too much terrorist activity, too many sad tales of child abuse, too much bullying. Too many shooters in schoolrooms, too many trucks and autos driving full-speed into crowds of people. Too much division . . . too much Trump.

These examples that follow are all taken from the 2013 news, but they could all be duplicated in any year from then to the present. We just don’t seem to run out of tragedy.

When Cory Monteith from Glee died from a drug overdose, either accidental or purposeful, the cast paid tribute to him and I wept along with them as Lea Michele sang “Make You Feel My Love” in memory of his passing, tears simply rolling down her cheeks as she sang, tears rolling down mine as I listened to her.

Then there’s the woman who drowned her three kids and just gave birth to her fourth child in a psychiatric ward. What chance does that poor fourth child have in this world? And why didn’t we as a society require that the woman have her tubes tied? All right, all right, I know we can’t become Big Brother and declare such an edict. But how can we or God allow such tragic insanity to continue?

Adrian Peterson, NFL running back, heard that his two-year-old son had just died from a beating. The boyfriend of Peterson’s ex-girlfriend beat the two-year-old to death. A two-year-old.

A sixteen-year-old in Phoenix recently gave birth to a girl in a public restroom and then threw the baby out the window.

Twenty-seven impoverished migrants, on a boat bound from Africa to Europe, drowned in the Mediterranean.

Joe Bell, father of the Oregon gay teenager who killed himself after being bullied by classmates, was himself killed during his cross-country walk to honor his son, struck by a semi on a Colorado highway.

The list goes on and on, like some kind of bad cosmic joke.

As I approach the end of my life, I realize more and more just how inconsequential all our lives are. It’s not that our lives aren’t worth living. It’s just that the marks we leave behind are so insubstantial, tiny ripples in an eternal sea. We die and the world moves on. I read all the time and I have all these words in my head, other people’s words. I know the lyrics to most of the Great American Songbook and can sing them in my head, word for word, thousands of songs. I’m writing stories and essays and expanding on ideas during most of my waking hours and, I swear, I’m even doing it in my sleep, or that twilight time between waking and sleeping when memory is at its clearest. Why have I spent my whole life stuffing words into my head only to die and have them vanish along with me? All those words seem so unimportant now. I don’t know. But now I think I’m babbling.

Words & Puns

I’m a big fan of words, English words, that is. I guess that goes almost without saying since I chose to teach English all my life. And English words can be so interesting but often so peculiar. For example, “invalid” has two pronunciations and two meanings. When it’s an adjective and pronounced “in-VAL-id,” it describes something no longer valid—having no force, null or void. But when it’s a noun and pronounced “IN-val-id,” it describes a weak, sickly person, especially one who is chronically ill or disabled. What a cruel thing to call a sick or disabled person, suggesting he’s null or void.

Another set of words involves the suffix “-ful,” which derives from Anglo Saxon, and “-ous,” which derives from old French by way of Latin. The both mean “full of” whatever is the root to which it attaches ("harmonious, full of harmony"). We have a small group of words which can take either suffix and mean essentially the same thing: beautiful and beauteous, wonderful and wondrous, plentiful and plenteous, graceful and gracious, pitiful and piteous, bountiful and bounteous, joyful and joyous, rightful and righteous, doubtful and dubious. All of these pairs are nearly synonymous, but not quite. Each one has taken on slightly different hues and one almost has to consult a dictionary to see the proper usage for each. The best example might be graceful and gracious. “Graceful” suggests beauty of form, expression, or movement, especially physical movement. “Gracious” suggests a person showing kindness or courtesy, mercy or compassion. Both describe people who are full of grace, but one a physical grace, the other a mental grace.

But we also have many words ending in “–ful” that don’t have a near synonym ending in “-ous” and many ending in “-ous” that don’t have a brotherly “-ful.” Many of them should, though, with some fanciful (fancifous) or humorous (humorful) results. For example, “sinful” might have “sinuous,” the one meaning full of sin, the other meaning full of twists and turns, like the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve with that tasty, sinful (sinuous) apple. If there’s a “righteous,” why not a “wrongeous?” For every “sorrowful,” there should be a “sorrowous,” a “hateous” for every “hateful,” a “stupendeful” for every “stupendous,” a “malodorful” for every “malodorous,” a “ridicuful” for every “ridiculous.” And to end this discussion, we should have both a “bsifous” as well as a “bsiful.”

And while I’m at it, here are some of the puns I’ve earlier used in one of my blogs, but they’re so very clever regarding words (I borrowed them from t-shirts in the Signals catalogue) they’re worth repeating:

1. Keep clam and proofread. Loose your cool and it’s easy to make misteaks.

2. “I” before “e” except when eight weird, feisty neighbors seize a surfeit of weighty heifers.

3. The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.

4. Seven days without a pun makes one weak.

5. Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.

6. A backward poet writes inverse.

7. Her bootlegging was illegal, but I loved her still.

8. A tardy cannibal gets the cold shoulder.

9. Never play cards in the Serengeti—there are too many cheetahs.

10. I regret not developing my photographic memory.

11. And my favorite of all in this age of talkers: Listen and silent have the same letters. Coincidence?

Blogger's Block

I’m suffering from severe writer’s block, or in my and Danae’s worlds, Blogger’s Block. There just doesn’t seem to be anything worth writing about. “Even if it’s crap, get it on the page,” some writers instruct. But who wants to read crap? Or maybe it’s not only that no one wants to read crap, no one is reading what I have to say, crap or garbage or words of silver and gold. Word crap, verborrhea. I wonder if there’s an antonym for verborrhea. How about verboconstipa? That’s what I’m suffering—verboconstipa. All the words are there, but the linguistic sphincter is squeezed like a fist. In some cases, that’s a better affliction than the opposite. Too many people today are so full of words they just can’t wait to find someone on whom to dump them. Such a nice list of words for this afflication—bombast (suggesting a barrage of words like hand grenades, or mouth grenades), prolixity, verbosity, verbal plethora, verbophilia, euphemism, grandiloquence (these last two suggesting not so much an outpouring of words as a fondness for purple prose, a straining for effect rather than meaning). But enough about verbal colon motion.

What about my lack of ideas? I could write about the weather, the wave of severe storms sweeping across the east coast. But what can I say except that I’m really thankful I live here in Arizona and not back there. I might write about any movies I’ve seen lately, but I’ve either already written about them or I haven’t seen any movies lately. How about books and television? How about plot elements that invite readers and viewers to root for characters who are either evil or appear to be evil? I remember when we began watching FX’s The Americans. How were we supposed to feel about this couple, an empathy for them or an aversion to them because they’re bad people embarked on a bad mission? The main characters are a couple of Russian spies, deeply embedded in cold war America. They’ve been trained to be as American as apple pie, living apple pie lives with two apple pie children, waiting for orders to do whatever spies do. But they both seem to be so normal, such good people. Do we root for them or do we despise them? I’m reminded of other fictional characters with this same double nature. John Sandford, in one of his Prey series, included a hit-person named Clara Rinker, a very likeable young woman who just happened to kill people for money, most of whom probably deserved to die, in some way connected to one mob or another. But still, she was a killer. Do we like her, root for her, or do we despise her? Lawrence Block has a series about a hitman named Keller. Keller kills people for money, and he’s very good at it. And, like Clara Rinker, he disposes of people who probably deserve to die. He, too, is a very likeable character and the reader really does root for him. I remember reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay a few years ago, a novel about a man named Dexter Morgan, whose foster father early on recognized the boy’s psychotic need to kill. So, instead of shipping him off to psychologists, he convinces him to channel his psychosis by killing serial killers. A psycho killer who kills psycho killers. And the reader sympathizes with Dexter. That’s rather creepy, but there you have it. The television series based on Dexter takes it even further, making him a loving husband and father, the flip side of his dark side. Hard to decide these days who are the good guys and who the bad. It’s like the popularity of the Twilight series a decade ago, the many fans of these fanged characters. I mean, they’re vampires, for God’s sake. And the current fans of the walking talking dead. I mean, they’re zombies, for God’s sake. Even Clint Eastwood’s main character in The Unforgiven is duplicitous (I know, I know, it means he’s a liar, but I want it to mean he’s a two-sided character). Is he an evil man who became good and then became evil again when he goes to fight evil and does evil things in his fight? The line between evil and good is no longer as clear as it once was, when good guys wore white hats and bad guys wore black. Now, everyone seems to be wearing gray.  And we have a president who should be a white hat and yet seems to be as black as midnight. Whoosh! That’s a lot of words for someone suffering from Blogger’s Block. The sphincter may have loosened.

Oz & Up

Last night I had a linguistic dream in which I was explaining to an old friend how difficult English is for foreign-born people to learn. Just so many anomalies, so many idioms. We like to force words into new meanings that don’t always make much sense. I told him about the first line of the song in The Wizard of Oz, “We’re off to see the wizard.” Odd word, off. “To be off” suggests an actual movement toward something. I can just see Dorothy, the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow skipping through the Oz countryside, the Emerald City in the distance (Oh, and don’t forget Toto). So they’re off to off the wizard. That is, they’re going there to kill the wizard. They aren’t really, but in my proposed sentence above, there’s that second off to explain, the verb to off, which in slang means to kill. The first off simply means that they’re about to begin a journey. Reverse it and you might get, “We’re on to you” (We know all your secrets). Or “We’re onto you” (We’re now sitting on you). And look at going in “We’re going to be going to the Emerald City.” The first going has nothing to do with a physical move forward as in the second going. It means future time, as in “Sometime in the future we’re moving toward the Emerald City.” By this time in my dream, my friend was just shaking his head, moving slowly to the bedroom door.

More linguistic oddities, even though not in my dreams, just in my observations. We love to take adverbs and force them into joining forces with some verb to take on new meanings. Our little two-letter word up is a good example of these strange verbal unions: give up (surrender), suck up (either to renew fortitude or to falsely flatter), take up (begin a new hobby), sign up (join), seize up (piston freezing by friction), shut up (close one’s mouth), chin up (raise one’s chin [a verb], but chin-up [a noun in which one raises one’s body by pulling oneself up to a bar]), shine up (falsely flatter), fix up (repair), show up (appear), slow up (And why does “slow up” mean exactly the same as “slow down?”), stick up (a verb suggesting the act of putting a gun in someone’s face) and stickup (a noun indicating the act of putting a gun in someone’s face), stuck up (nose in the air), and throw up (Do we regurgitate up or down?). You know, all this linguistic consideration is giving me a bellyache. I think I’ll just throw up my hands. Eeeooo, now there’s a disgusting image.

English Grammar Lesson

I’ve been thinking about all those old pedantic rules of English grammar that I used to teach, most of which I told my students to ignore. But I thought they should at least know what they were before they ignored them.

First, don’t split infinitives. That’s when you put some adverbial stuff in between the sign of the infinitive, “to,” and the verbal itself, like “Try to never listen to old English teachers.” Un-split, it becomes, “Try never to listen to old English teachers.” A little awkward but okay. But sometimes there’s no better place to put an adverb than right there between the “to” and the verbal. For example, “Life is too short to totally behave yourself in study hall.” Can “totally” go anywhere else?

Second, don’t end sentences with prepositions. Winston Churchill famously had this to say about that: “This is a form of pedantry up with which I will not put!” When a writer tries too hard to avoid the prepositional ending, the sentence can come out sounding too stuffily formal. For example, “The Red Cross was the charity they chose to give their fortune to.” Switch it to, “The Red Cross was the charity to which they chose to give their fortune.” A little stuffy, right? Now look at this sentence in which there’s no way to avoid the preposition at the end: “The trip committee decided it was the best direction to come in from.” Lousy sentence, yes, but the only way to fix it leaves “The trip committee decided it was the best direction from which to come in.” Okay, okay, maybe it should have been “The trip committee decided it was the best way to enter.” But we still have the American verb “to come in” equal to “to enter.”

Third, there’s the old dictum to never begin a sentence with “and” or “but,” and to always write in complete sentences. But I’ve already broken that one three times thus far. Also, two split infinitives in the sentence above. Also, a sentence fragment in the last sentence. Also this one.

Fourth, don’t let your modifiers dangle or get misplaced. A dangler usually refers to a word group at the beginning of a sentence that should be referring to the subject of the main clause. Such an error can lead to misunderstanding or sometimes even hilarity. For example, “Flying over the African plain, the elephant herd looked majestic.” That would require a very large plane or a bunch of big-eared Dumboes. Another: “Smashed flat by a passing truck, my dog Rowlfie sniffed at what was left of a half-eaten Whopper.” Poor Rowlfie. And one example of a modifier that got misplaced, maybe even lost: “The body was discovered by a hunter with a gunshot wound to the head.”

Fifth, don’t engage in superfluity, excess, repetition, prolixity, wordiness, or redundancy. That sentence is a good example of what not to do. Here are a few much shorter examples: a pair of twins (Does that mean there are four or only two?), surrounded on all sides (Does that include above and below?), consensus of opinion (One of the few things I learned in my high school Latin class was that “consensus” already means “a unity of opinion” and that only dumb dolts would ever say “consensus of opinion.”)

There, that should be enough English lessoning for the day. But one last comment about the vagaries and complexities of the English language. Look at these pairs of words that drive foreigners as well as natives crazy: "discomfit" & "discomfort," "sacrilegious" & "irreligious," "squash" & "quash," "rife" & "ripe," "complimentary" & "complementary," "effect" & "affect," and "slow up" & "slow down." These last two are crazy Americanisms that are but shouldn't be synonymous.

Texting vs Writing

At the Arizona Broadway Theater last week, my wife and I watched a couple a few tables away. They were sitting across from each other, heads down, shoulders hunched, hands in front of them not quite clasping. They looked like two novitiates praying to God, in this case, the almighty Phone God. Their little thumbs were clicking and clacking away at some game app, neither one looking at or talking to the other, neither taking in their surroundings to see what or who was there. They didn’t care. They were lost in their "appiness." I just don’t get it. This last five or six years has seen such an explosion of cell phones and smart phone technology that now almost our entire population has one of these hand-held computers, with constant babbling and texting, so much so that almost everyone has these busy thumbs and fingers and almost no one is saying anything meaningful. I keep asking myself, why is texting so fascinating? How is texting better than phone talk? Why is phone talk better than face-to-face conversation? Texting has also led to the silliness of text shorthand, with the subsequent loss of words and spelling and punctuation, the same kind of abbreviated messages that we now find on Twitter and Facebook. “Tweet” sounds like an adolescent trying to say “treat,” and almost all the tweets I’ve seen are pretty adolescent and certainly no treat to read.

What can one possibly say about writing that hasn’t already been said? We’re now in an age when more people are talking than writing. I guess if you consider texting as writing there are still a bunch of folks who write, but I don’t consider texting as any more than silly teeny tiny talk. Writing is what people used to do in letters and essays and short stories and novels, putting words on paper for other people to read. Most who then wrote did so because they wanted someone to read their words, listen to their ideas, maybe comment on what was written, maybe even pay them for what they wrote.

Did anyone ever write simply for the sake of putting ideas on paper without expecting any audience? Henry David Thoreau could be one, but even he might have thought his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson would give him a look, maybe a few others in their transcendental group. I’m sure there must have been some who wrote in diaries solely for private perusal. Samuel Pepys in the 17th century put his diary entries into a current kind of shorthand called tachygraphy which many later thought may have been his attempt to keep what he said strictly private. Or maybe he really wanted someone someday to translate his words. Which we did, finding it an invaluable picture of life in London in Pepys’ day.

Emily Dickinson wrote thousands of poems, only a few of which she shared with friends and correspondents. Did she never want us to share “Hope is the thing with feathers— / That perches in the soul” or to puzzle over “Wild Nights—Wild Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!” or to exult in “A word is dead / When it is said / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day” There must be others, but I can’t think of any.

Most of us commit words to paper because we want someone to read them. It’s an egotistical endeavor. We live and then we die, and for most of us the only words that point to our existence are the cryptic words carved on our headstones, as was this one pointing to John Keats: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Keats, who died very young, was probably despondent because he thought no one would ever recognize what he had written. He borrowed these words and personalized them for what his grave would say, and how ironic that his words and his name were written not in water but in books that will be around forever.

Some are driven to write. I include myself in that category. Our lives are shaped by the amount of time we spend with pen and paper, or, much more likely today, sitting with keyboard and word processor, putting thoughts on paper or hard drive. That’s what I’m doing right now. That’s what successful writers (those who actually make money at their craft) do. And some of them who have already made more money than they can ever spend continue to write daily until the day they die. They’re driven to write. In the past it was Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, Agatha Christie, and Barbara Cartland. Today it would be Stephen King and Dean Koontz. These people all wrote and wrote and wrote, with little regard for how much money they could make. They wrote because they had to. And then we have James Patterson, who writes and writes and writes with any number of co-writers for the money. How in hell much money does any writer need? I want him to be driven, as am I and Zane Grey and all the others I mentioned above. Forgive me for having put myself in the same category as those I’ve mentioned above (other than Patterson). But then, maybe no one is reading this.

Writing Style

          Since my pool of suitable blog topics seems to have dried up, I decided to go back to posts from years past that were good enough to repeat. In 2015 I wrote several about writing styles and what makes some better than others. Here’s one that struck my fancy.

As an old English teacher, I often notice a writer’s style, especially when the style is noteworthy for one reason or another. Michael Dirda, in "Style Is the Man," defines it thus: "Beauty, I learned, grows out of nouns and verbs, and personal style derives from close attention to diction and sentence rhythm. When Yeats decided that his poems had become too ornamented and flowery, he took to sleeping on a board. Before long, he’d put the Celtic Twilight far behind and was producing such shockingly blunt lines as 'Nymphs and satyrs copulate in the foam.'" Style is a combination of word choice, sentence type and length, descriptive accuracy, images that either bore us or surprise us, and a few other characteristics that are hard to explain. But I can recognize good style from bad. Most writing doesn’t need to do anything unusual. It simply needs to communicate whatever its message is. That’s what most non-fiction does or should do. I call it an invisible style, just doing its work without bothering or confusing the reader. Maybe the best and best-known American writer who wrote invisibly and yet managed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was John Steinbeck. A good, maybe even a great writer, but not a stylist. Some writers love jargon and obfuscation and don’t want to admit they don’t know what they’re talking about. These are writers one should avoid. They’re bad and their styles are bad. Romance writers often use a purple style, lots of flowery images and sexual innuendo. It’s an easy style to spot and one you would do well to avoid.

Since I’m much fonder of fiction than non-fiction, I’ll stick to writers of fiction. The two I always cited in my English classes were Hemingway and Faulkner, polar opposites stylistically. Hemingway was what I’d call a plodder. His sentences came at you like a somnambulistic heavyweight, one simple sentence after another, sometimes two simple clauses in a compound sentence, the words agonizingly chosen. In real life he exuded machismo, and he wanted his writing to do the same, to be a plodding tough guy. Often he might get only one or two saved pages after a full day at the typewriter. Writers who followed Hemingway and tried to duplicate his style most often fell flat on their faces. It may appear simple but its looks are deceptive.

Then there’s Faulkner, who drives us crazy with his complexity. I’ve often wondered if he was actually aware of how complex his sentences were or if it simply came naturally to his ear. There is that sentence in “The Bear” that goes on and on for several pages, going ever deeper in the layers of subordinate thought, hooking word groups together with colons and dashes and parentheses. And the poor reader is swept along with him, hoping to find shore before drowning. Faulkner is more admired in the writing than in the reading. Most readers just don’t have the patience to figure him out. Of the current writers, James Lee Burke comes closest to Faulkner in both style and Deep South setting.

Some writers caress the reader with their style. Fitzgerald is a good example. Although he wrote many short stories for The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, stories he wrote hurriedly and without much revision, he was still one of the most elegant writers our nation has ever produced. Listen to Nick’s thoughts at the end of The Great Gatsby, thoughts about the dead Jay Gatsby and his dream: “Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Elegant.

The modern writer with an elegant style is Kate Atkinson, who is the most quotable writer today. Nearly every sentence she writes is new and elegant and quotable. Two examples from One Good Turn: “Gloria didn’t believe in heaven, although she did occasionally worry that it was a place that existed only if you did believe in it. She wondered if people would be so keen on the idea of the next life if it was, say, underground. Or full of people like Pam. And relentlessly, tediously boring, like an everlasting Baptist service but without the occasional excitement of a full immersion. . . . He thought he was invincible, but he’d been tagged by death. Graham thought he could buy his way out of anything, but the grim reaper wasn’t going to be paid off with Graham’s baksheesh. The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself. If anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn’t necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (“Come along now, don’t make such a fuss”).”

Gloria remembers a time when Graham had been stopped for speeding, drunk, speaking on his cell phone while eating a double cheeseburger.

“Gloria could imagine him only too well, one hand on the wheel, his phone tucked into the crook of his neck, the grease from the meat dripping down his chin, his breath rank with whiskey. At the time, Gloria had thought that the only thing lacking in this sordid scenario was a woman in the passenger seat fellating him. Now she thought that that was probably going on as well. Gloria hated the term 'blow job' but she rather liked the word 'fellatio,' it sounded like an Italian musical term—contralto, alto, fellatio—although she found the act itself to be distasteful, in all senses of the word.”

And that leads me to a writer I’m fond of, Lee Child. I and millions of others have read all the books in his Jack Reacher series. I just finished the latest, Make Me. If ever a writer had a distinctive style (without judging it as either good or bad), Lee Child is such a writer. I’d compare his style to a slap in the face, or if Reacher were doing it, a violent head butt. It’s characterized by lengthy descriptions of time and distance and weapon calibers and statistical analyses. The style typifies Reacher more than Lee Child. For example, in Make Me, Reacher is confronting a hit man who has come to take out him and his female companion. The faceoff is in a shabby apartment building hall and lasts from start to finish about three minutes, but it takes ten pages for Reacher/Child to explain exactly what will take place—the moves, the countermoves, the kind of blows he will need to deliver to foil the shooter. Reacher is obsessed with facts and details, and the style shows it. And as I earlier said, it’s neither good nor bad, just distinctive.

Masters 2019

          What a weekend in Georgia. That roar we all heard was the sound of a Bengal tiger who had just made another trophy kill, and most who heard it were delighted, excited, and deliriously joyful. Some, however, were not so full of joy, still thinking of Tiger Woods as just another lucky, cocky, uppity black (fill in the “n-word” here). We may have come a long way in race relations, but there are still too many old fogies with red necks (fill in “retirees” here) who actively dislike Tiger Woods. Young people of all ages, but especially pre-teen boys and girls, are now embracing him as he was never embraced during the glory years from 1997 to 2005. Too bad for all the non-embracing old folks, though. They missed out on the celebration that followed Tiger’s fifth win at the Masters. It was good for him; it was good for the game; it was good for a world that’s grown weary of WH ego tweets. If Tiger can come back from his physical, mental, and emotional problems over the last decade, then maybe we as a nation can come back to political sanity in 2020.

          More Augusta observations: The golf course was even more gorgeous than ever before. It looked like they’d hired thousands of tiny gardeners with tiny scissors to hand-trim every blade of grass, kneeling in worship as they clipped each hole to resplendent beauty. There was a fear that thunderstorms would have the audacity to rain on Augusta National’s parade, but even the rain gods realized what a mistake that would be and stayed away for most of the four days.

What was the pivotal hole on Sunday? It was that little dream-killer the par-3 12^th. Jordan Spieth, in 2017 found out about what pressure can do, dumping two shots in Rae’s Creek to lose what should have been a walk-in win. And Francesco Molinari felt the tightening collar when he got there with a two-stroke lead and hit it in the water. All along, I’d thought of him as the Italian assassin because he seemingly never made a mistake, making only his second bogey of the first three and a half rounds. Until he got to number 12 and double bogeyed it. From there to fifteen, he and Tiger were tied until Molinari dumped another in the water on the par-5 15^th for another double bogey. Goodbye, Francesco. The Tiger pressure and the pressure of the second nine on Sunday finally assassinated the assassin.

This was Tiger’s 5^th green jacket and his 15^th major. The Masters, because of its extremely limited field, was probably the most likely place for him to win another major. But, guess what? Who do you suppose will be favored to win next month’s PGA at Beth Page or the US Open at Pebblebeach or the Open in Northern Ireland? Yep, probably Tiger. But that may not hold true if he doesn’t play well in May at Beth Page. Will the Comeback continue or will this 15^th win be his swan song? We’ll see.

          Now that Johnny Miller is gone as golf’s premier analyst, who’s left to call it like it is or make any controversial and astute comments about the game and those who play it? Paul Azinger was supposed to be his replacement but he hasn’t given any indication that he can do it. Curtis Strange, although he’s finally seen the wisdom of getting rid of his Southern drawl, is still pretty stupid. CBS’s go-to guy Peter Kostis, in his annoying soft-speak, makes too many too obvious comments about the action. And one of the Golf Channel’s spokespeople, Brandel Chamblee, tries to sound all-knowing by making controversial comments but comes off as seeking attention only by controversy. Brooks Koepka called him out when he said that Koepka’s rapid weight loss was the stupidest thing he might have done. I guess that the one I’d most like to see as golf guru on regular telecasting would be David Feherty, who is as funny as he is insightful.

          Now, to beat on this not-yet-dead horse, I must comment on the debate about leaving the flagstick in or taking it out when one is putting. No one has yet mentioned that much of this decision should rest on what kind of flagstick is being used. The lighter the stick the more one should use it. In the very old days, a bamboo flagstick was very lightweight and most receptive to a ball hitting it. Then came the fiberglass sticks which were also light and receptive. All studies showed that more chips were made with it in than with it out. Dave Pelz, an old-time putting guru, has done several studies that showed statistically that more shots were made with the flagstick in than with it out. However, that was when fiberglass was still being used. Now that it’s legal to leave it in when putting, what do the studies show? I noticed that the ones being used at the Masters were the new metal sticks, narrow at the bottom but much wider up from there, much heavier and less receptive to balls striking them. These heavier flagsticks will make it a more difficult decision about leaving it or taking it out. The debate will continue throughout the rest of this season. I’m guessing that by then, about half the professional players will leave it in, half will take it out. But amateurs should leave it in all the time.

4-Letter Words & Our Anglo-Saxon Heritage

           The shock value of all our 4-letter words has come a long way since I grew up in my staid little community in my prairie hometown—come a long way down to nearly not shocking at all. In many of the current films, the language is as blue as the deep blue sea and can desensitize the ears to the point that viewers almost no longer even hear the Anglo-Saxonisms.

          When I grew up, there were almost no f-words and certainly no m-f-words. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield tried to scrub away that one little f-word so that his sister wouldn’t see it, and The Catcher in the Rye was banned for years and years from public and high school libraries. The most titillating thing I ever read was from a book published in 1933, with that infamous page 69 in Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre. I and my lascivious buddies had to read it surreptitiously for fear of any adult catching us at it. But when I read it now, I realize how innocent it was, how innocent I was.

Another example of my age of innocence is the time when I, about ten-years-old, gave my sister a middle finger. She slapped me so hard I thought my head would come off, screaming at me, “Don’t you know what that means?” I blubbered that no, I didn’t know what it meant, just that it meant something insulting. “Well,” she told me, “it means something really bad and don’t ever do that again.” And I didn’t, at least not for quite a few years.

          Later, when I was in army basic training, then an older, more sophisticated but still linguistically innocent 18-year-old, I first heard the m-f-word and my brain buzzed at its awfulness. How could anyone, anyone, ever say such a thing about one’s mother?

          When I was a young lad, I and my home-towners were so loathe to use such language that we couldn’t even tolerate visually referring to anything pertaining to the human anatomy or bodily functions. Boxes of Kotex were wrapped in plain brown paper before they were put on grocery or drug store shelves. We even called them sanitary pads, and heaven help those who might consider a tampon and the ill-considered way it would be used. Even menstruation had to be called a period, like a unit of time, in this case a girl’s monthly visitation by some old lady. Some, though, more lewdly called it “Aunt Flo,” more crudely called it “got the rag on.”

          For the main bodily functions, we considered the Latin acceptable—defecation, urination, flatulence, and copulation. But we also resorted to cuteness and euphemisms. Take urination, for example. In my family, we called it “to squizzle.” As far as I know, this was strictly a term of my mother’s and that we’ve always been the only ones who called it that. She may have sort of got it from “squirt,” which describes male urination, and “splash,” more female descriptive. Others, in other parts and other times, have come up with equally innocent ways to avoid burning little ears: from softest and safest to more and more lewd (and, or, comical)—to tinkle, pee, go pee pee, wet, piddle, go number one—all labels for either sex—and, more crude, making them more masculine—to take a leak, piss, drain the lizard, and (my favorite of all) shake hands with the president.

Blacks in Basketball & Football

          Well, a few days ago I stuck my foot (my nose?) in the prostitution pool, so now I may as well take a dunk in other controversial waters even though this might be considered more situational than controversial—the present status of Blacks in America (Should it or shouldn’t it be capitalized?). Even that racial term gives me pause and I really dislike the label “African Americans,” since almost none of the blacks now here are from Africa. Granted, many of them are descendants of African slaves from that despicable time in our nation’s past, but most are an amalgamation of other races with widely diverse shades of skin color other than black. So, again, I suggest that “colored” may be the most accurate term even though that leads me back to the other question: Aren’t we all, then, colored? Or, best of all, aren’t nearly all of us American Americans? Asians, Indians (both from India as well as native to this country), Muslims, Europeans, Africaners, Hispanics all stirred in that metaphoric pot, all melded into various hues?

          All right, now for my plunge in the pool. First, I’m in no way a racist, in no way a white supremacist. I recognize how far we’ve come since 1965 and the Civil Rights legislation and how far we have yet to go. I’ve lived long enough to remember when there was no one but whites in films or later on television. All television commercials were restricted to whites. In the music industry, blacks were prominent in Dixieland jazz with someone like Louis Armstrong, in big-band jazz with leaders like Duke Ellington and Count Basie, in jazz vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and pop artists like Nat King Cole, but most other stars in the musical genres were white as snow.

As recently as 1967, there were still state miscegenation laws banning interracial marriage or even cohabitation. Affirmative action regarding college admissions and scholarships attempted to set a more equitable standard for admittance based on racial proportions. The same became practice in the work place. There are many examples of our attempts to make our lives more equitable regardless of our race. The Academy Awards have tried to become more balanced by expanding the voting membership to include a proportionate number of blacks. Every year more and more films and television shows are based on the black experience. Every year brings us more black actors and directors and writers. Every year America gets closer to racial equality.

Now, that elephant in the room. Should the black community still deplore the inequalities while at the same time extolling (and, yes, in some ways exploiting) their uniqueness. Whatever happened to Paul McCartney and the wonderful Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory,” a song that so powerfully attempted to bring us together. Should a black magazine called Ebony be exclusively black without offending any whites? What if today (and, yes, I realize many magazines in the past were exclusively white) a publisher tried to put out a magazine called Ivory that was exclusively white? Would blacks be offended? Should we still have an annual contest to pick a Black Miss America that excludes all women but blacks? What if tomorrow (and, yes, I realize there was a time when exactly this happened) there was an annual contest to pick a White Miss America that excludes all women but whites? In both cases, both races would be and should be offended.

          And now . . . wait for it . . . wait for that other shoe to drop . . . or the other elephant to show up . . .

For at least the last decade or maybe longer, two sports on all levels have become nearly exclusively black—high school about half, college almost three-quarters, professional about ninety percent. I’m talking about basketball and football. I now think of the NBA more as the BBA and the NFL more as the BFL. I’m not complaining, merely observing, and wondering how these stats came to be. The 68 teams in the current March Madness madness made it even clearer. Almost every team’s starting lineup was black, with only two or three whites on the bench. It wasn’t at all uncommon to see all blacks on the floor for part of or for the entire game. The same is even truer in the NBA with nearly every star being black. Then there’s college football and the NFL. There also, the ratio of blacks to whites may not be quite as high as for basketball, but is certainly close, like 80% black. It was once, unfairly, said that there’d never be a black quarterback because blacks weren’t smart enough to play that position. That label has, thank god, been put to rest. And though there are still quite a few white quarterbacks, they account for only about half. Most of the white players are on the offensive line, especially as centers.

Why are there so many blacks playing at all levels in these two sports? Is it because blacks really can jump higher, run faster, dribble better, shoot, throw, catch, tackle, rebound, and dunk better? Or is it motivation and expectation? The greater the possibility of success in these sports, the greater the motivation, and the more one believes the hype and sees the success rate of black athletes in basketball and football, the greater the expectation.

But where is the equity of opportunity? Should whites be given positions in all walks of life in an equitable ratio, like three whites for every one black to reflect the ratio of blacks to whites in the general population? Certainly not. But shouldn’t we all be hoping we can and will soon reach a place where we no longer need to ration out places in our society based on race and instead base them on skill and ability? Let’s just forget color and look only at individual skills and abilities for athletes and employees. That will be the time when we truly achieve equality in America.

Trump & Robert Kraft

            Because I can’t seem to find anything worth writing about, my blogging days are apparently near an end. Nearly all my thoughts these days center on Donald Trump, the things he says and tweets, the things others say about him. I daily scour the newspapers for editorials about him or letters to the editor on one side or the other; I watch those tv news shows that aren’t biased against him even though he accuses and accuses all but Fox News of being “fake news.” It’s driving me crazy and if I didn’t already drink, he would drive me there, screaming all the way. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Crying is more likely than laughing, despite his laughable displays of ignorance, since he is no longer a laughing matter. Now, he’s a fearful matter.

I fear so much for our future. Just the thought that he might actually find enough support to be re-elected in 2020 makes my blood run cold. In my entire life, 85 years now, I’ve never felt so politically alienated. Unless I know absolutely where someone stands on Trump, I’m afraid to mention him or anything in current politics. The two sides on left and right are now so far apart that any civil discussion would be impossible. So, I say nothing.

How can his support be growing? Gun owners and members of the NRA, fearing for their 2^nd Amendment rights, vote for him. White supremacists, seeing the influx of immigrants from Muslim regions and South American countries, fear that America will become mongrelized and they vote for him. The ultra-wealthy, who fear high taxation on their wealth, vote for him. Populists who hear and fear any mention of socialism vote for him. Most of the Evangelical community see him as a saving grace and vote for him.

In 2020, we have to make America sane again. We have to find someone who can get this dreadful man out of the White House. I hope it’s sooner than 2020, but impeachment doesn’t seem likely, and we may never see the results of Mueller’s investigation. And we, as a nation, become ever more divided.

* * * * * *

            First, I need to preface what I’m about to say. I don’t want anyone to be offended by it and I’m sure most won’t agree with or understand it, but so many stories in the news these days confuse me, Trump, certainly, but also many other news items. In fact, I’ll probably live to regret having explained my confusion.

One such news bite that confuses me is the arrest of New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, on charges of solicitation of a prostitute in the Florida sting on various spas and massage parlors. The public outrage about his alleged crime seems to me to be out of proportion to what he actually may or may not have done. To some, the idea of prostitution is abhorrent, disgusting, criminal to such a degree that those involved in it should be imprisoned and the key thrown away. “The World’s Oldest Profession” it’s been called, with a wink-wink to show how broad-minded the speaker is. And there are so many levels and kinds of prostitution that the term shouldn’t be a catch-all. Cities and police forces have nearly always tended to overlook the illegality of their “red-light districts” or their streets that cater to “street walkers” or their high-end hotels that provide “escort service” for their wealthy patrons. They overlooked it all because there didn’t seem to be any victims, either in those doing the soliciting or in those who were solicited. The pimps or madams kept everyone and everything in line. No harm, no foul. A successful Broadway musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, painted a rosy picture and sang happy songs about the profession, so it couldn’t be such an abhorrent crime, could it? Or was that just putting new makeup on a very sordid face?

There are many other levels of the sex trade in which there are victims on both sides: children sold like meat to anyone willing to pay, young women from other countries who were promised employment here but were instead enslaved in sex trafficking, drug addicts who resorted to prostitution to pay for their habit. Different levels, different crimes. In a Google search (ProCon.org), I found a poll that said from 15 to 20% of all males in the U.S. say they have at least once paid for sex. That means that 15 to 20% of all males have committed the crime that Robert Kraft is being charged with. Whoa, that’s a lotta men. And, yes, I’m one of them. But that was a very long time ago when I was so very young and so very naive.

            I grew up in a tiny upper plains town in South Dakota. One of the things most noteworthy about my hometown was the fact that we had a whorehouse just outside the city limits. Everyone in town knew what it was and that it was there, but nothing was ever done about it. Oh, I guess there were attempts by one church group or another every several years to get it shut down, but it remained. It was called The West-End Tavern and it must have been established about the same time as the town, early in the 2oth century. The local story was always that it was a way-station for young women who wanted out of the national string of prostitution businesses run by the Mob or by other gangster groups, a place where they could be safe from the dangers of regular sex trafficking, where they (six to eight of them at any one time) could earn enough money to make it out of the life. According to local belief, they were not held there against their will nor did they have to give up nearly all the money they made to some pimp or madam. I always assumed that they paid half their earnings for room and board and they kept half. They could leave whenever they wanted, either permanently or temporarily on vacation to visit friends or relatives. I know that one of them often took the train east to visit her family, and would then return. I don’t know how long she stayed at the West-End Tavern but probably not very long. What were the reasons for our townspeople or the law not shutting the place down? It was said that the local young men would be less likely to impregnate a girlfriend, that they could learn all about sex from a professional and not from just lame tame tales about birds and bees, that the regular medical checkups of the girls prevented anyone from contracting any sexually transmitted diseases. But finally, in about 1960, the best little whorehouse in South Dakota was closed.

            Back to Robert Kraft and my confusion. Why was that spa in Florida targeted for the sting regarding human trafficking? Why weren’t all illegal prostitution sites shut down and those who operated them arrested? Why is it so important to expose Robert Kraft to this public, national humiliation? In this age of public scrutiny of anyone, everyone, by Big Brother and forces we don’t know about or understand, aren’t we all subject to public exposure of every detail of our lives? Aren’t we all in danger of being spied on and listened to without our consent or knowledge?

Anyone who chooses to run for public office these days had better be absolutely certain his or her past is spotless. If I had chosen to run for public office, could my admission of having once paid for sex have prevented it? I’d like to think not, but that’s just my naiveté talking.

Personally, I don’t feel any guiltier of a criminal act than Robert Kraft probably does.

Road Signs

In my exploration of past journal entries, I found one about a trip I made to Arizona to find a house to buy. This was in 1994, only a few months before we would finally get our New York house sold and we could escape from spring and winter woes in Upstate New York to find refuge in sunny Arizona.

Along the way on Highway 40 (what was once called Route 66), I noted some amusing signs. Just west of Kansas City, a sign beckoned me to stop for a drink or two at a bar called Shenanigan’s. Clever.

Then, at fifty-mile intervals through Oklahoma, big signs warning “Do not drive into smoke.” Now what do you suppose that means? Does Oklahoma have smoke problems peculiar only to Oklahoma, or is it simply a warning to Oklahomans (who must be related to Pennsylvanians) not to do what no one else would do even without the warning? Strange.

A sign in western Oklahoma warned me not to pick anyone up because “Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates.” Whoa, now that’s an effective deterrent. They don’t tell us not to pick anyone up, just that whoever we do decide to pick up may be a knife-wielding, babbling, bloodthirsty psycho who's  just escaped from some prison or asylum. No way in hell I’m picking anyone up with that image in mind.

I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup, “Old truckers never die—they just get a new Peterbilt.”

At a restroom stop in the middle of the Texas Panhandle, in the spirit of the old Burma Shave signs, graffiti on a stall wall: “Here I sit, / Cheeks a-flexin’, / Givin’ birth / To another Texan.” I’m guessing the poet must have been a disgruntled (pun intended) Oklahoman.

And last but not least (certainly not least), a sign for a steak house called Big Texan that claims to serve the best steak in Texas, and has a standing offer of a FREE! meal involving a 72-ounce steak “if eaten in an hour.” Double whoa!! It’s not just the monumental size that astounds me; it’s the very nature of the offer. Picture this: a big meat-eater (and I mean a really big meat-eater, like a grizzly bear or a saber-tooth tiger) takes them up on the challenge. Would there be an official standing by with a stopwatch to keep track of the time? And what if, as Mr. Bear or Mr. Tiger is finishing his steak, the official says, "Sorry, Time's up. You lose." Or “Nope, you left a little on the bone. No deal.” Would Mr. Bear or Mr. Tiger be presented with a bill for $172.36 to pay for a meal involving a four-and-a-half pound steak? I’m not sure I’d want to be the one who gives that check to anyone big enough to take the challenge in the first place. Another thought struck me: this could hardly be called a meal since no one in his right mind would try to consume this steak as well as all that went with it—the salad, potato, veggies, and rolls. This deal puts a whole new spin on gluttony. Maybe they should also tie his hands behind his back and make him eat it like they do in a pie-eating contest. Just pitch forward and start chomping, jowls bloody, juices dripping down chin and neck. “Arrrggghh!” as the old pirate would say, “Now that’s a real man’s meal!”

English Curiosities

English is such a peculiar language, with so much diversity in pronunciation and spelling that I can’t believe those just learning English as a second language can ever wrap their heads around some of it. I guess even native speakers avoid such linguistic traps for fear of showing their ignorance. For example, how could one explain the difference in meaning between these two seemingly exact same words—offensive and offensive? “He was going on the offensive” and “He was offensive.” The first seems to be a positive word describing a course of action that’s positive, and the second is a negative adjective about someone’s rude behavior or bad odor. Now look at the parallel pair, defensive and defensive. “He was going on the defensive” and “He was defensive.” These two are exactly the same. Curious and peculiar, right? It’s a little like the principle/principal problem. Or the all together/altogether conundrum. Or the tortuous/torturous painful twisting. Or the lay/lie positioning. Or the “Which do I use?” affect/effect puzzle. There must literally be a billion examples of such linguistic curiosities. Or do I mean there must figuratively be a billion examples of such? You get the point. The painful point of our verbal vagaries.