You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Quotes, Pizzaz, Telecom, Critics

"I say the directions were underspecified."
"Yes, but since I was the one who said, 'get a room', I thought you'd realize that I didn't mean mine."
--Two girls talking at Andronico's

This is from In Passing, which is kind of Overheard In New York, but based in Berkley, and done by one woman. Still, it's been going since 2000, which shows you my vice-like grasp of what's hot on the web.

Speaking of what's not particularly hot -- "Pizazz (We're Gonna Give It To Ya)". I actually felt a little ill at the not-goodness of it. (And that is why, dear friend, that I'm sharing this with you.) Their website has a couple of their other songs, and they're called "Peg Me With Ur Luv" and "A2M (Ass To Mouth)". I didn't feel strong enough to listen to them.

***

We have some equipment in buildings owned by Telecom, and all of the people who need access had to watch a video called "Don't Be Morons (We Really Mean It)". Okay, that's not the actual title, but it was basically Possum Bourne talking about how you have to be careful about water, dust, and randomly flailing when you're inside the machine room of the telephone exchange. Why they decided they needed a race-car driver to tell anecdotes like "this simple accident that ended up costing $50 million" was not particularly clear, but I wasn't actually watching -- after all, if I don't have a card to get in, I can't be asked to fix anything there. ;)

I guess the reasoning goes along the lines of, "Techie guys like fast cars, and some are easily bored, so let's get someone who drives fast cars so they'll pay attention." The sad thing is that more than half the people in my room are really into cars -- I believe I've mentioned that one of them has a CD of different makes of cars being driven around a race-track, with a woman with various fake accents reading out the name of the car?

***

Critics are a funny bunch. There's an excellent book, called The Frank Muir Book, that gives a history of various subjects (food, education, music) by quoting people complaining about what was happening at the time -- from Roman orators to Chaucer to Dickens to Winston Churchill. But I suspect Paige is quite right: if someone was looking for a positive review of Duece Bigalow, they're not going to look to Roger Ebert. :)

I've just started reading Rats, Lice & History, which is a biographical history of typhus written in the 1930s in a style not unlike James Thurber. Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this -- he spends a chapter complaining about modern writers and modern literature in general, saying things like:

[of T. S. Elliot] Then he drops suddenly, after a few lines of majestic verse, into completely irrelevant babble.

In room the women come and go
Talking of Michaelangelo

One is tempted to add, "Eenie, meenie, minie, mo".

You get the impression that this stuff was mainly written to tweak the noses of the literary papers that were likely to be reviewing the book. :) Anyway, I'm finding the rest of it interesting, especially since this is written before they've understood DNA, and they're still grappling with what viruses might be; and there's that optimism that you got after the Great War, and before WWII. And the book itself has retained the old fashioned ligatured typeface, even though it's a reprint -- it's always nice to look at "difficult" and see that the two "f"s are joined together, and the "i" has no dot and is nestled under the bow of the "f", and know that someone had to sort through boxes of lead type and pick out each letter, carefully lining them all up on the page.

Okay, I admit that it's kind of an idiosyncratic reason to like a book. How about -- it's got an endorsement from David Bellamy? :)

Yeah, that's pretty much all I got. Goodnight. :)

Posted by svend at August 17, 2005 9:52 PM