Hurricane Preparation, Boston-Style

In North Carolina, where I used to live, during the days before a hurrican, you made sure your weather radio worked, bought water, batteries, non-perishable foods and (depending upon your inclinations) bourbon.

Yesterday I went to the nearest grocery store. The shelves were fully stocked with bread and bottled water. They had plenty of batteries.

I did notice, however, that the store had run out of low-fat yogurt.

Hurricane Preparation,

Quote of the Week

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
--Leo Tolstoy

"It Was A Dark and Stormy Night"

I don't know how I missed this, but the results of this year's Bulwer-Lytton Contest were announced almost a month ago. For those of you unfamiliar with the BLC, it's a contest sponsored by the San Jose State University English Department. Competitors strive to write the worst conceivable opening sentence for a novel--a tribute to the contest's eponym, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). Bulwer-Lytton was quite an accomplished man--the portrait at left was painted when he was Britain's Secretary of State for the Colonies, in which post he oversaw the development of infrastructure in the Crown Colony of British Columbia. He also played a minor role in the career of Charles Dickens, persuading him to change the ending of Great Expectations to something more upbeat than the original.

But sadly (or not, depending on your point of view) it's not Canadian bridges or Pip and Estella's connubial bliss that he's known for. Bulwer-Lytton is known for really bad writing. In addition to making sure Canadians had roads and bridges and telling Dickens how to end his novels, he also wrote novels of his own. One of them, Paul Clifford, begins:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Many of you probably recognize the first clause of that sentence as the opening for many of Snoopy's forays into fiction. But I digress. Without further ado, the winners of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton contest:





Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

Wearily approaching the murder scene of Jeannie and Quentin Rose and needing to determine if this was the handiwork of the Scented Strangler--who had a twisted affinity for spraying his victims with his signature raspberry cologne--or that of a copycat, burnt-out insomniac detective Sonny Kirkland was sure of one thing: he’d have to stop and smell the Roses.

You can read the others here.

The Week in Food: The One-Day Late Edition

Okay, so it's not really food, but this history of vodka in the U.S. is a great read.

All you wanted to know about tomatoes.

E. coli: it's what's for dinner.

To this resident of Jackson, Mississippi, not all pizzas are create equal.

Food prices and the Arab Spring: the shape of things to come.

Don't Rush into This

For several days now an online petition has been making the rounds urging the Sesame Workshop to let everyone's favorite muppet odd couple, Ernie and Bert, tie the knot.

Frankly, I think this is ill-advised. The wedding would be a horror show. Think about it: Cookie Monster would devour the wedding cake if he couldn't find any cookies (the guy's got an obvious eating disorder). When the minister says, "If any here present know any reason why these two should not be wed, let him speak now or forever hold his peace..." do you really think Oscar the Grouch is going to keep his mouth shut? There's also a rumor Ernie and Bert would make Gover the ring bearer. Can you imagine? He would either be in one of his totally manic phases, twitching or running down the aisle or he would trip and fall on his face. The guy's completely spastic. And then Count von Count with his out-of-control compulsion would start counting the guests out loud.

But let's look beyond the fiasco-waiting-to-happen that would be their wedding. These two have been sleeping in separate beds for forty years. Something is wrong with that relationship that a wedding can't fix.

Southern Dispatch

As a native Southerner, I sometimes point out to friends from other parts of the country that racism and idiocy are alive and well in throughout the USA (e.g., the New York Republican congressional candidate who wrote an essay denouncing interracial relationships), and that the South is a far cry from what it used to be (for example, a lesbian Latina is sheriff of Dallas County, Texas).

But reading the news from down South, I've been forced to admit that during this growing season the most popular crop seems to be craziness. Last Saturday Texas governor Rick Perry held his "national day of prayer" in Houston. The avowed goal was to invoke God's help for America, which I imagine will do about as much for the economy as a planned prayer walk on Aug. 21 will do for test scores in Jacksonville, FL public schools. Most pundits speculate his prayer rally is a bid to win over the evangelical base prior to announcing a presidential run. I find it odd that Perry would want to be president of a nation he has previously been in favor of dismantling. Nevertheless, he mightily impressed fundamentalists nationwide. One attendee said, "I feel that God moved him to do this." Another said, "He showed that he's sensitive to the Lord's leading." And Perry brought a choice bunch to Houston to bolster his evangelical credentials: members of the American Family Association, a Tupelo, Mississippi-based band of lunatics political organization that never seems to have grasped the principal of separation of church and state.

Among Rick Perry's other partners in godliness: a self-proclaimed 'apostle' who thinks the Statue of Liberty is a pagan idol, and a former seminary faculty member who thinks this year's earthquake in Japan was caused by the emperor having sex with a sun goddess.

I was pleased that some young Texans showed up to protest Perry's open-air madhouse, but I fear they were outnumbered by the true believers.

In other news, I found this depressing pie chart that shows how much we owe the recent stalemate in Congress and the resulting Faustian bargain to lunatics from the South. The Tea Party likes to present itself as a national movement, but here's a breakdown of members of the Tea Party Caucus by where they come from:

Why do I suddenly feel like it's 1832 all over again?

Meanwhile, in Missouri—one of the quaintly termed "border states" during the Late Unpleasantness (my favorite name for the Civil War), a school board has seen fit to remove two books from the school library and reading assignments. One of the titles, "Slaughterhouse Five," is a perennial target of censors. Interestingly, many object to the book for its profanity and not for its central event, the 1945 fire bombing of Dresden by Allied forces.

Note for visitors to the South: swearing is bad, killing is okay. And some young people in Mississippi have taken that message to heart.