I was thinking about those letters you sometimes get from family members who live far away and/or travel a lot. I've noticed that it seems that it's always the wife who writes the actual letter, even when she's not be the one who's the blood relative. I tried to imagine what a letter from the husband might sound like.

Dear Phil and What's-Her-Name:

I'm just teasing, Janie. I remember your name. Well, we had quite a year! Jimmy came home for a week from Des Moines or Spokane or wherever the hell it is he lives now. He's got a good job up there, which is good because I worked my ass off for ten years to pay for that degree! We met him at the airport, and he bitched about my driving on the way back, like he always does. We sat around and shot the shit for a while. We had some of that new beer Budweiser makes that's made from wheat. Humperdorf or Humperdink or whatever down the street told me it's pretty good, and he oughta know, being German and all.

Here's us in front of some
mountains somewhere

In May we went on a trip to England. By the way, DON'T GO TO ENGLAND IN MAY! The weather sucked, though the food wasn't as bad as everyone says it is. We stayed at some nice chateaus were they make wine, or was that when we went to France last year? Well, now that I think about it, I don't remember anyone at the place speaking too good English, and I'm pretty sure "chateau" is a French word. So that was probably France. Beautiful women there. In France, I mean. England probably had some lookers as well, but it was raining all the damn time so I couldn't see. I wonder why they call those guys Frogs? Or is that the French again?

Anyway, after that, we visited Gretta, who's living in Zurich now. It was nice there, and I got to see my grandkids. I taught them "pull my finger." Great kids, though I could swear that one of them looks a lot like that Hispanic guy that used to live down the hall from her when she first moved out. Your mother thinks I'm insane, but I don't know. I don't remember anyone in our family ever having hair that dark. We were supposed to go on a tour of the city, but my knee was acting up from all that rain in England, so I stayed behind while your mother went on it. Did you know they get The Simpsons out there? You wouldn't believe how weird they all sound in German. Funny, and all this time I thought they spoke Swiss out there. I asked Gretta's husband, and he said there isn't any such language as Swiss. Can you imagine that? That's gotta be weird, living in a country without its own language. Well, besides America, that is.

Oh, your mother said that Zurich is lovely. She's got about four zillion pictures to show you if you ever stop by to see us (hint, hint).

And so we're home now, resting our bones before the fire and all that stuff old farts like us are supposed to do. I spend most evenings at the V.F.W. Hall, and God knows how your mother keeps busy. You should give her a call some time, she pines like crazy for you kids. It's funny, you spend years scrimping and saving for your kids, praying for the day they move out so you can get some peace and quiet. And then one day you look around, and realize they're gone, and you don't have a clue what to do with yourself anymore.

Well, I gotta run. Hal Johnstone died last week. You remember him, guy from the V.F.W. who always gave you that cinnamon candy you hated. We're having a memorial or some crap for him tonight, and I gotta press my good pants for it.Hope you're doing well.

Love,

Dad

P.S.
I remember now. The French are Frogs. The English are Limeys.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Explicit content ahead. Viewer discretion is advised.

Last week, I was on the Wikipedia page for fuck. It was not the random wandering it might sound like. I'd gotten there while looking up the etymology of the phrase "screw the pooch." You can imagine how. I was there to try to find out where the word comes from, and I guess unsurprisingly, no one's sure.

I'm in your wikipedia
defacing your pagez

Anyway, it looked like someone else had gotten there before me, and had decided to have a little fun. In the middle of the article, something like the 3rd or 4th sentence in the second paragraph, someone had written something like "ooooFUCKYOUfuckfuckfuckyouOOooOOoofuck!" After applauding him for his creativity, originality, and high-brow sense of humor, I went to edit the page to remove it. However, someone else had gotten to it before me.

I was informed by a friend that Wikipedia has bots that go through the site removing vulgarity. They work pretty quick, too, as the brilliant observation made by the gentleman quoted above was removed less than one minute after it had been added. When I was told that, I found myself wondering if the bots would be so quick to spot defacement that was more subtle, especially on a page that's full of vulgarity by necessity. So I hatched a scheme, one that if the guy who'd been on the page before me had seen it, may have responded in an awed "no way d00d, u r teh g31gh!"

I figured, what's the point of defacing Wikipedia if it's gonna be noticed and removed before you can even show it to your friends? I wanted something more insidious, something that'd make you go back and say "Hey, did I just read that right?" Not that I think that I'm some sort of evil mastermind for plotting to edit a webpage with malice aforethought, but I've been Trolling since the World Wide Web was getting slapped on its backside by its obstetrician, and I've never been satisfied with doing the same-old same-old, so I figured I had to do something to keep my hand in.

What I did was simple. At several points throughout the page, I inserted the adjective "fucking" into a sentence. For instance, "Non-English-speaking cultures tend to recognize the word's vulgarity, however, it is generally not censored as fucking frequently as in English-speaking cultures." You probably noticed it, as you had advanced warning it was coming. However, the bots that caught the other guy in under 60 seconds didn't spot it at all, and it was about an hour and a half before my "contribution" was noticed and removed.

Subtlety is the key. A friend of mine posted a comment to another page which is still there. I won't say what page, or what the comment was, because I want to see how long it'll be before someone notices it on their own. It's been there since sometime last year, and I find it hard to believe that no one's spotted it for what it is. I guess no one's paying attention. That's what I get for picking a page as high-profile as "fuck." Next time, I'll have to pick something like the page of Dame Edna. I bet it'd be years before someone spotted a fake comment lurking in there.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

A Timeless Lesson

Last night I went to a bar for a friend's birthday party. When they closed, those of us who were left (myself and two people I don't know) decided to go to another bar a few blocks down. The clearest memory I have of that second bar is me trying a clumsy, absolutely terrible come-on line with the bartender. I don't even know why I did it, I don't recall considering her all that attractive.

Anyway, that's not the point of this. The night wore on, and I decided to go home. Outside were a couple guys talking about going to yet another bar. All of them were complete strangers to me, but that didn't stop one of them from asking if I wanted to go too. I said I did, because it seemed like the fastest way to get past these guys and to my car.

One of them, I think the one who asked if I wanted to go, said "I'll go with you, then." Great. Now I've got this guy I don't know who wants me to drive him to a bar that I didn't even want to go to. So I decide to find a way to shake this guy.

I had parked around the corner on a side street, and as we rounded the corner I saw that my car was the only one still there. I pulled out my keys and was about to unlock the doors when I suddenly realized that this guy doesn't know me from Adam, and therefore has no idea what my car looks like. So I started looking around, swinging my head in an exaggerated manner and slurring "Where's my car?" I was too drunk to act well, but that didn't matter because he was too drunk to notice.

He started looking around too, for some reason. Then he realized what he was doing and asked me what my car looked like. I decided to play up the drunken angle and responded "I can't find my car." I even pulled out my keys and started pretending to hit the unlock button, like I was waiting for my headlights to go off. I remember thinking that was an incredibly clever move.

At about that point I discovered that I had a real problem: my house keys were gone. My car keys and my house keys are on one of those key rings that can be pulled apart and separated. I must have done so without realizing it at some point when I was holding my keys. So I turned around and started looking for my keys, and saying so repeatedly. The guy didn't seem to interested in my lost house keys, he was more concerned with when we were getting to the bar.

Somehow, I managed to break away from him while searching for my keys. There's this line of stunted, gnarled trees along the bar, and I ducked behind them to hide, standing in about two feet of snow while wearing clothing inadequate for the weather. This is the kind of thing that seems sensible only to children and drunkards. Or drunk children.

I started making my way towards the back of the bar. My intention was to slip into my car and get away, my lost keys forgotten for the nonce. As I shuffled through the snow, I discovered a planter behind the trees when I tripped over it, losing my glasses.

I don't remember saying anything when it happened, but I must have, because as I was picking myself up, I heard a voice from the other side of the trees say "Did you find your keys?" You've gotta be kidding me.

I informed the guy that now my glasses were missing as well, somewhere inside a snow drift. I stood there, shining my cell phone around to see if I can spot my glasses, knowing it was futile. The guy starts asking me again when we're leaving, completely unsympathetic to my plight. I resorted to responding to everything he said with "I can't find my keys" or "I can't drive without my glasses." The second statement was a flat out lie. I can drive just fine without my glasses, assuming I don't have to scrutinize any street signs while moving. The guy still wasn't getting the hint.

You may be wondering why I didn't just tell the guy to go away. I don't know either.

I was standing by a fence that separated the parking lot from another one at this point. The snow was so high that it came up to about my chest, and I could see people looking for their cars and stuff. I had decided to try a new tack in getting rid of this guy, so I leaned over the fence and started making noises like I was being sick. Again, I didn't do a very good job, but the other guy was so drunk I probably could have just stood there saying "I am throwing up" and he would have bought it.

I'm not sure if it was that, or the sight of a police officer talking to a couple people in the parking lot that did it, but the guy finally scrammed. So I decided to accept the loss of my keys and glasses, jumped in my car, and got away before the guy changed his mind and came looking for me again.

About ten minutes later, I realized I was lost. Well, "lost" isn't the right word. I knew exactly where I was, I just couldn't figure out how I got there. I must have turned at some point without thinking about it. The shock of suddenly finding myself about two miles in the wrong direction sobered me up a bit, and I decided to go back and try to find my keys and glasses.

I pulled back up next to the now deserted bar, and trudged through the snow back into the hedge or treeline or whatever, falling a couple times. I spent a good long time looking around the vicinity of the planter for my glasses, with no luck.

Then, as though hit with some divine inspiration, I plunged my hand into a seemingly random bit of the snowdrift, and my fingers closed around my glasses. Wiping the snow off them and putting them on, I felt like I had experienced a small miracle. I turned around and headed back to my car. When I stepped out into the street, I heard a clink of metal. Looking down, I saw that I had kicked my house keys. I stopped right there, looked straight up into the starry sky, and gave God and whoever is the patron saint of drunken fools my heartfelt thanks.

The moral of this story is: If a stranger asks if you're going to a bar, keep walking.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Get thee to a nunnery

A few years ago, I played around with a short story featuring two British characters. When I was done, I showed it to a guy I know who lives in England, and asked how I'd done with the dialect. He said that it was pretty accurate, except that they sounded Victorian. I puzzled over that for a while, I've watched quite a bit of British television and movies, and I thought I had made the idiom correct. Then it occurred to me: with the exception of Harry Potter, all of the English literature I've read was either Victorian, or set in that era. Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, et al.

It's been said often enough to become trite that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." Alongside it is a quote I saw in an Orson Scott Card book (I don't know if it was his or if he borrowed it) that went "English-speakers are the only people who can't read Shakespeare in their native language." He was writing his works about 500 years ago, and that makes me wonder about the future evolution of our language. I haven't been able to decide if the explosion of world-wide communications in my lifetime has caused the rate of change in this language to speed up or slow down. That's probably something best left to linguistic experts, but I get the feeling that opinions on the matter are probably divided and will be for some time to come. I guess I'll wait till I'm 60, go back and watch stuff from when I was a kid, and see how archaic it sounds.

But going back to British-English versus American-English, I haven't had many chances to have a face-to-face conversation with anyone from across the pond, which is a bit of a shame. I can only think of one time when I had several conversations with anyone from England, and I can only think of one time when he said something that confused me. There's probably others, but I only remember the one. We were talking about something, I can't remember what, and he asked me if I was talking about "the Pakis." I asked for clarification, and he explained that he was talking about Pakistanis. From the way he had said it, I took the word for a racial slur, and found out later that it is. My knowledge of world relations is woefully small, I had no idea that there was enough emnity between England and Pakistan for there to be a nasty way to refer to them.

On a similar note, I have an on-line friend who lives in Norway, but learned English somewhere along the way. I have no idea how he sounds when he speaks English, but he writes rather well. I assume he must have learned English from British sources, as he uses words like "bloody" occasionally. There were a few times I decided to test how good his English was by engaging in Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness in an attempt to catch him up. Funnily enough, the one time I did get him to ask for clarification was unintended. We were discussing weight loss, and I told him about the time I dropped 15 pounds when I stopped drinking pop. There was a slight pause (if such can even be registered in IM format), followed by "pop?" Who knew that all I had to do to confuse the guy was slip into colloquialism?

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Addendum to the Previous

It got worse. Not long after the point in the book I was at when I was relating yesterday's blog, the readers hit on the idea that they should tell me when there's an ellipsis in a sentence. Meaning that when a sentence reads on paper "It would do...for now," what I hear is "It would do elipsis for now." They also do that for open and close paragraph, but for no other form of punctuation. I get the feeling that by the end of the book, they're going to be spelling out every word for me, and reading every single punctuation mark, and possibly ending every with something like "J-O-H-N space W-E-N-T space H-O-M-E period printed on recycled paper page 127."

If anyone out there has any justification for that, please give it to me.

From the "They Just Didn't Care" Department

I mentioned before that I like to listen to audiobooks while I'm driving. A while ago, I got downloaded a stack of Robert A. Heinlein audiobooks, and I've been going through the ones I hadn't listened to before. The quality of the recordings vary widely. A lot of them come from the Library of Congress, some initiative they had for books for the blind. I'm guessing they're in there because they're probably public domain.

Currently, I'm listening to Methuselah's Children, and I feel confident in saying that it is the worst audio recording I've ever listened to. Each track in the book appears to be read by a different person, and it seems clear that each one is reading the book for the first time. The reading is flat and emotionless, with all the warmth of someone reading a shopping list out loud. And it seems that everything was done on the first take, as you can hear the woman doing the reading stumble over words, and repeat parts that she messed up. In one particular case, the woman even sighed in exasperation before re-reading one line. They also read off each page number, which I don't understand at all. It's like on TV when you see a character pretending to be a bad actor, and their lines are delivered like "Well, I must be going. Exit stage left. Oh, sorry, I wasn't supposed to read that part."

In particular, it seems like the reader for Track 3 hadn't so much as glanced at her part before reading it to the recorder. There's awkward pauses at least once a sentence, more if the sentence contains words not normally used in English conversation. She even managed to mispronounce Heinlein's name at the beginning of the track. Normally I would wonder what the director was thinking when he or she was working on this book, but it's obvious that there was no such director, of if there was, they were fast asleep the entire recording. I can't say I blame the director, either. The readers managed to make daring death-defying escapes sound not only boring, but tedious. They read what the main character had for breakfast and a description of him taking down an armed cop with equal gusto, which is to say none at all.

What makes this especially annoying is that I've listened to some audio books that were done very well, with readers who brought a sense of pride and craft into what they were reading. A lot of them are accomplished voice actors, and give each character their own voice, from tone to timbre to accent. The people reading Methuselah's Children sound like they're doing it as a punishment.

I've heard other audiobooks done by multiple readers, but those were cases of giving narratives by different characters a distinct flavor. It adds to the sense that you're being told the story from different perspectives. In the case of this book, I find myself dreading if the next reader can possibly be any worse than the one before.

One good example of an audio book done right would be the Harry Potter audio books. I understand there's a couple different versions: the British audio books, read by Stephen Fry. Some may know Fry as the other half of Fry and Laurie, the latter of which is famous in America as Gregory House. I haven't listened to them, but I understand they're very good. The American audio books are done by Jim Dale, who, if you'll excuse the pun, is a veritable wizard of voice acting. He's so good at doing voices for the characters that you'd swear there's four or five other people in the room with him. One thing that really impressed me is that he can do convincing female voices. Most voice actors have trouble doing voices of the opposite sex. Women voiced by men sound shrill or like high-pitched men, while men voiced by women tend to sound like they have bad head colds or chew gravel daily.

It should come as no surprise that the women doing this audiobook don't even bother with voices. Hell, sometimes it's difficult to tell when they switch from dialogue to narration, as they don't even bother to pause between paragraphs. They even switch between different sections of the book without pausing, which a couple times had me wondering why one of the characters was suddenly the President of the United States. They do the same when stating page numbers (I still can't figure out why they're telling blind people what page they should be on), sometimes not even pausing when the page change occurs mid-sentence. So you'll get sentences like this. "We have to get out of page 42 here as soon as we can." Which is a very jarring experience, leading me to wonder why the person on the other end of that dialogue doesn't ask "Why did you just say 'page 42?'" At least, that's what I'd ask the reader if I could.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

To Hell with Money

A friend of mine has this phrase he'll use when he hears or sees something that pleases him, or he thinks it cool. In much the same way that Paris Hilton might say "That's hot," he'll say "That's money."

The phrase really bothers me. A large part of it is the implication inherent in the statement that money is not simply something that has worth, but that it is also worthy. In my opinion, taking something that has intrinsic value, and comparing it favorably to another thing that has no intrinsic value, cheapens that thing.

Of course, I know there are some people who would squawk at the idea that money has no intrinsic value. This world is full of people who bow to and worship at the altar of money, forgetting that money is not a thing in itself, but a shared hallucination. Money only has value if both parties involved agree it does by mutual consent. If I were to offer a dog a choice between a $10 steak and a $20 bill, which would he prefer? The $20 bill has no value to him, while the steak is a tasty meal. I couldn't explain to the dog that with the $20 bill, he could purchase 2 steaks. The $20 bill only has value because the butcher and I have both accepted the fiction that it does.

Some may argue that a dog and a person are not the same, and I shouldn't expect a dog to understand what a human does. So here's another example, which I'm paraphrasing from a book. If you were stuck on a desert island, would you rather have a sack full of cash, or a sack full of potatoes? A silly question, you might be saying, as the answer is so obvious. And yet you have to be pulled out of civilization to make the answer so obvious. The money is useless to you (no intrinsic value) on a desert island, while the potatoes can be eaten (intrinsic value), and with some luck, can be planted and cultivated into even more potatoes. While the merits of a potato-only diet are arguable, they certainly have more nutritional value than money, whether it's paper or coinage.

Traditionally, gold has had value to us because it's shiny and rare. That's pretty much been it for most of human history. Recently, some practical uses have been found for gold; it's conductivity makes it useful in electronics, for instance. But it would be absurd to claim that the ancient Babylonians were coining gold because they knew that in 6,000 years, we'd find a way to use the stuff.

Having said all this, I don't really have anything against money. I accept that it's a useful way to attain goods and services, and certainly more practical in an urban setting than keeping a bunch of livestock I can barter. Though if the Revolution comes tomorrow, I may find myself wishing I had a couple pigs to slaughter just in case. But it's not really something I can believe in, and certainly nothing I can ascribe higher values to and invoke its name to show my approval of something.

I was talking to a friend once, the same friend as I mentioned in the beginning, in fact. I told him that I don't believe in ghosts. He asked me why, and I said that I've never seen one. He countered with "do you believe in 1 million dollars?" His point, I'm sure, is that I've never seen 1 million dollars, either. And of course was the unspoken assumption that I absolutely must believe in 1 million dollars, or the fraud of money would be exposed for what it is. I gave it some serious thought, and I have to say, I don't believe in one million dollars. You may as well ask if I believe in a character in a novel. It's just an idea.

Hell, in this modern age of electronic banking, when a paycheck can pass from a corporation's account to the bank account of the employee via direct deposit, and from there to the grocery store's bank account via a debit card, without ever having become anything other than an electronic trail the entire time, can money really be said to exist? As I understand it, we don't even back our money on the gold standard, the silver standard, or any other hard currency. Our money is backed by credit. Money doesn't even have a physical existence anymore, except for those increasingly rare times we convert it from binary code into cash. No, I don't believe in 1 million dollars. But I do believe in steaks and potatoes.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights