[From the Manual]
“Prohibited in flammable and explosive occasions.”
“Do not touch the glue gun and glue bar when working.”
“It is forbidden to pull the glue strip out of the tail of the glue gun.”
“The glue gun is equipped with durable material. When it is used for the first time, the smoke may appear. After 30 minutes’ use, the smoke automatically disappears.”
“The crucial step… is the raw and willful decision each partner must make just to recommit. The relationship is strife-ridden. Every fiber of your body says to retreat to the safety of your foxhole. But you have to go against yourself and lunge toward intimacy.” (David Brooks, NYTimes)
Century plant, Fort Davis, JMN, 2009. Photo. Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.
A contestant in the final stages of the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee competition failed to spell “bewusstseinslage” correctly. I don’t know whether to bawl or weep.
That a young citizen of these United States speaking this American language should stumble over the spelling of “bewusstseinslage” is a sad statement on the state of our schools.
I Googled “bewusstseinslage” merely to confirm its middle-school-obvious meaning: “a state of consciousness or a feeling devoid of sensory components.”
Goodness, I live daily in (with?) bewusstseinslage — don’t we all? “Bewusstseinslage” has been the name of my state since forever. I’ve literally wallowed in bewusstseinslage for a coon’s age.
No idea why “bewusstseinslage” escapes a so-called spelling wizard, BUTT: Let’s hope our schools get serious on how to right rilly useful werds like “covfefe .”
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt.” (Anthony Bourdain)
I’d like to record how fruitless my multi-year meander in LinkedIn has proven. Full disclosure: I never sought employment on LinkedIn. My work history doesn’t define me — I’ve disliked most of my jobs. Why trot out a lackluster record … Continue reading
The largest exoplanet ever found
Is quite a marvel where marvels abound.
Theory holds it cannot be, they say,
But sometimes theory doesn’t have its way.
It is a type of planet they call puffy
That orbits its parent in just a jiffy.
Another is so light it would be floatable
Were such a tub of H2O available.
One planet takes the prize for poetry:
It’s called Epsilon Eridani B.
It’s closest to our Earth but no contender
For life support because of lack of water.
OGLE is yet another world most chilly,
While WASP is hotter than a hot tamale.
CoRot is rocky, but it takes the cake
For places whose sole purpose is to bake.
There is a three-star world whose triple suns
Put sundown in the shade on single ones.
A planet that is twice as dense as lead
May be a brown dwarf, or a star that’s dead.
HD has let its atmosphere be sniffed,
And glowing methane in its air was whiffed.
Coku Tau 4’s planet is very new.
The orbit of XO-3b’s askew.
There is a planet known to orbit backwards.
For this phenomenon I simply lack words.
GJ is thought to be a world of water,
A Super-Earth that has a solid center.
A year on SWEEPS is shorter than a day.
You would be ancient in one year that way.
A massive world that orbits a pulsar
Is made of diamond and was once a star.
How much more weirdness before you are made
Stark crazy by this alien parade?
Reference
http://www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html
The Hangover God, JMN, 2009. Photo. Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“Looking back, in an afterword written on the 25th anniversary publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth wrote, ‘I wished to dazzle in my very own way and to dazzle myself no less than anyone else.’ He recalled admonishing himself, ‘All you have to do is sit down and work.’ Aspiring writers might engrave those words.” (Roger Cohen, “The Liberation in Roth’s American Berserk,” NYTimes).
“… The misogyny isn’t really the problem. After all, if one policed literature for bigotry, there would be little left to read. The problem is literary: these caricatures reveal a lack of not only empathy, but curiosity.” (Dara Horn, “What Philip Roth Didn’t Know About Women Could Fill a Book,” NYTimes).
A female colleague once used a phrase in conversation that stuck with me — something like “Men just want to get their hoggin’s” or “He got his hoggin’s.” For me it was a colorful new instance of slang describing an outcome sought onesidedly by the unevolved male, like “He got his rocks off.”
I’ve tried to remember what I can about the two Philip Roth novels I read long ago. Of “Goodbye, Columbus” I recall that the title was cleverly revealed far along in the novel to be … from a school song? Nothing else. As for “Portnoy’s Complaint,” I retain only an image of a boy getting his hoggin’s into his gym socks. Dazzling himself?
Flaubert created Emma Bovary. The Bronte sisters and Jane Austen had some success writing in the male voice. Richard Jury and I have solved several mysteries together — he’s Martha Grimes’s handsome detective in “Man With a Load of Mischief” and other gumshoe yarns. Dara Horn’s column (cited above) triggered those reflections about authors projecting voice into the opposite gender.
Is a lack of curiosity about and empathy for women a willful state in an author? If so, it might expose Roth to an opprobrium able to be considered deserved by the caricatured party.
Or is a lack of curiosity about and empathy for women a congenital deficit in an author, one that can’t be overcome? If so, it could imply that Roth had a creative blind spot potentially limiting his scope as a novelist should he attempt to portray a convincing female character.
I don’t know if these are questions that even should be asked, much less answered. It’s a lame conclusion, but it’s what I’ve got. I’m too out of touch with Roth’s work to venture pronouncements, and I would like to avoid the pitfall of inflammatory bloviation swamping our discourse. As my female character, Garnet Belle Hatch of Stag City, sagely remarks, “In this town there are more opinions than people.”
Brick Struggling to Be Free, JMN, 2009. Photo. Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
One time I helped tend bar at a gala hosted by my father in the historic building that tripled as his studio, gallery, and dwelling. A man I knew by reputation, but not personally, appeared at my countertop and asked … Continue reading
Every other Sunday the Right Reverend Llewelyn Bidley-Spaulding motors in his classic antique Bentley from Meadowshire to Chichesterton-Upon-Hogg to visit professionally his old friend, Sir Alistair Chichester. In the 14th-century private chapel attached to Baldershanks, the baronial mansion that has housed the Chichester clan from time immemorial, the Reverend administers holy communion to Sir Alistair.
Afterwards, over a tidy supper of jugged hare, new potatoes, garden peas, and spotted dick, the Reverend Bidley-Spaulding and Sir Alistair make serene small talk about matters appertaining to the topmost levels of the upper crust.
Retiring thereupon to Sir Alistair’s leather-bound-tome-ridden library, the two worthies — Christ’s and the Queen’s — sink comfortably into padded armchairs to savor the port and cigars brought with deferential haughtiness by Wadsworth, the butler. It is then the Reverend gives sage counsel to Sir Alistair touching on strategies with which to evade eternal perdition.
Challenge your trifling faculties now with a bit of nonsense posed for the crying need of your edification: It involves a calculation of the expenditure by the parish occasioned by the Reverend Bidley-Spaulding’s personal ministrations in support of the salvation of Sir Alistair’s immortal soul.
Assume, though your essential means of locomotion is undoubtedly a rusting velocipede, that you are dimly aware of the price of a litre of petrol — perhaps from having shared a pint of piddling stout with your lady’s chauffeur at the tawdry little tavern on the low end of Chichesterton-Upon-Hogg — we can’t be bothered to recall its name.
Assume, in further pursuit of this all-too-polite fiction lending you credence undeserved by one of your station, that you possess a greater than bovine grasp of the number of kilometers that a pristine 1937 Bentley in fine tune will traverse on a litre of petrol.
Finally, subscribe for a moment to the wildly daft supposition that you have a tinker’s inkling of the annual amount of the Reverend Bidley-Spaulding’s general stipend, exclusive of allowances and contingencies, as paid by the parish he serves with noteworthy divinity.
Question: What else must one know (if anything) in order to express numerically the investment the parish makes for the securement of Sir Alistair’s heavenly reward?
(A) The distance from Meadowshire to Chichesterton-Upon-Hogg;
(B) The rate of speed at which the Reverend Bidley-Spaulding drives his Bentley;
(C) The sum of Sir Alistair’s contributions to the parish’s cathedral fund;
(D) The time lapse from when the Reverend leaves the parsonage to when he returns;
(E) None of the above;
(F) I am far too dense to reach a plausible conclusion.
If your answer is “F,” you have evinced a laudable self-awareness unusual in your sort. Receive our assurances that we have taken brief notice.
(Social Math — UK, Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
Tweet in haste, repent at leisure
Once I excerpted the following from a New Yorker article and flagged it in a tweet:
“The Odd Future charge has been led by…Tyler Okonma, known as Tyler, the Creator… Hodgy Beats, a diminutive, quick-tempered rapper,… is half of the duo Mellow-Hype, along with [a] producer who calls himself Left Brain. Two more rappers, Domo Genesis and Mike G, are known… Matt Martians makes spaced-out funk. Travis Bennett, known as Taco, and Jasper Dolphin, are members… Taco’s sister, Syd (the Kyd) Bennett,… Christopher (Lonnie) Breaux, known as Frank Ocean… Tyler and the others sometimes referred to Earl Sweatshirt as Thebe — pronounced “TEH-beh… Before Thebe was Earl Sweatshirt, he called himself Sly, short for Sly Tendencies… One of his friends… was Solomon Allison, who produces hip-hop under the name Loofy….” (Kelefa Sanneh, “Where’s Earl?”, The New Yorker, May 23, 2011)
I followed up with a pastiche which I can’t summon the effrontery to reproduce verbatim. In it my rap persona declares he riffs under the name ‘Pokehole,’ but “when rilly freestylin'” becomes ‘High Plains Vaquero’ and has a “high-fivin’ posse.” He’s ‘Milknickel’ when drafting, and ‘Doctor Skull’ when “the PHuDs get funky.” It doesn’t get better.
By inserting pidgin Spanish into the mix — “ricacho,” “macho muchacho,” “no manches,” “chiste,” “comprendiste” — as well as a smidgin of hackerese — “grok my kludges” — I invited in one swell foop disgust and mockery from at least three constituencies.
Sure enough, another Twitterer sent me an “Oh dear” message: I was getting nasty blowback. Who knew? I had zilch followers. I closed my two-month-old Twitter account and took a powder.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)