Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Before I answer–speaking of the surreal–do you ever wonder how people find your weblog? I have been looking at my blog’s “referer stats“–the searches that found me. I now feel honored, and spooked, and very puzzled.

I’m both honored and spooked that people come here from searches for “E.B. White” or “Once More to the Lake.” Honored, because I love E.B. White–his honesty, insight, and crafty craftsmanship. (Check out his biography for more.) Spooked, to picture White’s admirers reading my prose. Wooooohhh, scary.

I first started blogging about Republican “Astroturf”–PR push-pieces sent out to small-town papers by the RNC, disguised as local “letters to the editor.” Now, six months later, people end up at my blog after searches for things like “where to buy astroturf”, “astroturf colors”, even “astroturf snow.”

Some searches that end up here are even more puzzling. “Charlotte’s+Web+sexist”? I never said that! “Custodial parents+are+evil”? I said the opposite! “Why+is+my+cat+timid”? Errrrr–huh?

Is this the fault of search engines or misshaped queries? Nahhhh, let’s join Andrew Orlowski and blame sneaky bloggers!

That’s right, folks! I confess–I wanted readers who had (sob) no interest in my blog. I set my sneaky net to capture people looking for something that I don’t offer. Okay, I’m no alpha-blogger–but we epsilon-bloggers are evil in our own way.

Coming next week: how custodial parents and colored astroturf create semiotic heuristic synergy–and that’s why your cat is timid!

So, how many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Best answer I know is, “To get to the other side.”

The good:

Cape Cod’s North Shore is full of

• quaking bogs
• anadromous fish runs
• salt marshes
• other places known as “critical habitats“

Cape Cod’s South Shore is full of

• fried-clam-shacks
• taffy shops
• miniature golf
• other places known as “tourist traps.”

I absolutely love both kinds of places.

The bad:

Little-bitty teentsy-beentsy roads, filled up with stop-and-go traffic. Amazingly (to this veteran Boston driver) other cars stop to let you into their lane!

The ugly (do you really want to know?):

In all of the mid-Cape region where I was staying, the only Web-connection was one (1) Kinko’s in Hyannis–with exactly three (3) computers. Of these, one (1) was busy. One (1) was a Mac, still using OS 9 (nine).

The third (3rd)–a nice young man warned me–had a “problem” with printing. I soon found out why–it was completely offline–no printer, no server–and no (zip, zero, 0, also zilch) Internet connection!

God bless the old Mac, where I slowly emptied my totally full hotmail mailbox, and even posted Gollum to this blog.

What does it mean to the digital-body debate when Gollum receives a major film award and then makes an acceptance speech? I think this is somehow a win for David Weinberger, at least I hope so.

You Live in California when…
1. You make $250,000 a year and can’t afford to buy a four-bedroom house.
2. The high school quarterback calls time-out to answer his cell phone.
3. You drive a rented Mercedes to your neighborhood block party.
4. When someone asks you how far something is, you tell them how long it will take to get there rather than how many miles away it is.
5. The fastest part of your daily commute is backing down your driveway.

You Live in New York City when…
1. You say “the city” and expect everyone to know you mean Manhattan.
2. You have never been to the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.
3. You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Columbus Circle to Battery Park, but can’t find Wisconsin on a map.
4. You think Central Park is “nature,”
5. You know eye contact is an act of aggression.

You Live in Maine when…
1. You have only four spices: salt, pepper, ketchup, and Tabasco.
2. Halloween costumes fit over parkas.
3. You have more than one recipe for moose.
4. Sexy lingerie is anything flannel with less than eight buttons.
5. The four seasons are: winter, still winter, almost winter, and construction.

You Live in the Deep South when…
1. You can rent a movie and buy bait in the same store.
2. You know “y’all” is singular–“all y’all” is the plural.
3. After five years you still hear, “You ain’t from ’round here, are Ya?”
4. All the people you know have 2 first names: Billy Bob, Jimmy Bob, Mary Sue, Betty Jean, etc.
5. “He needed killin’ ” is a valid defense.

You Live in Colorado when…
1. You carry your $3,000 mountain bike atop your $500 car.
2. You tell your husband to pick up Granola on his way home and he stops at the day care center.
3. A pass does not involve a football or dating.
4. The top of your head may be bald, but you have a pony tail.
5. Your hometown bus lines are named “Hop”, “Skip” and “Jump.”

You Live in the Midwest when…
1. You’ve never met any celebrities, but the mayor knows your name.
2. Your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor.
3. You have had to switch from “heat” to “A/C” on the same day.
4. You end sentences with a preposition: “Where’s my coat at?”
5. When asked how your trip was to any exotic place, you say, “It was different!”

You Live in Florida when…
1. You eat dinner at 3:15 in the afternoon.
2. All purchases include a coupon of some kind — even houses and cars.
3. Everyone can recommend an excellent dermatologist.
4. Road construction never ends anywhere in the state.

You Live in Blog-world when…
1. You can’t understand how anyone could mix up Dave Winer with David Weinberger.
2. You check on friends while drinking your morning coffee–and hope none of them make you spit coffee on the keyboard.
3. You type html tags so fast it’s not worth the trouble to copy and paste them.
4. You know just why Andrew Orlowski is wrong.
5. You would love to meet Halley, or you did meet Halley, or you would love to meet some other blogger who has met Halley.

And speaking of Halley–it is sooooo much fun to go to the movies with her. Go read her lovely inspired bit on the magic of 60s New York City space-time.

Blame it on Shutterclog Niek: I just spent an hour I didn’t have absorbed in the photographs of Ari Versluis. Versluis works with stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek exploring the “dress codes” of wildly differing groups.

At first glance, the images look like proofsheets–12 shots of a recognizably “goth” young girl, for example. A closer look reveals 12 quite different young girls, each in her own unique version of a very goth dress.

Men in jackets and ties. Teenage boys in jackets and ties. Women with headscarves carrying babies. Cute guys in tiny Euro bathing suits. (See the site contact page for an animated display of those cute guys.)

The images don’t leave you snickering at their subjects–they leave you with a deepened awareness about the ways those people are just like you, and not just like one another.

We long to be seen, we long to be understood–and no clothing on earth could do the many jobs we want our clothing to do for us. We want to say “I’m unique”, and we also want to say “I’m this kind of person.”

Okay, I’m off to express my individuality by putting on one of my all-black “I’m a writer who lives in a big city” outfits.

If a man says ‘yes’ he means maybe.
If he says ‘maybe’ he means no.
If he says ‘no’–he is no gentleman.

If a woman says ‘no’ she means maybe.
If she says ‘maybe’ she means yes.
If she says ‘yes’–she is no lady.

This was a favorite joke of Paul Dirac (1902-1984), a brilliant physicist so shy that his Cambridge colleagues coined a unit, the dirac, to stand for the smallest measurable quantum of speech. Dirac was what I call an Aleph male–distracted from Alpha ambitions by his private obsessions.

I met Dirac and his wonderful wife Moncie the summer before his 80th birthday. There is a famous summer school for physics in the little hilltown of Sicily known as Erice. I was a young physics wife, quite visibly pregnant. (Just one year before, my bottom was pinched black-and-blue by Sicilian men, but my little round belly got me treated me like a queen.)

I have a nerdy fondness for learning languages, so I served as an amateur guide to physicists who didn’t speak any Italian. I was delighted to be the chosen companion of a Nobel laureate for an hour or two, even if our mutual goal was to buy him some shoes. Professor Dirac was courteous but shy–and when he smiled, he had a wonderfully naughty twinkle in his eye.

I thought Moncie was a very lucky woman.

Frank Paynter When asked how he had discovered the law of universal gravitation, he said: “ By thinking on it continually.”

xxx

I posted a page of pix including photos of organizer Alex Golub; Disseminarians AKMA, Margaret, and Trevor ; JOHOvial David Weinberger, Payntnetters Beth Hastings and Frank Paynter, Steve Himmer and Sage Brousseau from OnePotMeal; game-meister Greg Costikyan, Happy Tutor Phil Cubeta, and virtual economistTed Castronova. Special thanks to Sage for taking some of my favorites of these photos.

Note: You can find actual DGI conference info linked to by my impressionistic blog about it.

Harvard-blogger Yule Heibel has a smart, funny, quirky voice–and she points (all the way from Vancouver, BC) to cool stuff that you won’t read about elsewhere.

Here is just one of the gems she has pointed me to, an interview with a super-successful yoga named Bikram:

“Bikram…claims to have cured every disease known to humankind and compares himself to Jesus Christ and Buddha. Requiring neither food nor sleep, he says, “I’m beyond Superman.” When you ask how he can make such wild statements, he answers, “Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.”

Quick, somebody phone the President–we’ve finally found those weapons of mass destruction!

Clockwise from lower left: George W Bush with newborn twins Barbara and Jenna. Laura Bush with six-month old twins, looking exhausted. Fake ID confiscated from brunette twin Barbara Pierce Bush in a New Haven bar. Tabloid photo of blonde twin Jenna Bush partying.

Chelsea Clinton, bombarded with “She so ugly” jokes while still in her teens, should have been so lucky as to be invisible. Years after her father left office, Chelsea remains a target for rabid attacks. (Google hits in past six months: 29,000 for “Chelsea Clinton”, 7,000 for “Bush twins”.)

The Bush twins got into the papers only when busted for underage drinking, and then only briefly. (Pro-morality-right-wing-Bush-supporters dismiss these arrests, like their daddy’s DUI when he was 30, as youthful hijinks.) The twins vanished again once their age made their drinking legal.

The twins aren’t the issue here–their father is. Because there may be a darker connection between the twins’ invisibility and Bush’s past history:

“During his presidential campaign, Mr Bush has repeatedly refused to answer questions about self-described “youthful indiscretions” or deny rumours that he had used cocaine in the 1960s or early 1970s. He gave up drinking in July 1986 after waking up with a hangover following a 40th birthday party.”

The twins were born in November, 1981, so for most of the critical first five years of their lives, their dad was a problem drinker. Then he quit–why? His autobiography tells us:

“I am a person who enjoys life, and for years, I enjoyed having a few drinks. But gradually, drinking began to compete with my energy. I’d be a step slower getting up. My daily runs seemed harder after a few too many drinks the night before.”

In the early eighties, W’s business ventures lost many millions of dollars for family-and-friend investors.
Did business worries, or those “few too many drinks the night before,” create problems for his wife or his little daughters? If so, they were not as important as his daily jogging.

Kids get their own page on the White House website. The Clinton White House kids page introduced visitors to recent White-House kids. The Bush White House kids page has links to info about pets Spot and Ebony–Mrs. Cheney gets more ink than Barbara and Jenna.

Well, I suppose we’ll get to hear all about their early lives, once the Bush twins decide to start penning ghost memoirs.

Thanks to David Weinberger for wondering about this issue in such an interesting way he made me wonder also.