During a grey weekend when taking photos of photos wouldn't have been successful anyway, I had too much else going on to write an entry. Naturally, much of the daytime was squandered watching big-butt bullyboy behemoths belligerently battling in their patriotic paradigm of arrogant American aggression, to the point of stealing the name of "football" from what the rest of the world rightly calls football, since what we call soccer largely depends upon footwork, not brutally bashing beastly opponents, our cleated footwork for hostile invasions and end runs. In short, we should have named our sport soccim and left world football alone. All four teams I favored won, and Favre was fancilly funny in his Play of the Game, so I was happy.
With Netflix rentals, I watched through two-thirds of Carlos Sauras' flamenco trilogy, El Amor Brujo (Love, the Magician), Manuel de Falla's gitaneria/gypsy piece, which I didn't like much with its murdered faithless lover, and then an unusual version of the biblical, always salacious Salome, including the dance of the seven veils, naturally, which I liked very much, since it's not often the beheading of John the Baptist is clattered out in flamenco and the severed-head-on-a-platter keeps on dancing.
I also finished two books, short ones, and got 100 pages into a third, Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives: A Novel, just translated in 2007, often included in Best Books of the Year lists. Derek Walcott's short The Prodigal gave me these memorable, very applicable lines: "I sipped the long delight of a past time/where ambition was too late. My craft was stuck./My deep delight lay in being dated/like the archaic engine. Peace was immense."
I got through the other, an anthology of the Scientific American's short humor(ist) columns, Steve Mirsky's Anti Gravity (The Lyons Press, 2007), during commercials, which I mute for just such short reading spurts. A very punny writer, he often had me laughing, as here: "On Thanksgiving Day, I saw a bird get stuffed. The bird was a great blue heron . . . . the heron fired its beak into floating vegetation in a canal. He came up with a face full of foliage in the midst of which was a honking big catfish. The avian epicure thus grabbed both the salad and the sushi courses in one swell sloop." Who cannot enjoy this guy? Especially in his levity brevity!
In a column on how movies mangle bugs: " 'Insect pheromones figure prominently in insect fear films,' Berenbaum and Leskosky note, although in the 1978 movie The Bees, the characters call the chemical communication compounds 'pherones.' Lose the 'er' too, and the insects could just call each other."
He has no more use for creation science or intelligent design than I or most scientists do and took on the theologically conservatives' rapture over March of the Penguins as I'd already recounted to certain friends, which made me feel fine: "Conservative commentator Michael Medwed thought the movie 'passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice, and child rearing.' . . . Penguins are not people, despite their natty appearance and upright ambulation. Their traditional norms include waddling around naked and regurgitating the kids' lunch. But it would be as absurd to castigate them for those activities as it is to congratulate them for their monogamy. Besides, the movie clearly notes that the penguins are seasonally monogamous--like other movie stars usually reviled by moralists, the penguins take a different mate each year. And there are problems with them as evidence of intelligent design. While caring for the egg, the penguins balance it on their feet against their warm bodies; if the egg slips to the ground for even a few seconds, it freezes and cracks open. A truly intelligent design might have included internal development, or thicker eggshells, or Miami. Finally, penguin parents take turns walking seventy miles to the sea for takeout meals. The birds have to walk."
Furthermore, he quotes a sportswriter who quit watching basketball when it went to tall freaks running up and down dunking, why I get SAD in the winter when only basketball is on, which mention came on the same day as Marilyn vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn" opened with the too pertinent question about American Idol: "How can people who are such bad singers think they are really good?" to which the woman with what Guinness once said had the highest recorded IQ replied, "Conceit," explaining that audiences ironically prefer the giant egos of small talent ". . . we're amused by them or embarrassed for them--sometimes both." Given my four years of college vocal lessons and tyrannical choir directors in almost entirely classical contexts, I could jeer and cheer, having steadfastly refused to watch that nontalent show with its crudely rude judging panel after the first few bad hearings. Maybe 2008 would be newly improved after all.
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