Wednesday, December 08, 2004

At Bloggerheads

Wednesday already?
I tried to blog over the weekend, but I experienced a server error, which means, well, I couldn’t. I was out of town Monday, and too fried yesterday to do much of anything. So: here we are.

Overheard while waiting to get on the plane home.
A five-year-old girl was standing behind me with her mother. The mother asked her if she was excited to be flying, and her daughter said she was, but she had flown before, you know. And what did she know about flying?

The little girl said: “Don’t be dead on the plane. Don’t be loud on the plane. When people are sleeping, you should too.”

Flashback: Friday Night
Amy and I went to see Ben Manilla, producer of the House of Blues Radio Hour (for which I am a writer), and harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite, at a book signing for ELWOOD’S BLUES, a new collection of interviews gleaned from the thirteen years HOB has been on the air (I have a few bits in it, and ghost-wrote a little of it as well; shh, tell no one). Ben elected to play audio snippets of some of the interviews, and got Mr. Musselwhite to talk a bit about his life in the blues. He has some great stories, including the tale that he got into the blues professionally when he moved to Chicago from Memphis. He had to leave Memphis in a hurry, it seems, because his career as a bootlegger wasn’t really working out.

Flashback: Monday
I am off to Portland, Oregon, to emcee a fundraiser for a literary magazine, GOBSHITE (you got a problem with that?), a publication to which I am a contributor. I hope to find time to get to Powell’s, the Elvis of bookstores, but we shall see. Will be back Tuesday.

[NB: I did not go to Powell’s, and no actual funds were raised; there you go.]

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PC Alert
I read in Reuters that The Global Language Monitor (sounds ominous, doesn’t it?) has announced its top 10 list of “politically charged words and phrases.”

The list includes “master/slave,” as used in the computer industry, “non-same sex marriage,” “waitron,” “higher being,” “Red Sox lover,” “progressive,” “incurious,” “insurgents,” “barista,” and “first year student.”

And when did "terrorist" become "insurgent?"

PC Alert2?
I learned from the Associated Press of “…a Nativity scene at a London wax museum featuring soccer star David Beckham and his wife Victoria, a former Spice Girl, as the parents of Jesus.”

But wait! There’s more!

“The waxwork tableau at Madame Tussauds museum included U.S. President George W. Bush as one of the three Wise Men, actors Hugh Grant and Samuel L. Jackson as shepherds and Australian disco diva Kylie Minogue as an angel.”

Reverend Jonathan Jenkins, spokesman for the archbishop of Canterbury, responded, "There is a well-understood tradition that each generation interprets and reinterprets the Nativity ... but, oh dear!"

Here in the United States, of course, the wax museum would probably be firebombed.

DVD
Bill returns this week, at which time he and I will get together and start mailing.

1 Comments:

Blogger BonzoGal said...

I love the Rev. Jenkins' comment: "Oh dear." If only most spokespersons were as civilized.

4:05 PM  

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