Nov

7

Word Of The Week: November 7th, 2009.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment

In a classic Calvin & Hobbes strip (okay, technically they’re all classics–Bill Watterson is a genius) Calvin tells Hobbes that he likes to “verb words”. It’s the process of taking nouns and adjectives and turning them into verbs. He even gives an example: “Remember when ‘access’ was a thing? Now, it’s something you do.”

This didn’t originate with Calvin, obviously. Words have been verbed probably as long as there’s been language. A good example is tinker. Originally it was a noun. A tinker is a person who, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “A craftsman (usually itinerant) who mends pots, kettles, and other metal household utensils.” This word dates back at least to 1265–that’s the OED’s first recorded use, anyway, and the word probably had a long oral use before it was written down. The etymology is unknown, although maybe it’s onomatopoeic–just imagine the sound of someone working metal against metal. In Scotland and Northern Ireland tinkers were called tinklers, which I always thought was an entirely different profession, but that’s another story.

By 1658, what I think is now the most common usage of tinker appears:

To work at something (immaterial) clumsily or imperfectly, esp. in the way of attempted repair or improvement; also more vaguely, to occupy oneself about something in a trifling or aimless way; to trifle, potter.

And again that’s just the first recorded written example that the editors of the OED could find. People were probably tinkering with the meaning of tinker well before that.

Hobbes finishes that classic strip by saying, “Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.” He’s missing the larger point, though, which is that language is not fixed. It’s constantly evolving and changing and being stretched. The beauty of language is that we can expand it by tinkering with it.

Nov

6

Un-Fairgrounds.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 6, 2009 | 1 Comment

As a coin collector one of my best sources is the monthly Nashville flea market. For decades it’s been held at the state fairgrounds, but its future is uncertain because the fairgrounds is being closed down and sold to private developers. I feel like a part of my childhood is being taken away; I remember going to the flea market when I was four or five with my grandparents and an aunt. My grandfather would always joke, “We need to go. Your aunt is running short on fleas.” That was before I started collecting coins, and I don’t think I ever bought anything at the flea market then, but it didn’t matter. Plenty of people did–and still do.

The Nashville City Paper’s report on the closing asks, “Did elitism doom the fairgrounds?” And there may be some point to the suggestion that “the folks who make these types of Metro-centric decisions aren’t interested in stock car racing, fairs or flea markets.” Yes, there is stock car racing at the track that’s adjacent fairgrounds, but claims of elitism should be made carefully. The City Paper’s article starts with a comment about the city’s most prime real estate being its golf courses and parks, acreage “that is utilized by relatively few citizens, maintained by tax dollars, returns little or no profit and would be an absolute gold mine for developers”. I think it should be noted that parks and golf courses are more environmentally friendly than racetracks. And while the City Paper points out that the state fair drew 209,131 visitors (that’s more than 20,000 people per day) it doesn’t provide figures on stock car race attendance. Maybe closing the fairgrounds and its adjacent racetrack is part of a vast conspiracy to “shed the city’s perceived Hee-Haw image”, but it could just as easily be about the money.

Let me emphasize that I’m not in favor of closing the fairgrounds or the racetrack. It’s not just for flea markets and state fairs, after all. The annual Lawn And Garden Show has been held at the fairgrounds for several years, an event where spaces inside the drab buildings are turned into elegant gardens where you can find plants ranging from rainforest specimens to cacti. A friend of mine who’s a member of the Orchid Society of Middle Tennessee has helped put together spectacular displays that are worth the price of admission. I’m not sure where they’ll be next year–or if there will be a show at all.

The fairgrounds also hosts everything from gun and knife shows to bead and jewelry shows to computer sales. The Nashville Comic and Horror Festival and a dog show were held at the fairgrounds on the same weekend, proving just how versatile the space is.

And then there’s the flea market, where you can find tube socks, tubers, and tapeworms. You can find just about anything there. Unlike eBay, which is fine if you know what you’re looking for, the flea market is a place where, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re bound to find something. Admittedly most of the time I do know what I’m looking for and I head straight for the coin dealers, most of whom now recognize me even though they must see hundreds, if not thousands of different people. There’s a wonderful couple who, every month, drive up from Florida just to set up a booth at the Nashville flea market. They’ve been making the trip back and forth for more than twenty years. I wonder what will become of them when the flea market ends. Maybe they’re close to retiring anyway, but they’re not the only coin dealers–and not by any means the only small business owners who come to the flea market to sell things.

Flea markets aren’t unique–although every flea market is different, and lots of places have racetracks, but then again lots of places have fairs too. That doesn’t make them any less of a source of local pride and interest. The closing of the fairgrounds and racetrack is being compared, with good reason, to the closing of the Opryland Theme Park. Opryland was torn down and replaced with a mall that’s no different from malls across the country. The City Paper story is illustrated with a picture of an antique merry-go-round similar to one that Opryland had. While you could find roller coasters and bumper cars and, for that matter, merry-go-rounds at every theme park, Opryland’s merry-go-round was unique, more than a century old and restored to working order after fifty years in storage (information about the history of Opryland, including the merry-go-round, can be found here). A true work of art, that old merry-go-round has been returned to storage and may never run again. And now another landmark is going the same way. Tourism has been a very big part of Nashville’s economy, but I don’t see how it’s going to continue to be if the city keeps moving toward being like everywhere else.

Nov

3

Getting Real.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 3, 2009 | 2 Comments

Anyone who’s taken any art history course that covers Impressionism has heard that photography was, at least in Western art, the beginning of the end of intensely representational work–including the academic work of artists like Jacques Louis David. Starting with the Impressionists it was all a downhill slide to Pollock and Rothko, right? Well, not exactly. Various Surrealists and Pop Artists were representational, and artists from the Wyeths to O’Keefe stand outside any particular school. And there have been numerous photo-realist artists, including Tom Palmore, whose work is covered in a book called Earthlings.

The title is significant. In science fiction movies and stories human beings are often greeted or referred to as “Earthlings”, but Palmore’s subjects are usually animals–and often chimpanzees. It’s a funny and poignant reminder that all life forms on this planet are Earthlings.

Palmore, like Jamie Wyeth, paints animals–occasionally people, but animals are his primary subject, and he’s more controlled with his brushwork than Wyeth, aiming for realism so intense you feel like you could reach out and touch the nose of the frog in this painting:

It’s called Big Billy, Portrait Of A Prince, which is the other thing that makes Palmore’s work interesting. He’s got a great sense of humor. If you haven’t already, check out the wallpaper behind Big Billy. Sometimes the humor is in the painting, sometimes it’s in the title, sometimes both, as in Curtain Call For Teresa.

I’ve studied art a lot and even when confronted with the weirdest, most challenging conceptual art I can usually fall back on what I’ve learned to get some idea of what the artist is trying to achieve. But with Tom Palmore’s art I don’t feel like I have to fall back on anything–instead I feel I’m falling into it.

Oct

31

Word Of The Week: October 31st, 2009

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 31, 2009 | 3 Comments

Having had pagan friends for most of my life, I’ve been familiar with the holiday Samhain, but it wasn’t until I looked it up that I realized it was not, at least to modern pagans, October 31st, but the day after, November 1st. I’m not sure why this is, although maybe the answer lies in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, which says Samhain was “celebrated by the ancient Celts as a festival marking the beginning of winter and of the new year according to their calendar”. Since in the Northern hemisphere this time of year marks cooler weather, animals going into hibernation, the harvest, and death, it seems a strange time to call the new year–although not necessarily any stranger than January 1st, which falls in the middle of winter in the Northern hemisphere and the middle of summer in the Southern. Maybe the Celts were being optimistic. Maybe starting the new year at a time when so many things were ending was their way of noting the promise of renewal. And renewal would come with Samhain’s May counterpart, Beltane, but that’s another story. Clearly this was, and is, a time of change, and the Celts decided to celebrate rather than resist it. As the poet Robin Skelton says in his poem Samhain,

celebrate the riches we’ve known, the profusion,
the births, the deaths, the ever changing history,
finding in fire a vision beyond illusion,
welcoming the holiness and mystery.

For now, though, it’s still Halloween–my favorite time to put on a costume and celebrate the season. Guess who I’ve decided to be this year.

Oct

30

Dangerous Jobs.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment

About once a month my wife buys eighty pounds of raw chicken necks which I then run through a meat grinder, pack into containers, and freeze. Now I know what you’re thinking: Hey, call me the next time because I’d like to get in on that! Seriously, you’re probably wondering why anyone in their right mind would do such a thing. The jury’s still out on the question of whether I’m in my right mind, but I do have a good reason. We have three dogs and feed them what’s known as the BARF diet. Supposedly that’s an acronym for Bones And Raw Food, a diet that tries to mimic what dogs would eat in the wild–minus the fur, feathers, and assorted diseases and parasites.

I take plenty of precautions while handling raw chicken because of the risk of salmonella, but I think this is the most dangerous job that I’ll do. And it doesn’t begin to compare to anything in Wired magazine’s list of the best dangerous science jobs, which include:

Oct

28

Cadbury Is Too Cool For School.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 28, 2009 | 2 Comments

For some reason Cadbury bars, which are, I think, as synonymous with chocolate in Britain as Hershey bars are here, are kind of hard to find around here. About the only time I see anything made by Cadbury is either in the “imports” section of the grocery or around Easter when they start selling crème eggs. Maybe that’ll change, though, with Cadbury’s new cool image that’s helping the company’s sales. It might have changed a few months ago when Kraft tried to buy Cadbury but was turned down. And that’s a good thing. Honestly, can you imagine what the same company that makes Velveeta would do to Cadbury bars?

Anyway, as Marketplace reports, Cadbury has run two new cool ads, neither one of which actually tells you anything about Cadbury bars. The one with the gorilla is kind of weird and funny, but I really prefer this one with the racing airport vehicles:

Ben Walker, who’s with a British advertising agency, said, “I would imagine a couple of years ago my perception of Cadbury might have been slightly old and fusty…” And even though he says he loved the gorilla ad, the fact that it doesn’t say anything about Cadbury bars made him ask “is that a good advert?” Apparently it was good: Cadbury’s sales went up by more than ten percent.

This is a company that’s been around since 1824, and while it’s hard not to get fusty when you’re almost two-hundred years old, it’s great that Cadbury is finding ways to reinvent itself. The ads almost seem like they’re promoting Cadbury’s coolness. The message could be, “We don’t need to tell you what a Cadbury bar is. Here’s a funny movie.”

One thing I’m pretty sure has changed, though, is that Cadbury doesn’t use random groups of school kids as focus groups. This was something they did even before “focus groups” became common parlance. Roald Dahl writes about this in his book Boy. Every kid at his school would get a plain cardboard box of twelve chocolate bars, and they “knew intimately every chocolate bar in existence”. Cadbury used Dahl and his fellow students as testers, and, I think, this was really the beginning of his career as a writer, since they’d have to write comments about each bar they tried. He says “Too subtle for the common palate” was one comment he remembers writing, and then adds,

I have no doubt at all that, thirty-five years later, when I was looking for a plot for my second book for children, I remembered those little cardboard boxes and the newly-invented chocolates inside them, and I began to write a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Even though it inspired at least one great writing career the risks of throwing chocolate bars at a random group of kids today would just be too great, but that’s okay. Cadbury is old school and still cool.

Oct

27

Disturbing The Cleese.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 27, 2009 | 1 Comment

There’s something weird about October 27th. Both Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath were born on this day, in 1914 and 1932 respectively. Maybe this is just a coincidence, though. You could probably take any day and find that it’s the birthday of several famous people. For instance, John Cleese was also born on October 27th, in 1939.

And while it’s oddly fitting that one member should have a birthday in the same month that Monty Python celebrates its fortieth year, let’s not forget that John Cleese also gave us A Fish Called Wanda and Fawlty Towers. Episodes of Fawlty Towers have actually been used as instructional videos for hotel managers, which isn’t surprising since he made the sitcom after he did a series of instructional films for business. I’ve seen one of those instructional films. It was called More Bloody Meetings and it was almost funny enough to make me forget I was at work. And if you want to know what the real Cleese is like, pick up the biography Cleese Encounters. He’s surprisingly humble and private–or maybe that isn’t so surprising. His best friend was Graham Chapman, proving that opposites really do attract.

Happy birthday, Mr. Cleese. Here’s one of my favorite Monty Python bits.

Oct

26

Book ‘Em: The Foot Of The Bed.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

When I was in grade school there was a woman who worked in the lunchroom. She wasn’t a lunch lady in the sense that she didn’t fill the tray compartments with stewed prunes and reconstituted potatoes and processed meatloaf by-product. She sat out in the lunchroom itself and it was her job to break up fights, open snack packages, and stop us from blowing up paper bags and popping them. Mostly her job, though, was to just keep us quiet. She also lived on one of the streets where I went trick-or-treating, and always had the coolest house. She had spiderwebs and decorations up, and colored lights, and she dressed up as a witch, complete with green face and fake warts. I realize now that, while she probably took the lunchroom job just because she liked kids, she was also a bona fide Halloween fanatic. One of her ways of keeping us quiet during lunch was to read stories, and I distinctly remember her reading to us from Maria Leach’s The Thing At The Foot Of The Bed.

While you’ll find Some of the same stories in One Minute Scary Stories, the versions here tend to be longer, and they range from the very funny (the title story, for one, has a hilarious and surprising ending) to pretty violent. There are two stories in which people are beheaded. Did I mention this was a children’s book? Leach doesn’t just tell the stories, though; some of them have historical background, such as her version of The Vanishing Hitchhiker, and the book also begins with an introduction to ghost stories. I’ve never forgotten that people born at midnight are supposed to be able to see ghosts.

Maybe it’s just the neighborhood where I live, but it seems like very few kids go trick-or-treating anymore. Ghosts and monsters under the bed have been replaced by admittedly real fears of child molesters and exaggerated concerns about poisoned candy. One story from the book, Big Fraid And Little Fraid, seems like a funny comment on these concerns, as a young boy who doesn’t know what fear is drives his parents crazy with worry. Finally his father plans to scare the boy, but ends up being scared himself.

This Halloween, just in case, I’ll be sitting by the door with some candy. And I’ll see if I can find my old, worn, and much-loved copy of The Thing At The Foot Of The Bed. Just in case some trick-or-treater comes by, I’ll slip it into their sack and hope they’ll appreciate it.

Oct

24

Word Of The Week: October 24th, 2009

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 24, 2009 | 1 Comment

Someone suggested ruddy to me as a Word of the Week, and it really got me thinking. I know ruddy means reddish, or maybe orange-red, like rust, and ruddy, red, and rust all start with r. Do they have a common ancestor, or is it just a strange coincidence? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ruddy comes down from the Old English rudith, and, although the origins get really complicated, all three words can be traced all the way back to the Sanskrit word rudhira, which means ‘red’.

What I also thought of, though was, how the English will sometimes use the word ruddy almost like a swear word, saying “ruddy weather” when it’s raining and cold out, for instance. I’m pretty sure it’s a replacement for bloody, that wonderful British swear word. I once asked a British guy what he thought would be the American equivalent of bloody, and he said, “Probably damn.” So bloody is a very mild, barely-PG swear word, but sometimes, out of propriety, they feel the need to replace it with ruddy. The American equivalent of ruddy, then would probably be darn. Are the British words better? Consider this: ruddy rhymes with bloody, and ruddy means red, the color of blood.

Darn doesn’t rhyme with damn, and darn also means ‘to repair’—such as darning socks, while damn means ‘to condemn’. In fact damn and condemn come from the same root word, while darn is from somewhere else.

Ruddy swear words.

Oct

23

A Game Of Pool.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Every college campus should have a game room, and every game room should have at least two pool tables. The reason is simple: playing any game of pool teaches important lessons in physics, geometry, sportsmanship, and how to pick up strangers. It’s good stress relief. The Vanderbilt campus used to have a game room, but, before I get to that, let me say a few words about the pathetic excuse for one they’ve recently installed. Positioned right outside the Overcup Oak restaurant in the Sarratt Student Center are two pool tables with a foosball table in between. Here’s the first problem: the pool tables are in a high-traffic area where someone who’s about to make a shot will inevitably poke someone going into the restaurant. While this will be unpleasant for the person being poked, it could be disastrous for the person making the shot, especially if they’re trying to sink the eight-ball. The foosball table right in between the two pool tables just compounds this problem, since up to twenty-seven thousand people can play foosball at a time.

The second problem is that there’s no control over table access. Sooner or later someone’s going to think they need an eight-ball to decorate their room and that’s going to make the game unplayable. This will probably be even more likely if some bonehead decides to post something to his blog about the new pool tables.

Several years ago Vanderbilt had a real game room in the same Sarratt Student Center. It had pool tables, video games, and pinball machines. Like most campus pool halls you had to hand over your ID to get a set of balls which you could then take to a table. When you were done playing you’d get your ID back and you’d be charged a small fee for the time. Due to poor planning on the part of administrators the game room was closed on the weekends–the time when it was most needed. When the student center was renovated the game room was eliminated. The two pinball machines were briefly moved to the Overcup Oak restaurant where I (being a pinball addict) would go and play them two or three or twelve times a week. Every time I went there’d be the same three guys clustered around one machine, all of them playing so well I’m pretty sure they put in only one quarter and won free games for the rest of the day. One day I went to play pinball and only one of the guys was there. We nodded at each other as I put my quarter in, then, before I pulled the plunger, I asked, “Where are the other Lone Gunmen?” He simply said, “Class.”

The pinball machines disappeared at the end of the semester.

Going even further back, the college I went to had the perfect pool room, in the basement of the student union building. It had industrial green tile floors and white walls. It was called Tom’s Pool Hall, because it was run by a man named Tom, who’d known every pool player who ever lived personally and who I’m pretty sure was old enough to have been around when the game was first invented. Tom really was a great guy who always had a funny story to tell. One day he saw me eating a bacon cheeseburger and he told me about a friend of his who was so unhealthy the doctor gave him only six months to live. The friend turned his diet around completely, ate healthy foods and exercised daily. “Would you believe,” Tom said, looking at me over his half-moon spectacles, “that son of a gun managed to live seven months?” When he learned I was from Nashville he started reserving a particularly nice antique pool table, which he called “the Minnesota Fats special” for me.

I was at work the day an old friend I played pool with sent me a message that said simply, “We have lost Tom.” I’m sorry to say I never knew Tom’s last name, I never knew whether he had any family, or even what his life story was. I joke about his age but the truth is he must have seen some extraordinary changes. He was well past retirement age when I met him, but I get the impression that running a pool hall gave light and joy to what might otherwise have been a very lonely life. And now, seeing that miserable excuse for a game room that’s been installed on the Vanderbilt campus, I think how what this place really needs is its own Tom’s Pool Hall, even though Tom himself was one of a kind.


Next Page »