Rub-A-Dub Style

I'll confess that my intentions in your regard are not what you'd call honorable
That the ache that I feel points to a rather earthy origin
Pores, skin, flesh and ultimately sweat are what I envision
In the moment, you can bring the laughter, I'll make sure to bring the heat
We can go Dutch, rub-a-dub style, you do know what that means

The highlights, we'll never forget,
And even a mundane touch will be remarkable
Stay with me, whatever fits the bill,
I'll lay all my cards on the table
These words may be intense but are a mere testament to my ambitions
It's about the great longing, rub-a-dub style, you know what I mean

Nights exchanging whispers and then screams of passion
Surprising ourselves and watching each other's reactions
But, first things first, can I hold your hand?
Let me not get ahead of myself, may I have this dance?
Let's make memories rub-a-dub style, know what I mean?

Rub-A-Dub Style, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note, I favor a direct approach in accordance with the style. 25 odd spins on the rub-a-dub notion starting of course with Johnny Osbourne's One More Rub-A-Dub and the great Dennis Brown's Rub-A-Dub all the time. (spotify version)

File under: love, humour, language, seduction, attention, hubris, flirtation, toasting, culture, observation, perception, male gaze, toli, poetry

Writing log. June 7, 2022

I Daresay

I daresay I love this phrase
I daresay I love your face

I daresay we just met, but I'm canceling all my meetings, I'm delirious
I daresay not just meetings, but all prior engagements, I'm that serious

I daresay I feel myself drawn to you
I daresay I could build a whole life with you

I daresay I hope I'm not overstepping the bounds
I daresay I think you're bound, in short order, to come around

I daresay, stop it, you're making me blush
I daresay this has all the makings of a schoolboy crush

I daresay I'm enjoying this conversation
I daresay I've fallen for your brand of seduction

I daresay you disarm me, I like your smile
I daresay, for you, I would run for more than a few miles

I daresay you move me to excess
I daresay I'd expect nothing less

I daresay you're beautiful and carry yourself with grace
I daresay your voice beholds a wondrous sense of time and space

I daresay I'm losing myself in the contours of your brain
I daresay to lose this heaven would be no end of pain

I daresay I feel like I'm making progress
I daresay I'm momentarily speechless

I daresay this is some kind of flirtation
I daresay I see you moving in my direction

I daresay I think we should dance
I daresay I deserve one more chance

I daresay this is the start of a romance
I daresay I'll pay for soul insurance

I daresay you're making me bring out raps from the old village
I daresay words cannot describe you on this blank page

I daresay love is for suckers like me and you, to quote the soul song
I daresay I've found my comfort suite, a taste of paradise, right in your arms

I daresay meeting you has been the best thing in my life, I can't quite believe my luck
I daresay I made you giggle. Am I going overboard? I'm hopeless. Hyperbole much?

I daresay we're a match made in heaven
I daresay I like where this is heading

I daresay we fit like a glove
I daresay I think I'm in love

Flirt, a playlist

An effusive soundtrack for this flirtation. (spotify version)

• Flirt by Cameo
• Come Close by Common & Mary J. Blige
• Like To Get To Know You Well by Howard Jones
• Wanna Get With You by Guy
• Hot Thing by Prince
• Anything (To Get Your Attention) by Van Hunt
• Love Conversation by José James
• I Think I Love You by Dwele
• Playa Playa by D'Angelo
• Love Is For Suckers (Like Me And You) by Full Force
• I'm in Love by Omar
• N.e.thing2getura10chin by Van Hunt

See previously: Touch, Teenage Love and Janet and the Importance of Bubblegum

I daresay the above could work as some kind of Valentine, Dear Reader
I daresay some of these lines might make her fall hook, line and sinker

File under: love, whimsy, humour, language, sensory, seduction, attention, hubris, flirtation, culture, observation, perception, huhudious, poetry, male gaze, toasting, appreciation, Comfort Suite, toli

Writing log: May 8, 2021

Interstitial

The little glass fondleslabs
Were not the first to rob us of the interstices
But they were, truth be told,
Leaps and bounds, the most effective

While you waited in line, it was all too tempting
To whip it out of your pocket and, into its warm glow, plunge in
Better, during the commute, to plug in the headphones and listen
To scan the headlines or pursue whatever was the latest distraction

Versatile too, the mobile package, if charged,
Could supply essentially unlimited attractions
But this was not new, a thick broadsheet unfolded carefully
Could divert you to yesterday's news just as easily

But the convenience was the difference,
Oh so unobtrusive and frictionless,
Deployed in a single motion from one's pocket,
One handed operation supported
One click and you were transported

A paradox of modernity, no more idle chat while you wait for the bus
It's enough to make you wonder, what paradise have we lost?
And so I, for one, bemoan the loss of friction
The interstitial is on the brink of extinction

Interstitial, a playlist

As is my custom, a soundtrack for this note. (spotify version)

• Dodgin' Your Phone by Dwele
  Although ostensibly about dodging phone calls, I'll repurpose Dwele and David Banner's collaboration to be about eschewing the phone entirely, but then I'm a Luddite.
• I Don't Mind The Waiting by Omar
  Waiting Game was originally intended for this playlist but the deep cuts from the This in Not a Love Song album aren't available online. 'Tis quite the pity
• Idle Moments by Grant Green
  Any excuse to hear some Grant Green. Spread the word.
• Sitting And Waiting by Dave Barker & The Upsetters
  Lee "Scratch" Perry was on a roll
• What Am I Waiting for? by The O'Jays
  Survival is the name of the game.
• I'm still waiting by Courtney Pine
  There's a sweetness and sense of ease that runs through the Closer to Home album.

See previously

• Idleness Outlawed
• What Paradise Have We Lost?
• Waiting for Godot (Khayelitsha)

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time

File under: life, technology, attention, social, culture, phone, perception, communication, adoption, poetry, norms, whimsy, observation, covidious, Observers are worried, Social Living, toli

Writing log: May 1, 2021

Functional Defenestration

It’s almost been a Friedman unit since I published anything in this joint so, with due deference to that old standby public service pamphlet, What everyone should know about blog depression, and a head nod to Bertrand Russell's note In Praise of Idleness, here goes some throat-clearing toli.

I. Defanging Satire (or Editorial Genuflections in the Internet Age)

A highly paid editor at The New Yorker is now intervening to neuter the bite of Andy Borowitz's normally savage satire. The first injury came a few months ago with the retitling of the column and RSS feed from "The Borowitz Report" to "Satire from The Borowitz Report" as if to say “we must protect you from being a moron in a hurry”. Then the lasting, almost fatal, wound was the recent move to change the contents of the feed summary, which used to be the first few sentences of the article, to instead actively bash you over the head with a spoiler warning that each article is "a satirical report". Apparently the reader needs to be informed upfront that they are about to read a humorous article and protected from the dire possibility of being spoofed.

In other words, even for the most potent source of written content (and the New Yorker proclaims itself to have "the best writing anywhere"), it now of paramount importance to maintain its listing as a Google News "source" (and now with Facebook's Zuckerberg apparently faking concern about clickbait and fake news and the like, the audience needs to be coddled). The bean counters (and search engine optimizers) have run the numbers and, on the evidence, it is clear that telegraphing an article's intentions, and blunting its impact is worth the downside risk and what, I rather think, is grievous damage to art.

Up until a few months ago, the feed summary would have been the following (a pithy defenestrationof age-old hypocrisy)

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — The pornography industry has likely suffered permanent damage as a result of its unfortunate association with the Texas senator Ted Cruz, industry sources said on Tuesday.

It is soul-deadening to contemplate the considerable effort expended to actively sabotage noble hatchet jobs.

The only concession to art is that the editor didn't additionally prepend "Satire" to article titles as I noticed smaller publications starting to do routinely 12 or so years when Google News started being a dominant source of web traffic.

And here Dear Reader, as I wrote the foregoing sentence and began winding up to a thoroughgoing rant, I realized that I had been down this path before. Indeed I left a community (Blogcritics) back when its writing guidelines started to ask that writers explicitly tag their work and the site started messing with titles. The injunction then was that we needed to telegraph and prefix "Satire" to titles '(if you "make things up" or "bend the truth" notably to make a point, or for comedic effect)'.

Searching through the archives, I even found a cri de cœur written on the topic, Husbanding the Blogcritics Commons, a jeremiad-in-vain as it soon became a case of This Boring Headline Is Written for Google.

It is a disappointing development a decade later, that ostensibly powerful media outlets have thoroughly succumbed, even as one cannot deny their economic logic, pace Buzzfeed. And yet I remain a maximalist on the issue.

The story, I suppose, is about capitalism in the internet age. Per Jeff Hammerbacher by way of Allen Ginsberg, it is a case of "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads". Per contra, we could harken back to Slim Charles's folk wisdom from The Wire: "Game's the same, just got more fierce."

The existential question posed is how do we weigh the competing demands of popularity (as expressed by the Google News imperative) against whimsy (as expressed in satire). Sacrificing whimsy at the altar of attention is not a price worth paying, and I am yet to be convinced otherwise. Needless to say, I dissent.

II. Attention Mongering

Apropos attention, for a good decade, say right up to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and much to my consternation, a note I had hastily written On the importance of biting satire was regularly the top search result on Google about satire. It has since found its proper obscurity, but my unexpected Googlejuice in the interim meant that the occasional student writing a term paper on “why satire matters”, “significance of satire”, “importance of satire” etc. would start mining this blog.

The early web was a great equalizer, one in which my rants occasionally trumped the combined insights of Jonathan Swift, Will Self and the like, hell even the encyclopedic Wikipedia was lagging in the Anglophone internet. Even as Jon Stewart and company started a revival of the satiric tradition in America, the clicks kept coming my way.

I don't know if I ultimately managed to convince 15 readers of the paramount importance of savage satire as opposed to the milder form that Americans favor, but I feel my ultimate insight is worth restating:

I like my satire savage. It should be vicious, biting and deeply heartfelt. The targets should feel a sharp wound. The whimsical and comic artefacts of the best satirists are side-benefits; their purpose is really to serve as social barometers and canaries in the mineshafts of our communities.

III. On Satire

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that that so few are offended with it. But, if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent.

— Jonathan Swift - The Battle of the Books

Satire is an art form that thrives best on a certain instability and tension in its creator. The satirist is always holding him or herself between two poles of great attraction. On the one side there is the flight into outright cynicism, anomie and amorality; on the other there is the equal and countervailing pressure towards objective truth, religion and morality.

— Will Self - Junk Mail

[Will] Self sees himself paradoxically both as a moral satirist and as a social rebel who is more interested in shocking his middle-class readers than in reforming them. "What excites me," he has said, "is to disturb the reader's fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable"

— Gillian Glover, as quoted in Brian Finney's The Sweet Smell of Excess: Will Self’s Fiction, Bataille and Transgression.

Of all the gifts of the pen perhaps the most fraught with danger is that which resolves itself into satire. It is indeed difficult to distinguish between cynicism and satire, perhaps the former is born of disappointment perhaps the latter is born of humour. Let it remain so and it cannot be called debased, let it become cold and let it die.

— Patrick Braybrooke writing on Hilaire Belloc as Essayist in Some Thoughts On Hilaire Belloc

Instability fundamentally disturbs markets which is why even the threat of boycotts so unmans even the most cynical modern corporations. The reverse of the coin however is that whimsy, that most valuable human concern, and its close counterpart satire thrive as disturbances to the mundanity of life. Reconciling whimsy in all its messiness to the demands of hard-nosed capitalism remains a struggle and yet struggle we must. For better or worse, we must humanize capitalism.

IV. Orphaned Thoughts

I once spent forty minutes on a subway sitting opposite a group of engineers and salespeople that worked at Functional Fenestration. They were attending a conference in Oakland about window hardware and automation, of all things. I was fascinated with their technical argot, the intricacies of the actuators, track and carriage systems and door automation that they were discussing. I marveled at the engineering arcana, and the fact that the windows and doors that we take for granted could have such complexity. Their deconstruction of the merits of some of their competitor's offerings and their strategizing about how to market the new feature of whatever widget they had just come up with (a slide handler if I remember correctly) drew me in. The intensity of the back and forth between the marketers and the technical folks reminded me of a comedy of manners of sorts, office politics writ large. Hypnotized as I was by the language and the context, I immediately imagined a novel or short story, something in the vein of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and the title came unbidden, Functional Defenestration.

Most ideas are destined to be half-formed and ultimately, I never got beyond the few pages scribbled in my Moleskine, a meditation about a man unmoored by capitalism. The first sentence remains:

Man, it was hard to compete against those guys at Functional Fenestration, they were intense.

Run with it.

Soundtrack for this note

A playlist for those tilting at windmills.

• The Windmills of your Mind by Abbey Lincoln
  My favourite version
• The Windmills of your Mind by Dizzie Gillespie
  Latter day Dizzie was still looking at new standards
• The Windmills of your Mind by Barbara Lewis
  sampled by DJ Premier for Gangstarr's The Militia
• The Windmills of your Mind by Noel Harrison

File under: Small Things, web, attention, capitalism, values, commerce, satire, commons, communities, culture, observation, groups, hustle, marketing, media, rant, whimsy, perception, Dark Matter, Observers are worried, toli

Dilemmas

The following case study came unbidden, and thoroughly disrupted my carefully arranged plans. I tend to accept these twists of fate these days. Thus I give you a diversion that I nominate as Part 10 of the Things Fall Apart series, another entry that falls under the banner of Social Living. Do let me know if it fits the bill.

An Examination Question

Date: Saturday June 10, 2006
Time: 8:55 am EST

Problem Statement

You are manager of Toli inc., a small but growing concern. The following situation presents itself to you. Discuss how you would resolve the various competing concerns. Provide enough detail to satisfy the reporting requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley act in light of the corporate history of Enron and recent judicial verdicts.

Constraints

Hunger: You haven't had any breakfast although you woke up at 6 am on the dot as is your custom this time of the year. The reason for the delayed breakfast. Well...

Dying computer: Your desktop computer has been giving you fits for the past 3 hours as the power supply cuts out every five minutes as a result of being subjected to one too many lights out. More disaster recovery in prospect.

Laundry: There are at least 3 loads of laundry that need to be washed if you want to have something to wear this evening beyond tracksuits.

World Cup: the England vrs Paraguay match starts at 9am. 5 minutes.

French Open: the women's final starts at 9am. Or has it started already? Henin-Hardenne against Kuznetsova.

Day job: Need to check in the code that you promised the team this week. You want to be the Karl Malone of Lotus: "The Mail Man, I deliver". Prospects are dim.

Marriage: Desire for quality time with The Wife. 'Nuff said.

Groceries: Probably a good idea to do. See also: marriage.

Family: The mother-in-law is in town. You should see her sometime today. Also: need to do weekly phone calls to Ghana and all the cousins and friends. You remember that 8 members of the family are due to head to Germany today to support the Ghana team. You need to find out whether they got visas. Basically, catch up with people, talk football.

House: A mess. See also: mother-in-law.

Reading: you normally curl up with a book or three on weekends.

Futures: The Great Move West beckons, you have a month or so to finalize on the moving company, pack your apartment, and purge your possessions. Would be good to get a head start. See also: house and marriage.

Bills: The usual suspects need to addressed. Corollary: day job.

Preliminary Solution

Prioritize: football, laundry, house, mother-in-law, bills, reading, The Wife, day job, hunger (you'll work the rest out later).

Risks: marriage (justification: "in good times and bad"), day job (justification: well it is Saturday), tennis (life is like a box of chocolates), groceries (whatever), The Move (next week).

You're an engineer but technology can only help so much... You could use a Tivo, but even if you had the prescience to have bought one, it would only be good for pausing if you have to run out for a minute. With an event like the World Cup, you can hear the screams of people in nearby houses and in your building. Your upstairs neighbour, like you, is living every moment of the matches and your ceiling felt every half chance yesterday. Unlike that guy at the office who got his Tivo installed on Monday, you have procrastinated. You don't even have VHS tapes to record the games on your old vcr. Also your old TV doesn't have split screens. In any case, you don't like switching during football matches. Well maybe rolandgarros.com, there's an idea: laptop deals with tennis and day job in one stroke...

The immigrant workers outside your window have a radio blaring as they work, so they too are in the mix.

The Set-Up

1. The TV situation

Yesterday you started looking into the furniture business and adjusted the TV stand so that the angle is more amenable for long term viewing. Final is July 9th.

Within reach are two of The Wife's travel neck pillow things. They might come in handy since you are using your 10 year old bachelor futon: furniture from hell and source of chronic back pain and worse. Resolve: Burn it during The Move.

You have six pillows to fashion the futon into some semblance of comfort.

Remote control for switching back and forth with tennis. Check.

Sleep cloth, Dutch wax. Check. Good Ghana boy.

New cell phone. Check. No longer a high-tech Luddite.

Cordless phone for landline. Oops. Need to recharge it. Head to study.

Broom. Within sight.

2. The Laptop Configuration

You don't like to use laptop keyboards for extended periods, you normally use a full-sized keyboard and monitor on your desk in the study. This situation however calls for a laptop intervention.

You borrow The Wife's Cool Pad to prevent the scorching of the family jewels. The wireless access is all set... You decide you need to order one of your own pads. You open up a tab in the browser, search for "Cool Pad" at Amazon... open up another tab for Froogle "laptop accessories pad", another one for PriceScan

You get up to grab the laptop power cord from your study, you don't want to run on battery today.

3. Reading Material

1 copy of Friday's New York Times. You only buy the hard copy on Fridays and Sundays and don't have home delivery, it forces you to go to the convenience store to commiserate with that Persian guy about Dubya bombing his hometown two weeks before the upcoming November elections. Jesus wept. You bought said copy during the hour between games yesterday but have only read the front page... Remaining: the arts section, Krugman and that whole Zarqawi thing...

Kwasi Wiredu - Cultural Universals and Particulars, An African Perspective. Some philosophical reading for the theme for your Social Living series.

Madison Smartt Bell - The Stone that the Builder Refused. You've been carrying this novel around for two weeks and it's getting great. Haiti. Toussaint L'Ouverture. Napoleon. Revolution! Things fall apart.

All set for World Cup.

9:02am. Laundry. Quarters. Quick: downstairs. 5 minutes to go.

The Match

9:06am. Couch. Remote. TV. Okay.

American TV channels don't show the build up of the games unless the US is playing, the broadcasts start on the hour so you only get 7 minutes of pre-game commentary. There's barely enough time for analysis and you don't get to hear the national anthems unless the US is playing... And then there's the fact that if it's on ESPN there's that annoying ticker taking up the bottom of the screen. They are literally missing the big picture... Univision of course delivers on the comprehensive coverage but their image quality is worse and your Spanish? Well... ¿Se Habla Español? Well the game's on ABC today and they do full screen, so you'll try the English language commentary.

Sometimes you do want to hear the national anthems that the crowds sing, watch the players pretend to know the words, and soak in the tribal atmosphere. You've missed that today. Most Americans won't know what they are missing. Their country is becoming the Third World in the globalization sweepstakes, and some even seem proud about it... Well hopefully their team will do well in Germany and the underground football nation that I know lurks might manifest itself. Of course, I hope that Ghana will beat them handily, we need a little soul uplift.

Game on. Psyched.

Hmmm... the Paraguayan goalkeeper sustains an injury and has to leave the game.

The American commentator notes, "this is the second fastest substitution of a goalkeeper in World Cup history".

What the hell? You yell at the screen, "What does that have to do with the price of potatoes? This isn't baseball, football isn't a game of statistics."

Well anyway, experiment over. You promptly switch to Univision, they must be talking about things that matter. Anyway you'll need to know Spanish in Mexico, I mean California. (Justification: The Move).

It's a good game, England are looking great. Joe Cole terrorizing everyone, John Terry, Frank Lampard and Becks: the Axis of Solidity. Steven Gerrard, mon dieu. Peter Crouch: the hardest working man in the business... The whole team is shining and on the basis of this start, they could beat anyone. Meanwhile laptop on. Connect to Big Blue network, download latest build. Check rolandgarros.com.

Paraguay is keeping it close. Free kick. Beckham bends it...

"Gol! Gol! Gooooooooool".

Excitable announcer. Another one: "Goooooool".

Loud thumping overhead. A few shouts from neighbour. You shout. "Gooooooooooool".

Workers cheer from outside, must be Boston Irish or something.

"Here we go, here we go, here we go..."

Sounds of Wife stirring in bedroom...

"Gol! Gol! Gol!... Bravo. Goooool... Impressionante... Bravo... Gol... Mundialiasta... La pelota... Gol!..."

Remote. French Open briefly. Hmmm... Back to football. Start thinking about your glory days.

Laptop down. Pick up newspaper. Put down newspaper, match is too exciting.

Half time. Mexican adverts come on, skimpy dresses, rhumba dancing, eye-candy. Hmmm, you really need to learn Spanish... Still, remote: switch channel to French Open. Henin-Hardenne ahead. Whatever. Come on Kuznetwhatever. New York Times, now on page 4.

Oh! Laundry. Time to change the loads. Run downstairs.

Back upstairs. Hmmm. Hunger, food. Let's see...

Wife is up and about in the kitchen and looking grim... She's having breakfast but with that butter knife in hand, you need to tread carefully, you might get the macho treatment.

You try small talk and start muttering something lighthearted about the World Cup, widowhood and dilemmas... and begin to explain the various things on your plate, and talk about the match so far.

"You should eat", she says.

Good idea. More small talk... The food preparation business is not going too well, you turned on the kettle for the tea, but there was a noise on the TV, so you run there. False alarm, excitable commentator. You head back to pick up the toast. The broom is in your other hand. Start sweeping. Meanwhile more banter about glory days long gone...

You hear: "You're all over the place. You can't go on like this... not a bachelor anymore... A mess..." You nod your head and reach for the butter knife. Fridge. Marmalade. Milk.

The Wife is off in a huff (see also: evil eye). She comes back (avoids your eyes), grabs her laptop and heads for the bedroom.

Yesterday was your boycott day, it seems she's taken your message to heart and is boycotting you today.

Whatever. Justification: The Shankly Code (Shankly, Bill)

"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I'm very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that."

Second half is starting. There's the day job business. Food, laptop, cushions. Remote. Check French Open briefly. Switch. Watch.

10 minutes later, she shouts your name....

"What's up?", you yell between munches.

"I sent you an email".

Uh-oh. A deft multi-tasking effort now takes place.

• You put down the slice of buttered toast and marmalade and the bowl of Frosties (well Frosted Flakes in the US; the same Tony the Tiger, they're great!)
• You turn to the laptop, note that the build has long since finished downloading, start the install.
• Switch to Firefox and open up a new tab.
• You note that Peter Crouch just got a yellow card... Damn... England are looking like the most interesting team in the World Cup but yellow cards might be their downfall. Gerrard and now Crouch?
• You click on the Gmail icon in the browser toolbar.

You take a guess on the title of the email that should have shown up in your inbox:

Ultimatum.

Once again The Wife proves her fortitude and you read

From: The Wife
To: Koranteng@Toli

Subject: Fwd: The World Cup at the Enormous Room

Maybe you can see the match with some friends... Maybe I can meet their widows.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Soul Africa Bulletin
Subject: The World Cup at the Enormous Room
To: Boston Crew

Greetings,

The Enormous Room is hosting live Telecasts of the 2006 World Cup every day for the month of June. The 12 pm and 3pm games will be shown live. The 9am games will be recorded and played after the 3pm games. The bar will be open, but the kitchen will not open until 5:30pm. Feel free to bring some lunch.

see you there.

You smile. Great idea, the Africans in Boston are rallying... Commerce mixed with community. You could do that tomorrow and for the rest of the month, you vaguely hope they have Wi-fi so you could perch there during the work day. The World Cup is a 9 to 5 occupation for a month every four years, you wish you could get paid for it. Still there's no time today.

You fiddle around, back and forth between the Bloglines and delicious tabs, copying and pasting links and titles of things you remember reading yesterday.

You compose the reply in Gmail and hit the send button

From: Koranteng@toli
To: The Wife (Disgruntled and long-suffering)
Subject: Widowhood

Great idea...

See also from my internet friend Noel and his wife Elissa.

Avoiding World Cup Widowhood

Avoiding World Cup Widowhood -- a Guide for the Uninitiated (pdf)

Close game so far.

Cheers.

Back to the game... Paraguay getting close. What gives with England?

Day job: not much progress. New York Times: nope, too tense.

The game ends, England wins... A Google search about your nagging concern "World Cup 2006 yellow card policy first round", nothing obvious.

Ah yes, remote; you switch to the French Open... Henin-Hardenne wins the last point and throws her hands in the air 6-4, 6-4. She deserves it although you prefer Kuznetsova. Better luck next time.

What do you do next?

You head into bedroom to face recriminations.

They are blistering as expected... "In good times and bad". You're in a good mood so you continue with the small talk: lots of things that you're juggling today, talk about the match.

It's not working... Whatever. More football banter... Still not working... more football banter, reminisce about distant glories....

But then she softens for a moment at your evident enthusiasm and asks:

"When is the next match?"
"I don't know, I have to check."
"12pm".

One hour to go before the next match...

Arrggh! You forgot the laundry. You turn. Vague thought: you can't do the groceries in that time... after the next match maybe.

You gather up the towels and such for the next load... You would have washed the sheets too but you don't fancy your chances of survival if you try to remove them while The Wife is lying in them...

You rush down to get to the laundry before that other desperado you met at half-time gets there (you recognized the type, he's also doing laundry and watching the game).

Made it... Arggh! You don't have enough quarters... remember that inflation calypso you were singing six months ago... prescience huh?

You run back up to get some quarters, you almost trip on the narrow stairs.

You steady yourself... there's no need to rush, nice and slow. Quarters. Back down the stairs.

You nod your head at the guy who arrives as you put the quarters in...

"Good game."
"Yeah, England might well win the whole thing."
"Those yellow cards though. Do they carry over?"
"I don't think so. Google it."
"Will do. Again."

You start humming Jerusalem as you walk slowly back up the stairs, it's been on your mind recently

And did those feet in ancient times
Walk upon England's mountains green

You break out in full song as you open the door to the apartment.

"..pleasant pastures seen..."

Hold on, the Belgian national anthem is playing on the TV, the trophy is being awarded.

You settle down on the sofa and take up the cool pad and the laptop

".. builded Jerusalem..."

Kuznetsova is praising Henin-Hardenne. Justine looks as cool as Belgian beer and chips.

In England’s green and pleasant Land.

End of hymn. You need some more music... but the remote for the Rotel amplifier is out of reach, and the universal remote that you have doesn't control said Rotel amplifier, they said it was universal.

That Rotel remote is the worst remote you've ever had the misfortune to use, you remember that you were going to blog about its design flaws at some point. Laptop, you open up Notetab, open toli-ideas.txt and write this nugget down. Later.

So you do the next best thing, you start to sing the next hymm in the Boycott Hymnal: To Hunt the Wren

How will you kill him?
With sticks and stones

You have 54 minutes before the next game: Trinidad and Tobago against Sweden... Now you're talking, The T & Ts are the Dream Team in the World Cup, there's a shortage of Trinidad T-shirts. Like the Ghanaians, Togolese, Angolans and Ivoriens, they are in it for the first time...

Oh yes order the cool pad, it worked fine. Lets see... Where's that credit card?

Portugal will be playing Angola somewhere near the town of Marburg. You take pride in that you see things that others can't. You hum along:

Hatchets and cleavers
Honouring his bones

You decide to do the dishes. Ah yes, the kitchen. Then sweep. Then you'll run to the convenience store across the street to get some blank VHS tapes talk with the guy about his relatives in Tehran and their preparations.

The question is what do you do when you come back?

You've just read the answer.

See also Ecstasy

File under: life, whimsy, Small Things, football, world cup, tradeoffs, dilemma, decisions, obsession, fever, attention, A.D.D., community, relationships, modernity, multi-tasking, juggling, humour, internet, web, conversation, fun, soccer, organization, preparation, observation, funny, Things Fall Apart, Thought Process, toli Risks: Day job, perception. Next: Ghana vrs USA

Husbanding the Blogcritics Commons

A open note to those who run the Blogcritics community.

First a question: what is wrong with these headlines?

Satire: Partition - A New Solution For Iraq

Satire: Attack of the Killer Immigrants

Satire: How to Write Good

Satire: No Mexicans, Get Congress On The Job!

Satire: Take Cover, There's a Kennedy at the Wheel!

In your mad rush to "professionalize" the Blogcritics community and "drive traffic" to the site, you are losing the plot.

I have been fairly inactive in the community but I have a few comments on the editorial changes that have been made in our joint.

First what's the deal with not allowing product links in the body of the text... The link is the only currency of the web. If someone goes to the effort to punctuate a point, to explain with hypertext instead of footnotes, that should be celebrated. Instead it's a matter of style. Well we have our style. It's the web style. You don't need a print style to become "an official Google News and My Yahoo! source", those folks are coming to you. Fetishizing search engine reach and arbitrage for attention in the current manner gives cause for concern. That style is not the native web style. You should know better.

Which leads me to my second point, what's the deal with the titles? Why that big Satire prefix? Even the New York Times, and that lady is all about style guides, wouldn't label Calvin Trillin's wit and wisdom as "Satire:". That goes under Opinion or Op-Art or something.

And good titles are important to be sure... it's always worth spending a few minutes getting a good title but then you spoil it all with that nasty prefix. It then becomes a case of This Boring Headline Is Written for Google or shall we say Snooze Headlines

The days of the catchy newspaper headlines full of wit and style and the occasional double entendre are fading to blah as a growing number of news outlets are bowing to the 'bots. Search-engine 'bots, that is, designed to scour online newspapers, magazines, and TV news headlines worldwide to rank and list news items for the likes of Google and Yahoo.

News organizations have been rewriting or distilling the traditional eye-catching headlines with more subdued, logical ones for software to catch. One California newspaper recently renamed some of its sections to make them easier for 'bots to find: "Real Estate" became "Homes"; "Scene" became "Lifestyles"; and the dining out section became a bland "Taste/Food." Ironically, search engines often rework their algorithms to avoid self-serving manipulation by news outlets.

I have been on a tear in recent months with lots of material that could well have featured on Blogcritics. After I'd written each piece, I'd first worry that the title I'd chosen would be changed. If I got over that threshold, I would then compose the draft and prepare to hit submit. Out of habit, I'd check the Blogcritics front page and without fail would see another one of those "Satire:" posts on the site and lose heart. To the extent that I've "lost traffic" in the interim that is a shame. But my writing is about changing the perspective and I can't buy into the primacy of traffic and the disembodiment of my writing. Thus I've been conducting a quiet boycott for the past few months.

I suppose if Jonathan Swift had submitted "A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burthen to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public", you would have jumped in to make it more palatable. I can just see the title after it passes through the Blogcritics satirical filter

Satire: Irish Babies have nutritional value and should be eaten.

Why have titles like these?

Satire: How to Become an Onion Ring Connoisseur

Satire: A Deep Man Running for President

Satire: Q & A With the Bookologist

I haven't read the above articles, but really, why mess with the onion rings or the bookologist?

In your current policy you seem to be conforming to the worst stereotypes of Americans as overly earnest people and the notion that it takes "Old World" decadence to appreciate irony and satire. That hogwash about Puritans, Salem and such. At the very least fix the labeling of satire, categories are there for that, don't telegraph your intentions. Part of the shock of the best satire, the savage satire that I love, is that there is a sting of recognition and discomfort. We don't need to be protected from such things.

I dug the notion of the Blogcritics tagline, that "sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, technology, and politics". That sounds very much like that well-known English word, toli. More broadly, I make a living worrying about community software, hence I can see the classic warning signs of community drift and not just because I am currently drifting afloat in the brackish Blogcritics tide.

The Blogcritics commons is important, it's a community full of people bursting with ideas and wielding their keyboards irreverently. We are the unwashed masses that the energy of the web has unleashed. I love engaging with editors but it strikes me that in trying to tame that horseless carriage, you might neuter it into bland conformity. Consider me part of the dark matter of said community, I'm surfacing for a brief moment to simply say "pay attention to the commons and don't lose your soul". You may claim it's editorial necessity, at the risk of being perceived as deliberately provocative, I'll say it's just the commercial imperative. It appears that it's all about gaming search engines for attention as evidenced in the breathless tomes I read in the Blogcritics mailing list, "the traffic! the traffic!" echoes of that crazy baldhead known as Kurtz. Like that sign I saw on the subway in Boston read:

Buy something, you stupid consumer.

Needless to say I dissent.

The founding mythology of the Ewes, the Ghanaian tribe, my mother's people, is that they were chafing under the reign of an overbearing chief who was restricting them in countless little ways. They aired their complaints in the normal manner in town meetings but were roundly ignored over the years. They made their preparations over months, gathered up their children and belongings, and one night they snuck out through a hole they had secretly dug in the thick walls of the town (a precursor to those walled garden things). They walked backwards so that their tracks in the dust would confuse those who were sure to follow in hot pursuit come morning. It was a long journey until they found their promised land but it was worth it. That is why they don't have chiefs any longer, of if they do tolerate one, why everyone sits on stools at the same level in village meetings.

I am not so sure that clans as a means for social organization is effective - witness the degenerate case of Somalia, but it seems to work for the Ewes. Still they sometimes look longingly at the Akans, my paternal people, with a lump in their throat at their riches and prestige - you may have heard of the Ashantis. Still, things also work in the reverse direction, some of the other tribes look at their entrepreneurial spirit and fearlessness with a touch of wistfulness at the vibrancy that has been lost. And to pursue the analogy further, better financed and more "efficient" or organized sites may garner more traffic but they have far less soul and character. I wonder if you realize the depth of fortitude in your community and how important it is to husband its evolution. From another context, this was my take:

It is in small insignificant items that the tribal instinct is articulated.

Pagerank is not the reason we contribute to Blogcritics despite what you seem to think... Being "official Google News sources" is beside the point. Our irreverent and informed voices are the point.

In any case I've ranted enough, some editor will wordsmith this piece I suppose and make it fit the "official" style guide. I hope I picked a reasonable title, husbanding the commons sounds about right to me, but feel free to prepend some byline that fits the prevailing style (Rant, Nitpick, Satire or something) or maybe this:

Satire: Tempest In Teapot About Title Terminology and Traffic Tendencies

or perhaps:

Satire: Boston Blowhard Boldly Blows Bile on Bubbly Blogcritics Behemoth

With some tongue in cheek, you can consider this note as my raised hand at the village meeting in the blog commons; I've been making my own preparations. I do like the sinister cabal idea and wouldn't want to start walking backwards. Just recently I asked myself

"Must everything be utilitarian? Is a country without whimsy worth worrying about?".

Suffice to say that I'm wondering about Blogcritics in the same vein and those carnival things are looking more attractive. I miss the whimsy in our commons. So please, less of the breathless posturing, leaderboards and such... chill a little on the traffic obsession, and above all don't mess with the satire.

This is the second part of the Boycott Day Trinity: The Son

[Update] This piece is crossposted at Blogcritics although not under the "Satire:" category that I submitted it in; it got the "Opinion" label. The saga of its publication and the discussion that it is raising has given me ample material and incentive to complete a follow-up piece, something I have been procrastinating about for over a year now. The title of said piece is as relevant now as when it was conceived: The Dark Matter of Communities. Somehow it will write itself between world cup matches and an intense day job.

File under: community, soul, commons, Blogcritics, commerce, culture, marketing, attention, web, search, seo, hustle, sad, rant, Ghana, Ewe, Africa, history, mythology, satire, groups, values, organization, behaviour, media, Dark Matter, Small Things, boycott, Things Fall Apart, toli