Tuesday, September 13, 2011

In the news

Does anybody else think this report might be the first, innocent indication of our eventual demise?

DIalects

An alert reader directed me to this, a wonderful example about the uses and abuses of language, with a very amusing core question: were they joking when they insisted that 'punani' was a "sandwich sold locally and is made of Italian bread with cheese and tomato which is heated up"? One has to admire the several conceits in the line - the notion that it is a local custom, the concession to tenuous Italian origins in Italian bread, and the culinary explanation that it is heated up, all in all displaying a lovely ignorance of panini. Comedy is a wonderful guise for innocence, through uncertainly brilliant relays of stupidity, gullibility, and distraction.

Religious Fiction Double Feature

I just emerged from the Film Forum, which was packed with men in their (to be generous) late thirties, with retreating hair lines and expanding waist lines (it was nice to stand out from the crowd for once), where I saw a double feature - Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992) and William Friedkin's Cruising (1980) - that was supposed to be showing there on September 11, 2001. I considered the arbitrary significance of that fact, and it was a touching thing to replay those films (indeed, they're replaying the series that was showing then, NYPD). It's another New York and the same New York; both films are from a different era, somehow more in contact with each other than with us now, although that might be true of any two points in the relatively recent past; but it would be hard to imagine either film being made today, and I'm not sure that's a sign of progress.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Say what?

Not having bothered to blog in a while (during which time, this blog escaped and went feral, submitting posts under its own name on bizarre astronomical and eskimo-porn web-sites; I wrangled it back this morning with the promise of cookies, and then subdued it with a benzodiazapene-spiced cracker), I had no real inclination to blog today. If I didn't have anything to say, why say it?

That was obviously not the motivating question for the syndicated cartoonists in the Sunday Newspapers, who today banded together for the first time since they met up during lunchbreak in the maths classroom, played Dungeons and Dragons, and wondered what girls were, a few dozen years ago. And that includes the girls. Anyway, they put out a collective commemoration, in which they pretty much had nothing to say, and said it en masse.