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Author Archives: Ben
POETS Day! The Tay Bridge Disaster
[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 5/19/21 which was a Friday. You can look it up.]
Once again we have a P.O.E.T.S. Day – Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday – so do yourself a favor and weasel your way out of the office and start the weekend when the weekend should begin: on your terms.
I’ll think of you and your clever and resourceful selves enjoying a three or four o’clock cocktail as I begin my marathon drive from Birmingham to Albuquerque with a quick diversion to Austin which will be anything but quick. I’ll be jealous of you and your freedom as I bounce my way along unevenly paved Mississippi highways, constantly under construction Louisiana bottlenecks, and the terrifying Texas roadways where they trick you by letting you drive at 75 mph but then send a jet black Mustang driven by a no nonsense cleanly shaven deputy with sharp creases on his sleeve to ticket you for going 76.
Since you get to be happy and I’m at the mercy of weather and whim and eating terrible fast food at places that thinks I’m kidding when I ask for no mustard, I’m going to do something awful to you. I’m going to give you William McGonagall.
Continue readingCommenting Right Up
I just wrote a 426 word comment on someone’s opinion post. It took me all of a few minutes and that’s while watching Bologna disappoint me again, this time against Monza which is new for me as I haven’t seen them play each other before. There was some deleting and rewriting because I’m an absurd on-the-fly editor when I get to typing but it went relatively quickly. Why the hell does it take me so damn long to write when I’m expected to?
I remember a bon voyage and thanks for all you’ve done article years ago by Jonah Goldberg on the occasion of Florence King’s retirement from regular contributor and whatever editorial duties she had. He was jovial and kind and obviously in awe of her but he did tease about the four or so hours she always took to complete a one thousand word piece. (Dammit. Monza won… Sorry. I mean “Dammit. [SPOILER] Monza won.])
Continue readingPOETS Day! William Carlos Williams
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]
I was in the shed pulling out all my POETS Day yard decorations in anticipation and I couldn’t help think but what a gosh darn special thing we got going here. I mean, golly. I know how much people hate those last few hours of work before the weekend because they make us the worst us we can be. There we are focusing on the crummy negative of being stuck in the ole grist mill when we should be pleased as punch that Henry Ford thought about us, the little guys, and invented the weekend so we can goof around with the fellas and have a few pops, go for a stroll in the park with our best girl (or guy,) or maybe take in a picture. I don’t want to be called a Holiday Harry, but that day is here again so I’ll say it: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Staying at work doesn’t do anybody any good. Show your boss how productive you’ve been this week and promise to work even harder next week. Bosses aren’t such a bad sort. Then you can walk out a few hours before the usual time, free as a bird. Maybe send him (or her) a picture of all the fun you’re having instead of sitting around the office like a gloomy Gus. If you’re up for advice I’d spend some of my bonus time in thanks to that swell holiday acronym and read some verse. You’ll be glad for it!
***
Loudon Wainwright III has a great song called TSMNWA (They Spelled My Name Wrong Again) where he sings about the frustrations of having a weird name. I can’t help hearing his voice whenever I read about or meet someone who goes by something unusual even if it’s just mildly odd: “My parents should shoulder some blame/For calling their kid a strange name.” I’m sure that William Carlos Williams wanted to have a discussion with mom and dad. “You named me William Williams?” he would ask, not without cause, though I’ve read his parents brought him up in a rigid atmosphere so maybe he passed on demanding an explanation and settled in to a lifetime of long signatures. Considering some of the anachronistic tongue-stumbler family surnames that wind up some unsuspecting kids’ middle names, that “Carlos” to break things up must have seemed a godsend.
Continue readingMac & Cheese That’s Only Comparatively Time Consuming to Make
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]
I went to elementary school in an old mansion on the North side of Red Mountain overlooking Birmingham. It was donated to the Dominicans and the nuns converted the first two floors into classrooms and such with the third a convent dormitory. A few times a year two or three grades at a time gathered in a largish reception area bounded by the chapel, the library, and a classroom that housed the second grade for a while before swapping to house the fourth. It only had one easily coverable window so it was an ideal makeshift movie theater. The nuns set up an old reel to reel projector in back and showed us ninety-fifth run movies on a tripod mounted roll-down screen. The best seats were on the stairs.
After the movie we ran around the playground whacking each other with sticks as sword stand ins after watching Ivanhoe, arguing about who hit or missed with imaginary arrows after The Adventures of Robin Hood, and really arguing about who got to be Steve McQueen’s Captain Hilts (the coolest Cooler King ever) after The Great Escape. The movies were so old James Garner may have been the only actor who was still alive when we saw him on that tiny screen, but we didn’t know that. We were not learning and that was what mattered.
Continue readingThis Isn’t a Post About Anything. I Was Just in the Mood to Type.
Seriously. The title isn’t a clever trap to trick an unsuspecting reader into complacency and then reveal some grand truth at the end. No knowing rhetorical questions will be posed and no semi-nude pictures will be shown below the “— Read More —” break. I’m just whiling so feel free to make the most of your reading time and go read The Spare by The No Longer Tabloid Cover Corner Dweller Formerly Known as Prince Harry and then summarize it for me.
I read someone on Twitter comment that people who say they don’t like the royal family sure do know a lot about them. I didn’t think he meant Cromwell. I don’t really care about the royal family but I’m not going to back away from paying attention to what is turning out to be an extraordinarily well publicized train wreck just because I’m worried people might think I’m a fan. It’s not like a Venn diagram of people who’ve seem The Kardashians and people who’ve seen Kim Kardashian naked would be a circle. People can tell when something trashy on their peripheral is trashy enough to note. I just want to know what’s up with Harry and Megan without having to read anything longer than an eight inch blurb about what’s up with Harry and Megan and I’m certainly not going to interrupt my busy current Italian soccer/Monk/Impractical Joker’s highbrow T.V. (television) viewing with something so base as their Netflix series. A Reader’s Digest gossip post is out there and I’m going to find it and get someone to summarize it for me.
I was just sitting in front of a keyboard and typing. Should that be “I am just sitting in front of a keyboard and typing.”? Usually, I would say yes but the previous plus one paragraph demonstrates foreknowledge about what is not at the end of this post so it seems awkward to write about now when I know about later. I’m making an executive decision and announcing that I am in the here and now no matter how prescient I may seem, and boy am I going to seem prescient seven paragraphs from now.
Continue readingPOETS Day! George Gordon, Lord Byron
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]
The wheel keeps on turning and turning and turning ‘round. Life’s disturbingly predictable if you let it continue unmolested. Shake things up. Break the expected routine. It’s POETS Day again (that “again” in no way indicates that POETS Day is included in the bourgeois and repetitive pattern of events alluded to in the metaphor of “the wheel” whose crushing lack of spontaneity are anathema to fun and apple pie just because weeks are cyclical and POETS Day arrives with weekly regularity) and that means it’s your time to be a disruptor. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of that Hellespont you call a workplace before you drown. Your work is a vampire. It’s your weekend and you shouldn’t have to explain your motivation for leaving the job early to get a jump on the only time when the proper director (you) is on set. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint for a happy hour priced beverage and a mid-major game, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park and people watch, or, God forbid, go for a light jog. Do what you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.
***
“He may have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know but Mary Shelley shut herself away for a weekend and wrote Frankenstein to avoid spending time with him. ‘I’m just going to go invent the whole genre of modern science fiction rather than have a conversation with that tedious jackass womanizer.’”
– My wife
That may not be the most factual accounting.
Continue readingSpicy Pineapple Collard Greens and The Great Vowel Shift
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]
I wasn’t a very good vegetable eater as a kid. My sister was. She was evil about it. I’d be midway through the go-to opening pea deployment – a spread with a rise towards the plate edge, a scooped out crater in the middle, and a spread of green dots like a monochrome Pollock painting whisping along the curvature cunningly contrived to make it appear as there were less peas than before – as that little shrew was asking for seconds she didn’t really want. She didn’t just want to be Mom and Dad’s good little eater. She wanted to highlight that I wasn’t. A stray dog bit her once when we were playing in the woods and she had to endure a painful series of injections “just in case.” The rabies shots and the venal display she put on mugging for vegetable praise are probably unrelated. Contrary to popular usage, karma doesn’t act within the same incarnation so she won’t get hers until the next life. But she will get hers.
My oldest son claims to love veggies, but he’s got a narrow definition of them that includes French fries, pickles, and corn on the cob and excludes everything else. His younger brother will eat his brother’s list plus anything we’ve grown in the garden. It doesn’t have to be from our garden, it just has to be a variety of edible plant he’s seen come out of our garden at some point or a bell pepper, which isn’t really a vegetable but gets lumped in with them like tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and a lot of the things I immediately think of when I think of vegetables but aren’t. Both turn their noses up at the bulk of our dinner sides.
Continue readingpoets day: the e.e. cummings edition
[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 4/14/22 which was a Friday, Good Friday as a matter of fact. You can look it up.]
It’s not just P.O.E.T.S. Day, it’s Good P.O.E.T.S. day. A holy day but nonetheless a day to enjoy some clever verse and in the great Scots’ (probably) tradition connive your way out of work, find a convivial barstool before the clock strikes three, and enjoy the happy hour prices in the full glory of a Spring day.
Getting out of work early is never easy but if you are a Christian with a blasphemous streak and a true believer in the power of the confessional or cleansing prayer1, Good Friday presents a unique option. In the morning start complaining about having to skip breakfast. As the day goes on mention that you feel a headache coming on as that’s a possible side effect of fasting. Later you need to feign lightheadedness. If someone suggests you eat a candy bar or just something small to keep you going don’t just say “No.” Snap at them with a “No! Dammit!” Mood changes and irritability are side effects too.
Every once in a while, sit with your elbows on your knees and rub your eyes. Step up the irritability with a touch of fatigue and eventually someone is going to suggest that you go home. Don’t blow it at the end by hopping in your car and driving off into the nowhere near sunset. Tell everyone you’re not up to driving and call an Uber.
Continue readingI Read a Book! Kingsley Amis’s One Fat Englishman
The English Novel, 1740-1820
The open road winds down from Wilson’s farm
To neat lawns and a gilt-edged paradise
Where Pamela walks out on Darcy’s arm,
And Fanny Goodwill bobs to Fanny Price.
– Kingsley Amis
Until last summer Kingsley Amis was an author I felt I should have read. Note the “should have.” I was never possessed by an urge to actually read anything of his. I just felt like knowledge of his works was something I should have in my quiver. Lucky Jim upset all the type of people I think should be regularly upset so I finally gave in and picked it up sometime in July. I’ve read two more of his novels since along with a collection of essays on science fiction, a decent amount of poetry, and thumbed through a roguish reference book on English usage. There’s another of his novels and his collected poems on my “to read” stack. I really should have gotten around to his stuff earlier.
The reviews of One Fat Englishman fall into one of two categories: those where the reviewer says that he thought the book was okay but not nearly up to the standard set by Amis in his other novels or those where the reviewer says that he thought the book was okay but not nearly up to the standard set by Amis in his other novels until for whatever reason the reviewer picked up the book for a second reading some years after the first and realized he badly misjudged this sardonically cutting and brilliant work. I’ve read it twice in the span of a month and enjoyed it thoroughly both times so I’m only a reliable judge of literary worth half of the time. Reader beware.
Continue reading
The Columbo Game 