Weekend Update:
Agelast
The only important news, as I write toward the end of the Labor Day weekend — and how nice that it’s good news all round — is that New Orleans has declined to give an assist to the body-blowed Republican Party by succumbing to Gustav. The only succumbing that Americans are interested in at the moment occurred some time ago in the family of Alaskans by the name of Palin.
Closer to home, I was just discussing my creative output with a correspondent. In the course of this exchange, I discovered that The Alicia Letters, a work of fiction that I wrote almost fifteen years ago, has been, presumably since I posted it, illegible to all but the weirdest hackers. Thanks to “upgrades,” the font and the background were assigned the same color value. Happily, it didn’t take long to fix. Have a look. You’ll get a kick out of the archaic navigation, if nothing else.
Before my thoughts were turned to dusting off my one and only finished work of fiction, I was sulking about spam. You’ll be forgiven for having missed my shocked splutterings, a few weeks ago, about the Daily Blague setting, which I’m quite sure wasn’t my doing, that barred access to search engines. For almost an entire year, The Daily Blague was off limits to Google & al. If you searched for Daily Blague, you were taken to the MovableType site that I haven’t updated in a year. Why was that, I asked — for entirely too long.
The fool’s paradise effect was incredibly intensified when the spam began. I had had a terrible time with spam at the old blog. That’s why I gave it up, and gave up on MovableType as well. Ha ha! I thought, after the change. No spam now! For a year I lived in this delusion. But of course the reason for no spam was — no search engine access. Quel prix! Finding out why I had enjoyed a year off from spam only made the spam three times more unendurable when it began to show up. All right, six times more unendurable.
But enough about spam. Ick! There are so many nicer words. Take, for example, “gymnologize,” which, according to Ammon Shea’s new book about reading the OED, means “to dispute naked, like an Indian philosopher.” First of all, we all know that “naked” doesn’t mean “entirely unclothed,” but only “seriously underdressed,” perhaps because of the climate. The Victorians would never have used the word “naked” if it meant “nude.” Second, the idea of concocting a word out of Greek roots for the purpose of condescending to the Subcontinent — well, it’s a double play, isn’t it? Third, we’re waiting for someone in Mad Men to sigh, “Oh, honey, stop gymnologizing and get back into bed.” The men — they do gymnologize!