Out of the Loop

This error has gotten soooo common!

2011-08-10T00:23:00.004-08:00

Another post from the kodiakdailymirror.com Herman's Hawks and Handsaws collection

In the language of Western tonal music, a V chord at the end of a phrase makes your brain expect a I chord. This V-I sequence, called an “authentic cadence,” creates the most satisfyingly final-sounding ending possible. Consider the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a sequence of G and C chords (the V and I in the key of C) alternating eight times, just to make sure everybody really gets the point.
Other types of cadences play with the strong sense of expectation. The “deceptive cadence” creates a sense of surprise by following the V chord with a VI instead of the expected I.
The “half cadence” just cuts off at the V, ending the phrase with the unshakable feeling that something more must follow.
But where Beethoven could use that feeling to carry us into the next musical idea, people speaking and writing English have taken to misusing a little word, leaving listeners and readers hanging.
The culprit is “so,” when used as a substitute for “very,” as in this example:
“The teen vampire was so dreamy.”
This adverbial “so” needs another clause to make a complete sentence:
“The teen vampire was so dreamy that the girls swooned.”
or
“I swooned because the teen vampire was so dreamy.”
One might argue that the incomplete version belongs in the category of exclamations, like “Wow!” and “What a fluffy kitty!” These sentences share with imperatives an exemption from usual subject/predicate requirements. That whole area would make for some interesting syntax papers.
Meanwhile, I associate the incorrect usage with a style more immature than illiterate, but it has spread beyond the junior high schools.
The same internal grammar sense that gives me the “unfinished” feeling about those “so” sentences leaves me unhappy with an AP-sanctioned usage. It goes like this: The omnipotent stylebook tells us to use upper-case “Gov.” or “Sen.” before a name, as in “Gov. Sean Parnell.” But that leads to the less perspicuous usage “former Gov. Sarah Palin” or “ex-state Sen. Ben Stevens,” supported by a dedicated entry on the word “former.”
That bugs me because it applies the AP style by grouping the wrong elements. The rule should apply only to titles like “governor” or “senator” — not, I argue, to quasi-titles like “former governor.”
In formal syntax terms, “former Gov. Sarah Palin” treats “Gov. Sarah Palin” as if it is a constituent, excluding the “former.” However, any reasonable structural analysis would treat “former governor” as a constituent separate from the following name.
How say the readers? Should I defy AP and start using “former governor Sarah Palin”?
And why should my sense of what sounds wrong — as opposed to anybody else’s — have any relevance in deciding the issue? Frankly, the best reason is that I grew up in a middle-class family in Toledo, Ohio, and therefore use the most generic possible American English. It looks like this blog will keep coming back to the question of prescriptive authority for language.
Ceterum censeo “utilize” esse delendam.

Did elsewho among the studentry sneeze?

2011-07-10T22:12:00.004-08:00

Serious publications naturally adopt a conservative stance toward language choices, or diction. At the same time, language inexorably evolves, so that the Latin of Caesar’s time turns into the French, Italian, Spanish and so on of 1,000 years later.
I am fascinated by the ways change comes to different languages — and how communities consciously try to control the change. People who read Modern Greek can understand a 2,500-year-old text pretty well. The Icelandic of today differs little from the Old Norse of 1000 AD that changed to become Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. For English the break-off point comes a little before Shakespeare.
And I will come back to the Académie Française in a later blog.
It happens bit by bit. The Associated Press recently decreed that the venerable “e-mail” must now appear as “email,” and cell phones are now “cellphones.” Both demonstrate the common progress of compound nouns: first two words, then hyphenated, then one word.
I don’t particularly like “email,” but I won’t fight AP on this one.
Americans have brought several logical improvements to the language, including “plow” for “plough” and “today” for “to-day.” Phonologically, “centre” versus “center” is a toss-up.
Some reforms didn’t make it. I think it was the old Chicago Herald that tried to give us “thru” instead of “through” in a crusade to save three characters worth of ink.
Professor Strunk (pictured above) suggested one of my favorite failures. He wanted “studentry” to replace the awkward “student body,” by analogy to “faculty” and “peasantry.”
Eminently sensible, and stylistically strong, to boot.
Even more sensible would be to drop the biologically silly term “crab fishery” in favor of “crabbery.”
I don’t really think I’ll win this one, either, so here is another of my ideas for reform:
The word “elsewhere” is so tidy and useful, why not also “elsewho,” "elsewhen” and "elsewhat”? Much neater than “somebody else,” etc.
And of course, when I am king, “snaze” will become the official past tense of “sneeze.”
The complementary category consists of words and phrases that clearly do not deserve to survive. Some people call them “buzzwords,” but I say that’s one of them. This week two that have long outlived their time came over my desk. Please immediately and permanently retire “no-brainer” and “man up.” Other candidates?
Ceterum censeo “utilize” esse delendam.

Joe Miller picks pathetic path

2010-12-30T22:11:00.003-09:00

Despite his honorable Army service, Joe Miller has decided to embody the least admirable character in the naval tradition.

Miller’s post-election crusade marks him as a true “sea lawyer” — the type of sailor who uses a captious, pedantic insistence on the letter of the law to serve only himself.

The current political tragedy recalls the fall of former state Sen. Ben Stevens, who squandered his chance to inherit the mantle of his father, Alaskan of the Century Ted Stevens.

Thanks to the tea party Zeitgeist and his own energy and charisma, Miller earned a loyal following and a shot at the U.S. Senate. And he lost.

At that point he faced a choice about how to use his hard-won prominence and leadership potential. He could have launched a real political career, going back to the trenches to advance the issues he campaigned on, thus building himself a broader base of support in his own party.

Instead, he looked down from the mountain and decided the most urgent use of his energy, charisma, time and money was in service of personal pique.

Miller says his motivation is preservation of the integrity of Alaska elections. If that is so, why didn’t he denounce the people who tried to disrupt Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign by filing phony candidate papers under names designed to confuse voters choosing the write-in option?

Has Miller become an Alaskan Laurent Gbagbo? The president of Ivory Coast lost a re-election bid in November, but had himself sworn in for another term anyway. The psychology seems similar: Gbagbo claims election fraud, unwilling to acknowledge he could have lost fairly. He has chosen to impugn election monitors without evidence and invite civil war rather than man up to a schellacking.

No politician lists ego and personal ambition as platform planks. Ambitious people naturally use the language of the society and system they work in. On his way up to the Politburo, Vladimir Putin was content to spout the ideals of Communism. As president and prime minister in post-Soviet Russia, he talks as easily about his liberal democratic values while heading a regime as dictatorial as its Soviet and tsarist predecessors.

Yet we cannot fault politicians just for ambition, and it doesn’t necessarily stop them from being good and honest. As Al Gore candidly admitted while running for president, nobody seeks high office without a larger-than-normal share of ambition in their character.

Some exceptional leaders pay a heavy price for putting belief above opportunism. We cannot ask every office seeker to meet the standard of Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi or Vaclav Havel. That level of ideological integrity and heroism is not for most of us, or even most of our leaders. In this era, the willingness to serve in public office at all deserves admiration and a deep reservoir of benefit of the doubt with respect to motive.

Alas, Miller falls short even of Sarah Palin’s standard of service while out of office. Palin at least advocates an agenda based on a form of principles while advancing her own power and wealth.

Of course, sometimes sea lawyers are right, at least as far as the letter of the law goes.

But the law is only one leg of a tripod test. In legal matters we have to answer three questions: What are the facts? What is the law? What is just?

Even if Miller achieves the vindication of exposing flaws in Alaska’s election laws, his challenge fails the test of the other two questions. The evidence says the election results were fair and accurate. And throwing out the results would not serve justice.

Here it is in terms of the old Latin legal saws, “cui bono” (who benefits?) and “cui malo” (who is harmed?): Success of Miller’s election challenge quest could benefit only Miller; it would harm the plurality of voters whose intent nobody seriously questions.

The aspects of American politics most admired around the world are honest elections and the peaceful transition of power.
These are worth defending, but is that what Joe Miller would be doing if he takes his case farther?

Onboard the ship, sea lawyers lose the respect of officers and crew, ending up friendless and ineffectual. Redemption lies in picking up a mop and swabbing the deck.

Reality redivivus, or what kids really want

2010-12-26T12:36:00.006-09:00

For the ninth year in a row Merriam-Webster has ignored my nomination letters for word of the year, delivering another slap in the face to me and all the other loyal supporters of “borborygmus,” “sastrugi” and “pangolin.”

The company claims they choose the winner based not on intrinsic merit or accomplishments, but rather on how many times people looked the word up. That makes this year’s winner doubly disturbing. “Austerity” getting the nod means our primary education system must be in even worse shape than the economy.

I will not be so jejeune as to suggest a connection between a nation’s standard of public education and its long-term economic viability, but I bet the U.S. retail sector would collapse if we boycotted vendors who use scare quotes in their ads or spell “barbecue” with a q.

I can, however, suggest a better method for deriving outsized claims about the social and technological Zeitgeist from scanty linguistic data. Do not try this at home. To paraphrase Dan Coffey, I am not a real linguist. I have a master’s degree. In linguistics.

No thanks to which I landed a job as a part-time copy editor for the smallest daily newspaper in the country, and spent much of last week proofing letters to Santa Claus from local children for publication in our annual Holiday Greetings special section.

I don’t know why academia has ignored this source material, which would blow away hemlines and beards for economists and beat Facebook hollow for sociologists. For linguists, the most telling datum in the 2010 Santa letters signals a momentous convulsion in our reality on par with the widespread adoption of “acoustic piano.”

What does a redundantly named musical instrument have to do with sociolinguistics? Allow me to digress (but note I do commit to making an equal number of pushes and pops).

In semantics — the subfield of linguistics concerned with meaning in language — we refer to words as “marked” or “unmarked” for properties not essential to their main definition. To illustrate, I exhibit a riddle from an old joke book always in high demand at the Whiteford Elementary School library in the early 1970s:

A man and his son have a terrible car accident. The man dies, and medics rush his son to the hospital. In the operating room the surgeon sees the patient and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” How can this be?

Even in 1971, this riddle sucked. But apparently when the book was written, the appearance of a woman surgeon sufficed to catch most people with their stereotypes down. In linguistic terms, “surgeon” was marked for gender. The word indicated not only a human who performed medical operations, but a male (white, adult, non-disabled, Protestant, etc.) human, unless you specifically mentioned anything about race, gender, age and so on.

Words get marked and unmarked as society and technology changes. “Surgeon” used to be marked for gender and is now unmarked.

“Piano” started out unmarked for power source. From Beethoven to Tatum, the sound from a piano emerged due to direct mechanical generation. Then the unneutered housepet of sociolinguistics as who should say claimed some territory. With the invention of the electric piano, it occasionally became necessary to specify what you meant by "piano."

The important thing to note here is that “piano” went from unmarked with respect to method of sound production to marked as mechanical. If you meant electric piano, you had to say “electric piano.” Otherwise people assumed you meant the same kind Beethoven played.

At some point during the 1960s, musicians got so used to electric pianos, they stopped saying “electric” and just assumed you meant electric when you said “piano.” At that point the marking changed, and if you wanted to talk about a regular, old-fashioned piano, you had to specify, and that created a lexical gap.

Whoever thought of sticking “acoustic” on the front of “piano” to mean regular and non-electric achieved the kind of immortality I covet.

I thought “Skoldetnai” as a portmanteau of Soldatna and Kenai would prove my ticket into the neologistic big time, but it didn’t catch on with the people of the Peninsula. Then I pinned my hopes on “ambient reality,” which I coined when the rise of “virtual reality” meant we had to get more specific about where your head’s at. Then I found out cybergeeks had already adopted “RL” (for “real life”) to fill that role.

I may still have a chance here, since “RL” has gotten little traction in — savor the poetic justice — RL. Even if “ambient reality” does not ultimately triumph, I already feel somewhat vindicated. To the gatekeepers of cyberspace argot, I only pose this query: If it’s all in my head, where is my head?

Back to the Santa letters. The most striking request our freshest descendants had of the jolly sleigh driver: a “real puppy.” (I almost had to write this column about kids wanting paralytic shellfish poisoning, but the video game reviewer in the newsroom set me straight.)

So here we are. In post-"Avatar" 2010, children grow up with the default use of the word “puppy” referring to a plastic and electronic “pet,” and you have to add more words if you mean the old fashioned kind that pees on the leg of your acoustic piano, gnaws your print newspaper and guards your brick-and-mortar storefront.

In effect, living creatures are no longer marked for reality, itself now a relative concept. We stand on the brink of the final triumph of the cosmic, epistemological, ontological scare quotes. As ambient reality fades away we are all marked adult, white, Protestant men. And women, and African-Americans, and Sikhs, and pangolins …

Me and acoustic puppy Calypso

The Ruble Stops Here

2009-09-12T13:20:00.006-08:00

After three weeks in Russia, I have to admit I still don’t understand the Russians — but then, why should I start with them?
Still, that brief visit, during which I hardly left one little neighborhood of Kaliningrad, permits me to pass judgment. For you see, Kaliningrad is the westernmost piece of Russia, separated from the rest of the nation by the Baltic States. Since Alaska, where I live, is also a non-contiguous, westernmost territory, and I told people in Russia that I am a completely typical American, I feel obliged to assume that anything I concluded about Kaliningrad is valid for the rest of the world’s largest country and its hundreds of ethnicities and regions.
Not that I reached any profound conclusions. The Russians are as contradictory a compilation of virtues and vices as any other people.
Chief among the former I judge their enthusiasm for gardening and their tolerance for cats. Among the more conspicuous of the latter are rampant alcoholism and the utter lack of a free press. At least Putin doesn’t support the alcoholism.
But now a little history, starring the Dom Sovyetov, a Kaliningrad landmark widely known as “the ugliest building on Russian soil.”
The city of Kaliningrad sits on the Baltic Sea, less than 50 miles east of Gdansk, Poland. Like Gdansk, it was once German territory, part of East Prussia. For seven centuries the busy port, famous for the region’s amber mines, was called Konigsberg. And for many of those centuries, a spectacular cathedral and castle complex dominated the central cityscape, a gem of medieval European architecture.
Near the end of World War II, the Royal Air Force bombed Konigsberg, wiping out the central city and destroying the castle. The strategic value of the attack is debatable, but the people who live there now still hold a grudge, even though Konigsberg was an enemy city at the time.
After the war, the Soviet Union annexed the territory, ejected most of the Germans, and renamed it after one of Stalin’s yes-men who never went near the place. While the Soviets turned the rest of the city into a workers’ paradise over the following decades, the castle remained a pile of rubble, with one dramatic wall fragment teetering over the remains like the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin. That is, until 1967, when some party hack decided to make his bones by tearing down this last trace of bourgeois excess.
But what a great spot to demonstrate Soviet progress! After 20 years of design and development, construction began on the massive Dom Sovyetov, intended as a modern home for the national, regional and city administration of Kaliningrad. After another few years, construction stopped on the massive Dom Sovyetov as the even more massive Soviet Union went broke and dissolved into its pre-war constituents, except for Kaliningrad, which stayed Russian.
So for the next 15 years, a giant, unfinished, gray eyesore blighted what should have been prime commercial real estate in the center of a newly capitalist downtown. Then came 2005, and the visit of President Vladimir Putin to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city. What to do, what to do?
I can’t decide whether the next part harkens more to the Soviet tradition of the Potemkin Village, or further back, to the Gogolian “Inspector-General” tradition of tsarist oxymoron. Or maybe it’s just the latest manifestation of a timeless Russian approach to civic administration.
In any case, officialdom decided to feed more funds into the dingy Dom, but only to the extent of some thousands of gallons of light blue paint and a few acres of glass panes to cover all the window holes.
And so it stands today — massive, empty and unusable, casting its depressing shadow into the trench where a few archaeologists scratch for treasures of the medieval town and castle. Meanwhile, a German consultant concluded the cheapest and safest thing to do now is tear down the whole thing and let future archaeologists enjoy the rubble.
I grew up thinking of Central Europe as a zone full of backwards, impoverished victims of communist oppression, and found my recent visits to Poland and the Czech Republic a little jarring because they are now clearly more modern and prosperous than where I live. So I indulge a perverse schadenfreude from the story of the Dom Sovyetov and can still feel a little superior knowing that at least Russia has held true to dictatorship and public mismanagement. The only remaining question is when Putin will end the charade and declare himself tsar.
In America, nothing remotely like that comedy of goof-ups could ever happen. We would never, for example, disrupt traffic in Boston for eight years and go $20 billion over budget on a project with such shoddy materials that a piece of new tunnel collapses and kills a motorist. In America, a city like Denver would not build a new airport ($3.1 billion over budget) with a state-of-the-art automated luggage system that breaks down the first day and can’t be repaired because the access tunnels were taken out of the design as a cost-cutting move. Equally impossible would be getting most of the way through construction of an 8,000-foot highway bridge over the Saginaw River in Michigan and finding that the two halves miss each other by six feet ($48 million over budget).
So I’m back in the USA, and don’t I know how lucky I am, boy. I intend to enjoy it as long as possible — probably until 2012, when Obama and Romney split the rational human vote and throw the election to Palin on her Real American Party ticket. Then, While Vice President Limbaugh pats down the dirt on the grave of our own free press, I will humbly recall the words of another, somewhat more famous Konigsberg.
“In six months, we’ll be stealing Erno’s nose.”

Second Annual Esperanto Club Report

2009-08-03T00:53:00.008-08:00

GDANSK, Poland -- The 94th Universala Kongreso de Esperanto ended Saturday in Bialystok, in eastern Poland, and while I alone attended from Alaska, that still qualifies our state as among the proportionally best represented regions of the world.

Bialystok is the hometown of Ludwig Zamenhof, the eye doctor who invented Esperanto in 1887. The honor of hosting the 2009 conference commemorates the 150th anniversary of his birth. While growing up in the multiethnic city during the 1860s and '70s, the studious Jewish boy heard a veritable tumult -- a Gemisch, a melange, a gobbledy-gook, if you will -- of languages around him, as his fellow citizens spoke Polish, Russian, Yiddish, German, Lithuanian and Byelorussian. Zamenhof's ingenious solution to the problem of six languages competing for attention in the same space? Invent a seventh.

On the other hand, Esperanto is easy to learn, culturally and politically neutral and as capable as any other language of expressing the range of human experience. When it comes to popularization, that counts as three strikes against.

According to the United Nations, 2009 is also the International Year of Reconciliation. Unfortunate timing -- Poland's No. 1 brewery, Tyskie, also declared 2009 the International Year of Beer, thus stealing the U.N.'s thunder. Participants at the Esperanto Congress made every effort to honor both celebrations.

The declared theme of the congress was a modern re-evaluation of Zamenhof's ideas about mutual understanding and toleration, goals he hoped to further with his new language. In case you wondered, the 1,860 people who showed up decided we're still for that stuff.

But as impressive as that attendance number is, it doesn't quite live up to the 'universal' part of the congress title. Indeed, as far as I could tell, this year's event suffered from the same problem as the previous 93, with not a single representatives from off-planet, let alone outside the Solar System. Oh, well.

Still, on the principle that we will welcome any aliens who do make the trip, the 2010 congress in Havana will also be called 'universal'. In this respect we are more up-front than the sponsors of the Miss Universe Pageant, who don't even send invitations to Mars or Venus, in an obvious move to keep the home-planet advantage. I can hardly wait till a sentient green cloud from Alpha Centauri calls their bluff, sings all four solo parts from the "Ode to Joy," then blows away Miss Brazil in the swimsuit competition.

Within our movement, some admit to doubt about what we call the "final victory," the day when everybody in the world uses Esperanto as a second language. These Esperantists just make the most of the movement's own microculture of networking, literature, hobby clubs and wearing little green star pins on our lapels.

I suppose I'm in that group, but I do what I can for diffusion. During the congress, I took the intermediate Esperanto competency certification exam endorsed by the European Commission, and therefore recognized in every country of the world except the United States. But I figure it all works out, because even where they do recognize it, it doesn't entitle you to anything.

Meanwhile, I've read some good books, and I have connections good for free lodging all over the world. The Esperanto movement even issued its own currency, the 'stelo', or star, in 1959. I have examples of coins in the 1, 5, 10 and 25 steloj denominations in uncirculated condition -- as are all stelo coins. At the current rate, one stelo can be exchanged for another stelo.

Esperanto youth culture appears particularly vigorous, in a wholesome, make friends around the world and sing Pete Seegery stuff in translation kind of way. Kids who learn Esperanto also have an easier time learning other languages later (true fact in real world).

Indeed, my informal census in Bialystock reinforces observations I made last year at the Pan-American Esperanto Conference in Montreal. It looks like esperantists are either in their teens or retired. OK, maybe people of working age just had to work all week.

I credit the return to our traditional recruitment method for the resurgence among the younger set. Apparently our ill-conceived, friendly cartoon character, Esperanto Asparagus, reminded people of a gangrenous finger, and has now retired. So we're back to hiding around the corner from playgrounds with textbooks and dictionaries strapped inside our trench coats.

"Pssst. Hey, kid, wanna learn Esperanto?"

What's my point? Learn a new language -- it keeps your brain from shriveling.

And, as always, "Qapla'!"

[The first annual report is 'below' at 17 July 2008.]

No nutshell large enough

2009-04-15T19:28:00.005-08:00

As the 2009 recipient of the Suzan Nightingale prize for newspaper columns published in Alaska during the previous year — universally recognized as the world’s highest literary honor — I now face the same danger of career anticlimax that turned triumph into tragic farce for Alexander after conquering Persia, Ronald Reagan after leaving Hollywood, and Richard Daystrom after inventing duotronic circuits.
From this height, a decline looks unavoidable, but I have set my sights on another goal to at least prolong the pain. And while the Edward Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is not the Suzan Nightingale prize, it can still claim the distinction of a bar set so high that neither Walter Lippmann nor Walter Winchell reached it during their lives, and whose chances of ever doing so have only declined since their deaths.
EBLFC is like a TV show that doesn’t mind jumping the shark in the pilot episode. As a literary exercise, it blurs the line between the pointless and the superfluous, asking entrants to compose the worst possible opening sentence for a novel. That anyone reading this sentence already shares my high tolerance for unnecessarily complex sentence structures, irrelevant parentheticals and gratuitously recherché vocabulary goes, although obviously not without typing, at least without saying.
Either that or you’re German.
Yet I know restraint, having split only half the infinitives in this article so far. The name of the contest commemorates an author who knew none, an Englishman whose turgid style could stand eye-to-eye with that of Eichendorff, Kleist or Hoffman without flinching. Heck, it could take them all on at once, beat them around the ring, swipe their Menthos, and leave the entire post-Goethe pantheon gasping for a semicolon.
Amazingly, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) enjoyed tremendous success with Victorian readers, whose faultless judgment in wrought iron railings and which backward civilizations to colonize did not extend to their bookshelves.
Of course, modern readers have an answer to that in Jackie Collins. In the spirit of research, I once tried to read one of her books, since I make a modest living at writing but would rather make several thousand such modest livings, as she does. I found I lost nothing of the story by skipping every other sentence, then paragraph, then page, and finally chapter. The more mathematically inclined could see Collins’ style as the perfectly redundant literary manifestation of a Mandelbrot set.
But I digress. Of course.
The point is, Bulwer-Lytton is unreadable —and not in the cool way like “Ulysses” or “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Nobody pretends to have read his 1834 novel “The Last Days of Pompei” to score points with an intellectual chick. Witness the wisdom of the Hollywood rewrite. The classic 1935 film based on it kept nothing but the title. At least that’s what we all assume, since nobody has actually made it through the book since 1904.
During my stint as a newspaper editor, I have devoted most of my waking hours to the transmission of important information through clear, concise prose. But with the goal of winning this year’s EBLFC in mind, I did what anybody with a narrow range of outdated skills in a stressed industry would do during economic hard times.
I quit my job.
Would it make more sense to devote my energy to improving newspapers as a product, thus bolstering their status as an indispensable bulwark of democracy? Perhaps.
Do I marvel at my own ability to waste time composing such sentences? A little.
Are rhetorical questions a hackneyed and irritating literary device? Undoubtedly.
So here are my entries for this year’s contest:

The day began, like so many others, almost immediately after midnight, and continued virtually uninterrupted until the following midnight, despite Jeremy’s foredoomed attempts to construct a time machine without the calliope and live kinkajou usually associated with such devices.

I field-tested that sentence a few months ago, and was told it was too coherent for the spirit of EBLFC. So I tried again.

Theodosia’s gaze strayed to the kitchen window, through which she saw a dreary rain mottling Paul’s latest triumph, an abstract sculpture in concrete — an apt metaphor for life itself, she reflected, if only he had named it something other than “Up Yours, Manitowoc County Arts Commission.”

But I was enjoined to be more turgid. I took the criticism to heart and produced this third possibility:

It would be no wanton hyperbole to call Cecil Basingstoke-Weekes a giant among men, as it would be to call him one among musk oxen, and while to the great good fortune of the Godalming Society for Orthographic Reform’s reputation for scrupulous accuracy the latter expression never found its way past the lips of any of its members — due however much to their profound, if unsurprising, ignorance of a species rarely seen in that part of Surrey — it was the merest spite that prevented them from making use of the former.

This time the reaction tended to blank stares rather more than I intended, and I felt obligated to try one last time.

Palomina — for such was the name by which Fanny Metacarpal referred to herself in the privacy of her own thoughts — leaned against the drab doorway of her hovel, lugubriating in a mental landscape that owed much to the dreary aspect of similar hovels stretching into a Hoovervillian vista before her for its desperate Weltschmerz, strewn as it was with spiritual rubbish and emotional dirty laundry, and decided to go inside.

Was reading this column any more painful than watching Sarah Palin choose Bobby Jindall as her 2012 running mate at the exact moment a volcano erupted near Anchorage? You be the judge.

More stereos

2009-03-19T15:59:00.004-08:00

Holy Resurrection Cathedral, but it's not that big and there's no bishop in Kodiak any more.

Mel Gibson memorial tower in Stirling, Scotland. (OK, William Wallace memorial, but there was a statue of Mel in the parking lot).

Kodiak welcome sign in front of former day shelter for homeless, now out of business.

Baranov Museum, aka Erskine House, aka Russian magazin, oldest building in Alaska (1808)

The Water Key needs repainting. Haulout planned for early June, volunteers receive exclusive souvenirs (really cool ones). Note Drew's officer burgee as D17 ADSO-PA.

In Ferry terminal parking lot looking toward Near Island bridge.

Kodiak Daily Mirror pressman Jeff Henderson standing next to mighty engine of freedom, March 2009.

You people think I can just roll out of bad in the morning and look this scruffy? No, sir, it takes work.

Stereoviews for use with Drewview

2009-02-18T13:37:00.005-09:00

See previous posting for simple instructions on how to make the amazing Drewview stereoscope out of household objects.

Churchyard in Dunblane, Scotland, summer 2007

"Satchmo's Ghost Serenades Nessie Near Greenland"

Lion statue in front of Glasgow city hall, summer 2007

"Space Tourism"

Cheng Man-ching

"Haregaj sagxuloj de la 19-a jarcento cxirkauxsxvebas Zamenhofon"
(Hairy wise men of the 19th century hover around Zamenhof)

Tiller of the Discovery, one of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott's ships, from my visit to Dundee, Scotland, in 2007

"Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man"

The Drewview

2009-02-18T13:00:00.009-09:00

A stereoscope from household items

Thanks to the wheel of fashion, those of us with a penchant for vintage (what we used to call “second hand”) clothes and accessories actually lead every trend — if you wait long enough.
I introduced the Swatch to America in 1984. I liked the retro use of hands on a watch in an era dominated by those pre-LCD glowing digitals. I was also ahead of the curve on banded collars and green tea. Don’t come crying to me when you’re the only one on the block who doesn’t speak Esperanto.
Now the Hollywood buzz is all about a revival of 3-D, and this time I have published proof of my foresight.
I devised the following project for a children’s section of the Kodiak Daily Mirror (Dec. 19, 2006). I consider it by far the greatest achievement of my career in journalism.

Materials:
2 toilet paper tubes
1 pair 2.25X reading glasses
clear tape
1 business card
optional: paint or electrician’s tape

Construction:

1. As an optional improvement for opacity, you can wrap the toilet paper tubes with electrician’s tape, or paint the tubes. If you want to paint them for decoration, it might be better to do it before the other steps.

2. Pop the reading glasses lenses out of the frame. Tape a lens to one end of each of the toilet paper tubes. Call the ends of the tubes with the lens “A” and the empty ends “B”.

3. Tape the short end of the business card to the left tube about half an inch from the A end so that the card sticks up perpendicular to the inside edge of the lens (as if it were still in the glasses).

4. Tape the other short end of the business card similarly to the right tube. Now you can hold the tubes in position to put the lenses side-by-side like they were in their old reading glasses days, and the business card bends to form a bridge over your nose.

5. With the tubes held to make the bridge as in step 4, tape the inner edges of the B ends together to make the point of a V-shape.

6. Stereoscope is done. To view images, hold the viewer with the lenses up to your eyes and aim. You can adjust the viewer for the distance between your eyes by squeezing the bridge tighter or looser. When viewing, hold the image steady for a moment to let your eyes get a fix, then change the distance gradually to find the best position for the 3-D effect.

Making images:

I include some samples here from real life and some I put together from pieces. You can view them on the computer screen or print them out and make little cards. I calculated the specs so that the image to view (left and right halves taken together) is about the size of a standard playing card.

To make your own stereoviews with a camera, shoot one photo for the left image, then move the camera slightly to the right on the same horizontal plane and snap the right image. If there are people or animals in the picture, make sure they don’t move.

The distance between where the camera takes the two frames doesn’t have to be eye width. Depending on the distance to the subject and its size, you might get a better effect with a larger or smaller baseline. For example, if you shoot a building from across the road, you could try moving the camera a few feet for the second shot.

To make completely artificial stereo art, choose a background scene or pattern and place foreground objects on it (easy in Photoshop, but also possible by hand). Let that be the left image. Then copy that image, but move the foreground objects slightly left against the background to create the right image. The farther an object is moved, the more it will appear to stand out from the background, so you can place objects at different apparent depths.

Several online archives make old stereoviews available. Adjust the size on screen to about 66 percent for this homemade viewer, or you can print them out and reduce them with a copier to the right size. Mounting them on cardboard with spray glue makes them easier to use.
http://content.lib.washington.edu/stereoweb/
http://www.johnsonshawmuseum.org/
http://library.pacific.edu/ha/digital/spooner/index.asp

I am considering the design of a card holding extension for the Drewview like on the old-fashioned stereoscopes so you don’t have to hold the picture yourself.

Remember to use the awesome power of stereoscopy only for good, never for evil.

The universe is relatively fool-proof

2008-12-13T14:11:00.002-09:00

What a time to live in America, when through talent, intelligence and hard work, a descendant of slaves kidnapped from Africa and brought to these shores against their will can grow up to become — the president’s wife.
Before and after the November election, a lot of pundits waxed on about how Barack Obama’s candidacy and victory show that anybody can achieve anything in this country. That kind of talk brings two question to my mind.
First, what do I have to do to get people to call me a pundit? I’ve been a professional journalist and columnist for years, and now everybody I work with is younger than me. I’m just sayin’.
Second, didn’t George W. Bush already prove that anybody can be president? With his (sort of) election, we showed that you don’t need competence, general knowledge or respect for the Constitution to occupy the highest office in the land.
So what’s the big deal with Obama, a handsome, charismatic, brilliant legal scholar?
It’s like Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, two of the best players in the country, breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. They still had to sleep in separate hotels and eat at separate diners, and their middle- and lower-tier colleagues were all white. The game wasn’t really integrated until you could be mediocre and black, and still get a job with the Yankees.
Same for the White House. I’ll get excited about race and gender equality when we elect an African-American woman as incompetent as Bush to lead us into our next unjustified war.
Baby steps, I guess.
I have a colleague who would like to see Sarah Palin become president. Her arguments mirror those of B.D. in recent Doonesbury comics, so I won’t go into detail here. Suffice to say, she doesn’t consider a passing grade in high school geography a sine qua non to direct United States foreign policy.
I’m not sure what people see in these candidates the Republicans like to throw up, but I guess that’s why Karl Rove gets the big bucks. They attract people like Abraham Lincoln, Earl Warren and Colin Powell, then run Bushes, Palins and, bless his heart, Don Young.
According to one theory, average voters want to see someone like themselves in leadership positions. I’m far from the only one asking why we would want somebody as dumb as the average voter in the hardest, most important job in the world.
As against that, I can hardly argue anyone has a big enough brain to get us through what’s coming. Sometimes a no-win scenario deserves the name, and even if everybody handling luggage for the airlines were as smart as me, your bags wouldn’t get to the right destination.
The smartest human of the twentieth century was a devout, peace-loving guy who wanted the best for everybody. His work led directly to the invention of weapons that can wipe us all out, possibly starting next week in South Asia.
And maybe not. As Palin would ask, what does Indiana have against Pakistan that’s worth a nukyular war?
Even if Obama is as smart as Einstein and leads with the wisdom of Solomon, he can only buy Western Civilization a few years, at most. The whole human setup has reached a point that was probably inevitable from the day Oolgfrap figured out how to make the hot orange stuff out of sticks and leaves.
Apparently, Naeser’s Law applies even to the Almighty, which leads me to two more questions.
Will God tell the governor of Alaska to accept the Fox network offer, and what will people do if they schedule “Sarah” opposite “Oprah”?

Subatomic analysis of the vice presidential debate

2008-10-04T12:00:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Sarah Palin, I finally have the difinitive response for foreign friends who ask me to explain the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

As leader of Republicans for the last eight years, George W. Bush established a precedent for distinguishing the parties, a simple litmus test we have sorely needed since the ascendancy of nylon and polyester put paid to Pat Nixon’s cloth coat. So Bush will be remembered for giving the English-garbling world “nukyuler” for a lot longer than anybody remembered constitutional checks and balances.

In her debate with Joe Biden Thursday, Palin repeatedly took up the nukyular mantle with an insistance worthy of a commander in chief. Her opponent subtly defended the Democratic-approved stance, meeting Palin’s verbal detonations by inserting the high-taxing, big government watchword “nuclear” into the gaps not otherwise filled by “darn” or “doggone.”

It swayed her no more than Biden’s pointed hints about the U.S. general in Afghanistan. Maybe her references to Gen. McClellan represent abortive attempts by the spirit of Abraham Lincoln to slip Palin some classical eloquence from the Great Campaign Trail in the Sky. He probably feels responsible for using up all the Republican literary mojo at Gettysburg and his second inaugural.

However it started, the Republican preference for mangled prose and malapropisms now stands as fundamental policy.

Some people probably still believe Colin Powell left the State Department becaue of disagreements about doctrine or pique over being used and humiliated with his U.N. speech in favor of war against Iraq. In the event, the problem was his un-Republican habit of expressing complex ideas in coherent, well-formed sentences. The lesson has not been completely lost on Condy Rice, who avoids meaningful content even while risking her job by correct pronunciation.

Both of them need to remember their roots and pay attention to the example of previous Republican SecState Al Haig, who used the power of his office to make “impact” a verb.

Deep down, that’s the kind of leadership Joe Six-pack, Jane Chablis and Bob Bacardi really want. Not, as Mike Dukakis impotently put it, a president “who can think and talk in complete sentences.”

OK, that was Jon Lovitz, but his version of the debate got higher ratings.

Now, I would like to support an Alaskan on a major ticket, but Palin and the Republicans have taken a stand that reveals an ugly prejudice against my ethnicity. As a copy editor-American, it falls to me to stand up for our rights before the Republicans tack a rider onto the next Wall Street bailout bill that legalizes spelling “barbecue” with a q.

The backers of English-only laws are also overwhelmingly Republican, begging the question of how they propose to govern without violating the statutes every time they open their mouths. If a federal law were in place, Congress would have had no choice but to begin the impeachment process immediately following President Bush’s first State of the Union.

So no Alaskan in the Blair House this time around. It’s disappointing, but if you care at all about the basic rules of pronunciation our founding fathers believed in, your choice in November is clear.

Excuse me — culear.

How to face the end

2008-09-15T14:53:00.000-08:00

In six weeks, every subtle difference and shade of opinion in America will disappear into the Manichaean excersice of choosing between two candidates. You have that long to decide what to give up, expectations-wise.

A lot of truisms and their related spoofs start out, "There are two kinds of people in this world …"

I have correctly derided all of them, usually with no more rhetorical effort than it takes to refute a creationist. But one binary characterization of all humanity requires a little more attention, lest any more people get sucked into believing it reveals a deep, meaningful insight into two camps neatly divided by their respective weltanschauungs.

Some people drive straight in to parking spaces and then have to back out when they leave. Other people back in to park so they can drive straight out when they leave.

(Maybe some confused people — the sort who tell pollsters that they trust Republicans more than Democrats with fiscal policy — sometimes park one way, sometimes the other.)

Obviously, the total time either strategy requires for parking and leaving is exactly the same. So why pick one or the other?

Your facile psychologizer would conclude the back-inners have more foresight and are willing to invest their effort against a future convenience.

As one of the deeper-thinking back-outers, I know better.

Behold my logic: Someday the world will end. Statistically, I will most likely be parked when that happens, so any time potentially saved when pulling out of the parking spot never happens. The extra 20 seconds it would take to back in when parking gets wasted.

Since the two parking methods are time-neutral until that day, it makes more sense to drive straight in and use what may be the last 20 seconds of the universe to do something meaningful. I plan on recalling some of my favorite "Peanuts" cartoons, the ones where Snoopy puts on sunglasses, leans against a tree, and sums up all of existence in the last panel.

The real lesson? I drive too much.

Meanwhile, don't be the kind of person who thinks there are two kinds of people in this world. It's an overestimate.

Here's Joe Cool, ready for the end.

Presidential library to open in Wasilla in 2017

2008-08-29T13:08:00.002-08:00

Republican presidential candidate John McCain scored a landslide victory over his Democratic opponent today — in the race for the weekend news cycle.
This morning, the Associated Press wire service the Kodiak Daily Mirror depends on for most of its national and international news gagged on the news that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will run for vice president on McCain’s ticket. When I tried to put together today’s Politics page, the AP Web site couldn’t show me any stories because the Palin announcement generated so much traffic.
I have never seen anything like it since the current Web-based AP wire system went operational. Even when I typed in “Obama” or “Democratic convention” as the search terms, all I got was Palin-McCain.
Astounding.
Then again, maybe it was just a slow day for the computer. That happens.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell when somebody is being serious.
About 20 years ago, I was a graduate student in Santa Cruz, Calif. While waiting to talk to my semantics professor, I shot the breeze with his office neighbor, Tom Lehrer.
Lehrer came to fame in the 1960s for his satirical songs, like “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” “The Vatican Rag” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park." He taught math at Harvard and later at Santa Cruz.
I asked him why he disappointed so many listeners by quitting his musical career. His answer: With the election of Richard M. Nixon as president in 1968, he couldn’t think of any jokes that would be as funny as reality.
He’s a funny guy. I thought he was joking.
I felt similarly confused when I heard Ted Stevens say that Lisa Murkowski is a better senator than her father ever was, until I remembered Ted never jokes.
Like so many Alaskans, I heard the news about Palin first thing in the morning, and wondered what crazy world I had woken up to. I also finally realized Lehrer wasn’t joking.
McCain pulled a stunt today, the kind I thought American politics had gotten past.
To me it looks like McCain, a politician I have long admired, chose Palin just to have a woman on the ticket.
He could have done that and chosen a prominent female Republican more clearly qualified to be president. Why didn’t he pick Elizabeth Dole, Christie Todd Whitman, Lisa Murkowski or even Condy Rice?
It reminds me of the Clarence Thomas appointment. In 1991, George H.W. Bush apppointed Thomas to the Supreme Court to replace Thurgood Marshall — after 24 years still the only African-American U.S. justice.
Bush could have tapped any outstanding, experienced, conservative jurist, a group that includes a great many African-Americans, if that was a consideration.
Instead he chose Thomas, whose lackluster performace on the bench surprised nobody who looked at his earlier record.
It looks like Bush got blinded by the perception that he needed to fill “the black seat” on the court, an echo from discussion about the 1939 appointment of Felix Frankfurter to replace Louis Brandeis in the court’s “Jewish seat.”
Palin ran a little town in Alaska. Then she ran all of Alaska — which is like running a little town anywhere else. There are aldermen in Chicago with more constituents. That’s not a presidential resume.
McCain cashed in a token to steal coverage today. I doubt it will prove politically worth it in the long run.
More importanly, it ruins the humor column business for me. I have used this space to exaggerate, mock, lie and go off on tangents to tangents to tangents.
I had some good material ready for today, making fun of Obama and McCain about equally, with references to Czechoslovakia and bowling, and maybe the odd crack about Bill and Hillary.
But I can’t top this one.
I now understand what Lehrer meant, and so I’m getting out. Maybe I’ll keep up my ramblings on a blog or in some other medium, but this incarnation of Out of the Loop ends here.
The AP wire wasn’t the only thing that gagged.
Thanks for watching.
Drew Herman is a copy editor at the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

Beware Olympic hype — take a polo pony to lunch

2008-08-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

Sure, we managed to wipe their entire country out of existence 29 years later, but a lot of us are still smarting from the 1972 Olympic basketball final between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., and we could use a little more validation than our current hoopsters are likely to deliver.
So every four years, I remember the unsung heroes of past Olympics and overhaul my metaphorical accordion specially to sing them anew.
We could use a man like Thomas Hitchcock Jr. again. The handsome Harvard student flew for France in World War I, but came home to lead the U.S. polo team to silver in the 1924 Olympics.
Hitchcock and his crew had the real stuff, and given a few more decades, the U.S. would have cantered into international dominance. Every kid in America would have kept a pony in their room and practiced dropping their Rs during the off-season.
But after 1936, in a blatant bid to dim the glory of the U.S. athletic juggernaut, the International Olympic Committee dropped polo from the roster forever.
I blame fascists like former IOC head Juan Antonio Samaranch. And that’s not a slur about his management style — the man was a card-carrying member of Generalisimo Francisco Franco’s party.
Thus began the era of psuedo sports. Race walking? Rhythmic gymnastics? Synchronized swimming, for all love? If this stuff is sports, then I deserve at least a bronze for dodging traffic when I walk across the parking lot at Wal-Mart. Why not log rolling or darts? Heck, I’ve seen some balloon animal artists who work up a good sweat.
If this weren’t a humor column, I would mention cup stacking, but unfortunately that’s actually considered a sport in many U.S. school districts.
I had a linguistics professor who played cut-throat racketball — even in a singles game. He liked to say it doesn’t count as a sport unless you can hurt the other guy.
You only have to look at the butcher’s bill from the 1920 Olympic tug-of-war competition to see what real athletes risk. OK, no deaths or broken bones, but rope burns are no laughing matter. Maybe that’s why the IOC pulled the rug from under the tug, too.
In 1904, the United States swept all three medals in the Olympic tug-of-war. We lost a little ground after that, but I think we’re ready to resurge, and we lead the world in skin lotion production.
The world tug-of-war championships begin in less than four weeks, and flights to Stockholm are filling up fast.
Scriptor speculi Drew Herman sum. Ludes virumque cano.

Ni gxojas esti aux strangaj aux frenezaj

2008-07-17T06:21:00.000-08:00

To read the original English version of this column, go to www.kodiakdailymirror.com and look in the opinion section.

MONTREALO, Kanado -- Raporto de membrokomitato de Esperanta Klubo Kodiako: ankoraux sole mi.
Bonflanke, tio signifas ke ni bezonas nur unu novan membron por atingi cent procentan kreskon. Aliaflanke, gxi ankaux signifas ke ni estas nun tute senestrigitaj, cxar la tri-jara terminolimo malpermesas ke mi ankoraux kandidatas kiel prezidanto.
Intertempe, kiel foririnta prezidanto, mi estas en Montrealo por cxeesti la 7an Tutamerikan Kongreson de Esperanto kune kun pli ol 200 aliaj partoprenantoj de Usono, Kanado, Kubo, Gvatamalo kaj aliaj landoj, ecx de Euxropo kaj Azio.
Esperanto estas intence inventita lingvo, kiel la Klingona lingvo, sed sen kostumoj. Pola okulisto kiu nomigxis Ludviko Zamenhofo kreis gxin en jaro 1887 kiel facile eklernebla dua lingvo kiun cxiuj povus uzi por plifortigi universalan interkomprenecon kaj tutmondan pacon.
Se vi cxeestis dum la 1960aj jaroj kaj ne estis tro narkotigxita, vi versxajne memoras la tutmondan pacon. Gxi devis atingigxi per sxvebigi registrajn konstruajxojn kaj per netrancxajxon de haroj. Kiel ido de 1970aj -- la Novgxersejo de jardekoj -- mi konas tutmondan pacon nur kiel respondo dum la intervjua parto de la Frauxlino Ameriko konkurso.
Cxiuj konas kiel estas bedauxrinde, ke la homaro ne pli enfokusigas la korsentojn kiujn ni cxiuj partprenas kiel civitanoj de la mondo, ekzemple zorgo pri la malricxoj kaj malsatoj, maltrankvilo pri la ekosistemo, aux malsxato pri Gxorgxo W. Bush. Zamenhofo ekpensis ke la homoj malpli konfliktus, se ili povus almenaux plifacile interparoli.
Pesimisto povus remarki, ke konfliktoj iam okazas ecx inter homoj kiu scipovas la saman lingvon, versxajne pro tio, ke ili sin komprenas ja tro bone. Sed Esperanto, kio signifas hoping, sin ne okupas pri pesimismo.
Esperanto kiel internacia lingvo estas unu el tiuj evidentaj bonegaj ideoj kiuj funkcius bone se la homoj donus malgrandan penon hodiaux por sxpari multe da mono kaj kapdoloron pli malfrue, simile al universala sanozorgo aux publika veturilajxo. Pro tio ke ni sxajnas kontentaj ke niaj profesiaj sanozorgistoj konsumas la plejparton de ilia tempo plenskribinte formularojn anstataux kuracinte pacientojn, mi decidis elspezi mian kontrauxventomuelilan energion por cxi tio monda lingvo. Ni Kodiakanoj povus gxin utile uzi, kiel rapida ponto inter la angla, la pilipina, la hispana kaj la volapukazxo kiun la junuloj sin tekstas per iliaj posxtelefonoj.
Nun, poste nur 121 jaroj, nia celo estas videbla. Je la nuna rapideco de la disvastigxo de la Esperanta movado, cxiuj en la mondo parolos gxin ne post la jaro 6011485, pli aux malpli malmultaj milionoj, supozante nulan populaciokreskon kaj la kompletan malaperon de Usonuloj. Ni jankioj ne tre sxatas paroli alilande.
Do eble ni esperantistoj estas optimistaj stranguloj. Fakte, la stranguloj ofte gxustas je mi-tion-diris-al-vi-ajxoj. Kiel mi vidis en Montrealo, nia inventita lingvo vere funkcias. Esperantistoj konversacias normale, prelegas, skribas librojn, kaj amikigxas kun homoj de aliaj landoj.
Kaj jen la subtenantoj: Williem Baden Powell, la fondinto de la knaboskoltoj, rekomendis gxin. La religia sekto Oomoto en Japanio postulas ke la membroj gxin lernas, kaj la Usona armeo antauxe uzis gxin kiel lingvo de la malamikoj je la militoludoj. Hitlero gxin nomas judan konspiron, kiel demokratio aux presa libero.
Hazarde estas Montrealo ankaux la hejmo de la profeto Rael, kiu en jaro 1973 anoncis ke aliplanedanoj kreis la teran homaron antaux 25,000 jaroj. Niaj eksterteraj prapatroj diris al li ke ni devas adopti komunan lingvon tra la tuta mondo, sed strange, ili ne indikis specife Esperanton. Ili ankaux diris al Rael ke ni devus kloni sin por atingi eternan vivon, kaj ni devus neniam trancxi la harojn cxar ili funkcias kiel antena sistemo por telepatio kun la eksterteruloj.
Kaj parolante pri Klingonoj kaj Montrealanoj, la unua plenlonga filmo farita en Esperanto steligis la Kanadan aktoron William Shatner, antuax ol li igxis Kapitano Kirk. Eble la tutmonda paco afero estas ete tro optimista, sed se vi lernas Esperanton, eble ankaux vi povas gajni Emmy-premion por ludi frenezan korporacian juriston en televido.

Leather guy, indian chief, construction dude, cop …

2008-06-20T13:45:00.000-08:00

When that Carhartt and Xtratuf-clad icon of machismo, the Alaska fisherman, walks into a cafe and orders a skinny decaf strawberry latte, I feel like I have to hawk and spit, scratch something indiscreet, or maybe objectify the next woman I see, just to even up the karmic score.
The example above happened to occur this week, but don’t make the mistake of dismissing this as an “isolated incident.” Not three minutes after I witnessed that order, I hit the boat docks to watch crews stocking up. As one guy set off for supplies, his buddy yelled, “Don’t forget we’re out of tarragon.”
Tarragon? On the tough streets I lie about coming from, men don’t know what tarragon is, any more than they can identify mauve or chartreuse.
I hope they at least put it in a container labelled “rust flakes” before sprinkling it in their Alfredo sauce. Even writing about that incident makes me want to take apart a transmission or throw a handful of Doritos at the Mariners.
It’s just that a lot of us feel a little adrift these days, since the whole sensitive guy thing proved unsustainable after we sat through all those “Sex and the City” episodes. We really had no choice but to end the charade when it came out on DVD.
Let's face it — the macho movie icons have let us down lately. Where is today’s Duke or Bogey? Even the Fonz has more street cred than Brad Pitt. Maybe Clooney has some suave, but the wardrobe for suave costs too much, and Armani is a non-starter in Kodiak.
Not that I would recognize anything Armani, of course. I’m a little embarrased to even know the name. I assume they sell mauve shirts.
So fishermen, the next time you go to a cafe, remember that impressionable wannabes may be listening. For heaven’s sake, at least order a double shot with that creme de menthe.
Mirror writer Drew Herman is too cool to worry about his image.

Sophie gxuas la sunon sur nia boato.

2008-06-05T16:03:00.000-08:00

It’s all over except for the muttering

2008-06-05T11:48:00.000-08:00

With the long drawn-out race finally over, President Obama and Vice President Rodham have only a few months to get things done before the usual, short political “honeymoon” ends — probably in November, or January at the latest.
I don’t hold with the nattering nabobs who have already declared the Obama administration a failure. That’s just blatantly jumping the gun.
I mean, look at everything they have already accomplished. For example, appointing George W. Bush roving ambassador to Little League Baseball and other powerless allies was a stroke of genius, allowing the former figurehead-in-chief to fade away with dignity, a sort of diplomatic St. Jude spreading the joy of photo ops to lost causes around the world.
On the other hand, the Obamameister’s legislative agenda seems to have stalled, and I gotta ask, what is he waiting for? I hear he hasn’t cleaned out his old Senate office, and Michelle hasn’t even changed the drapes in the East Wing.
If I seem impatient, you have to understand what I’ve been through for seven and a half years. As a person whose relationship with reality is as who should say casual, I have had recourse to coping methods usually reserved for reading comic books.
In literary circles they call it “suspension of disbelief,” and you need it to shut down the law of momentum when Iron Man crashes into the earth at Mach 2, shakes it off and changes into a tux in time to dance with Gwyneth Paltrow. With all of Season 4 of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on DVD to go through, I don’t appreciate having to expend my usually large reservoir of suspendable disbelief on Karl Rove’s applications of the U.S. Constitution.
Welcome back to the real world, President O.

Copy editor Drew Herman’s vote counts as much as yours.

Who's rich, dead or in jail?

2008-05-04T05:13:00.000-08:00

DENVER AIRPORT — Last month, I googled a few of my high school classmates — people I knew long before the invention of googling, and for that matter before the Internet or triple-bladed razors.
I would have googled more of them, but I could recall only about a dozen names, and half of those turn out to have been characters in sketches by the original cast of “Saturday Night Live.”
But what can you expect? Guys at my advanced age deserve credit if we remember to shave at all.
For this weekend I will attend our 25-year class reunion, assuming I remembered the correct graduation year. Anyway, I got an invitation, which left me no way to deny that I am now, as who should say, something more than 30 years old.
At least I won’t have to endure childish comparisons of success and be humiliated by some former nerd we called “Weasel” who arrives in a chauffeur-driven limo with its own Starbuck’s. That’s because I went to a little school in a remote corner of Michigan from which students disperse to the four winds immediately after graduation to advance forward into the future that’s ahead of them. I expect little competition for hors d’oeuvres at the reception.
So now those futures are behind us. We can look back at living through an era of new technological wonders from touchtone phones to curved toothbrushes that overshadow even Gilette’s multi-bladed marvels.
OK, this whole reunion trip is mostly an excuse to go someplace where “spring” does not mean highs in the mid-30s with rain turning to snow toward evening, and where I can rent a sailboat without worrying where to stow a survival suit.
But I do look forward to the classroom visit part of the reunion festivities, when the school’s current students get to meet us oldtimers. I’ve put some work into the sage advice I assume they’re eager to hear and certain to follow. Although, I understand advice is now called “talking points” and high schoolers won’t notice them unless they come texted on a cell phone.
I will warn them to stay away from the two most pernicious temptations facing today’s youth: drugs and college, only one of which I was smart enough to avoid.
Maybe the students won’t care, and I sure don’t recollect what the visiting alumni told me a quarter century ago. Those crazy geezers were old, gray, out of touch, and probably still used straight toothbrushes.
This year’s graduates have never known a world without a weak dollar, and likely will think nothing of shaving with a quintuple-bladed razors. Thanks to gene replacement rejuvenation therapy, they won’t even be old and gray for their 25-year reunions.
But I bet their children will make fun of them for lugging around those clunky MP50 players instead of just downloading everything onto their brain implants.
Drew Herman is the Kodiak Daily Mirror assistant editor. Read past “Out of the Loop” columns at www.sputvalvo.blogspot.com.

After long enough, any career can smell rank

2008-05-01T11:16:00.000-08:00

Who would have thought that little Davy Petreaus of Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., would grow up to command the U.S. central command, and after only 34 years in the Army?
Hasn’t he ever heard of lateral mobility? Who stays in the same company that long anymore? Was it the medals, the titles, the free chipped beef?
If only the private sector —where five years in the same job now counts as a career-killing rut — could tap the military mystique. After almost five years, I am among the oldtimers at this newspaper, but do I get my own driver? (For the answer, shift the following letters one alphabet place to the right: mn.)
Maybe employees would stick around longer if they could look forward to becoming reception desk commander or colonel of custodial services. Think of poor Lt. Wombat, still waiting for promotion 24 years after Capt. Kangaroo retired. And I don’t even want to get into the ugliness between sergeants Iowa and New Mexico since Captain America died.
It could be worse. George Washington, after making it to commanding general of the United States Army in 1799, wasn’t promoted to general of the Armies of the United States until 1976.
Even without uniforms and salutes in every workplace, title inflation has a firm hold these days, as we were just reminded by National Administrative Specialists Week. Woe betide anybody looking for work as a mere secretary when other resumes sport that job description.
Is this part of the same trend that turned my grade school history class into social studies? When I was growing up, Gilette made razors; now they only offer shaving systems. Then again, maybe it’s because of the advent of disposable razors and the complications they cause that the garbage man of my youth has been replaced by our modern sanitary engineer.
Of course, there are also problems with the title rewards system, as the United Federation of Planets knows only too well. As I enjoyed watching “Star Trek” TV shows and movies over the decades, it got more and more interesting to see how the writers explain either a) the same ship with an entire crew of officers whose ranks entitle them to command their own ships, or 2) crewmembers serving onboard the same ship for 30 years without getting above lieutenant. Personally, I would find the cumbersome admiral’s braids a little annoying while washing dishes.
Mirror assistant editor Drew Herman is commodore of a fleet of two kayaks.

Streets paved with fish in Alaskan El Dorado

2008-03-28T15:02:00.000-08:00

I’ve lived in Kodiak long enough that first-time experiences have grown rare, so I was moderately surprised when I stepped out of my front door Wednesday morning and onto a 30-inch halibut.
My second thought (right after, where did I last see Luca Brasi?) was, how am I going to explain this at the office?
It may come as a surprise to readers who know this column as the shrine to veracity I always intended, but sometimes, some of my colleagues doubt my assertions.
As a kid from the Midwestern suburbs, where fresh fish are — as who should say — uncommon underfoot, I have some understanding of their doubt.
On the other hand, I have also lived in Kenai, where the tide brings in all kinds of stuff, and if you have to step over a few herring or a waterlogged crate of Nikes to get to your car in the morning, nobody considers it worth mentioning.
My third thought was, cool — here’s my chance to try out www.whatdoesyouromenmean.com. There, between “entrails” and “fruitcake,” I found “flatfish, stepping on (morning)” and learned that either the Greek empire or the Persian empire will fall. No specific dates were given, so I pulled my investments from both, just to be safe.
But gods who leave important messages like that with a copy editor on the other side of the world have their own credibility problems, so I spent some time exploring other hypotheses.
I quickly rejected the idea of a halibut just getting lost. While I do not ask an animal with a brain the size of gummy bear for an opinion on public funding of health care, I’m reasonably sure they understand the difference between the bottom of the ocean and my doorstep.
Did an eagle drop it there? When I was camping near the beach in Ninilchik, I saw an eagle swoop into a stream and fly out with a live halibut. The eagle took its catch to a nearby tree and started eating, but then dropped it a few minutes later out of exasperation with a raven that lighted on the same branch and wouldn’t shut up about some investment opportunity in Baghdad.
It was almost a disappointment to find out later, by a roundabout message, that a friendly neighbor left me the fish. The moral? We need to invent a pen that writes on slime so as to leave explanatory notes on gift fish.
Meanwhile, thanks for the offer, neighbor. I couldn’t refuse.

Kodiak resident Drew Herman’s award-winning column Out of the Loop has readers in more than 40 countries, for all anyone knows.

Maybe the questions are just too crooked

2008-03-21T13:38:00.000-08:00

You gotta believe in magic — the way the spring sun makes flowers bloom, falling in love makes all the world sing, and filing to run for public office makes a person’s ability to give a straight answer vanish like George Bush’s budget surplus.
I listened to the ComFish Congressional candidate’s debate last night, and I had to wonder about what happens to people’s psyches under that grilling from voters.
In personal interactions and with few exceptions, politicians are far more charming than us regular folks. They seem more forthright and engaged, able to feel familiar quickly without calling you “sport” or “chief.”
Not that any of them are strangers, in this state. Like every other Alaskan, I have met and talked with most of the candidates before. If I’d lived here a little longer, we would all be on a first-name basis. And if my parents had lived here they would have been to school with half of them, worked with the other half, and probably divorced a few of each.
I have family in Columbus, Ohio, a cow town with the same population as all Alaska. They don’t undersand that for us to know our U.S senator is like them knowing their video store clerk.
The point is, I know our political leaders are all real people. But give them a podium and the risk of losing a vote, and they drone out the same script whether you ask them about fishery policy, oil pipelines or their picks for the sweet sixteen.
In my capacity as a professional reporter I have spoken with Rep. Don Young three times in the course of 15 years. I should disclose that I would vote for a patch of lichen before I would vote for him, but that’s not because he never remembers me. Recognizing a small-town reporter you only have to deal with for five minutes once every five years would require a level of intellectual prowess that would disqualify him from membership in the Republican Party, if not from Congress altogether.
But I do resent The Joke. At each encounter, Young told me the same reporter joke, one that already had gray hair and false teeth when Millard Fillmore trotted it out for Horace Greeley.
Now most people wouldn’t think it wise to begin such encounters by insulting the interviewer’s entire profession, but I guess that’s why Don gets the big bucks. Of course, journalists are trained to be objective and we would never take a sense of personal outrage out on somebody unfairly in print, no matter how many slimy deals in Florida are involved.
Anyway, we are pretty well inured, since journalists rank below lawyers and politicians in polls about public trust. And, I have to admit, Young seemed to genuinely enjoy the joke every time.
The particular joke is too lame to reprint here (if you really want to hear it, all you have to do to trigger the tape is say the word “reporter” to Young), so here’s a trombone joke instead.
I got paid for being a musician long before I ever got paid for being a reporter or an Alaskan. We instrumentalists have our own default goats. Instead of lawyers, blondes and rednecks we have trombonists, violists and accordionists. (I understand singers have tenors, but that’s just sad, like the way Ketchikan makes fun of Petersburg.)
Q: What’s the difference between a dead squirrel by the side of the road and a dead trombonist by the side of the road?
A: The squirrel was on his way to a gig.

Mirror writer Drew Herman would never change the subject.

Do your demographic a favor — hug a pollster

2008-02-08T11:45:00.000-09:00

A Republican friend (of course I have some — who ever heard of a liberal junket at Club Med?) recently pointed out that President Bush has done more to unite Americans across party lines than anybody since Washington ran twice unopposed.
As this GOP loyalist explained, if his fellow party members now wish the current president could run for re-election, it’s only so they could vote against him. So now the elephants are stuck with a candidate whose consistently anti-choice (look it up, people), pro-war, tax-cutting agenda is not conservative enough for the stalwarts.
How did the liberal media get away with the sick joke that labels Republican — that is, real American — states like Alaska, the “red” states, anyway? And where did those throngs of Democrats at last week’s Alaska caucuses come from? Did they really all spend the last 35 years tinkering with indoor grow lamps?
Well, if this election has the major parties confused by blurry identity lines, their strategists and pollsters do not lack for lines to play with. But as a flood of statistics tracks the Hispanic vote, the female vote, the black vote, the comb-over vote, the seniors, veterans, Christian evangelists and so on, I have to ask, What about us?
Although now in a shrinking minority, those of us who fit none of these hip categories deserve some attention. That’s why I decided to throw the power of the press behind a group that needs help getting its voice heard.
Pollsters have overlooked the short vote for too long.
Seeing the world from below five and a half feet gives us a keen perspective on the true grassroots. Yet they treat us as safe to ignore, as a voting block from the world of fantasy just like leprechauns or environmentalists.
But we are not fantasy, and in terms of electoral power, it would make more sense to aim campaign ads at us than in certain other directions. Hey, candidates even waste money courting the “youth vote,” which is — as we long suspected and the New Hampshire primary confirmed — the most blatant oxymoron in English next to “Internet security.”
Alas, it’s probably too early to field our own candidate. We vertically efficient Americans have not held the White House since James Madison (5’4” in high heels). Even Michael Dukakis — at 5’8” slightly shorter than Hillary — was at best a token.
Abe “The Stilt” Lincoln set the bar on height qualifications when he told us a man’s legs need only be long enough to reach the ground. It is hardly his fault that a sign now guarding the entrance to the Oval Office features a clown with his hand leveled six feet off the ground and the caption, “You must be this tall to undermine the Constitution, ruin our international credibility and incur record deficits.”
Maybe our time has not arrived just yet, but when Randy Newman’s bones are dust and all you other ethnic, gender and religious groups have blown your chances — look down.
Mirror copy editor Drew Herman would have been a giant in medieval Mongolia.

Candidates shifting focus to shifting focus

2008-01-11T14:06:00.000-09:00

With all the talk about how they can make change better than their opponents, I can’t help wondering whether Hillary, Rudy and their other podium pals are running for president of the United States or for night clerk at a 7-Eleven.
Maybe George W. Bush has made a few missteps in the last seven years, but whose fault is that? After all, almost half of us voted for him.
Now the Bush Era is winding down and the president has gone to seek his legacy by bringing the full force of his diplomatic skills to a feud dating back to David and Goliath which none of his predecessors could fix. You go, boy!
No doubt, in the spring of aught-nine, while we all enjoy our wine and cheese while discussing the latest selection from Vice President Winfrey’s book club, we can look back on the days of the “Carl, Dick & George Show” and laugh.
But first, Americans have to get through an election, and decide whether it’s about the economy, the war, the economy, climate change, the economy, immigration, or the economy.
At times like this, it is a huge comfort to be an Alaskan, with our steady, laser-like concentration on the one question that matters: “When do I get my share of ANWR oil profits?”
Meanwhile, as a loyal American, it just gets my goat that the candidates and voters harp on change, obsessing on the way the president’s first response to the terrorist attacks was to tell us to go to Disneyland, or on a few minor hiccups like wiretapping Americans without warrants, invading a country based on false intelligence, firing prosecutors, denying climate change, and mispronouncing “nuclear.”
They seem to have forgotten all the solid accomplishments of the current administration. So here’s an exhaustive list of things the next president should keep the same:
• The stunning china pattern Laura chose for state dinners.
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time for Conundrum of the Week, another brain-teaser drawn from the headlines of real life.
On Thursday, the only officer to receive any punishment in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal had his wrist publicly unslapped by the Army. Kudos to Lt. Col. Steven Jordan for admitting the investigation had some flaws.
But the original question remains: Why didn’t every officer in the chain of command from second louie to three stars resign of their own accord as soon as the pictures came out?
In the country with a tradition of military heroes from John Paul Jones to Audie Murphy who embody courage and honor, it’s interesting to see that the buck now stops with a lance-corporal.
Copy editor Drew Herman takes full responsibility for the Mirror’s former policy of reporter abuse.

A look back from this point in time

2008-01-05T13:06:00.000-09:00

So you survived 2007 — if you are extremely old, somewhat infirm, or even slightly Iraqi, congratulations.

A lot of world-shaking events happened last year in politics, economics and science, but as a mere copy editor, I am no more competent to make pronouncements about how to deal with that stuff than, say, a baseball team owner would be.

However, I am perfectly placed to observe the prosaic perfidy perpetrated by the language-using public, and then foist my opinions on readers of this column.

Competition for worst written or verbal sin of the year came down to a tight race between two grotesque locutions that give us self-appointed grammar police an abiding sense of being needed. But before I name the winner, let’s look back at some previous champions.

The top dishonor for 2006 went to “wellness,” which finally replaced all uses of the perfectly serviceable word “health.” May it rest in peace.

Before that we had a run of wins by time-related phrases, starting with “basis,” as in, “The proposed jail location changes on a monthly basis.” The brain-ray that stopped people from saying simply “monthly” is still at large. Then came “this point in time,” chosen for its oniony layers of redundancy.

In 2003 the pure pointlessness of “located” got the judges’ attention, since any jail “located on Near Island” would also be “on Near Island.” This came from the same faction that thinks prepostions can’t take the load alone, so they invented “in conjunction with.”

But nothing matches the classic that started it all. “Utilize” remains king for having absolutely no context where it could mean anything different from “use,” yet continuing its pompous, ubiquitous career unabated.

The runner-up this time is “adversely affected,” another pompous infection from the officialese lexicon. We pray for a cure to the pandemic that has as its main symptom an inability to use the word “harm.” It probably comes from a virus that spreads because of our feeble wellness practices.

But the surprise top place citation for 2007 goes to the confusion of “ground zero” and “square one.” The first time someone said “This setback takes us back to ground zero,” it got little notice. But then it happened again and again, prompting the grammar panel to issue its directive: Stop saying it unless whatever happened really included a ticket to Hiroshima or the World Trade Center.

Mirror writer Drew Herman still refuses to use “impact” as a verb.

Scarring and scabbing are torture to writers

2007-12-30T20:45:00.000-09:00

Grown-ups say the darndest things.

Here’s one I heard recently in a National Public Radio story about the Hollywood writers’ strike. The reporter said the schedule of upcoming awards shows gives the writers extra leverage, because without writers, the producers will have to cancel the Oscars.

The Oscars show uses writers?

I bet I’m not the only movie buff shocked — shocked, I say — to learn that the presenters’ snappy repartee is not the spontaneous product of razor-like intellects trained in the same school that gave us Ronald Reagan, Fred Thompson and Arnold Schwarzenegger (who once modestly remarked, “Maria didn’t marry me for my brains”).

I’m either severely disillusioned, or just miffed that professional writers make obscene multiples of my annual take-home for generating inane banter that would earn two thumbs down in a second-grade production of “Mr. Toothbrush and the Cavity Monster.”

That’s what the writers have to hold over the heads of their Tinsel Town oppressors? Yet these greedy adversaries have the entire nation facing a crisis with potential repurcussions every bit as long-lasting and crippling to the American spirit and economy as the devastating National Hockey League impass of — well, whenever that was.

It almost tempts me to offer my sevices as a literary scab, to rescue the national psyche from the scars that would result from going all spring without at least three hours of Billy Crystal introducing introducers.

How hard could it be?

“Hey, Lindsay, it’s great to see you here tonight! I’ll have to rethink my opposition to work release.”

“Bite me, Leo. Speaking of nail-biting performances, this year's nominees for best supporting actress are …”

And so on. Alas, I don’t cross picket lines, and anyway I’m too busy on a monologue for Letterman.

And another thing. As long as I’m on about odd statements, let’s make a brief visit to Langley, where CIA officials explain the destruction of interrogation videotapes as a security measure to protect their operatives.

Those of us who enjoy sudoku and other brainteasers have had a great time interpreting this one. Does it mean that the tapes show CIA agents comitting crimes, or that the CIA doesn’t trust itself to keep its own sensitive material secure? Difficulty level: 4.

Mirror copy editor Drew Herman is available to write your awards show. Call now for scheduling and rates.

Royal Alaska Mail rates to Amerikastan too high

2007-12-21T16:18:00.000-09:00

You win, you eBay ignorami and mail order morons — I’m ready to admit Alaska is an island.

After years of fruitless fights with shippers who do not distinguish between “contiguous” and “continental,” I figure it’s probably just easier to cut a canal along the border with the Yukon and let British Columbia annex the Panhandle.

I’m sure you’ve all been there. You find that Howdy Doody lunchbox your uncle always wanted, or try to order a chromed exhaust for your sister-in-law’s Harley. The instructions say the rate applies only for shipping within the continental U.S., and then they bill you an extra twenty bucks for Alaska. You write back explaining that Alaska is continental, sharing North America — however uneasily — with such real American states as Alabama and Chicago, and if the shipper had meant to exclude Alaska, they should have said “contiguous.” Then the shipper writes back saying everyone knows what they meant and anyway it costs them too much to send stuff here. So you write back pointing out how that’s their problem and if they were content to waste their years of schooling by not learning some basic vocabulary so they spend the rest of their lives as illiterate savages, they could at least have the integrity to admit a mistake and pony up the difference, even though the dollar has really tanked against the gruening lately.

At this point, the dialogue and transaction usually end, and the Harley rider gets a gift card worth a few days of double-shot creme de menthe lattes.

Maybe it’s a little disingenuous to make this argument from Kodiak, which has never been either contiguous or continental, but there’s a principle involved — the long established right of Alaska to federal subsidization of a lifestyle utterly unsuited to our location. Maybe we’re not contiguous, and they don’t know we’re continental, but we can at least be contentious.

Hawaii, you’re on your own.