Death by Grammar

27 MAY 2007 hey, look grammar

Quiz: Who is the jerk in this scenario?

1: She made a joke at her own expense. I know she was being self-depreciating, but--
2: Actually, it's "self-deprecating". But go on.
1: What?
2: "Self-deprecating". Not "self-depreciating". That's not the right word.
1: Yes it is.
2: No it isn't.
1: People say it all the time.
2: People say Las Vegas is the capital of Nevada, but that doesn't mean it is.
1: What are you talking about?
2: If you bought yourself and went down in value over the time you owned yourself, you might be "self-depreciating". But in any other circumstance, it doesn't make any sense.
1: Oh, so instead you "deprecate" yourself. That makes tons of sense. Sorry I didn't go to your fancy college.
2: The college thing is irrelevant.
1: Irregardless, I--
2: "Regardless"! There's no such word as "irregardless", it means what "regardless" means!
1: How can it mean anything if it isn't a word? Ah ha! I caught you! It must be a word!

2 stabs 1 in the neck with a pencil.

And that is how grammar kills.

(The Answer to the quiz is: Both, because they're getting all pent up and personal about a word usage issue and should just have some sangria and relax. Standard usage now accepts "self-deprecating" when one is being excessively modest, but only because it overtook "self-depreciating" over time in the sense of "belittling oneself". One example I read said you could say "self-depreciating" if you did something that lowered your own worth to a project, like if you insulted your potential client right before turning in your bid.

And that's how I learned that "self-depreciating" is a valid term, though not in the way most people use it, though it used to be at one time.

These grammar murder mysteries are awfully confusing in terms of assigning guilt and a sentence. Ha! You get a "sentence" for a "period" of time, and so on!

I'm tired.)

Robert Sean Leonard on "House"

I made the mistake of seeing "Dead Poets Society" twice; the first time you notice its earnest sincerity, the second time you notice its exasperating sentimentality. The worst part was watching Robert Sean Leonard mope around with his big cow eyes, dripping his sensitivity all over the place. I swore off the RSL right then and there.

This particular boycott was very easy to keep up because he never seemed to be in anything I wanted to watch. Since 1989, RSL has apparently been winning Tonys or some "I'm so special and New Yorkie!" crap like that, so, fine, I was happily RSL-free.

Then "House" came on the T.V. and I had many layers of prejudice against it: 1) Hugh Laurie is funny and British, not dour and American; 2) I was worn out by medical shows -- I did a long, dedicated residency with "ER" that ended when the show got too soapy, I'd had plenty of "Trapper John, MD" growing up, along with vague memories of "Quincy", and nothing could ever match the genuis of "St. Elsewhere" anyway, so why bother?; 3) the character was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, so he's called House, GET IT?; 4) he's a cranky, non-PC, man-you-love-to-hate, Becker of a guy, and I didn't watch "Becker" for good reason; and 5) RSL. Case closed. I'm not watching "House".

But it kept sticking around, and one day I was so bored I decided to increase my knowledge of current shows by watching a season three episode and getting it over with. Well, sew my buttons, this show is fantastic! I instantly became addicted.

It gives you to mystery of the diagnosis without fetishizing it like procedurals do with crime, and it gives you the character's personalities without lapsing into distracting melodrama. The best of both worlds, and perfectly cast to boot.

And wouldn't you know, my old nemesis Leonard is stellar in the part of Wilson, House's best (and only) friend. He's witty and noble, kind and depressed and sarcastic. He's got that look in his eyes, that awful vulnerability and hurt that even the best actor can't fake. It's the same look that Ed Flanders had as kind, tough but tortured Dr. Westphall on"St. Elsewhere". It's the look that brought that tremendous dark depth to Montgomery Clift's characters. (Incidentally, neither of those actors had happy personal stories, so here's hoping that RSL really is a great enough actor to fake it.)

Curses, RSL! You've defeated me by being a great actor and stealing my TV heart!

"Dancing With Myself" by Billy Idol

Just thinking about this song gets your toe a-tappin' and your head a-bobbin'; it has that perfect blend of mellow reflection and defiant rockin' to suit almost any mood. It's a song about being so far into self-pity that you're past it, suddenly happy to bop around despite being a pathetic wallflower and make your own fun. Or masturbate. It might be about masturbation.

(I still remember my junior high health teacher singing and dancing around the room to "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Even I knew what that one was about, and he didn't? Maybe as our health teacher he was giving us some kind of secret message, the kind of message that got Joycelyn Elders booted from the Surgeon General's office (she wanted to "ask the world to dance", too). Hmmm, I hadn't thought of this. Stealth teaching in a Christian Right-dominated society.)

I read an interview with Billy Idol in his heyday, and he said that he has no problem with people who laugh at his punk posturing -- that he welcomes it, in fact, as long as they're open to his music. I can believe that a man with that perspective could write a song as matter-of-factly great as this one.

My friend Killian has a theory that songs with "la la la" sections automatically might be great. This song's excellent "oh oh oh-oh" bits bear that out, along with its perfectly-measured tempo changes and Idol's brilliant performance. He tells the story of the song from smooth to snarl to "scat" (what one set of lyrics I found on the internet hilariously called his oh oh oh-ohs) to scream with perfect ease.

Dude put toothpaste in his hair, but he could sing.

F, Marry, Kill: Tom Ripley, Holden Caufield, and Henry James

F, Marry or Kill? You'd have to kill Tom Ripley, obviously, in preemptive self-defense. Marry Holden because he's so sensitive, which leaves Henry, who you wouldn't so much F as spend an awkward evening with unsatisfying results, then never speak to him again and look away when you see him in public.

These guys are three sides of the same three-sided coin, despite the fact that only one was a "real" person, for those of you who are literalists and fictionphobes. (It's so typical of you to hold someone's fiction-ness against them, as if they are second class citizens!) They cannot get into someone else's mind or walk a mile in someone else's shoes because they think other people's shoes smell and will doubtless give them athlete's foot. Other people are inexplicable and annoying and rather gross to these guys. They either hate them or idealize them. They try and fail to make other people better than they are.

Holden believes there are two types of people in the world: idiots and Phoebe. But he knows that he's doomed to be misunderstood or abused by the idiots, and that he's bound to fuck things up with the Phoebies. His saving grace is that Phoebe will forgive him.

Tom believes there are two types of people in the world: Tom Ripley and all the people he despises and/or kills. Thank goodness he has those forgery/murder/identity theft hobbies to keep his spirits up.

Henry believes there are two types of people: Henry alter egos and naive women full of crippling self-doubt or crippling self-confidence. Women are just waiting to be victimized, and all Henry Alter Ego can do is watch and wring his hands and hate them a little for being so dumb.

Thus the core problem for these men is, of course, women, those boorish or beautiful or clingy or coquettish puzzles who insist on being both alluring and repulsive. Women never act right, and they can be terribly pathetic and/or treacherous. Men make no sense to these guys, either, but the great folly of men is when they abuse women or lose their heads over them or both. It's all about the ladies.

So if the game were reversed, Tom would kill you and convince himself it was your fault; Holden would F you and then get way too attached until you had to change your cell phone number just to get away from him; and Henry would marry you just to make you miserable.

How to get a cat out of a tree

This is my good friend Duchess. Isn't she cute? She likes head scratches.




This is a clump of red cedar trees. They aren't that cute. I don't know how they feel about branch scratches.

One day, Duchess decided to climb one of these trees. They are very dense, with lots of dead leaves near the trunk that fall down if you shake the tree. There are a great deal of small branches shooting off from the trunk in all directions. With these five trees in a row, there's a lot going on in there.

So Duchess got to the top, looked down, and said, "Uh oh." She went as high as the telephone wire, which cuts through the trees and is thick enough so she could walk on it and have a path from the tree on one end all the way to the tree on the other. So she could go sideways but not down. And she was 30 feet up.

She was not happy about this. When she didn't show up for dinner, I knew something was up. Then I heard the pathetic meowing coming from our trees.

We couldn't see her in the thickness of the trees unless she found a hole and stuck her little face out. We stood on our second floor balcony and called to her. She meowed at us. Her mother cat stood on the wall at the base of the trees and meowed at her. She meowed back. So we were having lots of conversations, but no movement.

The days and nights went on. We rigged up all sorts of contraptions to get food over to her and to try to provide her with a bridge to walk over to our balcony. No dice. We worried about her starving up there and leaving a white corpse. We couldn't sleep for worry; she meowed most pathetically at 3am.

Q: Have you ever seen a cat corpse in a tree? A: No, because the corpse falls out of the tree. Or something like that -- look, I searched my old friend the internet for help, and mostly found either lame jokes about dead cats or lame advice like "wait for her to come down" or "put food at the bottom of the tree" or "get another cat".

On the third day of the kitten tree-sitting adventure, we tried calling our friendly city officials. The fire department sent a guy who looked around and said it'd be too dangerous for their truck and basket to maneuver up there. Pardon my vernacular, but HELLO? Too dangerous for the fire department? I thought their middle name was dangerous. Not when it comes to kitty cats, I guess. At least he came to visit.

Animal control said they didn't have ladders high enough. They said to get a ladder, somehow assuming we had access to higher ladders than they do. They didn't even send someone to look.

City tree trimmers were working nearby, but we couldn't get ahold of them in time.

We called private tree trimmers who either refused or didn't answer the phone or didn't call back.

Our building has a 20 foot ladder, so we tried that but couldn't coax Duchess down far enough. Alas, 20 feet is not the same as 30 feet.

We called a cat rescue lady from our neighborhood who is a true cat crusader and will do anything to help a cat. She is a god-send. She helped us trap, tame and adopt out a family of very gentle feral cats. She was alarmed about Duchess and pissed off at the city for not helping.

She contacted a cat-friendly friend of hers who had some tree trimmers at her house with a long ladder. On the fourth night, she asked (forced?) them to come over to our place. A super-nice father and son came with their ladder after a long day of work and tried to help.

We had rigged up a bucket-and-pulley system to get food up to Duchess, with the hope that she would somehow jump in the bucket and we could lower her down. Duchess ran away from the tree man, but he did secure the bucket for us so she could reach it.

He then promised to come back the next day. I couldn't believe he was being so nice when everyone else had shrugged their shoulders.

He came back the next afternoon. I asked our neighbor if we could put the ladder in his yard (the yard you can see in the picture). Our side of the trees has a driveway sloping underground, and a small side yard with little room to maneuver. Duchess was by this time near the phone lines on the left-most tree in the picture. We've lived here almost six years and had never spoken to this neighbor. He was very nice and said go ahead. He was also maybe high.

We were all a little pissed at Duchess for not just jumping on the neighbor's roof, but we figured it was too far for her.

The following happened within fifteen minutes of the tree man arriving: he set up his ladder, climbed up and reached for Duchess, she cowered away from him and screamed a bit, he came back down for his tree tools to be able to get closer, I gave him a pillowcase to put her in to get her down.

(I forgot to say: my web search did bring up one useful story, of some young men who rigged up a basket system to rescue their cat, and as they put it up, the cat panicked and simply jumped out of the tree. That gave me the idea for the basket-and-pulley, and also some hope that Duchess really would get down when she had to.)

So the tree man went back up, pushed aside some branches with his tool, and climbed closer to Duchess. She panicked, pushed her way out the side of the tree on the left, and LEAPT the 30 feet down to the sidewalk.

My neighbor, two bystanders and I GASPED.

She wobbled to her side when she landed, then straightened up and took off running away from us down the sidewalk and around the corner. She ran full tilt without limping.

I rejoiced. I ran after her but couldn't find her, but I was convinced she was fine because of the way she ran. The tree man was very worried, but I thanked him and assured him she'd be fine and would come home. He wasn't so sure.




(dramatic reenactment)

I thanked him again. He had already refused any kind of payment the night before. He packed up his ladder and left.

I searched the area for Duchess for the next few hours. I went out back by her food bowl. Maybe three or four hours after her big leap, I turned around and she was chomping at her food.

She said hello nonchalantly. She was none the worse for wear and not even particularly hungry. You couldn't even tell anything had happened. I petted her and felt around for broken bones or pain, but she was a-ok.

We thanked our two cat lady friends and got the tree man's address and sent him a Home Depot gift card and and a note assuring him that the cat was fine.

So the moral of the story is: cat rescue people are amazing and no-nonsense cat advocates who will help you in this situation. Give their organizations money if they work with one! Also, some individuals are extremely nice. Also, cats are mysterious and also cute.

If you have a cat in a tree, I'd say try the bucket thing. I know it's hard to wait, especially after the third and fourth days. Get a tree trimmer. Maybe put something on the ground to lessen the cat's jump? Don't give up on them. Keep talking to them. Contact cat rescue people (who rule).

And call the fire department, if it isn't too dangerous.

Do not write these things down

Why would you tell me this is what you've written and expect me to read it?

1. Musings -- Best exemplified by the inexplicable Larry King and his bizarro, ellipsis-happy, stream of nonsensical consciousness newspaper column, full of Angie Dickinson shout-outs and endorsements of things like "rain" and "holidays". Musings are what kill first dates. Your musings are as fascinating to other people as your dreams are, which is to say, tell it to the mirror.

2. Random Thoughts -- Can't be bothered with a specific thought, I see. Let me help you. From now on, you can only write about death.

3. Rants -- Have you ever known a schizophrenic, or an elderly person who has slipped into dementia, or a weird boyfriend who lied about being employed? These are people who rant. Their rants are loud and make no sense and are best listened to from the other side of a locked door. Same goes for Dennis Miller, the unfunny, pseudo-intellectual, former joke-teller who's about as funny as Tiny Tim at the Council of Trent -- next up, my good friend and fellow cutup, George W Bush! When you feel the urge to rant, push your face into your pillow and rant away. Pull your head away from the pillow before you suffocate (I know how ranters lose track of time when they're really steamed about lady drivers who can't see over the steering wheel, or brussel sprouts).

4. Ruminations -- Musings that have been to college.

I hope we've all looked deep inside ourselves and realized that we should put the keyboard away before we embarrass ourselves.

And that reminds me -- brussel sprouts are disgusting! They smell like a wet towel that's been crumpled in the corner for three days, and they taste kind of like nothing, and it's like watching Lance Armstrong pedal a cotton gin for Scarlett O'Hara as Tara burns...Bats fly, but they don't have feathers. I wonder what would happen if we measured time in stones?

Vons Light Brown Sugar and Bacterial Cultures

Mmmmm! Don't the graphics on the Vons Light Brown Sugar package want you to start baking right away? Let's see -- you could:

1. put a bacterial culture on a cracker, or
2. make just the plain cracker, suffering from a rash, or
3. put peaks and valleys of glue all over a slice of pizza, or
4. put a diseased raspberry clot on top of an iced cookie.

I'm hungry already!

Mike Judge, the funniest man in America

"Beavis and Butthead" was so smart, it was dumb. So dumb it was smart? Both? Had they been Mike Judge's only contributions to American culture, he would still deserve a nod as an important contributor to smart comedy in a country that insists on acting increasingly dumb. Ever since Beavis told Morrissey to "get up off the ground and stop whining" in one of his videos, I've been in love.

Judge hasn't stopped working since, and the miracle is that he didn't pander to his presumed audience in order to increase his popularity and ride the gravy train of crude to the end of the line. He's gotten better and sharper and more subversively satirical as he's gone along. He's also gotten kinder, an almost unheard-of evolution for a highly successful television writer. His comedy despairs for the willful stupidity of mankind, but it does not condescend. He has hope. He doesn't think he's superior to his audience because he has made a lot of money, and that is a rare quality in popular culture indeed. (And if he does feel superior, he hides it very well.)

"King of the Hill" is a marvel of character-based comedy that respects both its characters and its audience. Hank and Peggy and the rest have their laughable flaws and exaggerated self-regard, but they also have their admirable qualities, most notably a core of decency that Judge celebrates in his work as the only thing that can save us from our own stupidity. It's no coincidence that the younger generation (Bobby, Connie, even poor Joseph) are the calmest, nicest, most tolerant and most curious characters in the show. They point to a future that has a chance, just maybe, of being better than the past.

We all know that OFFICE SPACE is a cult classic for the cubicle crowd (which is really everyone, whether you've worked in an office or avoided it because you suspect it's just like this movie presents it), but it's time now to make IDIOCRACY the classic it deserves to be. Forget its bizarre release (or non-release) history -- studio machinations are none of the audience's business, since they never make for a better film and we can't do anything about them anyway. This movie is hilarious in many ways, but mostly in its willingness to be stupid to be smart (that again). Presenting a future overwhelmed with advertising, sexual innuendo, and violence is not exactly groundbreaking, but linking it to our own embrace of things we know are dumbing us down and calling out the capable people who prefer to do nothing rather than lift a finger to stop it (as represented by the Luke Wilson character) is. Groundbreaking, that is. Showing the sheer scrot-level to which we allow ourselves to sink is not only funny but very very...funny. Oh, and a bit sad, if you have any hope for humanity and/or America at all. (Hmmm, "or" I guess would be America without humanity. Are we there yet?)

I feel like a scrot myself for analyzing a comedy, especially one that relies on yelling, slogans, phallic monster trucks, and the transmutation of Fuddruckers into ButtFuckers to tell its story. But that shit's funny, and it's accurate as well. I guess people haven't seen the movie due to its theatrical disappearing act, mixed reviews, and the fact that it hits too close to home. We can watch JACKASS, but we can't stand some prissy smartypants making fun of JACKASS. It's no coincidence that the people of the future ridicule Luke Wilson's perfectly logical comments by repeating them in a high-pitched voice.

Other great things about Judge are: that he's a Texan, that he shot his movie in Austin, and that he works with a regular group of hilarious actors (e.g. Stephen Root, the marvelous David Herman). His casting is impeccable. He is one of the few people in the state of mind and money that is "Hollywood" who goes his own way. He has something to say and he says it with a minimum of fuss or self-promotion.

And he's very, very funny.