Do I like that I ask myself questions out loud as rhetorical device? No. But do I do it anyway? Yes. Am I trying to stop? Absolutely.

Among the many verbal and rhetorical ticks I’ve tried to fix in myself – including but not limited to the overuse of “um,” an overreliance on “interesting…” when I don’t have something more specific to say, and the tortured locutional use of double negatives (“It’s not unremarkable to me that…”) – the use of self-directed questions to make a point is rapidly becoming public enemy number 1 in the abstract citizen world.

A lot of people use this, I think, because it allows them to set up their own microterms after positing a macro rhetorical strawman. In some cases, the purpose of the sequence is to illustrate that the microterm is a lot less extreme than the macroterm. For example:

Am I for the indiscriminate euthanizing of Rottweiler puppies? Absolutely not. Would I support some measures to identify and track violent dogs and keep them away from children and the elderly? Sure, if it can be done in a minimally invasive way. And would I support taxing all Rottweiler owners to pay for a testing program that? Hell yes I would.

But really, it’s not even that these questions create a dialogue that’s intellectually dishonest or that is manipulative. It’s just…inefficient and inartful. And pedantic. We’re not in a classroom, and I don’t need to run anyone through exercises. Whatever happened to being able to directly express ambivalence or caveats? I’m not for this idea, but I think there is merit to a portion of the underlying argument. Or, I’m for this in principle, but oftentimes good ideas in this area don’t get successfully translated into practice.

Since when do I need every thought to be broken up into a Q and A format? The Ithaca chapter of Ulysses notwithstanding, I think we would all do well to express our ideas as directly as possible, and let questions arise naturally as the result of statements we’ve made, rather than injecting them into our monologues as a preemptive measure to frame the discussion.

Having said all this, will I probably still fall off the bandwagon? You bet. Will I judge you if you fall off too? Absolutely not.

Still life with student of nutrition science

[The Abstract Citizens are out for a weekday evening stroll. Mr. AC notices some graffiti on a park bench.]

Me: Does that say..."fuck bananas"...?

Ms. AC: Hmmm. Someone must really dislike potassium.

USCIS: where we're at...

So, you may recall that I thought, naively, that our greencard interview - originally scheduled for June 2008 - would be right around the corner.

In fact, USCIS told us as much this past September. "Oh, you're about to be-rescheduled. It says right here in the system. Your interview will happen in less than 6 months."

Cut to 6 months later. No new date. So, we go through the pain in the ass of re-scheduling and making it to an "appointment" with USCIS to find out what is going on. It seems - oh boy, this is a good one - that a mere 4 weeks after our last visit, in September, my biometrics - taken back in early August 2007 - "expired." Apparently, my fingerprints and picture are only considered "current" for 15 months. So, the person who saw us in September didn't think it would be important to tell us that we were a mere 4 weeks away from having our petition be completely "frozen."

But surely, you think, they told us it was frozen? SURELY the much-touted "check your case status online" function would tell us that our case was something other than "pending"?

To you, I say: "The very pants I was returning!" And then I shall chuckle heartily.

So, now I get re-fingerprinted on April 7, and a few weeks after that, we schedule another "appointment" and beg someone to please please please move our case to the top of the list instead of having us start over from the beginning - a prospect that means, if you do the math...August 2007 to June 2008 (original biometrics-to-interview timeframe) - well, it us in the interview hotseat sometime in February 2010.

Yup. Twenty motherfucking ten!!! The Abstract Citizen will remain a very concrete nonpermanent resident alien for a while longer, it seems.

Yes, I am posting from a USCIS waiting room...

...But no, our interview has not yet been re-scheduled. We are just here to see if they can tell us when the damn thing will be re-scheduled for.

In other news, there should be a special word for the kind of contempt I felt driving home from the half-marathon on Saturday morning, around 9am or so, seeing people getting all dressed up in their gym threads, going out for 20 minutes of light cardio or whatever...we'd been awake for 4 hours and had already run more that. 13 miles when these people roll out of bed for their "exercise." Bastards.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated...

Because I roll on the three-years-late wagon, I just got around to watching “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” which was tremendously enjoyable and appropriately anger-inducing. It’s really hard to imagine this not being one of the most important critiques of the corporate film industry ever committed to, uh, film.

And many of the broad points it makes feel right and seem valid: as a society, America tolerates violence more easily than sex; and even then, male pleasure is definitely more ok than aggressive sexual behavior from female characters (or, perish the thought, the depiction of female sexual pleasure.)

But I have one major bone of contention with the film, and it happens as an aside – taking up no more than 5 minutes, maybe, of the total running time, although it’s a recurring theme throughout the movie. Namely, it’s the implication that the MPAA ratings system somehow makes American culture more bellicose and violent. To review, the MPAA ratings system was born in 1968. Here are a few other things that happened in 1968:

RFK’s assassination
MLK’s assassination
My Lai massascre
The, uh, 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago

…to name but a few. And of all the things we want to single out in that hectic year, that may have left America more divided and more prone to violence – we’re going with the MPAA ratings system? The fact that some kid had to wait till he was 17 to watch “In the Realm of the Senses” is what makes America more violent?

I hate this in otherwise rational liberals. Why presume that a prudish minority is imposing some tyrannical form of censorship over the country? Sure, I have major beef with the process issues surrounding the MPAA ratings system, but I don’t presume that a group that doesn’t reflect my views is automatically not representative of America. A lot of the filmmakers spotlighted say, “Well, I’m a parent too! And I don’t have a problem with my movie! Why do they?” And aside from the solipsism inherent in that argument, it's worth noting that this is just a nihilistic line of thought that leaves no room for any kind of representative committee, because everyone is always going to disagree with something a committee does.

Why is it presumed that the individual’s relationship to culture is a one-way street? In this linear worldview, our cultural beliefs are dictated by the MPAA. We blindly accept the norms dictated by our MPAA overlods and become more violent. But isn’t it just as likely that the individuals on the MPAA ratings board were influenced by something that was already prevalent in the culture - a prudish and socially conservative outlook when it comes to bedroom matters? And that, in turn, the individuals on the board are reflecting back broader cultural norms that they themselves didn’t create, but absorbed just the same as we did? Sure, the MPAA board reinforces certain ideas, but did these people create those norms? Please. And just because a few of us don’t share in those norms doesn’t make the norms any less real. America is, by and large, fairly conservative. Remember that it took a very enlightened Supreme Court justice for Ulysses to be published in America - 10 years after it was released in Europe.

And the conspiracy theory then has to build: that the MPAA board is somehow a cabal of union-hating villains as opposed to well-meaning but naïve and misguided self-righteous people. Does anyone who knows the DC area think that a set of their neighbors from Montgomery or Fairfax county would come to different conclusions than the MPAA board??

To be fair to the filmmaker and to the directors interviewed in the documentary, I get what they’re saying – and I think it’s infuriating. These people count the number of pelvic thrusts in a sex scene, or they disproportionately object to female sexual pleasure over that of males. Sure, this has some kind of impact on children. But only a filmmaker would be arrogant enough to think that real-world violence could have been prevented if more teenagers had easy access to “I am Curious (Yellow)” over your standard-issue action flick. If it were that simple, why would societies that are notoriously more permissive than the U.S. also have problems with endemic violence? (Helloooo, I watched “Caligula” on prime time tv when I was 13 – in a city where a bad weekend can mean 100 homicides.)

Other than that minor quibble, the film is spectacular, and if you don’t know much about how movies get rated PG-13, R, or NC-17, go watch it – three years late. Just like me.

So, to review:

I'm running a half-marathon this Saturday. Until last Friday, I thought I had two more weeks to go. Awesome.

I haven't run more than 9 miles during this whole "training" period. Awesome.

I have a cold. Awesome.

Around mile 7, the route actually passes directly in front of our apartment building. The temptation to go inside and go back to sleep will be overwhelming. Awesome.

Two good friends moving away. Awesome.

The only truly good news I've gotten today is that the weather forecast for next Saturday looks good. It'll be in the mid-40s when we run, which is very do-able.

Going home to nap. Awesome.

The only reason I think I'll give Watchmen an A- is...

...that they had to make the action scenes, you know, very action-y. This undermines the central point of the comic book - that these are normal people who, for their own confusing psychosexual or militia-minded reasons, derive enjoyment from dressing up in costumes and fighting crime. By having them snap people's arms in two and do all sorts of super hero-y stuff, it sort of dilutes the point that Doc Manhattan is the only person with real superpowers.

BUT - having said all that - I second Das Binky's review. In a series of conversations with people, I've more or less said something like, "Here's what I would quibble with...[list of minor grievances]...but, having said all that, if you wannt hop on the metro and go to the Uptown right now, I'll totally watch it again."

Rorschach and The Comedian are every bit as good as they are in the book. And they pulled off the Doc Manhattan/Mars thing in a way that was basically frame-by-frame, line-by-line from the book, but it didn't feel canned or stunted. I was a happy, happy camper.

It has come to my attention...

...that many people - especially those of you who have never bought a bean burrito and a .22 oz Sammy Smith Oatmeal Stout from a shaggy dude in the parking lot of a phish show - are unfamiliar with the brilliant use of the term "wook" as slang.

To remedy this wrong, I give you The Smoking Gun's gallery of people who were arrested at the Phish reunion show in Hampton, VA this past weekend. It is wook-central.

A personal history of gin

When my roommate college was nearing his 21st birthday, he kept saying things like, “When I can do this, we’re going to start drinking a lot of gin and tonics.” I don’t think I had any idea what a gin and tonic tasted like before then – the only thing I knew about them was that in a video of our moving-away-from-Berkeley party, one of our friends – dressed in drag, in one of my mom’s dresses – got a big laugh when he fretted about losing his gin and tonic, so I gathered that my mom used to like them before switching over to vodka.

But once EDS crossed the line into adulthood (defined in alcohol-purchasing-ability, of course), we were setting aside 20 bucks a week for a Friday night trip to the liquor store. If we had more than 20, we could get a liter bottle, but usually we had to settle for 750 ml’s. We tried Tanqueray and Bombay, and were quite happy with them – until one day we decided to spring for the Bombay Sapphire. We spent a lot of time in the room, staring at the bottle – the ingredients etched into the side, the higher alcohol content. We smelled it, and man, we drank it.

A few months into this gin phase, we discovered something gross, and utterly delicious: a lime wedge from the previous night, left to sit in a glass with melted ice and some gin? It made the gin and tonic supersonic, as we would say. The lime flavors were concentrated and flowery, and we found that when we couldn’t get Sapphire, this lime trick was a great way to mimic some of the enhanced flavors without spending the extra cash. We would have people over for g and t’s and explain the nuances of this trick – it helped you save money on gin and also on limes, since one lime became enough to get you through the weekend.

That summer, my mom chuckled when she saw me making one. “Add some bitters,” she suggested. "It changes the drink." And it certainly did. Except I sort of outgrew Sapphire. I wanted something cleaner and less flowery, so I went back to Tanqueray. My switch was buoyed by a friend’s revelation that one of my professors drank Tanqueray on the rocks when he went out.

A few years after college, I noticed new brands on the shelf. Bols was interesting – I first had it in Rio, with fresh Persian lime wedges, and didn’t understand what the waiter was telling me - what the heck was a Bols? It's heavy on the juniper. With enough lime, it tastes like the beach. A few months later, I saw the bottle in a liquor store here and put two and two together. Then Daresbury’s came out, and that was a’ight, it was a’ight. Van Gogh made a gin, and now these new high-end gins were becoming a bit generic to me. And then I found Hendricks, and my life changed completely.

Instead of trying to hide the herby gin flavors with lime, Hendricks offered an opportunity to exacerbate them. More herbs! Embrace the cucumber! And embrace it I did. It has had more staying power than any other gin, in my experience. I occasionally pick up a bottle of Plymouth for martinis if I want to feel like I’m having a working man’s cocktail, but Hendricks is still where it’s at. Not surprisingly, my all-time favorite cocktail is the Cucumber Collins at Hudson. I could easily down five before looking at the time. This is a bad thing.

As scotch began to vie for my attention, I found myself having a hard time choosing between the clear and amber liquors. Even now, I probably go to scotch more often than I should, especially since every time I have a good gin cocktail, I’m reminded that gin really is my first 80-proof love. And with summer right around the corner, I definitely plan to reacquaint myself with Mr. Gin on my rooftop deck.

Fun facts I’ve picked up along a lifetime of gin-love: gin was sort of like the crack cocaine of 17th and 18th century England. It was considered a vile and classless libation, and you sometimes had to procure it from loose women who sold it from under their skirts at public executions. Hogarth’s Gin Lane series is infinitely more laughable than any “Just say no” campaign you might remember from your lifetime.

Impossible to estimate how much gin I’ve consumed, as I did for beer. But here is a partial list of all the states and countries in which I’ve consumed gin:


California
Canada
Colorado
England
Florida
Illinois
Louisiana
Massachussetts
Mexico
New Hampshire
New York
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Ohio
Oregon
The Netherlands
Rio
Spain
South Africa
Tennessee
Vermont
Washington State
Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia
West Virginia

Infundibuliform

It looks like a made-up word.

But thanks to A Word A Day
I know that it's all too real:

MEANING:
adjective: Funnel-shaped.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin infundibulum (funnel), from infundere (to pour in), from fundere (to pour). Ultimately from the Indo-European root gheu (to pour) that is also the source of funnel, font, fuse, diffuse, gust, gush, and geyser.

The likelihood of getting head.

Good thing I’m taking a couple of classes at the USDA grad school to prep for real grad school in the fall. I have no idea why the USDA even has a grad school, but the nice thing about it is you can take classes for about $400 a pop, which – in DC – is a great deal because it is about as good as Montgomery College in terms of price, and you don't have to go all the way out to the end of the red line for it.

So, I'm taking statistics. The professor means well, though he keeps making transcription errors in his problems – transposing values, getting his columns mixed up, going back and checking his notes, realizing he can’t read his own handwriting, apologizing, erasing everything on the board, starting over, making the same mistake a second time, etc. If it’s a technique to get the class involved, it works wonders, because we all routinely chime in now to keep him from going too far down the wrong path.

His English is good but not great. Yesterday, in particular, we got some unexpected comedy when discussing probabilities. He was talking about flipping coins, except he would forget to pluralize “head.” So, this led to lots of statements like:

“Ok, now you’ve gotten head twice. What else can happen?”

“How many more times can we get head in this example?”

“What is the likelihood that you will get no head?”

And so forth. Comedy gold for the ten-year-old in me.

Hoya to be

Just got the letter!