Genius Disney Remix by Pogo -- Thanks to Isa

I can't say I ever paid much attention to Alice in Wonderland until several DJs starting messing with the soundtrack and I wish I could remember them right now, but here's a guy, Pogo, who does remarkable remix work with the videos and music. Rhythmically compelling.

After this video, there's the Garden Remix based upon his mother's gardening. Genius!

Genius Garden "Remix" by Pogo

Click here.

Great Song -- Great Video by Little Dragon

More Wacko Conservative Moments

I don't fully understand why, but I sometimes subject myself to conservative talk radio to see what sort of churlish, loutish ranting qualifies as temperate deliberation on any given day. Maybe I just like the taste of my own bile as my indignation gets exercised. I listen for about 5 minutes and then wonder what in the hell I did that for.


Well, because it's fascinating. I feel like the anthropologist of some whacked culture of foam-at-the-mouthers. (You can actually learn more, by deduction, from the ads run on these shows: Lots of predatory loan, insurance, legal, mortgage, and precious metals ads for which Rush and others act as shills: "See my good friends at _________ and remember to tell that the Rush sent you! That's ___________ and, remember, tell 'em Rush says they're the best!")

Here's a little of what I've heard and read among whacko conservatives -- just in the last few days! Take it from me, turn away now!

Rush Lumbaugh, always the triumphalist when it comes to the impact of European settlements and conquest on Native Americans, insisted that the introduction of tobacco by the Native Americans to the Europeans was far more deadly and sinister than the slaughter and displacement of Native Americans and the annihilation of their cultures and languages. I guess, if I follow Rush's logic, we white folks should go out and kill the rest of the Natives because of the noxious carcinogen that they foisted upon us. Nevermind that conservatives, until well into the 80's, consistently opposed science linking tobacco to cancer, consistently opposed the regulation of tobacco, and remain opposed to the regulation of tobacco as a drug.

Some conservative radio host on Thanksgiving morning expressed outrage toward the new scanner and the optional pat downs at airports. He said, "It's time we targeted terrorists instead of sexually assaulting Americans!!!" Well, who could disagree with that? How about we give terrorists their own line at the security checkpoint? Perhaps we could just ask terrorists to identify themselves. Or we could just not check "Americans" at all and anyone who isn't an American would be, by definition, a terrorist.

I saw a big pickup truck today pulling a huge travel trailer (basically a motorhome with no engine so you have to pull it). With bay windows busting out of the sides, this travel trailer seemed disinclined to stay within the lines of its lane on the highway. Seemed like if I passed it, I'd go under one of those bay windows. Anyway, on the back of the travel trailer were two decals: One was a Ford decal which included this information: "Eating Dodges" and "Shitting Chevies." Now, I'd just spent a couple of days around Thanksgiving subjected to network television which seems to consist of screaming, almost unimaginably bad halftime shows, and the celebration of our greatest national holiday: Black Friday. But I wasn't prepared for the vulgarity of this decal. But what's conservative about this driver?

The other decal showed a little boy arcing his pee onto the word "terrorists." So, I'm guessing, no terrorists allowed in this mode of travel either. What's more, any terrorists on American roads will get their comeuppance when they come upon this American!

On the other hand . . . it's clear to me that this driver is himself al-Qaeda terrorist. A terrorist trying to fit in, to draw attention away from himself by seeming to be a vulgar gas guzzler. If not a terrorist himself,he is, at the very least, a sympathizer with terrorists insofar as he contributes to our dependence on foreign oil, a portion of the funds for which goes to regimes that support those who would roast us alive. So I assume he's part of the terrorist-sympathizer wing of the conservative movement which believes that some god will provide all the fossil fuels we could ever want and burning 'em won't cause any problems for us.

Okay, this next one doesn't involve politics so much, but . . .

Finally, Sarah Palin. In her new book, Palin apparently compliments former American Idol judge Simon Cowell for being the only person who tells the talentless that they are talentless instead of massaging their "self-esteem" like too many others do. However, when the judges on "Dancing with the Stars" dismissed Palin's daughter as talentless a la Simon Cowell, the Palinites called in with their support nonetheless and kept the kid alive! Where was Palin then with her defense of Cowell-like discernment? She'd probably dismiss Fred Astaire as "elitist." Later, when daughter finished high in the ranking, the young hoofer said, "This is a big middle finger to my mother's" opponents. Still more proof of a so-well-raised child.

For an excellent insight into the history of conservatism as an idea beginning with Edmund Burke's defense of Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy, read Corey Rubin's essay, "The Party of Loss" in Harper's magazine 2010.

Tech and Addiction: Excerpts from What I'm Reading . . .

From "Hammer and Sickle," a short story by Don DeLillo in Harper's magazine, December 2010. This paragraph describes the main jonesing of minimum security prison inmates who were once high-flying, fraud-fueled, business tycoons:


We had TV but what had we
lost, all of us, when we entered the
camp? We’d lost our appendages, our
extensions, the data systems that
kept us fed and cleansed. Where was
the world, our world? The laptops
were gone, the smartphones and
light sensors and megapixels. Our
hands and eyes needed more than we
could give them now. The touchscreens,
the mobile platforms, the
gentle bell reminders of an appointment
or a flight time or a woman in
a room somewhere. And the sense,
the tacit awareness, now lost, that
something newer, smarter, faster, ever
faster, was just a bird’s breath away.
Also lost was the techno anxiety
that these devices routinely carried
with them. But we needed this no
less than we did the devices themselves,
that inherent stress, those
cautions and frustrations. Weren’t
these essential to our mind-set? The
prospect of failed signals and crashed
systems, the memory that needs recharging,
the identity stolen in a series
of clicks. Information, this was
everything, coming in, going out.
We were always on, wanted to be on,
needed to be on, but this was history
now, the shadow of another life.


And from "Bright Frenetic Mills" by Thomas Frank in Harper's. Frank, an historian of economics, decries the dumbing-down of journalism which is more and more responsive to market demands and thus deprofessionalized rather than providing in-depth analysis of cultural and political matters:

So powerful is our desire to believe in the
benevolent divinity of technology that
it cancels out our caution, forces us to
dismiss doubt as so much simple-minded
Luddism. We have trouble grasping
that the Internet might not bring only
good; that an unparalleled tool for enlightenment
and research and transparency
might also bring unprecedented
down-dumbing; that something
that empowers the individual might
also wreck the structures that have
protected the individual for decades.


Photo credit: Federico Morando via Flickr.
Painting: Optimism, by John Slaby

Cruella de Ville Doesn't Read Fairy Tales

I'm always amazed at how well people know fairy tales because I have no memory of anyone ever reading them to me. Maybe my folks did, at least my mom, but I don't remember it and I don’t see that being part of my mom’s maternal repetoire. Too much ghastliness for her tastes and I’m damn sure her mother never read them to the little girl who became my mom.

I know my grandmother, Cruella de Ville, didn't read anything to me either or to my brother except maybe the Riot Act, preferring as she did to smoke in front of the TV while my brother and I cowered in our bedrooms afraid to come out. God forbid one of us should be in the bathroom when she needed to go. "There's only one bathroom in the house AND I'M AN OLD WOMAN!" she'd yell and I know that at least for me it had the effect of constricting whatever progress I might be making. My God, I thought to myself, is she gonna punish me for peeing or is she going to . . . . oh my God! . . . COME IN HERE?

Like I said, I don't think my parents read to me either; not that I recall anyway. Well, there was the one time when I'd stolen some milk money in the first grade and my mother suspected as much -- after all, what's a 6 year old doing with ten dollars of bills and change? -- so she read me the story of the boy who stole and got his hands -- that's hands as in the plural -- cut off. I confessed and feared books thereafter.

Okay, my mom didn’t read me a story of hands being cut off of some boy who stole something. She just sat me down and read a pleasant story that both calmed me down, I suppose, but also prodded some guilt in a boy whose mom was so nice and warm that she didn’t deserve a thief for a son and so I confessed, knowing, instinctively, that life would be better for it.

So, fairy tales? No, but I do recall going to the drive-in with my parents and probably with my little brother to see "101 Dalmatians" and being entranced by the whole spectacle of something so joyous, so engaging as an adventure with 101 spotted, happy pups appearing as they did on the largest screen I'd ever seen there in the middle of a warm summer night fragrant with popcorn, motor heat, and my parents' Winstons.

More Gaby Kerpel Music and Video

Gaby Kerpel is best known for the music he writes for an avant garde Argentinian circus. You can see this troupe and hear Kerpel at the Fuerzabruta show which, I believe, is still off Union Square in Manhattan.

Notes on the World Series

San Francisco just won the World Series . . . .

Me and Baseball:

Though raised mostly in Mississippi, I was born in Detroit to Detroiters, so I proudly stood by my, and my dad's, Detroit Tigers. A lonely devotion this was, too; made fierce by the disdain Mississippian peers directed toward all things associated with Detroit, except cars. I followed the Tigers, and especially hall-of-famer Al Kaline, for years in box scores and watched avidly whenever the Tigers appeared on television -- a rarity in the days of one or two televised games per week. I saved my pennies and bought a satin team jacket . . . which I never wore because at the time, the late 60's, I was the only person other than a real professional athlete, who I'd ever seen wearing a team jacket.



I thrilled to Denny McLain's 31 wins in 1968 followed that Fall by the Tigers coming back from a 3 games to 1 deficit to win the World Series against the seemingly invincible Bob Gibson in the 7th game in St. Louis. And the pleasure of this was made more delicious by the fact that the most hated teacher in my junior high hailed proudly and loudly from St. Louis. Stough was his name. Can't believe I remember the name and him.

But . . . thanks to Pete Maravich, Bill Walton, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, the Georgetown Hoyas, and the Run TMC Golden State Warriors, my interest in baseball withered to be replaced by (if you didn't recognize that pantheon of stars) basketball. Like too many people, I misunderstood baseball and complained about the lack of "action" as if chess were solely about moving the pieces on the board. As the great Leo Durocher, the manager of the World Series winning 1954 New York Giants, aptly stated: "Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand."


Just before this year's World Series, a report on NPR shared a study of baseball in which the "action" was timed in several games. Comes out to about 14 minutes. Even I, having forgotten baseball for so many years, knew that statistic to be misleading to the point of stupidity. Only someone ignorant of baseball could find such a statistic significant.


My Ignorance:

It was the second to last game of the National League Championship series between the Giants and the Phillies (a team I've always hated because in the 60's Philly, according to the appendix in the little Webster's dictionary I still possess, was the 4th largest city in America while Detroit was . . . fifth). 9th Inning. The Giants, at home, get a man to third. One out. Up comes (can't remember) either Juan Uribe or Pablo Sandoval. He hits a high fly to middle left field and my immediate reaction was . . . "Eh, a second out." But, in fact, as I realized almost immediately, it was a sacrifice fly that will win the game because the man on third came steaming home for the winning run.

Chagrined, I pondered how I had lost even the most fundamental baseball acumen. I thought it would be nice to "know" baseball again. Or did I ever really know it? Had I ever understood baseball? If I had, how could I possibly have switched to basketball? I used to envy writers like Roger Kahn and George Will and others who waxed rhapsodically about baseball. I watched Ken Burns's "Baseball" and secretly yearned for the love of baseball's pastoral pleasures (now, to my mind, sadly compromised by the noise and the commodification of every moment at the ballpark).


Been Away from the Game Too Long -- Baseball and 9/11:

In one of the Division Series' games, we're going into the bottom of the 7th Inning and the broadcast has not broken away for another set of commercials. Instead, we get "God Bless America."

My reaction was: Hey, what about "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"? Later, I was informed that "God Bless . . . " is televised, but "Take Me Out . . ." is still sung in the ball park and so I was initially placated.

Okay, so . . . 9/11, right? Right. However, I guess I'm really ignorant of the game because I have no memory of having heard "God Bless . . ." at the handful of games I've attended this decade.

And now that I've heard it 10+ times since the Giants entered post-season play, I'm convinced that "Take Me Out . . . " is more patriotic, more of a spit-in-the-eye to Al Qaeda. After all, we still have the National Anthem at the beginning of the game, right?

"Take Me Out . . ." proclaims a gospel of its own: the "good news" of the communal joyousness baseball bestows in a lovely ballpark; the joyousness of the American Pastime that cannot tarnished and certainly not defeated by some bloody nihilists. Every game of baseball, lovingly played and witnessed, tells Al Qaeda and its ilk that we are still here being Americans. Maybe that's not always pretty, but we are not bloody nihilists, that's for damn sure.



After the National Anthem, "God Bless . . . " just seems overwrought, the result of being far too earnest, and not sufficiently joyous. And there's the undertone, too, of darkness, of nativist triumphalism, a smugness. It's not the song. I wouldn't mind if the song replaced the National Anthem at games. No, it's not the song. It's the forced, sanctimonious communalism and the sense of it being a prayer for the validation of darker impulses.


Stats, Stats, and More Stats:

Seems like I heard a lot of not very dramatic, and even quite useless, stats on the broadcasts. I gather baseball is especially prone to stat-fetish. One of the following is a stat I heard on the broadcast. The others are made up:

First rookie to throw 5 scoreless innings in a World Series game since 1982.

Most broken bats in a World Series game by a team whose mascot is not an animal.

First team to win its first two games in the World Series by more than 5 runs
when both games were night games.

Dave First is the first first baseman named First in the first game of a World
Series when the winning run was scored in the first inning.

First shutout by a visiting pitcher with 3 syllables in his surname.

First time a rookie catcher is in the World Series when the play by play announcer
was himself a catcher.


Names:

I'm glad the World Series is still called the "World Series" and not the "WS". Why can't the National League Championship be called, well, "the National League Championship" instead of the "NLCS"? We've become acronym crazy in this culture. Words are mighty and often beautiful. We should use them, not reduce them to initials. (My students should now remind me of my own "WIR," my "ROL," and my "WWIOTFOWWT".)

Slightly related: I prefer "the 43rd Superbowl" to "Superbowl 43". (I use "43" because I think we're in the 40's with the Superbowl, but I'm not sure which 40. I did watch the Saints win last year. Made the Mississippian in me very happy.)

I prefer "September 11th" to "9/11".


Politics and Baseball:

On November 1st, the Giants of proudly liberal (YES! LIBERAL!!! You got a problem with that?!!?) San Francisco won the World Series. San Francisco dominated, repeatedly dominated teams, despite being deemed underdogs going into every post-season matchup. And in the end, a skinny hipster (or a hippie; can't decide) savaged the Texas Rangers; beat them deep in the heart of Texas, in the politically sclerotic heart of reactionary politics. Of course, this proves the superiority of San Francisco and our "life-style."



And so tomorrow, November 2nd, when we go to the polls for our nation's midterm elections, I will be inspired by our ragtag Giants when I yell on some street corner,
"LET'S GO DEMOCRATS!!!!" I might even throw in a "Fear the Obama!"








My Loyalties:

At the beginning of the season, I could have named one Giant: Tim Lincecum. And yet, I really couldn't have named even him because I wasn't sure how to pronounce "Lincecum."

I've lived in the Bay Area for 30 years, but I had to borrow a Giants cap when I went to Dallas for a wedding just before the World Series. Then, of course, gracious Texans seeing me in the cap would want to talk about players, stats, games, etc. I just had to admit, "The cap ain't mine and I just yesterday stepped up on this here bandwagon."

But on it I was. I was so on that bandwagon. So on it.

And now, we've won. We, that includes me, have won. Now, for the first time in maybe 25 some years, since the Tigers won in the 80s with Kirk Gibson, I can rattle off the starting lineup, and its variations, for a baseball team! And sitting alone in my home, I was strangely moved and overjoyed by the World Series triumph. So much so that it suddenly occurred to me that if the Giants had played the Tigers in this World Series . . . I would've rooted for the Giants.

Dear Detroit and Dear Tigers! Best Wishes, Greg

Wristwatches -- Quaint Machinery

From "A New Wrinkle in Time" by Matthew Battles in the November 2010 issue of Atlantic Monthly:

"Who wears a wristwatch anymore? Although luxury mechanical watches remain status symbols, time may be running out for the clock you wear. For a generation with smart phones and other networked devices readily at hand, the utility of the classic timepiece is unclear. “The Beloit College Mindset List,” a much-cited annual index of the rapid pace of cultural drift in the digital age, observes that members of the college class of 2014 are so unfamiliar with the wristwatch that “they’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.” Yup, that’s your wrist, old-timer. Touch of arthritis?"

Music or Lyrics?

Would you listen to a song because the lyrics seem wonderful to you even if the music is boring? And what about the opposite? Do you enjoy some songs that have uninteresting, sometimes even nonsensical lyrics? Do great lyrics compel you to like the music? Does great music compel you to take the lyrics seriously? Can you separate the music from the lyrics?

Take, for example, "Come Together" by the Beatles and more specifically by John Lennon. If you know the song, you know the lyrics are not exactly "We Shall Overcome." But, man, what a great song.

Then there are plenty of songs with interesting lyrics that really don't move me because the music is . . . eh.

Here's Lennon himself from the the Playboy Interviews with John and Yoko (conducted by Urban school father David Sheff) on his own lyrics:

Sheff: With these early love songs, were they about your girlfriends, your love life?

Lennon: They were basically made up. . . . Yeah, we were just writing songs a la Everly Brothers, a la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought to them than that -- to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant.

As for "Come Together," Lennon calls the lyrics "gobbledygook." But about the music he says, "It was a funky record. . . . It's funky, it's bluesy, and I'm singing pretty well. I like the sound of the record. You can dance to it!"

Why the Noise Everywhere?

Is it in our nature to abhor a vacuum of sound?

My dentist of 25 years just started broadcasting Baby Boomer E-Z listening throughout her offices as if an aggressive hygienist or a root canal were somehow insufficiently agonizing. When I inquire about this new feature in her den of pain, my dentist explains, "Oh, it's a service we subscribe to now. Don't you like it?"

I calendar a note to myself to take an iPod for my next dental appointment.

Later, on my way to the airport, I pull up to my local Shell station where I always seem to forget that the pumps have television screens. I insert my credit card and a cheery young face appears. "Welcome to Shell!" she says. "Did you know . . . ," she continues with her enthusiastic promotion of Shell services and products followed by commercials for television programs that apparently evoke uproarious laughter. I turn away from the screen, but I'm near the car, so I can't help but hear several manically upbeat solicitations of my consumer loyalty.

I get in the car where it's quiet. But if I want quiet so much, why did I turn on my radio before driving off? Or was I listening to music? And did I have my cell phone earpiece at the ready in anticipation of some call I might make?

And I admit that when I'm home, I usually have relatively quiet, instrumental music playing from a playlist I've created on iTunes.

Later, when I arrive at the long-term parking for the San Francisco Airport, the waiting area for the shuttle has music, the shuttle vehicle itself provides the same music piped in, areas of the airport, too, have their own Muzak, and the gates have inescapable, and inescapably loud television screens all dialed to CNN where some family is running around screaming during a competition of some sort.

The plane is quiet, except for the white noise of the engine, once we are in the air, but I'm happy with my iPod.

Dallas airport, same thing. Even at the baggage carousel. CNN and more screaming families, but this time it's one of those Judge Whoever small claims shows where we witness humanity at its most petty.

Why are we simply not allowed to indulge our own thoughts in quiet solitude.

This doesn't seem wholly new, but it does seem more widespread and is it just me or is it also louder? Or does it just seem louder because it seems more invasive?

A couple of years ago, I took a cab from LAX to a friend's home in Santa Monica. On the way, smooth jazz, a genre from which the blood has been drained, winds it oleaginous way into the back seat. Without warning, I found myself ensnared in the cab while being subjected to Billy Joel's "I Love You Just the Way You Are," a song I've heard maybe a thousand times, always involuntarily, always provoking a search for a means of escape.

But I was in the cab and there was no escape. To my chagrin, I realized I knew all the words to the song, but not only that. I also knew the ingratiating saxophone solo note for note. How? Because this shit is everywhere, that's how.

Could I have asked the cabbie to turn off the music? Sure, but then I may be denying him the music that makes his job more tolerable. And I'm also faced with knowing that he's thinking, "Who the hell doesn't like Billy Joel?"

Once, for few weeks during a year off from college, I was selling men's suits during the holiday season in a department store in Erie, Pennsylvania, where my folks lived at the time. It was a smallish department and I was usually there alone on my shift. I brought "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" with me to keep my mind occupied. A good thing, too, because I needed it to help me tune out the insipid Xmas music piped in . . . piped into all of America.

Took my lunch into the employee's lounge one day and I'll be damned if it didn't seem like the music followed me in. And, of course, it was louder in that smallish, featureless, all white room.

But I was alone. And desperate. So I went back out onto the floor, found a pair of scissors, returned to the lounge of the damned, situated a small table beneath the speaker in the ceiling, climbed up, pushed the ceiling panel up high enough to reveal the pablum transmitting wire, and, yes, I cut it and jumped down triumphantly to a nice quiet read.

Breakin' the Law, Breakin' the Law. (A horrible song by Judas Priest.)

I frequented that lounge more happily from that day until the end of the shopping rush. A quiet oasis it was. Totally.

I might have really enjoyed an iPod then.



So here's a list of quiet songs you might look up on iTunes or on YouTube:

Trolleyvox -- Midvale
Kaki King -- Ahuvati and Neanderthal
Wayne Horvitz -- Tired
Larry Goldings -- Redwood Portrait
Johann Johannson -- Part 2/IBM 1403 Printer (yes, that's right)
Fink -- If Only
Hem -- Sailor
Philip Bimstein -- As Plain in My Mind as Yesterday
Andrew Bird -- Yawny at the Apocalypse
Keith Jarrett -- Someone to Watch Over Me
Jenny Schneider -- Buoy Song
Steve Tibbetts -- Climbing
Ralph Vaughan Williams -- The Lark Ascending
Lou Harrison -- Waltz for Evelyn Henrichson


And the band in the photo at the top? They walked the streets and plazas of San Sebastian, Spain, a few summers ago. Boisterous and magnificent!

Photos I Like

A view of SF from the Grizzly Peak area above Cal, a closeup of a painting at the East Wing of the National Gallery in DC (can't remember the artist, but I really like the painting), and a water tower viewed from the High Line in Manhattan.

Wacko Conservatives -- How They Misunderstand the Founders and the Constitution

Columbia historian Alan Brinkley reviewing "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History" by Jill Lepore:

The architects of the Constitution, [Lepore] makes clear, did not agree about what it meant. Nor did they believe that the Constitution would or should be the final word on the character of the nation and the government. It was the product of much compromise, and few were satisfied with all its parts.

There were enormous omissions — among them the failure to define citizenship, the lack of a clear definition of suffrage, the evasion of most of the issues connected to African-Americans and Native Americans. Jefferson insisted that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” Madison asked in Federalist 14, “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” The reality of the creation of the Constitution is a far cry from the idea that it instituted immutable limits to what government could do....

We should not be surprised that so many Americans are angry. Almost four decades of growing inequality have left most of them no better off than they were in 1970, and many worse off. The recklessness and greed of much of the financial world — the principal causes of the crisis — have done far more damage than taxes or the deficit. The corruption and dysfunction of Congress and much of the rest of the government have disillusioned many. Everyone should be angry about these injustices, even if no one has proposed a workable solution to them. The Tea Partiers are right to be angry. But the objects of their outcries — taxes, deficits, immigration and supposed violations of the Constitution — are of far less consequence than the great failures that plague the nation.

I'm White . . . I'd Forgotten

I don't know about you, but for a long time, I'd forgotten that I'm white. Last December, I realized that I had forgotten that I'm a white person. Yes, I have acknowledged that I'm a white guy in the past, and I'd attended various conferences on race relations, diversity, etc., but a fuller recognition of my whiteness had slipped away some. What a luxury it is to just be Greg! What a luxury to let my whiteness come and go and never stay too long! At last year's People of Color Conference (POCC, under the auspices of the National Association of Independent Schools), I didn't rediscover my whiteness because of all the people of color around me. No, I became white again when the students of color from my school became more attuned to being students of color. And they were fired up and clearly in need of talking about it with whomever cared about them. My initial reaction was to defer to our Multicultural Dean, to let him have those conversations because he'd want those conversations, and then it suddenly struck me that all of us should be able to have these conversations with these kids. That the kids should be feel not just comfortable having those conversations with all of us, but also confident that we had something to offer them that recognized them not just as wonderful kids, but as kids of color. So if I was going to have the conversations, I had to acknowledge for myself what is surely apparent to those kids in their fired up state of revelation: Greg is a white guy. If you're white like me, I think we need to make time to consider our whiteness, our consciousness of whiteness, our willingness to address our whiteness with others. I think we need to forego the luxury of not thinking about it . . . if, in fact, you're like me and you haven't had to think about it. Now, I know that my situation - white, male, straight, and at least raised Protestant -- confers a lot more of that luxury than it does for women, Jews, gays. But that whiteness advantage we all share is a substantial luxury. And it may be that people of color would be pleased to know that we address it now and then instead of letting it slip away out of consciousness.

You Know, You Should, Like, Speak with Conviction?

This video does more in a few minutes on this subject than I've done in years:

Ouch! Why My Generation is Lame

From the 9.12.10 column by Thomas Friedman in the NYT:

Ask yourself: What made our Greatest Generation great? First, the problems they faced were huge, merciless and inescapable: the Depression, Nazism and Soviet Communism. Second, the Greatest Generation’s leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice. Third, that generation was ready to sacrifice, and pull together, for the good of the country. And fourth, because they were ready to do hard things, they earned global leadership the only way you can, by saying: “Follow me.”

Contrast that with the Baby Boomer Generation. Our big problems are unfolding incrementally — the decline in U.S. education, competitiveness and infrastructure, as well as oil addiction and climate change. Our generation’s leaders never dare utter the word “sacrifice.” All solutions must be painless. Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans? A national energy policy? Too hard. For a decade we sent our best minds not to make computer chips in Silicon Valley but to make poker chips on Wall Street, while telling ourselves we could have the American dream — a home — without saving and investing, for nothing down and nothing to pay for two years. Our leadership message to the world (except for our brave soldiers): “After you.”

Wacko Conservatives and Why Obama Should Go After Them

From the 9.12.10 Frank Rich column in the NYT:

In June, the Business Roundtable chairman and Verizon chief executive Ivan Seidenberg gave a speech so rank with self-victimization — he claimed that government was “reaching into virtually every sector of economic life” — that the normally polite Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein reviled him as “a corporate hack” peddling “much-discredited country-club nonsense.”

Seidenberg was soon topped by a multibillionaire Republican contributor, Stephen Schwarzman, who likened Obama’s modest financial regulatory package to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Among the clients of Schwarzman’s private equity company, Blackstone, is Goodyear, which signed on in 2004 to get advice on “optimal business configuration” and announced it was shipping more jobs to Asia the following year. That narrative, one of countless like it, might have come in handy last week when Obama was speaking in Ohio, just 30 miles from Goodyear’s headquarters.

. . . .

Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

Artists: Just Do It!

In The Name of the World, a novel by Denis Johnson, a character says this about art: "And I realized that what I most required of a work of art was that its agenda -- is that the word I want? -- not include me."

I've been pondering the nature of art. What makes something art? What makes you care about my opinion on this? You cannot hope to find some revelatory expertise here. You're hoping for an artful expression of unoriginal ideas.

Anyway, AG and I have tussled over whether the preparation of food can be an art form. She says certainly and I have been reluctant to agree. However, EC sees a measure of "pretentiousness" in certain dishes she's been served in the San Francisco area. It's as if she dismisses the artistic ambitions of chefs or friends adept in the kitchen. I push back here, too, and I'm left to wonder where I stand between AG and EC.

Who cares? Well, the greater question is, "What is art?" or "What makes some endeavor an artistic project?"

I like Denis Johnson's understanding: It's not a definition, not an attempt to answer the question, but it certainly does, for me, provide a guidepost for what I consider great art.

Food wouldn't qualify in this definition because chefs presumably want me to be delighted by their work. I am clearly part of their agenda. And, of course, this applies to most artists who must respond to the market to some extent if they want to do art.


In the movie "Big Night," the proprietor of a very busy, but schlocky Italian restaurant gives the proprietor of what we would now call an "artisinal," struggling Italian restaurant, the following advice: "Give them what they want and then you can give them what YOU want." Trouble is, once artists start compromising, they not only stop doing what they feel they must do, they also forget it. Or if they haven't forgotten it, they're so out of practice that they lost the ability.

So there's art and there's art. AG is right: The culinary arts are arts. EC is right: Chefs can risk pretentiousness.


However, we're a creative species. We try to turn everything into an art form. We add a flourish to the mundane and so, for example, walking eventually becomes dancing. Watch how kids innovate when playing a game. We want to be creative, beautiful, cool.

And we want to be acknowledged for our creative take on the quotidian. We want approval. At the same time, we tend to honor those artists who stay radically true to their vision without attending to the tastes of the day. Yes, we also think them jerks sometimes.

When I appreciate a work of art -- a novel, some music, something visual, and, yes, a meal, or skateboarding tricks, etc. -- my appreciation is serendipitous for the artist unless I'm part of a fairly predictable demographic targeted by the artist. I hope that the artist is creating whatever she needs to create and that I am happily responding to it. I don't want to think that she's pandering to my demographic or my tastes. I'd rather the artist do what she needs to do. And then, if I like it, great. If not, let's hope someone else will so that this artist can eat and work.

So art is best when the artist's agenda does not include me. And if the artist's agenda does speak to me . . . . good for the artist. I hope.

AG . . . Happy?

The College Essay: Who Are You and How Do You Know?

Look over to the right for the College Essay tag or link or whatever. Go there.

Cool Website to Play With

This is a bit like creating your own virtual, animated, Bobby McFerrin choir. Hard to describe and there's no reason to really. Just go to the site. Play.

Sex and Death -- Our Neuroses in the West

For at least 1000 years, we've not handled sex and death well in the West. Maybe not in the East either, quite possibly not in the Middle East, but definitely not in the Judeo/Christian, mostly Christian, West.

And why?

My guess: We've been neurotic about it ever since the vast majority of us bought into the notion that the Messiah, the Son of God, God incarnate, was born of a virgin, lived a virgin, and after dying, didn't stay dead.

So what does this story, especially as it is more and more glorified, imply? Well, one idea it seems to promote is that sex is too scandalous for a god, too carnal, even for incarnation. Tricky story here: On the one hand, we can't have a god born of an unmarried woman. Way too scandalous. On the other hand, we can't have a god born of a married woman who has had sex with her husband. If God is the father (and the Son as the Gospels would have it, thus giving us a family dynamic that at least casts a glance at Oedipus), then some mere mortal can't be involved . . . except in the giving birth part. But virgin birth? What's the point of that? Why is sex unworthy of a god's entry into the world? The Hindu Rama had a mama and a papa . . . on earth. Why not Jesus? I suspect it's because if Jesus comes from or goes to dust, the rest of us really are just dust to dust.

So a Child is Born in a manger and he, too, grows up to be a virgin before . . . .



Dying. But he doesn't stay dead. Or so we’re told. (As a child, I was instinctively skeptical about the Resurrection of Jesus. Sure, I wanted to believe it, but c’mon! My pastor didn’t cotton to skepticism. “If there’s one lie in the Bible,” he preached, “then it’s all lies!” This hard line struck me as troubling. It shut down the discussion instead of, perhaps, tending the sparse kindling of my flickering faith. And, of course, I didn’t really know about metaphor or allegory or even myth then.)

Death must be defeated. And if the Messiah can’t defeat death, what chance do the rest of us have? We call him the Messiah because he defeats death and shows us “the way.” Does the way require abstention, poverty, and crucifixion? Well, yes, it would seem so. After all, sex is suspect; we are plagued with wanting more than we have; and the anxiety about our mortality is the cross we all bear.
Now, there's much to inspire us in the resurrection part of the story, but only so long as we don't get the idea that consciousness cannot die and we can live forever in some sort of immaterial realm, i.e., as long as we don’t take the resurrection literally.

Why do we imagine that consciousness is eternal? Because we can’t imagine not being. It’s oxymoronic: to imagine not being. And so we create myths to help us wrestle with death. We let these myths work through the culture, through us as individuals; we revisit them and we try to derive some wisdom from them. It’s hard because we’re surrounded by what appears to be the finality of death. “Aye, but to die, and go we know not where . . . . ”

The 19th century French thinker Senancour struggled with faith and said, “if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us act as if it is an unjust fate." My response is, well, you do that. I can appreciate how unjust nothingness seems, and I can understand how hard it is reconcile to this. I sure don’t want to not be. So I can see how we’d create myths to helps us place all of this in perspective.

Perhaps the ancient Mesopotamian text “Gilgamesh” does this best. Our eponymous hero spends much of the time raging against the night after he sees his best friend, Enkidu, die. There is no bringing his friend back to life and Gilgamesh quickly surmises that the same awaits him, even him, the part divine, biggest, baddest, somfabitch in between the Tigris and Euphrates. So he looks for the elixir promising immortality. He finds it. Then loses it. Only then is he open to the wisdom of an elder who tells him that there the immortality of a memorable legacy is available to him, and that’s all, but it can be good, really good, if we can see the wisdom in it. Gilgamesh does, in fact, happily reconcile himself to this figurative immortality and then, guess what? Everything he found unsatisfying in life becomes glorious. And a life of wanting more, more, more only to be unsatisfied, unsatisfied, unsatisfied, becomes a life of fulfillment.

Great story!

But not good enough apparently for some of the seers to follow in the Fertile Crescent. I can hear them now, sitting around the fire, listening to the tale of Gilgamesh: “Yeah, yeah, I got your legacy, but don’t tell me that my mind will be snuffed out like a oil lamp.” What’s the point, after all, if we all just really die?

So we create myths and legends to help us deal with it. But let’s not create an industry around the idea that there is a literal life after death.

If it turns out that consciousness is eternal, then I wonder why there’s no firm evidence of that? We’re an ingenious species, a sentimental species. Wouldn’t someone in the after-life have figured out how to contact us in the here and now? You might say that God forbids this. But no one has rebelled against this edict? You might say that our temporal life will seem so . . . yesterday to us once we enter the Empyrean.

Much as I’d like to, I can’t buy it.

When we’re dead, we’re so dead. Death is like the bullet that destroys our brain before we hear the report of the gun that’s been pointed at us.

We rage against the night. As well we should. And we create a god to create a celestial, unlike the material realm around us, to support the afterlife. But if upon arriving in the afterlife, my consciousness is so expanded that I'm just la-dee-dah about Tina, then I'm not really me anymore. I might as well have died.

And since death is a door that has remained closed, we keep telling ourselves, via the afterlife industry, that there’s no brick wall behind it. And we have to keep telling ourselves and keep telling ourselves and keep telling ourselves, because if there IS anyone on the other side, they just don’t seem to care enough about us to make any contact with those of us on earth. Our insistence on an eternal consciousness is an afterlife addiction.


There’s a lovely, and gently honest, definition of faith in the Christian New Testament. In Hebrews 11:1, our unknown epistler explains, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It’s hard to know if the claim of “evidence” in the second clause is figurative or literal, but if it’s literal, it’s qualified playfully, I think, by the first clause which states that the substance of faith is hope. Just hope. Not evidence. And I admire Kierkegaard’s leap of faith whereby he embraces the second clause in its more literal sense. And what did he leap over? The Abyss of Doubt? Yes. And rational thought. And these two – the Abyss and rationality -- are inseparable because rational thought tells us that nothing awaits. Even that phrase, “nothing awaits,” seems to anthropomorphically suggest a consciousness that we will greet in some fashion, however briefly. No, let’s just stop hoping for what cannot be . . . nothingness does not await. It simply is.


My life is good. Sure, I don’t want the goodness of it to end. But nothingness means that I can’t possibly find myself in some realm where I’ll miss my earthly life.

I like the word “off” as a verb here. Disease, old age, or some calamity will off me. And I will not be in any form whatsoever ever again.

The Christian story of resurrection and the Gilgamesh legend of the partially divine being reconciling himself to immortality can inspire us to consider the figurative immortality we might achieve. But not if we take them literally. Then we just get neurotic as our beliefs fly in the face of what we see around us all the time, but are unwilling to accept and encouraged not to by the peer pressure of the after-lifers.

Wacko Conservatives -- Dr. Laura and the "Ground Zero" Mosque Opposition

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the conservative talk radio advice and insult dispenser, recently sprayed the airwaves with "n______" in response to an African-American caller who had been upset by some racial slurs, specifically n______, directed her way. Dr. Laura wondered if maybe the caller was too sensitive, too thin-skinned. After all, she argued, black people use n_________ all the time with one another. By the end of the call, Dr. Laura had used the term many, many times as she explained why white people might be confused about whether the term is permissible.

I'm not confused. Who's confused? White kids on occasion, sure. But adults? I'm confused about how anyone could be confused about it. What? African-Americans start using the word with one another (and for the record, I think it's a bad idea even for them) and suddenly it's open season for white people to use it? Who are the white people just waiting for tacit permission to say "n________" so that they can get down with their black bros? Who are the white people stupid enough to think that's going to be cool?

This needs to be explained to adults?

An NPR commentator provided a good analogy explaining why the permission to use "n_____" does not extend to anyone who isn't black. "I can say things about my sister," he explained, "but you can't say things about my sister."

So Dr. Laura apologized, but also told Larry King that she would quit the show so that she could speak freely. "I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what is on my mind, in my heart, what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry."

She's an idiot.

She never lost her First Amendment rights. The Bill of Rights protects us from the government, not from the displeasure of others. Does she really believe that the First Amendment protects her from other people taking issue with her? She has every legal right to say and think just about whatever she wants.

The First Amendment exists for the very purpose of allowing people to piss off other people and not get killed or jailed. We don't need a First Amendment to protect supporters of say, moms and puppies. We need it for ....

Muslims, I guess, in this country. But . . . conservatives have forgotten this.

Conservative commentators -- following in the footsteps of their ideological ancestors who persecuted Catholics and some wayward Protestants, not to mention Jews -- have conflated Islam with Nazism because a Muslim leader, an imam who has been chosen by President Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and the FBI as a liaison with the Muslim community, wants to build an Islamic cultural center two blocks away from Ground Zero to better serve his growing flock. “Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” Newt explained.

He has also argued that you can't find churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia, so why should we allow mosques here! Great idea, Newt! Let's use Saudi Arabia as the standard for religious tolerance.


1.57 billion people, 23% of the world's population, are Muslim.

To conservative Newt Gingrich, they are all Nazis . . . or the moral equivalent. For you young 'uns out there, Newt is a presidential aspirant, and former Speaker of the House. No conservatives have stated that he's crossed a line here. None of them seem to get it that when we suggest that all Muslims are morally nefarious, craven, and maniacally genocidal (i.e., Nazis), we might create a few more enemies among them.

And, yes, unfortunately the spineless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid agrees and our mealy-mouthed qualifier in chief, President Obama, can't take firm stand. (For the best commentary on this, see here.)

So Dr. Laura believes that her First Amendment rights are violated if people disagree with her; Newt believes that the First doesn't apply to people with whom he disagrees; Democratic Party leaders side-step the issue at best; and as is often the case, the only people who seem to understand the First Amendment are the people who need it most.

Another Overused Word: Passion

The statement on the bottle of Lipton iced tea says that the tea leaf selectors are apparently "passionate" about choosing the right tea leaves for my tea. What does this passion get them? A spot in the fridge of a gas station mini-mart.

One of the funders for my local NPR affiliate claims that accounting is not just their business, it's their "passion." Same's true for a pharmaceutical company going after diabetes. More and more, I hear this word used to define the commitment of employees in various commercial enterprises. I pity the employee who hasn't mustered this passion despite her obvious competence.

From whom shall we expect this passion then?

Is it not enough to be deftly skilled and diligent with our work? We must also have a "passion" for it? Apparently so. No longer can we merely enjoy our work, grow in competence, and attend to challenges successfully. And if we cannot necessarily enjoy our work, then can we at least trade competence and reliability for compensation?

No. Now, considering the full understanding of the word "passion," we must harbor one of two possible attitudes toward our work: We must either "suffer and endure pain" for our work, e.g., be crucified by it for some greater purpose. Or we must be in constant "throes of sexual ecstasy" as we go about our work. Between the two, I guess I'd opt for the latter, though I don't know how well that would go over in my line of work, nor can I imagine how I'd get through the day even if my employer approved of my new-found gusto.

But just imagine, say, the Bank of America building in San Francisco. From every office, at all times, comes "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

What could get done in such a place? What would meetings be like? And consider the effect on company morale if Barbara experiences a crucifying "Oh, my God" while in the next office, Bob experiences multiple orgasms . . . all day long.

Okay, okay, I know, with its current usage, the flames of "passion" -- whether they inflict pain or provoke climax (or both . . . for some?) -- have been doused so that, now, our "passion" need only be, what? A fanatical commitment to our work to the detriment and possible exclusion of other aspects of our lives?

Song of the Month or Week

"El Microfono" by the Mexican Institute of Sound. Very much fun.

Great Lines or Paragraphs From What I'm Reading

". . . I give you the fair-minded American patriot Josiah Quincy of Boston. In the 1760's he boldly opposed the British occupation, but when a mob of Bostonians tormented British troops into shooting some of them -- the Boston Massacre, it was called -- and the troops were charged with murder, he and John Adams defended the redcoats and saved their lives. Remember when American leaders did things like that? The country [at that time] wasn't just threatened by jackleg terrorists, it was occupied by an army, and yet people like Quincy and Adams felt strong enough to focus on due process -- to resist the occupation but still identify with the occupiers as people. Those were the days."

-- Roy Blount, Jr., in Alphabet Juice

Today . . . I Was Offered My First Senior Discount!

Today, at the age of 55, I was, for the first time, offered a Senior Discount. It was some youngster at the front desk at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum.

"Are you a member?" she asked as I proposed to purchase a ticket.

No," I replied.

"Cal employee or student?" she continued.

"I'm nobody," I said.

"Senior discount?" she offered.



I chuckled and asked, "What age should I have reached to qualify for the senior discount?"

"65," she said, looking right at me.

Amused, I smiled and asked, "What made you think I'm in the senior discount category?"

"Oh, we'd just take your word for it," she kindly offered.

She was charming, so, no, I didn't respond with, "Just take my WORD for it? What is about what you see here that would make you BELIEVE I'm 65 . . . or OLDER?!!!!!?"


The museum was $8 for non-seniors. $6.50 for seniors. Not being good with money, I didn't see my opportunity at the time. Nor did I reflect upon the fact that this was a milestone event in my life: my first offer of a senior discount.

I just said, "I've a ways to go to hit 65, but from your perpective it must be like looking at the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building from the sidewalk between them. Hard to tell which is taller."

"Yeah, I can't tell," she laughed, still looking right at me. In this moment, she was merely acknowledging what she must have considered our shared plight: the inability to make a distinction between 55 and 65. She wasn't being rude because she's not only unable to make a physiological distinction; she's not capable of discerning an emotional distinction between 55 and 65 either. From her perspective, if you're 55 . . . you might as well just be 65, 75, dead. It's all one big undifferentiated horror.

She gave me a ticket. I reached and took it without difficulty. One day, my hand will tremble a bit.


It was much later that I noted the milestone, but I also noted that it shouldn't surprise me. I was dressed in 3 shirts, a jacket, jeans, and a hat because it was cold outside. Or was it? I had noticed in the morning so many young people around Cal wearing far less clothing, sitting outside, riding bikes, and I had asked myself: "Is it cold, objectively, so that most humans would regard it as cold, or am I cold because I'm getting old? Do I have less energy to fight off the elements?"

Now, if I'm asking myself that question, then . . . .

Gotta keep a sense of humor about this aging thing.

Does being a curmudgeon, to the extent that I am, have an effect upon my face so that it makes me look older than I am. (What's the word for psychological conditions which slowly change the facial affect?)

Literally Overused Words and Phrases – Awesome, Literally, Unique, “It’s All Good.” And a Word I’m Afraid of: Curmudgeon. In Five Posts:

Okay, so these next few posts may seem curmudgeonly to some, but we’ll get to that later.



The misuse of “awesome” is not awe-inspiring, but it’s so fashionable now to use “awesome” (or “amazing”) as the standard response to the smallest convenience or pleasure that I have to wonder if the actual meaning of the word is forgotten, or perhaps it was never fully understood, thus leaving us with one fewer word to describe the stupendous.

Conversation in a store:

Clerk: There’s something wrong with the credit card operation right now . .

Me: Well, here, I can pay cash.

Clerk: That would be AWESOME!


Conversation on the street:

First person: Looks like there’s 15 minutes left on this meter.

Second: That’s AWESOME, dude!


It’s actually kind of cute and kind of annoying all at once. It’s cute because people, mostly young people, say “awesome” with such conviction. It’s as if they’d suffered uniformly drab, disappointing lives up to that moment. “Tic tacs in colors other than white? AWESOME!!!” “There’s a bus-stop. AMAZING!!!”

“Really?” I want to ask. What word is left, then, for, say, comprehensive climate change legislation, a cure for cancer, the resurrection of John Lennon? And so the evocation of awe, previously reserved for the wonders akin to those given us in the Old Testament, annoys after awhile for the same reason that the misuse of “literally” annoys.

This brings to mind the current vogue in the expression of gratitude: “Thank you soooooo much!” which can be evoked by a gesture as simple as loaning a pen to someone for a moment. If such a simple courtesy evokes such gushing gratitude, what is left if I save that same person, moments later, from an oncoming car or a knife-wielding maniac?

Addendum to "Awesome" -- Mea Culpa!!

One of you wrote in response to this entry:

greg, your blog is just AWESOME! amazing, really!

My initial reaction was that I was so pleased that she liked it . . . and then, after a few moments, I realized, to my chagrin, that she used "AWESOME" and "amazing" for comic effect.

Whereas, initially, I just felt complimented.

So, it would seem that, for a moment, I accepted the possibility of my own awesomeness. And that, dear reader, is even worse than the overuse of "awesome."

Literally . . . Overused

I am not literally sick to death of the misuse of these words. Why? Because if I were, I’d be dead. Why? Because the presence of the adverbial form of “literal” in this paragraph’s first sentence tells you . . . . oh, you may be literally tired of this, but . . . I continue: The presence of “literally” means (and, of course, I’m tempted to say it “literally” means) that what follows in the sentence happened just as the words indicated, i.e., in reality, actually, factually. “My head literally exploded when Rosie played 30 minutes of Justin Bieber last night while I was doing math,” means that . . . you’re dead and your math book is a mess.

(Tina sometimes, but never literally, talks trash.)


Yes, yes, yes the overuse of the misused “literal” is not a revelatory observation. Others are fighting the good fight on this front. See here and here. And, yes, I know that the abusers of the word don’t mean me to believe that whatever follows “literally” literally happened. People are speaking figuratively, of course. But is that the end of it? Is that really an adequate defense for “I literally coughed my lungs up” and “I literally cried my eyes out” and “_____(your favorite here)______________”?

Can’t we also recommend that we literally give the figurative “literally” a rest? That would be awesome.

Unique -- This Post Is Not

I’m amazed I intend to spend time on the death of “unique” as a spoken word. The misuse of it has so ingratiated itself into common parlance that it’s official definition may change in my lifetime. Custom has long made “unique” more applicable to the merely unusual and so those of you out there wanting to fight this fight . . . will lose. My English teachers, yours, too, probably, occasionally explained that “unique” is like “pregnant.” There are no degrees of pregnancy. You either are or you’re not. So with uniqueness. Something can’t be “very unique.”

I rarely hear it used correctly, i.e., to indicate that some phenomenon is “one of a kind”, absolutely sui generis. Rather, I most often hear it used to describe relative rarity and, sadly, when I hear it used correctly, the person is quite often wrong about the uniqueness of the phenomenon because they are too hopeful or just quantitatively wrong about the uniqueness of the matter addressed.

It used to be that “unique” maintained its integrity in the written word, but with so much online writing, without proper editors (like Tina), “unique” will fall from its lonely perch to join the ranks of “unusual,” “rare,” “surprising,” and other slovenly, unquantifiable terms.

The misuse of “unique” may be due to the very construction of the word itself. “Un-” gives us the “one” and oneness of things. But the French “-ique,” like the English “-ic” translates to “in the manner of” or “kinda’ like” as in “heroic.” So if “unique” were fully anglicized, it might be a very ugly and unEnglishy “oneish,” pronounced “one-ish” and that does, we must admit, suggest relative rarity rather than one-of-a-kind absolutism. Americans are often peeved with the French and thus may be sabotaging the Frenchy “unique” because we can perceive the potential “oneish” and would use it if that “-ei-” weren’t so thoroughly hideous.

And, just in case you think I’m literally tone-deaf to how silly my objection to “unique”’s misuse makes me seem to you, dear reader, well, I see you rolling your eyes and exclaiming, “No one cares!”, but you are so wrong for I am not unique in my banner-raising about this matter. I have the English speaking world’s grammarians and English teachers behind me and they kick ass. Awe-inspiringly.