I break bones and laugh.

I think it was Thriller. If you didn't own a copy of Thriller--an original copy, on vinyl--whose cover you dragged around everywhere or studied endlessly or pinned to your wall. If you didn't, as a child, dance around your room or your living room to "Beat It" and feel cool. If you didn't see a man moonwalk. If you didn't or didn't know anyone who owned and wore a single glove, preferably a perfect replica--white with silver sequins. If you didn't. But in a few cases, maybe it wasn't Thriller. Maybe it was Bad or even something later. All I'm saying is, if you didn't have a certain childhood memory that you can associate with him, before he was an abstract concept, a tabloid conceit...then you probably can't relate. But for some of us, he was a "strand of our cultural DNA," as John Mayer put it.

Or as Touré said the day of, "If you remember Michael Jackson as a weirdo you didn't know him. There was a long, beautiful, groundbreaking career before all that stuff."

( Read more... )

First of all, RIP Konrad Dannenberg. Don't know who he is? Well, he's one of the men who put a human being on the moon! See When The Germans, And Rockets, Came to Town, a favorite article of mine, for more details in general and NASA's own Legendary Rocket Pioneer Visits Kennedy. Or you know, any of the articles shooting across various news wires today.

"In an interview with The Associated Press on the 30th anniversary of the first moon landing, Dannenberg said of all the rocket launches, the test launch of the V-2 on Oct. 3, 1942, stood out the most. It soared 53 miles high, just past the 50-mile point where space begins. It was the first rocket to break that barrier."

Can you imagine what that felt like?

How did I learn about Dannenberg's death? From Twitter, of course. My favorite tweet this week (from Quest while at a gentleman's club): "lol @ 6 people outtin me on twitter like this is some gossip girl ep: SPOTTED AT STRIP CLUB W/ 4 HONEY DIPS, DR AFRO LOVE LOL"

I am down to Scumdog Nixon as my last Best Picture nominee to watch, having finished The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the other night. I thought I kind of liked it, but when I wrote a capsule review on Facebook, this came out: Lovely and well-acted, but based on an absurd premise that provokes more questions than it answers. Worst of all, the inclusion of Katrina is not only hamhanded, but cheap and offensive--it's the real curiosity considering Pitt's work with Make It Right Nola.

Um, thumbs down?

Urgh, I hate this story about the chimp in Connecticut, particularly all the "Ooh, what could have caused it? Could have it been Xanax or the Dow or the position of the moon?"

Or was it the fact that THE CHIMP IS A WILD ANIMAL? Have you heard about Frodo, the on-and-off alpha male at Gombe?

Frodo seized the position of alpha male in 1997, taking advantage of his brother Freud when the latter came down with mange. By then, however, his instinct for dominance had already produced a series of violent run-ins with prominent Homo sapiens. In 1988, for example, "Far Side" cartoonist Gary Larson was the target of Frodo's belligerence. Larson walked away from the tussle with only bruises and scratches, but his caricatures of primates as malevolent geniuses gained a sudden authenticity. A year later Frodo jumped on Goodall and thrashed her head so thoroughly that he nearly broke her neck. In the wake of that incident Goodall has consistently refused to enter Frodo's territory without a pair of bodyguards along for protection.

Oh and what happened after those incidents? "...Frodo snatched and killed the child of a Tanzanian park worker." To quote Cracked (on the subject of the dingo, but still), "It took 7,000 years of breeding and training to make your pet dog. This is not your pet dog." And hey, look--that post is where I learned about Frodo in the first place.

In other news, I fulfilled a cheese dream last weekend. I finally got some Rogue River Blue and it is everything that I hoped it could be. I was a little nervous when I was perusing the cheese counter and the guy asked me if I needed help--I didn't want to have that awkward conversation where you have to be like, "Actually...I already have a cheese advisor." [As per our previous talk, I also got Gjetost. As I was raised by Norwegians (on my dad's side), I am charmed by it. As a person who likes cheese, I am unsettled by it. I'm going to have to do some more experimenting with it, maybe try it in some recipes. "The Norwegian game sauce suits excellent game meals as for example reindeer." No, not that one.]

Speaking of food, I have to bounce 'cause it's dinnertime, but first--a conversation I had with my grandmother.

Me: Oh, MIA had her baby.
My grandmother: Oh, I knew that already.

PS: I don't care what anyone says--I am psyched about Inglourious Basterds.

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

From an email I just wrote: There's a sadness in me, thinking that just before I was staggering through my house repeating "I will not die, I will not die," DFW was believing that he should.
*****

Rest in peace, Mr. Wallace. And for the rest of y'all, if you're thinking of suicide, read this first.

EDIT: There were two George Carlin videos here, but they have since been removed from yt.

More later, when I've regained the full functioning of my extremities.

Ramrod, gone fission.