Poor sports

mcenroeYesterday I watched the epic Federer-Roddick Wimbledon final. I hadn’t watched a tennis final in years and had forgotten how absorbing it can be. Although I found myself thinking that it would be even more enjoyable if Andy was named Frederick, so that it would be ‘Frederick Roddick’ vs ‘Roger Federer’ and have a kind of matter-vs-anti-matter vibe.

Anyway, during the match, they kept showing shots of a florid, smiling, very Swedish-looking man in a suit whom I soon realized was Bjorn Borg. This happily reminded me of the Borg-McEnroe years, which seems curiously like one of the great under-reported sports episodes in modern history (er, given how over-reported everything else is, I mean). How has this not been made into a bio-pic yet? Other than McEnroe maybe refusing to give permission, which come to think of it is probably exactly why it hasn’t been made into a bio-pic yet. But seriously, given that Paulie Shore and Steve Guttenberg have already been the subject of recent Oscar-winning bio-pics, why not Johnny Mac? For one thing, his feud the crusty old Wimbledon committee was more or less the last historical installment of the ‘Brash American vs. stodgy old English’ trope that had been running for about 300 years. Nowadays, civility has declined to the point where an American being rude to Brits or vice versa would no longer have any kind of cultural narrative– it would just be another example of some person flipping some other people the bird.  

Being a tremendous poor sport myself at sports and especially board games, I have a kind of perverse affection for the luminary poor sports in professional athletics. Not the contrived, sociopathic trouble-makers like Terrell Owens, but the true tantrum throwers: the McEnroes, the Charles Barkleys, the Billy Martins and Lou Pinellas. The ones who feel compelled to scoop up dirt and pile it onto home plate in order to convey disgust with the umpires.

Fun with bribes

I’ve always been fascinated by the protocol of petty bribes: the folded bill nonchalantly inserted into a functionary’s pocket, the suavely encoded ‘suggestion’ indicating what the bribe is for. One of my unrealized goals in life is to subtly condescend to someone by pretending to try to bribe them with a one dollar bill. Imagine your friend drags you to a posh nightclub that you don’t want to go to anyway and the doorman refuses you entry because you’re wearing sneakers instead of fancy shoes. Theatrically slip him a crumpled $1 and conspiratorially murmur, “My friend George Washington would like to join the party,” then enjoy the series of expressions that pass over his face as he realizes that you’ve essentially tried to buy him off with a candy bar.

In the Czech Republic, these ‘My friend so-and-so…’ lines take on an added dimension because the historical figures printed on Czech bills have biographies that are both more dramatic and obscure than their American currency counterparts. Imagine the fun/confusion that could result  from slipping someone a 100 crown note (equivalent to five dollars) and indicating, “My friend Jan Komensky would like to come in and develop a language where false statements are impossible.” Or: “Excuse me, but I think my friend is late to his defenestration.” A Tomas Masaryk would set you back about $250, but you would get to say, “My friend would really like to join the League of Nations.”

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Czech currency, incidentally, is really beautiful–  I will be sad when it’s eventually retired in favor of the Euro. The very first Czechoslovakian bank notes (along with the first stamps) were designed by the great art noveau artist and Czech patriot Alfons Mucha.

When Natural Disasters Collide

MG1The worrying mention of an unholy alliance between ants and bees in Krafty’s ant domination post (clearly the animal kingdom’s answer to Stalin + Hitler in 1939) reminded me of my pilot idea for one of those Fox lowest-common-denominator TV shows about things blowing up and people experiencing horrible accidents and whatnot: When Natural Disasters Collide. The idea would be to film footage of various natural disasters encountering one another: earthquake vs. tidalwave, killer bees vs. hurricane, etc etc. I can just picture something like this airing after Cops. 

One issue this raises is the need to clearly define the official canon of natural disasters involved. When I was a little kid, these were all-to-clearly defined in my mind and only shifted in terms of ranking– earthquake, tidal wave, hurricane and tornado as the Big Four; killer bees as a close fifth. I even remember exacting a stern promise from my father that we would not go vacation in Barbados ever, because I had somehow heard about that island being hit by hurricanes. Anyway, I think it would be important to define natural disasters, and to limit their inclusion to occurrences that are either easy to dramatize (earthquakes, tidal waves, etc) or involve more amped-up versions of things people are already afraid of (killer bees), or both (giant killer bees). I think this is a lot more fun than including things that are more abstract, grown-up and legitimately dangerous (Swine Flu, climate change, etc).

More ant facts

I seem to remember those ant fun facts coming from the printed side of a disposable Dixie drinking cup at the Bachrach for Congress headquarters where the young Krafy and I volunteered. But I could be mistaken.

In the spirit of ‘ants have psychiatrists’, here are other spurious ant fun facts that sound plausible but are made-up:

  1. Ants cannot move backwards.
  2. In order to perform certain tasks, one strong ant will throw a smaller ant, called a ‘jumper ant’, into the air.
  3. If you put all the ants in the world together end-to-end, they would reach the moon and back some arbitrary amount of times.

Ant World Domination

antAt some point many years ago, somebody (possibly my older brother) told me several “ant facts” that I have been repeating to anybody who will listen ever since: 1) The bio-mass of ants is greater than the bio-mass of all other living creatures on earth, including all other insects (and elephants); 2) There are more ants on one square mile than there are people on earth; and 3) Certain ants can blow themselves up to spread poison on their enemies, thereby protecting their colony.  After a few years I added some other ones, such as that ants have psychiatrists.  Of course, I have no idea if any of these “facts” are true, and I’m not about to use the internet or some other resource to find out now.  But lo and behold, a credible news source (the BBC) has this headline to a story: “ANT MEGA COLONY TAKES OVER WORLD.”  It appears that some tribe of ants has, well, taken over the whole globe, and they are all working in concert to accomplish their devious ant-aims.

Click here for more breathless details on “the true extent of the insects’ global ambition.”  And don’t miss the links to related articles detailing, among other things, ants’ punishment for “cheaters” and their no doubt ill-intentioned cooperation with bees.

Egh

An indication of how totally un-into cars I am: we bought a new car on Monday – the first car of any kind I’ve ever owned in my life – and I still haven’t seen it. It’s been parked on our street for two days, fifty feet from the door to our apartment, but I keep forgetting to go look at it when I leave in the morning.

The midget folio

This is a book I once saw in the rare books room of the San Francisco Library called Quads Within Quads. It was published by an oddball British printer named Andrew W. Tuer in 1884 and contains a collection of jokes about printing.

The jokes about printing that I am capable of understanding are generally pretty corny and hard to explain and not really worth the effort of explaining anyway. Take, for example, the left-hand page pictured below: you see a caption THE NEW STEAM COMPOSITOR under a robotic figure of someone standing at a weird kind of table. The joke is that steam-powered presses had been introduced earlier in the century to speed up the printing process; compositing, meanwhile, was the thankless task of assembling metal type by hand (thus, the weird table which held the type); therefore, one expects to see some sort of newly-invented machine that automates the task of compositing but instead sees a compositing automaton. Get it? No? OK, let’s just move on…

The great thing about Quads Within Quads is that it was printed with a square section cut out from the middle pages, like where you might hide a bottle of whiskey or a roll of microfilm. So, what’s placed in the cut-away square section? A miniaturized version of the same book. Apparently, this is called a ‘midget folio’ (when you produce a mini-version of a larger book). I was a little disappointed to learn that the miniaturized version does not itself contain an even smaller version, and so on and so forth like Russian dolls.

Quads Within Quads

tuer2

Top photo: both versions together. Lower photo: zoom-in on midget folio.

Enjoy Mock Duck

ihod

I found this vintage promotional Holiday Inn postcard in my step-mother’s house and it instantly became one of my prized images, earning the strongest magnet on my refrigerator door and loosely inspiring – with its garish, ghoulish Stepford-leisure-suit vibe – the whole ‘Enjoy Mock Duck’ concept.

As with the White Album or Carl Lewis’ disastrous rendition of the National Anthem, it’s hard to pick just one favorite part. But one minor detail I enjoy is where the father’s hand is lying on his daughter’s shoulder in the Swimming Pool Scene: note the strange turquoise shape that’s hovering over her shoulder. Is it a snorkel? A discolored candy cane? A sea horse? No, it’s a ribbon in her hair that’s somehow as perfectly stiff and lifeless as everything else in this little set. Marvelous.

Frontier-style justice with Mayor Schmitz

killprocWith the recent talk of martial law in Tehran, my thoughts have been wandering back to the 1909 San Francisco earthquake and its insane aftermath, when the city’s mayor issued a blanket proclamation warning that any and all looters found in the streets would be shot dead on the spot. And, apparently, over 500 civilians were shot, many of whom were not in fact looting but instead trying to protect their belongings from advancing fires.

With earthquake, fire and out-of-control firing squads already accounted for, its a wonder that tornado, tidal wave and killer beers weren’t inflicted on the citizenry just to complete the natural suite of terrors. It feels like it must have been a hundred million years ago that firing squads roamed San Francisco, given that nowadays you can’t step on a bug without people drafting a ballot measure in protest. It’s a vivid reminder of the old, weird Wild West past that the city emphatically grew out of.

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The alleged actual proclamation is posted above (although it clearly seems to have been photoshopped up a bit). Apocalyptic post-earthquake photos here. Many years ago, I made a weird little installation page using two of these photos on the old, defunct Mock Duck Project site.  Photo: fallen zoologist Louis Agassiz outside Stanford University.