Still playing catch-up on my blog reading after the vacation. Next year? WiFi.
I missed a lot, not reading every day, but it's been a lot of fun going back through people's archives. Mostly I missed a lot of news. News from the world of Fashion, for instance.
Neddy Jingo, the manliest metrosexual east of Lake Michigan---Nancy Nall's husband is the manliest metrosexual in America---reports from the land of haute couture that Americans are slobs. Neddy, being tactful as well as manly, because manly men mind their manners, as all fans of Gary Cooper know, Neddy puts it more tactfully.
Ned longs for the return of the day when men were men and dressed like it, when 40 year old men did not leave the house dressed like 16 year old pizza delivery boys, when 16 year old pizza delivery boys did not dress like 16 year old pizza delivery boys but like 40 year old men:
Oh, what a country we would be if we could revive a sense of shame in a man if he leaves the house in the morning without a sack suit, brogues, waistcoat with watch chain, shirtfront, string tie and skimmer! What a noble cause it would be to revive social opprobrium for crimes against elegance! A national Jeeves to sniff scornfully at the backwards baseball cap, logo-encrusted leisurewear in the office, the low-rise love-handle, the flip-flop, the peeping tattoo! You're not going out dressed like that, are you?
Ned waxes particularly elegant on the elegance of the straw boater or skimmer.
Speaking of Nancy Nall, but not of her manly metrosexual husband, except indirectly: Nance got to thinking about the big strike at her husband's newspaper 10 years ago. This is news in that it offers a sad commentary on the state of unions, health care, job security, and the newspaper business today.
Nance waves a clenched fist high and cries, "Solidarity Forever!"
It would have seemed ridiculous, these white-collar, college-educated people carrying on like this, yuppies who already made pretty good money and didn't have to worry about losing a finger in a punch press. But this is Detroit; we name freeways after labor leaders here. Many strikers were the sons and daughters of Teamsters and auto workers, people who owed their college educations to the good salaries their parents made as union members. There were signs on lawns all over southeast Michigan: "No scab papers at this address." These weren't employees; these were readers. Even if they weren't screaming in their bosses' faces, there was a great deal more at stake than just one company and its workforce.
And I think everyone must have known that. One of my writing-group members went through this and submitted his personal recollection for a critique. He was non-union and his wife was a striker, and there were stories of tears and shouting and a birthday cake being thrown into the trash in fury, of riding in the company van to work while police held the pickets back, and stony stares and security guards who stuck video cameras in your face. The van driver casually calls the pickets assholes and the passenger says that's my wife out there...
I didn't actually miss the news that James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, died, but I didn't have a chance to think or read much about it, much less write about it. Domoni of Temple of Me, though, had a personal connection that propelled him to the keyboard. He met Doohan once, at a Star Trek convention, back when Domoni was a kid, and "The Day James Doohan Came to Town" saved Domoni's mother's son from a black hole of bitterness, withdrawl, and self-loathing:
I was 11 and my mother was having a rough time. She was struggling to help her son. My father had disappeared. I wasn't giving her any way into my thoughts. I had withdrawn. I would go to school and my room. The only thing I really looked forward to were Sunday mornings. After church I'd sit glued to the TV and watch Star Trek. I'd been too young to watch it in prime time, but I was devoted in reruns.
In the paper one morning my mother found something she thought I'd enjoy. A local hotel was holding a Star Trek convention. Fans of the show would get together and there would be Star Trek items for sale. There would even be a Star Trek personality on hand to talk...
...When James "Scotty" Doohan finished speaking and answering questions he wasn't whisked away by convention handlers. He sat down and talked. To each one of us. One or two at a time. For the rest of the afternoon.
Understand this -- James Doohan spent part of a Saturday afternoon talking to a kid in a dingy hotel meeting room. A kid abandoned by his father. A kid who was drifting away from his mother. James Doohan didn't learn that about me. I'm sure he saw just another kid who was amazed Scotty was sitting in front of him. But my mother would tell me later she noticed how nice this man treated her young son...
Another post that's not news except that it is, because of its relevence to what's happening every day in the White House: Carla of Preemptive Karma remembers an encounter during the 2000 Presidential Campaign with President Bush's surrogate mommy and nominee for Deputy Secretary of State in Charge of Lying to the Arab World, Karen Hughes, during which, surprise, Hughes told Carla a big, bald-faced whopper of a lie. They just go from "Lie to Shining Lie," says Carla.
I held out my hand and introduced myself. I told her that while our politics were completely different, I thought it was wonderful that a woman was so high up in helping to run a Presidential campaign.
She smiled one of those slick, oily Texas charming smiles that play extremely insincere in this part of the country. She then proceeded to tell me that Governor Bush was the only Presidential candidate who had a woman so high up on his campaign staff.
At first I didn't think I'd heard her correctly. I repeated what she said just to clarify. She responded in the affirmative.
I asked her if she was familiar with Donna Brazile the woman who was running Al Gore's campaign?
Karen never stopped smiling. She seemed to recover her memory of Ms. Brazile rather quickly after that.
That's just a small sampling of all the good stuff I missed while I was away. I'll find many others over the weekend, so you can pretty much count on a Monday Morning Gazette. One more for now, though. Not news. Just a piece of fine writing by the Heretik. As if there's any other kind of writing by the Heretik.
Joe remembers a fallen firefighter. Not one who died on 9/11. One who died on a day that won't be remembered by anyone except those who knew him. One who was a childhood pal of the Heretik. One who through, as Joe writes in a poem accompanying his post, "living on in others," has achieved a form of "Immortality."
Bobby Hassett became a fireman in the Bethpage Fire Department as soon as he could. You could see how proud he was when he pulled up in his car with the Fire Department decal on it at the Jack in the Box on Old Country Road and South Oyster Bay Road, where we’d all go after we had done what we’d done with whoever we’d done it with, where Bethpage and Plainview and Hicksville all met. Somebody would ask him to turn on the flashing light firemen slap on their cars when they respond to a call. That was not Bobby’s way...
...As my mother and I drove back in the Comet from Wagner’s Funeral Home, the one that advertised in the parish bulletin, I was thinking of how my friend had died and what he must have thought, if he had had a chance to think at all. I was wondering if he had any doubt when he went into that storefront on Hempstead Turnpike through the back door. Bobby never burned in the fire or had a chance to breathe in too much smoke. Chlorine gas from the pool supply store next door took him early whereI have not yet gone...
"Still playing catch-up on my blog reading after the vacation. Next year? WiFi."
WARNING - geeky response follows:
Maybe by next year, the problem will be less severe, in the same way that eventually the band width issue got addressed -- but WiFi is only as good as the local access to a network. It's basically the same as your cell phone. It works great, as long as you don't need it wherever you are.
On Cape Cod, the WiFi "hot spots" might be few and far between, and then you'll be crying for good ol' fashioned dial up.
Then again, if you can find a Starbucks anywhere on the Cape, supposedly they are WiFi friendly everywhere.
For what it's worth...
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Sunday, July 31, 2005 at 09:48 AM
Mac,
The library in Chatham is now WiFi friendly. I like that library and will happily blog from there any time. And although there are fortunately no Starbucks in town, one night I saw a kid using his laptop at one of the tables outside Monomoy Coffee. I don't know if he was online but if there's a hot spot right there then I'm really golden!
Posted by: Lance | Sunday, July 31, 2005 at 07:52 PM
Lance,
Makes sense now that I think about it that there would be WiFi in Chatham. All those New York types on their "vacations" simply cannot be disconnected from their financial schemi--er, planning clients. So naturally Chatham, and likely Hyannis and Wellfleet and Truro are hot spots.
I wouldn't speculate on Route 6A though.
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Sunday, July 31, 2005 at 09:12 PM