Bada-Dada-Boomerang

A few minutes ago, my ears heard the rumble of early Fourth of July fireworks a few miles away. Which got me reassessing, as any Laughorist would. Do I really enjoy fireworks?

Less than I thought, if I really examine my fireworks conscience. I've come to believe it's one of those things one is supposed to ooh and ahh over (one of those predictive happiness things explored by Daniel Gilbert). Granted, a few moments ago the neighboring Inner Harbor fireworks were merely an auditory apparition, not the visual array of chrysanthemums and umbrellas of neon-hued ashes punctuated by sonic bursts. I mean, fine, okay, I enjoy fireworks and all that, but I'm finding on closer inspection it's a predictive pattern. It's a social norm. I'm not convinced it's worth the traffic jam or mosquitoes or long day's journey into dark-enough dusk.

It's possible the fireworks I've encountered have been subpar, and that I must defer judgment until I experience Grucci-generated millennial, apocalyptic, transcendent fireworks in New York, London, Beijing, Berlin, or Boston. Maybe my fireworks encounters have been, shall we say, or-chasmic.

Which reminds me. Why do corny old movies depict orgasm via fireworks imagery, especially for females? (I may be wading into more-than-usual embarrassing waters here. For all I recall, that particular imagery was only employed in crummy 1970s porno flicks, or so, um, I've heard, not obscene.) Is that what the female-peak-sexual-nerve-ending-heart-stopping experience is like? Fireworks? Is it the sound? The visual configuration? The colors? The rocket's red glare? Somehow I doubt it (though I have no doubts that "their" experience is far more transporting than our male deal, except maybe for 1.4458 seconds).

I confess a vague, unpatriotic feeling, a hazy guilt about this fireworks, quasi-Freudian admission.

Maybe it's my age; perhaps it's my contrarian nature. It might even be that I've experienced more than enough spiritual, domestic, mental, or workplace fireworks, and don't need anymore.

Give me the verbal pyrotechnics of lustrous prose or poetry. Or sizzling correspondence. Or the belles lettres of fiery bloggers. Now, there's some fireworks.

(Be careful with those cherry bombs now, ya hear?)

Gone With The Windy Drafts

Disclaimer in Fine Print: Well, it's a good thing this blog has nothing to do with real life, and that it chronicles the misadventures of an impurely fictional persona, Pawlie Kokonuts. Yeah, what a relief that it's more factoid than fact. Sure.

Why is it that so-called experts (called subject matter experts, or SMEs, in some fields) think more is better? They wallow in bloviated, turgid, verbose prose. The wings of their condescension sail loftily on windy drafts of repetitive redundant redundancy. If you can say it, spray it (all over the page).

Of course, redactors (those of us in an editorial role) are mere "wordsmiths," respected for the polished veneer of their diction, certainly not valued for their substantive contributions. We prettify; SMEs solve ponderous problems with tumefacient efficiency.

Call it a rough day in the mines.

We all have them.

Oh well. I don't care if the final product ends up in Swahili; I get paid the same.

Mapenzi salama

Kondomu

Kama unahisi uko tayari kufanya mapenzi, au tayari unashiriki katika ngono, ni vyema kuchukua tahadhari. Hakikisha katika harakati zako za kufanya mapenzi, unajali afya yako kwa kufanya ngono iliyo salama. Inaweza kuwa vigumu, na jambo unalolionea haya kujadiliana na mapenzi wako, swala la uwezekano wa kuambukizwa magonjwa ya zinaa, na kutumia njia za kuzuia mimba.

Asante*


* thank you

Or-chasm

or - chasm - n. The immeasurable distance between one choice and another.

Or, with its grammar of gestation. Or, with its suggestive reservoir of participles of posing; its gerunds of guessing; its infinitives of "to do this" or "to do that." Or, the signature nomenclature of choice and mystery.

But is it possible for the divide between "either" and "or" to be exciting? I don't know. Anxiety-producing, yes, but exciting? Anyway, ask Soren Kierkegaard, author of "Either/Or." (Kierkegaard didn't seem to be that big on pleasure, though, did he?)


For or-chasm, picture Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," a paean to the possibilities of choice.


Or William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," with its potently resonating phrase "so much depends." (Of course, when pondering either or-chasms so much depends on lots and lots of things, eh?)

Play nice now. You're on your own.
Copyright © 2007 The Laughorist and Pawlie Kokonuts

Anti-Semantic Banking

As part of a new ad campaign, HSBC Bank barks forth with this online copy:

A headline of:

there's no small change

Followed by:

Choose a more impactful way to bank.

It's all part of the green, eco-friendly bandwagon, which is fine, which I salute. The HSBC site says they were the first major bank, in 2005, to be recognized for being "completely carbon neutral." Fine. Excellent. Even without a hyphen between carbon and neutral. Alleluia. I get it. I'm green with usury.

But let's ponder impactful.

Yes, it is found in dictionaries; yes, our dynamic, living language gives birth to new words every day. I don't subscribe to the pedantic or superior view that yesterday's solecisms can't become today's standard form. You might say it's sort of like clothing fashion and style.

Impactful, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

Well, for one, I believe it all stems from "impact" as verb, arising from environmental impact statements in the U.S., starting in the 1970s. With that usage, "affect" flew out the window like some threatened or endangered bird.

Impactful carries with it all the weight of seriousness it doesn't deserve.

It abdicates responsibility; it lets the writer or speaker avoid taking sides as to whether we're talking good impacts or bad.

I loathe it.

You can bank on it.

p.s. At least the spellchecker hates it, too, for once (for nonce).

Moth-eatin' Potential

So I'm in the anteroom of the pool, with a floor whose cerulean hue merely mimics the paler teal of the pool water, out beyond the doorway (unseen, but remembered). Swimming pools, those tiny mock diadems of suburbia that wink at you as you jet across America, as you subconsciously, or fervently, pray that a clear blue sky won't be an omen reminiscent of an apocalyptic September Tuesday morning. It is not the free urban pool up the hill from our house, the one with an occasional police presence, if only as a deterrent. It is up the road a piece. Yes, the suburbs. And, here, the deterrent is green, as in moola: three dollars for adults, two dollars for each kid. Cash as winnowing factor. The girls go left; I go right. They take a preswim shower; I do not, because I do not intend to swim. I just want to sit in the lounge chair (an amenity not provided, for lamentably obvious reasons, at the pool closer to home) and leisurely read The New York Times, the Sunday Times, on Father's Day. A guilty pleasure, guilt-free. But first Nature calls, perhaps triggered by the thought of water, perhaps by the echoic splashing of water only yards away, though still unseen, but surely smelt chlorinatedly. To answer Nature's call, being a man, I stand at a urinal. You would too, in my, um, position (HAHAHAhahaha). In mid-sentence, so to speak, I am slightly startled by a fluttering. No, it is not the arresting flutter of an old man's heart. Instead, I am startled by the wings of a moth, in the urinal. A beautiful brownish moth caught in the albino porcelain of wastewater preliminary pretreatment. I would have to report this as a personal first. I was a little concerned my winged creature would zero in on my exposed vulnerability.* So, I interrupted my paltry riverine contribution midstream, and switched to an adjacent urinal. Duty done, safely free of aerial attack, I chuckled to myself, squinted my eyes, spied the pool, and proceeded poolside, wondering what metaphor of moth-eaten and rusted desire had winged its way to my soul.

(For the record, the moth was nowhere to be seen on a return visit to the lavatory. Make what you wish of any of this.)

Laugh. Or . . .
Else.

* This is where Tony Soprano would interrupt and say, "Whaddaya tryin' to tell me? A moth tried to bite your pecker?"

Anniversary This

Speaking of anniversaries, 35 years ago today Richard Nixon's buddies broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington, D.C., to help them get political intelligence, to win an election that was a shoo-in anyway, and was ultimately a landslide. I distinctly remember a radio news report about it, perhaps even a day later. A totally unremarkable story, "a third-rate burglary," that was perhaps the closing item on the hour's news.

And so the lying and the cover-up did in the presidency of Nixon, just before a looming impeachment trial.

Will anyone believe that some 14 or 15 years later a sitting president was not impeached for circumventing the will of Congress to subsidize illegal guerrillas in Nicaragua?

Furthermore, will anyone believe, 50 years from now, that a succeeding sitting president was impeached (and acquitted) essentially for lying about his private sex life?

To say nothing of a current president carrying on a misdirected war on basic civil liberties in the name of freedom?

Bloomsday Blogsday 1, and Counting

Today is my first blogiversary. Or is that blogaversary? Maybe it's even a bit of blogslavery, shackled by semantics and the art and craft (and obsession) of saying (saying anything, anything at all, in almost any manner). (Incidentally and fittingly, June 16, is also Bloomsday, the day in 1904 when the fictional events in James Joyce's Ulysses take place, in Dublin.)

It started on a Thursday night and into Friday morning, wandering around the steamy back alleys of the World Wide Web (without the editor's choice of "Worldwide," which would have forever branded us with WW), teasing out the scene not far from Seattle, tempting my tendency toward the tawdry, when I should've been sleeping.

And so, the nom de plume Pawlie Kokonuts was hatched, with hats off to Paulie Walnuts.

The title of The Laughorist was a natural, since I had already started a store revolving around the concept of so-called laughorisms. And my first post, on solipsism, was indicative of a suspicion I harbored, and harvest, for this talking tour.

Looking back, I notice I received no Comments for a week; not until my 11th post (did I care? was I more pure then? less self-conscious?). The first Comment was from the blogger at Kierkegaard Lives. Thank you. (I see, he's still posting; we share similar layouts.) Most likely, I stopped at his blog and teased him into stopping by at my place, with a word or two on Soren Kierkegaard thrown in.

I confess I've not been the perfect blog community member or neighbor. By that, I mean I don't reciprocate Comments faithfully or even read other blogs consistently. And that is because it's hard enough for me just to keep this going, being of meager discipline and possessing little perseverance. Don't take it personally, or impersonally.

Thanks for stopping by. Then and now. I've met all those people you see linked n this page, as well as many others, and more who need to be linked. Or will be. Deo volente.

It's been a journey of linking, connecting, conversing, and cavorting. I've gotten more from all of you than I've put into it. Thank you.


Spotlight on Year 1

One Slice, With Legs

Testing Testosterone

Water You Know

We the People, We the Ephemerists

(which evoked the most Comments).

One easy discovery was, I can't be funny all the time, nor do I want to be (witness several posts on the deaths of loved ones, or on la petite mort, or on the death of deception or illusion).

And who would've guessed that I would get the most hits, so far, owing to my post on the serial comma, with chitchat coming from Vanity Fair and The New Yorker?

Again, thanks to all of you -- first-timers, late-comers, new-comers, toll-takers, big-talkers, and silent-partners (even if all those hyphens aren't truly needed).

Carry on.

Excelsior.

Age quod agis.