October 2006 minutiae

• When I check to see where my traffic is coming from, astonishingly frequently I will find a link that says something along the lines of, "Here's something I found on a site called adamcadre.ac — I don't know who wrote it." Er? I mean, based on what you just wrote, you kind of have to figure that the author is either Adam Cadre or Ada McAdre, don't you?

• I got to wondering whether Montecore, the tiger who mauled Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy, had a Wikipedia page. As it turns out, he does. And at the bottom it says:

  Category: famous tigers

• Heard on the radio: "One word — I mean, two words: 'Super Mario Brothers.'"

• I misplaced my box grater, which is bizarre, because how do you lose something as large and unmistakable as a box grater in a minuscule apartment? Eventually I found it. It was in my toaster oven.

• AP: North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported the country has performed a successful nuclear test. Other top KCNA stories that day: Monument to Party Founding Visited by People; Floral Basket to Kim Jong Il.

• cnn.com: NASCAR racer reveals his passion for dogs. Watch out, buddy — Santorum isn't out of office yet.

• If I ever suffer some sort of serious misfortune, please do not pray for me. Thank you.

• It has started to become rather chilly at night, so I checked to see whether the pilot light of my heater was on. It was. It was larger than I thought. Large enough to make me think, "Gyah, there is a raging blue flame in my apartment all the year round!" That's disconcerting.

• Am I the only one who thinks that "horse" is a really funny word? Like, every time I see the word "horse" I giggle a little bit.

• "UNSUBSCRIBE" would be a good suicide note.

• In Seattle I found that while I was intellectually a little shaky on the route from, say, the University District to Capitol Hill, muscle memory not only put me on the right roads but even into the correct lanes for the various strange turns.

• While in Seattle I met Matthew Amster-Burton's daughter Iris, who is not quite three. My visit lasted for about an hour and fifteen minutes and Iris remembered my name the entire time and repeatedly called me by it. I found this quite touching considering that I have students whom I work with for eight weeks and who still can't remember my name when it's time to fill out course evals.

• On the trip down from Seattle I checked into a motel in Roseburg, Oregon, and quickly finished the book I'd brought. So I watched some TV for the first time in a long while (since I don't own one). The Discovery Channel had a couple of specials on about autism so I watched those.

  The specials introduced several well-known savants, almost all of whom were severely disabled in terms of interacting with people or taking care of themselves. There was one exception, a British guy named Daniel Tammet, who could do the sorts of things savants do — calculate twelve-digit products in his head just by "seeing" the answers, rattle off irrational quotients to however many decimal places you wanted, learn new languages in a week — but he wasn't disabled, and could explain what was going on in his head. After an interview, Simon Baron-Cohen diagnosed him as an extremely, extremely high-functioning autistic.

  Tammet said that every number from 1 to 10,000 looked different to him, had a unique color and shape and texture. He talked about how going to New York felt to him like being surrounded by 9s. That is also how my brain works. I don't have the same linkages, but I have linkages of my own and they are very deep experiences to me. A while back someone asked me what her birthdate felt like to me. I thought it was 7/6/87. Well, 7687 to me is like foil ribbon in Mardi Gras colors: purple, green, gold, purple. Except then she told me that her birthdate was actually 7/6/86. 7686 isn't foil ribbon. It's fluorescent spray paint on dry grass. And 7685 is cake icing. Someone asked Tammet what the number 44 was like to him. To me, 44 is like this.

  I'm not making this up. This is what numbers are like for me. People have made fun of me in the past, using the @emit function on the MUD to attribute to me remarks such as "I should've known it was a Thursday because I've felt purple all day," but, well, that's not a joke to me. That's actually how it feels. Tammet's forthcoming memoir, incidentally, is called Born on a Blue Day.

• One of the wonderful things in life is when you buy an album, and at the end there's a little songlet, just a nifty little riff and maybe a verse or something, to cap things off... and then two years later you get the band's next album, and in the middle of a sea of unfamiliar music, there's that song again, only now it's been fleshed out into a magnum opus.

• I usually run out of the house without any food and then have Must Eat emergencies later in the day, so when I saw a slab of coffee cake at Trader Joe's I figured I would buy it to avoid this problem. But then every time I ate some I could literally feel my body complaining, "No Nutritive Value. Choose Again."

• I was reading an essay by George Orwell about PG Wodehouse and encountered this sentence: "He was well known in the United States, and he was — or so the Germans calculated — popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle." It took me a long moment to realize that Orwell didn't mean "silly-ass" in the modern sense.

• Mike D'Angelo often lists movies slightly differently in his "added:" tag from in his "films seen" list. Compare:

  313. (25 Oct) Fires on the Plain (1959, Kon Ichikawa)

  Films Seen 2006 (added: I've Had It With These Motherfucking Fires on This Motherfucking Plain)

• I gave a talk which was simultaneously translated into sign language. It was weird knowing that my dumb ad-libbed jokes were being reworked into a series of gestures right in front of me.

• espn.com: The Boston Celtics will wear a black clover leaf on their uniforms for the upcoming season as a tribute to former coach and general manager Red Auerbach, who died Saturday of a heart attack at age 89. The clover will appear on the right side of the jersey and will be inscribed with the word "Red" in green lettering. This will also help to confuse opponents by taking advantage of the Stroop effect.

• I have often heard it pointed out that rock music is generally sung outside the natural range of most singers. Not many men are natural tenors, but when Rick Astley hit the charts with his baritone it sounded comically low — because pretty much every other male singer on the radio (or at least on the mainstream rock stations, which played Rick Astley for some reason) tried to sing up in Sting's range. Women, by contrast, sing much lower on rock records than elsewhere; most women naturally have a range way the hell up there, but that sounds like opera, not rock, so instead they sing down around, well, Sting's range. When I am recording Adriffs songs I will often have to tell Bridget, "No, lower, lower," coaching her so far out of her range that it sounds like she's making fun of Rick Astley.

  I just bought my first record of '06, Coward by Made Out Of Babies, and it is an exception to this phenomenon. Their press kit is pretty accurate when it says, "Wailing front woman Julie Christmas — about whom a fan recently asked, "Um, is she going to be able to keep singing like that?" — screams and yelps with a bewitching intensity that defies her charming beauty and (occasionally) cherubic whispers." Julie does indeed normally sound like an unbalanced she-banshee most of the time. But on Coward, there's one song on which she deviates from her usual combination of caterwauling and babydoll whispering to sing a song like a normal adult woman, and her voice is so much lower than on the other tracks that it's surprising when she hits high notes that remind you that it is indeed the same person singing.

  (By the way, I mean "unbalanced she-banshee" in a good way.)

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