L u n a t a l k

There are some combinations that are just flat-out wrong. I found one this week. Both recommendations from the same friend.

First item: a salad. Specifically, the grilled Asian chicken salad from Jack in the Box. This friend, normally a rational person, came under the influence of the salad recently and wouldn’t let the subject drop. “It’s got crunchy things” were words that would come to haunt me. There would be no peace until I tried the salad.

There is a Jack in the Box near me. There was an empty lot on the corner for years and then suddenly, Jack’s sinister bobbing head loomed over the movie-going traffic. I turn that corner regularly, but never noticed any construction. Do fast food places splorp into being like pod people from Night of the Living Dead? However it came into existence, I did not have the excuse of lack of opportunity. In fact, I’m convinced if I had put it off longer another Jack in the Box would splorp even closer to home. And then another. Until…

I got in the car, drove over and, under Jack’s staring blue eye, bought the salad. I drove it home.

The salad does indeed have crunchy things. All in all it was a completely inoffensive salad and reasonable choice on a menu long on grease and dead cows.

I settled in for a munch and a read. This brings me to the second item: a book.

Now here’s a piece of advice I hope you’ll take to heart. “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl’s heartbreaking memoir of survival in Nazi concentration camps, while excellent and even “must read” is not what you want going into your eyes while crunchy salad bits are going into your mouth.

World War II may have ended over sixty years ago, but the Germans still have a lot to answer for. And now they can add ruination of a salad to the list of war crimes.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Imagine that you, an American (in this example), have uprooted yourself from your home digs and bopped off to live in some pleasant but remote backwater. It’s so remote that you haven’t heard a song in English since you arrived. One day you happen upon a small restaurant and hear familiar music wafting out onto the sidewalk. You peer inside. A waitress is plopping plates of burgers (burgers!) in front of a few patrons lounging at small tables. And just inside the door, in the corner by the window, there’s a band - also locals. But they’re playing American music! Songs you know but haven’t heard for years! But… they’re playing music you HATED back home. You not only hated it, you hated anyone who liked that music. You’d cross the street to avoid being contaminated by accidental earbud bleed from one of them.

But now… you’re far from home. It’s been years. Can you really remember why you hated those songs so much? Would you roll your eyes and walk on? Or would you waft in, grinning and singing along? And those people you hated - the ones who loved the songs you hate - would you turn away? Or would you sit down and shoot the breeze? Even if it was someone who’s favorite song was Achy Breaky Heart, I bet you’d share a drink and a chorus.

I haven’t talked much here about my other band, Balkanarama. We play hot gypsy nightclub music various places around the Seattle area but mostly (monthly) at a local Greek restaurant and mostly for immigrants from Eastern Europe. We played there Saturday night.

I didn’t have high expectations for the night. It was a drop-dead gorgeous sunny spring day here and the sun was still up when we started at 7 pm. Predictably, the restaurant was largely abandoned by hordes hungrier for a little sunlight than a little souvlaki. But things picked up as the sky grew dark and we ended up playing a full four hours.

Lots of requests. The Bulgarians had their faves and we played every one. Then a table of Albanians trouped in and we played everything on their hit list. Then the Serbs. And so on. I feel like we’ve reached some kind of landmark as a band, that people from any of those countries can come in and ask for a tune and for a whole evening we know every one. Maybe it was just luck.

But even more fascinating to me is that the Albanians were singing along on the Macedonian songs, the Serbians were requesting Bosnian songs, the Greeks were dancing to the Turkish tunes. Back home, these people are at each others’ throats - and worse - but here they are all equally adrift in foreign seas and suddenly the similarities are so much more important than the differences.

(A Serbian woman tucked forty bucks into the pocket of our sax player for playing that Bosnian song out on the floor while she danced.)

Popularity: 2% [?]

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It’s the standard line about weather in Seattle (”the Intermittent Windshield Wiper Capitol of the World”). Don’t like it? Wait ten minutes. Like a city bus in some fantasy world, new weather will supposedly materialize on schedule.

Today was definitely a wait ten minutes day. An hour or so on the road was like watching TV with an obsessive channel flipper. Light clouds, heavy clouds, mist, drizzle, buckets, rainbows!, sunshine and finally a light dust of snow near my destination.

Still waiting for blue ice, oobleck, frogs and pink lizards.

True weather story: Years ago in the southern California desert on a baking, cloudless summer afternoon we were lounging, somnolent around the kitchen table trying to avoid any heat-producing activity. Simultaneously and for no apparent reason we all rose from our chairs as if the atmosphere had bunched itself under our feet and pushed up. Outside, the light grew thick, though there were still no clouds and a directionless wind whipped the tree tops. The hair on my arms prickled. I went outside. Up and down the street, people were coming out of their houses and looking around. The tension grew oppressive and it became a struggle to breathe. Suddenly, electricity arced between two high tension lines overhead. The blinding violet arc traveled along the lines for a moment accompanied by an earsplitting buzz, until it finally snapped and power went out for miles around. The tension immediately evaporated and everyone exhaled.

The memory of this storm was the germ behind the lyrics to my song, Monsoon.

Weather stories?

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Ultra-short fiction seems to be getting bigger.

The experience of reading flash stories is qualitatively different from reading a novel. It’s necessary to be a more active participant in the story telling - and that’s what I find so captivating. Rather than sit back and be a passive observer of the author’s fully-presented vision, we are only allowed a thin slice. A tantalizing, voyeuristic peek through a partly open door. If the author is skillful, the peek is enough to let you tease out the story.

A very fine collection of flash fiction was published by my friend, Mark Budman: You Have Time for This

I came across the podcast of another friend this week, Laurence Simon. He produces a 100 word story every day. Sometimes more than one a day. I have to admire that kind of sheer… throughput. He also has a weekly challenge - with prizes! - to write a story of one’s own on a given theme and record it for the podcast. Funny how motivating prizes are. The theme this week was “Cake” and here’s my entry:

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CAKE
by Eva Moon

Alma bent her legs first one way and then another, trying to find the right fit. In the end, she discovered if she curled up on her side and tucked her right foot tightly behind her left ankle there was just room to snug her hips inside the rim of the round pan. She leaned forward, pressing her breasts against her thighs; left arm beneath her cheek and right snaked into the small space above her feet. It wasn’t easy, but wasn’t her family worth a little sacrifice?

After dinner the kids all begged for an extra slice.

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Listen to it - and all the other stories - HERE

But I hope you’ll vote for mine!

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Two holidays in one week! With National Napping Day hardly behind us, it’s already Pi Day: March 14 - 3.14.

In honor of the occasion, here are a few treats:

Pi in the kitchen

How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs (really!)

Haiku (piku?)

Three point one four one
Five nine two six five three five
Eight nine seven nine

Pi Hop

Pi in the face?

But is it true? A hoax revealed: One of the oldest hoaxes in history was unmasked today. A group of mathematicians, called “the Brotherhood” revealed that pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, long held to be an irrational number equal to 3.141592…, was actually equal to simply 3.

Cloaked in a green hood, one spokesperson, called ‘Pascal’ said that after years of soul searching and intense debate, the Brotherhood voted unanimously to reveal the hoax to the public… [link]

A friend points out that they can’t celebrate Pi Day in Europe, but I think they approximate it on July 22. I truly wish I could publish this post at exactly 1:59 pm today, but I’ll be out eating pizza pi.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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I had a gack moment tonight.

A gack moment is what you experience the moment you become aware that big trouble is about to land in your lap and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. You know the feeling: The skin of your face feels suddenly hot and a size too small, you forget how to exhale and your heart goes FLAM against your ribs in a mad dash to distance itself from your sorry ass.

My gack moment was a classic: The unexpected appearance flashing police lights in the rear view mirror. I hadn’t done anything wrong that I could think of, but my body instantly went into full gack mode anyway. My inner caveman was instantly ready to take on the sabertooth tiger. This time the gack moment was followed by a phew moment when I pulled over and the cruiser passed by. Phew!

The rest of the way home I tried to think of other gack moments I have known. Here are a few. Do you have any to add?

• The millisecond between committing to shutting the locked door of your car and the realization that the keys are in the ignition.
• Remembering the eggs boiling on the stove - when you’re at the mall.
• Driving off the ferry and watching it pull away from the dock and then noticing you don’t have your purse.
• Checking your calendar and discovering a date to meet a friend… three hours ago. (And she drove in from out of town and waited and waited!)
• Arriving at the Canadian border in Idaho after driving nine hours to discover someone’s passport (not naming names here, but you know who you are) was left at home.
• Asking the teenage cat sitter to overnight said passport and then realizing it’s in the nightstand drawer with all the sex toys.

Share your gack moments…

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Your bed is calling you. Calling, with its sweet siren voice. Yes, it’s the middle of the day. Yes, you should be working. But it’s still there, caressing the back of your mind with pillowy fingers.

You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one — well, at least one and a half.”

–Winston Churchill

Americans are sleep-deprived. Even though studies show that short naps improve alertness, performance and productivity, we persist in filling every daylight second with eyes-open activity. As if the world will get into who knows what kind of mischief the minute we turn our backs. Trust me. Things will continue pretty much on schedule without your constant vigilance. If you ever doubt it, go visit a cemetery.

Now, you have a perfect opportunity to turn over a new coverlet: NATIONAL NAPPING DAY. National Napping Day is celebrated each year on the Monday following Daylight Savings Time. You’re tired enough already. And now they’re stealing one more precious hour!

Make a stand for lying down.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Israeli police are on the lookout for a thief with a super-sized chocolate craving. The robbers broke into a factory in the northern Israeli city of Haifa late Monday and walked away with nearly 100 tons of chocolate spread. [Link]

Please promise you won’t turn me in. I’ll make it worth your while…

Popularity: 12% [?]

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And the nominees are:

COLDCUT MOUNTAIN - The inspirational true story of six heroic friends who took on the monumental task of consuming appetizers intended to feed sixteen - and conquered the mountain.

THE BRUCHETTA ULTIMATUM - A party guest dodges new, superior international snacks as he searches for his unknown pasta while a culinary agent tries to track him down.

NO COMPANY FOR LO MEIN - The feast was laid but the chairs were empty. Where were the eaters of the night? Lurking… lurking…

HOW GREEN WAS MY FACE - The evidence was clear: Four empty champagne bottles. Four. Oy.

MIDNIGHT CHOWBOY - It stalks the kitchen by night. What leftover party wings are safe from its slavering jaws?

Coming soon to a theater near you:

A TIME TO DIET

Popularity: 3% [?]

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I recently came across this site. It’s a (largely empty) Wiki of obsolete skills. It makes amusing reading as a list, mostly for the unexpected juxtapositions (Bleeding patients is right before Blowing the dust out of a Nintendo cartridge). But the more I thought about it the more I realized what a complete waste of bandwidth it is. Why do we need a Wiki for this? This is what the whole internet is. If you want to learn flint knapping, dBase III how to churn butter or make a 5 1/4″ floppy disk two-sided, google it.

And anyway, should we find ourselves in a situation where we actually NEED to navigate with a sextant, you’ll be knapping flint with your laptop because it won’t be good for anything else. Better hope we still have books. No, the intriguing thing about the site is realizing how thoroughly our skulls are stuffed with skills we’ll never use again. Here are a few examples:

• Adjusting rabbit ears on top of a TV
• Aligning the heads on a 9 track tape drive
• Assessing the relative merits of BetaMax and VHS
• Autoexec.bat editing
• Balancing the tonearm on a turntable
• BBS administration
• Calculating sales tax
• Calling a phone sex line
• Caulking your wagon to ford the river
• Changing the ribbon on a typewriter
• Changing tracks on an eight-track tape
• Cleaning the balls inside a computer mouse
• Config.sys editing
• Counting back change
• Crew a muzzle loading cannon
• Darning a sock
• Degaussing a CRT monitor
• Double-speed Tape-to-Tape copying
• Extracting square roots
• Editing dates and time source code for Y2K
• Focusing a camera
• Formatting a floppy
• Going outside (instead of editing pointless Wikis)
• Harness a team of oxen
• Hewing wood with an adze
• Hunting a woolly mammoth
• Interpreting punch cards
• Jumpers on a Motherboard
• Knapping flint
• Loading film into a 35 mm camera
• Long division
• Longbow training (sorry Dreah)
• Morse-coding messages
• Popping corn in a pot with oil
• Quill Sharpening
• Reading a dictionary or encyclopedia
• Running a mimeograph machine
• Salting cod
• Sending a telegram
• Shave with a straight razor
• Spelling
• Throwing with an atlatl
• Tinning copper cookware
• Untangling the cord of a telephone
• Using carbon paper to make copies
• Washing clothes with a washboard
• Winding a watch or clock
• ZIPping archives across multiple floppy disks

Popularity: 11% [?]

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