Category: From Macromediocrity

More things on earth, Horatio

Okay if I call you Horatio?
I will probably tell you all this in a big rush on Monday, but thank you so much for pestering me to buy the DVDs of Planet Earth, or I wouldn’t have, because I have a giant queue of David Attenborough productions I don’t own yet and I would have stuck it in there. And then I would have been deprived.
Swimming elephants!! Golden snub-nosed monkeys! Cranes riding thermals over the Himalayas!
So far, it’s all amazing. With the crying, as predicted. When I was very young, maybe 3, we had a mobile of cranes in our bedroom, and they looked just like the footage of the migration over the Himalayas–in that riding-thermals, kite-sail-winged, dangly-gangly-legged way. I couldn’t find any images online that capture that odd elegance. And *why* is it so delightful to watch elephants swimming? Is it just the incongruity of the largest land animal floating weightless, or is it that their knees all bend forward, plus the snorkely trunks and the evident pleasure? Ridiculously pleasing. I watched that bit four times.
Also, so I don’t forget: Pester me to write a fan letter to David Attenborough. I started one ages ago but didn’t finish, plus never found out where best (or at all) to send it. (“Sir David Attenborough, c/o The BBC” probably wouldn’t work very well, alas.)
I just realized (reading about his career) that I have clear memories (clear–full audio-visual and emotion and everything) of a show of his that aired in 1975, which means I was 4 years old. It was called “Fabulous Animals” and was mostly about mythical beasts (including those weird pictures of people with faces in their chests) but also touched on real ones like Komodo dragons, and I remember Sir David (just David, then) sticking together broken pieces of a huge bird’s egg with masking tape. Bigger than an ostrich egg. More like a really big honeydew melon. And the people who found the pieces used them to carry water. Madagascar comes to mind. (I thought it was “Madacasca” because I heard him say it before I could read.) Maybe an elephant bird? So he’s been a huge piece of my life since I was four. Very much a part of the fabric of my world. That deserves some mad fan mail.
Also I have a theory about why Sigourney Weaver did the U.S. voiceover: Sir David’s voice has lost a tiny bit of its crispness. He has a very, very faint slur on some words now (he is 80 years old, after all), and I’m guessing the American viewer isn’t prepared to deal with even faintly impaired speech, even if it’s coming from someone with 60 years of solid gold credentials. Boo on that. I’m glad I got the UK version.
I owe you one.
P.S. I couldn’t find that trailer you tried to show me (remember, I made you stop, “Crying, crying!”). And the clips I could find on the Discovery website have some random American dude doing the voiceover–neither Sigourney Weaver nor Sir David. Grumblecakes.

Rogue Apostrophe Speaks Volumes

I just got an email from someone whose title is “Communications’ Manager”.
Not “Communication Manager” or “Communications Manager”. That apostrophe stands out bigger than an exclamation point.
It gives me cold shivers.
What’s the rationale? Is she the manager of all the individual communications produced by her organization, and therefore sees “Communications” as a plural, and therefore “Communications'” as a plural possessive?
Is the word “Communications” as an academic or professional discipline not recognized as a formal word? Did she kowtow to a spellchecker, or does she have a stronger pedigree for this bit of pedantry?
Whatever its origins, innocent or not, that apostrophe makes me desperate to avoid ever having to deal with this person or her communications department (or presumably “Communications’ Department”).

Mmmmmmarmite!

I was shopping this evening for my insolent minion (“the Boy”) who has requested a German chocolate cake with almonds instead of pecans for his 15th birthday. While searching in vain for Dutch-processed cocoa[1], I was stunned to find jars of Marmite in the baking aisle.
(You don’t bake with Marmite, except as a flavoring. It is not live yeast. It won’t make bread rise. It doesn’t belong anywhere near baking yeast. Urgh.)
But I bought some anyway, and then got to thinking about what the Marmite-eating public does with Marmite (other than eating it straight from the jar, which is my usual Marmite-eating mode). I’ve been giggling/gagging over this dubious collection of Marmite recipes for a good 20 minutes. What’s great about it (to me) is how none of these recipes even pretend to be “How to introduce people to Marmite without scarring them for life” or “How to get your children to eat Marmite because it’s so good for them even though it tastes like toxic saline axle grease“.
These people love it, and they aren’t afraid to try new things, and even recommend those things to strangers. It’s the antithesis of the monoculture mentality, and that’s a joy.

[1] There was no Dutch processed cocoa at the Arlington Road Giant, so I’ll be making an extra trip to Whole Foods tomorrow. This may seem like a lot of work, but not everyone gets a minion and he’s a good ‘un, so I’m happy to oblige. His birthday cake last year took two grocery store trips as well.

Honest Marketing and Cheerful Tangents

“His websites, Keaggy.com and Grocerylists.org, have been described as genius, useless, inspiring, stupid, beautiful, profound and a complete waste of time.”

Now, there’s an artist/social commentator/waster of bandwidth I can get behind.

This whole thought-stream resulted from me going through my spam folder, which despite repeated training attempts has yet to learn that I really do want to receive Liquid Treat. A recent issue featured this intriguing book about graphic interpretations of single words (which I think we’ve looked at before; that comes from this fabulous design blog; I really like this series about “Primal” but can’t imagine why none of them feature horseshoe crabs), which Amazon (for some reason) connects to this book about grocery lists, which is a print work drawn from the website above. This tangent cheerfully leads me to think of James Lileks, whose web-work has turned into books, and who has on more than one occasion made me laugh so hard I thought I might actually die.

I think there might have been some caffeine in that coffee I had this morning. I love the Internet.