Fritinancy

May Linkfest

Lots o' links this month, so make yourself comfortable.

Haikuvies: Tell a movie's plot/In seventeen syllables/Spoilers? Sure--why not? (Actually, you get 17 times seven.)

It took about 24 hours for a meme called When Obama Wins to make the leap from Twitter to the whole wide web. Gather round, children, and hear Andrew Crow of Adaptive Path tell the origin story:

I'm never sure about how internet memes start, but this one started with a typo.

Dan was twittering something about Alabama, but wrote "Alambama". He joked that when Barack Obama wins the election, certain states will probably be renamed Alobama, Califobama, Nevama, Massabama, New Yobama. Of course, I thought that was hilarious and started thinking about other things that would change once Obama wins. So, a few of us started twittering silly little things, thinking of it as an inside joke.

Overnight, a few people caught on giving it a life of its own.

Jason Kottke took this and mashed it up to create this really cool microsite.

I think what interests me the most about these is how fast they spread. It's been less than 24 hours and there are already over 500 tweets about it. Certainly taken on a life of it's own.

Which is the perfect segue to my favorite WOW so far: "When Obama wins ... everyone will know the difference between its and it's." (By 111archeravenue.)

I considered saving this for Halloween, but death is always in season at Fatal Utterances, "a glossary of slang, jargon, euphemism, and cant as used by undertakers, criminals, consumer activists, and the ordinary people." Some favorite entries: bier baron (a funeral-parlor owner), Mrs. Z (a corpse), and Stare Number 12 ("the look that passes over a man's face as he regards another man as a meal").

The idea behind Brand Tags is that a brand is whatever people say it is. Go there and give your one-word impressions of brands like Gap, Starbucks, Yahoo, Greenpeace, Whole Foods, and many more. (It's all over Twitter now, but I heard it first from Rowland Hobbs, whose tags I follow on Del.icio.us.)

The Big Word Project is selling words at $1 a letter. "Search for your word and link it to your website. Your website is then the new definition." Started by a couple of graduate students in Northern Ireland.

You probably know about Stuff White People Like, which reportedly is being turned into a book. (What do white people like? Coffee, Asian girls, Ivy League schools--stuff like that.) Now Andrew Hammel, an American in Germany, offers Stuff White Germans Like: #3 Balkan disco music, #5 custom-designed bookshelves, #11 Paul Auster. (Really? Paul Auster?)

Roy Peter Clark is serializing his next book, The Glamour of Grammar, on his Poynter Online blog (Poynter's slogan: "Everything You Need to Be a Better Journalist"). He's inviting readers to make suggestions and correct errors. His goal is to present "not a comprehensive grammar, but an essential grammar: those elements of language that the reader and writer can use today and every day." Even if you groan at the mention of grammar, read this series: it's lively and engaging and wildly informative. (Yes, glamour of grammar. You knew the two words were related, didn't you? Roy explains in his first installment)

Mike Pope on the seven stages of being edited:

3) Anger

I'm starting to get irritated. What the -- ? That's a stupid edit. And so's that one. Ha! That's just wrong! Smartypants editors, think they know everything! Well, let me just set that editor straight ...

And speaking of anger, here's the Baltimore Sun's John McIntyre on "Those Damn Copy Editors," in which he addresses the complaint of "someone named Seth Godin"¹ that a copy editor "totally wrecked" his work:

Unfortunately, Mr. Godin does not supply a single instance of the copy editor's destructiveness, so it is up for discussion whether he is an injured author or a fulminating boor. (The other texts at his blog do not suggest that revision of his prose would be a cultural catastrophe.)

Catching his breath, McIntyre offers some very sensible suggestions for improving relations between writers and copy editors.

___

¹ Guru Supremo of hip marketing manifestos and, according to one of McIntyre's commenters, "author of the most popular ebook ever."

"Welcome to the New, Post-Female American Cinema"

Manohla Dargis writes in the New York Times about the dearth of women on the big screen:

Nobody likes to admit the worst, even when it’s right up there on the screen, particularly women in the industry who clutch at every pitiful short straw, insisting that there are, for instance, more female executives in Hollywood than ever before. As if it’s done the rest of us any good. All you have to do is look at the movies themselves — at the decorative blondes and brunettes smiling and simpering at the edge of the frame — to see just how irrelevant we have become. That’s as true for the dumbest and smartest of comedies as for the most critically revered dramas, from “No Country for Old Men” (but especially for women) to “There Will Be Blood” (but no women). Welcome to the new, post-female American cinema. ...

Last year only 3 of the 20 highest-grossing releases in America were female-driven, and involve a princess (“Enchanted”) or pregnancy (“Knocked Up” and “Juno”). Actresses had starring roles in about a quarter of the next 80 highest-grossing titles, mostly in dopey romantic comedies and dopier thrillers. A number of these were among the worst-reviewed movies of the year, including “Premonition” (Sandra Bullock) and “The Reaping” (Hilary Swank) ... The days of “Million Dollar Baby,” for which Ms. Swank won an Oscar, and “Speed,” which rocketed Ms. Bullock to stardom in the summer of 1994, feel long gone.

Well, maybe all the women in Hollywood were otherwise engaged in the remake of The Women, scheduled for an October release. In the fabulously bizarre 1939 original, directed by George Cukor (and based on Clare Boothe Luce's smash-hit stage play), all the performers (even the animals!) were female. I could happily re-watch it every couple of years for the snappy dialogue and the gloriously over-the-top performances by Joan Crawford and a very young Rosalind Russell, among many others. The remake is directed by Diane English, perhaps best known as the executive producer of TV's Murphy Brown. And the cast is a Who's Who of Hollywood actresses, most of them at least 20 years older than their counterparts in the original version: Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Candice Bergen, Cloris Leachman, Carrie Fisher, Bette Midler, etc., etc.

The Aptronym and the Googlegängers

Jason Captain was until recently a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, which is amusingly aptronymic in itself. (Lieutenant Captain, meet Major Major Major Major.) But then he left the military to train to be a commercial airline pilot, according to this article in today's New York Times.

That's right. Captain Captain.

(Or maybe not: "[W]ith the airline industry ready to go into another swoon because of high fuel prices, Mr. Captain and other junior pilots could find themselves furloughed.")

Elsewhere in today's Times--on the front page, as a matter of fact--reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom investigates Googlegängers--namesakes found through Google searches. (From German Doppelgänger, literally "double goer": a ghostly double or counterpart of a living person.) From the article:

In “Finding Angela Shelton,” a book published this month, a writer named Angela Shelton describes her meetings with 40 other Angela Sheltons. Keri Smith, an illustrator, has posted drawings of six of her Googlegängers on her blog. There are name-tally Web sites like SameNameAsMe, and Facebook coalitions including nearly 200 people named Ritz (their insignia is a cracker box logo) and a group aiming to break a world record by gathering together more than 1,224 Mohammed Hassans.

But while many people are familiar with Googlegängers, a fundamental question has gone unanswered: Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name?

I'm certainly familiar with the phenomenon. Well before Google's advent, I crossed virtual paths with Nancy Friedman of St. Louis, who calls herself the Telephone Doctor. (She advises companies on improving their customer service skills.) When the Rainbow Room closed in New York City, a news article mentioned its publicist: Nancy J. Friedman.

I also learned of the still barely Googleable Nancy M. Friedman, a therapist who lived only a mile away from me. (I used to get voicemail messages from her clients.) Nancy M. and I eventually met and, yes, bonded. It turned our we belonged to the same gym and bought subscriptions to the same performing arts events.

Out of idle curiosity, I began looking for and discovering more and more Nancy Friedmans.  At one point I considered writing an article or even a book about this odd little sisterhood--it turns out we all were born within a few years of each other--but I ended up consigning the information to the Not About Me section of my web site. (Scroll down.)

Angela Shelton, however, did publish a book, Finding Angela Shelton, about her encounters with 40 namesakes. And Grace Lee, a Korean-American filmmaker, made The Grace Lee Project, "a funny, highly unscientific investigation into all those Grace Lees who break the mold -- from a fiery social activist to a rebel who tried to burn down her high school."

I'm pretty sure there was another first-person documentary on the subject, by a male filmmaker. Does anyone remember its name?

How Dry I Am

I'm aware of today's date, but I think this synopsis from the San Francisco International Film Festival program is meant to be taken seriously:

Saturday, May 3

1:00 Dust

Hartmut Bitomsky (Germany/Switzerland, 2007)

(Staub). For some, dust is business, for some an obsession, for others merely something to be sloughed off, literally, into the environment. Even if we are not aware of it, we all participate in the subject of Dust. Hartmut Bitomsky's fascinated and fascinating documentary exposes the cyclical and relentless nature of dust in interviews with everyone from scientists uncovering its role in the origins of the universe to artists reveling in the discrete beauty of dust bunnies. Throughout, dust is persistent. Whether welcomed or not, it will no doubt always return. -- Rachel Aloy

Oy, Rachel Aloy, I feel your pain. I suspect "the discrete beauty of dust bunnies" will never rival The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

It has to be hard to write film-festival program notes. I picture student interns watching gloomy eight-hour Uzbek sagas, scribbling frantically in the dark, and then pacing their garrets in hair-tearing despair. No wonder the capsule reviews are replete with code words (followed by my translations):

Lyrical: I have no idea what the plot was.

Haunting: I spent eight hours in a dark room on a beautiful spring day for this?

Poetic: Couldn't understand a thing.

Exquisitely observed: Bo-ring.

Bleakly beautiful: Bleak.

Richly detailed: Bo-ring.

Meticulous observations: Bo-ring.

Minutely detailed: Bo...ring.

Naturalistic: Unattractive naked bodies.

Shows considerable skill: Remembered to remove the lens cap.

Speaking of reviewers' clichés, the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts, recently listed "Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing" and invited readers to contribute their own nominations. So far, 238 comments. My own pet peeve is luminous prose, unless, of course, we're talking about medieval manuscripts. (Hat tip: Verbatim.)

P.S. There sure are a lot of books with "dust" in their titles. I wonder whether film director Hartmut Bitomsky used The Secret Life of Dust or Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible in his research. (Yes, Amazon gives you a discount if you buy them together!)

Boilerplate

Some of the funniest writing in the New York Times appears at the very end of movie reviews, in the italicized ratings information. Like this, from a two-thumbs-down review by Jeannette Catsoulis:

“Under the Same Moon” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has bad white people, hard-working brown people and morally ambivalent people of mixed race.

I've long believed that boilerplate copy represents an excellent opportunity--usually overlooked--to connect with an audience. If you can add something interesting, amusing, attention getting, or just plain human to the standard text, why pass up the chance?

For example, here's the setup message I got when I downloaded Google's Web Accelerator:

Privacy Policy. Please read this carefully. This is not the usual Yada Yada and is different from the Google Toolbar Yada Yada you may have seen before.

To be sure, most readers probably click right past that paragraph. But those who spend just three seconds reading it are rewarded with a smile.

By the way, have you ever wondered where the term boilerplate comes from? Here's what Wikipedia says:

The term dates back to the early 1900s, referring to the thick, tough steel sheets used to build steam boilers. From the 1890s onwards, printing plates of text for widespread reproduction such as advertisements or syndicated columns were cast or stamped in steel (instead of the much softer and less durable lead alloys used otherwise) ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. They came to be known as 'boilerplates'. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation's largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union.

Shatner in Esperanto

John McGrath posts at Errata:

Have you ever wondered what spoken Esperanto sounds like? Have you ever wondered what it sounds like spoken by Bill Shatner, in an expressionistic black and white fantasia of an arthouse horror movie?

Of course you have, so you need to see Incubus, made in 1965 by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens and written entirely in Esperanto.

I've been fascinated by Esperanto, the international language that was supposed to bring about world peace and harmony, since I first learned about it as a child. Isn't it lovely that "Esperanto" means "one who hopes"? And isn't it poignant that the language, invented in 1887 by a Polish-Lithuanian-Russian-Jewish opthalmologist named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, still has, according to Wikipedia anyway, "between 100,000 and 2 million speakers," including "approximately a thousand native speakers"? (Forget Shatner: don't you wonder what Esperanto baby talk sounds like?)

I used to have an insurance-company client in Emeryville, a tiny enclave between Oakland and Berkeley, whose offices shared building space with Esperanto-USA (formerly the Esperanto League of North America, which had a ring of quaint subversion that the new name sadly lacks). I kept meaning to drop by and say Salut! but never did. I have, however, slipped Esperanto words into naming lists on more than one occasion. So far, no client has accepted the challenge.

More about Esperanto--"the international language that works!"--here, here, and here. Sonja's English-Esperanto Dictionary--a highly arbitrary compilation that includes translations of "wapiti" and "sainfoin" (what-what?) but not of "sharp," "bright," or "happy"-- has a nifty "ten random words" feature, including--just now--"squint (partly close eyes) duone fermi la okulojn."

Funn-E

Pixar is promoting its next release, Wall-E (in theaters June 2008), with a faux website that's a poker-faced parody of every corporate site you've ever seen. It's called Buy n Large, and the mission statement is priceless:

At Buy n Large we are committed to absolute excellence, utilizing standards that raise the bar for customer satisfaction to the highest levels. We aim to bring you, our valued customer, an unprecedented level of convenience across the whole spectrum of your life. Our promise to fulfill your continuous needs while maximizing your satisfaction and comforts is one of our prime mandates. Here at Buy n Large, we always strive to positively impact your life and to give it more of that supreme effortlessness you love. Because at Buy n Large, we want you to leave your life to us.

But the best stuff is revealed when you click the "New Robots!" icon in the navigation bar. Naturally, I was charmed by the Nanc-E Nannybot, whose "revolutionary SingMode ... will gently rock and sing your child to sleep while it continuously monitors your child's health and happiness monitors."

Elsewhere at Buy n Large, there's the covetable Xanadou Shopping Pill (from BnL Pharmaceutical), which "simulates the euphoric shopping experience."

There's a Buy n Large store over at Zazzle, but it doesn't sell the Nanc-E or fill scrips for Xanadou. Damn.

Check out the trailer for Wall-E.

Hat tip to Kottke.org.

The Bottom Line

Kevin Smith, the director of Clerks, Clerks II, Chasing Amy, and Mallrats, has written a book, which he's promoting on his blog. The title of the book is My Boring-Ass Life, which prompts my question: What's with all the ass-onance?

I mean, once you start looking around, you see ass-suffixes everywhere. (I'm sure there's a proper linguistic term for this type of word formation, but it's eluding me right now.) A very selective sampling from the world of the web (omitting all the obvious pron stuff):

• Cheapass Games
• Cheapass Gamer
• Cheapass Food
• The Great Cosmic Happy-Ass Card Company ("Creating Art for the Spiritually Challenged")
• Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii (which has its own legend and culture)
• Kickass Web Design, offering "template and website design solutions for small businesses and non-profit organizations." (You'd think a company with "kickass" in its name would come up with something less tepid than "solutions.")
• Pompous Ass Words ("dedicated to identifying words that shouldn't be used on the grounds that doing so makes you sound like a pompous ass")
• The Frozen Ass Fifty, an ultramarathon sponsored each February by Gord's of Calgary, Alberta. (A summer event, the Hot Ass Fifty, has been discontinued.)

The title of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song ("The film that THE MAN doesn't want you to see!") was unprintably vulgar when the film was released in 1971; today it's quaint. And there are twelve live trademarks for "Badass" in the USPTO database.

Somewhere along the way, the "ass" suffix became an all-purpose intensifier that signifies (choose one) hipsterdom, slackerdom, street cred, or in-your-face-ness. It's an easy one-syllable verbal booster, like like, with the bonus feature of that satisfying sibilance at the finish. It hasn't quite been leached of all its shock value, but it's headed there, as the lexicon expands to include lazyass, stupidass, sorryass, and crazyass. (Ass-compounds aren't universally pejorative: see cuteass, cleverass, and coolass.)

The Official Ass Awards Dictionary--kind of a halfass site, in my opinion--cites wideass, poorass, dumbass, tightass, and grumpyass among its newest definitions. (I'd have guessed tightass to be a charter member.)

The Free Dictionary lists a number of ass idioms such as "kiss (someone's) ass," but none of the ass-fixes I'm addressing here. The Urban Dictionary is much more enterprising: see the ass emoticons, for example. (_$_) = "rich ass."

Urban Dictionary also provides an impressively long list of expressions (all reader-submitted, by the way) that incorporate a front-ended (so to speak) ass. I was pleased to discover that there's a name for something I've been noticing a lot lately: lettering across the backside of a garment that pronounces the wearer "juicy" or whatever. The name is ass billboard. Ass casserole--a synonym for "disorganized"--is evocative and euphonious.

And then there's ass anchovies, defined as "a term frequently used in Texas Hold 'Em, which describes a pocket pair of aces." Damn. That's poetic.

Anyone care to comment on new, unusual, or favorite ass words? Or explain the whole phenomenon to me? Much obliged.

Update: Dan the copy editor shares an accidental ass-ism.

(Hat tip to Kottke.org for the Kevin Smith item.)

Word of the Week: Mumblecore

Mumblecore: An early-21st-century independent film movement. Mumblecore films are populated by characters in their late teens and early twenties who have difficulty expressing their confusion about love, work, and life in general (hence "mumble"; the -core suffix is most likely a nod to hard-core and soft-core). Practitioners of mumblecore (also spelled with a capital m) are sometimes called the mumblecorps.

In "A Generation Finds Its Mumble," New York Times arts writer Dennis Lim identifies Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha-Ha (2002) as "the film that kicked off the mumblecore wave." Other films in the genre include Aaron Katz's Dance Party USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007) and Jay and Mark Duplass's The Puffy Chair. Lim writes that "mumblecore" was coined during the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival by  Bujalski's sound mixer, Eric Masunaga.

For more on mumblecore, see this article in IndieFilmPedia.

Update: Erin discusses -core as a snowclone morpheme on her blog, Snowclones.org.

The Simpsons: An Oral History

The August issue of Vanity Fair features John Ortved's oral history of The Simpsons, available online in expanded form.

Ortved interviewed about two dozen people for the article, including writers, producers, voice actor Hank Azaria, animator Gabor Csubo, and former Fox network chairman and CEO Barry Diller. He even got to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who claims that when he saw a 20-minute compilation of early Simpsons animation from "The Tracey Ullman Show," he said, "You gotta buy this tonight." (Murdoch also takes credit for scheduling "The Simpsons" opposite NBC's seemingly unbeatable "The Cosby Show," which went off the air one season later.)

On the other hand, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (Maus) was skeptical:

I pleaded with Matt and advised him strongly from my elder-statesman position to not work with Fox. "Whatever you do, don't work with those guys! They're gangsters! They're gonna take your rights away!" He's never let me forget it.

Check out Vanity Fair's picks for ten funniest Simpsons episodes ever. With one exception, all of the episodes on the list aired during the show's first eight seasons.

P.S.  Just one week till the opening of "The Simpsons Movie." Register at the official website to create a Simpsons avatar like mine. (Hat tip to Bill Walsh at BlogSlot.)

P.P.S. In case you missed it last month, here's a link to the Simpsons Brand-o-Rama.