the blog quebecois

They make me madder 'n a wet hen. Cliches. I must've seen a million of 'em, and at the risk of flogging a dead horse about it, I'm about ready to go ballistic...

OK, they do creep into my language once in a blue moon (heh), but, at least in writing, I try to keep them to a minimum. It bespeaks at least laziness, if not a genuine poverty of metaphor. (Oddly, the poverty of metaphor hasn't seemed to hurt the likes of Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy much. They must have a "richness of simile" or something.)

One in particular drives me to distraction. (I know, I know.)

"At this point in time."

This usually comes from politicians, PR flacks, bureaucrats, etc., who, I suspect, are paid by the word to sound off at length and with authority, while in truth saying as little as possible.

To deconstruct: Something can happen at this "point," or something can happen at this "time," but when something happens at this "point in time" it is high time to point out that I could just plotz.

But nevermind. Another corruption of the language has crawled upon the scene, and I am dutybound to remark it.

"Just kidding!"

By which I refer to the lamentable habit that some have of tacking the phrase onto the end of whatever remotely-outrageous thing they have said, or think they might have said, or wish they hadn't said at all. An example or two:

"Women sure are lousy drivers . . . [brightly] Just kidding!"

"I say, let's kill them [insert favorite race, religion, sex] all . . . [brightly] Just kidding!"

This never works. You'd have to have the timing of Jack Benny and the chutzpah of Lenny Bruce to carry it off.

I understand what people are up against in this brave new PC world. There is a palpable floating fear that something one says, no matter how subtle or well-intentioned, will be misunderstood or torqued out of recognition by the leagues of the Perpetually Offended.

With real consequences. I recall the Washington, D.C. (city manager?) man who used the word "niggardly" in a presentation and was forced to resign when some illiterate in the audience complained. (I believe he was reinstated a few days later when the Post and Times started to rain down ridicule, always the best PC [and D.C.] disinfectant.)

This "Just kidding!" is the tic, the flinch of our age. You never know when some moron KGB-wannabe is hovering just in earshot waiting to dispatch you to the GULAG.

So like minor Soviet poets, we giggle at the edges of ideas and fire off that exculpatory flare, "Just kidding!"

Not for me, this krepnechz prutzkov. I say what I mean, and I mean what I say.

When I say, "Let's kill all the [insert favorite race, religion, sex]!"

I mean, "Let's kill all the [insert favorite race, religion, sex]!"

I am serious.

[beat]

Just kidding!

Well, the test of a good blog is thinking up a name for it. I just googled "Blog Quebecois," and I'm the first on the bloc, as it were.

I'm hoping it leads to a messy and embarrassing lawsuit, or at least some confused francophone readers.

This is from an upcoming New Yorker piece by Peter Boyer, about Martha Burk's quixotic tilt at Augusta:

At one point, I asked her to help me to understand the benefit to society that would result from a woman joining Augusta National. She responded with what has been, throughout her campaign, her case-closing line: "You wouldn't ask me what was the benefit to society if we were talking about excluding people on race."

The difference, she explained, has to do with the conditioned behavior of men and women. "Here's the difference. And it's interesting that you should ask this, and it¹s just now come to me, pretty clearly. It is because, when men get together, denigrating women is often a part of the social interaction. When women get together, denigrating men is rarely done. It's just not even on the radar screen. Even among the so-called strident feminists of the women's movement. We don't have anything to hide in that way, and men seem to."

I am flabbergasted. This is tinfoil helmet territory.

For Ms. (I know, I know, "Dr.") Burk's edification, men don't spend a lot of time together running down women. Apart from the obligatory, "Hey, did you see that stupid bitch Burk on Crossfire last night?"

Not that I'm invited to such august councils myself, but I've got an educated guess as to the conversation:

What is it with these kids today?
I made a shot like that on . . . Pebble Beach? 4th hole? 1964?
So I'm up about three, four times a night?
How's your beer? Anyone?
What I would tell Bush is . . .
Hey, did you see that stupid bitch Burk on Crossfire last night?

I am really, really sorry that Martha Burk was kicked out of the treehouse by her deadwhitefatherbrotherhusbandfetus or whatever.

Get over it, and leave those rich old farts whatever scrap of dignity they have left.

Rich old farts are people too.

A Teamster on vacation in Las Vegas decided to check out the brothels.

At the first he went to he inquired of the madam: "Madam, is this house a union shop or non-union?"

She replied: "We are non-union. 80% of the profits are paid to management, leaving only 20% to the workers."

Disgusted, the Teamster went on to the next establishment and inquired of the madam: "Madam, is this house a union shop or non-union?

She replied: "We are a union shop. 20% of the profits are paid to management, leaving 80% to the workers."

"Excellent!" the Teamster cried. Pointing out a particularly curvacious blonde, he threw his money down on the table and shouted, "I want to buy the night with that woman!"

The madam, as she gathered up the money, said, "I'm sure you would, but --"

She jerked her thumb at a pathetic 85-year-old woman cowering in the corner.

"You get Agnes. She's got seniority."

One final touch -- the blog is now "The Blog Québécois." Soon I hope to be regaling you with the tedious minutae of my day-to-day existence, which even I find boring.

Or maybe I'll just make everything up.

"Dear Blog,

It's like a major bummer, man."

Call me Captain Courageous, but the latest tape of Osama bin Laden doesn't scare me much. There he is with his Dickee Dee skullcap, a dead cat nailed to his face, and he's not moving around an awful lot, like -- maybe? -- they propped him up for the camera and got him to lip-synch the deal, though I note his lips aren't moving too much, either. E's turning a bit green round the edges, mate.

That smell of bad cabbage emanates not from al-Jazeera, but from the Iraqi government, which is crapping its collective bloomers with the thought that al-Qaeda has hitched its wagon to the soon-to-be-extinct Saddam.

I am cynical, but not that cynical. The exquisite timing of all this shrieks CIA, but the CIA isn't smart enough to time it correctly.

bin Ladin or his successors are. They're all going down together.

I think it started with Pearl Harbor, the movie. Japanese Zeros zooming through parade grounds and barracks, wheeling and cornering like Han Solo's fighters in their final assault on the Death Star.

I noted it too in When We Were Soldiers, Mel Gibson's Vietnam epic. F-4s launching napalm strikes from the lofty distance of, oh, 15 feet. The best-forgotten Windtalkers, with P-47s screaming across the terrain at . . . 7 feet?

And now I've just seen the ad for Bruce Willis' new movie, the name of which escapes me.

The jets might as well be weed-whackers on dandelion patrol.

Hollywood, listen to me. I don't care how good it looks. Tactical aircraft do not, no -- never -- strafe, bomb, or otherwise annoy the enemy at that altitude, unless to temporarily incapacitate him with laughter when your hotshot pilot slams into that unanticipated clump of poplars. Let alone bombing it a half-second before he gets there.

War is terrible enough without your phony visual heroics. Illustrate this: During the Battle of Britain, a Spitfire pilot was tracking a badly-wounded German bomber when he spotted the belly gunner's cockpit smashed and with a pair of legs kicking out of it.

He knew what would happen to that man if the plane crashed, or if it landed and so he aimed at that point and unloaded all his machine guns and cannon at it until those legs stopped kicking.

Dramatize that, Hollywood.

The new (well, it's been running on HBO, I think, for a while now, but this is its Canadian debut on Showtime) Larry David show, Curb Your Opportunities is on tonight.

It's gotten rave reviews, so I suppose I'll tape it and look at it tomorrow.

Correction: I'll tape it and then toss the cassette into the pile of tapes that I've been meaning to look at for several years now . . .

OK, I admit it. I'm lousy at writing comedy. I do better with titles. "The Blog Quebecois" will have no resonance beyond Canada's borders; but at least within, it'll get a few phlegmy chuckles from old Scotsmen in Westmount, who are, as far as I can tell, my main audience at this moment.

For the others who might not appreciate the incredible pun that I've cooked up, the Bloc Quebecois is the Quebec-based separatist party. The Blog Quebecois is, like, an exceptionally clever take on that.

Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you, too.

Besides, I googled it, and nobody else seems to have come up with the idea.

I actually had planned to run a blog with that name, but this project and some others have sidetracked me at the moment, so I decided to recycle it into here.

Any writer worth his salt knows the value of the "hook," the initial paragraph -- ideally, the first sentence -- that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go until you lose him on the second sentence.

Or ideally, the second paragraph.

I think it's a combination of two things. One would be the overload of the Information Age. I don't read a hundredth of the things I'd like to read on the Internet any day. It's like being stuck forever in an infinitely-wending Borges landscape.

I love it.

The other, related issue is our attenuated attention span. click I'm at the New York Times click I'm researching Russian military equipment in 1941 click I'm, uh, let's not go there.

The title is the "come hither" glance across the room that screws up your courage to approach a beautiful woman.

That hook is in that smoky dark velvety rasp of a voice that bubbles over into girlish laughter and soon enough tunes to a note of hysteria beyond human hearing before morphing into the braying of a jackass underlain with the hideous cackle of the hyena.

OK, I admit it. I'm lousy at love, or at least writing about it.

But that's a new column.

It might be a little too fresh, and a lot too politically incorrect, but let's face it:

If all you can do on a Thursday evening is go out to the bar and shout "Whoo-hoo!" as Great White takes the stage, then your life is over, no matter how you calculate it.

Better you should have perished flicking your Bics at Journey or Toto. What a perfect waste of perfectly good mullets.

-------------------------------------

Appalling. That's my usual reaction the next morning when I read what I've blogged (is there some alternate word? Blurched? Blopped?) the evening before, usually under the malign influence of beer, or worse.

As penance, I did a bit of research on some of the other major fire fatalities (Coconut Grove, Beverly Hills, etc.) and have come to the conclusion that I'm glad I wasn't there.

Death just reaches out and grabs you when you least expect it. I imagine that the people thinking that unthinkable jump from the World Trade Center must have thought

not here

not now

no, never

I don't watch much U.S. college football. I don't have any particular allegiance to any university or team, so it all operates pretty much below my radar.

For some strange reason, though, I usually tune in for the Army-Navy game.

There's something quite poignant about it -- all the young midshipmen and cadets in their greatcoats of blue and gray, cheering on athletes who, by the standards of the age, qualify as true amateurs.

Few of them will make it to the pro leagues, and the few that do owe Uncle Sam a few years labor and possibly a whole lot more in the meantime. Devotion to country is still worth something in my estimation, even if the country isn't mine.

But of course I can't let this observation pass without one of my usual sarcastic comments.

I get Navy's colors, Blue and Gold. Blue for, duh, the sea; Gold for . . . anchor chains? Sunken doubloons?

I don't get Army's colors, Black and Gold. It raises several mettlesome questions:

1. Do they not teach the fine art of camouflage anymore at West Point?

2. Is there any beer left in the fridge?

OK, so it only raises two questions. Mirabile dictu, the latter of these can be answered in the affirmative.

Which leaves Army's troubling choice of colors. Ideally, their uniforms should be Astroturf green, splashed with irregular white stripes and yard markers. Done well, all you'd see of an Army ballcarrier would be a hairy forearm, cradling a football, floating down the field.

A plug for a website I happened across by accident.

Jump The Shark is an obscure reference to an obscure episode of Happy Days, and signifies the moment when you realized that the show was truly in the toilet.

It's an entertaining look back at a lot of shows that I've forgotten, and a lot that I wish I could forget.

Also the memory of Adrienne Barbeau's stupefying ta-tas, which was (were?) the most mesmerizing feature of Maude.

A horrible show, but . . . O, those zoomers!