Monday, March 22, 2010

One week is less than 'weeks'

Spring is Here! Which reminds me of Tom Lehrer's comedy song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", whose title unfortunately gives away the joke, and I wonder why Lehrer let that get by him. Perhaps the title was imposed on him by his producers, who are notorious for messing up artistic visions in misguided attempts to pander to the popular will. That is, not Lehrer's producers in particular, but producers in general. For all I know Lehrer's producers are or were gems in human form and the title is merely an ironic joke that's too subtle for my poor brain to grasp. My guess would be that that's not the case but I've been wrong before. More than once, even. Like Fred Saberhagen's time-traveling hero, Pilgrim, I can remember three times in the past century that I've been wrong. (Pilgrim is quite a character.) But he doesn't really have much to do with Spring, or with Tom Lehrer, as far as I know, although, again, it could be that the whole story Saberhagen tells is a coded message, understandable to those in the know, explicating Lehrer's song and it's relation to the season, and how it all traces back to trained aardvarks from Ancient Atlantis.
But probably not.

Monday, March 15, 2010

I hate bloggers who don't blog for weeks at a time.

It's really inconsiderate! Here I am, all eager to see what new amusement they're going to provide me for free, and they haven't done anything! Therottabealaw! Although, we have a lot of laws already, come to think of it, and I hear somebody in New York wants to ban restaurants from cooking with salt, which doesn't sound very practical to me, although I would certainly appreciate the option of at least one truly low-sodium dish on a restaurant menu. But that's a case where I'd say there didn't ottabealaw and so far there isn't, so I guess it's all to the good, except for seekers of low-sodium meals, who are mostly forced to cook their own meals, but that's cheaper and healthier anyway, so what's the big deal? (Funny/gruesome typo: I first wrote: 'mostly forced to cook themselves', which evokes some rather disturbing images, no?) It reminds one of the fabled auto-cannibals of Lemuria, the car-eating cars that are said to have evolved 500 million years ago on that lost continent from a colony of defective self-reproducing robots left here as junk by visiting aliens from outer space. The eventual extermination of the auto-cannibals was indirectly triggered by the time-travelling antics of the well known Young Man (well, little-known, really), in a brief episode regrettably left out of Wells's account in The Time Machine. How Wells came to know of it at all is an amusing story which may one day come to light if we're all lucky.