A Little Levity From Dave Barry

 We Need Some
   So far, things are not going well this year and that is unfortunate since most things did not go well for all of last year. It is the case, however, that Dave Barry was able to find some humour in 2024, as he has done for many of the years that came before that awful one. 
  In 2022 his annual year-end review even included some CANCON and for that reason ended up in MM (see, "Year-End CanCon Continued".) He also merited attention in MM for his coverage of the "Great Canadian Worm Wars" of 1993 (see, "On Worms.") That alone should convince you to read on, but, if not, I will also throw in the fact that he has won a Pulitzer Prize and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism. 
  He has been a columnist since the 1980s and his year-end one is widely syndicated. It is as lengthy as a very long novel and I will offer a bit of it since I don't think Mr. Barry would mind, or need more money. He begins with a preamble, which is novella-length and then writes almost a chapter for each month. Here is a portion from the introduction and a few samples from just a few of the months. Funny stuff is even found in the title. If this year also turns out to not be funny, at least we can look forward to Mr. Barry's review of it. 

"Dave Barry's 2024 Year in Review: How Many Goofs Can One Nation Endure? The Answer is Boeing in the Wind." (from The Washington Post and found in other newspapers. It is worth looking for the entire column.)

How Stupid Was 2024?

  "Let’s start with the art world, which over the centuries has given humanity so many beautiful, timeless masterpieces. This year, the biggest story involving art, by far, was that a cryptocurrency businessman paid $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction for ...
A banana.
Which he ate.
“It’s much better than other bananas,” he told the media.
And that was not the stupidest thing that happened in 2024. It might not even crack the top 10. Because this was also a year when:

*The Olympics awarded medals for breakdancing.

*Fully grown adults got into fights in Target stores over Stanley brand drinking cups, which are part of the national obsession with hydration that causes many Americans to carry large-capacity beverage containers at all times, as if they’re setting off on a trek across the Sahara instead of going to Trader Joe’s.

*Despite multiple instances of property damage, injury and even death, expectant couples continued to insist on revealing the genders of their unborn children by blowing things up instead of simply telling people.

*The number of people who identify as “influencers” continued to grow exponentially, which means that, unless we find a cure, within 10 years everybody on the planet will be trying to make a living by influencing everybody else.

*Hundreds of millions of Americans set all their clocks ahead in March, then set them all back in November, without having the faintest idea why. (Granted, Americans do this every year; we’re just pointing out that it’s stupid.)

* But what made 2024 truly special, in terms of sustained idiocy, was that it was an election year. This meant that day after day, month after month, the average American voter was subjected to a relentless gushing spew of campaign messaging created by political professionals who — no matter what side they’re on — all share one unshakable core belief: that the average American voter has the intellectual capacity of a potted fern. It was a brutal, depressing slog, and it felt as though it would never end. In fact, it may still be going on in California: a state that apparently tabulates its ballots on a defective Etch a Sketch.

  A few monthly samples:
February:
*In a highly controversial decision, the Alabama Supreme Court rules that frozen embryos are, for legal purposes, children, and therefore must immediately be thawed out and provided with iPhones.
*Tucker Carlson conducts a two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, offering Westerners a rare opportunity to find out what the Russian leader really thinks. It turns out he thinks Carlson is a useful idiot.
*In a Super Bowl for the ages, two teams compete against each other under the watchful gaze of Taylor Swift.

April:
*As the tragic situation in Gaza worsens, American college students on a growing number of campuses engage in protests and other dramatic actions intended to draw attention to the single most important issue facing the world: the feelings of American college students.

November: (with a bit of CANCON)

*On election night, the TV networks are teeming with political commentators prepared to analyze and dissect and crunch the numbers far into the night as the nation settles in for the long, grueling process of determining the winner — a process that everyone agrees could go on for days, possibly even weeks, because of the extreme razor-thin closeness of the ...

Never mind. In roughly the same amount of time it takes to air a Geico commercial, the networks determine that Trump has decisively won the election, including all of the so-called battleground states and four Canadian provinces. It’s a stunning result and a massive failure by the expert political analysts, who humbly admit that they had no idea what was happening, and promise that from now on they will be more aware of their limitations.

We are, of course, joking. In a matter of seconds these experts pivot from being spectacularly clueless about what was going to happen in the election to confidently explaining what happened in the election."

December:

*Clearly, this year needs to end. Which is why we’re looking forward to New Year’s Eve — when, in a beloved tradition, thousands of revelers will gather in Times Square to say goodbye to 2024 and welcome 2025. We like to think that on that night, as the seconds tick down to zero and that giant ball starts to descend, the people gazing up at it will all be united, if only for a moment, by a common hope — a hope shared by the millions of us watching on television — specifically, that the giant ball was not manufactured by Boeing.

Also, while we’re hoping, let’s hope that 2025 will be a better year. How could it be worse?

Try not to think about it."

In Love With Norma Loquendi

 Quoth the Maven

   I do not  write much because I keep discovering things about which I would like to write and then never have time to do so. I start poking around to learn more about the new things, while the older ones gather dust. It is a disease of the dilettante, I suppose, to be so easily diverted.
    That attempt at constructing an alliterative phrase is made in deference to a major manufacturer of them, William Safire, the subject of this post. The new thing distracting me this week is that I learned that it was during the last week of September that Safire died 15 years ago. Examples of such diversions which keep me from creating my magnum opus are easily found. I noted, for example, the anniversary of the death of another columnist and even his birthday. (That columnist is Russell Baker: see "Russell Baker (August 14, 1925 - Jan, 21, 2019," and "Russell Baker's Birthday." (Like Safire, Baker was both clever and funny.)
   If you spent the majority of your years in the last century you will recognize the name "William Safire" and remember him as a conservative hanging around the Nixon White House, both of which are true. Safire was also responsible for these Spiro Agnew utterances: "pusillanimous pussyfooters" and "vicars of vacillation" (Democrats) and those "nattering nabobs of negativism." Another one, which could be used in Canada these days: "The hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history." Pulitzer Winner He won a Pulitzer for his "distinguished commentary" about the Bert Lance affair and here are his distinct titles: "Carter's Broken Lance," "Boiling the Lance," "The Lance Cover-up," "Lancegate," "The Skunk at the Garden Party" and "Beyond Lance." We could use him now.

Enough politics. Safire became a prose pundit and his New York Time's columns were under the title, "On Language." They were fun to read and have aged well. Many of them are collected in the books listed below. There is enough reading to get you through winter. What About Love and Norma and the Maven? They are found in titles of two of his books and you were probably more curious about them then you would have been about any title I could have come up with. Here they are with some information about each book.

In Love With Norma Loquendi "Safire charms yet again with his lively interest in our language. ``Norma Loquendi,'' that fickle lass whose name the author translates as ``the everyday voice of the native speaker,'' is the title character of this ninth book to come from Safire's ``On Language'' column in the New York Times Magazine....Those who believe language is a delight as well as a necessity will happily while away the hours meandering through these pages." from Kirkus Book Review.

Quoth the Maven
"There are connoisseurs. There are virtuosos. And then there are mavens. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer William Safire is the maven's maven....Safire - using alliteration, puns, and other tricks of the writer's trade - offers a cornucopia of words, phrases, slang, and grammatical oddities, proving once again why Time calls him "the country's best practitioner of the art of columny."" "Safire probes the surprising origins of such expressions as "kiss and tell," "people of color," "stab in the back," "bonfire of the vanities," and the whole nine yards. He attempts to explain what a White House press secretary meant when he announced, "We can't winkle-picker this anymore.... "Knowledgeable, witty, and impeccably grammatical, William Safire's essays on language are an important and entertaining reference for mavens everywhere." from the Book Jacket.

Books By Safire
  Listed here are just his nonfiction works; he also wrote a few novels. The London Public Library has a couple of them and the Western Libraries have lots. They are easily found for purchase and you can read all of In Love with Norma Loquendi on the Internet Archive.

Nonfiction

Before the Fall (1975)

On Language (1980)

What’s the Good Word? (1982)

I Stand Corrected (1984)

Good Advice (1985) LPL

Take My Word for It (1986)

You Could Look It Up (1988)

Words of Wisdom (1990)

Leadership (1990)

The First Dissident (1992) LPL

Lend Me Your Ears (1993)

Quoth the Maven (1993)

Safire’s New Political Dictionary (1993)

Watching My Language (1997)

Spread the Word (1999)

Let a Simile Be Your Umbrella (2001)

Fumblerules (2002)

No Uncertain Terms (2003)

The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (2004)

How Not to Write (2005)

Safire’s Political Dictionary (2008)

In Love with Norma Loquendi (2011)

Language Maven Strikes Again (2011)

Coming To Terms (2012)

Post Script:

  I have a copy of the very thick Safire's Political Dictionary and pulled it from the shelf for this exercise. A few pages were noted, for reasons I don’t recall, but here is what was on one of them. It provides a good example of what can be learned by poking around in a Safire book. Note his last sentence. I hope members of the NRA don’t happen upon this post.

“Your Home Is Your Castle”

--A slogan appealing to whites opposed to residential integration.

   George Mahoney, perennial candidate for statewide office in Maryland, used this slogan in his 1966 campaign. It was picked up by Louise Day Hicks, candidate for mayor of Boston in 1967; both campaigns lost.

   “Your Home Is Your Castle – Protect It” was regarded as a Code Word phrase by most analysts, playing on the prejudices of voters concerned with property values in their neighborhoods if blacks moved in.

   The phrase “a man’s home is his castle” is taken from a proverb and was codified in English law by Sir Edwin Coke in 1604:

“For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium…Resolved: The house of every man is his castle, and if thieves come to a man’s house to rob or murder, and the owner or his servants kill any of the thieves in defence of himself and his house, it is no felony and he lose nothing…”

   In recent usage, the proverb has been more the property of opponents of desegregation than of the “gun lobby.”

Safire’s Political Dictionary….1978. p.806.

Birds Aren't Real

 

   If you count yourself among the credulous and are aware of the evil things which were done by the Democrats in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, then you will know that birds are really drones created by the U.S. government (probably with help from George Soros), to spy on people (particularly Democrats.) So, this post is not for you. It is for a couple of my incredulous and intrepid birder friends, who are too busy birding to read the news. They should know that their Life Lists are full of imposters. 

  Well, not really. Many of us now know that the BAR movement is a huge hoax and if my birder friends happen to hear about it, they will be reassured that birds are real - if they bother to read this blog. Unfortunately, a large number of people do not read this blog and an even larger number have come to believe that birds aren't real and perhaps roost in the attic of Comet Ping Pong. 

   You are likely mystified by all of this if you are unaware of BAR. The notion that Birds Aren't Real was proselytized across the country by the gentleman pictured above starting back in 2017. Since then, large BAR billboards have been  erected in cities, the message has been spread and the movement has grown. Those who are part of the movement realize it is a preposterous parody, but unfortunately there are many members of the public who do not do a lot of critical thinking and they are now trying to avoid the government drones and are still on the lookout for Democrat pedophiles.

  I think the kids should be commended for poking fun at the political discourse of our time and for attempting to "fight lunacy with lunacy." Buy some of their gear and help support the cause. It is interesting that their products, unlike MAGA-wear, can appeal to both believers and non-believers. 

Sources:

   If you begin at the website of Birds Aren't Real, you can buy some of their merchandise and read a false history of the movement. 
   For a recent account about BAR see: "Birds Aren't Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory," by Taylor Lorenz, New York Times, Dec. 9, 2021. For an older one see: "The Bird Man: An American Reality and a Fake Conspiracy," by the blogger Rachel Roberts. 
   Although the idea of fake birds is rather bizarre, someone did ask the folks at the fact-checking website SNOPES, if BAR was true. They answered and provide a bibliography: "What is the Birds Aren't Real Movement?", Bethania Palma, Nov. 22, 2021. 
"Is It Satire?
Based on our review of social media accounts and various analyses of Birds Aren’t Real, it seems safe to say that the movement is satire that skewers real conspiracy movements that are built on similarly far-fetched beliefs. But it also captures the zeitgeist of Gen Z, who have grown up in a social-media-driven information ecosystem, in which facts have become partisan footballs."

The Bonus:
  Like most of my posts, this one may not make much sense, especially if you are bewildered by the words "Comet Ping Pong" and have never heard of Pizzagate. About them, see here. 
   I suppose if birds weren't real, we wouldn't have to bother to rename many of them and cancel that horrible Audubon. See: No More Name Changing.