One big world
Someone left a note for a photo I uploaded to a group fotolog of, of all things, dashboards. Hey, I ran across it, I knew I had a pic of my Xterra’s dashboard at night (and a fairly cool one at that), so I posted it. But the message was in Portuguese, because Fotolog is positively overrun with Brazilians (no, no one has ever explained this phenomenon to me). I popped it into the Google translator, and out popped:
“if I had sufficiently grana with certainty I would have one”
Which struck me as sufficiently close to “You Shall Know Our Velocity” to serve as a book title, or at least a short story title.
Lots of Courtney Love in the news lately as she enjoys an extremely public and fascinating breakdown, much of which I’ve been able to enjoy through Howard Stern. And because the iPod is psychic, it served up “Rock Star” while I was grocery shopping tonight, and I may have been singing “Well I went to school! In Olympia!” a little louder than would be strictly in keeping with my public image. At least I’m sure I wasn’t singing “we even fuck the same!” out loud. I don’t think. (Oh, guess I should have added the parental advisory up front, eh? My position on “bad words” is generally to make my kids aware of them, make them realize that people will think less of them if they use them, that they will not use them around adults or their parents, and to realize that by the time I was Hannah’s age, “fuck” was a regular part of my vocabulary although I had only the vaguest sense of what it actually meant.) Anyway, there’s little that is more fun than screaming along to Hole while wandering the yogurt aisle at the Hannaford.
Speaking of blasphemy, I had the bad taste (or lack of forethought) today, upon learning that my trip to NYC this Friday coincides with Good Friday, meaning the trains back north will be jammed all afternoon, to exclaim, “Good Friday?! Jesus Christ.” And I wasn’t even trying to be funny.
Tomorrow? Playing hooky! Chaperoning a fifth grade trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the only trip on which they don’t have to beg parents to come — I’m told every kid in the class will have a parent tomorrow. Cool. The Hall of Fame rocks, by the way, and anyone who ever loved baseball even for five minutes really should go there. If you can’t go there, then I highly recommend Richard Ford’s “Independence Day,” which has little to do with the Hall of Fame and nothing to do with baseball, but some of the pivotal action takes place up the street and at Doubleday Field, and it’s just an incredibly excellent novel about a man adrift in mid-life.
By the way, a raft of new NYC pics at Fotolog, which has finally resolved its many many issues and seems to be running right again.