Dry Ice Factory

So I was thinking the other day that I'm hapless when it comes to certain things, and then I got to thinking about what "hapless" means. OED says it's a lack of "hap" or good luck. But for me "hapless" has a connotation of "helpless" as well. To be hapless is to be incapable. So there's an undercurrent of meaning here: "The only way I can be successful is if I'm lucky, and I'm not lucky." In other words, I can't make this happen, so I need hap. It's a passive trait. "Get happy" is a contradiction in terms.

'Francine Porad of Seattle, Washington and past President of the Haiku Society of America says, "There are some people who believe any reference to human beings in a haiku turns the poem into a senryu. I disagree. In my opinion there should be no separation, is no separation between human nature and the world of nature." '

-- Elizabeth St Jacques, "Haiku or Senryu? How To Tell the Difference"

(I'd never heard of senryu before today. Now I wonder if there is a past President of the Senryu Society of America. Google doesn't think so, alas.)

'Borage, incidentally, is said to be part of a complex piece of Cockney rhyming slang: "thyme and borage" - "thyme" punning on "time", borage rhymes with "porridge", hence the slang word for a prison term... '

-- Nic Farey on Facebook (comment on a post by Gary Mattingly with pictures of mullein and borage)

Brouwers Cafe announcement on Facebook: "We were approached to do a 4 square swarm party tonight. If we reach 50 4 square logins by 6, we'll extend happy hour drink prices until 7."

Come again? The happy hour part I understood, but not much else.

"Listless" is an odd word, isn't it? What's the etymology? I like the idea that one is lacking a list, therefore lacking the focus to do anything.

In any event, that was my mood over the long weekend, although I actually got quite a bit done nevertheless. I worked all three days on my piece for the next Chunga, and I finished a draft. Problem is I still don't really know what the piece is about or what I'm trying to accomplish with it. I'm attempting to take the attitude that it is a process of discovery rather than a lack of anything interesting to say. It needs more work, but I hope not too much more, lazy bugger that I am.

The soggy weather was one reason for the lack of list, so I didn't get to work in the garden as much as I wanted to, although I did manage to mow the lawn in the rain. However, I've been meaning to mention that I recently bought a plant mostly for its name: bloody dock. It's actually a very pretty plant, which, I've just discovered from Jessica Amanda Salmonson's page on it, is edible. Hm. The nursery didn't say anything about that and treated it as an ornamental.

I watched Mamoru Oshii's anime Angel's Egg (Tenshi no tamago, 1985) twice over the weekend. It really is as strange as its reputation -- surrealist or symbolist, nearly wordless, non-narrative or at least non-linear narrative. Here's a good description I found at that link: 'Told with minimal dialogue and maximum Christian imagery, Angel's Egg shows a little girl living out her life in a gloomy, gothic, abandoned city. After she symbolically gives birth to the titular egg, she meets a Christ-like figure (complete with cross) who accompanies her to an ending that is beautiful, transcendental, and entirely depressing.' I found it kind of annoying the first time, less so the second time. There's one "speech" that seemed like the worst kind of pseudo-philosophical posturing (you know, like maybe we're all somebody else's memory, whoa), and the artwork is kind of a mixed bag. It's redolent of the Euro-comics style of Heavy Metal (the magazine), for better and worse. Still, there's something compelling about the imagery and the sense of dream logic it captures and the questions it raises. Why are the fish shadows of coelacanths? Why is the bird skeleton of an archaeopteryx?

And that's my little list of what I did this weekend. Sort of. I left out some interesting communications and a couple of whiskey sours.

One of the things I learned this weekend (I can't remember who told me, but maybe the waiter at TS McHugh's) is that Rat City is a name for White Center, which is where the Rat City Roller Girls started out. White Center is a little working class town outside of Seattle that has a bit of a (no doubt classist) low rent reputation. The only reason I've ever gone there was because Victor's grandparents lived there, and I visited them with him a few times. I had never heard it called Rat City before, and the Wikipedia entry on the name is fascinating. It's short enough that I'll just quote the whole thing here:

Rat City is a colloquialism for the area of White Center, Washington, a small, low income suburb of West Seattle. White Center garnered a poor reputation due to its high crime rates and small homes. An alternate scenario for the moniker is that the name refers to the "rink rats" who roller skated at the Southgate Skate Center (which still stands). Rat city is also known as mice city There are a couple theories as to how "Rat City" got its name. Some people assume there was once a prolific rat problem in the 1940s, but RAT might have also been an acronym for Restricted Alcohol Territory, which Seattle was designated as during WWII. Unincorporated areas such as White Center were a draw for servicemen in part because of less stringent liquor regulations. Additionally, a military Relocation and Training (RAT) Center was located in the area during that period.

Somewhat incoherent even by Wikipedia standards ("Rat city is also known as mice city"?), but I love the indeterminacy and sheer weirdness of some of the derivations. If you google "Restricted Alcohol Territory", you mostly get references to this Wikipedia article. Even HistoryLink.org seems to be paraphrasing this article. Very strange. Google finds no references to Restricted Alcohol Territory that aren't an explanation of how White Center got its nickname. Smells fishy to me.

I never knew that "ortho" meant "correct". Thus "orthodoxy" means "correct belief". So "politically correct" could be understood as another way to say "orthodox", which is probably pretty close to how it was used in the Marxist-Leninist context, before it became a libertarian pejorative.

... AGW -- anthropogenic global warning ...

(From Marc Ambinder's takedown of Sarah Palin's "Boycott Copenhagen" Op-Ed in the Washington Post.)

I recently ran across the word "ferverent" on the intertubes. I looked it up in the online OED, which doesn't know of it, but if you Google it, you get a 63,000 hits (along with the query of whether you meant "fervent"). From what I can tell, it means the same thing as "fervent," but perhaps with added fever. (It seems to be associated with the word "prayer" a lot, too.)

Anyway, it was a new one on me. My initial thought was that it was a typo.

Years before Wells popularized the term "Scientific Romance," Bulwer-Lytton devised a narrative that he described as "perhaps a romance, but such a romance as a Scientific amateur might compose."

-- David Seed, Introduction to the Wesleyan University Press edition of Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race