Haggis: It's What's for Dinner

This past weekend was Burns night (January 25th), the birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. It is traditional to have on or around that night a Burns Supper, a gathering designed to celebrate the life and works of the Scot who gave us "Auld Lang Syne," also known as "that song everyone sings on New Years Eve but I always could only mumble along." It is also my annual opportunity to eat haggis.

The reason I bring this up is because the last two years I have had the privilege of being invited to one such Supper, arranged annually by the department's resident Scotsman and possessor of, unquestionably, the most awesome name ever: Gordon Dangerfield. Gordon and I shared an office for a year, and thus he was subjected to my broken sense of humor and penchant for opening my mouth well before thinking. Out of what could only be a sadistic desire to see me fail, Gordon asked me to give the Toast to the Lassies, a tongue-in-cheek (but good spirited) address that simultaneously roasts the fairer sex but, in the end, expresses our genuine affection for them. I delivered said speech that first year, and after the butter knife was removed from my torso and the worst of the bleeding stopped, I was elected to the position again. Last year's supper went off with similar success.

But in the interim since then, Gordon has been called back to the old country for personal reasons. He was one of those people who helped me learn how to navigate our department, someone who always kept his priorities straight. With Gordon and his wife Liz gone, there are no more Burn Suppers here, but in honor of the occasion, I've decided to post last year's speech. Slainte.

Another Toast to the Lassies

The Toast to the Lassies was originally designed as a thank you to the women who prepared that evening’s Burns Supper. While I was raised in an Irish Catholic household, I’ve been told that less civilized corners of the globe allow men to prepare meals and events alongside women, albeit often to the chagrin of all who would partake. Luckily, tonight is quite the exception, and so let me steal a quick moment of your time to first thank, by way of a quick toast, our gracious organizers Gordon and Liz, and our hosts Carolyn and Deckard. Your generosity and hospitality are warmly appreciated.

I had the pleasure of delivering the Toast to the Lassies last year, and apart from a few minor beatings in the parking lot afterwards and some extensive vandalism upon my vehicle, I escaped the joyous event unscathed. So sitting down to write a new Toast this year, I naively assumed I would have a leg up. Not so. I once again found myself unsure of how to proceed. And to my great shame, I could come up with nothing other than the trite evasions I give my freshman writing students on a daily basis:

Well, one can always open with a quote, and George Bernard Shaw, that great Irish man of letters, was on occasion known to quote himself, if only to liven things up a bit. Regrettably, I have yet in my scant twenty seven years of life to have said anything of worth, and while I have been assured by anonymous third parties that my lovely fiancé Kelly is utterly replete with pearls of wisdom, I bear that curse of the masculine sex in which I never entirely listen to the women in my life. No doubt this toast will suffer all the more for it.

There’s statistical evidence, which has a certain charm. For instance, women outlive men, on average, by about 15 years, which means once we croak you get all our stuff and then at your leisure may go through our computer files and find out just how sick we really were.

Strange facts can also be an attention getter at the start. In medieval France, you may not know, one punishment for an adulterous wife was to make her chase a chicken through town naked. Unfortunately, my research was unable to unearth what the chicken was being punished for.

But what I sometimes remember to tell my students on my better teaching days, and what they invariably remind me of anyway in their writing, is that these introductory tactics can also be gimmicky and trite. And I would never want to be either of those in a matter of as grave seriousness and honor as this toast. So let me speak from a more genuine place of perplexed but heartfelt masculine adoration.

The lassies are utterly selfless, for instance. They will readily give us the opportunity to investigate any suspicious sounds in the house, wearing nothing but our boxer shorts and an ill-fitted Lionel Richie t-shirt, waving a lampstand before us threateningly as we pray the intruder doesn’t fancy academics. She can immediately roll over and go back to sleep, secure in her knowledge that we will triumph over this more experienced and certainly better armed adversary, and will claim no share of credit when the local papers run their story on the savage beating we gave the entertainment center.

They, of course, have a greater threshold for pain than we do. We all know they trump any claim we can make (kidney stones is a favorite) with the unpleasantness of childbirth—with or without the rather obligatory fruit or sporting-good metaphors sometimes used to give us men a visual; any man who has not been reminded of this numerous times by the women is life is obviously and blissfully stone deaf. But I believe their psychological fortitude goes unsung far too often. I have, entirely by accidents that I rue even to this very day, stumbled upon shows such as America's Next Top Model, Platinum Weddings, or Gilmore Girls, and even a bare minute of airtime has threatened to burn the very eyes from my skull, as if I dared look into the face of God. The fact that women can not only endure one unholy sitting of this torture, but can return to it again and again, evinces the sort of deliberate and repeated masochism any man can admire.

And despite many of our vocations in the humanities, regardless of formal training, women have a far keener appreciation of the nuance of language. While we men of course realize that different words must have different meanings (even if we don’t always know what they are), we are sometimes unable to adeptly deploy them. For a period of time after our engagement, for example, I continued to call my fiancé “my girlfriend.” She in turn asked me, “Are you trying to piss me off?” (Which, let me assure you, is best treated as a rhetorical question, men! This is a trap!). Anyway, once I properly schooled my tongue, I then happened upon the idea that by occasionally calling her “wife” I would average out the previous oversight. The tactical deployment of this clever little stratagem, however, garnered only strange looks from Kelly, as if I had a horn growing out of my forehead. I was no longer even meriting a verbal response on her part.

Part of the problem, if I may call it that, is that for all their glorious qualities, we simply do not understand them. For example, if you compliment a woman on her thin figure, even not in earnest, you will receive a smile, perhaps a modest blush across her cheeks. If you compliment an older picture of said woman on how thin she was then, you will reap the kind of punishment pharaoh enjoyed for refusing to release the Jews.

They simply see things differently than we do. When Kelly and I decided to get a dog, I stupidly assumed we were getting a dog. As it turns out, we were getting a practice baby—I still have not received the memo. But what I have received is repeated reminders that I will apparently make an uninvolved, distant and borderline abusive parent, which I again lay at the feet of the Irish Catholic upbringing.

Now only a grad student would even consider making this claim, but regardless—something I once learned about theory may help me resolve this issue with the lassies here tonight, and that is this: some of those particularly opaque theorists out there (we all know who they are) write the way they do because the moment you think you’ve got something under wraps, you can stop thinking about it. And maybe that’s then why it works out so well that we don’t understand women: so we can keep on thinking about them. About their strength, and about their intellect, about their curious toleration of the menfolk who bustle around through their lives and scuff and break all the nice things they own and can only offer to open the occasional mason jar or crush a spider in exchange. So let’s think a bit on the lassies tonight, and when that smile inevitably dances on your lips, remember she’s the one who put it there. And in this world, that’s always something to be thankful for.

If you will, please raise your glasses with me for a Toast to the Lassies! Sláinte!

Viva Pinata...while you still can

Let me preface this post by stating from the beginning that Viva Pinata is an extremely charming game, possibly enough to cause minor tooth decay and an almost irresistible desire to plaster a shit-eating grin all over your face as you play. There. It's done. But, you see, there is a deliberate rationale behind this upwelling of good feeling generated by the game. Not unlike the narcotics mandated by the totalitarian state in Equilibrium, ones designed to numb the populace and thereby encourage them to miss the sinister underworkings of the hegemony, this charm and goodwill masks a dark--dare I say, nefarious?--system operating just beneath the surface.

Allow me a brief moment to give you the game's fundamental premise. On Pinata Island, where you apparently dwell/are banished, pinata live and roam in edenic bliss. You, as a novice gardener, must cultivate your patch of land to attract various pinata to visit, and ultimately, set up permanent residence. Once there, you can get them to "romance" and thereby bring in another generation of pinata; can cultivate various fruits, flowers, and vegetables; and landscape your garden to match your own peculiar aesthetic, and more (!). Sounds great.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. The pinata are seemingly immortal, or at least, immune to the ravages of old age. Thus so long as they are not destroyed by stronger, more predatory pinata, they will persist indefinitely, like styrofoam in a landfill. What this amounts to, though, is the same progenitors used again and again to propagate the family in a horrible parody of those values Republicans love clinging to. In less flowery language: the same parent can repeatedly "romance" his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, ensuring an increasingly isolated and stagnant gene pool. It's a kid's game, so the subsequent generations don't suddenly emerge with two heads or a dead fetus protruding from a rib, but one can't help but hear the soft twang of a banjo playing the theme from Deliverance. Indeed, those pinatas do have a perty mouth.

Incest, however, is only the tip of the mutated iceberg. "Sour" pinata roam into your garden from time to time, and certain varieties of even tame pinata are also known to cause trouble. One can, at times, bring these ruffians in line with merely a dousing from your water can. But should these recalcitrant beasties prove too stubborn, one's sole recourse is to...savor it....beat them to death with your shovel. And this isn't like killing your rich grandmother, either. One shot won't do it. After a few blows, the target of your righteous fury will crumple to the ground, moaning, while you continue to bludgeon it until candy comes out. And come out it does. The pinata explodes, leaving behind delicious candy innards for your other pinata to feast upon as a celestial light descends from above, drawing the shredded, paper-mache remains of your pinata's flesh and, I imagine, skeletal structure into the sky in a gentle spiral, not unlike the caress of God. Oh, and as the pinata explodes, a chorus of children scream in delight from seemingly everywhere at once.

As any gardener with an acute God-complex would expect, one is free to "engineer" your pinata as well. Often this simply involves feeding them certain food to evoke a change in color or form. However, a few counter-intuitive instances stand out. For instance, if you want your "tadfly" to change from blue to red, you must buy a tiki torch and then consign him to the flames. He will emerge, like a phoenix, rejuvenated and newly crimson. The point I want to make, though, is that if you don't have the strategy guide or read the forums, to discover this you must be of that special temperament that feels randomly incinerating your pets is a good idea. In other words, at least for select moments, the game seems designed for people like Nero as he trussed up Christians and set them afire to light his dinner parties.

Commerce, as everywhere, is generated through the development of a product and its eventual sale. In Viva Pinata, you sell anything you want. Including your pinata. That's right: breed them recklessly with no concern for the retardation such rampant incest is likely to create, beat them into submission or simply burn them alive, and then sell the manicured survivors off to be beaten to death by children, who too will gorge upon the pinata's candied innards. No wonder these poor bastards long for the sweet embrace of death and can dream only of finally making it to a child's party (or WWE inspired quinceanera, I suppose) so that their misery might end. Viva pinata, indeed.

Bibliophilic Voyeurism: Take Off Your Dust Jacket

A friend of mine (we'll call him Oghrim, since that's the name he's using on this website) pointed out a website named Librarything to me months ago. As is my way, I replied with a cursory "Looks interesting" and then went back to whatever it is I do. However, since I promised a former student I'd write her a letter of recommendation this weekend, as it's now Sunday night I need something else to do other than fulfill my promise. And so I returned to Librarything to give it another look.

As it turns out, it's a pretty interesting site, so long as you (like me) feel that the quality, content, and quantity of the book spines you have facing out of your (hopefully plentiful) shelves is somehow a measure of your intelligence and all around cultural sophistication. It's basically a virtual library, one that you can construct to mirror your actual collection and then, if you're feeling particularly bold, share with like-minded people. By like-minded, I refer to those other anonymous souls who have identical, or at least similar, books on their virtual shelves. While I'm sure their hearts were in the right place, I shudder to think what kind of socially-inept, obsessive compulsives I'd be matched with. Why do I assume this? Because as I was entering the hundred books (literally) that I could come up with off the top of my head, I was getting frustrated that I wasn't actually in front of my books, because I didn't want the wrong editions of the right books in my virtual library. So, keeping in mind that this sort of minutiae bothers me during what should be a purely diversionary moment, why the hell would I want to get in contact with another person like moi?

I've added a widget (a delicious word all it's own, I might add, though I can't help but describe it as "short" or "gnomish") that randomly shows the covers of any twelve books in my collection. Quaint, yes, though I wonder how good a decision it was. First of all, some of the more obscure scholarly books I have don't seem to have covers in the system, so they're ruled out of the widget, thereby losing any chance of impressing my friends who are better read and more intelligent than I am (almost all of my friends, as it turns out). Secondly, I'll eventually get all of my books in there, which could potentially result in such jarring spectacles as Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice sitting alongside Everyone Poops. Alas, such is the cross we truly eclectic individuals must bear, we who are equally fascinated by the sociological implications of supposedly objectivist practice and the ubiquity of shitting.

Anyway, if you have a moment to kill, check it out here. If you make a library, and the site has friend lists (I didn't take the time to check), add me. I'm under Colonel_Gentleman. "Super awesome, dashingly handsome, staggeringly well read, humanitarian, nobel laureate, and all around humble guy" was already taken, surprisingly enough.

Two Fisted Birthday Wishes

Well, I hope you all had a pleasant holiday season, and that Santa brought you everything you wanted. I wish I could say I've been negligent in my posting (again) because of the furious work I've been performing on my dissertation, but I respect you too much to lie to you like that.

However, I do return to you bearing gifts. The first I had actually forgotten I'd seen, but was recently reminded by visiting Media Sheep. Upon reflection, I probably had a minor stroke when I saw this movie poster for the first time, and thus as a sort of knee-jerk reaction my short term memory wiped the image from my recollection utterly. Such is the price one must pay when being slapped in the face by visuals of such potency, as crisp droplets of raw masculinity and distilled awesome slowly glitter in the air. Since I used the adverb "slowly," I suppose this metaphor is happening in slow motion, so let's throw some doves flying in the background, a la John Woo. Not that this poster needs any verbal augmentation:

Delicious.

The second gift brings us to the title of today's post. Come to think of it, it dovetails nicely with the whole "see something and have a stroke" point, which in turn uses a figure of speech that touches upon the John Woo reference. I tell you, I don't plan this stuff. The language just...does it for me. And by "it," I mean "twist itself into a horrific parody of itself." Gotta love pronouns, eh?

Anyway, the WWE is teaming up with Mun2 (which I can only assume is short for Telemundo 2, in some sort of bizarre echo of MTV2) to provide one lucky girl with a wrestling themed quinceanera, complete with "WWE Wrestling Superstars Carlito and Melina to join the party." No, I'm not making this up; I'm not nearly that creative. For instance, I never would have thought that the perfect way to celebrate a 15 year old girl's coming of age is to watch someone pretend to punch someone else in the face a few dozen times, while her uncle gets too drunk and tries to body-slam his brother-in-law off the roof of the house, demolishing a folding table in the process and ensuring he's never invited anywhere socially ever again. But then I read that "Only girls age 15 (or turning 15 in 2008) to age 21 are eligible," and I blacked out. So, just to clarify, WWE Raw and Mun2 are teaming up to potentially give a 21 year old woman the 15th birthday party she always dreamed about, and apparently has been obsessing over for nearly six years since. Don't believe me? Enjoy the commercial below, and be sure to savor what is apparently the polarized ends of the teenage girl spectrum: a blond cheerleader and some sort of squarish, Ugly Betty sort of girl in boy's clothes:

I hear that the new American Gladiators will give a lucky octogenarian with serious bone density problems a vicious ass beating for his next birthday. Neil Patrick Harris will host the festivities, and personally grill the unicorn shanks...and for a nominal fee, Lindsey Lohan will snort the powdered unicorn horn in the bathroom.