things not to do

1. Don't ever get into an argument with a friend about whether you should have brought him/her a whopper from Dresden. No good can come of it. Even if you are RIGHT you will realize at some point that you are arguing about transporting beef-based fastfood across international borders and it will depress you.


2. Don't hang your new 2007 "Inexpressibly Wonderful Travel Destinations" calendar on the floor. Your housecat, even the one who has been behaving beautifully for the past six months, will pee on it as if to say "There's no place like home! There's no place like home!"

3. Don't take a job editing market research reports unless they are absolutely not hiring at the plant.

4. Don't stop me if you've heard this one before.

5. Don't try to order coffee from a Czech waiter while he's doing something else - like taking away your empty plate. It will anger and confuse him and you will not see him again for the rest of your meal, not that there will be any "rest" of your meal, but if there were, you wouldn't seem him again during it.

6. Don't look at me like that

7. Don't pull a coat on over your pajamas on a Saturday morning to go to the store for bread, run into a friend at the checkout, decide to go to a pub for a drink, and forget you're in your pajamas until you actually take your coat off in the pub and it all comes rushing back to you in a flurry of flannel.

8. Don't go home just because you're in your pajamas in a pub, especially if you've already ordered a drink. Pull your coat around your shoulders like a fashionable woman of a byegone era (or a recently escaped mental patient) and drink your beer.

9. Don't ask me how I know that.

10. Don't stay up into the wee hours of the morning on your computer when you have perfectly good Yorkshire murder mysteries to read.

Wanted Man

My favorite country song of all time (oh, I just lost most of my audience, didn't I? Well, that's okay, it's cosier with just the two of us). So, as I was saying, my favorite country song of all time is a number I've always thought of as "Bullet in My Shoulder" but which is actually called "Wanted Man," sung by the late, great Frankie Laine.

He died this week at the age of 93 and it was only through reading his obits I discovered that he, like all the best things Western, was Italian. And I mean Italian as in, "My dad cut Al Capone's hair":

Frankie Laine was born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio on March 30, 1913, the eldest of eight children of John LoVecchio, a barber, and his wife, Anna, both of whom had left Palermo, Sicily and settled in the Little Italy section of Chicago. (Al Capone was a customer of Mr. Laine’s father.)

I also discovered that his nicknames included "America's Number One Song Stylist," "Mr. Rhythm," "Old Leather Lungs," and "Old Man Jazz."

For me, though, he will forever be the man who sang "Wanted Man" on an eight-track cassette from a Reader's Digest boxed set of greatest country hits that belonged to one of my Aunts. During the summers, we kids played those cassettes so much we may have helped render the technology obsolete.

Here's where I should link to the song, and let you decide for yourself that it's the best country song ever, but Booger I mean Blogger won't let me do that (in case I've stolen the music I suppose, which is SO unjust; my version of "Wanted Man" was lovingly transferred from eight-track to mp3 by a little process called OSMOSIS, which I believe is still legal.)

Since I can't post a link, I'm going to walk you through the song as best I can. So, ahem, it starts with the spoken bit:

SPOKEN: Bullet in my shoulder.
Blood runnin' down my vest.
Twenty in the posse and they're never.
Gonna let me rest

Then the music kicks in, and it's really upbeat, considering the subject of the song is a potentially fatal bullet wound, and you hear:

Till I became a wanted man I never even owned a gun
But now they hunt me like a mountain cat
And I'm always, always, always on the run

But wait till you hear WHY he's on the run:

I killed poor Jed Kline in bad Laredo fight
Killed him with my bare hands for the girl I loved that night
Jed's brother's out to get me
He's comin' with a gang
But I'd rather shoot it out, by God
Than let 'em watch me hang

And then things really pick up, and you get horns, and backup singers, and I always picture the posse forming a kickline (Laine did sing the theme to Blazing Saddles, after all) and he sings:

Bullet in my shoulder!!
BLOOD runnin' down my vest
Twenty in the posse!!
And they're never gonna let me rest
Till I became a wanted man I never even owned a gun
But now they hunt me like a mountain cat
And I'm always (always), always (always), always on the run

But the VERY best part is yet to come, for even as he knows he's going to die for her, he expresses some rather serious doubts about "the girl he loved that night."

She had spangles on her red dress
She had laughter in her voice
When he tried to put his hands on her
My heart left me no choice
But was she really worth it?
Well, I guess I'll never know
She'll be drinking someone else's rye
When I'm six feet below

She'll be drinking someone else's rye. When I'm six feet below.

Ooph.

Repeat chorus.

A wanted man
A wanted man
On the run

Fade out.

As my cousin Catherine said, upon hearing of his death, "I suppose that at the age of 93 it's unlikely he went out in a hail of bullets, but that's the way I like to picture it."

degrees of...all descriptions

I've been thinking about degrees of separation. Basically, wondering whether they're measured in Celcius or Fahrenheit. Which led me to wondering about Fahrenheit himself and whether he ever got a degree and if he did, did anyone look at it and ask "What's that in Celcius?" Because I would have. And then he would probably have punched me.

Which got me to thinking about Sonny Liston (punching always makes me think of Liston, to the point where I'm surprised to discover that some people hear the word "punch" and don't think of Liston; they think of a British humor magazine, or one half of a two-puppet team, or a fruity beverage mix named for the 5oth state, it's nuts, really, the way people's brains work). I've been thinking about Liston - pictured here on the cover of the December 1963 Esquire ("The last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney," as Sports Illustrated later put it) - since reading about him in a Vanity Fair article about the heyday of Esquire magazine. (It's okay for a magazine to write about another magazine's heyday if it's made quite clear that not only is that heyday over, it's been over for some time). Coincidentally, it turned out that my sister, who lives in Quebec City, had read the same article. It reminded her of her love of, and ambition to write for, magazines. It reminded me of my once cherished desire to be the world heavyweight boxing champion. Ah, the dreams of youth.

I first learned about Liston at the age of eight when I read my father's "Boxing Champions of the World" book cover-to-cover. I also learned about the great John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tuney, and Archie "The Old Mongoose" Moore. My father was (and still is) a big boxing fan, and he did his best to turn all of us (three girls and a boy) into boxers, with varying degrees of success (degrees of success, by the way, are always measured in Celcius). I can't say I really like watching boxing, but I love reading about it. More to the point, I love reading about boxers. Their stories are always grittier than those of hockey players, or golfers, or rhythmic gymnasts. And I like gritty. I used to drink the afore-mentioned fruity beverage mix without water.

Liston stuck in my memory because he was a true badass, complete with a police record and mob connections. He came as a shock to the American system, becoming champion by creaming the gentlemanly Floyd Patterson(prior to Mike Tyson, the youngest man ever to hold the world heavyweight title). Both were black, but they represented opposite ends of the spectrum of public black personas. Think Michael Jackson (back when he still had a nose) vs. Prince. Think Condoleeza vs. L'il Kim (a boxing match I'd pay to see anyday). Think Punch vs. Judy. No, wait, don't think that.

These meditations on Liston and black persona came from a book on Mohammad Ali by David Remnick, by the way, not from my eight-year-old brain. At eight, a lot of that boxing book went over my head. For instance, I remember reading about the world middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, the "Michigan Assassin." He was of particular interest because my grandfather, also a boxing fan, had named one of his sons after him (my uncle, Michigan Assassin Campbell). Ketchel was murdered on a ranch where he was training for a fight by "a jealous farmhand." I thought the farmhand was jealous of his boxing title, which made sense to me. A boxing title seemed like a pretty awesome thing to have - and I imagined Ketchel wearing his championship belt around the ranch, just to rub it in. I had no idea there was a woman in the mix until years later, when I'd learned to cherchez la femme, as they say in French boxing circles.

I'm ready to end this now, but I'm not really sure how to do it. I could follow my own advice on writing and "end abruptly," but that seems particularly lame in a posting that started with a discussion of degrees of separation. So let's see if I can bring this back to where I started: Farhenheit to Liston to Ketchel to my uncle who is now in Florida where the temperature, when he last checked in, was in the '70s. FARHENHEIT.

sunday vows

It's SUNDAY and I've been relaxing with a cup of coffee and the Vows section of the New York Times. You may remember that I often turn to the Vows section when the squalor of my own life becomes too much to bear. Today has been particularly trying - my French executive assistant, Francois, has decided I own too much stuff. This morning, he's helped me divest myself of two coffee mugs, a large glass vase of dried flowers, and a ceramic teapot. He also seems to feel I have no need for my Internet connection (he keeps knocking the modem off the desk) or my headset (he's trying to chew through the cord). While I appreciate his concern, and do, in fact, have some sneaking leanings towards a more minimalist lifestyle myself, I'm also tempted to tie his ears in a knot across his nose.

And so, surrounded by bits of broken glass, ceramic, and the odd sprig of dried baby's breath, I turned to the Vows section for comfort.

Today's edition features the marriage of John W. Warner IV, son of Senator John Warner of Virginia. As a child, Mr. Warner "loved explosions, cartoons, army uniforms, pranks involving frogs and ice cream — he called health food 'seeds and twigs.'" He also "loved wearing kilts because of his Scottish heritage."

Are you as enchanted as I am? Could there be a more winning combination than a guy in a kilt putting a frog in your ice cream? Doesn't he sound dreamy?

But wait, it gets better! "After Mr. Warner graduated from the University of Virginia, where his fraternity, Chi Phi, voted him 'hellmaster' four years in a row, he became a professional race car driver, naturally."

Naturally. The path from hellmaster to professional race car driver is deeply rutted, so many have trod it.

Said his father, “He wanted his own identity and he found it.”

He decided to become an ASSHOLE.

Mr. Warner spent the late '90s living in Westport, Connecticutt sitting on 17th century furniture and selling NASCAR memorabilia on ebay (or something, I started skimming here). He remained, however, a "diehard and distinctive bachelor" (I'm guessing it was the kilt that earned him the "distinctive" label.)

But he "grew to dislike breaking hearts as much as he hated eating tofu." And here - TEN paragraphs into their wedding announcement - comes the bride:

"...in November 2004, Jodi Edmonds, another old friend of Mr. Warner’s, set him up on a blind date with Shannon Ford Hamm, a first-grade teacher at the Spence School in New York, who had taught her two daughters. Mr. Warner, who still loves frogs and other slimy creatures, suggested that they meet by the reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History in New York."

Okay, I have to admit, I wondered where they were going with that sentence - "Mr. Warner, who still loves frogs and other slimy creatures, was immediately smitten."

He wasn't, though. In fact, after their natural history museum date, he didn't call for a year, when, tired of his "tempermental beauties," the "fashion models and party girls" he usually dated, his thoughts returned to Ms. Hamm.

This time, realizing they had both "grown up with wealth" (hers a Minnesta brewing fortune) and watching her with children, he fell in love with her "simple and guileless" ways.

Their wedding reception was on a beach, in January, in a tent done up like a "chic new Manhattan hotel lobby" (the first plan, to do up a chic new Manhattan hotel lobby like a beach, having been nixed by the concierge).

"The bridegroom, whose back still hurt from a recent motorcycle crash, greeted guests à la Truman Capote, while lounging (in a kilt) on one of the couches. The bride, meanwhile, looked completely natural in her sleeveless gown and her hair pulled back as if for tennis."

Can you say "DOOMED," children?

I can. And just did.

Pictured above left: The hellmaster preparing one of his trademark frog/ice cream pranks

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y NIGHT!

I'm taking it easy tonight. I got a little carried away last evening celebrating the end of the week that was - but so would you have, had you accomplished half of what I did over the past seven days: editing a 160-page report on photocopier sales in the Levant AND coining the term "homeless grade" (for toilet paper, but clearly possessing potential for wider application).

I'd tell you more about Levant photocopiers, but I know how it sucks to pay US$18,000 for a market research report only to have some asshole in editing give away the ending. Let's just say, it's a page-turner.

As though this weren't enough, I also read 400+ pages of Anna Karenina. Nice, but it paled in comparison to the photocopiers; I really fear my days of reading fiction may be over. I just don't see the point anymore - 800 pages of unbroken text? PUHLEASE. Throw me a bone, give me some bullets, or a table, or - better still - a graph. Below, for instance, is a graph I've made out of data concerning the height and popularity of four of the main characters in Anna Karenina (Anna, Vronsky, Kitty, and Levin), based on the 400 pages I've read so far:

See? Wasn't that easier than all that foolish READING? You can grasp, in an instant, everything there is to know about these four. Of course, I still have to read the book in order to generate the graphs, but then, somebody has to count the photocopiers in the Levant, too.

And so far, I'm happy to report, that somebody is not me.