Dr. Frank's What's-it

America

Underwear

As a little kid, quite a lot of my time was spent listening to and telling what we called "dirty jokes."

Some of these were straightforward and followed a familiar logical pattern, and were thus easily construed, even by me. For example, the endless variants of the "mommy mommy" joke, in which parental euphemisms for sex organs result in a punchline when used by an ingenuous child upon observing, say, mommy's monkey eating daddy's banana.

Most, however, were, and remain, unfathomably obscure, the result of my own naivety in such matters compounded by countless retellings by other naifs. They took the form of jokes, and we all laughed vigorously at the punchlines (which we could identify because they came at the end, and were related with an imitation of a "knowing" emphasis.) But as I understood and remembered them, they made very little sense. Reverse engineering them to try to arrive at the original joke is sometimes possible. Every now and again, I'll accidentally happen on the original joke, slap my forehead, and exclaim something like "oh, so that's why she was in the closet with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!" (Something I'd been wondering about for thirty years or so.) A great many of such puzzles remain unsolved. I'm pretty sure, in most cases, it's better that way.

The popularity of "mommy mommy" jokes, and their comprehensibility, isn't hard to explain. It is an exaggerated, satirical recapitulation of a very common, relatable situation, in which parents and the society they represent attempt to obscure the truth with euphemisms. It's enjoyable to observe that whole system come crashing down. Also, of course, it's an excuse to say "swear words," which is always fun, regardless of whether the story in which they occur makes any sense.

Most of these jokes are too gross and nasty to cite here even in mangled form. However here's a very tame example, which I, as a five-year-old, placed in my mental "dirty jokes" file because it involved underwear.

The original joke was one of those "good news/bad news" jokes. As I learned much later, this is how the real joke went:

Staff sergeant: okay men, listen up. I've got some good news, and I've got some bad news.

First the good news: after three weeks in this godforsaken trench, I'm pleased to report that we finally have a change of underwear.

Now, the bad news: Murphy, you change with Maseroni, Jones, you change with Parkinson…

Here's the joke as I remember it being told to me, and as I told it many many times throughout my childhood:

Army guy in a war: I have some good news and some bad news.

First, the good news: we were changing our underwear.

Now, the bad news: Michelangelo.

It always got a laugh, I swear. Must have been the underwear.

Nightmare

When you were just a baby, those days when you were happy...

Larry turns up some interesting old photos, including a pretty funny one with me in it from way back when.

You can't live without salt, you know.

I've got to assume that the bill linked in this post on the Reason blog prohibiting the use of any salt at all in the preparation of food at all restaurants in New York state has to be a satirical "modest proposal"-type bill meant to underscore the absurdity of food-banning legislation. I mean, right?

ADDED: well I guess I was wrong. The guy who sponsored this is evidently a dedicated anti-salt activist.

Notebook

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

-- Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude.

I don't know if that's the absolute best opening for a novel that I've ever read, but it sure is up there.

Misty-eyed

I just came across Reading for Robin, a new book blog with a touching origin:

My mom passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on February 2, 2010. As people gathered to mourn her death, the topic inevitably turned to books. Her friends remarked that she had always been the one they looked to for recommendations. I know that I certainly went to my mom first whenever I needed a new book to read. Now that she’s gone, she has left behind a devastated husband, two devastated children and countless devastated friends. But she has also left behind her reading list. On it are 50 books and authors she intended to read. While she may not still have the chance to get to them all, I do. And I will. And it will all be chronicled here on “Reading for Robin.”

I may not still have my mom, but at least I still have her advice on what to read.

King Dork is on Robin's list, and Tom's father's reading list is posted as well, which is how I was google-alerted to it. I have to admit, the whole thing got me a little choked up.

I'm Looking at You, Entire World

Andromeda and Booklist against the world.

With Your Love

Unusual Alignment

Somehow, Andromeda Klein has made her way in to the Urban Dictionary.

The Sum of Its Tropes

TV Tropes does King Dork.

Another Weird Book

W. B. Yeats's Golden Dawn journal.

(via hermetic.com.)

A Weird Book. Very American.

Bookwitch reads Andromeda Klein.

"Later in life I saw the movie "Conspiracy Theory" with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, and then it hit me: the book was about MK Ultra and the CIA."

Here I am blathering a bit about the Catcher Cult on the Huffington Post.

(This post's title is from a comment left on that post.)

I learned some stuff

Check out this extensive, photo- and link-laden interview with my super agent, Steven Malk.

Getting in Tune

That Prozac Moment

Matt of 41 Gorgeous Blocks on the uke.

With Features like These...

Are you aware that Safari 4.* saves two snapshots (a png and a jpeg file) of each web page you visit, as well as some seemingly random ones from your history or bookmarks? I wasn't, till I accidentally stumbled on it yesterday.

The culprit is an executable file called Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher in the Safari package. Its only function that I can see is in aid of the Top Sites feature of this release of Safari, a cool-looking but more or less useless routine that displays sites in a table, and illustrates the browsing history with images. I haven't found an easy way to turn only it off, though "Private Browsing" does knock it out along with everything else it knocks out. There's also an option to "stop loading previews" when you're in Top Sites, but that doesn't prevent the images from being generated and saved when you visit sites. The "Reset Safari" dialog box has a checkbox to clear the files that are already accumulated, but it doesn't stop new ones being generated. It's less hassle to remove them manually, but it is still a hassle.

These files can take up a great deal of space if this thing is left running over time. My folder of previews was over 2.5 GB on a machine I've had for two months; and only a few minutes of routine browsing can quickly accumulate hundreds of these files. It is also a potentially awful security risk if you use webmail, especially since, as I assume, most people who are using it have no idea that it's there. Counter-intuitively, clearing your history and/or cache has no effect on it, even though the directory in which the images are saved resides in Library/Caches.

Anyhow, I thought people might like to know.

UPDATE: In the comments, Sigivald points out this Apple Support discussions thread with a few work-around type solutions. The easiest one is simply to empty and then lock the $HOME/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Preview folder manually in the Finder. That doesn't turn off the Web Page Preview Fetcher, but it prevents it from writing anything to that directory. It will still try to, though, which is a waste and which will generate an error for every single webpage you load. But it's not as much of a waste as constantly writing thousands of big, useless files in the background.

Another solution mentioned is to enter the command in the shell:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

This is supposed to shut the whole thing down. I haven't tried it, so I can't verify that it works. If it's valid, I would guess the way to reverse this simply to delete it (i.e. "defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy") but I'm not sure. I'd be careful about editing defaults you don't know how to reverse, because that kind of thing can cause havoc when future updates are applied.

As some commenters point out, even just locking a folder in the library can have "side effects," but it's easy to uncheck the box. It's not ideal, but until they write a way to toggle it in the preferences into the program, the locked folder approach seems like the way to go.

My uncle used to love me but she died

The "…and I will be with you" 7" is featured in this post on my band and the history of the concept of the novelty song from the excellent Music Ruined My Life blog.

Don't Send Me No Flowers, I Ain't Dead Yet

As the Valet Reader mentions, I'm doing a reading thing at the Ferry Building Book Passage store in San Francisco on Thursday, Jan. 21. 6PM. Come on by. I'm gonna bring my guitar and books and just kind of see what happens.