Be Prepared

It was 89 degrees Fahrenheit in Philadelphia today.  That's 27 degrees above normal, a record. 

So, do you think it's time yet to take the snow shovel out of the trunk of my car?

Waiting for Snow

The snow from Nemo the Nor'easter is due to begin within an hour.  (Actually, it will be a change of light rain to snow - just a drop in temperature.)  Waiting for snow is always an odd sensation.  Sound carries differently over snow.  Even before the snow begins, I imagine that I can hear sounds from far away.

Thankfully, I live near Philadelphia, which is often near the dividing line between rain and snow.  North of us they are expecting up to two feet of snow; the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have ordered everyone off the road.  But here in the Philadelphia area, it's business as usual.

Around here, tonight is expected to be just another night.  Only with an inch or two of snow.

Waiting for Snow

Here in the Philadelphia area, we never know how much snow we'll get over the course of the winter.  Some years it's a lot.  Sometimes we don't get any at all.

Right now, we're waiting for our first appreciable snowfall of the season.  The forecast is for up to three inches by tomorrow.

When you don't live in a terrain of constant snow, its imminence is powerful.  There is an exquisite anticipation in waiting for snow.

You remember being a child: hoping that there will be enough snowfall to cause school to be canceled.

You remember walking in a snowfall at night: the astonishing quiet of it, the way the snowflakes only become visible as they enter the cone of a streetlamp.

You remember playing in the snow.  Personally, I never understood the appeal of sleds - they looked unnecessarily complex to me.  I always preferred the simplicity of a toboggan.

Of course, the year I asked for - and received - a toboggan for Christmas, it never snowed that year.

But that's winter in Philadelphia for you.

Naturally...

The Philadelphia Marathon is this weekend.  So, naturally, tonight's Philadelphia traffic jams are the worst in recent memory.

Reading from My Work on Wed 28 Nov

There will be a reading on Wednesday 28 November - two weeks from tonight - at the Chester County Book and Music Company in West Chester, PA, USA.

The readers will be members of the Main Line Writers Group.  We will start at 7 pm and end (we hope) around 8 pm.  Each writer will get a maximum of ten minutes to read.

The Chester County Book and Music Company is located at 975 Paoli Pike, West Chester, PA 19380.  It is in the West Goshen Center at the intersection of Route 202 and Paoli Pike, so it is easy to find

Sadly, this bookstore has announced that it will close in the near future.  The loss of this enormous independent bookstore will be a great loss to the Philadelphia area.  And, since it will be closing, this may be our final event here.

This event is free and open to the public.  The bookstore does request that you call them to say you plan to attend, so that they can put the appropriate number of chairs out.  Their number is (610) 696-1661. 

Hope to see some of you at the reading!

Defending Plagiarism

And now for something completely different: The New Yorker ran a contest asking its readers to suggest what a dog would tweet.  (If, of course, dogs COULD tweet.)

The winner they picked submitted an answer that was uncomfortably close to the caption of an old Gary Larson cartoon.  (Of course, ALL Gary Larson cartoons are old - he retired his strip "The Far Side" in 1995.)

Defending its decision, The New Yorker declined to disqualify its winner because of the number of times the word in question was repeated.

Sorry, it's still plagiarism.  Repeating the word doesn't make it different, unless it's in a foreign language incomprehensible to the reader, and the joke is how often the word is repeated.

Somehow, this reminds me of that episode of "Seinfeld" in which Elaine gets a cartoon accepted by The New Yorker, only to discover that she stole the caption from a "Ziggy" cartoon.

And, if you want a much more clever answer to the "What would dogs tweet?" question, go see Philadelphia stand-up comic John Kensil perform.

OK?  OK?  OK?  OK?  OK?

Jesus in Starbucks

I spend a lot of time writing in coffee shops.  And I see my share of odd things in them.

For example, at a shop in a college town, I know I'm liable to see all sorts of fraternity/sorority rush weirdness.  Not long ago, I witnessed three college girls hopping over each other while saying "ribbit" while a fourth filmed them.

But today is one for the books.

I'm having a bad day with my knee.  I'm limping; I'm in pain; I'm using a cane.

I'm in a Starbucks in a Philadelphia suburb.  You often hear customers speaking Hebrew in here.  It's that kind of neighborhood - a suburb built by Jews in the 1950s, back when they were restricted from buying houses in other suburbs.

So the last thing I expected to encounter in here was a faith healer.

I'd just limped over to my table and fired up my computer when a young woman approached me.  Blond, fairly attractive.  She asked if she could sit down.  I said "sure."

Then she went into a speech about how Jesus spoke to her and told her to heal that man.  She asked where the pain was, then she asked if she could lay hands upon it and pray!

Despite being an atheist, I had two reasons for letting her do so:

1)  I'm a writer.  If you don't do odd things, what are you going to write about?

2)  Hey, I'm a guy.  If an attractive young woman wants to put her hands on my thighs, I have no objection.

So she did.  Having grown up Catholic, I'm disappointed by impromptu prayers in English.  I'd be more impressed if she prayed in Latin (or Hebrew, for that matter).  But she sounded sincere, and that's worth something.

When she was done, she asked me to stand and try my knee out.  I did.  No change.  She wasn't daunted - maybe it was God's will that me knee be healed later.  I wonder if she thought that Jesus was going to restore my knee to its youthful flexibility, or that God would install a titanium knee replacement.

I didn't ask her that, though.  I just gave her my favorite salutation from Hamlet:

Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

She didn't understand.  Apparently her Jesus doesn't put a premium on a classical education.  I told her it was from Hamlet, and that she should look it up.

Just another day in Starbucklandia.

My Best Laugh Today, Provided by Joe Queenan

It's been a grim week.  Even though, except for some short power outages, I personally escaped Hurricane Sandy, plenty of my friends have not.  Some are still without power, and several have probably lost their vacation homes at the New Jersey shore.


So I was surprised to hear myself laughing at the NPR radio show "All Things Considered" today.  They were interviewing the notoriously sardonic writer and critic Joe Queenan.  A self-described "well-paid bastard," Queenan was plugging his new tome One for the Books.

Queenan is a big, grey-haired, Irish Catholic from Philadelphia.  As he says, "I look like a cop."  He doesn't look like an author, or even someone who belongs in a bookstore.  And he's become used to being dismissed by the typical bookstore clerk - what he calls "the irony boys."

Now, I've never been to Paris.  But I always wanted to visit the legendary English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, which was James Joyce's home bookstore during his years in Paris.  Queenan's description* of his visit there made me laugh:

When I was in Paris and I was 20, I used to go to Shakespeare and Company.  You always hear about what a great place that was.  They were horrible to me! 

Most of the people who'd go in there were poorly shod.  They looked like they hadn't eaten in a long time - they looked like they were at death's doorstep.  So you knew that they'd gone to Phillips Exeter!  You knew they'd gone to Andover!

No doubt it made me laugh because I'd been similarly dissed by haughty store clerks.


Anyway, if you'd like to listen to his interview, go here.  And here is Joe Queenan's list of must-read books:

Darwin - Marx - Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, by Jacques Barzun
A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
Emma, Persuasion or Lady Susan, by Jane Austen
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift
The Iliad, by Homer

Source: NPR

Copyright(c) 2012, NPR

* This was my transcription of Queenan's interview. It's probably not 100% accurate.

Hunkering Down

I'm awaiting the arrival of Hurricane Sandy.  It's not my first hurricane, and I'm well positioned: 35 miles west of Philadelphia, so I'm inland; and atop a hill, so I have no worries about flood.  There's always to possibility of wind damage, of course.  The electricity and internet will probably go down.

But hunkering down does give me even more time to read and write.  Reading the minor stories in today's paper, I learned a new word: "ovine," meaning "of, relating to, or having the appearance of sheep."  It was in an AP story about a shepherds' protest in Madrid, Spain.  As long as I'm learning, I figure the day hasn't been wasted.

And I can always write longhand by candlelight!

Bloomsday 2012

It's Bloomsday, and people will be gathering to hear recitations of Ulysses by James Joyce!  I'm glad that the weather is pleasant here in Philadelphia.  The big local Bloomsday event will be at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, which houses Joyce's autograph (hand written) manuscript of Ulysses.  As you can see from the above, the Rosenbach is not a large museum, so the audience gathers outside.

Bloomsday is our most literate celebration.  It doesn't draw as many Philadelphians as, say, the annual Wing Bowl, but it shows that some of us still read.

I, unfortunately, won't be attending the Bloomsday celebration.  I'm committed to an afternoon of chores.  This evening I will be managing a comedy club, where I can listen to some comics do knob gags.  (Yes, I made some bad life choices.)

Undecided

For the past two days it's hit 80 degrees F here in the Philadelphia area.  Do you think it's safe yet to take the ice scrapers and the emergency snow shovel out of the trunk of my car?

Hawks

I have no idea why, but I've seen more hawks in urban settings than in rural ones. I've gone on hawk-viewing expeditions to Hawk Mountain, PA, and managed to miss every raptor. Yet I've spotted several hawks feeding on the lawn at my parents' house in West Chester, PA. I even saw one getting entangled in a scrubby pine tree next to a parking lot off Route 70 in Cherry Hill, NJ.

At present, there is a live webcam showing three eyassers (baby hawks) in a nest in Philadelphia, PA. This nest of Red-tailed hawks is on a window ledge of the Franklin Institute. You can see the busy traffic beyond the nest on the Franklin Parkway. There is also a Facebook site for the Franklin Institute hawks, called Franklin Hawkaholics. It's worth a look.

Good-bye, Mr. Movie

Last night I was driving home from managing the South Jersey Comedy Cabaret when, as usual, I turned on the radio to listen to Steve Friedman, "Mr. Movie."

It was then that I learned that Steve Friedman had died last week at the age of 62. I hadn't caught his obituary in the newspapers, and he wasn't quite famous enough to make the national news.

He had suffered from kidney disease for years. He was on dialysis and needed a kidney transplant, but was unable to find a viable match. This wasn't for lack of donors: his radio fans loved him so much that several offered one of their own kidneys.

Steve loved doing his radio show, sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of movies with his fans. His nationally-syndicated show originated here in Philadelphia.

Steve Friedman was also a guest at my writers organization, the Brandywine Valley Writers Group. In fact, he was our first guest during my administration as president.

Last Saturday night Steve finished his radio show, went home, and died in his sleep. I'm grateful that I got to listen to his final show.

He will be missed. I will probably end up listening to the BBC as I drive home from New Jersey. There's no one who can replace Steve Friedman.