Oh, No

I have a sort of millennium bug up my ass. It’s not exactly a Y2K problem… it’s a Y2KX… no YMMX… well, it’s all these end-of-the-decade-wrapup stories I’ve been seeing the last few days.

Remember back when everyone was partying like it was 1999? I mean, when it actually was 1999 and they were all like, “It’s the end of the millennium!” And all the geeks [like me] were all, “No, the millennium actually ends next year.” And we would try to explain that there was no year zero, which NEVER worked, so then we would say, “OK, see. The first century had to be years 1 to 100, and the second century had to be years 101 to 200, and so on. So the twentieth century has to be years 1901 to 2000.” And that’s when we were uninvited to all the new year’s eve parties that year and some of us the next year also [because we just couldn't let it go and we would have spent all that night too explaining that this was the dawn of a new century] and a few of us several more years after that [but I'm not bitter].

OK. So we have NOT just finished the first decade of the twenty-first century. We have finished a decade of years with 0-numbers. But even though I am one of those annoying people [shut up] that said twenty-oh-one right up through twenty-oh-nine, not even I ever said twenty-oh-oh instead of two-thousand. [I have said uh-oh a LOT, but the date has nothing to do with that. Well, once it was on a date. But that's a different story....] And I know you’re wondering, so yes, to me this year is twenty-ten, not two-thousand-ten.

Is this what Santayana meant by, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”?

Details, Details…

Obviously I am too critical of what I read. I followed LAWKI with books I chose for pure escapism, Sail by James Patterson & Howard Roughan and now Spy by Ted Bell.

I really like the Alex Cross novels by Patterson. I wonder how much writing he really does on the books he co-authors. It seems he is more of a brand now. All the way through Sail part of my brain kept saying, “This is stupid!” while another part reminded me, “It’s supposed to be.” I need to read things just for fun and after LAWKI anything is an improvement. So I finished Sail and chalked it up to my need for an easy summer read.

Now I’m almost half-way through Spy. Novels often require a suspension of disbelief. Super heroes need super villains and what would be the point if the fate of the entire world did not hang in the balance? So, okay, I’ll accept that a terrorist group has spent years building a huge military complex in the rain forest of South America virtually undetected. Honestly I can let that go much more easily than little things like this: A sheriff breaks up a bar fight on a Sunday afternoon. The next Sunday he is again called to service and thinks, “It had been nine days since the incident at the Wagon Wheel.” Nine days? Damn, that’s a long work week!

And this: Two characters playing gin rummy. One plays a winning hand with “three queens, three jacks, and a royal straight.” He explains that he only drew three cards, “the third queen, the ace of diamonds, and the jack of spades filling in a lovely straight.” Scoring in gin rummy requires sets of cards all with the same face value or runs of cards in sequence (a straight) all in the same suit. So he needed to have all four queens and all four jacks in his hand and the straight would have had to be in diamonds (to use the ace), not spades. If that weren’t bad enough, his opponent was caught with, “two kings, two jacks, pair of nines, pair of sevens….” That puts six jacks on the table. Haven’t the author and editor ever played this game?

So while terrorists amass south of the border, these are the things that get under my skin….

Meaning Wanted

I am a fan of some of the shows on the USA cable TV network. I am not a fan of their various “Characters” promotions. One of them in particular gets me every time I hear it.

The 2009 Character Approved winner for music is hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco. In the spot he says,

I try to write about meaningful things… drug abuse, skateboards, giant robots….

I freely [and quickly] admit that I am not a fan of rap or hip-hop. To be fair, I’m not exactly in the target demographic for rappers, so maybe I’m just not supposed to get it. Does he really think that drug abuse, skateboards, and giant robots are all meaningful things? Equally meaningful? Or is he being ironic and I’m just being too literal?

Not that I care.

Nor should you.