Keep it up Allison; our hopes are riding on you and the thousands of other volunteers!

Fair ’nuff. But what if that earlier relationship is potentially embarrassing to either party? Alan Dershowitz used to bemoan the lack of recognition defense attorneys get from their clients, who aren’t exactly eager to tell their date for the evening, “Yeah, this guy helped me beat that rape charge.” Not to mention porn starlets, for that matter (in which case the embarrassed party would likely be the inquirer).

This is all made more complicated by the fact that you can Google practically anyone nowadays. Recently the Globe Magazine’s Miss Conduct addressed whether you should bring up something you’ve learned about a relative stranger from her blog. (Her answer: yes, so long as the topic is neutral and not stalker-ly specific).

All of this is to say that we were recently invited to dinner at a new colleague’s house with her spouse, who turns out to be Wayne of Wayne&Wax (thank you, Google!). I had this nagging suspicion that we were in a blues outfit together back in college, but here he is now, a well-known musician and ethnomusicologist featured in the Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, NPR, and the BBC. If he was our bassist, would he want to admit to it now? Worse, if he wasn’t, would it seem like I was puffing up my own musical credentials? “Nice to meet you Marshall Mathers. Hey, didn’t you used to rap in my moms’ basement?”

Well, to cut short this very minor mystery, Wayne was indeed the bassist for the band Whiskey Moan (here Google had let me down: I was unable to find a list of band members to verify it beforehand), but I couldn’t bring myself to ask him until the end of the night. When I did, and when we finally, officially, recognized each other, his wife rolled her eyes and observed that only men would hang out for several hours before figuring out that they’d met before.

I can see her logic. It’s hard enough for men to admit they’re lost and ask for directions. It seems an order of magnitude worse to forget a person’s name or his role in your life. Yet worst of all, perhaps, is losing the opportunity to ask and to re-establish old friendships.

(Good to meet you, again, Wayne!)

My sister has a new blog about the sartorial travails of the not-talls in an expanding world. Now, women’s shopping is just plain harder for women than men, but I do think the difficulty of finding clothes when you’re short cuts across gender. Consider how many “Big and Tall” stores dot the strip malls of America, and then consider how many “Short and Scrawny” stores there are. The bell curve is symmetrical, isn’t it? (Probably not, when over 60% of Americans are overweight or obese… call it a “bell curve with a pot belly”).

True, the boxy cuts of men’s clothing makes them easier to tailor, but I can never wear my shirts untucked because they end up looking like smocks. (Along similar lines, Amy considers wearing a tube top as a skanky dress). But at least I can get custom-made shirts, while I don’t think women really have that option.

Anyway, as a 5′5″ guy with a 4′10″ partner and sister (um, that’s a 4′10″ partner and a 4′10″ sister — not the same person), I have a personal interest in seeing more shopping choices for those of us on the short end of the stick. Personally, I think it’s prejudice rather than market forces, if only because the former is fixable and the latter not. (Journalists feel no compuction beginning sentences about short businessman or politicians with “Despite his stature…”).

Some Small Sense (at Blogspot)

Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow hit the stores today — picked up my copy at the local Barnes & Noble. With all the hoopla over The Da Vinci Code, I’m sure it won’t hurt Matt’s sales to have an endorsement from Dan Brown on the back cover. With all due respect to The Dante Club, I personally enjoyed this “Hist and Lit” outing much more. The presence of a strong central protagonist gives a stronger, more focused narrative. (Any similarity between said narrator and the author are, I’m sure, purely coincidental). Get your copy today.

(It’s already #55 on BN.com and jumped from #691 to 493 on Amazon from yesterday to today).

Tome has unleashed his first Podcast. The subject, I think, is “Sound check.” Oh, and ukelele.

What’s a podcast?

Coming soon: the Nan Show.

Meanwhile… HAPPY BERFDAY TOE!

Growing up as I did in nerdish suburbia, Monty Python — and
specifically, Monty Python and the Holy Grail — was the cornerstone of
our little group’s existence. We used to watch our version of the film
to the point where we even had the commercials (yes, our copy was taped
off TV) memorized and iconized. Fifteen years later, the thought of
bubonic plague still makes me thirst for Sunny Delight. Good day, sunshine!

Turns out us nerds are a big enough demographic group that Broadway saw
fit to market us our own live-musical version of the film, an honor once
bestowed only upon rabid ABBA fans. The review of the musical actually hit #1 on the New York Times’ list of most emailed articles. So much for getting tickets anytime soon…

Yet Another Blog: xRoommates is the new refuge for my college roommates (including Argus).

Do I really need to write for 4 blogs???

I’m happy to see several blogs that I read regularly mentioned in this article, including Maud Newton and Old Hag. Also, I’ve worked a bit with Kate Lee in the past (isn’t “currently a twenty-seven-year-old assistant” a strange place in that sentence for her age?). Obviously there are some authors of big books who also have big blogs, like Andrew Sullivan and Terry Teachout. But I don’t think you’d want to try to convert a blog into a book in any way. I mean, isn’t the whole point of a blog that it’s not a book — it’s a completely different format and forum. I was encouraged by the article recognizing that it’s a blog’s “brand” that should be transferred into potential publications, not the blog itself.

Wonkette should definitely have a book. She’s cuter than the drawing of her at the top of the blog!

Okay, I watch too much television. In doing so, I watch too many commercials. They’re almost all horrible and some even worse. The times when “event shows” used to stimulate great commercials is over (we can only cling to nostalgic memories of the Bud Bowl). Since it’s presumably the same marketing teams and advertising agencies as the non event shows, just thrown more money and maybe more time, it’s not surprising.

There are a few trends that I find particularly baffling and difficult to watch. The first is the soulless business world trend. There’s so many of these I can’t keep track. There’s one for Kyocera Mita printers and copiers that really bugs me. Echh, just thinking about it. It shows the CEO of some generic company standing in front of a large room of employees, announcing “I have an announcement that’s going to make a lot of you very happy. We’re getting brand new printers and copiers from a company called Kyocera!” The room lights up with excitement like they all just won the lottery (there’s no attempt at humor in this one, it’s in earnest). What’s worse, the CEO has planted certain employees in the crowd to stand up on his cue and say why it’s particularly exciting that it’s Kyocera. CEO: “Tell them why, Andy” Andy, standing and holding a sign to the same effect: ”They’re People Friendly!” This goes on with two or three pathetic employees. And each time they stand up with their signs they get a rousing round of applause from their colleagues (and I’m pretty sure “oohs” and “aahs”). I don’t know why this is necessary since the room is sufficiently excited at the CEO’s first announcement (maybe they have really old printers and copiers). Anyway, the amount of personal and professional joy from these hundreds of employees proposed to come from their CEO ordering Kyocera equipment is plain depressing even in a commercial. Also, Kyocera Mita couldn’t be a more annoying name to repeat ten times in a commercial.

There’s another one, meant to be funny, for Scottish Bank of Scotland (or something like that; update: Royal Bank of Scotland, that’s it), where a group of business colleagues are sitting around at lunch when one of them starts choking. Instead of administering the heimlich, the rest of the table coldly discusses what the heimlich is and how it’s pronounced. Another suited businessman from another table gets up, delivers the heimlich, and the choker spits up his chicken leg (I’m guessing) onto his surprised colleague’s lap. The idea, of course, is that the “good” businessman, representing the Bank of Scotland, acts while many businesspeople (Americans?) just talk. Besides being disgusting to watch and listen to (most of the sound is the guy gagging), and regardless of whether or not it’s funny (I can’t imagine thinking so), even the hero is a disturbingly emotionless automotan. Apparently this commercial is also offensive to Christianity. There’s a similar ad — can’t remember what it’s for, some investment company — also in a restaurant (looks like the same one), promoting the company’s perfectionism. It does this by having a drop of syrup drip on the table in the middle of the conversation. The guy at the head of the table stands up and yanks the whole tablecloth off and, everyone automatically lifting their utensils and dishes, he puts in a new tablecloth. Besides being absoultely the wrong message — who wants freaks for investment advisors? — the businesspeople again are just soulless Stepford suits.

There is a plague of commercial spots and campaigns as derivitive as their characters that use the same image of businesspeople: lots of IBM ones where robotic businesspeople are given a lesson by civilians in the rules of business; another one (maybe also IBM) where soulless employees are on a retreat on a dock and push off their tech guy into the water, as far as I can figure just because he wears glasses. All the commercials seem to set the mood with bad musack and muted tones of gray, cream, tan and dark blue.

I don’t work in an office. Maybe offices and businesspeople are soulless Stepford automotans. Tom Norris cites the Kyocera commercial as epitomizing why he quit his job. The reliance on the motif, either way, is really annoying.

Related, there’s an excruciating New York Times commercial for home delivery. It’s a pretentious, high-powered family of three, a graying businessy father, a hot-to-trot slick business mother about ten years his junior, and a grating know-it-all daughter about 12. The 12 year old has a quasi-suit and glasses on, and explains reading the NYT let’s her know what’s happening on the web. Yeah, the New York Times is really up on that. They report on trends about three years after they happen. I think this week’s Style section noted that Sex and the City is really catching on. The point is, this commercial intellectual cutout of the 12 year old girl is on her way to getting ostracized at school and going into therapy five days a week.

Gene, you don’t watch TV so this will have been meaningless to you.

Our friends Theresa and Adam had us over for a lovely Seder at
Theresa’s apartment in Belmont. It was significantly… quieter… than
the Passover we usually attend at the Spiegelmans on Long Island. In
one respect, though, it was similar — all four of us were reading from four
different versions of the Haggadah. Passover at the Spiegelmans usually
involves some disagreement over how each of the ceremonies and prayers
should be performed. It kinda reminds me of a lot of Jewish humor.

While I’m on this tangent: my friend Jarrett was
working for the UN in Kosovo several years ago and claims that, in one
town he visited, there were only two, very old, Jewish men still
remaining — and that they did, indeed, attend two different synagogues.