WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Blubber Chicken and Middle-Class Pie

Hello, everybody—nice seeing you again.

I was reading a social history of housework, because that's the kind of thing I do for fun, and in the chapter on cooking the author said that now that a whole generation has grown up eating Hamburger Helper, that's what Americans think home cooking is. They associate a good, home-cooked meal with Mom dumping the contents of a box into a pan and mushing it up with some ground beef. This made me feel very un-American, because I'd never eaten Hamburger Helper in my life. Then one night I happened to have a pound of ground beef in the Kelvinator, and it was a night Sluggo wasn't going to be home for dinner, so I decided to experiment. I walked to the store and, mirabile dictu, Hamburger Helper was on sale that week. There were a lot of flavors; I hadn't expected that. I didn't know which was the correct, all-American flavor to get, but there were empty spaces on the shelf so I figured probably the "regular" flavor was already sold out. I wanted to do my experiment, but I wasn't so committed to it that I was willing to get a raincheck and another pound of ground beef the following week, so I finally chose "Oriental" because its name seemed more politically incorrect, and therefore more all-American, than "Stroganoff."

Well, it was dreadful. The predominant flavor was salt, apparently as an attempt to disguise the bizarre chemical flavors of the other ingredients. I like salt—I sometimes snack on sea salt straight from the box—but Hamburger Helper was too salty for me. I am sorry for the Americans who eat this stuff, but on the other hand I'm not a foodie, either. Foodie food is peculiar in its own way. For instance, foodies are responsible for blubber chicken. For hundreds of years, American cookbooks have advised folks to roast a chicken by letting it sit in a 350-degree oven for an hour or two, depending on the weight of the bird. It was delicious, and it was fool-proof—but unfortunately it wasn’t foodie-proof. Pick up any new-fangled foodie cookbook, and you’ll discover that you should be putting your chicken in a 500-degree oven for a while, and then lowering the temperature for another while, and then you will wind up with a nasty, undercooked, blubbery bird which apparently you are supposed to pretend to enjoy because if you don’t you are an unsophisticated rube who only wants your food to taste good.

Poor Christmas

I have been poor most of my life. Not poor as in, “we have to cut back on the cleaning lady’s days,” but poor like being passed around from one relative to another to live, and wearing other kids’ used clothes, and going an entire north-Midwest winter with no winter coat because nobody noticed I didn’t have one. I don’t remember ever being hungry then, but I do remember being cold; I cried from the cold sometimes.

I worked hard in school so I could get a scholarship to college, because I knew that was the only way I’d ever get out. I got a full scholarship to a school in the Pacific Northwest. The winters were warmer there, so my lack of a winter coat didn’t matter so much. I arrived at college with my entire wardrobe: two sweaters, two pairs of jeans, underwear, socks, a pair of clogs, and a jacket. I don’t remember being cold there, but sometimes I was hungry. I stood in the cafeteria where the other kids emptied their trays and took the food they didn’t want. I remember when the price of a box of saltine crackers went up a nickel at the local store, because that meant I couldn’t afford them any more. Then my little sister came to live with me. One of the happiest days of my life was the day we qualified for foodstamps.

One year I started saving at the start of the school year, and by Christmas I had $6.00. I had three people I had to get gifts for, so I used the money to buy cheap little address books at a 99-cent store and some fabric scraps, and I covered the books with the fabric and decorated them and wrapped them in paper I drew myself. It wasn’t so bad, really. I think I have a naturally sunny nature that probably would have come out more if my life hadn’t been so hard when I was young, and that year I thought, “Well, at least I’ll never have a Christmas as poor as this one. Every Christmas from now on will be better than this.” But I was wrong. This year is worse.

That Boy Jumpy Sure Can Dance

Hello, Everybody—Nice seeing you again.

The WFMU Record Fair this past weekend was the most fun ever. Everyone had been waiting a year for it, and folks were ready. There were great live acts, and bizarre entertainment in the AV Lounge, and album cover modification procedures, and dancing, and food—and, of course, tons of vinyl, CDs, and stuff. So much stuff. Usually I can’t even buy anything at the Record Fair, because when I’m confronted by that much recorded material the acquisitive part of my brain overloads and shuts down. I walk up and down every aisle, and then I leave. But this year I was on a mission to find a recording that featured washtub bass, and I want to thank that one dealer who came down $5 on the price so I’d have enough money left to get home. But still … there was a lot of stuff.

I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have a lot of stuff, huge accumulations of pop-cultural detritus: comic books, plastic toys, baseball cards, books, records, CDs, 8-track tapes, shoes, hats, teapots, watches, fountain pens, videos, art, little bits of metal picked up off the street, shopping bags, postcards—anything—everything—all of it at once. I never thought of myself or my friends as being participants in the great American consumer economy, but when I look at our itty-bitty living spaces stuffed full of crap, I have to reconsider.

I think there are various categories of stuff, or that stuff is acquired for several different reasons. There are things that are useful, but I think most stuff is not acquired to be used. One very nice wristwatch is a useful thing, but 37 assorted wacky watches hanging from nails on the wall constitutes stuff. People who collect things may take solitary pleasure from their collection: a philatelist can sit down and leaf through his stamp album and enjoy the collection. But stuff often seems to require an audience. The thing I enjoyed most about my collection of jackalope postcards was the reaction of people who appreciated the humorous aspects of anybody having a jackalope postcard collection in the first place.

Things to Think and Boo

Hello, Everybody—Nice seeing you again.
I always advise my Listeners to check the business news sections of web sites or the newspapers, because how else are you going to find out what’s really going on? For instance, how else would we know that the haunted house business is not what it used to be?

First off, who even knew it was a business? Well, it is. There are a couple of trade magazines called—surprise!—“Haunted House Magazine” and “HauntWorld” (“the ONLY haunted house magazine for professionals!”) There is a haunted house industry association, and haunted house trade shows where haunted house industry professionals can meet with haunted house vendors. But unfortunately it’s not the business it used to be. All those old houses are being seized under the new eminent domain rulings, and there’s all those new safety regulations, and the price of liability insurance keeps going up, and it’s getting hard for a simple animatronic zombie entrepreneur to scare up a few bucks. So don’t quit your dayjob.

I was trying to think of something really scary to leave leave you with this Halloween, and here it is:

When asked if she approved of the Park Slope Pavilion movie theater’s policy of searching the bags of all patrons. Ms. Bridget O’Connor said, “Oh, definitely, I hope they continue. It puts your mind at ease. It might take a couple extra seconds, but what doesn’t?”

Well, EXACTLY. What doesn’t?

Thanks for taking a couple extra seconds to read my blog entry, and happy Halloween.

The Stradivarius of the Washtub Bass

Hello, everybody—nice seeing you again.

One reason Sluggo and I are still together, after ALL THESE YEARS, is that he is never boring. He’s always finding some new thing, like Punjabi Radio   or the Tejano Conjunto Festival in San Antonio.  And he likes all the weird, interesting things I dig up, too.

Sometimes people I don’t know very well, like someone I work with at my dayjob, will express doubt about our eclectic tastes; one guy I thought was a good friend of mine said he was surprised that I really like this stuff, and that I wasn’t just pretending to like it to seem “cool.” I still don’t understand that. Why would you pretend to like something? When I lived in the Midwest, I never assumed that people pretended to like Paul McCartney and Wings just to seem pathetic.

Anyway, the latest thing that Sluggo’s really into is washtub bass. Here’s THE web site.  And here’s a link you can start with if you want to hear what a washtub bass sounds like.  But before Sluggo could start playing washtub bass, he had to build one. First he built one out of an beat-up little galvanized garbage can we had lying around, along with an old broom handle and some sash cord, but already he’s improving on that. He went out on a local hiking trail and found a big tree branch that blew down in the last storm, brought it home, debarked it, whittled on it, and made a staff that’s the pole for his new washtub bass. Of course he’s carving a block of wood into a figurehead kind of thing for it, and now we have to buy some taxidermy eyes of various sizes. He’s already invented a double bridge, and is making me drive him around to garden supply stores to look for just the right kind of weedwhacker cord to make the perfect string. I’m sure it won’t be long until he’s the Stradivarius of the Washtub Bass. He’s also very excited about getting his photo up on this one web site that has a picture gallery of people with their washtub instruments.

When I was growing up in Iowa, the washtub bass was still around. It wasn’t exactly common, but it was common enough that I got the message that it was kind of outré and not a proper thing to like, even though I DID like it. I liked the sound of it, and the fact that it was made out of, you know, a washtub. I liked the cigar box banjo, too. (Now here is a digression—how is it that the people of Southwest Iowa are taking over WFMU? There’s me, sometime DJ Bronwyn C., from Pottawattamie County, and there’s DJ Clay Pigeon, from Audubon, and there’s DJ Bethany from just across the Missouri River in Omaha. What’s that about?) Anyway, I don’t care what’s  supposed to be cool, and what isn’t, I like what I like, and I’ve always been that way. I guess that’s why I like WFMU.

Thanks for reading my blog entry this week, and may God Bless.

Back to the Books

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

I was very busy in September, and I only finished reading two books. I didn’t realize until I began to write this entry what it was that the two books had in common. Here, look:

The first book, “True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa” is by Michael Finkel, a former writer for the New York Times who was fired after being accused of inventing part of a story he wrote for the Sunday magazine section. This struck me as amusing and ironic, since I’ve always referred to the NY Times as “The Big Grey Pack of Lies,” although now that I’ve read Professor Frankfurt’s little book, I understand that it is actually “The Big Grey Pack of Bullshit.” (You can’t say that on the radio, though.)

In his book, Finkel describes writing the story that got him fired. He was assigned to write about the use of child slaves in cocoa production in Africa, but when he got to Africa he discovered that the story was pretty much a fabrication. Then, when he got home, his editors at the Times really, really, really wanted him to write the story from the point of view of one particular child cocoa worker—so Finkel invented a composite character and wrote the story, and then he got caught. He was home feeling sorry for himself when he got a call from a reporter in Portland who told him that a guy accused of murdering his family in Oregon had been apprehended in Mexico, where he was hiding out under the name “Michael Finkel from the New York Times.” This was so bizarre that Finkel got in touch with the guy and began a correspondence with him. The guy’s real name was Christian Longo, and although everyone is supposed to be entitled to the presumption of innocence, there is not one sentence in Finkel’s entire book that would lead you to believe that Longo was anything but guilty of the murder of his wife and three children. And yet, Finkel himself seems unsure of it all the way. He’s so flattered that some baby-killer would appropriate his identity that it’s not until he actually attends the trial, sees Longo in the courtroom, and picks up on the reaction of everybody else that he realizes that—quelle horreur!—Longo is probably a sociopathic mass murderer. Finkel himself comes across not as a bad guy, but just totally, terminally clueless.

Here Comes the New Technology, Same as the Old Technology

Hello, Everybody--Nice Seeing You Again.

Sorry I'm late posting this week--I seem to have lost track of everything, including whether or not I've already told you about the great Japanese CD Gramophone. See? You take all those nice free promotional CDs you've been using as coasters and pocket mirrors and put them on the gramophone and sing or talk, and then the needle cuts the grooves and you've made a wee, tinny recording of yourself. How fine is that? It costs about $30, depending on the exchange rate, from Hobby Link Japan.

But just in case someone else has already told you about the gramophone, here's the newest old technology, sure to be a hit with fans of Mac's Antique Phonograph Hour show--the Edison Cylinder Plastic Cup Recording Device!

Unfortunately, I think you have to speak Japanese to order this--the only place I've found it is on a non-English web site.  But Yuletide is coming, so put it on your list and maybe Hoteiosha will bring you one!

Me, I'm still hoping for the complete DVD collection of "The Immortal Yi Soon Shin" with English subtitles.

Thanks for reading my blog entry this week, and may God bless.
-Bronwyn C.

Things to Think and Do

Things to Think and Do

Hello, Everybody—Nice seeing you again.

I accidentally got a job writing fiction once. It was a pretty good job, and it paid pretty well, but the problem was that I’d never written fiction before and I wasn’t sure how to do it. Up until then, all I’d written were true stories of my real life, which apparently someone had mistaken for being fictional, but weren’t. (Of course, now that I know more about serious literary writing, I understand that it’s all pretty much just thinly disguised autobiography anyway, but at the time I didn’t know that.) So anyway, I panicked, and then I read that George Saunders—one of my favorite writers ever—was teaching up at Syracuse, so I wrote to him and asked him if he would teach me writing in a sort of freelance tutoring, don’t-tell-the-University way. He said no, of course, but he was very nice about it. As far as my writing job went, it turned out not to matter too much anyway. And George Saunders is still one of my favorite authors, so I was very happy when Dr. Colby asked if I wanted to go see an adaptation of Pastoralia at P.S. 122 on Saturday.

We did go, and we had a jolly time. The story, about a guy who works as a caveman reenactor at a failing theme park, makes a fine play. I haven’t had the chance to go back and reread it, but it seemed to me that director Yehuda Duenyas did a nice job of adapting it for the stage. All the technical stuff was good, and Michael Casselli’s sets and Kirstin Tobiasson’s costumes were excellent. I don’t go to plays very often because so much of the acting just annoys the crap out of me, but these actors didn’t, and both Aimee McCormick, who plays Janet, and Ryan Bronz, who plays Ed, were outstanding. Bronz conveyed so much with just his facial expressions, which can’t be easy when you’re wearing a caveman unibrow headband. He’s no Kim Myung Min, but he’s very, very good—although it might not be so successful in a bigger theater where you couldn’t see him right up close. Pastoralia is in the wee little theater space on the 9th St. side of P.S. 122 through next weekend, and I recommend that you see it if you get the chance.

Here are some other things I’m looking forward to doing to fill time until I get my Hepatitis shots and ship out for Louisiana:

Wouldn't It Be Nice—

if Brian Wilson called you on the phone? He will, if you just donate $100 or more to Hurricane Katrina relief through his web site, brianwilson.com. He'll also match your donation dollar for dollar. I figured probably you'd give the money and then get one of those auto-tape calls, like the ones from political candidates that are always clogging up our answering machine at election time, but no—Brian says he will call to say hello, or even answer a question if you've got one. Do you have a question you'd like to ask Brian Wilson personally? I can think of a couple. But you've also got to have the $100.

Waiting to Deploy

Hello, Everybody--nice seeing you again.

Here’s how I know that Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst disasters ever to hit this country: They’re willing to use me to help clean it up.

A couple of weeks ago, when the Red Cross said they needed 250,000 volunteers to go down and help the victims of Katrina, I went to their web site to sign up. (www.redcross.org) It turned out they weren’t looking for 250,000 volunteers, they were looking for 250,000 volunteers with specific disaster-response training. I can sort of understand that. I know they don’t want a whole bunch of kind-hearted people showing up and then standing around wondering where they’re going to eat and who's going to give them a place to stay. But I’m pretty self-sufficient and I’ve got skills: My first job in New York was driving a wholesale grocery delivery truck, so I can drive and I can lift heavy things. I know how to change the oil in a car, gap spark plugs, and use an engine timing light, in case somebody has a 30-year-old car that needs that. I know how to knit. I can type about 90 words a minute. I have a vast repertoire of obscure song lyrics and memorized poetry. I’m a pretty good shot with a handgun. I can play the cello. I know how to replace faucet washers and fix the toilet when it runs all the time. In college I had a work-study job that involved performing vasectomies on the rats in the psych lab, so I can do minor animal surgery. I got Red Cross lifeguard certification when I was 16, and Red Cross pet first-aid certification last year. That’s right: I have Red Cross pet first-aid certification, yes I do. And that’s why the Humane Society of the United States seems willing to send me down to Gonzales, Louisiana to clean the cages of the animals rescued from New Orleans.

Last Monday there was an article in the Daily News that said the Humane Society (www.hsus.org) was looking for volunteers to go down to the Gulf and rescue animals who are still trapped, but they also need people to walk and water and feed and clean up after the animals that have already been saved and are being held in the big emergency shelters in Gonzales and in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The story said “even people without experience can pitch in.” Actually, I do have some experience cleaning cages and all—I was an assistant at a veterinarian’s office for a while in college, too, because back then I was thinking about becoming a vet. I sterilized stuff and ran simple tests and fed and watered  and walked and cleaned up and washed the animals that were being sent home and held the ones that were being euthanized when their owners couldn’t bring themselves to do it. And I do have that Red Cross pet first-aid certification, so send me! Send me! SEND ME!

The Card Man

Hello, Everybody--Nice seeing you again.

One day, years ago, I was walking down Madison Avenue on lunch break from my dayjob at a law firm. I was on the west side of the street between 39th and 40th, when a chubby little man with a bad haircut, wearing an ill-fitting, brown blazer, handed me a business card as he walked past. The card had the name of some employment agency on it, and I tossed it into the next trashcan I came to.

A few months later, he did it again. I was on lunch break, on Madison, near the spot where I saw him before, and he handed me the same card. “What is this?” I asked.

He looked a little startled when I spoke to him. “It’s about a job,” he said.

“What kind of job?”

The question seemed to make him uncomfortable. “You have to call,” he said, sidling away.

When I got back to my office, I did call. A woman answered. “Hi,” I said. “A gentleman gave me your card and suggested I call about a job.”

“You’ll have to come in to the office, “ said the woman.

“What kind of jobs do you have?” I asked. “Are you a temp agency?”

“I can’t talk about it on the phone,” she said. “You have to come in and see us.” Of course, I never did.

The Books of August

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

I thought August was a pretty good month for me. I’ve been feeling better and was able to get out and have a little summer fun--I went to a couple of parties, an art opening, and a wedding, and I saw Jean Nathan speak in Bryant Park about her brilliant book, “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll.” But then I looked at the books I’ve read over the past month, and I started to wonder about what’s really been on my mind: Two of ‘em are about my childhood homeland, two of ‘em have the word “gothic” in the title, one of ‘em is about surviving in extreme circumstances, and one of ‘em made me think of a very dear, dead friend.

American Signs: Form and Meaning on Route 66, by Lisa Mahar (2002, The Monicelli Press). Is there anything better than reading a book by someone whose mind works just like yours? Lisa Mahar traveled Route 66 from Chicago to L.A. and analyzed the motel signs along the way--their history, evolution, construction, function, and the messages they convey--with charts, illustrations, and many photos. The fact that she even thought to do this thrills me, but the execution--the book itself--is even better. Here is the caption to one of my favorite illustrations: “Motels signs that included a saguaro [cactus] illustration were relatively common along Route 66, but none were located within the natural range of the species. This illustration, which locates the motels in relation to the plant’s native habitat, is based on an illustration in Douglas Towne’s ‘The Mysteries of the Wandering Cactus Unearthed.’” Okay, maybe she could have used a better copy editor, but the book is a real treasure. It’s 272 pages long, and I thought of Mr. Boyd as I read every page.

Only the Realistic Survive

Hello, everybody--nice seeing you again.

Like everyone else, all I know is what I read on the Internet.  Of course, this week  I’ve been following the story of Hurricane Katrina, and I’ve listened to the mayor of New Orleans’ radio interview and I’ve watched the president of Jefferson Parish break down and cry, and I’ve read all those commentors asking, “How could this happen?” That seems a little disingenuous to me. People want to know why President Bush couldn’t attend to the biggest natural disaster in the country’s history, when  he was in Florida--the Bush Fascism Testing Ground, the state that “won” the election for him in 2000, where his brother’s the Governor--within 48 hours after one of the big hurricanes hit there last year. Well, why do you think? Within 48 hours of Hurricane Katrina the administration announced that all those Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard soldiers over in Iraq were NOT going to be allowed to come back early, and if that’s not a good, solid indication of their brand of leadership, I don’t know what  is. People say the Department of Homeland Security failed during this crisis, but actually they’ve continued to do their work--spying on American citizens’ public library records and preventing Canadian rescue teams from entering the country to help us. And the Navy has announced that Robotic Lord Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, will be restoring power and rebuilding three naval facilities that were wrecked by the hurricane in Mississippi. We can all take comfort in that, I guess.

Bronwyn's iPod Shuffle

Hello, Everybody—nsya.

There’s lots of things I don’t have, money being probably the main thing because if I had some money I might get some of the other things I don’t have now. Then I would have those things, but I wouldn’t have the money any more.

One of the things I don’t have is an iPod Shuffle. But if you go to the web site that explains how to automatically fill up your Shuffle with your favorite corporate listening product, you will see that Bronwyn's device is copying a tune called “Tonight We Fly.” I wanted to hear what that song sounded like, so I googled it and found a reference to a group called Divine Comedy, but I couldn’t find any links to that song or any little samples of it. I did find a record company called Divine Comedy that has lots of stuff I think I’d really like to hear. Maybe we can get them to send some things to Program and Music Director King Brian at WFMU. But even if I did have some money, I don’t think I would trade it for an iPod Shuffle, because if I were listening to real music I might not be able to hear the songs that are always on in my head.

Thanks for reading my irregular blog entry, and MGB.

Pablo Picasso, He Was No Porno

Hello, Everybody--Nice seeing you again.

Nick Bertozzi is smart, funny, good-looking, and talented. Unfortunately, he’s also a cartoonist. He started out the way a lot of alternative cartoonists do, drawing his own crude, obscene, and funny comic book, “The Incredible Drinkin’ Buddies.” Then he got all artsy and drew “Boswash,” a story about a cartographer that, instead of being printed as a book, folded out like a map. He won some awards for that one. He drew a bumper sticker for WFMU in 2001. His art got better and better, and he started getting illustration gigs, and he got married and had a little girl, and his comics got more and more serious and historical, ’cause you don’t want to draw dirty stuff when you’re thinking about keeping your daughter off the pole. That’s why I was surprised when I heard that some poor guy in Georgia might be going to prison for giving away a comic book with a Nick Bertozzi story in it.

Every year, the comic book industry has a promotion where they give away free comic books. This is supposed to lure people into comics stores, as if there’s anything in there you’d actually want to buy once they get you inside. I used to love comics, but I don’t go into comic shops any more because I got tired of pimply-faced 17-year-olds calling me “Ma’am” as if it were an insult. Anyway, this guy, Gordon Lee, owns a comic book shop in Rome, Georgia, and he had a bunch of books for 2004 Free Comic Book Day that he couldn’t even give away, so he decided to hand them out to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. One of the books was an anthology called “Alternative Comics #2” that featured an excerpt from “The Salon,” Nick Bertozzi’s graphic novel about Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. You know how kids love the early cubists. Nick did a lot of research on these guys, and the story is historically accurate, including the fact that the first time Braque went to Picasso’s studio, Pablo was painting in the nude. Naturally, that’s the part of the story that was excerpted in “Alternative Comcs #2.” Gordon Lee says the comic—which has a "Mature Readers" label—was accidentally put in the give-away pile, where it wound up being handed to a 9-year-old boy. The kid’s parents complained, and Gordon Lee was arrested.

Mr. Moog is Dead and Dead

When he was 14, Robert A. Moog built his first theremin from a kit in the basement of his house in Flushing, Queens. He described himself as "an electronics nerd," and said he liked building stuff in his basement because "there wasn't too much I could do with the guys at school, other than getting beat up." When he was in college he started a little business selling his homemade theremins and other electronic instruments, eventually including his own Moog synthesizer. Moog-playing musicians helped revolutionize music in the 1960s, and made Robert's last name a household word that pretty much nobody ever pronounced correctly. Last Sunday Robert Moog died of an inoperable brain tumor at his home in Asheville, North Carolina. He was 71 years old.

IN THE WORDS OF P-5

Hello, Everybody--Nice Seeing You Again.

The good news this week is that our friend Dave just got a new dayjob. You may have seen Dave at some of the WFMU record fairs, selling his nifty Savage Monsters posters and puppets, and if you haven’t seen him, you’re just gonna have to buy his merch online, ‘cause we probably won’t be seeing him again. The good news is his new job sounds really interesting and lets him use all his creative talents and pays really, really well. The bad news is that it’s in Cleveland and he’s gonna have to move there.

“Cleveland, city of light, city of magic,” I hear Randy Newman singing in my head, and if I weren’t writing this to you on a Civil War-era iMac running OS 1⁄3 I would hook you up with the mp3 file so you could hear it, too. It’s a song called “Burn On,” about the Cuyahoga River—the river that runs through Cleveland—bursting into flame back in 1969. But that river is always burning. Good old Time magazine once said, “The Cuyahoga oozes rather than flows.”

Cleveland, city of light and the Cleveland Indians. Nice logo, Cleveland! I have never thought of myself as being a politically correct person, but even I find the Cleveland Indians logo appalling, that Sambo-ized Red Man with the shit-eating grin. If you wear a Cleveland Indians cap in New York, you might get away with claiming it’s an ironic gesture, but it you wear one in Cleveland, you mean it.

Ohio was in the news last week when their Governor, Bob Taft, became a convicted criminal.  Convicted Criminal Taft is the great-grandson of Fat Stuck-in-the-Bathtub President Taft. (When I was trapped at the dogfood factory in Dayton last June, I saw an awful lot of Taft-sized people in Ohio. I don’t know what’s going on there, but the people are enormous.) Great-grandson Criminal Taft is the first Ohio Governor to be either charged with or convicted of a crime. After pleading “no contest” to charges of failing to report gifts and golf outings, he was convicted of four misdemeanor violations of state ethics laws, fined $4000, and ordered to write e-mail apology notes to state employees and newspapers to say he’s sorry for his behavior. This is probably the harshest part of the sentence, because Convicted Criminal Taft doesn’t use e-mail. Back in 2002, when he was pushing his Third Frontier project to turn Ohio into “a hub of new technology,” Not-Yet-Convicted-at-That-Time Governor Taft admitted to the Associated Press that he had never sent an e-mail and didn’t even have a computer on his desk. He said he preferred hand-written notes and telephone calls.

I don’t understand getting caught taking golf outings. Golf outings! Is that a euphemism for something else? If I were in a position of power, I would not be selling out my office for a golf outing. At least the Convicted Criminal Governor of Connecticut got some nice home repairs. I think he also got jail time, though, and Convicted Criminal Taft did not. In fact, Taft isn’t even going to leave office. Although in the past he’s forced out some of his minions for ethics offenses, he says those cases were different. Well, they were different—they didn’t involve him. He says he still has important work to do. Maybe he has to go door-to-door with O.J., looking for the missing $300,000 coins.

The State of Ohio, in its infinite wisdom, gave $50 million dollars from its investment fund to a well-connected Republican named Tom Noe so he could invest the money in rare coins and baseball cards. (Baseball cards! Too bad they weren’t looking to invest in comic books, ‘cause I’ve got some old issues of Catwoman   I’d be happy to sell to any savvy Republican investor.) Alas, it turns out that $300,000 worth of gold coins have been lost in the mail. Don’t you hate when that happens? And then about $12 million is just missing, and nobody knows where it is.  Tom Noe—whose strip-mall coin shop went under in 1992, leaving him $16,500 in debt—was contacted at his million-dollar Florida home, but he said he doesn’t know where the money is, either. I wouldn't put my savings (which currently total $204) into rare coins, so how could the state of Ohio think it was a good place to put their $50 million? Why didn't they just buy 50 million dollars’ worth of lottery tickets? Or they could have bought 50 millions dollars’ worth of Amway products and gone state-to-state, selling them to Missouri and Nebraska.

But don’t worry, Ohio—President Bush is there for you. He’s reported to have reacted calmly to Criminal Governor Taft’s conviction, just as he reacted calmly to the results of his personal friend Rafael Palmiero’s drug test. “Governor Taft apologized today, he has paid the fine and said it was a serious mistake, and the President accepts that,'' White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. So there. And remember which state put Bush over the top in the 2004 election—because he certainly hasn’t forgotten. As our friends Pizzicato Five say: “OHIO!”

Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God bless.

LET US NOW PRAISE CHARLIE MURRAY

Hello, Everybody--nice seeing you again.

Charlie Murray was born in 1976 in a little village on the Hudson River in New York. He had a brother and two sisters and a mom and a dad. His mom taught at the village elementary school, but instead of staying in the public school or going to the local Catholic school, Charlie went to Archibishop Sepinac High School in White Plains. After he graduated in 1993, he joined the village volunteer fire department and became the driver of one of the ladder trucks. A lot of the other guys in the fire department had jobs at the village department of public works, so Charlie got a job there, too. At the DPW he did stuff like replace the bulbs in the street lamps. He also started his own landscaping business on the side, and we’d see him in the evenings, driving around in his pick-up truck with Buster, his pit bull, watering the flowers in the hanging baskets on Main Street. Even though the landscaping thing was supposed to be a business, Charlie maintained the yards of several elderly people for free. When the chief of the fire department had knee surgery, Charlie went and cut his grass and refused to take any money for it. It seemed like he was always working, and always helping someone out.

The ladies who sit in the evening on the bench by the parking lot on Main Street gossiped a little about Charlie and his girlfriend, because she was “older” and maybe was divorced. When she and Charlie got an apartment together in the village just north of ours it turned out the landlord wouldn’t allow dogs, so Buster had to stay in a garage where Charlie would pick him up every day. No wonder that dog always looked so happy, driving around in the pick-up truck.

On Monday, August 8, after almost 11 years with the DPW, Charlie Murray was fixing a burned-out street light on Main Street and he got electrocuted and he died. Sluggo and I went up to the funeral home on Thursday night to pay our respects, and the street was a mob scene. There was a cop directing traffic, cars parked in every available spot for blocks, firetrucks everywhere, and about a hundred firemen in dress uniforms getting organized in the parking lot. We pushed our way inside, past a village trustee, the local pharmacist, and one of the librarians. The funeral home was jammed with people. The next day most of the village offices were closed so Charlie’s friends could go to his funeral.

It’s hard to stick to the facts and not make up a big story about Charlie. Why did he work so hard all the time? Why did he go to school in White Plains? What’s going to happen to his girlfriend, and what’s going to happen to his dog? Did he know how many people loved him? If you Google “Charlie Murray” or “Charles B. Murray” the only results that come up are about other people with the same name—there’s nothing at all about our Charlie, but it turns out he was one of the most important people in our town.

The local weekly newspaper put the story of Charlie’s death on the front page. They illustrated it with a file photo of him rescuing a kitten from a storm drain.

Thanks for reading my blog entry this week, and may God bless.

July Indoors

Hello, Everybody--nice seeing you again.

I had to spend most of July indoors, so I've been doing a lot of reading. Here are some of the books I've read in the past month.

Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger, By Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson, artwork by Alexis Rockman. (2005, Villard Books). Margaret and Michael are a writing team, and I don't even understand how that works. I think of writing as something solitary and painful, like pulling out your own teeth with a pair of pliers, but somehow they sit down together and write the most interesting and fun books and articles about natural history stuff. While they were doing some research at the American Museum of Natural History a while back, they came across a taxidermied specimen of the extinct Tasmanian tiger and fell in love with it. (I'm not sure how that works, either, but to each his own.) They ended up traveling to Tasmania with their pothead artist friend, Alexis, and his girlfriend, and a friend of a friend, and all sorts of things happened including that they learned the verb “to quoll.” Their book about their adventures in Tasmania is extremely amusing and good-humored, just like Michael and Margaret. To celebrate the publication of Carnivorous Nights, they had a party and taxidermy competition at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. DJ Dorian  was one of the judges, and my armadillo handbag, Randall, won a prize. It was one of the most fun parties I've ever been to, and they said they're going to do it again when the paperback comes out.

(P.S.--The picture of me making a face with Randall Handbag is not the best picture of me ever posted online. This one is better. I can't wait to hear this edition of Chris T's “Communication Breakdown, 'cause I think Jeff is a nice guy and would look really good in a fireman's outfit.)

Moravagine, by Blaise Cendrars.(Copyright 1926, translation 1968, published in paperback 2004 by New York Review Books.) I came across this in Posman Books when I was looking for the new translation of Don Quixote. The cashier guy who usually rolls his eyes when I come up to the register with something like Happy Kitty Bunny Pony got all excited when I plunked this book down on the counter. He wanted me to come back and let him know how I liked it. I dunno. Maybe I would have liked it better in 1926, when it was written, but it kept reminding me of the scene in the first Austin Powers movie where Dr. Evil says he want “One MILLION dollars!” Ooh, Blaise Cendrars is so pervy and evil! Plus, I just couldn't get into the whole deal with Blaise Cendrars being a pen name or an alterego or whatever, and the whole artifice of his background: “What is true? What is false?” You know what? I don't much care. But maybe I just need it explained a little better. I wish DJ Rix  would read this book and tell me what he thinks of it.

The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Captial: The Masons and the Building of Washington, D.C., by David Ovason. (2000, HarperCollins Publishers.) I do believe David Ovason had something to say when he wrote this book. What was it, I wonder? I finished this book--all 465 grueling pages, including the notes--in July, but I've actually been reading it every night for over a year. I could never manage more than about a page before I became unconscious. It is the most soporific volume I've ever read, and I recommend it only as an infallible aid to sleep. I plan to donate my copy to the WFMU station library.

Happy Kitty Bunny Pony: A Saccharine Mouthful of Super Cute, by Charles S. Anderson Design Co. with text by Michael J. Nelson (2005, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.) Did you believe me when I said I bought a book with this title? I got it to cheer myself up, and because looking at it doesn't require any thought process whatsoever. There are pictures of kitties and bunnies and ponies, and some duckies, too, though I recommend caution when purchasing books that are authored by a Co. Michael J. Nelson turns out to be one of the guys on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Sometimes he's funny, and sometimes--especially after the first 100 pages of cute pictures of kitties, bunnies, ponies, et cetera--he sounds like he's trying a little too hard. I don't exactly regret buying it, but it is the only book I've ever tried to get Sluggo to store on his bookshelves.

Meditation as Medicine, by Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D., and Cameron Stauth. (2001, Fireside.) One good thing about getting cancer is that it can make you more receptive to trying new things. In the first part of this book, Dr. Khalsa is very careful to explain kundalini yoga and meditation practice in terms of Western Scientists-and-Experts' research into the endocrine system, glands, the vagus nerve, neurological PET scans, spatial-temporal reasoning, and so on. Obviously, this is aimed at people who are really skeptical about mudras and chakras and whatnot. All I know is that I get up every day at 5 AM and take a cold shower anyway, so I figured I might as well try the rest of Dr. Khalsa's program. I had a very dramatic reaction the first time I tried the medical meditation for the immune system, and I felt really good all day. I'm still not sure what a chakra is, but I'm actually not sure what my thymus gland is, either--that doesn't mean either of them is nonexistent. Right now a new copy of the hardcover version of this book costs less than the paperback on Amazon.

Pet Architecture Handbook, by Tokyo Institute of Technology Tsukamoto Architectural Laboratory and Atelier Bow-wow. (World Photo Press, not sure what year.) This book is not by a Co., it is by an Institute. Or a Laboratory. Or an Atelier. Sorry I don't have a picture of it. It's  a collection of photos and brief descriptions of 73 wee, tiny, eccentric buildings--most of them commercial spaces--in Tokyo, plus project proposals for 8 more itty-bitty buildings. Sluggo gave me this book to read and, while it is cute and interesting, it puts me to sleep almost as fast as the book about the Masons and Washington, D.C.

Here is a book I read a long time ago, and talked about on my old book club show on WFMU: The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll. The author, Jean Nathan, is going to be at the Bryant Park reading room this Wednesday, August 10, at 12:30. I wish I could take my copy of the book for her to sign, but I'm still spending all my time indoors. I thought you might want to check it out, though. It's a really good book, and I think the paperback's just come out.

So that's the full report on my month of reading. Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God bless.
-Bronwyn C.

The Dog With No Nose

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

I have a dayjob at a dog magazine, and when I first started there people kept telling me about the dog with no nose. They said he lived somewhere in the neighborhood of our office, and that occasionally they would see him outside being walked. As an extremely gullible person, I am always a little afraid of being pranked, and for a long while I thought this was probably just some kind of initiation trick, like going to camp as a kid and being sent on a snipe hunt or when the other production staff at the Village Voice used to threaten me with tales of Gauzehead, the dreaded specter of Deadline Doom. I did actually see Gauzehead once, and he was truly terrifying. He also had an uncanny resemblance to Andrea, the drummer for the Fuzztones,
but I’m sure that was just a coincidence.

Anyway, one day I went out for lunch very late, later than usual. I was talking on my cell phone to DJ Amanda, when I saw him—The Dog with No Nose. It is almost impossible to describe what he looks like, because it’s just so wrong. He’s a nice old Golden-Retriever-looking fella who’s missing the top front half of his face. His tongue laps out periodically as if he’s trying to smell things with it like a snake. He shuffles along the street leaving a wake of double-takes and horrified looks from the people he passes. “Omigod!” I hissed into the phone. “It’s The Dog With No Nose!” “Oh, I’ve seen him,” Amanda replied. It turned out she knew all about him, having run into him once when she took her Puli , Dodger, to the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan.

This would seem to confirm some of our office speculation that The Dog With No Nose lost his nose due to some awful accident or maybe an illness, dog nose cancer or something. Dogs are not vain, so the ghastly disfigurement probably doesn’t worry him, but how does he get along without the sense of smell that is so important to dogs? Was his nose removed to save his life, and was that a kindness or not, given the circumstances?

I have been thinking a lot about The Dog With No Nose lately, since my skin cancer’s come back all across the tip of my nose and a little spot on my upper lip. I’m just finishing my fourth week of chemo, and my nose is coming off in hunks. I realize now I’ve always been rather fond of my nose. I stare at it in the mirror and suddenly find it perfectly adorable. I know I’m going to miss it if they have to take it off. Having been through cancer twice before myself, and having been the friend or relative of a number of other people who have had other types of cancers, I know it’s difficult sometimes for well-meaning friends to know what to say or do. Of course, everyone is different in their reaction to serious illness, but here are a few things I’d like my friends to keep in mind, and maybe other folks would find these helpful as well:

1. Please don’t be afraid to ask how I’m doing. I want to know you care about that. But please don’t call me at work and ask for the full report while I’m sitting in a cubicle. E-mail is probably the best way to contact me, because even when I’m home I may be tired or may not feel like talking right that moment about being sick. Send me an e-mail and tell me you’re thinking of me. Tell me I can call you anytime if I feel like talking. Think of something fun we can do together that doesn’t involve my sitting in direct sunshine. Please don’t disappear from my life just because you’re afraid you’ll say the wrong thing. Telling me you care about me is always appropriate.

2. Please be optimistic, but don’t tell me your elderly uncle had skin cancer and the doctor just scraped it off and he was fine. I really hate it when people act like skin cancer is baby beginner training wheels cancer and not the “real thing.” I have already endured being told I was going to lose an eye from this. I have been through two major operations—one took four hours, and the other five hours, and I had to be conscious during both of them while pieces of my face were being removed. The left half of my face is so scarred up it looks like a hippie chick’s patchwork handbag. On the other hand, I don’t want to hear about how many people die from skin cancer every year, either. So this is tricky, I know. Maybe you can just concentrate on how lucky I am to live in New York, where there are so many great doctors to help me. There have been some terrific advances in treatment since I had my surgeries a few years ago--that’s a good thing to keep in mind, too.

3. Make me laugh. Send me a funny card, or a copy of the funniest book you’ve ever read. E-mail me a joke. Send me a DVD of a funny movie. If you’re SURE you know my sense of humor, you can even make jokes about my stupid illness. DJ Kelly told me that if I had to have some of my nose removed, she would donate tissue from her ass to replace it. This made me howl, because she knows her ass is a never-ending source of hilarity to me.

4. IF you can do it honestly, compliment me on some aspect of my appearance. Not only does my face look weird right now, but being sick makes me feel ugly. On the other hand, I’ve recently lost 22 pounds and I look pretty good. I just got a great haircut. Saying something nice would really boost my mood right now, if it’s sincere. We had a small electrical fire in our office last week, and the cutest fireman came to check it out. I said something flirtatious to him, and HE FLIRTED BACK. I can’t tell you how great that made me feel.

5. Pray for me. Scientists and experts have found that other people’s prayers have a positive effect on the recovery of sick people, even if the sick people don’t know they’re being prayed for. So please put in a good word for me with your deity of choice, or just picture me happy and healthy, flirting with some fireman, my adorable little nose intact. I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God bless.
-Bronwyn C.

Patriot Action

Hello, Everybody—Nice seeing you again.

Some time ago—a few weeks, a couple months, I’m not sure–I noticed a big beige box in Grand Central Terminal near one of the information windows next to the big ramp that leads up to Vanderbilt Hall. The box was made out of sheet metal and had what looked like a stovepipe coming out of the top of it with a funnel-shaped cap on the top. I walked over to look at it, and it was humming away, making a noise like an air conditioner or a dehumidifier. “Checking for gas,” I thought. It just seemed obvious that it was some kind of Homeland Security machine to warn us when the Bad Thing happens.

A couple weeks later I saw some guys in MTA vests, accompanied by a cop, out in the middle of the main concourse at Grand Central. They had a funny little device set up on a table—it reminded me of those 4-armed things in physics class that spin around in sunlight, except this one was bigger and had some kind of paper tape printout spooling out of the bottom of it. So I walked over to check it out. “Excuse me,” I said, “But what is this thing?” The vest guys looked at me and looked at the cop. The cop nodded. “It’s to test the air flow in the terminal,” one of the vest guys said. Yeah, that’s what I thought it was.

A few days after that, all the National Guard soldiers and the MTA police in the terminal suddenly were walking around with bulky canvas pouches hanging from their belts. This was new equipment that they’d never carried before. Gas masks, I figured, so I asked. Yeah, that’s what they were. I have to wonder if all these studies and precautions are being taken because some security consultant just happened to think of it, or is it being done because there’s a real threat? I go through Grand Central every day—if it’s a real threat, then where’s MY gas mask? It seems like I can either go with the survivalists or with the even scarier folks who find gasmasks especially ... um ... interesting.

I’m a little skeptical about all these new “security” measures anyway. Like right after the first London bombings a couple weeks ago, the Port Authority cut off cell phone access in all the tunnels. They said it was to keep terrorists from setting off cell-phone-triggered bombs, but then everybody complained that it also kept regular folks from calling for help in case of an emergency, and a couple of big-deal security consultants were quoted as saying it was a bad idea, so then they turned the cell phone access back on. It made the whole thing seem like a panicky reaction to something happening 4,000 miles away rather than a well-thought-out security policy.

They followed that up with the new random-search policy. New York police are now stopping subway and bus passengers and searching their bags—without probable cause—supposedly at random. The Daily News sent out 5 reporters to check out the policy: Pete Donohue, Jego Armstrong, Jonathan Lemire, Veronika Belenkaya, and Tamer El-Ghobashy. Guess which one was the only one stopped and searched? In fact, he was stopped and searched twice. So random. At least it’s better than London’s Metropolitan Police policy of randomly selecting subway passengers to shoot five times in the head. And it turns out that the NYPD’s random searches are costing millions of dollars in overtime, so I’m betting they’ll be discontinued as soon as they can find a couple of big-deal security consultants to say it’s a bad idea. In the meantime, I've decided that I will decline to be searched. If the police stop me, I'll tell them I understand they're just doing their job, but that I believe the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect me from unreasonable searches. I know they won't let me on the train, but, jeez, people have died to defend our freedoms, the least I can do is be late for work.

Grand Central has been patrolled nonstop by armed National Guard soldiers for a while now. The first time I ever saw them, I was getting off a train with an older guy, an attorney who lives upstate. “Look at the soldiers,” he said. “Aww,” I replied, “they don’t scare me.” He looked at me oddly. “They’re not supposed to scare you, Bronwyn,” he said. “They’re supposed to make you feel safe.” Well, it’s been a few years now, and I can tell you that it’s not working. Seeing soldiers with weapons and gas masks everywhere I go does not make me feel safer than I felt in the old days when National Guard patrols at the train station would have been unthinkable.

The basic assumption of democracy is that people are good. What do you get when the basic assumption is that any random person may be really, really bad?

Thanks for reading my blog entry, and watch your step.
-Bronwyn C.

The Immortal Yi Soon Shin

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.
I never thought I would want to visit Korea, but now I do. Now I want to go stand in the middle of Sejongo in Central Seoul, and I want to go to Tongyeong City to see Historical Site No. 113, and I want to visit the village where the 100-episode Korean Broadcasting System’s historical TV series about a 16th-Century Korean naval strategist was filmed. The TV show is called “The Immortal Yi Soon Shin” and it is the greatest television show ever made. What “War and Peace” is to novels, “The Immortal Yi Soon Shin” is to television shows—except it’s all true.

I don’t watch TV very much, except for sports. I’m not a TV snob or anything, it’s just that most of the shows don’t interest me. But I’ve always enjoyed the leased-time programs: Greek music videos, Italian news reports, Bollywood film reviews. The cheese of other cultures is at least different, and therefore more engrossing, than our own. Luckily, when Sluggo and I had our income malfunction and had to cut back to broadcast basic cable, we still got WMBC, channel 55, out of Newton, New Jersey. That’s the station that has the KBS soap operas every Saturday night. For a while we were watching, off and on, some historical drama about Medeival Korean politics—not every week, but if we happened to be home on Saturday night and not doing anything else, we’d look at it. I don’t even know what the name of that show was. The best thing about it was that there was one character who was called the Archfiend, although he didn’t look anything like Jessica Simpson. Other people would call him Archfiend to his face, like that was his name or his title or something. I’m not even sure if he was supposed to be the villain.

Presumed Dead

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

One thing that struck me about the bombings in London was how quickly the English people got out there with their photocopied flyers with the pictures of their missing friends and family members. I remember going to work in New York after the attacks in 2001 and walking past the thousands of flyers posted everywhere. For a while it seemed as if every vertical surface in the city was papered over with hundreds of flyers, all very similar in their message and with the same seemingly inevitable design: At the top the word “Missing” in large letters, centered, then below that a photo, also centered, and a caption giving the person’s name, then some particulars: “works on the 84th floor,” “works in the North Tower,” “last seen on her way to a meeting in Windows on the World,” and a phone number to call with information--if there ever was any information.

Last February the city medical examiner’s office announced that there were over 1,200 people “known to have been killed” in the World Trade Center attacks whom they still could not identify, and so they were going to stop trying. (And by “people” they meant 9,726 bits of human remains that have now been dried and stored in “deterioration-proof” pouches.) How is it that those people are KNOWN to have been killed? There’s no body, not even a definitive piece of body, for any of them. Don’t they mean that these people are presumed dead, or have been presumed dead for a while? I think there are statutes that govern when you can have someone declared legally dead, but the presumption of death is purely personal; I guess it varies from person to person. 

I Know What Boys Like

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

I know what boys like: Boys like Beetlejuice although, being a girl, I don’t quite understand why. Beetle is a 37-year-old black microcephalic man. He is extremely short, but technically neither a dwarf nor a midget. His tiny head is emphasized by his very disproportionately broad shoulders. Beetle became famous when his friend and manager, Sean R., got him on Howard Stern’s radio show. I guess guys enjoy Beetlejuice because he says whatever comes into his head and, being that his head is unusual, so are some of the ideas inside of it.

Sluggo adores Beetlejuice. For years he has spoken of his dream of someday having lunch with Beetle. So, when Sluggo’s 40th birthday approached last week, I knew what I had to do.

In the old days, Beetle would have been called a “freak,” and he might have made his living exhibiting himself at carnivals. How do I feel about that? I’ve seen interviews with retired carnival people who say they were grateful for the chance to make a living, but I hate the idea of someone being exploited. A guy I know—and admire—made a movie about some retarded people. He loaded them into a bus and drove them around the country and filmed them doing things they probably wouldn’t have thought to do on their own and, while I know that the guy was genuinely fond of the retarded people, the movie made me really uncomfortable. I think the key is that they wouldn’t have been doing the things they were doing if this guy hadn’t put them up to it.

Beetlejuice, on the other hand, met his manager when they both were hanging out at the same bar together, and I don’t feel Beetle ever has to do anything he wouldn’t be doing anyway, even if he weren’t being paid. For Sluggo’s party, Beetle came to a bar with his manager and sat with us and had some drinks and talked with everyone, and after about an hour we said good-bye and he went home. This cost me my entire savings account, but it was worth it. I have never, ever seen Sluggo so happy.

The funny thing was that Sluggo’s birthday is January 25 but because of scheduling considerations we had to have his party on January 27, which is my birthday, which means that in the midst the hoopla of the Beetlejuice Birthday Party everybody pretty much forgot about me, except—I got a voicemail message at my dayjob from someone who sounded just like Dirty Duck. He wished me happy birthday and then told me to go fuck myself, which is par for the course with him, except isn’t he supposed to be dead? I’ve heard of phone calls from the dead, of course, but as far as I know they don’t leave voicemail. Maybe Dirty faked his own death, just like Andy Kaufman—I wouldn’t put it past him. But how would he know where I’m working now?

So that’s the way the birthdays went this year—Sluggo got drinks with a microcephalic dwarf and eternal blissful memories, and I got an empty bank account and voicemail from a feathered biped junkie.

Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God bless.
-Bronwyn C.

The Very Worst Day

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

Today is January 23 and, thanks to Scientists and Experts, we are now able to prepare for what comes next—that is, January 24. Because just this past week Scientists and Experts made a big announcement: They have devised a formula for finding the long-sought Worst Day of the Year.

Is April the cruelest month? No, that’s just some poetry, whereas this is SCIENCE—or at least math. Dr. Cliff Arnall, of the University of Cardiff (that’s in Wales), has devised a formula, to whit:
[W + (D-d)] x TQ / M x NA, where W = weather, D = debt, d = monthly salary, T = time since Christmas, Q = time since failure of New Year’s resolution, M = motivational level, and NA = need to take action. Just because you and I may not understand how something like the “need to take action” becomes a quantifiable number, that doesn’t make Dr. Arnall wrong. Certainly not. For Dr. Arnall is a Scientist and, in fact, an actual Expert on seasonal disorders. In Wales. By putting in the secret numbers that correspond to weather and motivational level, Dr. Arnall realized that January 24 is the absolute crappiest day of any year. “Eureka!” she said, except in Welsh.

It’s odd, though, that the Worst Day of the Year comes so close to the Best Day of the Year, which is January 27—my birthday. It is even closer to Sluggo’s birthday, and not that far from the birthdays of other WFMU staffers, whose names you would immediately recognize if I were to write them here.

We interrupt this blog entry to bring you a report from the WFMU Storm Center. It snowed quite a lot yesterday and last night, and was extremely cold and blowy. Scientists and Experts say this is to be expected in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year, which they refer to as “winter.” Today local residents are beginning to dig out from Snowstorm ’05. And now back to the blog.

One might wonder why Scientists and Experts have not yet devised a formula for the Most Fan-effing-tastic Day of the Year, but this is in part because the British travel company that funded Dr. Arnall’s research has never asked for that. They just wanted to know when people might be most likely to book vacations. Dr. Alan Cohen, the spokesperson for the Royal College of General Practitioners, was asked about Dr. Arnall’s equation. (In a country where “Cliff” is a woman’s name, the use of gender-neutral terms such as “spokesperson” is preferred). “I’m sure it’s right,” Dr. Cohen said. So there.

Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God bless—especially tomorrow.
-Bronwyn C.

Filming "Guest of Cindy Sherman"

Hello, Everybody, nice seeing you again.

On Thursday DJ Kelly and I had to go out to the station to be filmed for a documentary called “Guest of Cindy Sherman.”  Maybe some of you heard “The Kelly Jones Show, Starring Bronwyn Carlton” last May 25 (it’s in the archives) when we answered Listener Paul H-O’s request for advice as to how to deal with his famous girlfriend. We guessed it was Cindy Sherman and that turned out to be right. Now he’s making a film about his problem, and he wanted us to be in it.

I used to think that people who wrote fiction were actually making up the stories, but then I met some fiction writers and found out that most of it is just thinly-veiled autobiography. That was a little disillusioning, although then I started writing fiction myself. Anyway, it turns out that documentaries are similar: When you watch them you think you’re seeing something just the way it happens, but actually it’s all pretty much staged. They wanted us to re-enact the show we did last May, and I was hoping it would be like Civil War re-enactors and we’d get cool uniforms and get to make our own bullets and stuff, but it wasn’t like that at all.

First, it was really hard to schedule the shoot, because Listener Paul H-O is working with real film crew guys who are all working on multiple projects, and I work at my weird dayjob where it’s hard to get a day off, and of course DJ Kelly is a delicate hothouse flower and must be scheduled for the exact day she is in bloom. Plus we needed to film in Studio A, so we had to pick a day when everyone could get there AND our engineer, John Fog, wasn’t doing maintenance  AND the DJ whose show we would disrupt would agree to broadcast from Studio B. Thanks to DJ Diane Kamikaze for letting us have the studio during her regularly scheduled show, we were able to shoot for 3 hours on Thursday. DJ Volunteer Director Scott was invaluable, too—he spent hours helping the crew work out all the technical audio stuff. Program Director Brian helped a lot with scheduling, and Station Manager Ken peeked in the window, and I know DJ Special Events Director Mike did something, because he always does.

Anyway, it was sort of stressful. There were big lights everywhere and cameral guys and then, because one film crew wasn’t enough, Phil and Lauren came in to film the filming of the Paul H-O documentary for the WFMU documentary. DJ Kelly and I were sitting in the middle of the maelstrom, and they told us to relax and just do our show the way we normally do, except not with bed music and maybe the director was going to feed us lines through our headphones. I guess it went okay, though—they kept telling us it was good. Then we changed clothes and invented a completely made-up show where we had Listener Paul H-O into the studio and interviewed him. If you ever see the movie, you’ll know that part documents not a real show that we ever actually did but the show that we pretended  in retrospect that we had done.

I liked all the film guys very much, and the only thing that bothered me about the whole experience was when we were doing the faux show and they had us introduce it by saying something like, “Now that we found out that Paul H-O’s girlfriend really is Cindy Sherman, we wanted him to come in and talk to us in person.” That made it sound like we were celebrity suck-ups, and it’s something I would never do—have someone come on a show just because they were famous or knew someone famous. We were genuinely interested in Listener Paul H-O’s problem, but it didn’t matter to us who his girlfriend really was.

Paul H-O is planning to have a screening of the film “Guest of Cindy Sherman” next summer, so keep an eye out for that. DJ Kelly and I plan to arrive at the screening as if it’s a big premiere and we’re huge stars. I want us to wear sparkly dresses and arrive in a white stretch VW Beetle.

When I got home on Thursday I opened my mail and found I’d been invited to Petra Nemcova’s tsunami disaster benefit at the club NA. Petra Nemcova is the Czech supermodel who got her pelvis shattered in the tsunami and held on to a palm tree for 8 hours while her photographer boyfriend was washed away. I have no idea how I got on the list for this event, which featured “special guest host supermodels Jessica Miller, Anne V., and actress Rashida Jones” and even listed the name of the celebrity doorperson who was going to be letting people inside—not a celebrity who was acting as doorperson, but somebody who does that for a living and is therefore a celebrity in and of themselves. Obviously someone made a big mistake. I am a middle-aged suburban housewife and not even a DJ any more, although I play one in documentaries. I hope they made a lot of money for the tsunami victims, though.
Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God Bless.
-Bronwyn C.

Tsunami Relief

Hello, Everybody--nice seeing you again.
The WFMU post-holiday party was last night, and I wish I could tell you all about which DJ showed up dressed as the Baby New Year in a diaper, and who spent the whole evening riding up and down in the elevator drinking Jagermeister, and what Program Director Brian did on the pony ride--but unfortunately I wasn’t there. I don’t go to parties very often. Usually I tell people that parties make me uncomfortable because of my face-blindness, which is true, but really it’s just that I’m married. The main reason I ever went to parties in the past was to get drunk enough to get over my natural aversion to having sex with another person, but of course that’s all over once you get married. So I don’t expect I’ll ever go to a party ever again in my life. Why should I?
I had to go to my dayjob’s office Christmas party this year, but I don’t think that counts because it was more like work than a party per se. I did get kind of drunk, but not enough to have sex with any of those people. The nice lady from accounting who always tries to get people to do the electric slide with her tried to get me to dance, but I told her I couldn’t because there wasn’t any pole.
I have no idea what the people at my dayjob think of me. A couple of weeks ago a bunch of us ordered in Chinese food and we were eating lunch together in the little conference room, and everyone was talking about the tsunami and what they could do to help those poor people. I said I’d already written a check to the Islamic Circle of North America, which is a Muslim charity that’s taking donations for tsunami relief. There could not have been a more shocked silence if I had crawled up on the conference table and emitted a big poo in front of everyone. I was kind of surprised at their reaction, and I’m still not sure I understand it.
On Tuesday, December 28, two days after the tsunami, the Daily News ran a box on page 3 headed “Here’s How You Can Help.” It listed a few agencies--AmeriCares, Save the Children, and the Islamic Circle of North America. It made sense to me that religious groups with some local presence would have the best chance of distributing aid, and Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. But since that day I haven’t seen another mention of Islamic aid groups anywhere. I’ve checked newspapers and online, and they all list a variety of agencies, but not any Muslim ones. Actually, they usually list 1 or 2 Jewish agencies, which strikes me as a little odd because I don’t think the tidal wave hit any areas with large Jewish populations. But anyway, I can’t think of any good reason why Muslim aid organizations wouldn’t be listed--just bad ones. Like there was a survey recently that found 44% of Americans think the federal government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans.
Okay, here’s something even scarier: Last week there was a newspaper story that said Richard Lugar, the U.S. Senator from Indiana, was on a TV show called “Fox News Sunday” on New Year’s Day, and he said on that show that he thought it was a bad idea for the federal government to lock up terror suspects FOR LIFE without giving them a chance to defend themselves in court. But it turns out there wouldn’t be any way to take them to court because the suspects they want to lock up FOR LIFE are the ones they don’t have enough evidence to prosecute. And apparently Colin Powell was on the TV show “Meet the Press” the same day, and he was asked about the federal govenment’s plan to build a 200-bed “super-maximum-security” prison for these alleged terror *suspects,* and he said he didn’t have enough facts to talk about it, in spite of his own people being involved in the planning. So there’s a plan to put people in prison FOR LIFE because there’s not enough evidence to bring charges against them--What country are we living in? Have you even heard about this? ‘Cause I hadn’t. But, like everyone else, all I know is what I read on the Internet.
Anyway, D.J. Kelly and I are going to be in a movie that’s going to be shot at FMU this week, so maybe I can write about that next Sunday.
Thanks for reading my blog entry, and may God bless.
-Bronwyn C.