I think this is how movie ideas are generated now.
Epic Penile Picnic Panic
There’s a hot dog joke in there somewhere.
Each morning I do a series of New York Times puzzles including Wordle, the Mini crossword, Connections, and Strands but I start with the Spelling Bee. That's how this gem of a sequence of words appeared as I puzzled away on the possible anagrams (where you try to create as many words as possible with the seven assigned letters).
It even included the word “Alien”. I only wished I hadn’t thought of it out of sequence. Can you imagine being confronted with “Epic Alien Penile Picnic Panic” first thing in the morning? Even separately there's fun to be had: "Epic Penile-anything" could be fun or terrifying. Who hasn't had a "Picnic Panic"? Or, if I may say so, who amongst us hasn't suffered a "Penile Panic"? The less said of "Penile Picnic" the better.
For the last year or more I've been using AI driven grammar bots to help me improve my writing. All I really wanted was something to fix typos, correct comma usage, or guide me when I accidentally change point of view or tenses. Most of the corrections suggested by such AI agents at Grammarly or Evernote are helpful. Actually not Evernote. Evernote is an application whose AI is so dim as to offer "Amurican" spellings despite having set my dictionary choices as "Canadian English". While the application allows words like "labour" and "colour", the bot automatically suggests "labor" and "color" and makes such changes without consulting me at all. If I were an editor and Evernote was my assistant, they'd be gone. Eighty-sixed. Dismissed. Fired. Given a dishonourable discharge.
One thing that has always bothered me about spell-checkers and grammar assistants is how they insist that everyone write the same way. It's very difficult to write in an almost casual informal tone with these pearl-clutching old biddies telling you that what you are writing simply isn’t said in polite society. If I had wanted Ms. Gillingham from my seventh grade English class to write my post, I would've gone through the trouble to dig her up and re-animate the old soul, Frankenstein style. But I didn't and I won't, because that kind of thing isn’t done in polite society.
I remember a David Foster Wallace essay, Tense Present, referencing SWE, or standard written English (or as it was sometimes referred to as Standard White English), and making the case to his class about how they should approach their essay writing. I may be misremembering it, but his point was more about aiming to write this way at college as that is how you will be judged. When writing creatively for yourself or your audience, there are plenty of arguments to abandon that style. I use the word, "style", loosely here because there's still a case for grammatical correctness. It's also important to at least be consistent in how you use punctuation, quotations and the like for clarity. Yet, (there's an even a reason I use "yet" rather than "but" to begin a sentence, but I digress) if you want to sound loose, conversational or natural in text, I'm not sure being grammatically correct is always necessary. It's also true what we say in spoken terms, can be unclear in written text. My point is that if you want to convey a story or idea in your own voice or style, then these AI grammar agents are not here to help you, but hinder you. Knowing how these AI agents are "trained" by being fed reams and reams of existing text, it's not surprising they seek to make any one person's writing sound like everybody else's.
For most of my life skating meant only one thing: hockey. As an adult I've moved on from late night shinny and pickup games that required an hour of driving for 45 minutes of ice time and a following day of barely being able to lift my feet, to more leisurely skates. Skating now is that more civil activity of circularly striding around a rink or trail until the cold has taken hold and your body has told you it's time to move on. Still, the glide, the breeze and especially the sounds are very nice. That scraping of blades on the ice reverberating and echoing around you is so evocative of childhood winters. The skating in circles, while repetitive, does remind me of those occasional school trips where a busload of us would be driven to the rink and told to skate dutifully around while perhaps the worst speaker system in the world blared some fuzzy Bay City Rollers. For those of us who played hockey it was a fun moment to skate circles around school bullies who inexplicably didn't play hockey (most likely due to some economic disadvantage). Even better for me, as I, for reasons still unknown, could skate backwards almost better than forwards, now had a chance to impress the most unimpressionable prettiest girls in our class. Oh yes reader, I played it cool. I would stride around letting my teammates whiz by, then with the simplest of spins, cruise easily around the bend, building speed with every crossover, then overtake Alison, Kim, Gina or Tina, and looking back at them say with an easy grin and head tilt, "hi, I think you're skating the wrong way." before hearing a resolute teacher yell, "Mister Rogers! Please, turn around!", "Yes, miss" I'd say and swoop past that one girl who'd falsely protest, "Hey, watch it, show-off!" then in a gentlemanly and quiet manner offer, "oh I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you." At which point I would pick up enough speed to lap my clumsier classmates and glide along side her and say, "You again, didn't I just see you here?" I think I could elicit a giggle. Here, on the ice I was as confident and pithy as any Jane Austin paramour. Off the ice, I had nothing and would return to doodling in the back of my Hilroy notebook. Innocent times. I still take pleasure in some, though not as much, love of the ice. I see it in others too. We're not the brash ones. We're the ones holding back and making space for kiddos that might fall, who then decide to lie there looking up at the clouds. Trust me, we want to break free but we'll put our hands behind our backs and slip into an easy floating pace.
It's that time of year and The Absurdly Quotidian Omnibus has landed. Has it "landed" or "launched"? "Book Launch" is an odd expression. Is it like a boat launch, struck by a bottle of champagne and pushed down a slip into the water? No. Is it like a rocket launch whereby a tin can packed with enough explosives to thrust it beyond the atmosphere? No. I guess the idea is that this thing, this collection of ideas illustrated in words and printed and bound is let loose upon the world. Will it take flight? Unlikely. Will it hold open doors? Definitely not heavy enough for that. Will it keep you company on the privy? Hopefully, if the author is lucky and if even luckier, it will sit comfortably on a shelf for years of posterity, a time capsule of sorts - though please refrain from burying it in the backyard for future generations to find.
It's been sent to the printers. The first batch is in the post. At 281 pages, the tenth annual Omnibus (previously The Almanac of General Knowledge) may be one of the longest ever. Here is a preview: warts, grammatical errors, mistypings and misgivings for all to see.
Most years, this tome of timely nothings, takes a leisurely two weeks to assemble (three weekends, with the two weeks in-between). Each time I do it feels more like the end. For some reason I always finish with the Film section and usually have the TV on in the background (which may explain the typos) and a bowl of roasted chestnuts, or some chocolate or a peeled clementine or two beside me. It feels like closing up a shop for the season. A way of revisiting the year and remembering all that has happened. It was a hell of a year and it's not done yet – but I think we can all agree, we're all done with it.
No promises but I may make this available as either a downloadable PDF or ePub in the near future. If I do, I'll make a real effort to fix all the weird typos and grammatical errors that are driving me nuts!
This year's Omnibus has only just been fired off to printers – if you cannot wait for the cracking of the spine of the printed ephemera sent your way (expect delivery in the first week of the new year), then you can virtually snap it here. It is agreed that really the only satisfaction of the Omnibus is the thing itself, so a digital version is no doubt, a disappointment to everyone. The digital edition lacks a certain door-stopping, fly-swatting thwack that is dearly missed yet it is merely a delay in the ultimate delivery of the ultimate diversion.
This year's almanac is at the printers as I write this and only days away from shipping, but I thought I'd post a preview here. One thing you may notice is the re-christening of the Almanac of General Knowledge as the Absurdly Quotidian Omnibus. To be accurate the full title is Roget's Almanac of General Knowledge Presents the 2013 Absurdly Quotidian Omnibus, if you're not into the whole brevity thing. Or the 'bus for short, if, you know, you are into the brevity thing. Why the change? Boredom I suppose, but also it's a truer reflection of what the book is. An omnibus. A collection of previously published works, both by me and from the public domain — if you describe the Internet as a domain in the public and if you consider “copy/paste” part of fair use copyright laws (laws, schmaws… am I right?)
You can download a PDF of the 'bus from Issuu.com but there is a limit of only 25 downloads available so act now! Okay, the directive that you should act now may in fact be hyperbole. For those so inclined, I do intend to make an ePub version available once I have the time. So follow me on Twitter @rowdyman for further announcements. I'm kidding of course. I know exactly 3, maybe 4 people out of 6.5 billion who may actually want a digital version and even then they are just being polite.
It's funny I should bother doing that because it's so backward. I mean, this Web site is the digital version of the Omnibus. The whole idea of making a book in the first place was to explore the idea of the printed Web. Well, the real reason behind the Almanac was one year I noticed mother had left me out of the Christmas newsletter and this is my revenge. I like the idea of curating pieces of writing and projects that are born in the digital ether of the Internet and turning them into something so three dimensional as a book. Making the ephemeral ephemera, you might say. What once was only server space shall now be shelf space, and for that I truly am sorry.
