"You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point."
By Cyberquill • 03/20/2010 •
6 Comments
Stadttheater Klagenfurt, 1992
Nobody wants to hire me. Not even stupid restaurants want to hire me anymore. (Smart ones never did.) Whatever. No doubt, this is all due to the recession, climate change, and the recent late night imbroglio at NBC. My attitude has nothing to do with it, and whoever suggests otherwise is in for a mighty knuckle sandwich.
Speaking of chow, since starved actor will look a trillion times more flattering on my tombstone than starved waiter, I’ve scoured my nostalgia folder for some spiffy audition clips. By virtue of posting them here and designating them as such, yours truly has officially become a starving actor again. Yippee. Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced the footage of my storied Hamlet on Broadway, and copyright strictures preclude me from sharing clips of my acclaimed Stanley in Warner Bros.’ unreleased Streetcar remake. Oh well. My remaining thespian oeuvre still looks plenty … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 03/17/2010 •
8 Comments
Yesterday I received my 2010 Census form in the mail. Didn’t I just read somewhere that they were looking for census workers to knock on doors and ask personal questions? So then wherefore this form in my mailbox?
Presumably, someone will ring my bell shortly to inquire whether I had liked its font and the design with its light-blue background, and whether I found the Start here at the top enlightening or perplexing given the omission of a matching Stop here at the bottom of the final page. After all, without having been told when to stop, I might have plowed through the end of the form like a Toyota on steroids and kept checking imaginary boxes until my pen ran out of black or blue ink.
So most likely, the door-knocking wetware will be deployed to collect feedback on the forms; to make sure people received, understood, completed, and returned them; and perhaps to elicit one or the other confession about … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 03/15/2010 •
12 Comments
This is the opening line from an Associated Press article in the Business section of today’s New York Times:
If you don’t mind going door to door and asking strangers some personal questions, you may have a future as a Census worker.
Huh?
I used to mind very much going table to table, ragged out in a dopey apron and tie, asking strangers some personal questions about their dinner preferences, yet minding it didn’t prevent me from having a rather extensive past doing precisely that. So why should the fact that I would certainly mind shuffling door to door and interviewing strangers … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 03/12/2010 •
12 Comments
“It was either a massive 30-city tour or start helping out around the house,” said Conan O’Brien, announcing his upcoming Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour.
As soon as the tour wraps up and his contractual television ban expires, Mr. O’Brien is expected to return to the small screen and essentially do the same show he’s been doing for 17 years, only on a different network. Probably Fox. [Actually: TBS!]
Whatever station he’ll be on, the title for his new show is obvious, and you read it here first: … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 03/01/2010 •
18 Comments
If you’re just goofing around, applying won’t suffice. In addition, you’ll have to come in for an interview, undergo job training, and perhaps even show up for work every day.
If you’re serious, all you have to do is apply, and you’re done.
Or could it be the dangling only refers to the serious and not to the act of applying?
As I keep scouring Craigslist’s Help Wanted section in my endearingly fruitless quest for employment, I keep stumbling across the endearingly insipid Serious Only Need Apply. I can’t help but wonder about the mindset of an employer who would bother to include such a silly line in a job ad, assuming the employer him- or herself either wrote or personally signed off on it prior to its publication. (Even if some factotum was wholly responsible for the content of the ad, the impression it engenders attaches to the employer and the company, not to the witless minion in … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 02/24/2010 •
41 Comments
An attractive young woman suits up in a tight mini skirt and a skimpy peekaboo blouse, paints her face like Irma la Douce, dons a flashy diamond necklace, sticks a wad of 100-dollar bills into each of her exposed garters, puts on a pair of four-inch stilettos, gets plastered out of her mind, and proceeds to take a midnight stroll on the South Side of Chicago, all by herself.
She ends up raped, strangled, and robbed.
Now, if—upon condemning this act of violence—you ever so gently offered for consideration the thesis that the young lady’s choices in the run-up to her demise may not have been among the most conducive to her personal welfare, chances are you’d be taken to the woodshed by every women’s and victim’s rights group under the sun for “blaming the victim” in a disgraceful bid to make excuses for her attacker(s), as if you were implying that on account of the victim’s conduct the crime committed was less severe than had she been stone sober, wrapped in a burlap blanket with a potato sack over her head, and assaulted en route to the grocery store in broad daylight with fifteen body guards and a pack of … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 02/12/2010 •
27 Comments
Some folks were born one sex but would like to be the other. More precisely, they feel they are the opposite sex, but owing to some sort of cosmic misunderstanding or genetic snafu, their soul/spirit/essence or whatever came to inhabit the wrong body. Now their hormones find themselves in a perpetual state of war with their external anatomy, thus resulting in a painfully conflicted existence. Something like that. So if a man perceives himself to be trapped in a female body or vice-versa, and the psychological distress over such mismatch impairs his/her daily functioning, that person is diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder.
Apparently, GID has been officially classified as a medical condition such that, in some cases, sex change operations may even be tax-deductible as medical rather than cosmetic procedures. Translation: you and I foot the bill. At least part of it. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with helping the sick.
My aim is not to dispute or even to debate the merits of such classification. I do, however, contend that if GID indeed amounts to a genuine medical condition, then my DDD is a genuine medical condition as well.
I honestly don’t know if I’m joking or not, as I find it increasingly difficult to tell what is and what isn’t a joke when it comes to the ever growing lexicon of … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 02/07/2010 •
18 Comments
In his splendidly (oops…) entertaining and highly (ouch!) edifying writing primer On Writing–A Memoir of the Craft, horrormeister Stephen King counsels against the use of adverbs:
Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is a the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish moustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.
The above 80-word paragraph features five adverbs, i.e., 6.25% of it is pure adverbiage—quite remarkable for a paragraph explicitly composed to discourage rather than to promote their employment—including a whopping three instances of the word usually. (On the previous page, Mr. King had stated that he was “not in love” with the sentence My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss because it contained the word with twice in four words.)
Mr. King continues … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 01/27/2010 •
30 Comments
My previous post contained the following sentence:
Weapons of mass destruction or no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, being located smack in between Iran and the Saudi Arabian oil fields, with Saddam and his murderous Oprichniki removed as a regional stabilizer of sorts, I guess there’s little chance of pulling out of there until such time as we’re all driving solar vehicles.
A former-sort-of-coworker-turned-Facebook-acquaintance of mine (not the gentleman pictured above) kindly yet forcefully lamented that something was “very wrong” with this sentence and that it made “no sense,” grammatically speaking.
Yet I contend that my sentence works just fine, as it is structurally modeled upon the Second Amendment:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
This antiquated construction is called … (Read More »»)
By Cyberquill • 01/25/2010 •
12 Comments
On one of the late-night talk shows, rocker Jon Bon Jovi referred to Barack Obama as the “coolest” president in the universe.
Agreed. We do have the coolest president imaginable, the classiest First Lady, two adorable First Daughters, and the most hypo-allergenic First Dog in history. More importantly, with the exception of Bo (left), less than one average human lifetime ago this entire beautiful family would have been relegated to the proverbial–as well as the literal–back of the bus in certain parts of the very country whose executive mansion they now rightfully inhabit. In spite of its flaws–which may be due to imperfections in human nature itself rather than the American system of governance–we live in a great nation with a moral arc bending towards justice in many respects.
Who can forget the expression of joy mingled with a sprinkling of disbelief in the teared-up eyes of older African-Americans, who had witnessed segregation firsthand, as they watched a black man delivering his acceptance speech and subsequently being sworn in as, yes, president of the United States of America? And irrespective of whether or not one agrees with Mr. Obama’s policies, who could possibly fail to delight in the notion of a bunch of knuckleheaded drips banging the deranged contents of their goofy-looking … (Read More »»)
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