Rain Gryphon

I'm told (apparently on good authority) that in England it's considered terribly rude to describe someone as a "Paki". Why? I'd thought the general rule with the "-stan" countries was that the part preceding -stan was the name of the people that lived there. Does this hold for all the "-stan" peoples (e.g., Afghanis, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, etc) or is it something peculiar to Pakistan?

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There's an oddity here in the midwest that "Jew" is somehow considered faintly perjorative. No-one ever wants to say "Bob is a Jew". It's always "Bob is Jewish." Other religions don't suffer this. No one thinks twice about characterising someone as a Methodist or a Baptist. I don't think this holds on either coast - just in the middle of the country.

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I'm starting to look seriously at "Second Life". Nikoonie's got the cutest avatar (a Qoon girl) I've seen yet. I've discovered with a bit of poking about that you can just buy a nice avatar for cash, instead of having to start as a human and upgrade later. That helps. Plus you can build cars. There's something dreadfully appealing (and somehow appropriate) about some sort of wild-eyed Mustelid driving the Novi Governor.

I'll have to load up Windows again, of course...

And even though I'm not entirely sure what a "poof cube" is, I like saying it. Poof Cube. Püf Qüb...

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I took the Looney Toons character quiz earlier, which scored me as Foghorn Leghorn. It's not the choice that would have occurred to me, but on reflection, it's an eerily good fit. I'm loud, bombastic, and often a bit too clever for my own good. I occasionally like to start a pissing match to alleviate boredom, too (think how many cartoons started with FL @whacking the sleeping Dog).

It's the preamble to the quiz that really bought my eye, though. In some real sense, the Warner Bros cartoons do constitute a working American mythology. You've got a number of stereotypical American and other personalities involved in situations and conflicts that are familiar from American life.

When I was in grade school, I caught the tail end of the whole "American Voice" thing that flourished from the 1930s to the 1960s. American Voice is my own name for it, from a textbook that we used. I'm not sure if it ever had a proper name, but it was definitely an academic movement, even if it didn't see itself as one.

What was going on essentially was that American academics after the First World War were determined that America had to have a separate cultural identity from England. In the main it stemmed from insecurity, I think. In any event, it led to a rather strident fixation on American authors, painters, and composers. That's about all we saw in our books, frankly, was American works. You'd have thought we were living in some African republic that had been independent for about five years, the way they drilled it in.

Part of the package was a desire to create an authentic American mythology. A people's myths reflect how they see themselves, after all. Robin Hood and King Arthur are as familiar and well-loved figures here as I must suppose they are in England. For the American Voice people, that would not do. They dug up from somewhere stories about Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and the like, and more or less force-fed these to us.

They never took. Even when I was young, there seemed an uncouth enthusiasm to the way these stories were presented. Stories of Hercules, Arthur, Robin Hood, etc., were told, knowing the audience would accept them - Pecos Bill, John Henry and Paul Bunyan were pushed. They were propaganda. When you look back now on the mid-50s Disney efforts to popularize these legends, they look remarkably stilted, and uncomfortable. These characters had been, at best, minor regional traditions, oral tales almost stillborn at the dawn of public literacy. I'm guessing they were more or less almost completely forgotten when the ethnographers exhumed them after the turn of the century. Trying to burden them with mythic signifigance and sweep; and make them stand for all Americans, overloaded and broke whatever charm they had.

The Warner characters as mythic figures had never really occurred to me before, but the idea just rings with truth. It'd piss off the overly-serious 'American Voice' types too, so that's all to the good. A lot of the character types are, if not peculiarly American, at least types more common here than elsewhere. Foghorn Leghorn's that way. Yosemite Sam too - look who we've got in the White House, and think about him that way :) Looney Toons make a fine lens through which to view America.


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Richard Seaman went to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Museum, which is something I'd like to see someday. It's kind of sad that his vacation pictures and commentary are far superior to the museum's official page, but so it goes.

Intro

Damage

Bits 'n Pieces

Informational Plaques w/ commentary

His whole site is actually quite fascinating, with lots of pictures and intelligent commentary about the places he's been. I think he'd be fun to travel with.

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They seem to have found a heart for greysontiger. I hope things turn out as well for the trapped Russian submariners.

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This weekend is the Brickyard 400. I'm never as excited about that as about the Five Hundred or the USGP. NASCAR is entertaining, but there's always a lingering suspicion that it's not quite on the level.