Category: Uncategorized

Here’s my column from today’s paper.
Number of minutes after I woke up this morning that I got my first angry phone call from a senior citizen: 6.

Sufjan Stevens live on KCRW. I link to it only because he reveals which states he’s considering for his next geography-driven album — Oregon, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. (At 22:00 in the video.) And, more importantly to me, he reveals that the New Jersey album will be a musical about the exits on the New Jersey Turnpike.
That is awesome primarily because, when that comes out, I will seem retroactively extremely cool. Because for several years in the mid-1990s my email signature was:
“Thomas Edison! Grover Cleveland! John Fenwick! Joyce Kilmer! Clara Barton! Vince Lombardi! Walt Whitman.”
I knew those names as the ones Jon Spencer yells out at the end of “Big Road,” on the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Extra Width. (Which, by the way, was probably the first “indie” record I ever bought, back in 1993.) At the time, I didn’t know those names, aside from being fine citizens of New Jersey, were also all service areas on the Turnpike, along with Woodrow Wilson, Molly Pitcher, and James Fenimore Cooper.
(It may be a sign of my impending blog bankruptcy that I’ve been reduced to recycling posts from 2001. Not sure. Also, I’m using more italics these days, it seems.)

Hell yeah! My wee Cajun colleagues from Lafayette, Louisiana are kicking ass in the Little League World Series.
They played their first game Saturday and fell behind to the New England champs from Maine. They were down 2-0 in the bottom of the sixth inning. (Little League games only go six innings instead of the traditional nine.) So, what happens? Three runs! In the bottom of the sixth! Cajuns win!
(Coach: “This little team is a very confident club. They never lost their composure.”)
Today was game 2. Things weren’t looking good — the boys from Owensboro, Kentucky, took a commanding 8-1 lead in the third. Did Our Heroes wilt in the face of pressure? They most certainly did not! They began to chip away at the deficit — one run in the third, two in the fourth, then four more in the fifth.
In the bottom of the sixth, Owensboro retired the first two batters. Down to their final out, Our Heroes…bunt! And reach base! And advance to third on a timely single! And…throwing error! That’s a run! Cajuns win, Cajuns win!
These guys rock. They’ve got good Cajun names like Duplantis and Toups and Romero and Bergeron. As if that weren’t enough regional cred, they’ve got a sweet old grandma they call Nama who blesses them with a quick sign of the cross on their foreheads before each victory. (It doesn’t get much more Cajun than that, friends.)
Up next for Our Heroes is the villainous Rancho Buena Vista. Their star pitcher, Kalen Pimentel, just tied a Little League World Series record by striking out 18 batters. (For those good with math, 6 innings x 3 outs per inning = the dude struck out everybody.) And that’s just his pitching arm: he’s the “Barry Bonds of Little League,” who was recently batting .756.
I know nothing of this Kalen Pimentel boy. But I assure you that on Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. Central Daylight Time, on ESPN2, he will feel the mighty pincers of our crawfish-fueled Cajun heroes.
If not, I say check his pee for steroids.
(By the way, best part of any of these stories:
One thing the team and coaches have had to adjust to is the local cuisine. The first night the team sat down to supper, it was served what [head coach Mike] Conrad described as mashed potatoes on what looked like a waffle, all covered with a light tan gravy.
“They were all just staring at it, not one of them had a fork in his hand,” Conrad said.
Conrad said he’s been told help is on the way today, when families and other supporters travel north with boudin and cracklins. The coaches are hoping to see some Community and Mello Joy coffee coming up as well because the local java just isn’t measuring up. “Whatever this stuff is, we still haven’t figured out what it is yet,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t even wake you up.”
Trust me: a team high on boudin cannot be stopped.)
Finally, a shout-out to Buddy Guirovich, the “godfather of Lafayette Little League” and my middle-school gym teacher.

Things you don’t expect to run across on Wikipedia: “Other related modern theories involve Hitler having escaped to the Antarctic, where he joined with a subterranean dinosauroid master race, with whom he now travels inside UFOs underground, generally beneath the South Pole or throughout the center of the hollow earth, but sometimes to a Nazi moon base as well.”
That’s the crazy p.o.v. of one Miguel Serrano, who actually held positions of some authority in various Chilean totalitarian regimes of the last half-century. “He believed that Hitler was in Shambhala, an underground centre in Antarctica (formerly at the North Pole and Tibet), where he was in contact with the Hyperborean gods and from whence he would someday emerge with a fleet of UFOs to lead the forces of light (the Hyperboreans, sometimes associated with Vril) over the forces of darkness (inevitably including, for Serrano, the Jews) in a last battle and inaugurating a Fourth Reich.”
I’ve always been fascinated by white supremacists who try to bolster their craziness with made-up religious beliefs. I wrote my senior essay in college on a guy names Charles Totten who was sort of an 1890s bridge between British Israelism — the idea that the lost tribes of Israel somehow got confused, moved to Manchester and became the Brits, allowing the English to claim “chosen people” status — and Christian identity — the big-in-Idaho varient that claims white Americans are the chosen people, too. Both schools think the people who call themselves Jews are actually “mud people” descended from Satan.
Like I said, nutcases all. They love getting wrapped up in faux history — City of the Medes this, tribe of Khazars that — when their real interests are more along these more prosaic lines: “A relatively new tenet gaining popularity among some radical Christian Identity believers justifies the use of violence if it is perpetrated in order to punish violators of God’s law, as found in the Bible and interpreted by Christian Identity ministers and adherents. This includes killing interracial couples, abortionists, prostitutes and homosexuals, burning pornography stores, and robbing banks and perpetrating frauds to undermine the ‘usury system.’ Christian Identity adherents engaging in such behavior are referred to as Phineas Priests or members of the Phineas Priesthood. This is an appealing concept to some Christian Identity’s members who believe they are being persecuted by a supposed Jewish-controlled U.S. government and society and/or are eagerly preparing for Armageddon.”
Bonus Fact I Would Have Included In My Senior Essay Had The Internet Been As Built Out In 1997 As It Is Today: Charles Totten is the father of fencing at UMass, whose athletes have won two recent national championships.

Teacher and the Rockbots, a lame attempt to out-“Schoolhouse Rock” “Schoolhouse Rock.” Quoth the press release: “This 13-song CD reinforces American history and government lessons in a kid-friendly way with humor, modern rock music and commentary from a robot!”
Someone’s been listening to mid-period Clash records. Although I’m not sure whether it’s appropriate to fake a British accent when you’re singing about the American Revolution.

An introduction to Cajun English. Cajun English, not Cajun French.
Some of the elements are awfully familiar to me. I’ve always said “get down” to mean “get out of a car.” (Much to the amusement of people riding in the car with me. “Do you want to get down?” is not typically an invitation to dance.) It’s “a” coffee, not “some” coffee. And my grandmother used to always say “zink” instead of “sink.” Throw in some “was” leveling and “-ed” absence, and throw in some loss of interdental fricatives, double subject construction, and extra definite articles and you’re getting there. (“Dem, dey was so tired uh dat ol’ dam dog they kill da ting”)
An LSU prof who’s studied it calls Cajun English an ethnolect: “varieties of a language in which the expression of ethnic identity is maintained in an adopted language after loss of the ethnic language.” A la AAVE, or as the Oakland school board would call it, ebonics.
The author advances an interesting theory: That as Cajun French dies out, the ability to speak Cajun English — with its passel of linguistic holdovers from the mother tongue — is the key social indicator of ethnic identity. “Why would a dialect which was considered a mark of ignorance until very recently be heard on the lips of Cajuns young and old?…To be a Cajun these days, the necessary and sufficient condition seems to be that you must speak Cajun English.”
That would be an interesting twist on the view, advanced by Zachary Richard and others, that Cajun culture can only survive if “the language” survives. They mean Cajun French as “the language,” but maybe the accent of Boudreaux jokes is enough.
Finally, a bonus quote on anti-Cajun discrimination in the early 20th century.

Reader poll time: Settle this dispute.
The fingers of a human hand can be distinguished by the following names: thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie finger.
Question: Are there similar names for the toes of a human foot?
In other words, would big toe, index toe, middle toe, ring toe, and pinkie toe be accurate terms? Is “ring toe” appropriate despite there being no great cultural legacy of putting rings on said toe? Is “little toe” or “baby toe” more appropriate than “pinkie toe”? Is “index toe” sane?
Your thoughts in the comments, please.

Kick ass: Zombies Walk!, an unspeakably awesome mix of Sufjan Stevens and Kanye West, the two reigning kings of unique-first-name music. (Stolen from Gorilla vs. Bear.)

Orange roughy — the lovely-tasting fish that forms the core of the delish ceviche tostadas at Gloria’s — doesn’t even start to breed until about age 25 or 30. The ones caught are often over 100 years old.
Which means (a) that when I chow down on those ceviche tostadas, I may be eating a fish older than my great-grandmother, and (b) orange roughy stocks worldwide are near depletion because the species doesn’t have time to recover from overfishing.

Names seriously considered for the young Canadian nation, 1865: Mesopelagia, Superior, Albionora, Tuponia (as in The United Provinces of North America), Efisga (England, France, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Aboriginal lands).