FeeFiFoto Blog

Good Grief! We Are Colossal Nerds!

As I write this Cupcake and I are watching ESPN. 

What are we watching, you might ask?

The Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Here are some of the words that have been spelled correctly so far:

• meridienne
• isochronal
• boutade
• deuteragonist
• duchesse
• anaphylaxis
• ovidian
• canaille
• excrescential
• supposititious

Yeah, we're nerds.  So what?

Favorites Of 2010

Recapping some of my favorite posts of 2010, because I'm not Allie Brosh* and no one else will do it for me

A List Of My Favorite Posts From 2010
Which Should Carry Exactly As Much Weight As
When The Waitress Confides Her Favorite Menu Items
But It's My Blog So If You Don't Like It Get Your Own Blog

In January, there was the time I bargained for that dress.  Remember when I bargained for the dress?  It's a cute dress.  In fact, I'm wearing it right now.  I'm a bit concerned that if I don't praise the dress while wearing it, it might rise up and throttle me as I doze with my face pressed into the keyboard and unintentionally type hgyhygggggggggggggg: In This Economy, Retailers Are Smart To Bargain.

In February, the car broke down due to an electrical malfunction which had absolutely nothing to do with my leaving the lights on, which I did because the warning dinger didn't ding because there was an electrical malfunction (see above): Is There Ever A Convenient Time For The Car To Break Down? (Hint: there isn't).

In March, the entire airport broke down, which again was not my fault and furthermore had nothing to do with electrical malfunctions or electricity of any kind.  Except maybe lightning: Weather Disruptions Worked In Lindsay Vonn's Favor...

In April, we touched on the colors of travel (hint: there's lots of blue): Blue Is The Color Of Heaven

In May, I had some advice for the varmint population in our yard on how to appear less blockheaded: Letters of Advice.

In June, Robespierre became a Bar Mitzvah.  I wrote a lot about the subject (you try throwing a Bar Mitzvah without raving even while sleeping); here is one of my favorite posts on the subject: Superhero Or Super Villain -- Choose Wisely.

In July, I Shot An Elephant In My Pajamas, which degenerated into an existential discussion of grammar. With this post I received one of my favorite comments of all time from Ivan Toblog: Written, your statement would have to say something like, "Don't use that spoon. I killed a fly with it."

In August, I did some reading: More Of What I've Been Reading Lately.

In September, some of us got stuck in the mud.  Fortunately, we got out and lived to tell the tale: Sorry We Weren't In Touch Last Weekend. We Were Swamped.

In October, I discussed why cell phones rock: Why I LOOOOVE My Cell Phone.

In November, I unveiled my FeeFiFoto Fundraising program: Need To Raise Money For Your Organization? Here's My Proposal.

In December, I remembered that I forgot to have the sprinklers turned off before the first freeze: My Mistake.

*Of Hyperbole and a Half.  Last year I compared myself to Dooce but I don't like Dooce and never have, so I'm happy to be able to compare myself (heh) to someone I admire instead.

Do you have a favorite 2010 post?  Of mine?

I Shot An Elephant In My Pajamas

What an elephant was doing in my pajamas, I'll never know.

Image borrowed from Paula J. Becker, who has a really cute blog.

The point of this extremely lame joke is that I killed a fly with a spoon last week. 

Not that the fly had a spoon in its little fly hand.  Although it might have, for all I could tell, since fly hands are normally microscopic and my vision isn't too sharp, even with glasses.  And for that matter, it was a pretty big fly.  As flies go.  So it's possible that the bigger-than-normal fly did have a demitasse spoon in its hand with which it intended to stir cream and sugar into its iced coffee.

In any case, I saw no evidence of a spoon in the fly's hand as I picked up the spoon with which I swatted the fly.

The point?  The point is that when writing a letter to Cupcake at camp, I wrote "I killed a fly with a spoon last week."  And then I had to clarify my statement because the way it was written it appeared as if I might have killed a fly that was holding a spoon in its hand, which we have already established was not the case, and in any case would be most unlikely.

As I was telling this story to my sister (an instinctive grammarian, like me -- it runs in the family, like prominent noses and curly hair), we tried to dissect the sentence and figure out what was wrong with it and how to fix it. 

But we couldn't find anything grammatically amiss. 

"I killed a fly with a spoon" seemed to be completely proper, especially if the sentence were spoken rather than written.  If, in conversation, you say "I killed a fly with a spoon," your listener, while finding your choice of subject rather grotesque, should nevertheless understand the implication that you picked up a spoon in your hand and used the spoon to swat a fly, which fell down dead on the floor.

Yet, the written sentence begged to be restructured so as to make abundantly clear that the fly was killed with the spoon, not that the fly came equipped with its own fly-size spoon.

Can anyone explain this conundrum to me?  In a way that won't make my eyes roll back into my head and my knees to buckle, thus causing me to fall backwards on the floor, bash my skull and end up in bed for a week with hallucinations of flies stirring coffee in china cups using teeny tiny silver spoons?

Thanks.

Does Anyone Else Wonder What It Might Be Like To Have Lunch With David Sedaris?

I always look forward to reading David Sedaris in The New Yorker.

I've heard that  95% of New Yorker readers say they flip to the cartoons first, and the remaining 5% who claim to read articles first are lying.  Being somewhat obtuse about these sorts of things (I won't ask for directions just because people assume that all women do.  This frequently results in my driving in concentric circles for an hour until I stumble upon my destination, but my dignity remains intact, at least until someone asks why I'm an hour late) I try to read something, anything, before flipping through to the cartoons.  If David Sedaris is writing that week it's simple -- I read his stuff first.

If you've never read his writing, let me supply a little background. David Sedaris first came to prominence in 1992 when his essay "SantaLand Diaries", about his experiences as a Macy's Christmas elf called "Crumpet", was broadcast on NPR.  His writing makes me feel the way I felt the first time I saw Pulp Fiction -- as I laughed myself silly I made a mental note to hire a psychotherapist because anyone who found Pulp Fiction funny must undoubtedly be insane.

Here's a sample from his latest piece in this week's New Yorker:

"I didn’t much notice my fellow-smokers until the mid-eighties, when we began to be cordoned off. Now there were separate sections in waiting rooms and restaurants, and I’d often look around and evaluate what I’d come to think of as “my team.” At first, they seemed normal enough—regular people, but with cigarettes in their hands. Then the campaign began in earnest, and it seemed that if there were ten adults on my side of the room at least one of them was smoking through a hole in his throat.

“Still think it’s so cool?” the other side said. But coolness, for most of us, had nothing to do with it. It’s popular to believe that every smoker was brainwashed, sucked in by product placement and subliminal print ads. This argument comes in handy when you want to assign blame, but it discounts the fact that smoking is often wonderful. For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend. Not only that; they tasted good, especially the first one in the morning and the seven or eight that came immediately after it. By late afternoon, after a pack or so, I’d generally feel a heaviness in my lungs, especially in the nineteen-eighties, when I worked with hazardous chemicals. I should have worn a respirator, but it interfered with my smoking.

I once admitted this to a forensic pathologist. We were in the autopsy suite of a medical examiner’s office, and he responded by handing me a lung. It had belonged to an obese, light-skinned black man, an obvious heavy smoker, who was lying on a table not three feet away. His sternum had been sawed through, and the way his chest cavity was opened, the unearthed fat like so much sour cream, made me think of a baked potato. “So,” the pathologist sniffed. “What do you say to this?”

He’d obviously hoped to create a moment, the kind that leads you to change your life, but it didn’t quite work. If you are a doctor and someone hands you a diseased lung, you might very well examine it, and consequently make some very radical changes. If, on the other hand, you are not a doctor, you’re liable to do what I did, which was to stand there thinking, Damn, this lung is heavy."

This piece is quite typical of Sedaris's writing.  As I savor every word and phrase I ask myself, could David Sedaris possibly be like this in real life?  Could a live conversation with him possibly be as spectacularly disturbing intriguing, shall we say, as his essays?  Could I conceivably carry on a coherent conversation with someone who skulks around trash cans prospecting for flies to fling into his pet spider's web?

What do you think of David Sedaris?

Visit FeeFiFoto and put photos of your favorite Christmas elf (hey, it's never too early, is it?) on tee shirts, sweat shirts or baseball caps.

Tackle It Tuesday: It's Easier To Write Someone Else's Resume Than Your Own

Today I promise to finish editing my niece's resume, which contains accomplishments like these:

The Oxbow School, Napa, California

Attended the Oxbow School for the fall semester of 2007. Oxbow is an interdisciplinary semester high school boarding program that interweaves academics with visual arts. The program fosters independence, critical thinking, and self-reflection through a rigorous studio art curriculum.

Rhode Island School of Design, Pre-College, Providence RI

Attended a concentrated summer arts program where I majored in traditional photography and participated in drawing, art history, and basic design classes.

School of Cinema and Performing Arts, Beginning and Advanced Film Courses- Brooklyn, NY

2006 graduate of both beginner and advanced summer film courses. Wrote, cast, directed, filmed, and edited five live-action short films.

She's applying to colleges.  She needs a resume to apply to college.  If I'd composed a resume when I was applying to colleges, my major achievement would have been gaining detailed knowledge of the theme songs of dozens of TV programs.

She's gonna owe me big time when I finish this resume.  Maybe now I'll finally get the animated films I wanted her to make to help promote FeeFiFoto.