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Elvis Caged for Brandishing Exclamation Point!
MONDAY: Lunch today is haloumi and the usual veggies on a malted grain bap. Simple but satisfying. My fruit includes tiny Lincolnshire strawberries and slices of gorgeously perfect nectarine, pear, and satsuma. It's a perfect lunch for a hot day.
Things have gone too far! It's time we caged these vicious criminals who maul and abuse the written language! I'm talking about newspaper reporters who use exclamation points and sensational dehumanising words like "caged" to report the news! And let's not forget to at least one word, and sprinkle commas, willy, nilly.
One expects this sort of language rot in sensational rags like the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the National Enquirer. I've found so much amusement in sensational tabloid headlines like "Queen Forced To Eat Slimey Slugs" that I once wrote a Javascript program that randomly produced headlines like "Elvis Gives Birth To Own Grandmother" and "Two-Headed Albino Gorilla Forced To Eat Los Angeles Convention Center Smeared with Marmite".
But if the Los Angeles Times or the Guardian started to write in this style all hell would break loose -- or I certainly hope it would. I'll admit that more and more typos creep into the Guardian these days, probably due to the fact that because of the growing reliance on spell-checking software, actual manual proofreading is quickly becoming a dying art. But never have I come across anything so blatantly SCREAMING as an exclamation point!
So why must the local Sheffield Star resort to this punctuation mark which should be reserved solely for fictional dialogue and casual correspondence? Not that I'm a regular reader of the Sheffield Star; but I do like to check the local job adverts every Thursday, and a local paper should be a good source for particularly local news specifics. But! I feel as though!! I'm being! PUNCHED IN THE FACE! I WISH! Somebody would cage! these villains' exclamation point keys! Or just TEAR! THEM OUT! in a horrendously grisly manner! And while they're at it, burn that damn CAPS LOCK key!
Don't get me started on the misuse of apostrophes. Please don't…
God Particles and Poodle Perms
TUESDAY: Lunch today features a new Sainsbury's flavour of houmus with roasted red pepper and basil pesto. It's quite nice. I've got it in a whole wheat breadcake from my local bakery with cream cheese and my usual garnish of red pepper/spring onion. It's a slippery sloshy sandwich that, along with my slippery sloshy container of fresh raspberries, cherries, nectarines, and melon, makes for quite a sloppy meal.
This morning my bus was packed to the gills, but I managed to squeeze behind a massive hooded man into the only free seat on the bus, a window seat facing backwards. Like most slightly neurotic people I prefer facing the front and gazing into the future rather than watching the past slip by. But today, as we spent a very long time stopped at the next bus stop, I had a perfect view right into my local neighbourhood dog grooming shop. I watched as the groomer clipped a large curly dog, rendering its hairs into the past as a small terrier watched disapprovingly from an adjacent cage. From my view through the door I could see part of the price list on the wall, with an entire menu for Poodles, one for Spaniels, one for Collies, and one listing miscellaneous breeds. And I smiled happily when I realised that being the only rear-facing passenger on that side of the bus, I was privileged to have my own private viewing experience.
WEDNESDAY: Lunch is odd: a marriage of not enough haloumi for a sandwich with not enough mature cheddar for a sandwich. Like Marmite and peanut butter they go surprisingly well together.
Last week I hungrily devoured the Guardian's supplement about the LHC or Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator at Cern which is due to be turned on later this summer and will hopefully, by colliding two counter rotating beams of protons, recreate the conditions and energies that existed shortly after the Big Bang. I suppose I'm a bit more excited about this than most of my friends and workmates, but I do have a strong interest in physics. Although my love of mathematics when I was young was stalled a bit in high school by an extremely boring teacher whose Texas monotone took all the fun out of trigonometry, I still love to read about physics and maths from a laywoman's point of view.
Ten years ago I became so enamoured with chaos theory that I read probably 10 books in a row on the subject, branching off into complexity and symmetry breaking, and then I wrote a novel based on the butterfly effect and my idea of fractal time. So this huge, massively expensive particle accelerator -- which has the potential to answer many of the greatest questions of physics, not to mention philosophy -- excites me in a way I can't describe without becoming just a bit obscene.
One of the questions it is hoped the LHC will answer is if the Higgs boson, aka the God Particle, actually exists. It is theorized that this subatomic particle is responsible for mass. So if it is discovered that the Higgs boson doesn't exist, does that mean we're all figments of our imaginations? And although Michio Kaku, author and professor of theoretical physics, explains that any potential black holes created by the collider will be so minute they will dissipate instantly, why are so many people fearful that he could be wrong? I mean, if a black hole were created that was big enough to swallow the universe, as some sceptics fear, would it really matter? We'd never know the difference, would we? Have you ever been swallowed by a black hole? Me neither. I wouldn't think it would hurt much. And I think my lifelong California-born fear of being on the toilet when the Big Earthquake strikes just wouldn't come into account.
Another theory the LHC is hoped to prove or disprove is string theory, which proposes that the physical universe is based not in 4 dimensions of Space-time but in 10 dimensions. This worries me a bit, as I've been very excited about string theory ever since I first read about it. In fact, in one of my coffee columns I suggested my Ball of Superstring Theory based on the fact that cats seem to perceive matter in not only more than 3 physical dimensions but in several differently timed dimensions as well. To me this is the obvious explanation of why cats seem to have so much fun. And if string theory is disproved, life just won't seem nearly as entertaining.
On the other hand, how will they go about proving or disproving string theory? Do they need a bunch of cats watching the results? In the £2.6 billion budget for the LHC, I certainly hope they've allowed for enough catnip.
Inside (Not Under) The Bus
TUESDAY: Lunch is tuna and cream cheese on a whole wheat breadcake. Sadly I've been out of capers for several weeks and can't afford any at the moment, so instead of my usual caper vinegar I had to make do with a splash of sherry vinegar with loads of fresh dill and a few drops of Tabasco. It's actually quite nice. (Sorry, I'm just not a rootin' tootin' tuna-mayo kind of gal.)
Lately, because my current indenture -- er, job is located near the bus interchange, I've enjoyed the luxury of taking a bus to and from work instead of hiking three miles a day, the latter half of the trek requiring crampons and pitons. Unfortunately it's the 95 bus I'm riding, which is the same route that knocked me down and ran over me a few years ago. I still experience a bit of nausea whenever I come into close proximity of the outside of a bus, and I often get a flashback of pain in my now-healed-but-previously-fractured pelvis. As I've never been injured by the inside of a bus, being inside a bus is a completely different story. Not only am I out of danger of being crushed by the wheels, but I never know what eccentricities of life I may encounter during my ride.
My morning journeys into town have been the most enlightening. One recent morning, as the bus edged its way slowly down a narrow city centre street, a 70-ish man in a cap hobbled slowly past the bus on his crutches, hurling a loud Marmite-textured "F*** OFF!" in our direction with every other step. I couldn't help wondering how many times he'd been run over. In stark contrast, the next morning a woman boarded the bus and greeted the passengers loudly, wishing everyone the best day and thanking the Lord for giving us such a beautiful day as well as our health. As the bus pulled out of my neighbourhood and progressed toward town, she continued to address us all, joyfully reciting various Bible verses and finally breaking out into some sort of psalm or hymn (forgive me but I didn't grow up Christian so I don't know the proper terms). At the close of her song she recited another few prayers, said "Amen", and began reading her book, which was a Bible, no doubt. In a couple of minutes she debarked, again wishing all of us a glorious day thanks to the Lord and so on and so forth. The whole time the other passengers were either hiding in their reading material or staring blankly ahead in the hopes that she would stop and they could continue undisturbed in their bored reveries. Ah well, I thought. At least she was happy and pleasant and wishing us all the best, as opposed to the passenger a couple of friends experienced on the same route a few months ago who kept uttering TSK! TSK! and angrily muttering, "…god!" and "I don't BELIEVE IT!" every time the bus stopped.
It's not only in Sheffield or the UK that one can experience this unique world when riding the bus. I've experienced some wondrous things on buses in America, especially Southern California. When I was young I worked for a few months at a steamship agency in downtown Long Beach, and I commuted to and from work on the bus, a rare way to travel in the Los Angeles area. As I had recently graduated from university with the intention of becoming a film director, and as I absolutely detested my mundane job and my over-the-top sexist boss, I took great pleasure in the slightly Fellini-esque part of my day spent on the bus. I even made a diorama of a Long Beach bus stop peopled with the actual or composite characters with whom I rode every day: the Bird Woman who worked at the cafeteria, with her long wrinkled neck and large glasses resting on her pointed beak of a nose, jerking her head this way and that like a bird eyeing the grass for worms; the old gent who enjoyed chatting just a bit too lasciviously with young female passengers; the Candy Man who always wore a pink candy-striped t-shirt, shorts, striped tights, and bright green shoes; the man dressed in camouflage clutching his shoe box full of useless bits of debris and junk and occasionally answering calls on an old telephone receiver, its loopy cord dangling freely in the air. This was Life, this was Inspiration, and I loved every minute of it.
I feel sorry for people who are so chained to their driving licenses that they can't fathom subjecting themselves to Public Transportation. But car travel, by contrast, is so boring!
WEDNESDAY: Lunch is mature cheddar and English mustard and blah blah blah. I know I've said this before, but I'll say it again: why are so many people who work in University libraries so damn patronising?!! All the more reason to get out of this biz…
Sledgehammer Fantasies
TUESDAY: Lunch is a bakery-fresh granary breadcake with currently rare Haas avocado and mature cheddar flavoured with chilli powder, cumin, cayenne, and spring onion. I say "rare" because avocados are currently well over a pound each, so I can't justify treating myself too often. This particular one was only 69p, which is a bargain.
There have been so many news reports lately on the increase in urban crime, specifically of the violent sort. A range of factors are blamed for this rise: an expanded population and hence more crowded conditions, information overload, the failing economy, the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, poor education, and impatient generations growing up with television as nanny and video games and the Internet as playmates.
But let's not forget one of the major causes of urban violence, particularly in the case of normally peace-loving citizens who suddenly snap and lash out, even going so far as to shoot up a post office or a McDonald's. I'm talking, of course, about faulty alarms. After being kept awake all night by a wailing and whooping car alarm set off by nothing more than a passing cat, who hasn't had fantasies of taking sledge hammer in hand and going forth into the street and smashing said wailing and whooping car into oblivion? And if, after the former vehicle is no longer recognisable as a three-dimensional object, the alarm still insists on blaring, then nobody on the street is safe from the sledgehammer wielder's completely justifiable rage.
Let's start with the most basic of alarm nuisances: the poorly placed smoke detector. I thought the single detector in my rented Seattle house was inconvenient enough, because every time we boiled water or opened a jar of Marmite we would have to throw a tea towel over the infernal thing. But I had yet to experience the home I currently rent in Sheffield. The landlord seems like a nice normal guy, aside from being an obsessive pyrophobe, as there are no less than 5 smoke detectors in our very cosy 3-story terrace house. That means there are 3 detectors on one floor alone. And of course all but one are situated on the high ceilings in impossible-to-reach locations, and they're all wired into the mains so we can't unplug them. Whenever one of us dares to turn on the cooker, Horace -- as we fondly call the detector at the top of the main stairs -- starts beeping away; and if one of us doesn't drop whatever we're doing and charge up the stairs to push Horace's snooze button, the rest of the detectors soon join in with a terrifying chorus of "BEEPBEEP! BEEPBEEP! GET OUT FAST! FIRE! FIRE! THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!"
At least the only nervous wrecks the paranoid smoke detector creates are the building's inhabitants. The detector's big brother, the car alarm, has the power to turn an entire neighbourhood into a posse of screaming vigilantes. One afternoon years ago in Seattle when I was working at home, I was so engrossed in my computer that it took me probably a good hour to notice the whee-ooh-whee-ooh-ing of a nearby car alarm. As this was late in the afternoon when people are coming and going I figured the alarm would either turn itself off or its owner would arrive home from work and disconnect it. After another 2 hours my nerves were ravaged to such an extreme that my body had become one massive facial tic. After another half hour I quickly scrawled an angry note with my shaking hand and stomped outside in search of the offending car. I had intended to tap my note to the windscreen; but quite a few other neighbours had got there before me, as the windscreen was plastered in notes, some polite but firm and some satisfyingly obscene. Like a war veteran placing a wreath on a memorial I solemnly and proudly added my note to the angry collage.
What prompted me to write about alarms is the fact that I had very little sleep last night. In my dreams I kept hearing a chorus of birds warbling. When, at 1:00am, I finally became conscious, I realised the warbling was much too regular and mechanical to have been produced by living things, and I gradually realised it was a house alarm from just down the road. As there was no variation to the pitch or tempo I found it impossible to fall back into Slumberland. By the time I arose at 7:00 the alarm was still warbling loudly and strongly in perfect time with my gnashing teeth.
It really makes me wonder: is the potential reduction in car thefts and house burglaries really worth the increase in gross violence inflicted on car and house owners? It doesn't make much sense to me. But then I'm feeling pretty sleep-deprived at the moment.
