Thursday, November 04, 2004
Precap: Finding the Victory; Crossing Guard
I landed last night at 1:30 a.m., which my body sort of thought was 4:30. I got home at 2:30. The alarm went off at five and I got up half an hour later. I feel like, how do you say in this proud democracy of ours, crap. I think I’m supposed to have a pretty important conference call with a law school dean and a few of her top people at 9:30 - a call in which I will play the role of Ramrod Hardass, OGF.* My brain, meanwhile, is trying to escape out my earholes, while my stomach is engaged in a rousing round of “so you wanted a krautdog in vegas last night?”. My hands are still significantly stained with blue ink blotches from a couple of those entertaining “pen responding badly to pressure changes in airplane” experiences, and I find my writing has deteriorated into the “chimerical references in quotes"** school. So let’s cut to the chase:
I had a lovely trip and Cleveland is a terrific town. I will get around to the details later, but I want to take this opportunity to say that many more people than I would ever have anticipated had a lot to do with this trip by clicking that pay pal button that I’ll be taking down tomorrow when the throbbing in my temples subsides. (Typing, I can handle. Coding, screwit.) And there were many many others too, who wrote me supportive letters, took care of me, boosted me toward the goal of going where I went and doing what I did. Thinking this morning of all these dear friends, I gain valuable perspective on what has happened. I am surrounded by generous and truly righteous people who have stood by me and cheered me on, and these people are not going away; they may have suffered a form of defeat but in a way there was a more important underlying victory, one in which a vigorously fought campaign culminated in a world-riveting day of judgment that seems to have gone, generally, procedurally, the way it was supposed to. This will not go down historically as a good example of a “clean” campaign. But it was a clean election, and that was really the most critical thing as far as I was concerned. It was what I set out to try to help ensure. In this very important way, I do think I helped accomplish my goal. Me, together with my amazing and wonderful friends, some of whom are total strangers to me and to this site, who just liked the idea and helped make it happen, and who in particular fill me with gratitude and appreciation - we were at ground zero in the battle for democracy, and democracy won, and so did we.
But there is one thing that I do want to get off my chest so I can go on with my day: the goddamn crossword puzzle on the airplane. I usually don’t do those little puzzles but I just got a contrary whim and went and gave it a shot. Here’s a little insight into the Chuckle mentality: I will not leave a puzzle unfinished simply because I couldn’t figure it out. Therefore, I worked that confounded thing for a long time, until I was just totally stuck, and then I started sneaking peeks at the solution. (hey don’t judge me man i’m a free spirit.) So, it was a little irksome to find that they’d use the clue “menu” for CARTE, because there was no indication of language change as there had been in other such clues. And “goose formation” and “repeated curves” were VEES and ESSES, which was totally cheating. But maybe that’s the best they can do, so I would have cut them slack. I’m a mellow dude, after all. But then they actually used:
“Scramble the Arrangement”: MESSORT. Messort is not a word. (Dorkwanks.)
“One Dimensional”: LINEAR. Linear is, by definition, two-dimensional. One dimension is a point, a point in motion is a line. (Prongholes.)
So what I’m saying is, America West, your crossword totally sucked. Airpuds. (The word “airpud” has been totally stuck in my head since I saw a place called the AirPub during my first layover (in phoenix, I think that’s where I saw this); their sign used a fat and sloppy font and was poorly painted and it totally looked like it said “AirPud,” and since then I’ve needed to call somebody an Airpud and now it’s been taken care of so I’m greatly relieved and can go on to work. Thanks for listening, and for everything else.
*Outraged Grant Funder.
** Or footnotes.
