What are the three most beautiful words in the English language, taken together?

Of course, most people will say, I love you. That’s a no-brainer. But then, if you’re a long-time Star Trek viewer, you’ll remember that in the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”, Jim Kirk tells Edith Keeler that in a hundred years or so a novelist from Alpha Centauri (I think) will recommend the words Let me help over I love you.

Those are certainly two promising candidates. But there are other concatenations of three words that, depending on your circumstance, are far more beautiful than either of those. For a college student, Here’s twenty bucks and The Prof’s sick may well outrank the two above.

And for any male member of our species, I think there may be one three-word phrase that trumps them all. And it is….

We’re having ribs.

Oh, those three little words bring out the tears….

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Continuing with Short Fiction Month, I read two stories by James Thurber the other night. I’ve always loved Thurber’s off-kilter way of looking at the world, even though he’s unaccountably fallen off my radar screen in recent years. So I got out my Library of America Thurber collection and chose two tales, pretty much at random.

First was “The Macbeth Murder Mystery”, which is one of those stories that has even me, an aspiring storyteller, thinking: “How on Earth did this guy come up with this, anyway?” This is a very short story that is simply a conversation between two people, one of whom is a reader of nothing but murder mysteries like Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and all those. Problem is, she ends up in a situation where the only reading material at hand is a copy of Macbeth. Which she reads as a murder mystery, approaching it as if it were a Christie novel. And proceeds to critique, in the same way. The sheer delight of invention here, in so small a package, is wonderful; especially when our mystery-loving heroine announces, “I don’t think Macbeth did it” and goes on to outline why.

The second story was “You Could Look It Up”. Having just seen Bull Durham last week, and recognizing “You could look it up” as that film’s final line, I wondered if the Thurber story with that as its title could be about baseball. Sure enough, it is. This is the tale of an unnamed baseball team that is suffering a losing streak in the midst of a September pennant chase, and the very odd way in which they turn their luck around. I won’t say more than that except to note that I always thought dwarf-tossing was primarily a 1990s phenomenon.

Thurber is required reading for anyone looking for dark, off-center humor. What I especially love about him is that he wrote in the middle of the twentieth century, when various norms of propriety forced writers to look for more literary ways of suggesting what they had in mind. Reading the writers from those eras always makes me wonder if we’ve lost more than we bargained for when we became a more permissive, “anything goes” type of culture.

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That site I posted a while back, which compares real-and-fictional spacecraft to scale, has a new and permanent home. Among other things, there is now a portion of the Earth’s moon, to scale, on the same page that the Death Stars appear. And now I’m wondering, just how much power can they pack into that tiny laser beam, since they can blow up entire planets with something so incredibly small?

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SDB points us to a desperation ploy by German governments to raise revenue. They’re taxing brothels, apparently. However, I’m not sure it’s quite the way that SDB portrays it — he says they’re taxing sex, whereas it seems to me more accurate to say they’re taxing certain sex-related businesses. They’re actually not taxing sex in the same sense that here in America we tax, say, smoking.

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Aaron has a picture of what he thinks is Jupiter and its four Galilean moons, but is really the Channel 9 traffic chopper. Go point and laugh.

(Or, since Blogger’s permalinks are messed up again, go to his main page and scroll down. Once again I find it odd that since Google bought Blogger, the Blogger service has gotten worse. My own permalinks are also messed up, and I’m not able to republish all my archives, either. Ugh.)

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Goofy Search-Engine Stuff:

:: My off-hand mention of the word “Clenis” brought in some hits. I never thought I’d see this as a search-term, but there it is. Now, if it proves to be an actual traffic-generator for a while, I’ll have to work it into the posts every few days, kind of like how I did when those Don Cheadle NFL ads were all the rage. (Is “Google-whore” a word? It should be.)

:: A favorite TV show of the kid’s is Caillou, an animated show from Canada about a four-year old boy named Caillou and his experiences (mostly rooted in normal, everyday life) with his parents and baby sister, Rosie. So I found this search a bit…disturbing. I hope this person was looking for something other than what I think they were looking for….

:: In 24-related news, I got a search hit the other day on the phrase “the Kim Bauer Power Shower”. You wish. (Yeah, so do I….)

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In the wake of the bombings in Casablanca, I suppose headlines like this were to be expected. And now, inevitably I’m wondering if they rounded up the usual suspects, or just any old suspects.

(EDIT: Well, they changed the headline on me since I posted this. The story’s old headline was something like, “Moroccan police round up bombing suspects”. Now it’s a bit more prosaic, and less reminiscent of the movie Casablanca.)

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All hail the Top 100 Video Games of All Time, which somehow omits favorites of mine like Myst and Riven. And I never got the fascination with the whole Mario Brothers thing — the original Donkey Kong was fun, but the subsequent entries in the Mario franchise never did it for me.

And my favorite game of all time is one whose name I cannot recall for the life of me. The player is a guy who is faced with bouncing balls of various size, and he has to pop them using these ropes-with-grappling-hooks that he shoots straight up, deploying them to break the balls in two. The balls get smaller each time you pop them, until they disappear entirely….in the first screen you’re faced with a single, large ball, which you then break into two, then those into four, and then into eight smallest-sized ones that finally disappear when you pop them. When you clear a screen of balls, you advance to the next screen, which has different combinations of obstacles and balls to pop. Does this ring any bells with anybody out there? I ruled on this game in college….probably because it wasn’t all that popular of a game, and thus I was always able to play it. But the patterns of balls-to-obstacles created interesting spatial puzzles to solve.

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Short Fiction Month Update:

Richard Matheson is a writer that anyone interested in the horror genre must read. His book Hell House is a classic in the “haunted house” vein; ditto I Am Legend for the vampire genre, and so on. Matheson is also one of the great writers of horror short fiction. Steven Spielberg’s first movie, Duel, is an adaptation of a Matheson story; Steven King has cited Matheson as one of his primary influences. You simply can’t delve into the horror genre in the 20th century without running full-square into Richard Matheson’s work.

I read two stories of his the other night: “The Funeral” and “The Near Departed”. I chose them pretty much at random; they appear in the same collection I own, and after reading “The Funeral” I chose “The Near Departed” because of its very short length. To my surprise, both stories involve a person making a very strange visit to a funeral director. “The Funeral” involves some very odd supernatural content, but interestingly it is “The Near Departed”, with its sly twist-ending, that is the more horrific of the two stories. Both stories exhibit Matheson’s gift for direct, clear prose and matter-of-fact reportage of details, some of which are actually the same in each story. (Each, for example, mentions the funeral director reaching for the pen in the holder.)

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(WARNING: Irrational anger ahead.)

If the President of NBC were to walk in my front door this morning, I would grab a hammer and beat him with it.

Last night I’m watching the hour-long season finale of Friends, and I’m prepared to switch over to CBS when it’s over so I can watch the season finale of CSI. But as the last minutes of the eight o’clock hour ticked away, with Friends still not ending, I started getting a little suspicious. Sure enough, it turns out that NBC ran Friends not for the advertised one hour, but for seventy minutes, thus ensuring that people like me who are fans of both Friends and CSI got screwed by having to choose between missing the first ten minutes of the latter show or the last ten minutes of the former show.

And NBC specifically advertised this episode of Friends as one hour. So: NBC blatantly lied, and they did it for no other reason than to screw people who watch CSI. What’s more: it’s not like they gave us a special ten-minute extra bonus of Friends. They just inflated the commercial breaks so as to take the show to 9:10 pm.

(And the VCR wasn’t a solution, because I was already taping Friends for my wife, who had to work.)

Stupid NBC and their stupid damn #$%&^@!!! ratings-stunts. And while I’m bitching about NBC, gee whiz, how did I ever know that Law and Order would do one of their idiotic “ripped-from-the-headlines” stories about “a celebrity who dangles his kid over a balcony…and drops him”?!

OK, I think I’m better now.

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