Category: Uncategorized

Confederates in the Attic

I’m reading a book called Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz.

Its subtitle is “Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,” and in it the author travels through the modern South talking to people about the Civil War, what they know of it and what it means to them. Horwitz, who spent years as a war correspondent in places like Bosnia and Iraq, is surprised to find so many people (eccentric and otherwise) who are intensely passionate about that ancient conflict. They aren’t interested in seceding anymore so much as they are interested in remembering and romanticizing the Lost Cause of the Old South. I admit I’m a sucker for Civil War books, but this is a great read.

I am a Southerner, and I’m glad the South lost that war. It fought for the wrong reason and lost for the right reason.

But what a story!

It’s damn near impossible to read about the run-up to Gettysburg or Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg and not be swept up by the drama of it. And I’ll tell you one thing the South has that the North does not: we know what it means to have lost a war. And I’m not talking about any Vietnam did-we-lose-or-didn’t-we ambiguity. We were whupped fair and square, invaded, defeated, and occupied. Strangely, there is a perverse comfort in that. The South stood up for what it believed and was pinned to the floor. The burden’s off. All Southerners, eccentric and otherwise, are welcome to relax in the warm and weathered lap of humility. It makes it a little bit easier to kick back and live a life.

You want some bourbon? Drink some bourbon. You want a smoke? Light up a goddamned cigarette. A little blustery Uncle Sam is all well and good, but it helps to be able to chuckle.

The Cause is Lost, but the memory endures. I’m glad the cause lost, but I’m glad the memory endures.

This week, we are grateful to St. Frank for sharing a word with us about cigarettes and enduring memories.

Mr. Nym Goes Adventuring

A palindrome, you will recall, is a word that can be read both forwards and backwards, like dad, or the language name Malayalam. But we needn’t stop at words; entire phrases can be palindromed, as for example, in the phrase: Otto made Ned a motto. And why stop there? Why indeed. In the entire history of humankind, no one has ever been able to fashion an entire coherent story in which each and every sentence is a palindrome. Everybody knows those lame one-liners like Able was I ere I saw Elba, and A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. But how far does that get you, after all? Today, on the Star Chamber pages, history is made. Herewith, we present you with that most remarkable of remarkable creations, the wholly palindromic story.

Mr. Nym Goes Adventuring

(Editor’s note: I know that’s not a palindrome; it hasn’t started yet)

My name is Siema Nym. Once I went to the city of Foyticeh tott New Iecno. There I met a magical dwarf named Deman-Frawdla Cigamat E. Miereht.

“Eciovy reeh canie mot diase!” he said to me, in a cheery voice.

“Huh? Em etib,” I helpfully read from my phrasebook, but he said, “Dias eh tub, koobe sarhpym morf da erylluf plehi, bite me!”

“O no!”

“Ecanem ta ergh tiwdna reduol diase!” he said, louder, and with great menace.

He taunted me… he threatened to poke me in the shoulderblade with a candlestick, all the while growling in a low voice, “Eciov wol anig nilworgelih weht; llakcit seldna cahtiw edalbred-luoh seht nieme kopot denetaerh… tehem detnuateh.”

What a terrible mistake to come to Foyticeh tott New Iecno; I wish instead I had gone to Tenog da Hidaet-Snihsi Wionce Iwent tothe Cityo’Fo Temoco Tekatsim el-Birret a Tahw!! At least there they will offer you a tasty plate of the local delicacy, caciled lacoleht foe talpy-tsatau oy reffolli wyehte rehtt saelta. Mmmm.

“Look over there!” I shouted, hoping to draw his attention away from my increasingly desperate situation by pointing out a low-flying fruitbat native to his country whose name is quite long and complicated and which I will abbreviate here (if you will forgive me) as a saem-revokool*.

No luck; he glared and gurgled, “El grug d’na deral gehk culon…”

“Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”

He paused and tapped his finger thoughtfully on his long nolsih-noy llufth guoh tregnifsih deppat d’nad esuapeh.

Aha! I left and never went back to the city of Foyticeh tot Kcabt New Revend Natfeli.**

My name is Siema Nym.

The end neeht.***

  • Its full name is Saemev igrof-lliwuoy fier eh etaiverbba lliwihcihw d’nadetacilp moc d’nagnol etiuq sieman esohwyrtnuoc sih ot evitan tabtiurf gniylf-wol a tuo arey ouchec kingt his gnitniop yb noitautis etarepsed ylgnisaercni ym morf yawa noitnetta sih ward ot gnipoh detuohs Ierehtre vokool. Wow.

** A law came into effect during the course of the story that actually changed the city’s name! Hah!

*** I accidentally typed the word “neeht” at the end of this sentence. It was an honest mistake.

A trip to Mexico

As the noble Coffee Czar confided in our last installment at this site, the board of directors for Star Chamber Consolidated Heavy Industries went adventuring in Mexico last month (see our
helpful phrasebook on the subject if you plan on visiting). It was a delightful excursion, made all the more pleasant by the fact that one of our number, zaP, speaks the language and is intimately familiar with the sights.

I found the place names in Mexico almost as arresting as the visual splendor: Xochimilco, Ixtaccihuatl, Teotihuacan. Some of these names defy pronunciation by the typical gringo (such as myself), but if you keep at it and tame the sounds, you are rewarded with gemstones on the tip of your tongue. Once you’ve captured the volcano name Popocatepetl, once you can conjure it up at will, you can practically see the steam belching from its dark conic peak. Cuauhtemoc, Kwau-TE-mok, was a warrior, and if you see his likeness and hear his name properly pronounced, that stressed second syllable falling forcefully against the front teeth, Kwau-TE-mok, you can sense the repect he commanded (it’s no accident the current mayor of Mexico City has the given name Cuauhtemoc).

Whereas the Coffee Czar amused us in the van by carving tiny animals out of soapstone and scrap wood, I entertained my fellow travelers by reading all the place names aloud as often as possible. I’m told it can be annoying, but it had the curious effect of magnifying my there-ness. Even now I can cook up a little Mexican there-ness by pushing my finger across the atlas pages and reading aloud: Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala, Iztapalapa, and Iztacalco. To my mind, the conquering Spaniard’s names (San Miguel, San Luis, Santa Ana, repeat…) don’t have nearly the same staying power as the solid Indian names. Fortunately for Mexico, the old place names survived more often than they were lost. Good place names reek of earthy there-ness, and Mexico is blessed with an abundance of good place names. And I don’t know anybody who doesn’t need a good dose of there-ness every now and again.

Reversals of fortune in placenames and prose figure prominently in our contribution this week. It may seem a matter of no great importance, but zaP spelled backwards is Paz, which is the Spanish word for peace. In this season of darkness becoming lightness at long last, may peace, and an abiding sense of here-ness, be with you all.

Day of the Dead

Happy Day of the Dead. It’s a big holiday in Mexico, but what are the odds that it will ever catch on in the United States? Maybe better than you think, because you’ve got to wonder if it’s a coincidence that the Day of the Dead falls so close to election day here in the States. The Star Chamber editorial staff urges you to do your part to flush out the zombies: vote for someone who shows the least glimmer of actually being alive. Otherwise they’ll roast us all in the same fire.

The story today brings us back in touch with Fisher Pinckney, whom last we saw throwing back beers at the Scarf and Bolt.

Bubbling Hot Springs

Larry assured me of this: each day on the river, the image of Bubbling Hot Springs got more and more appealing. In addition to being my friend, Larry was an experienced river guide on the wild and scenic part of the Rogue River in Oregon. He was also something of a storyteller, as all river guides seem to be, so as we slowly paddled downstream in the rain-swelled Rogue river one June afternoon, he told me the story of Bubbling Hot Springs.

Working as a river guide is entertaining, but the pay ain’t great, as they say, and it can be a real grind after a few weeks, particularly if you have an unpleasant customer or two. Running a raft through the rapids is one thing, but cooking and cleaning up for a pack of demanding tourists is something else entirely. Of course, what pay there is comes from paying customers, so you do what you can to keep them happy, sometimes even to the point of lending them warm clothes they should have had the sense to bring themselves. You do all that and more, and sometimes the bastards still stiff you on the tip at the end of the trip. As a result both the customers and the river guides, lying awake and cold at night, dripping with river water and rain, dirty and water-wrinkled, they both have good reason to look forward to Bubbling Hot Springs.

If you’re a paying customer, any of the guides will tell you (after some prodding) that one of the joys of rafting the Rogue river wild and scenic wilderness area is the pre-dawn hike to Bubbling Hot Springs. Normally this would occur on the fourth day of the trip, and I can tell you from experience that by the fourth day of the trip, the ice-cold waters of the Rogue have lost some of their charm. The vision of a steaming spring emptying into a natural hot tub is a tempting one.

No customer is expected or even encouraged to go on the hike to Bubbling Hot Springs; it isn’t on the official itinerary so it has to be squeezed in early. It isn’t suitable for the aged, the pregnant, the halt and lame. To make the trek you have to wake up early and hike hard and fast. You have to get up when stars are still just twinkling in the western sky, when the cool river mist is still curling around the reeds, when the birds are tuning their morning songs.

You follow the sure-footed river guides up up up on a short but steep hike during which time few people really have the energy or inclination to talk. The guides are moving fast now in happy anticipation. Scramble over a rock ledge and walk across a small clearing and there it is: Bubbling Hot Springs, bubbling and steaming just like you’d expect. The river guides hop in first without the least hesitation. In with a mighty splash and then they float blissfully up to the surface wearing contented smiles.

And well they might, too, because they’re the only ones who know that the water of Bubbling Hot Springs is only slightly warmer than the frigid Rogue itself. This information tends to become widespread rather quickly. On a bad trip, someone will stick a toe in prematurely and ruin the fun. On a good trip, two or three customers will actually hop in before the comprehension is general. In fact, one or two customers have actually been known to regain their composure as they float to the surface and emerge with a convincing enough smile to induce the rest of the crowd to jump on in. River guides really like people like this.

River guiding is hard work, and the pay ain’t great, as they say. But it has its own rewards, as Larry will tell you. Customers and river guides, lying awake and cold at night, they both have good reason to look forward to Bubbling Hot Springs. It may well be, however, that only the river guides look back on it with the same warmth.

Moore’s Meta-Law

Warning! Moore’s Meta-Law is in grave danger of becoming obsolete. Moore’s Law, as you are no doubt aware, says that the computing power of a single chip will double every 18 months. Moore’s Meta-Law states that usage of the phrase “Moore’s Law” in the world press will double every 12 months. After years of solid predictability, there now appear to be both long term and short term limitations to Moore’s Meta-Law. In the immediate future, we can expect to see continuing heavy impact from Monica and Bill as they drain the resources of every available journalist: more Monica means less Moore. Is this the future you deserve? Don’t you deserve Moore?

Working on exactly this principle, several House Democrats led by Rep. Brian Tinker (Calif.) have proposed a “More Moore’s Law Law” that would legally coerce journalists to include more mentions of Moore’s Law in their articles (and by extension, fewer mentions of Monica).

In the long run, and perhaps more disturbingly, we can expect to hit the true physical limitations of Moore’s Meta-Law early in the next century. According to current calculations, by late 2004, every word appearing in the technical press will be either “Moore” or “Law”. Beyond this horizon predictions are sketchy, but we should remember that in the past researchers have always managed to skirt even the most dire obstacles. Dr. Lester Wu of Bell Labs observes that “we may well work out a very
satisfactory semaphore system, not unlike Morse Code, in which the dashes and dots are replaced by the words Moore and Law.” Armed with this “Moore’s
Code” we could, in theory, stay on track for another ten years or so merely by increasing the total output of published matter in the world’s press.

It’s exciting that this is what we’ve come to expect from the rapidly changing face of technology. Or put another way: “law moore law law moore moore law moore law law law moore law law moore law moore moore law!”

Grounding Day

Happy Grounding Day, 1998. It’s time for a midsummer stretch — wallow in the overripe heat and ventilate your brain with a cool gin breeze. There is less time than you think.

It’s a good time to sit back and listen to a story. Relax, there is more time than you think.

Baiting spiders

Dedicated readers of the Star Chamber will remember a piece from way back in October of 1996 called Spider-Baiting. Avoiding for the moment the obvious joke that this was centuries ago in web time (though the venerable StarChamber was already six months old), it was a time when search engines were still called spiders. The idea of the piece was that a search engine would read the lascivious text-between-the-lines of our innocent story about canoeing on the Ipswich river, and then horny teenagers from around the world would bombard our site with page requests.

Clever enough, only it didn’t happen that way. Recently, we received (from one Alan H. Martin) the following email here at the Star Chamber executive editorial offices:

Cute.

However, I just hit the page with the following AltaVista query:

+”ipswich river” +canoe*

(since I just bought topo of Eastern Mass./RI and want to find the location of the canoe rental place my group at work used years ago on an outing…)

/AHM

In other words, the only person who found the page with a search engine was actually looking for someone to help him innocently canoe down the Ipswich river! And, by the way, he found what he was looking for (through no assistance from us)… so if you’re ever in eastern Massachusetts and you’re looking for a good place to outfit a canoe trip, try the Foote Brothers. And tell ’em Paracelsus sent ya.

This week we are honored and delighted to publish in this space a contribution from a long-time friend of the Star Chamber, Pandora. It’s a great big world, and it’s getting bigger every day.

The Star Chamber Mexican-Spanish Phrasebook

Happy Groundhog Day!

Groundhog Day is a welcome cross-quarter day — halfway between the winter solstice and the first day of spring, it’s a reminder that warmer days are really coming, even if you don’t quite believe it yet. It’s opposite

Grounding Day (August 2) on the calendar and as part of its official celebration, good citizens everywhere join to rip down and destroy any faded Christmas decorations left up by their lazy or misguided neighbors. We at the StarChamber would like to encourage our readers to participate in the celebrations: discharge your civic duties and pull down those browning wreaths and rotting strings of twinkling lights wherever you find them. It will relieve that midwinter depression, your neighborhood will look so much better, and you’ll get to enjoy the traditional Groundhog Day martini with your fellow revelers. And that’s what it’s all about, after all.

This week’s contribution is a joint effort of Paracelsus and zaP, just in time for your winter trip to sunnier regions.
Continue reading “The Star Chamber Mexican-Spanish Phrasebook”

Life and death reading

Happy 1998. Have you read “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer yet?

As far as my highly scientific survey can tell, soon every man, woman, and child in the country will have either read it, heard it aloud, or been lectured to at length about it by some well-meaning bore. If you have evaded this trend so far, I can tell you that it is a truly gripping story of danger and death on the slopes of Mt. Everest. Go read it and tell all your friends about it. Curiously, another best-selling book this season, “The Perfect Storm” by Sebastian Junger, is a tale of man battling the elements for survival, this time in fishing boats during an enormous New England hurricane-force storm.

Why the sudden popularity of these life-and-death books? Perhaps people in this comfortable age feel more removed than ever from the flesh-biting Real World. Perhaps they long for an adventure to ground their lives in meaning. But then again, people have always bought adventure books. So is there anything new here?

One of the more interesting aspects of Krakauer’s book was the mention of Internet websites reporting from the slopes of Mt. Everest. When things got ugly, people all over the world knew about it instantly. We all listened in as Rob Hall talked to his pregnant wife in New Zealand even as he was freezing to death on a mountain in Nepal. There is a voyeuristic fascination with tracking the deadly and the evil minute-by-minute, whether it’s the Ebola virus, the Oklahoma City bombing, or United Flight 800 making an unexpected descent.

Voyeurism isn’t new, but it’s getting cheaper all the time. Professional Hollywood pornographic films have lost much of their market to amateurs with video cameras. Anybody can make a movie these days, and if it’s sexual in nature, people will pay. Soon enough, anybody will find it easy to launch a website. Tabloid television and network news, slick as they are, may find themselves competing with the gritty realism of eyewitness gladitorial websites filed by people on the scene, such as those who saw Rodney King being beaten senseless. Krakauer’s book is a terrific achievement, but in itself it doesn’t represent anything new in popular writing or society at large. What is new is the ease with which horrifying details can be reported by eyewitnesses from the burning building, the murder site, the erupting volcano. We should brace ourselves for an onslaught of badly-written but inescapably compelling eyewitness websites, because the tools of mass media are in the hands of the masses.

And now, for your further reading pleasure, a touch of voyeurism.