convention (n.): an established technique, practice, or device

The Democratic National Convention convenes in Denver today, and I have good news for all of you: I won’t be live-blogging it.  In fact, I’m only really interested to see Obama’s acceptance of the nomination (natch) and Action Joe Biden’s speech, which I’m excited about for the following reasons:

1.  I like Joe Biden and am glad that Obama picked him.  Yeah, he’s an insider, but he’s a true straight-talking, no bullshit kind of guy, and Obama, whose reputation as a straight-talking, no bullshit kind of guy has started to become tarnished by closer examination of his rise to power and quavering support among old-guard black leadership, could use a smart guy who isn’t afraid to speak his mind.
2. Joe Biden is a loose cannon.  He’s said some profoundly tone-deaf shit about Indian immigrants and 7-11s, he bragged about his state having been a slave state in a perverse attempt to appeal to southerners, and he referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”. You can tell he always has the best intentions — he meant “clean” as “without skeletons in his closet,” and he was trying to insinuate that Indians are hard-working and entreprenurial — but his apparent inability to form a thought before it emerges from his mouth (or at least to assess his words for political boneheadedness before uttering them) ought to lead to some delightful high jinks, if not at the (highly scripted) convention, then over the next few months.
3. Joe Biden once accosted my friend Pete in the coat check of a restaurant.  “I’m Senator Joe Biden,” said Senator Joe Biden.  “Will you come with me a second?”  Taken aback, Pete followed the senator back to his table, where Biden proceeded to remark at length to his dinner companions about how much Pete looked like his nephew, Bloody Social guitarist Jamie Biden, before thanking him and letting him go.

But political conventions themselves are relics of a bygone era in American politics.  Specifically, I’m talking about the era when political conventions were effectual gatherings of party operatives that created platforms and chose candidates. 

American politics used to be a tightly controlled, oligarchic enterprise, and it evolved that way because the Constitution suggested it be so.  When the United States was founded, only the House of Representatives was constitutionally decreed to be elected directly by the people.  The Senate was to be selected, two by two, by each state’s legislature — a practice that only ended with the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.  Electors in the Electoral College were appointed by state legislatures rather than elected by popular vote in a number of states up until 1832 (and by South Carolina right up until they decided freedom wasn’t for them, in 1860).

So it should come as no surprise that political parties followed similarly undemocratic lines throughout the gloriously corrupt 19th century.  The presidential primary didn’t exist until the Progressive Era — prior to that, candidates were selected by party bosses and their various lackeys in proverbial smoke-filled rooms.  This made conventions interesting and worthwhile, even if it did render the entire concept of democracy a little bit farcical.  As Boss Tweed said, “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.”

Today, therefore, the parties’ nominating conventions are four-day publicity stunts that get free television coverage.  Which begs the question: why are they so lame?  If the convention serves no practical purpose, why isn’t it wholly given over to bread and circuses, nationally televised exhibitions to thrill and delight (and build brand awareness in) the American populace.  The current format resembles nothing more than the world’s worst Friar’s Club roast.  If I were Howard Dean, the DNC would have much more in common with the Olympic opening ceremonies.  Or Cirque du Soleil.  Or for fuck’s sake, anything to make people tune in.  Put Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Evan Bayh, Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Kucinich in a funhouse with hidden cameras and see how long it takes them to kill and eat one another.  This is spectacle, people – you’ve got to do a thing.

Tags: politics, spectacle
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nightmare: a dream arousing feelings of intense fear, horror, and distress. From night + mare, a Middle English word meaning “an evil preternatural being”

McDonald’s, that bastion of metaphysical thought, has been spreading far and wide a print ad campaign featuring this image:

Did no one in the extensive Inoffensiveness Division of Mickey D’s stop to think about the horror show of a message that’s being sent by this ad? Every egg’s dream is TO BECOME A CHICKEN. This cannot be disputed. It is certainly not to be fried and eaten, and especially not to be sandwiched between slices of veal byproduct and Canadian bacon, wrapped in wax paper, lined up under heat lamps, and then sold at an insulting price to oily suburbanites. Stop the madness, Ronald. Just stop it.

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milpool (n.): a word that is miswritten or misspelled due to distraction, ideally with the misspelling including some element of the distraction.  see THINKO

The above definition comes from a Simpsons episode in which the Simpsons get a swimming pool but on a daring dive, Bart breaks his leg and thus can’t swim for the rest of the summer. Bart asks Milhouse to sign his cast, and Milhouse, trying desperately to get back to swimming, signs, “Get well soon, your friend, Milpool.”

Legendary link-list and notorious time-waster Fark.com has an ongoing meme known as FAIL, which basically involves pictures of boneheaded or generally unfortunate things (people holding telephones upside down, container ships capsized, a man trying to hitchhike while holding an axe) with the word FAIL written, preferably in Impact font, somewhere on the image.

Today, I saw the following FAIL post:

Moreover, it appears that this isn’t an isolated incident, but a recurring milpool:

I suppose this begs the question: are ending-matching milpools likelier than others? I don’t have any way of looking up errors of this type, but if anyone’s seen anything similar, do let us know, would you?

Tags: milpool
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umlaut (n.): a diacritic mark placed (in proper usage) over a vowel to denote a sound change in German.  used by extension in English to refer to any diaeresis or trema

It’s Spam Week here at MTPN!  The umlaut is an uncommon mark in American English, generally reserved for Frenchy-sounding names like Chloë and Anaïs and for hoity-toity publications like The New Yorker, whose house style decrees that it be used in such words as coöperation and reëdit.  The exception to the rule that says umlauts are for elitists is the heavy metal umlaut, found in the names of such bands as Motörhead and Queensrÿche. The heavy metal umlaut was originally intended to seem “mean” and “Wagnerian” by association with noted historical badasses such as the Visigoths and the Nazis, but it has been parodied so often (most famously, by “Spinal Tap,” which places an umlaut over the “n”) that it is now as much a satirical meme as a sincere one. (That’s right, Abörted Hitler Cöck, I said it.)

Which is why I was a bit surprised to discover one of the first Facebook spam worms (which are at long last starting to crop up due to Facebook’s rapidly growing market share) posted something on my wall informing me that “SOMEONE HAS A CRÜSH ON YOU!” I hadn’t realized the metalhead love-connection market was so demographically powerful, but hey, maybe this worm’s creators were hoping to catch the extremely irony-steeped as well.

Tags: facebook, spam
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spam (v.): to mark a message or posting as spam, as for a system administrator or automated spam filter’s use

Welcome to the new and improved Maybe Tomorrow–Probably Not!  I’ve missed you all. 

My experiment in Tumblelogging was more or less an abject failure.  I’m just too much of a verbose blowhard for short-form blogging, and I’m not particularly interested in sharing dozens of links, videos, and images every day.  But I also don’t regret leaving Blogger, which is a clunky, confusing, inflexible, bloated platform that’s designer-unfriendly, to boot.  

So here we are, using WordPress on the servers of the new and largely unimproved joehankin.com, with a custom theme of my own creation and a pent-up blogging fever that ought only to be relieved by torrential, stain-splattering posting.  Get ready, world — and buy some Shout.

The word of the day is “spam,” which has been used as a verb for many a day to mean “to send unsolicited email or to create internet postings offering goods or services, soliciting sensitive information, or as vandalism.”  Today, though, I discovered that WordPress has repurposed the word “spam” to hold the definition above. 

I received an email today alerting me to my first comment on this new blog, whose text read as follows:

The joehankin.com is interesting resource, tnks, webmaster.
viagra viagra online drugs.

I’ve finally made it!   The options to deal with this comment were Approve It, Delete It, and Spam It, which threw me for a moment — someone had already spammed it, after all — but there are only so many realistic options for a link like that.   Gmail uses “Report Spam” as the name of their Spam-It button, which I think is vastly superior, but WordPress tries to be a fun, funky, speaks-your-language blogging engine, so I guess the parallelism of the three “X It” options was just too fresh to pass up. 

I guess all this is a roundabout way of saying, WordPress, I think you’re pretty great, with your CSS/PHP templates and your intuitive content management system, but you will never be the cool kid at the party, and the sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be.

Tags: spam, WordPress
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football (n.): a game played by two teams of eleven players each in which a round ball is advanced towards a goal using any part of the body other than the hands and arms

Several weeks ago, I talked my good buddy Jeremy into purchasing FIFA 2008 for the XBox 360.  It’s a state of the art soccer game with gorgeous graphics, innovative ball-handling controls, and a sensitivity to the unique timing aspects of soccer that make it unlike the other sports games that are more or less the same idea (basketball, hockey, etc.). 

I’ve had an on-again-off-again love affair with soccer as a spectator sport since 1998, when the World Cup coincided with a summer I spent with a shit-ton of Europeans at a nerd camp at Haverford College.  Everyone I liked at this otherwise uninspiring camp lived and died for the World Cup, so I let myself get swept up in the action and found I quite enjoyed watching — much more than I ever enjoyed playing.  Soccer players are fast in the way that no American athletes are fast.  Soccer players control the ball in ways that look cool even if you don’t have an appreciation for their difficulty.  Soccer players pass to one another with an uncanny field awareness that suggests telepathy.  And yeah, it’s low-scoring, but when there is a goal, holy fucking shit.

My interest in soccer has waxed and waned — I happened to be in Italy in part of the summer of 2006, so I was pretty into it then, for obvious reasons.  But playing horrifyingly long hours of FIFA 2008 has reignited my passion for the beautiful game in a whole new way.  Jeremy and I play match after match after match with him as Chelsea F.C. and me as Manchester United, and the end result is that I’ve started paying an unseemly amount of attention to English football.

Did you know Time-Warner Cable carries the Fox Soccer Channel?  Did you know you can set your cable box to DVR a live sporting event?  I learned both of these things recently and treated myself to the Barnsley-Chelsea match that aired Saturday.  This match was one of several from the quarterfinal round of the FA Cup, and it was a shocking upset — a mere Championship team defeated a Premier team!

What the fuck am I talking about?  Let me give you a little backstory — it’s worth it, I promise.  The major league of soccer in England is called the Premiership.  Any English soccer team you’ve ever heard of plays in the Premiership: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, etc.  Below the Premiership is a system of less prestigious leagues, including, in descending order, the Championship, League One, and League Two.  Based on their performance, teams are promoted and demoted between these divisions and the Premiership.

Below that are non-league soccer clubs.  The top tier of these non-league clubs comprises a national division of pro teams and the lower tiers include regional divisions of semi-pro and amateur teams, which tend to have very small followings in very small towns.

The FA Cup is an annual tournament in England that just about any team at any level can enter.  There are qualifying rounds for the legion of lower-level teams, but in the “rounds proper,” all the teams, from top-flight Premiership teams down to regional nobodies, play games based on a random draw.  Thus any two teams can face each other.  On January 26, Liverpool F.C. played Havant & Waterlooville F.C.  This is roughly the equivalent of the Boston Red Sox playing the Texas Instruments company softball team.

Chelsea won last year’s FA Cup and finished second in the Premiership league.  Barnsley finished 20th out of 24 in last year’s second-level Championship league.  But Barnsley played a scrappy, never-say-die match and won on a beautiful header goal in the 66th minute.  The excitement in the arena was palpable even on TV — it was like watching a major league team lose to its own AAA franchise.  You don’t see that kind of stunning, staggering thing in American sports — at least, I certainly never have.

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matrimarchy (n.): a government of rulers linked by marriage; e.g. a succession of power descending from a husband to his wife

That’s better. Anyway, much has been made of the fact that an H-Dawg presidency would constitute at least 24 years of rule by the same two families. I know plenty of people who cite this factor as a rationale for supporting Obama (or opposing Clinton, depending on how you look at things). Such a sequence would, admittedly, be unprecedented, but I think a lot of people miss the fact that throughout American history, politics has been a family affair at every level of government.

The examples are so numerous that counting them would be a fool’s errand, so naturally, such a list exists on Wikipedia. Who knows how reliable the Wikipedia research is, but if it’s accurate, there’s some spectacular stuff in here. In some instances, the lineages seem like a joke: for example, Henry Sherman, a 16th century Englishman, spawned lines traced to the present day whose members include William Taft, Herbert Hoover, Aaron Burr, Bushes 41 and 43, John Kerry, and Winston fucking Churchill. This, is merely one big phylum in the larger class, whose members include such disparate figures as John Adams, William Tecumseh Sherman, Susan B. Anthony, and, praise Jebus, Rockwood Hoar.

I only happened to get intrigued by all this because I was looking up John McCain to see if anyone had diagnosed the big-ass goiter on his left side, when I discovered that not only had he filled Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat in 1986, but that his brief stint as the representative from Arizona’s 1st District in the U.S. House was preceded by that of John Jacob Rhodes, Jr. (30 years) and succeeded by that of John Jacob Rhodes, III (6 years). Dynasty is everywhere.

Tags: coinages
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dynasty (n.): a succession of rulers from the same line of descent; a family that establishes and maintains predominance in a particular field of endeavor for generations

The Hillary Clinton candidacy has brought about a lot of talk in the zeitgeist of “dynasty,” used in a less technical way than the definition above — Bill Clinton’s administration followed by Hillary Clinton’s administration does not constitute a dynasty, strictly speaking, so much as a rare succession from spouse to spouse, a lineage that I hereby term “matrimarchy.”

In fact…

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sobriquet (n.): an assumed name; a fanciful epithet or appellation; a nickname

“Sobriquet” is a fancy-pants word for an appellation used interchangeably with a real name, one that requires no explanation. Oftentimes, a sobriquet is more familiar than a real name — famous examples include Genghis Khan (real name Temüjin, which sounds less impressive being thundered across the steppes) and Caligula (whose real name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus Finkelstein). In certain cases, a sobriquet is created to refer to an object which has no name — the case in particular I’m thinking of is Stradivarius instruments, which are given sobriquets related to their provenance or, occasionally, distinctive aspects of their appearance.

Why am I mentioning this now? Well, it was just revealed that, this past holiday season, world-renowned violin virtuoso David Garrett slipped and fell down the stairs, landing on his violin case and smashing the shit out of his Stradivarius, whose sobriquet is San Lorenzo. The claim is that the repair bill will cost almost $120,000, which is chump change considering that violin is probably worth a cool $3 million, but the reality is that that violin is fucked, to hell, forever. Oops.

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bolus (n.): a soft mass of chewed food

That’s right, folks — you don’t swallow your food, you swallow your bolus. This came up last Sunday, when the erudite M.K. Mulkeen hosted a small gathering at his abode for playoff football. Cake was baked and frosted, both chocolately and white-style, and Martin requested a black-and-white piece. When informed the cake had already been cut in a fashion that made a black-and-white piece impossible, did our hero despair? No matter, he bravely ventured, “I’ll just have a black-and-white bolus.”

The thing about the bolus is that it would be a patently silly word if it simply meant, “what you have in your mouth while you’re chewing.” But my understanding, based on Cursory Internet Research (“serving your barely-investigated whims for probably like ten years now; I guess I could look up how long but it seems like a lot of effort”) is that the bolus is a fundamental structure created in the course of digestion, a structure which is maintained from the time of swallowing all the way through the stomach and intestines until defecation, at which point the bolus has fulfilled its purpose and its services are no longer required. You require boluses. Without a bolus, you will die. Take heed.

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