A Day of Learning

I learned a whole lotta things yesterday. I feel 1.3% smarter. And taller.

1. I learned that Merriam-Webster has listed "nuke-you-ler" as an accepted pronunciation of "nuclear" since 1961. It's a variant, but such a widespread variant that they threw in the towel and listed it. They say that it has "been found in widespread use among educated speakers including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, U.S. cabinet members, and at least one U.S. president and one vice president." When I sputtered about the degradation of the language, someone pointed out some things: Wednesday. February. Who says "Wed-nes-day" or "Feb-ru-ary"?

Huh. Well then. I still think a certain U.S. president is stupid.

2. Which leads to this: in the dictionary, when they include a little ÷ next to a pronunciation guide, it means that the pronunciation is a widespread variant "used in educated speech" that some experts find to be incorrect. As Michael Caine would say, "A lot of people don't know that."

3. I learned that saying "axe" for "ask" dates as far back as the 14th century. Chaucer said "I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housband to the Samaritan?" Again, huh.

4. I learned how to play Go, the ancient Japanese board game. And I won! I kicked someone's ass the first game, 58-11! (And then he beat me three games in a row by a wide margin.) And then I won the last game, a hard-fought 35-32 victory!

Johnny, Rose Mary, and Uncle Sam

Johnny Carson and Rose Mary Woods died a day apart. One was one of America's greatest entertainers, longtime host of The Tonight Show and fixture on the Oscars telecast. The other was Richard Nixon's secretary, the woman who "accidentally" erased much of the Watergate tapes and stonewalled the investigation.

Your assignment: Write a 2000 word essay drawing parallels between these two. Extra points for linking Woods to Carson's success or linking Carson to the Watergate scandal. You have one hour. Go!

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It's nearly tax time again! For some, it means not seeing their accountant husbands for several months. For others, it means tax evasion and flights to unnamed South American countries. For me, it means a little extra bit of chaos this year.

I am getting W2s from two full-time employers, neither of which has my current address. That means waiting for them to be forwarded, but in Chicago, it likely means that they'll get lost in the mail. In addition, I have an unknown number of freelance gigs who will submit 1099-misc forms for work I did. People with freelance experience know what that means: the self-employment tax! Yay! I get to pay around a 40% tax on the income I earned through freelancing.

There are several ways of making this more bearable:
1. File quarterly returns so you're not hit with a huge bill once a year.
2. Put a set amount of your income into an interest-bearing account, so you can actually make a little bit of change on it before you have to give it to the government.
3. Sit around and do nothing until the tax bill comes and kills you.

Guess which one I picked.

I think the self-employment tax is one of the most un-American of taxes. Isn't it the American Dream to go out on your own, do your own thing, entrepreneurial spirit and all that? Go west, young man, and be your own boss? Then why does the taxman put on his heavy boots to stomp on your fingers as you reach for your divine right as an American?

Dan Brown Bashing

One of the writers at Language Log, a site full of grammatical pedants and perfectionists (my kind of people), hates The Da Vinci Code and its author, Dan Brown. I read it, and I thought it was passable: the prose was burdened, the plot kind of silly, and all 100-odd cliffhangers annoying as hell. Thus, I really enjoyed reading these posts.

Dan Brown can't write worth a darn.
Dan Brown's opening sentences suck.
Dan Brown illustrated.
Thank God the film won't use Brown's expository prose.
Dan Brown's kaleidoscope of power.

Sure, some of it is incredibly nit-picky, and I have issues with the claim that the title of the book is ungrammatical. Just about everyone in the world thinks "Da Vinci" is Leonardo's last name, and quibbling with that is a sure sign of looking for things with which to quibble. But for anyone who simply can't understand what the big deal was, these are lots of fun.

Meeting Mr. R / Kickstart My Heart

So I met Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the Chicago Reader, yesterday. He wanted to preview one of the movies we're showing at my theater. I was nervous: what do you say to one of your idols (or at least someone you greatly respect despite thinking that they are nuts some of the time)? This wasn't like seeing Timothy Hutton on the subway; I would have to interact with him, right? After the movie, what if he asked me what I thought of it? To shake hands or not to shake hands?

The experience was less than exciting. He showed up at 5:30 sharp. We walked up to the theater, and he asked how it was that we picked the movie in question (it wasn't me, it was the other Mike). I got him a Diet Coke. I went upstairs and played the movie. He sat 2/3 of the way back, on the right-hand side of the main section of seats. "What was he wearing?" I hear all his breathless fans asking; he was wearing a big furry hat with ear flaps and a gray tweed coat.

During the screening, I worried about what I would say about the movie when he asked me what I thought. I made mental notes: the fight scene in the hotel, where the two men's faces were pressed together at the end; the aerial shots of the plane crash and aftermath; the tacked-on ending. Would that be enough? Would he think I was an idiot? Should I mention my website?

When the movie was over, I went downstairs. He remarked that the print was in pretty good shape. He said that he would contact me about the screening in April, when we're showing another film that he wants to see. He left. The end.

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Philips is selling the first over-the-counter Heart Defibrillator. I have two words for them: bank robberies. You heard it here first—it's only a matter of time that these dangerous things are used for criminal purposes.

Get Your Gay On

In a 1994 brainstorming session, Air Force personnel at the Wright Air Force Base proposed a chemical weapon that would cause opposing forces to become sexually irresistable to each other, thus causing "distasteful but completely non-lethal blow" to morale. Reports that the plan was called "Queer Eye for an Enemy Guy" are unconfirmed. Other suggestions included a spray that would cause bees and mosquitoes to attack troops, or a drug that would cause "severe and lasting halitosis" so our forces could sniff out insurgents.

Cold and Misc.

It was 5 degrees this morning when I left for work. The doors on my car were frozen shut, and it took me five minutes to pry them open. I drove to the bus stop (hey, it saved me frostbite on my nose), then stood waiting for the bus. It is 66 degrees in Chiang Mai right now. How's Florida, Shane? And why did I move from Michigan to Chicago?

To the guy on his cell phone this morning: a crowded bus is not the best place to discuss your STD history.

I've always thought Jennifer Garner, star of television's "Alias" and the new movie Electra, had a funny-shaped head. She's completely unappealing to me. My male friends look at me like I'm crazy, but now I have official support: David Edelstein, Slate.com's critic, agrees, sort of: "That face is really strange—long and fish-lipped, with different planes going at different angles. She's like a Picasso guppy." Of course, he prefaces it by saying that he "see[s] the allure." But he agrees: she has a funny-shaped head.

I've been working at the ad agency this week, and it looks like they'll continue to want me here on a regular basis. I could see it turning into an actual job. I'm torn. If I could work out something where I would not have to work a full week but still get benefits, that would be perfect, because I'm sick of feeling like a leech and sick of not having health insurance. I don't want to give up the filmmaking, but I don't want to be broke.

A Thing, a Thing, a Marvelous Thing

My favorite art historian had an article published in the Boston Globe on Sunday about the "thing studies" craze—scholarly and popular histories of mundane things: glass, salt, cod, cotton, paperclips. I read one of the things books, the one about cod. It was surprisingly informative and entertaining, for a book about cod.

Happy Birthday to Me

I'm 30! I feel... different. I feel a new sense of purpose. I feel like I'm less of a risk to my automotive insurance company. I feel like my bones may have stopped adding mass. I feel...

Actually, I don't feel any different. Well, I feel happy that I'm having my first actual birthday party in god knows how long. I've invited everyone I know in town out to my theater, where we're showing one of my favorite movies, Out of the Past. Afterwards, we're all going across the street to a taqueria that has Spanish karaoke on Saturday nights. It should be fun. No, I'm not singing. No hablo español.

I ended up having 21 people come to my birthday movie party! I didn't even know that I knew that many people. Seventeen of us went to the taqueria for a late dinner and conversation. Sadly, there was no karaoke.

My birthday present seems to be having my opinion about movie critics published on Slate.com. You'll have to search for my name, but it's there.