Take Back the Words!

I was just checking the final copyedits of my book which is appearing in the spring, which includes a scene where zookeepers are chasing a raccoon around a Dumpster. That's right, Dumpster, capitalized, because it turns out, this word is a trademark.

Well, three pages of a novel that include the word Dumpster, capitalized, multiple times, reads like advertising copy for the Dumpster Corporation, so I wanted to replace it. But there is no synonym. I got suggestions from many people. They were either circumlocutions that couldn't replace one word repeatedly, or technical descriptions that no one would recognize, or words for a thing that was similar to a Dumpster but not identical.

I also discovered that many words that we all feel are normal English words are also still trademarked, like Laundromat and Bubble Wrap. Bubble Wrap!!!

Well, I've had enough. I want to start a Movement. Why are corporations allowed to interfere with the natural evolution of language? The way it works now, you can get in trouble if you use a trademark generically - but why does a corporation get to decide how we can use the language? If everyone else, as English speakers, needs the word, why does a corporation get to keep it?

Poppers of bubble wrap in dumpsters out behind laundromats, unite! You have nothing to lose but your superfluous capital letters!

Why sometimes a person just gives up and goes to Starbucks

Recently I decided there is no excuse for someone who works at home, with a full kitchen, to go out to Starbucks in the afternoon for a chocolate banana smoothie. However, the chocolate banana smoothie, which is under 300 calories, is a pretty healthy afternoon snack. So the plan was to figure out to make the same thing at home.

The first obstacle was that I don't have a blender. We threw out the blender when the kitchen was being remodeled. It was a new blender that I had bought after careful research of reviews from trusted sources, which, when it arrived in the mail, I discovered had a glass container that weighed about a hundred pounds. And which didn't always screw onto its bottom properly, resulting in its liquid contents spilling out the bottom all over the blender base. There was absolutely nothing good about this blender. So when faced with the prospect of finding someplace to store it during the remodeling, I jumped at the chance to throw the damn thing out.

Now, I do have a stick blender, which I bought as a replacement, not being willing to buy another stand blender after that traumatic experience, and thinking it would take up less space and be useful for blending things without dirtying another container. It turns out that is great for things that are already being prepared in some kind of container, but stinks for making drinks because you can't really put it in a drink glass. It might work if we bought the right kind of container to use it in, but at the point of considering that, it becomes clear that what we need is a regular blender.

So, first I went out and bought a blender.

Then, I went to Whole Foods to find a chocolate protein shake mix. There's one made with soy, but sometimes soy milk gives me a stomachache. So I looked at the other, made with whey protein. WTF. They sell this at a store called "WHOLE foods"? There appears to be no entire food anywhere in this product. There was also that warning that they put on aspartame, although I couldn't find aspartame in the ingredients. I got no idea what's going on here with micro-filtering whey and having to warn phenylketonurics not to eat the stuff, but no way I am buying it.

So I decided, if the alternative was something that started with milk and then processed it beyond recognition, why not just make the thing with milk?

OK, fine. I have milk. Now I just need a way to make it chocolate flavored. So I go look at the chocolate milk powders. To make a long story about factory ingredients and the quality of chocolate short, it turns out that the only one that I find acceptable is made of just cocoa and sugar.

Well, I have cocoa and sugar at home. So never mind buying that product either. Now remember, real cocoa powder does not dissolve in cold milk unless processed in a factory, so using real cocoa means that I am going to have to make a paste of cocoa, hot water and sugar every time I make a shake. Or else find a recipe for cooking that into a syrup that will keep a little while.

Then I go buy some bananas. Which reminds me, there's this other whole problem which is that to me, bananas are only at an acceptable stage of ripeness for about five minutes. OK, for a shake, I'll eat them a little riper, so they might be OK for about a day. What are the odds that when I want a shake, A, I will have bananas, and B, they will be exactly ripe enough? Yeah.

So, chances are, every time I want a shake, I will have to go to the store to buy a banana. Then I will have to make a paste of cocoa and sugar, then I can put all that stuff in the blender. Then I have to wash the blender, and all the equipment that I used to cut the banana, make the cocoa paste, etc.

There is no way that it will be faster to go across the street, buy a perfectly ripe banana at Whole Foods - assuming they have one that day - and come home and do all of that, than it would be to walk another block and wait on line at Starbucks for a shake in the afternoon when they are usually not busy. It's also unclear when, factoring in the cost of the blender, it will start being cheaper to make it at home. I don't have the energy left to try to do the calculation, even if I knew exactly how many tablespoons of cocoa I am going to want to use and so on.

I give up. Some things are best left to a professional.

Curmudgeonly environmentalist

I hate the whole thing about taking reusable bags to the store. I'm sure it's just a way for stores to save money, and the environmental argument is just an excuse.

But I realized today that there is one bright side: It's revived the art of careful grocery-bag packing.

Maybe this only ever happened in big cities where many people carried groceries home by foot, but there used to be people who packed groceries into bags beautifully, like it was really their life's work. Maybe the difference is that for years now I've shopped at more suburban stores, but at these places it wasn't uncommon for them to toss only two items in one of those plastic bags and move on.

But today I had ONE reusable tote and slightly too many groceries, and by God if someone hadn't actually spent some time training that cashier to bag, I'll eat my tote.

General Annoucement to Hotel Proprietors

If you're going to give someone a 4:45 AM wakeup call, could please you be damned sure you're calling the right room? Thank you.

The internet is dying

Here's the other thing about Facebook. Or the other two things. Or something.

The internet used to be where I went to talk to people I wouldn't have met otherwise. And, like the famous New Yorker cartoon put it, where no one knew that you were a dog.

People didn't used to post under their real names. Sure, this meant that some people felt freer to be assholes. But it also meant that you could talk about adult issues and politics and be snarky and funny and not worry about what your mom or your boss thought.It's a good thing for people to be able to discuss things that they're not sure their mom or their boss would approve of, you know? What's more, it's a good thing to be able to discuss them with people who don't already agree with you, who don't live in the same place and know the same people and are likely to have exactly the same world view.

But on Facebook, you not only have to use your real name, you can't talk to people you don't know, and you can't even read people's stuff unless they've approved you as a friend. There's no browsing around and experiencing ideas and thoughts you'd never be exposed to otherwise.

Now, to some extent this is no great loss because most of what people post on Facebook is trivia. But it's the principle of the thing. I'm afraid something important is being lost, if this comes to be most people's idea of the online experience.

Maybe I am panicking for no reason. I guess there are a zillion public blogs and messageboards out there, so plenty of people still want strangers to read their stuff and maybe interact with someone new. Maybe this is an addition for those kinds of things and not a replacement. But it worries me.

Peer pressure

I finally gave in and joined Facebook. It turns out that it's as bad as I thought, and worse.

I much prefer to use a simple tool that does one job well. I don't need my refrigerator to connect to the internet or my phone to make toast. I don't want to scroll through a dozen irrelevant menus that make it harder to use the thing for its main purpose. But that's the modern way, to add features just because you can, not because they're a good idea.

So similary, I like Twitter and Flickr and a blog and messageboards that all different things well. I never longed for a one-stop-shopping experience, so there was no problem that I needed something like Facebook to solve.

But it turns out, it's not just that it tries to do too many things, it's that it can't even decide on one way to do each of them. There are several slightly different ways to post things, several slightly different ways to see material displayed... Basically, the thing seems to have been designed by a committee that gave up and, instead of making any choices among competing alternatives, just decided to do everything, no matter how confusing that was.

It's better than MySpace because at least people don't make sites with horrible designs and music. But instead, it's got a totally bland design that you can't customize at all - I feel like I am hanging out in a bus station. It's a clean, well-lit bus station, but it's exactly that comfortable and stylish.

I don't get it. I don't know how this became so popular. But, as we know from the case of Microsoft, bad design is no obstacle to worldwide dominance in software. I can only surmise that this is one of those things that's a result of EVERYONE being on the internet now. I suppose many of these people have only ever used badly designed software, so they don't even imagine there could be an alternative.

Rant: Business advice

I know, everyone hates their cable company. It's not a new rant. I won't bore you by describing what idiotic thing they did this time.

But I only just realized the depth of this. I realized that every time I try to decide whether I want to give them money for some new or additional service, the calculation doesn't just involve whether the service is worth X dollars to me. Every time, I also have to decide whether I want the particular service badly enough to overcome the fact that I just hate the idea of giving them any more money.

Really, I'm not asking for greatness. I just want them to run a business in a normal, average, mediocre manner, so that I can decide whether to purchase something solely based on whether it is worth the price.

Is that so much to ask? Just don't run your business so badly that people actually hate you. That is my advice.

General Announcement to PR People

If your name and phone number are listed as PR manager on the website of a major national organization, you might want to consider answering the phone "Hello, this is Name, Major National Organization."

As opposed to, "Hello?"

Seriously. We didn't even answer that way at the Reptile House, where outside people had no way of getting our phone number. Isn't this basic business etiquette?

Why newspapers are dying

This morning I read a restaurant review in the Washington Post Weekend section which contained the following sentence:

"Let's be honest, Mexican food is pretty straightforward with variations on a cheese, meat and tortilla theme."

I immediately had to drop everything I was doing and write a curmudgeonly email which began "I know you've downsized the staff, but what's going on here, are you having the high school interns write the restaurant reviews?"

Seriously, this is Washington DC. This is an audience that has a high level of culinary sophistication. The existence of Mexican regional cuisines is not a secret nowadays, nor is the existence of dishes beyond Tex-Mex tacos and enchiladas. And surely it's not news to readers in an area with such a large Latino population that "plantains are a fruit similar to bananas."

I managed not to also comment on the style of the quoted sentence, so really, I did exercise some restraint. But, although I know from personal experience that it's the time of year when a lot of the grownup editors are on vacation, there's really no excuse.

(The title of this post is stolen from my famous writer friend Beth Harpaz, who forwards around terrible newspaper stories under this heading.)

General Announcement to PR People

Note: When you send out a press release or pitch a story, the whole idea is to get reporters to call you up and ask to interview the person you talk about in the press release. Therefore, could you please make sure that the person is not going on vacation the day that you plan to send out the release?

Today's Hell in a Handbasket Report

On July 2, the Washington Post ran a couple of pictures of frogs that I know personally from the Reptile House. They misidentified the species of one of them, despite giving a description of that species in the caption that didn't match the frog in the photo. The caption also said the pictures were taken at Amazonia, despite the fact that neither were South American species, which should have given someone pause.

I wrote to them to point this out, but apparently they have decided it was not important enough to run a printed correction. In contrast with the following:

· A Reliable Source item in the July 1 Style section incorrectly described Kansas City Barbeque in San Diego as the site of the scene in "Top Gun" in which Tom Cruise sang "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling." Kansas City Barbeque was the site of the scene in which Kelly McGillis played the song on a jukebox, but Cruise's singing scene was set in a different bar.

Yup, that's clearly more important than scientific facts about nature. Who could argue?

General Announcement to Book Reviewers

I am tired of reading reviews of mysteries (or pseudo-mysteries) in which you're told that you're supposed to want to read the book because it's better than the whole rest of the genre - that it really has good characters, or that it's well written, or, like one recent example, that it's worth re-reading. As if it's incredibly unusual and surprising for a mystery to have these qualities.

I am hereby officially refusing to buy any book reviewed this way. And not just out of annoyance. I actually LIKE the genre. So why would I want to take the advice of a reviewer who apparently thinks that the genre is crap? Obviously we don't like the same thing, never mind the possibility that the reviewer actually has no idea what standards are applicable.

While I'm at it, let's include any book where the publicity makes a big point out of the fact that the author's previous books were not mysteries, implying that s/he is a REAL novelist.

Progress?

I just walked Rose to the ATM outside our back to deposit some checks. I had filled out a deposit slip, remembered to bring a pen to write on the envelope so I didn't have to sneak a dog inside the bank, and expected it to take ten seconds.

Well, I discovered that they have installed new machines, labeled with great fanfare about how you don't need deposit slips and envelopes. What you have to do instead is:

Press "check"
Type in amount of check
Hit another button to continue after reading instructions to endorse the check and smooth it out
Insert check, facing in the correct direction, flat and smooth enough to go into the machine
Wait while it is scanned in
Hit another button to answer whether the number you gave is the correct amount
Wait while they process it
Hit another button to say you want to deposit another check
Repeat for each check.

I think that was all the steps.

Hello? How is this easier than filling out a deposit slip in the comfort of my home and sticking one envelope in the machine? When did I volunteer to work as a bank teller for free?

At the Zoo

Another suggestion for zoo visitors that I left out of my earlier post:

See those fancy signs with the nice graphics that are posted near each exhibit? They cost the zoo a whole lot of money. When your child asks you what animal that is, could you just humor us by taking a quick glance at the sign before you make up an answer?

Thanks.

General Announcement to PR People

If you have to keep repeating "I'm not telling you how to write your story but...," then YES, you ARE telling me how to write my story.

Psychic powers

You know how when you're in a rush, every light seems to turn red as you approach?

I also have the opposite problem if I am driving and have an idea that I need to write down. Today I was having a normal commute till I suddenly figured out how to restructure this week's column. The minute I had the thought, every single light was green. Finally when I was almost at work I managed to check my mirror and stop safely at a yellow before I forgot what I needed to write down.

I don't know how they do it, but obviously the traffic signals can read my mind.

General announcement: Laws of Physics

I don't know whether all the drivers in the DC area have Spring fever or what, but it's obvious that some clarification is needed:

It is a fundamental law of the universe that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. So STAY IN YOUR OWN DAMN LANE.

Nice Cup of Milk and a Sit Down, part 1

(Apologies to Nicey and Wifey)

As a public service, this year I bought some newfangled kinds of Girl Scout cookies to report on, along with the usual "Do-si-dos" peanut butter sandwich. (I'm not going to talk about how good these are or you'll want some of mine, but more on these in part 2 of my report.)

Lemon Chalet Cremes: After repeated testing I am sorry to have to conclude that these are nasty. The "creme" is very odd. It tastes like nothing at first and then like lemon extract after a couple of seconds, which is disconcerting. The cookies themselves taste like nothing the whole time, and I am unmoved by the chalet and pine trees that are nicely embossed on them.

These are so bad that I took two out to jog my memory while I wrote this post, and only ate about 2/3 of one. I didn't want to finish the rest. This is very much not my usual approach to cookies.

"All Abouts": these are a plain cookie dipped in chocolate on one side. I hoped from the picture that this was dark chocolate, but instead it's that kind of thing the cookie companies call "fudge," which is neither particularly chocolately nor anything like fudge.

These were mostly inoffensive. I kept wanting to eat another, but I don't think that's because they were good. More that I kept waiting to feel like I'd eaten some chocolate.

Now, these cookies turn out to also need another sort of review, because they contain writing. They're embossed on the non-chocolate side with words embodying Girl Scout virtues, like "courage" and "confidence" and "fun."

It seems to me that some of them should say "out of touch with modern business methods." Because you still can't buy Girl Scout cookies on the Web. I read on their web site that troops aren't even allowed to do this on their own.

So, great. Girls are learning these business skills: having your parents sell things for you at work, and standing at a sales table in front of a grocery store all weekend. As far I can tell they're not even getting the nineteenth-century skill of selling door to door, because I've been working at home a lot over the past few years and no one has ever come to sell me any cookies.

And if they're really afraid that internet predators are going to stalk girls via cookie sales, I say: What better modern skill to teach than how to identify and avoid creepy people on the internet?

OK, I'm just cranky because it was so hard to find the danged cookies. A few more concrete remarks:

One way in which neither of these newfangled cookies is as good as Do-si-dos is the way they're packaged. Do-si-dos are wrapped in two rows, so you don't eat more than half a box at a time. In the other two, all the cookies are wrapped together. But I guess since they're not very good, there's not that much risk of eating the whole box at once.

Finally, it's odd that both contain partially hydrogenated shortening but are listed as having zero trans fat. Seems like someone's playing with the rules for rounding down here.

Well, that was disappointing. I'm going to go have some more Do-si-dos now to recover.