Ambrose & Elsewhere

If it’s Wednesday, it must be time for some whining, puling excuses about why my Blog Gate post of the week is late. Only this time it’s actually early. (I was avoiding other work, naturally.) It’s just some incoherent thoughts about a fantasy epic which, in some ways, is too brilliant to cohere.

It had been so long since I hit pavement that the first signals from my nerves were a little hard to decode.

“Hey! Is this pain? Pain and biking don’t mix! Go back and make sure the nerves know what they’re talking about!”

Then I remembered I was rolling in the street with the bike on top of me. So I figured maybe it was pain after all.

Nothing very serious, though. What happened was that a puppy, being chased by a peace officer (doubling as animal control, apparently), ran into the street right in front of me, stopped suddenly, and gave me the old deer-in-the-headlights look. I managed to brake before I slammed into him, but Newton’s First Law of Motion carried me off the saddle and onto the street. Pretty light consequences: some road rash on my forearm and hand, and some bloodstains on a shirt I don’t like much. (Laundry day was several days ago, only it never happened.)

Here’s the thing: this happened about a block away from the place where a squirrel bounced off my bike last fall. And the place seems to have more roadkill than any comparable stretch of road in town (though I can’t claim to have made a scientific study).

The only rational explanation is that there is some aura of doom about the road that impels cute fuzzy creatures to seek their destruction on it.

Which is fine with me. I mean, if they like it. But why involve me and my shiny new bike in their bloodstained deeds of terror and despair?

Is it crazy that this image Do not look behind the curtain!

This week’s Blog Gate post is up, this one tackling the subject everyone is talking about these days: effability.

Now everyone can participate in ongoing political debates without the trouble of formulating coherent arguments! It’s a wonderful age we live in, for however long that is. (Infamous examples here and here.)

This: Mihir Wanchoo of Fantasy Book Critic interviews the oversigned. Herds of untold shocking revelations revealed. No one will be seated during the last fifteen minutes of this interview. Etc.

That: Christian Lacroix files for bankruptcy. My first thought on reading this was, “Sheesh, Edina Monsoon is going to be upset about this.” It was a few seconds before I remembered that she doesn’t actually exist.

It’s still Wednesday somewhere in North America, so I figure my Blog Gate post of the week is not technically late. (Nick, reading over my shoulder, remarks, “I think you’ve used that line before.” But that just makes it a classic. Also, it’s happened before, so….)

Anyway, it’s a review of Dreams with Sharp Teeth, probably the best movie about Harlan Ellison to come out in the spring of 2007.

I was pedalling down the bike trail last night, wondering if the Latin alphabet was unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause, when I suddenly sensed that someone was grinding French Roast coffee quite nearby. Glancing around at the trees, the swamp, the fields, it seemed a little unlikely. Then I realized it was skunk that I was smelling. I didn’t linger.

The trail seems to be unusually lively this spring. I startled a woodchuck the other night, and also raced an odd-looking yellow bird that may have been a goldfinch (although it looked too narrow).

[edited to add:]

The bird won. Just for the record.

Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.

–Longfellow

There is no dumbness like the dumb of a frightened xenophobe: like the guy who argues that legal Latin violates the First Amendment, since it’s “the foreign language of a church.” The best thing about this is that the guy uses a Latin phrase (“per se”) in the course of making his silly argument. (Seen at Language Log, with a pretty crunchy answer.)

English-only types might be interested to see what would happen to the text of the First Amendment if all the Latin were struck out of it.

As is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Without Latin:

REDACTED shall make no law REDACTEDing an REDACTED of REDACTED, or REDACTEDing the free REDACTED thereof; or REDACTEDing the freedom of speech, or of the REDACTED; or the right of the REDACTED REDACTEDably to REDACTED, and to REDACTED the REDACTED for a REDACTED of grievances.

I might have snuck one or two more REDACTEDs in there, but I didn’t want to go overboard.