that "What say you?" is only one word-swap away from "What you say?" One easy step from Aragorn Elessar* to Sihyung Lee.
*I didn't know about the "Elessar" part either, but this helpful website was more than happy to enlighten me. No asking about how I found it.
posted by ben @ 8:31 PM
2 comments
A bit of trivia, and then a question for you guys.
While valiantly avoiding anything vaguely resembling a college application today, I found a few rather useless websites discussing the origin of the popular children's rhyme "Pop goes the Weasel." The consensus seems to be that the rhyme is broadly about the ruinous practice of pawning one's belongings ("two to one you won't get your stuff back" was apparently the pawnbroker's motto -- perhaps not the optimal corporate slogan), and more specifically about a poor bastard who's drank too much (the "Eagle" in the rhyme is apparently the name of a London tavern) and has to pawn his tools (the "weasel") to pay his tab. "Popping," by the way, is slang for pawning, vernacular which seems to have survived in certain parts of England to this day.
Which calls to mind the colossal credit-card debt of the average American, as well as our staggering amount of debt as a nation, but I really didn't mean to start this line of debate.
Anyways, I was going to ask if any of you happened to know if there's any connection between the children's song "London Bridge is falling down" and GK Chesterton's "The Old Song" -- from which, incidentally, I derived the title of this blog.
By the way, "Pop Goes the Weasel" goes like this, in case you missed out on this completely unnecessary part of your childhood.
posted by ben @ 8:40 PM
2 comments
children live what they see and what they're taught. if you grow up around war and that's all you see, that's what you'll do, because that is what is done. older children can follow other paths, but small children don't know there are other ways of living yet. they merely do what their elders do. rather than sanctimoniously bemoaning the fact that, simply, iraqi children are inured to what they grew up in (just as kids who grow up in the projects play with needles), focus on how to change what they grow up in. maybe the next generation -even this generation's younger half- will be lucky enough to grow up around something else. then you'll see different toys.
posted by sara. @ 1:53 PM
3 comments
NPR's Ann Garrels (Naked in Baghdad) had a story on today's Morning Edition about the popularity of toy machine guns among children in Iraq (scroll down until you see it). Toy stores in Baghdad are doing brisk business with plastic AK-47s and submachine guns--the more realistic, the more popular. In the piece, an American soldier marvelled at the detail of the detachable magazines, the butts, and the trigger mechanisms.
The danger is obvious given how jittery GIs are in a battlefield environment where the enemy is indistinguishable from the civilian, and so American troops more and more find themselves confiscating caches of real and toy weapons. Yet parents don't seem to care that their children play with toys that could get them killed, and in fact buy the toys for them.
Some have mused that insurgents are distributing the weapons in order to have images of a dead Iraqi five-year-old, killed by American bullets, show up on al-Arabia or CNN. As far as I can tell, there's no proof of this, but it has the trappings of yet another brilliant PR strategy on the part of the insurgents--something that, if successful, would mean one more obstacle towards elections in January.
But putting the politics aside, there's something more interesting in this story. Why would a society that has known nothing but violence for the past generation--from the Iran-Iraq war to the regime of Saddam, to the current quagmire--become so enamored with the icons of their suffering? Why would Iraqi children, some of whom have probably seen more violence than any American kid watching FCC-regulated television, not be scarred by even the sight of a toy AK-47? Maybe it's simply that universal urge in all young boys to want to be warriors--even I, a rabid pacficist, played soldier when I was younger. Children don't quite fully grasp war, perhaps even when it's right in front of them, because they don't quite fully grasp mortality.
On this day, the outset of the holiday shopping season, I propose an American-Iraqi toy exchange program . Iraqi children would mail their toy guns to American children, and in exchange American children would send over their Gameboys, their board games, their stuffed animals, their soccer balls. We have plenty of peace over here, and over there they don't have enough. Top that, Santa.
posted by ata' allah at-talib @ 8:27 AM
0 comments
Ever wonder why evildoers are always hellbent on establishing some colossal Orwellian database indexing all known information about your person from your credit card number to your preferred brand of toothpaste?
I suspect it has less to do with world domination than it does with moments like these, when I'm desperately and obsessively endeavoring to discover the link between an Academy student living in Ridgefield Park and a multiuser Paramus High School blog. It's a bit like having a splinter in the brain, at least in some unknown dialect of English in which "splinter" denotes a small nuclear device.
This, in case that wasn't clear enough, is driving. me. insane.
posted by ben @ 12:08 AM
1 comments
I've been spending a bit of time recently exploring the online blogging community. I realize these aren't exactly the New Kids on the Block - when FOXNews is already blaming them for the nation's woes, you can be pretty sure that, aside from probably being completely faultless, they're also around to stay.
I was first introduced to this phenomenon while googling, of all things, a quote from Spiderman. Something about great responsibility coming along with the ability to climb walls with only the aid of augmented hair follicles, or something. For the priviledge of accidentally discharging gooey webs from his wrists to snag lunch trays and the like, Peter has to stop the neighborhood kids from playing in traffic, thereby losing his job and his girlfriend and halting the progress of natural selection in one fell swoop. Sweet deal.
Anyways, I discovered what can only be described as an Objectivist analysis of the superhero archetype in American graphic novels, which was fascinating to say the least and a definite appeal to my geek-ego to go a bit further. Turns out I've stumbled across some sort of libertarian pro-free-market blogring, which proceeded to eat the rest of my productivity during my internship today.
Also, the author of the first blog I found not only refers to himself as Unqualified Offerings (the name of the blog) but also calls his wife Mrs. Offerings. Mrs. Offerings! If that's not fucking legitimacy, I don't know what is.
posted by ben @ 9:09 PM
0 comments
Content coming soon, I promise. We promise, hopefully.
posted by ben @ 6:40 PM
0 comments
... will melt away, melt away, melt away.
