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Tuesday, November 6, 2001 - 10:49 a.m. -
Monday, November 5, 2001 - 05:10 p.m. -
Monday, November 5, 2001 - 05:09 p.m. -
Friday, November 2, 2001 - 04:11 p.m. -
Thursday, November 1, 2001 - 01:13 p.m. -
Wednesday, October 31, 2001 - 10:49 p.m. -
Wednesday, October 31, 2001 - 03:24 p.m. - Don't use Sanrio Badtz-Maru lemon drops as cough lozenges if you also want to sleep. The super-sour acid quality lasts longer than you'd expect or want, and the involuntary puckering is worse than a jerking knee. Perhaps some green tea candy or Everlasting Gobstoppers will work for you instead. Tonight, for me, it's Ludens. High class all the way.
Tuesday, October 30, 2001 - 01:20 p.m. -
Tuesday, October 30, 2001 - 11:48 a.m. - You'd think the Dutch would have learned. The Low Country had blessed Europe with many of its finest minds - Spinoza, Leeuwenhoek, and Huygens, to name but a fraction. Their land's reputation for boring, unromantic mercantilism was given the lie by multiple bouts of tulipomania, but time and again individual Netherlanders found the means to reimprison their fellows in the cold iron shackles of stereotypy. Even the Boers, those most adventurous and successful of the Dutch colonials, chose to stick with their internalized dullness when it came to naming indigenous animals. This Adamic right was used in wildly different ways by different colonial groups (see kangaroo, skunk), so the Boers must have felt some leeway in their choices. Yet they blessed Africa with many odd-sounding but ultimately baffling names; the totemic example, of course, is the aardvark. Modern American speakers of English, unfamiliar with even the most closely related foreign languages, find "aardvark" amusing, maybe even rhythmically musical. The sensitive etymologist trembles with ennui upon learning its derivation from the Dutch for "earth pig." Earth pig! Poetically redundant, it provokes wonder at the mind that could imagine a pig more earthy than the familiar Sus scrofa. A perverse or mean-spirited sort might imagine stately zeevarks gamboling with dolphins and orcas or even high-soaring luchtvarks frightening children and dogs alike. An aardvark, however, is by definition profoundly and unimaginatively absurd. The new, happening, sexy 21st-century Dutch might seem different when seen through the clouds of smoke pouring out of hash pipes and prostitutes, but the educated men and women of the world are waiting for the other wooden shoe to drop. Will the first colonists of the stars name their adorable green fuzzy neighbors "space pigs" or something more fitting? Can we risk such a cosmic failure of the poetic imagination? Review and discuss Tuesday.
Tuesday, October 30, 2001 - 11:36 a.m. -
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