Infinitive Splitter

…hearing that someone else got the apartment you wanted after you’ve already made the scale models of your furniture to see how it could be arranged after you move.

I found out today that I can still hit baseballs thrown by the “fast” pitching machine at the local batting cage. I’m not very consistent, the “fast” pitches were probably only going about 60 miles per hour (which I think is about average for the 13- and 14-year-old pitchers who always got the best of me in my last two competitive seasons), and my hands hurt like crazy, but I can still do it.

Next: can I still get big air on the bike ramps in the park?

Later: I bet I could jump over that!

No artist had a greater influence on the way I learned to understand and articulate my ideas about pretty much everything that matters. Goodness requires no promise of punishment or reward; we are our own best (and only) arbiters of honor and accountability; and jerks and pain and delusion are ineradicable features of human existence, but so are our opportunities to laugh.

Some notes on recent entertainment.

Lily Allen @ 930 Club.
For all her efforts to cultivate an image as a diva with both middle fingers up, Allen’s on-stage manner is just childish. Dressed in a nightgown and backed by a band of polite fraternity brothers (many, many photos that other people took are available at Flickr), she introduced her songs with a combination of superfluous explanation and cringe-inducing grrl power (this song, “Not Big,” is about stupid boys and small penises! Who needs em! Right, girls?!).

I still like the songs, of course, and I had a good time, thanks to Chantal and Tony and the handful of other grownups who shared our bemusement over the antics of the high school girls (and at least one girl’s BFF mom) in the crowd, but I can’t say I was terribly impressed by anything that happened on stage.

Entourage.
This show is stupid, stupid, stupid, but I love it. Ari needs more face time, and everyone else needs less (my suspension of disbelief over Adrian Grenier’s role as a Hollywood superstar erodes with every awkward minute he’s on camera), but either way I’m watching every episode.

The Sopranos.
I never really watched this show regularly until last season (technically, the first half of this season), which everyone said was pretty weak. I like it for the same reason I like “Entourage” — it’s a show full of loathsome people who I find immense satisfaction in rooting for, anyway. I think just about everything that happens is riotously funny.

Grindhouse.
When I was very young, and still small enough that I had to stand next to the “you must be this tall…” sign at amusement parks, my dad took me on my first roller coaster ride. There were no loops, it probably wasn’t very fast, and the whole thing was probably over in about 30 seconds, but we were in the front row and I was terrified, sure that if I ever challenged death like that again, I would lose.

For years after that, I refused to get near the rides. I grew up in Pittsburgh, home of the Steel Phantom, which in my youth was both the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world. Nothing could get me on it until eighth grade, when I caved to peer pressure and rode the Drachen Fire something like 12 times while on a school trip to Colonial Williamsburg Busch Gardens. Holy crap, I thought, I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this for so long.

In a similar fashion, though without the singular, traumatic event, I’ve always shied away from scary movies and those with a lot of blood in them. I like to think it’s evidence of my advanced, compassionate nature, but really I’m just easily spooked (or I used to be, and I never tested myself to see if I changed between the ages of 7 and 24). So when two roommates suggested yesterday that we get a few drinks after work and then see Grindhouse, my first reaction was to think of how I could demur without looking like a wimp.

But what the heck. After a few beers and a parting shot of Wild Turkey, we walked over to the theater for three very entertaining hours of blood, guts, guns and girls, during which I kept thinking, Holy crap, I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this for so long.

This is true: I watched Babel last night and liked it a lot, but I did not learn until this evening that the film’s non-English parts are meant to be subtitled.

Before I get to the explanation, though, here’s a section of Genesis 11, which, like most of the Bible, I had never read, and which contains the story of Babel:

[5] And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
[6] And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
[7] Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
[8] So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
[9] Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
[10] These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood:
[11] And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters.
[12] And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah:
[13] And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.
[14] And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber:
[15] And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.
[16] And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg:
[17] And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.

It goes on like that for a while. Like I said, I’m no expert on the Bible, but I don’t really see how a book whose first chapter comprises interminable lists of implausible genealogies got to be the best-selling volume in all of human history. I didn’t get past the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code, either, though, so maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, here’s my story of Babel.

When the DVD started and no subtitles appeared during the first non-English conversation, I thought it was interesting but not cause for alarm. The movie is called Babel, so I expected some language-related confusion.

As I got into it, I was surprised by both how much untranslated dialogue there was and how much of it I could understand anyway. Communication is whatever percent nonverbal, and I was following all of the stories despite not understanding any of the words. In a film whose characters have trouble making themselves clear to each other because of language differences, I thought it was neat that language differences between the characters and me didn’t turn out to be much of an obstacle. That made the movie better than anyone had given it credit for, I thought.

Some scenes felt a little weird, including some long conversations involving an isolated, deaf Japanese girl, her father and another man. But in those cases I thought that the filmmakers were taking risks with the audience; I never guessed that I was missing something I shouldn’t.

So it was with some surprise to find out this evening, during my second conversation of the day about the film, that the movie is meant to be subtitled. (The first discussion lasted about 20 minutes and never clued me in.)

I don’t plan to watch with the subtitles. The story details that tipped me off seemed kind of gratuitous and I don’t think knowing more of them would add to the experience.

The LA Times editorializes today about the silliness of recent efforts to force dictionaries to remove entries that corporations deem offensive — most recently by McDonald’s, which bristled at the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of McJob:

The dictionary currently defines the popular term as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector.” David Fairhurst, “chief people officer” for McDonald’s in Northern Europe, called for a new definition to “reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime.”

Presumably, Fairhurst is semi-joking. Unless he’s some kind of Orwellian villain, he can’t possibly believe he can, by decree, get people to hear “McJob” and think “awesome gig!”

If McDonald’s really wants to change the public perception of employment in its restaurants, perhaps it could begin with improving the conditions of employment in its restaurants. This may yield only limited improvement, since fast-food production will never come with the benefits of, say, software development for Google, but a PR campaign and some strongly worded letters to dictionary editors certainly won’t suffice.

I’m observing St. Patrick’s Day in the traditional way this afternoon — drinking a few cases of Guinness with the roommates while the college basketballers do their thing on TV — and something about the situation reminded me that the latest Oxford English Dictionary quarterly additions were due out. Some of the more entertaining rookies:

• asswipe, n.
• cryptozoology, n. (the search for animals that are rumored to exist)
• fricking, adj. and adv.
• fuck-off, n.
• irritainment, n.
  
• shit-eater, n.
• tighty-whities, n.

I’ve written about this twice before, and I’ll certainly do it again, since the additions provide such a great window into our societal development.

The English major in the room noted that it seems to have been a downward trend.

This is how the home screen for ESPN’s 2007 Men’s [NCAA Basketball] Tournament Challenge game looked yesterday afternoon (I saved it because I had a feeling I’d be writing about it today). Read it carefully:

There are more than 3 million active brackets in the game, and players are allowed up to five entries, which means at least 600,000 people (but probably more like 2 million, since lots of people only do one) have been repeatedly logging in through that page for almost 24 hours.

Here’s how it looks this morning:

As you can see, they have recognized the problematic text but made only two changes: “see if you will win $10,000″ in the first sentence and boss’s to boss’ in the last one. The first change helps, but still doesn’t totally fix the sentence; the second change is wrong.

Nobody cares, of course, unless their (my) brackets aren’t doing well and they (I) need something to complain about.

Big news today is Khalid Sheik Mohammad’s claim of responsibility for 31 acts of terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks, which he claims to have masterminded “from A to Z,” and the decapitation of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; the New York Times has a list:

1. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
2. The 9/11 attacks, from A to Z.
3. The shoe bomber operation to down two American planes.
4. A 2002 shooting in Kuwait that killed an American marine.
5. The Bali nightclub bombing that killed more than 180 in 2002.
6. Planning attacks against several prominent American skyscrapers.
7. Planning to destroy American military vessels and oil tankers.
8. Planning to bomb the Panama Canal.
9. Planning to assassinate several former American presidents, including President Carter.
10. Planning to bomb several New York landmarks, including the stock exchange and suspension bridges.

…and more.

The Times’ front-page story notes that it is “not clear how many of Mr. Mohammed’s expansive claims were legitimate,” and, indeed, the first thing I thought when NPR awoke me with the news this morning was how similar this sounds to the scene at the end of the first season of The Wire where, in order to avoid the death penalty (and help his friends) Wee-Bey falsely confesses to a series of open murders.

Khalid Sheik Mohammad is a preemptively convicted enemy combatant in a military tribunal and obviously not a candidate for a plea bargain to reduce his sentence, but how is major skepticism not everyone’s first reaction?

I last saw the Shins when they opened for the White Stripes at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in the fall of 2005. It’s entirely possible that my perception was skewed by my proximity to the band (about a mile away, on the lawn) and the several 24-ounce beers I drank between sets, but I recall that I was much more impressed by the White Stripes.

Massive outdoor amphitheaters like Merriweather are fine for Jimmy Buffet drinkapaloozas, pop-orchestra summer concerts and meandering jam-band head-bobs, but most indie bands, like the Shins, have too intimate a sound to fill the endless space.

Before last night’s show at D.A.R Constitution Hall, I’d heard lots of complaints about the (indoor) venue’s acoustics: in a recent Washington Post chat, some commenters suggested that the hall is acoustically suited for high-school commencement ceremonies (which it hosts every year) and nothing else. I wasn’t in a great position to judge the mix, since I was in a balcony box slightly in front of the stage and directly under the 15-foot, stage-left tower of speakers, but it sounded pretty good to me.

The seating, though, sucks big time.

Constitution Hall has no real orchestra pit; its first row of seats is two feet away from the stage, so even the “pit” crowd has to fill seven rows of rigid chairs instead of a freer space (one that might, on other nights, accommodate an orchestra). The entire floor of the venue has immovable seats, so every person has four to six square feet of reserved space.

The restriction is awkwardly stifling. The Shins’ catalog comprises several dozen bouncy, feel-good pop songs, but at D.A.R. they played to a crowd of full pockets that applauded after each song but stood mostly still for the music itself. Apart from a handful of carefree types who jumped in place for most of the set, my view from the box — where, like most people on the tier level, I remained seated for the duration — was of a static sea of smiling white faces.

Awkwardness aside (and with indie-pop music, when is the awkwardness ever really aside?), the show was well played and well received. The band curiously soft-pedaled a couple of their more energetic tunes — a companion noted that they were playing “Girl on the Wing” at an “adult contemporary” pace — but mostly they stuck to the album versions. At the end of the night, the band’s return to the stage for an encore sparked a cheer that was markedly louder than any that had followed the songs — not an unusual occurrence, but until that moment I’d had trouble figuring out how much fun the crowd was having, and I suspect the band had similar trouble.

Auditorium seats don’t mix with rock and roll.

(Thanks to Simon for making a ticket to the long-ago sold-out show available!)