Occasional Jots and Tittles

I spent the evening at a live taping of “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”, the public radio news quiz show, in New Orleans tonight. I came away with a great appreciation for what they do to get the show on the air.

The total recording time ran close to two hours, which means that almost half of what transpired will end up on the cutting room floor. That’s not surprising, considering some of what was said (and what I’m sure would make a fantastic outakes/blooper tape for the show). Some observations and thoughts:

1. Amy Dickinson (“Ask Amy”) has a potty mouth. Who would have thought such a mild-mannered, nice advice columnist could come up with some of what she had to say about Eric Massa? Some of it will probably make it onto Saturday’s broadcast (3/13/2010), but the rest? Well, as she said, “What’s said in the room, stays in the room”.

2. All three panelists (Roy Blount, Jr., Amy Dickinson, and Mo Rocka) are quick on the draw with their comebacks and one-liners. Much of the show was clearly unscripted and they have great chemistry as a group.

3. Carl Kassel is amazingly spry for a man of his age and he’s no slouch with the one-liners either. On the air, as scorekeeper and judge he doesn’t get to say much, but they cut out a lot of ad libs from him that are great zingers.

4. The entire cast kept going on about what a wonderful place New Orleans was and how great an audience we were compared to many of the places they go. It could have been the usual BS from visiting artists but they really did seem to be having a great time. In fact, the three panelists mentioned they should get a time-share and come live down here part of the year. They sounded believable to me.

All in all, there’s a LOT they’ll have to cut from tonight’s recordings to go on the air. My original fear, when we sat down, was that they’d have too much material and not know what to sacrifice to fit the time limit. After listening to the Massa bit (a good 6 minutes worth) and a few other riffs that really got out of hand, I realized the opposite was a more likely problem: if you cut out all the stuff not suitable for NPR, you may not have an hour’s broadcast to work with.

All in all, it was a blast – it’ll be interesting to hear the final version of the show in 2 days.

Remember how, on I Love Lucy, no matter how simple a task the girls set out to accomplish, it always turned into a huge production that (usually) ended badly?

That’s how I feel about things around my house. Jonathan and I both enjoy projects, and we’re actually getting a lot better about tackling one at a time and finishing them, but still, each one grows and grows until it’s spiraled out of control.

The latest is our back yard and garden, which took a major hit in the freezes of January. Now, I know it got a lot colder in a lot more places, and some of you were buried under feet of snow, but it’s a relative thing. Down here in Baton Rouge, we seldom go below freezing for more than a few hours on one or two nights at the peak of winter. As a result, while plants like banana trees will freeze back and drop their leaves, quite a few of our tropical plants will thrive through the winter. It’s a big help particularly for our wintering hummingbirds, but beyond that, the walls of greenery helped to shield our sitting area in the back yard from the alley behind us, where we park and where neighbors stroll all the time.

Not this year; three nights in a row below 20 degrees and barely going to 32 during the day was enough to freeze back nearly every tropical shrub we had, leaving a mass of black and brown mush drying out and offering no privacy (not that we need much, in the winter, since we’re not outside often). A good many of the plants will come back, but not for a few months. But in a way, that’s good.

Because we’d already lost a huge hackberry tree during Hurricane Gustav in September of 2008, and in the subsequent winter our cherry tree died. We still had one tattered Chinese Tallow tree left, but that tree should never have been planted, and we really wanted it gone, too. So… a month or so ago, we had a tree service take down the dead cherry and the live Tallow. Coupled with the die-off in the beds surrounding them, it gave us a rare opportunity to re-evaluate the layout of the plants. Many of the tropicals had just been shoved into the ground wherever there was a space, with no idea how big some of them would get.

And we wanted some new trees to replace the dead ones, so all in all, it seemed a good time to just rework the plants.

But then… in doing so, we realized it would also be a lot smarter to move the old, original watering system from its “snake through the bed” location and re-route the trunk line along one side of the bed, so that we could easily find it for repairs (and miss it when we dug holes for new plants). Likewise with the low-voltage electrical lines for the outdoor lights, the main line for which also snaked through the beds kind of wherever there was a spot.

And then… looking it over, we realized that we’d only put the pool sand filter and pump for the koi pond where it was because it was the only spot we could fit it around some existing banana trees. It wasn’t the ideal spot – it wasn’t even a good spot – but it was what we had to work with. Finding a better site for the filter and pump now, while everything was dug up made a lot more sense than leaving it where it was.

You can see where this is going. At this point, there’s now hundreds of dollars worth of PVC pipe and fittings, low voltage electrical line (with new fixtures to follow, I’m sure), and even more hundreds of dollars of plants to put in, while the beds are being cleared back to the bare dirt except where established plants may come back. We’re facing at least a couple of LONG weekends busting butt to get the watering system back in, to get the pond filter back online, to get the lights back in place. Not to mention that we so overfilled the two 96 gallon garbage carts provided by the city that the truck wouldn’t take them; we’ll have to remove some of the excess before Tuesday in the hope that it will be deemed “acceptable”. Meanwhile, we’ve got another couple of cartloads (at least) just of branches leaves, and other yard waste – on top of the normal household garbage. And no place to put any of it until the garbage folks take the other loads away.

Still, I have to say when it’s all over, it ought to be worth it. The pump will be completely hidden, we’ll have more room for plants than ever, and perhaps by summer 2011 everything will have grown back big enough to really screen the yard.

Not that this changed really in the last several months, but it’s been a while since I filled out one of these to see where all I’ve been.

Click here to create your own.

It’s two days before Christmas, and this is usually the time of year, rather than Thanksgiving or New Year’s, that I take stock of the year and life. Thanksgiving is really a Yankee holiday, anyway, and New Year’s always has seemed too busy with other things – in recent years, getting ready for the Christmas Bird Count, but even before that, it seemed like something was always going on. But nobody does much in the days leading up to Christmas, anyway (except last minute shopping) so it’s a good time for reflection.

As much as most people I know and I like to complain about this, that, or the other, we are all incredibly lucky and have so much to be grateful for. By a chance of fate, we were all born in the (loosely defined) West, where (compared with where about 75% or so of the world lives) we have unparalleled freedom. Even in a country where several million of us are denied the right to legally marry our partners, we at least don’t have to worry about being taken away in the middle of the night for protesting injustice. Though most of us don’t have every single thing we want, most of do have the things we need – food, clean safe water, shelter, clothing… Some of us may lose our jobs temporarily, but the chances are, in the long haul, we’ll all be fine; millions around the world will never have a job doing more than providing subsistence for themselves and their families.

I grumble sometimes about the quirks Jonathan has, but at the same time I can’t imagine what my life would now be like without him. For every little problem that comes up from a quirk, there are at least a dozen moments of joy that more than compensate.

I have a good circle of friends who enjoy my company and whose company I enjoy as well. Whenever I gripe that I haven’t gotten to see people lately, I need to remember that at the same time there’s nobody (that I know of, at least) who really detests me and I don’t have to watch my back around others.

I have only minor health complaints, none of which seems that serious, and the same is true of everyone in my immediate family – including parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews. Having lost a first cousin (just three years older than me) a year ago to a heart condition and an aunt to complications of renal failure, cancer, diabetes, and too many other problems to list, that’s no small feat.

And it’s not that I live a charmed life. As I noted above, most everyone I know has plenty to be grateful for. Christmas is supposed to be about the arrival of hope, but that’s something I have in abundance; it’s still a good time to be reminded of that hope, and all that’s good in our lives, not the petty stuff that we can’t control anyway and usually isn’t worth getting worked up about.

For all my friends out there – not that many of you will find this message, since my blog readership is relatively small – I hope you have as joyous a Christmas holiday as I hope to.

I hate being snarky. OK, I obviously don’t completely hate it, since I do it often enough, but I don’t really like myself as much when I am. Still, every once in a while I have to vent and I guess it’s better to do it here than at the object of my, well, snarkiness.

One of the good things about the Internet and all the profusion of socializing (a broadly applicable term) sites is that it enables people who can be shy in public to open up a bit and talk with strangers, something they might never do in person. Still, online or off, I think certain customs should be observed. Most sites allow a user to bookmark certain profiles of people you find hot interesting, which is fine. Many sites also allow you to tag “friends”, which is a reciprocal action; if I tag you as a friend, and you accept that tag, then each of us is listed as the other’s friend. If it’s not accepted, then… it doesn’t show on either profile.

So I keep the lists separately. The people on my “friends” list are people I’m friends with – usually offline, though for long-term online friendships I’ve certainly made exceptions. My bookmark/hot list, on sites that allow such, are separate. As they should be. And I make it clear in my profiles, on sites with “friend” type lists, that if you don’t know me already, and you’ve never even said hello online, and I get a “friend” request from you… it’s likely to be ignored or returned with a “Who the hell are you?” note. And yet I get them, over and over. Obviously, it’s people who’ve looked at part of my profile (my pictures? surely not) and didn’t bother to read most of it.

I swear, the next one that does that, I’m going to go off on.

Still, it pales in comparison to the cheekiness I had yesterday. One such “social” site allows you to sign a member’s “guestbook” with one of several pre-selected comments (I like you, you’re hot, you’re handsome, etc.). It’s a nice way to halfway introduce yourself to someone, and if the person you tag wishes, he can either sign your guestbook in return, or initiate a real conversation (or just say thank you). This one said (first words, I swear): “I’m a competitive bodybuilder, looking for sponsors. Interested?”

Leaving aside the vaguely whore-like aspects of asking people who think you’re hot to pay you money, since when did the expense of his hobbies become my concern? I know taking all those steriods supplements gets expensive, but then, whose hobbies don’t? I’m a birder; a good pair of Swarovski binoculars would set me back about $1,700. A nice Leica Televid spotting scope is another $4,000. A decent, lightweight but solid tripod and head? Add in $600 or so. And like Mr. Muscleboy, birding involves travel, so add in all those travel expenses too.

I don’t go around asking for contributions to the optics fund, and honestly I’m appalled at the gall he had in asking… but then, I guess, there are people with gall out there and some of them get what they’re looking for. I guess that’s what separates the whores from the rest of us.