"The ten most overrated things in the world [SLIDESHOW]."

Let me guess. Is one of the things internet slideshows? Top 10 lists?

Noted author and essayist Christopher Hitchens once said that the four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics.

First sentence at the link. So much better than anything in the slide show that you've got to click through. I miss Christopher Hitchens. He wasn't overrated.

ADDED: After reading the comments (and writing some), I've gotten to the point where I can give the first 3 of my top 10 most overrated things in the world:

1. Sitting in an audience, listening/watching something on a stage/screen.
2. Working at some fucking job.
3. Bruce Springsteen.

Why are we so hostile to non-natives?

"Giant cannibal shrimp more than a FOOT long invade waters off Gulf Coast."

The black-and-white-striped shrimp can grow 13 inches long and weigh a quarter-pound, compared to eight inches and a bit over an ounce for domestic white, brown and pink shrimp.

Scientists fear the tigers will bring disease and competition for native shrimp. Both, however, can be eaten by humans.

‘They’re supposed to be very good,’ Pam Fuller, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN. ‘But they can get very large, sorta like lobsters.’

They're very good. They're the size of lobsters. Does everything have to be a problem? Can't we just say thanks?

This reminds me of #Asian Carp on an American Rampage# — the Chinese puzzlement at our anguish over Asian carp, their favorite food fish.

"My love of footnotes as art form, as commentary, as the place to embed sneaky and wry asides..."

"... that do not belong in the text, only grew and grew through childhood, until I reached college."

A woman who loves footnotes so much she had "n.b." tattooed... on her foot. The woman, s.e. smith, links to Wikipedia to help people understand "n.b." — nota bene — and Wikipedia just gives us the literal and semi-literal translation: "note well" or "pay attention"/"take notice."

Now, I've listened the the audiobook of David Foster Wallace reading "Consider the Lobster" about a thousand times — n.b. David Foster Wallace gluttonously indulged in footnotes — and he does an aside:

n.b. - which means "nota bene," which the audio commandant wants me to tell you means "note well," but actually really means "by the way"...

Here's a reddit discussion of that Wallace aside. They seem to think he's joking. But what's the joke? Is it that people use "n.b." when there's no reason to pay any more note to the thing after the "n.b." than to anything else in the text? Or is it not a joke, and Wallace is giving the abbreviation the meaning it has genuinely acquired in use over the years, which is to designate an aside?

At this point, you might wonder whether Wallace is a prescriptivist or a descriptivist when it comes to word usage, and the cool thing about that is there's an essay in the "Consider the Lobster" essay collection* — it's not all about lobsters! — that has about a million things to say on that subject, but since it's not one of the essays in the audiobook — which is an abridgment — his resolution of that issue is not lodged in my brain. The essay is "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Key passage:

Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is thus both a collection of information and a piece of Democratic rhetoric.⁴⁹ Its goal is to recast the Prescriptivist's persona: The author presents himself as an authority not in an autocratic sense but in a technocratic sense. And the technocrat is not only a thoroughly modern and palatable image of Authority but also immune to the charges of elitism/classism that have hobbled traditional Prescriptivism.

--------------------------

⁴⁹(meaning literally Democratic — it Wants Your Vote)

Thus, I take it, Wallace wasn't joking. He was seeking votes for assigning the meaning "by the way" to "n.b."

--------------------------

*Even though I have the audiobook of "Consider the Lobster" and the paperback of the unabridged text, I bought the Kindle version just now so I could cut and paste text for blogging purposes. But when I made my first attempt at copying, I got a pop-up window — the first I've ever seen in a Kindle book — "Due to publisher restrictions, copy is not allowed for this title." That was pretty annoying. I found a few key words — hypereducated snoot egghead — Googled and found copyable text here. Feel free to read it free. N.b., it has 52 footnotes [at the free link; 124 footnotes in the Kindle text].

"The worst thing I ever smelled was a 40-yard dumpster full of shrimp shells fermenting outside of a cannery in Kodiak."

"I came very close to losing my lunch. You could actually see a heavier-than-air fog of ammonia rolling out of the top of the bin, but I wasn't allowed to puke. I worked for the company that picked up all the cannery offal and recycled it into useful products. I actually deserve some kind of eco-medal."

Said Tyrone Slothrop at 8:33 PM in the comments on my post mocking the notion that it's romantic to roast lobster on a stick in your fireplace. That made me 1. wonder what's the worst thing I've ever smelled and 2. realize I'd never smelled anything truly awful. I remember one time, back in the 70s in NYC, we bought some expensive cheese at Dean & DeLuca, and it smelled exactly like shit. We thought we were sophisticated. At first. When we ate it. Then we thought we were stupid. And we stopped eating it. But if you want to compare notes with Tyrone Slothrop, you've obviously got to come up with something that smells worse than shit.

***

Don't criticize me for writing a blog post on this subject. Do you realize that I'm not allowed to work today? I'm literally forbidden by the state. There was something I wanted to do too!

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene says: "I think furlough day is tomorrow??" Oh, that's true! It's Wednesday. I keep thinking it's Thursday. Okay, then. I'm all about transforming the syllabus!

A purportedly romantic idea: roasting lobster in the fireplace.

Ugh! And look at the picture! The same blogger — at The Atlantic website — who tells us it will be sexy to roast a big old lobster tail at the end of a stick the way you'd toast a marshmallow also attempts to artfully arrange a photographic still-life depicting said lobster-on-a-stick and includes — in the upper right-hand corner — a sculpted ass. An ass! This romantic snack is ass.

Is the blogger — a woman — suggesting this as something a man would try to get a woman excited about or is a woman supposed to cajole a man into this nonsense? Who is this for? It's quite disgusting. Lobster juice dripping into the ashes. What's that going to look and smell like the next day?

Now that I look at what I've written, maybe there is something sex-related about that last question. You meet someone. You're trying to decide what you're interested in doing. Maybe you ask yourself: What's that going to look and smell like the next day?

At the Summer Grass Café...

... you don't have to talk about lobsters anymore.

"The enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held every late July in the state’s midcoast region..."

"The assigned subject of this article is the 56th Annual MLF, July 30 to August 3, 2003, whose official theme was 'Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster'":

2003 Festival highlights: concerts by Lee Ann Womack and Orleans, annual Maine Sea Goddess beauty pageant, Saturday’s big parade, Sunday’s William G. Atwood Memorial Crate Race, annual Amateur Cooking Competition, carnival rides and midway attractions and food booths, and the MLF’s Main Eating Tent, where something over 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught Maine lobster is consumed after preparation in the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker near the grounds’ north entrance. Also available are lobster rolls, lobster turnovers, lobster sauté, Down East lobster salad, lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, and deep-fried lobster dumplings. Lobster Thermidor is obtainable at a sit-down restaurant called The Black Pearl on Harbor Park’s northwest wharf. A large all-pine booth sponsored by the Maine Lobster Promotion Council has free pamphlets with recipes, eating tips, and Lobster Fun Facts. The winner of Friday’s Amateur Cooking Competition prepares Saffron Lobster Ramekins, the recipe for which is available for public downloading at www.mainelobsterfestival.com. There are lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet claws that wobble on springs.

I'm doing a lobster theme today, following the pattern of previous theme days on this blog, which is to work a theme only after I've perceived an accidental theme present in the first 2 or more posts.

Putting "lobster" through a Google news search just now, I see that "Lobster fest starts today in Rockland." An odd coincidence:

Lobster lovers and others come from all over the U.S. and other countries to the volunteer-run festival, which [the prez of the festival] estimated generates as much as $2 million annually for the area economy.

“It’s gained so much national and international recognition,” she said.

She said many of this year’s showcase activities — such as the crowning of the Sea Goddess from a court culled from local girls — are tried-and-true crowd pleasers which have been around for decades. Others, such as Sunday’s “Real Maine Man” pageant, are relatively new.

Last year, organizers had a “Real Maine Man” cooking contest, but they’ve upped the ante this summer. Cash prizes totaling $225 will be awarded to those who can prove their Mainely manliness after competing in categories such as Best Real Maine Man Outfit, Talent, and Feats of Strength and Endurance....

There also will be a parade, an art show, Navy ship tours, and a lobster crate race, among many other activities planned over the five-day festival.

But the star of the show, Kolmosky emphasized, is everyone’s favorite sea creature.

“I think the highlight of the festival is the delectable Maine lobster,” she said.

One must-see is what organizers proudly refer to as the “World’s Greatest Lobster Cooker,” a behemoth that can cook 1,600 pounds of lobsters every 15 minutes at its peak capacity.

“It’s a show in itself,” Kolmosky said.

That's from today's news article. The quote that starts this post is from a much darker account of the festival, David Foster Wallace's 2004 essay "Consider the Lobster." Wallace has a lot to say about the World’s Greatest Lobster Cooker:

So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is it all just a matter of individual choice?...

[T]he whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of [G]ourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.

There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site. As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.

He's just getting rolling at that point... just getting roiling. It's a festival of agonizing over there at the link.

"OK, I understand the psychologists' point. I do think they should consider seeing a psychiatrist about their explosive anger."

Funny line from an excellent post about how the NYT is overreacting to some stuff in Wikipedia revealing things about the Rorschach test.

***

And, hey, this one's a lobster or you're crazy...



... and I see an invisible woman in a blue bra and green stockings with yellow pincer-hands...

Jeffrey Goldberg says "Dahlia Lithwick is a Haiku Genius."

"She's condensed a week of Senate blather about Sotomayor into exquisite little poems."

I'm no poetry expert — maybe you are — but I don't see why these should count as even marginally good haiku. I suppose the whole thing is that it was done at all — making Senators' statements about Sotomayor into haiku.

Here are some teaching materials on haiku, focusing specifically on haiku in English:

The haiku poet cultivates awareness so that s/he may experience some unusually forceful impact coming from ordinary life or from everyday surroundings....

In 'haiku spirit' the poet adopts a self-effacing and faithful attitude towards the object s/he perceives. S/he does not set out to be moralistic or didactic or judgemental. The haiku form has been used successfully to write adages and epigrams, but because the aim of adages and epigrams is to mould opinion they are not haiku in spirit....

[M]any successful haiku result from a long process of draughting and re-writing, during which the poet clings hard to the original perception.

The pain is to give readers the means to feel as the poet her/himself felt at the time, or maybe differently, without any explicit (and so directive) statements about actual feelings. Some typical attitudes are humility, serenity, compassion, acceptance of transience and man's lonely state, joy in resurgence and company, wonder, wistfulness, as well as humour of a whimsical and sometimes paradoxical kind.

Now, those "typical attitudes" are so obviously not what one finds among Senators that the idea of writing bad haiku in the voice of a Senator is a very good one, but if you're doing bad, be really bad — there's a blog, Bad Haiku — and I think — I think — that would have to exclude anything that Jeffrey Goldberg would proclaim as the work of a genius.

***

And I know, I know, I know: How can you take advice about taste from someone who writes "S/he" and "her/himself"?

UPDATE: And curses! What a missed opportunity to keep up what began as an accidental Theme of the Day. Permit me to compensate via this update:

1.
Dead Sea Shells Worship
Lobster Fangs In Hades Door
While I Sleep Dead

2.
Lobster and artichokes
Slather with spirits
Canine hurls protein yak

3.
Snip my buttons off,
With your shearing claw, my sweet
Lobster in my pants

4.
Though warm tasty and
delicious, urine should not
be served with lobster

5.
Such a tasty meat,
Drenched in succulent butter
Lobster dies for me

All right. Enough. I am satisfied.

UPDATE #2: Jeffrey Goldberg is not amused.

Things found behind the radiator.

I tend to put magazines on the radiator when I'm clearing away the clutter that accumulates on the dining table, so it didn't surprise me that an old magazine had slipped into the rarely inspected space between the radiator and the wall. But if, at the point when the magazine had been spotted, you had asked me what old magazine I'd hoped had hidden out back there and escaped my routine recycling, I'd have said the issue of The Atlantic with the David Foster Wallace essay "Host."

I have the essay in the book "Consider the Lobster," but the book had taken the magazine's big pages that had little colored boxes around text and wide margins with corresponding colored boxes of additional text and reduced it to small black-and-white clutter, and I'd been avoiding reading it for years.

I exult when the magazine is the issue of The Atlantic with "Host." I display the layout, note the colors, and bitch about the book.

Response: "It's like hypertext."

I look on line and immediately find the essay with all the boxes moved out of sight and words and phrases neatly hyperlinked. How deflating! Is the magazine discovery nothing at all — or nothing more than a prompt to Google the old essay, which now all of you have too?

I scan the magazine version. There's something nice about the way they found to graphically depict hyperlinking, I suppose, but more than anything, I think about how much I love reading on line, fully at ease with clicking through things I'm in the middle of and flowing all over everywhere for hours, completely enthralled, perhaps never to return to the place where I started. There's nothing at all like the copy of "Consider the Lobster," sitting on my bedside table for years, reminding me of the unread essay it contains.

"Movies have long relied on half-cooked turkeys colored with motor oil, fruit made of plastic, and ice cream carved from Crisco..."

The work of movie food stylists. (Did you know there's a new movie with Meryl Streep playing Julia Child? It's called "Julie & Julia" — and the "Julie" is a blogger.)

A good [movie food] stylist always has enough replacement food. That’s not so easy to plan for. Often, no one knows what part of a dish an actor will eat until the scene is shot or how many takes the director will want....

Johanna Weinstein, a food stylist based in Toronto, said, “It’s guerilla kind of stuff because you are all about making quantity so the actors have enough of the one thing they have to eat 100 times and then correcting things on the fly.”

And things change fast. For the 2000 movie “American Psycho,” Ms. Weinstein had prepared several vegetarian dishes for the actor Willem Dafoe, who, she was told, didn’t eat meat. But at the last minute, he decided his character was a carnivore. In deference to his Method acting technique, she had to send out for steaks and figure out how to cook them on the set.

What a complicated, brilliant way for a committed vegetarian to finally get some steak — and look even more committed!

A few more tidbits:

There are a thousand little ways to make it easy on the actors.. Parsley needs to be used sparingly so it doesn’t get stuck in teeth. Toast can’t be so toasty that it crunches too loudly. Low-fat options like apple slices need to be tucked on top of a high-calorie dish that an actor has to nibble on repeatedly....

Then there are live creatures on a set that must be dealt with properly. On “Titanic,” which was filmed in Mexico, the food was constantly sprayed down with pesticide to keep the flies off....

On the set of “Julie & Julia,” the lobsters posed a special challenge. Ms. Adams appears to plunge two live lobsters into a pot of steaming water. The steam is actually a cool mist, and just off camera representatives from the American Humane Association monitored the creatures’ health.

"Lobsters? This is how I wind up after leading a just life? In a tank on Third Avenue?"

"The Lord works in strange ways... Take Phil Pinchuck. The man keeled over with an aneurysm, he’s now a hamster. All day, running at the stupid wheel. For years he was a Yale professor. My point is he’s gotten to like the wheel. He pedals and pedals, running nowhere, but he smiles."

Tags.

You may have noticed that I've started making more specific tags -- the various labels at the end of each post. There are so many posts on this blog that huge numbers build up in the broad tag categories. The "Obama" tag has 896 posts.

So I've decided to get more specific -- with that "boring Obama speech" tag I created today and "Obama songs," things like that. There is a danger I'll make a new tag and then forget to use it again, like "shut up and believe." I sort of remember to use "written strangely early in the morning," but probably not as often as I write something strangely early in the morning.

When I first started doing tags, I tried to keep it general, with things like "animals." Now, when I have a post about an animal, I make a tag for the specific animal. Then, I do a search for all the old posts with that animal, and I'm always amused when some particular animal has been the subject of a lot of old posts. Of course, there are many old posts for "dog" and "squirrel," but I was delighted to find out, after I did a new "alligator" post, that I had 10 posts that could take the "alligator" tag. I had no idea I'd been writing about dolphins.

And today, when I created the "lobster" tag, I saw that I had 16 posts that deserved it. I clicked on the tag to see a page of miscellaneous old posts. I'd forgotten the time we murdered a lobster for dinner. (Recipe for Chilled Pea Soup with Lobster, Crème Fraiche and Wilted Watercress reachable through that link.) "We were just squealing and shooting photographs a la Annie Hall." I wrote that back in 2005, so it not only pre-dated tags, it pre-dated YouTube. It makes me want to do this now:



I love all the many ways the blog lets me reach into the past 5 years.

"Intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual..."

I want to talk about this passage from a footnote in the David Foster Wallace essay "Consider the Lobster" (at page 240 in the paperback essay collection):

My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place or context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all... To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant, but essentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

My questions:

1. Is Wallace saying anything about travel in general, or just intranational travel, or just travel that deserves the label "tourism," or just tourism that is also "mass"? If he's not saying something about travel in general, what is it about this subset of travel that deserves this special loathing?

2. What do these feelings have to do with being an American, and what is "pure" and "late-date" about it? Haven't there been "alien, ignorant, greedy" travelers all over the place and throughout the ages?

3. As we know, Wallace was deeply depressed and ultimately committed suicide, and is that the main thing that passage means?

4. On page 237, Wallace tells us that "lobsters are basically giant sea insects" -- lobsters and insects are all arthropods -- and that they are "garbagemen of the sea, eaters of dead stuff," so if we become "an insect on a dead thing," we're like the lobster, right? And therefore we shouldn't eat lobster, presumably. Or should we? We are after all hateful, in that view, so why spare the lobster?

"Al the Shoesalesman Gets a Tax Cut."

Nicely done ad and website with easy to use calculator -- not that I believed the number I was given.

ADDED: This post is red meat lobster for my other readers.

AND: I just rewatched. In the end, Al says, sarcastically, "This is gonna be tough," then: "Obama!" I feel sorry for an older, family man who only makes $20,000 -- and I know this Al is the fictional TV-show character -- but really, is it okay to think of elections in terms of a personal deal for each voter, so that it's obvious that you vote for the candidate who offers you the most money? Quite aside from whether we believe we'll get what we are promised, isn't there something fundamentally wrong with thinking in such self-centered terms? Notice, too, that this idea is out of keeping with the statement Obama made to Joe the Plumber, that Joe ought not just to think of himself but to see the value of benefiting everyone.

On the Santa Monica pier.

The amusement park:



Things you might not notice unless you go to the enlargement: pigeons on the roller coaster, toddler has a red squirt gun, the man in front is not eating a hot dog (but a striated pastry of some sort).

Note: We see men in shorts here, but I don't disapprove. It's the beach and the shorts are longish. Many men are wearing heavy blue jeans, which seems unwise. I think the striated pastry guy has the best fashion sense: lightweight, light-colored, long pants.

The merry-go-round:



The Lobster — a pretty good restaurant, with a great view:

Did you feel that 5.4 earthquake?

I was saying I'd like to experience an L.A. earthquake... nothing destructive, but something. So there was this big earthquake today. And I felt nothing! I don't know why? Do you not feel it if you're driving in a car? Do you not feel it if you're eating lobster and truffles at The Four Seasons?

"Looking for la langosta blanca - the white lobster."

There's a town where no one needs a real job, because cocaine, tossed overboard by smugglers, washes up on the beach.

"People here now go beachcombing for miles, they walk until the find packets. Even the lobster fisherman now go out with the pretence of fishing but really they are looking for la langosta blanca - the white lobster."

(Via Metafilter.)

Well, what would you do if you happened to live there? Remember, you'd be with all the other people who lived there. Outsiders flow through town, eager to give you cash for whatever you want to sell. It's your decision: Take as much money as you want, use as much cocaine as you want. What would you do? You'd be all:

Why are we eating so much shrimp?

Shrimponomics. Not only are we eating a lot of shrimp, but we're concocting a lot of explanations for why we're eating shrimp.

Before reading the piece, let me just say that I think people think they should eat more fish, but they don't like fish, so they enlarge the concept to "seafood" and eat the one thing they like that isn't as expensive as the one thing in the category that they really like (lobster).

Reading Stephen D. Levitt's analysis:

Interestingly, women in general were only half as likely to give supply explanations as were men....

Oh, damn. Caught being a woman again!

Levitt thinks the answer is on the supply side:

I’m not exactly sure, but here is what I can glean from the Internet. A key factor is that prices have dropped sharply. According to this academic article, the real price of shrimp fell by about 50 percent between 1980 and 2002. When quantity rises and prices are falling, that has to mean that producers have figured out cheaper and better ways to produce shrimp. This article in Slate argues that there has been a revolution in shrimp farming. Demand factors may also be at work, but they don’t seem to be at the heart of the story.

Why don't they seem to be at the heart? Because Levitt is a man?

"Christopher Hitchens famously put picnics on his list of life's most overrated things, alongside lobster, champagne and a certain sex act."

So begins an article titled "Abandon tired picnic dishes." Do you: 1. Keep reading to discover exciting new picnic dishes? 2. Google to discover exactly which sex act Hitchens thought was overrated?

I Googled... and gave some thought to the possibility of all four things coming into play on a particular occasion. Why not invite your paramour out on the perfect anti-Hitchens date?