In addition to a style that defined the oxymoronic “Soft Rock”, Bread was also infamous for its very erudite lyrics in an era when erudition was not (and frankly still isn’t) a big plus. They made one attempt to counter that image with “Baby I’m-A Want You”, which to me, just sounded like a mistake. But still, hearing the lyrics to “Diary” sung again while in the Frozen Foods department showed me that this one song was not just erudite, it really was totally wimpy.

I found her diary underneath a tree.
And started reading about me.

Okay, this starts out a little creepy. I mean who goes snooping into another person’s diary? Of course, nowadays when you DON’T want to keep a secret, you write it in a blog, so the dead-tree diaries are rarer and much more obviously meant to be kept secret than they used to be. I was rather young when this song came out but I do NOT honestly recall ‘leaving your diary underneath a tree’ being the pre-internet equivalent of putting it on YouTube.

The words she’s written took me by surprise
You’d never read them in her eyes.

Now this should have been the first warning sign.

They said that she had found the love she waited for.
Wouldn’t you know it, she wouldn’t show it.

At this point, you already know this is not going to wendell end well.

When she, confronted with the writing there,
Simply pretended not to care,
I passed it off as just in keeping with
Her total disconcerting air.

Now that has to be one of the most perfectly grammatically structured quatrains in the history of Pop Music. Note the use of the subordinate clause “confronted with the writing there”, and the complex prepositional “just in keeping with”, not to mention the 25¢ word “disconcerting”; nobody in Rock and Roll does things like that. (And probably for good reason).

And though she tried to hide
The love that she denied,
Wouldn’t you know it, she wouldn’t show it.

That’s one for the Department of Redundancy Department.
In fact, it’s a TRIPLE redundancy (“tried to hide” “denied” “wouldn’t show it”). Sigh.

And as I go through my life, I will give to her, my wife,
All the sweet things that I can find.

After all, if she’s already planning the wedding, then he can start planning the honeymoon. That’s the way they did things in 1972, right?

I found her diary underneath a tree.
And started reading about me.

Repetition? No, a later incident of diary snooping. Still an invasion of privacy, even if she really loves him, but again, it was 1972… But wait…

The words began to stick and tears to flow.
Her meaning now was clear to see.
The love she’d waited for was someone else, not me

In the eloquent words of Ashton Kutcher (or somebody who wrote his character’s dialogue in “That 70′s Show”) BURN!

Cue the Dramatic Gopher

Wouldn’t you know it, she wouldn’t show it.

Of course, now, in retrospect, it’s clear that she WAS showing exactly how she felt. But I still love the phrase “disconcerting air”… I wish I’d known a woman with a disconcerting air, rather than some of the personality flaws I have had to dealt with…

And as I go through my life, I will wish for her, his wife,
All the sweet things that she can find
All the sweet things they can find

Give this guy the GOOD SPORT OF THE 70S Award because if this had happened to me, I’d never have the nerve to show my face anywhere near her again. I’d have moved out of state.

What? You don’t remember/never heard this song? Here ya go…

Hot Dog Buns are truly the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, and please let’s get past the old mismatched-quantity-hot-dogs-vs-buns conundrum/standup-comedy-bit, since no matter how many wieners are in a package, the optimum for buns will always be a multiple of 4 (most often 8 or 12)*. Because here you have the buns, baked together in a block of four, and as you pull one from the block, you find it partially sliced in the middle so you can fold it open and drop in a wiener without separating the bun into two pieces. Who thought of that minor marvel of convenience? And who made it work (even if it doesn’t always work)? And why can’t I find a picture of one of these wondrous machines on the web? (I have found three patents for such machines, one from the 1950s, one from the 1970s and one from the 1990s, which means that hot dog bun slicing technology continues to move forward!)

On the other hand, one ‘modern convenience’ that simply does not work is the squeeze bottle of Pickle Relish. Dribbling pickle juice and a bottleneck of relish (no matter how large the opening) that always releases with a burst of way more relish than you really wanted (and not always where you wanted). There is no way to make this work, and I have tried them all. The pump dispensers at the hot dog stand outside Costco stores work well, but the smaller ones inside 7-11s, not so much (although I have not attempted to use one of those since before the Millennium, and the last time I did, the chili dispensing pump was also less than optimum). A Costco-sized relish dispenser is out of the question for me, so good pickle relish will always require a wide-mouthed jar and a utensil (Fork or spoon? I’m not partial to one or the other. I am proudly bi-utensilish, a true sporker).

And one more thing about relish. DILL Pickle Relish is always a special treat and a taste surprise, no matter how well you know in advance what you put on the hot dog/sandwich/hamburger in question. UNLESS you ONLY use Dill Relish; then, after a certain amount of time, your picklish appetite inevitably begins yearning for the sweet stuff.

And chunky salsa (fresh in the carton, not in the jar) can be an occasional substitute for fresh tomatoes, but that wears out its welcome rather quickly (less quickly if you use Mild Salsa, but I’ve always admitted to having Gringo Taste Buds).

*I finally came to accept the quantity mismatch as a Way of Life after I started buying Hebrew National Franks that are SEVEN to a package. Seven?!? And yes, I was brainwashed by their ad campaign claiming that their wieners were of a higher quality and purity because they were Kosher. Of course, there are other things blessed by Rabbis (circumcisions, the Israeli military, Woody Allen) that I am far more dubious of… Still, I like the flavor of Hebrew Nationals far more than Ball Park, Oscar Mayer or even Farmer John Dodger Dogs (forgive me Vin Scully, but Sandy Koufax would agree with me), and I feel less guilty with their 97% Fat Free Franks or even their (Kind Of) Reduced Fat Franks and wish they had similar alternatives for their Big Honkin’ Polish Sausages, which do come FOUR to a package.

#1 This article on “how Freddie Mac halted regulatory drive”. I ended up focusing on this paragraph:

In 2005, Freddie Mac hired political consultant Frank Luntz, a Washington fixture whose specialty is choosing the right buzz words to achieve a particular goal. The records AP obtained do not cover 2005 and Freddie Mac refuses to confirm that it brought Luntz on board. But four people familiar with events at Freddie Mac at the time confirmed the Luntz hire. All four spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they fear reprisals if their names were revealed. Luntz did not respond to efforts to contact him through his office.

To some, half of that paragraph would be considered Journalistic Ass-coverage, but to me it’s explaining clearly how much the reporter knows, how much he thinks he knows and why he’s not sure. Four sources fearing reprisals if their names were revealed? Interesting…

The reporter, Pete Yost, has written a lot on political scandals over the last few years and been accused by both Republicans and Democrats of bias, which I consider a good sign, especially since he’s working for the AssPress, which, among its many sins, surgically removes all nuance from most of its content. Not a good sign is that the #1 result of a Google Search for his name is one of the accusations, at least not a good sign for Google.

#2 The “color company” Pantone (what else can you call it?) has declared Mimosa, a bright, slightly-orangish shade of yellow to be its Color of the Year for 2009. No fighting it, you are going to be Yellow next year. Just like you’ve been Blue Iris for 2008, right? Between the economic Blues, the Red States turning Blue in the election (or at least Purple) and this song that’s been earworming me all year…

If you’ve never seen this trippy video, it’s almost worth listening to the song even if you hate it. But I digress…

Of course, I had to check out just how close this Mimosa was to the Yellows and Oranges in this site’s color scheme (yes, I really did put some thought into these colors, don’t act so surprised) and found that, based on the color swath on Pantone’s own page, it averaged out very close to a 3-digit RGB of #1BF, although the same swath on other sites was closer to a #2BE. Or not #2BE. That’s a question.

#3 The Web and the Entertainment Biz have a “top hits chart” for everything, and when the two come together, you get something like “The Hitwise Top Visited US Cable Network TV Show Sites – Excluding Children’s Programming (Week ending Nov.29, 2008)” (via Cynopsis.com – warning: auto-starting video news report). “South Park” is number one in this category for the double-umpteenth week in a row, but a close #2 is “Paula’s Home Cooking” from Food Network. The Ingestibles Channel actually has 6 of the top 10 show-based sites, including “Good Eats with Alton Brown” at #8 just edging out Rachael Ray’s “30 Minute Meals”. Yay Alton!

In other news from Cynopsis.com, J.K. Rowling has legally forced Hogwarts trivia collecter Steven Vander Ark to change the title of his upcoming book from “The Harry Potter Lexicon” to “The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials”. According to the report “the new title was created using the guidelines set out by the judge in his opinion that would avoid any copyright infringements”, meaning that adding an additional 8 words to the original 4-word title makes it OK.

I could probably do a blog just commenting on stories from that site, one of the few places where “Entertainment News” doesn’t just mean gossip about a dozen pre-chosen celebrities (which is why I’m not writing for MSNBC.com these days). But then, I just received my copy of the re-published “Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People” in which, 27 years ago, I wrote two gossipy articles about long-dead celebrities, so who am I to complain?

*Now, I don’t have a prudish attitude about , but I do feel that people who overuse it or use it trivially strip the word of its truly impressive potential. Even George Carlin, whose analysis of it in his “Dirty Words” monologues was near genius, got into the bad habit of using it as a placeholder, a mere modifier of other words. But when I saw him live last year as he was putting together his last show, he did convince me of the status of being called “An Old “, or in my case, “A Fat “. But I really really don’t want to overuse the word, and creative bowdlerization often actually enhances the word’s effect. So fuck off.

What is the problem for him if somebody obsesses over the purchase of a camera? If it were a Kodak Digital Camera that Woot.com was selling for $69.95 (which was my most recent camera purchase), I’d say that person was indeed getting things seriously out of proportion. But the camera you’re linking to has a price tag of $1619, marked down from $2099, so obsessing over it and involving other people in the purchasing decision process is not unreasonable.

You see, Merlin, for eons, people had things called ‘hobbies’ and photography has been one for at least one of those eons, and these ‘hobbyists’ have gotten ‘social’ with other people (not just other hobbyists) over the stuff they own or want to own for their hobbies and this was happening long before there was a ing Internet, which is a ‘social’ medium that encourages everybody to do everything more ‘socially’. Sure, it’s annoying when you don’t share the same hobby as the person getting ‘social’ with you, but the Internet also has rather simple ways of avoiding that kind of ‘social’ contact and maybe you should have never friended at Facebook or followed at Twitter that person in the first place. And if the person annoying you isn’t even addressing you directly, then you just need to step away, click on a different window, turn up your iPod or just start thinking of the theme from “Gilligan’s Island” to drown them out with an earworm.

Actually, with that price tag, it’s likely to be more than a hobby; the intended buyer may be planning to sell pictures to the AP and has to figure out how long to depreciate the capital cost before the last newspaper goes belly up. Or it might just be someone with way too much money and way too much time on their hands and so I must ask again: why is this person anywhere near you?

I’m sorry, Merlin, if somebody bothered you by getting you involved with their relationship with a camera that’s worth more than my car, but was it really worth making up two web pages containing 27 uses of the ? And now here I am wasting my own not-all-that-valuable time to tell you to stop wasting your much more valuable time.

So please back off, Merlin, and let the camera-obsessed have their fun or I will have to make use of the most potent weapons at my personal disposal. Ridicule and derisive laughter. The Nelson Muntz “ha ha”. The Reagan-seque “there you go again”. And the assignment of the demeaning middle name – you do not want to become widely known as Merlin “Buy the ing Camera” Mann. You really, really don’t.

I’ve never had the need to say it out loud, having always taken it off the shelf when it was on sale, and on the rare occasion I talked to someone about a foodstuff where I’d used it, I always just called it Philly. At that point I realized I was dealing with the only food product available in the U.S. that sounded less special when you used the French name. But I never said the French name and I didn’t know how to say the French name.

Not a spiritual or existential crisis, but still a quandary of sorts. So, when I left the kitchen and returned to my Sino-American laptop*, the first thing I did was a websearch** for “Neufchatel”. Of course, Wikipedia came up first, but its article, while confirming something I’d long suspected, that American Neufchâtel wasn’t the same as the Original French Neufchâtel, it offered no pronunciation guidance. A link to Cheese.com was also disappointing (it didn’t mention the American version at all), the next search result, “Wisegeek”, was no help and the next link after that showed how to make Neufchâtel, but not how to say it out loud.

Finally, Epicurious.com had the too-long awaited answer: noo-shuh-tell, with the accent on either the first or third syllable (but if you talk like I do, emphasizing either will result in a semi-emphasis on the other). As I had suspected and hoped, that awkwardly positioned “f” was silent (it seems like half the consonants in French are silent, doesn’t it?), because ft it weren’t, some American regional accents would make it sound like NERF-CHATTLE. Which is another reason for the bad blood between France and some American regions.

But what this extremely trivial adventure in Web-based research showed me was that, after umpteen years of massive growth in the disorganized database called the Internet, we are NOWHERE NEAR having “everything at our fingertips”. Maybe if Neufchâtel were also a slang term for a sexual practice 99% of us consider disgusting, it would be different. And if it were, it certainly would’ve been in the first five results (I live dangerously by searching in un-filtered mode). Come to think of it, this blog post has probably set Internet Rule 34 into motion. I’m sure Neufchâtel Cheese porn would also feature Smuckers Jams & Jellies (because with a name like Smuckers, it has to be dirty), and bagels… bagels with tight little [THIS STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS HAS BEEN STOPPED BY WENDELL'S BETTER JUDGMENT]

*it’s a ThinkPad, manufactured far enough back to have an “IBM” label on it.
**after all my documented problems with Google, I don’t even verbify their corporate name anymore.

The word device has a very dangerous connotation, due to its frequent use as a military euphemism. “Yes, it was a 14 megaton nuclear device that we accidentally dropped onto the home of that blogger in Central California. No Mister President, it wasn’t nucular, it was nuclear. No, it didn’t detonate and our surveillance cameras show he is now using it to hold up one end of his kitchen table. Well, we can always hope, sir.”

But for me, after a single college course in scriptwriting in the mid-70s which included a one-and-a-half classroom hour lecture on “Plot Devices“, I can’t quite take the word seriously. So at that moment when the hard-working patriotic language guerrillas in the U.S. Army redefined the “home-made bomb” as an “improvised explosive device”, I suddenly had visions of the people who did their improvising at Second City.

Of course, this word is also severely overused in the computer field. I thought for a while that it was falling out of favor when more and more geeks shortened “peripheral device” into simply “peripheral” (an early example of the nounification of an adjective that was quitepopular before the verbification of nouns took over). But then Microsoft (which itself is the nounification of TWO adjectives) started referring to “Plug and Play Devices” which I always thought should have been called “Plug and Work Devices“, but that would’ve given the false impression that they actually work.

A common affectation among physical laborers wishing to give the impression that they are more skilled laborers is to substitute the word Device for Tool. Norm Abrams has done this at least once in every episode of The New Yankee Workshop. And many actually licensed plumbing contractors in Ohio specifically refer to “Joe the Plumber” as a total device.

There are also Rhetorical Devices, which are featured in every Wendell.Me blog post of more than one paragraph, and the military also uses the word Device to refer to “an attachment to a medal’s ribbon denoting special service, participation in a battle, or additional awards”, which can become disturbingly ironic when issued to a soldier who has been injured by an improvised explosive device. Fortunately, the latest Defense technology has succeeded in making military medals virtually impervious to irony.

Of course, there is an easily Googlable website that provides a special perspective to all this: The Museum of Unworkable Devices, which is primarily devoted to failed Perpetual Motion machines and NOT the storylines of “Heroes”.

For anything else on this subject, I’ll have to quote a former boss of mine who’d end each staff meeting with “I’ll leave you all to your own devices. Please don’t use them.”

George Carlin has passed away, expired (like a magazine subscription). It happened in the hospital so they called it a terminal episode. The insurance company will refer to it as negative patient care outcome. FUCK, he’s dead.

I admire(d) George Carlin so much, although I do not share his style, particularly his enthusiastic use of shocking language (even as it became more banal than shocking), but if there’s any time to say OH SHIT, this is it. I’ve written about him before.

The thing that was most notable to me when I saw him perform live last September (‘perform live’ – he’d point out both the redundancy and irony in that) was how he had backed away from the Angry Old Man personna in recent years to a more philosophical – the world is screwed but I’m getting through my own life pretty good so fuck ‘em – attitude. Note the evolution in this set of pictures.

My defining “Carlin Moment” was when I was in college and Saturday Night Live debuted with him as it’s first Guest Host. He did a few separate monologue bits, including his comparison of Football and Baseball, a bit that included Airport Security, Weird Bacon and Are They Dead Yet?, another that went from Blue Food to Jumbo Shrimp and one of his earliest zings on Religion.

Oddly, the one thing that inspired me the most was his few words on Oxymorons: “The term Jumbo Shrimp has always amazed me. JUMBO shrimp. What is a Jumbo Shrimp? I mean, it’s like Military Intelligence – the words don’t go together, man.” It inspired me to start collecting Oxymorons – I didn’t even know the word, Carlin didn’t use it yet, I just called them Paradoxes – by 1983 I had a list of nearly 500 that I kept tacked to my cublicle wall. In 1999, I fleshed out the list to over 2,000 so I could publish on the Web “2000 Oxymorons for the Year 2000: The OXY2K”. I REALLY apologize for the self-link, the eye-bleeding design of the list and misspelling Millennium. In George’s honor, I should fix that.

But then, it just proved to me that there was more to his skillful use of language than just Seven Words… In retrospect, the Religion bit was also food for thought that took hold much more subtly, hung around my self-conscious and made it really easy to accept that one of my future in-laws, a librarian, had founded an organization for “Evangelical Agnostics”.

I wasn’t all that upset when Bill Hicks died, because Carlin, IMO, did it better and was still around. Now that he’s gone, Lewis Black and Patton Oswalt and all the other comics I can’t remember off the top of my head who are following in George’s footsteps have so much more work to do.

Then I check Yahoo! Search. (Yes, it’s still around, stop getting ahead of yourselves, internetters) And I’m back on Page 2, #17, about where I usually was under the old domain name; mostly multiple sites for the towns named Wendell (including Wendell, Idaho) and that Furniture maker ahead of me. I’m still beating the Nobel Prize winner. And feeling a little bit guilty for that.

But now it’s time to check MSN Live Search (which I much prefer to their former Dead Search). I have struggled over the years to work my way into the Top 100 searches there, in spiteofthe fact that I (occasionally) write for MSNBC.com, and have LINKS to my articles there on my front page. If that isn’t proof that Microsoft doesn’t GET the internet, I don’t know what is. Anyway, it’s official. I have disappeared without a trace from the “wendell” search, even through searching “wendell wittler” brings this blog up as #1. But the entirety of my MSNBC.com writing is grouped at #4, behind two joke pages I had forgotten about.

Speaking of dicey algorithms, as long as I’ve dragged you so far into the triviata of my internet identity, let’s see where Ask.com put me. #9, nice… but a couple of surprise contenders ahead of me: Wendell Ferguson, Canadian Country Music Guitarist (who is funnier than I am, damn it: “Happy Songs Sell Records, Sad Songs Sell Beer”), is #2 and the Mark T. Wendell Tea Company is #7. And right behind me at #10 is wendelltextiles.com, which has fallen into the hands of a German domain squatter promoting on-line poker. ASK.COM: THE ALGORITHM STILL NEEDS SOME WORK.

Farai Chideya, something that Dr. Seuss’s Whos sang in a musical number edited out of “Horton”.

Andrei Codrescu, a French/Czech joint operation fashioned after the secret high-tech organization in “Thunderbirds”

Mandalit del Barco, the REAL forbidden dance.

Kitty Felde (who left NPR for local radio in Los Angeles, possibly after the bigwigs decided that after Cokie Roberts, they could no longer support reporters with ‘cutesy’ first names), a rather obscure predecessor to LOLCATS.

Ira Flatow, one of those macro-economic things you need to protect your retirement savings from during a recession.

Corey Flintoff, old west gunslinger whose 37 confirmed kills included 22 guys who laughed at the name “Corey”.

Anne Garrels, reportedly a British Secret Agent who rose through the ranks to become the highest ranking woman in the Nazi Party.

Steve Inskeep, that character played by Tom Poston on “Newhart”.

Renee Montagne, the fifth Musketeer.

Sylvia Poggioli, long rumored to be the mistress/brains-behind either Benito Mussolini, Tony Soprano or Mario Batali.

Snigdha Prakash – I think I accidentally ordered this once off a confusing menu in an Indian restaurant… a little too spicy for me.

Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, the result of a merger of three pharmaceutical companies based in different countries, currently attempting to market a cure for Adult Hyperactivity (the problem being it works so well, the patient’s income sharply declines and can no longer afford the medication)

Kai Ryssdal, one of those more obscure nutrients you get in an expensive multivitamin (which also reminds me of the days before Regis Philbin became ubiquitous how he’d joke that people would mispronounce his name “Ribo Flavin”… which really is a better name for him, but I digress)

(Puzzlemaster) Will Shortz (not so much known for his work on NPR, although he is there every Sunday on Weekend Edition doing the radio version of a crossword puzzle, and a very NPR name), a new line of products from Fruit of the Loom.

Joanne Silberner, a newfangled kitchen appliance for putting grillmarks on paninis.

Lakshmi Singh, a direction from a seriously drunk vocal coach.

(I hate to do essentially the same joke twice in a row, but…)
Sandra Tsing Loh… sweet chariot.

Eric Westervelt, a region of Africa next to the Eastervelt.

Daniel Zwerdling – I wouldn’t know, I’ve never zwerdled.

4. Barry Williams
In the latter part of the 1970s, the only actor named Barry more prominent than Mr. Morse was the kid who played Greg on The Brady Bunch, very likely motivating a lot of young men named Greg to change it to something like Barack. Or Wendell.

3. Barry White
There have been several notable Barrys in pop music, like McGuire, whose “Eve of Destruction” protest song was an eerily inaccurate prediction of Armageddon. And Gibb, eldest of the Brothers Gibb (aka Bee Gees) who sold millions of records by adding falsetto vocals to a disco beat. But one of the most successful, as well as the most famous black guy named Barry at the time, was Barry White, whose pre-hiphop ‘seducto-rapping’ and soaring-string-sectioned Love Unlimited Orchestra was a rather odd mutation of R&B music at the time, but very successful until a thousand parodies knocked it down to size. Anyone with aspirations of anything beyond “scoring with dumb girls” had to run away from that image.

2. Barry Goldwater
Sure, what better namesake for a young, black, kinda-good-looking and solidly Liberal aspiring future politician than the very white 1964 Election Loser and Spiritual Father of the Reaganistas who looked 60 in his 40′s and did so much to make black rimmed glasses desperately uncool for decades.

1. Barry Manilow
Come on, Barry Manilow. BARRY MANILOW. BARRY FREAKING MANILOW. What more can I say?

If the Barry-named role models were bad in 1980, here are five more who have emerged in the years since that have clearly shown Obama’s abandonment of the name to be one of his best decisions:

5. Barry Humphries
Okay, not a lot of people know the name of the Man Behind Dame Edna, but that doesn’t make it any better.

4. Dave Barry
It’s not just guys with the given name of Barry who have given the name a bad name, but also surnames, as almost perfectly reflected by the current archetype of humor writers, who has declared that “Boogers Are My Beat”, and must remind us constantly when he “Is Not Making This Up”

3. Marion Barry
And if surnames are fair game, then Mr. Obama is more than justified in keeping a thousand-mile distance from the disgraced but indestructible Washington D.C. politician.

2. Barry Bonds
The Asterisked Home Run King is probably the most famous famous Guy Named Barry in the world at this moment, and that is not a good thing. And it’s just a little scary that the Before picture of him here does superficially resemble the Young Barry Obama.

1. Barry vs. The Tick
This episode of the cult favorite superhero’s adventures (animated version) pretty much nailed down the concept that Barry Is A Dumb Name for me. In this, Barry was an aspiring superhero who took on the name “The Tick” just as the Real Tick (who had no other identity) was gaining prominence. I agree with this reviewer that this was the funniest “Tick” episode of any format ever, piling on the Superheroes Private Club (and the semi-attached Sidekick Lounge), the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight and other wild concepts and characters on top of the Attack of the Seriously Pissed Guy Named Barry. And it’s clear that the character would not have worked with an obviously less cool name (Fred or or Clyde… or Wendell) or more cool name (Ethan or Josh or Dylan) or a more generic name (John or Bill or Tom). Barry was perfect for this semi-super wannabe, and that’s why it is no good for anyone aiming for the Presidency.

Next week, a look at the secret relationship between Hillary Clinton and the recently departed Sir Edmund Hillary.