Calendrical studies in the pool at the Y this morning:

— It’s a leap year this year.
— [overhears, cannot let this stand, starts shaking head no]
— [takes notice] No?
— No.
— Are you sure?
— Yeah. They’re only in even-numbered years. Divisible by four.
— Oh. But February’s still the shortest month, right?
— [implied facepalm] Yes. [resumes swimming]

Note: Actually they’re not always in years divisible by four. The exceptions are years ending in 00 that are not divisible by 400. So while 2000 was a leap year, 1800 and 1900 weren’t, nor will 2100 be. But in our lifetimes, the rule is solid.

From Crimewave, the mid-eighties Sam Raimi movie written by the Coen Brothers:

RENALDO THE HEEL   Well, maybe I’m a heel.

VIC AJAX   Maybe I’m a guy who hates heels.

RENALDO THE HEEL   Maybe I’m a heel who hates guys who hate heels.

I chance to see this scene on TV as a kid, at an impressionable age, I’m guessing eleven or twelve. (Almost certainly on cable, i.e. at someone else’s house.) I never knew what the movie was, but the above dialogue fragment has stuck in my mind for what, like twenty years? I only recently think to Google the phrase “hates guys who hate heels” and am overjoyed to discover that it was a Raimi/Coens flick I’d unknowingly seen — and that Bruce Campbell was the heel! Retroactive geekout!

YES! The US Postal Service may cut back to a five-day delivery week! Just like Canada Post! Come over to the dark side! Hey you can save even more money by doing like our delivery route drones do and don’t bother delivering packages either. Don’t even attempt to bring them around to recipients’ addresses. Just dump them down at the post office without even leaving a delivery notice, and let it fall to the recipients to stop by the post office to ask if any packages are waiting. As has happened to us four times this month. Perhaps more — not sure how many Xmas presents were sent back or dead-lettered after unwittingly never being picked up. (At least two.)

An envelope from the reptiles at the IRS arrives in the mail today. Right there at the mailbox I am instantly nervous and in need of a drink of water. They mean business when they take the time and expense to send me unbidden international mail, turn that lidless eye outside their borders. I open the envelope in grand mal wince mode, expecting a gut-knotting dollar figure and a chilly return envelope. It turns out to not be bad news. My sigh of relief sends the drapery fluttering. It is simply a letter reminding me that the X dollars of interest they were kind enough to pay me in 2008 (don’t ask) qualifies as taxable income. How ouroboric! Of course, I will be paying that tax not back to them but to Canada, once Accountant Awesome does that thing he does. I have to end this paragraph now because every sentence I devote to tales of international tax arcana subtracts a year from my life — and from the middle of it.

The late John Updike, “Sonic Boom”:

Our world is far from frightening; I
No longer strain to read the sky
Where moving fingers (jet planes) fly.
Our world seems much too tame to die.

And if it does, with one more pop,
I shan’t look up to see it drop.

After work tonight I drive to the States and go into Buffalo, drive around parts of the city for what ends up being a couple of hours, shopping, running errands, grabbing food. Doing my small part to help stimulate the mummified corpse of the U.S. economy. I buy only essentials: tea, books, bourbon (no TN whiskey this time, the store is plum out of Dickel), and a long-needed replacement pair of big fat fuck-off headphones (MDR-V700s again, my old phones are almost toast, not sure yet whether the new ones’ll be better or worse at spying on ambulances). Driving through Buffalo by myself feels odd now; as an experience it kind of time-warps me back to 2004, clammily. On the twilight drive over my soundtrack is monopolized by Auto-Tune Axl — for some reason not really worth exploring, Chinese Democracy only sounds good to me inside a car. On the dark and late drive home I hear Kurt Masur and the Orchestre National de France on the radio doing the Ninth live; this is followed by an agreeable hail of plinkety pianistic Schubert, dissolving into jags of static the closer I get to Hamilton. (Once you get to Hamilton the static is the best thing on.)

Annie Dillard:

The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world — if only from time to time.

(This space used to contain a two-hundred-fifty-word excerpt from part one of Dickens’s “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain”. It was a big fat heavy slablet of gothically descriptive winter-weather writing. The nighttime wintry miseries of people in the streets, travelers by land, mariners by sea, etc. This excerpt is no longer here [as of mid-Feb 2009] because I don’t care for it anymore. It sounded silly and portentous, struck kind of an awkward tone. And though I myself am often silly and portentous, and strike many awkward tones, I think erasing.org’s line of January 2009 entries are better off without this dose of Dickens, which irritated me every time I’ve gone back and looked at it. Instead, please enjoy this icicle photo, taken by Laura in 2007, which photo originally accompanied the now-expunged text.)

Bruce Jay Friedman, “Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos”, describing the stories published in the men’s adventure magazines he worked for in the fifties:

Although “nymphos” abounded in the pages of Male and Stag (even the rhinos were nymphos) and girls were mentioned frequently who would do “anything and everything,” one would have to look elsewhere to discover exactly what that anything and everything was. Would-be masturbators were made to settle for a few lubricious crumbs. “Throw ’em a few hot words,” was Martin Goodman’s edict when a nervous editor suggested heating things up a bit for sales. These were along the lines of “heaving breasts,” “long shapely legs,” “a flash of pink panties.” It may be that a “dark triangle” or two slipped by, but I rather doubt it.

Via Jason: Project-management philosophy from the Rampant Coyote:

Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it — only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.

Technological pathos: Every time I turn off our Blu-ray player, its little digital display reads PLEASE. Then it reads WAIT. This repeats a few times: PLEASE … WAIT … PLEASE … WAIT. Makes me feel like Dave Bowman turning off HAL. Finally it reads BYE and goes dark. Saddest thing I ever did see.

Summer 1997: My brother and I are watching Letterman, Will Smith is the guest, promoting Men in Black. Will snickeringly relates an anecdote about having gone with his co-star Tommy Lee Jones to some sort of star-studded Hollywood awards ceremony or commemorative thing earlier in the year, maybe the Oscars, tons of industry people in attendance. TLJ went as his date, Will says. The event drags on, and the utterly bored TLJ leans back in his seat and goes to sleep. This is not difficult to picture. Eventually a presenter up on stage, introducing an award or something, mentions that so-and-so or such-and-such is based on a play by William Shakespeare. At which point, Will says, TLJ abruptly opens his eyes and barks the following line: (which line for some reason the Late Show broadcast leaves uncensored, and which line is of course best imagined in a dry, deadpan, rapid-fire Tommy Lee Jones twang)

“Holy shit is Shakespeare gonna be here?”

(If a clip of this ever shows up on YouTube, someone please let me know…)

Seasonal Affective Department: Environment Canada says that for the past two months, Hamilton has gone only six days without snow.

While the precipitation hasn’t always been significant — or even snow, for that matter, as several days of rain around Christmas melted most of the powder — Phillips suggested the numbers take a greater toll on our psyches than shovelling snow has taken on our backs.

“It’s been nickel and diming you to death,” he said.

Didn’t care for Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem yesterday. But I appreciate that the New Haven Advocate’s interview with her was entitled “Obamic Pentameter”.