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Word of the Every So Often

widdershins: (adv.) going in the opposite direction of the sun; counter-clockwise, as opposed to “deosil,” which is going clockwise. It is consider bad luck to go widdershins.

Everyday History

“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” Bokonon

Today is both Armistice Day and Veterans’ Day. Pretty much every country around the world celebrates some version of remembering the horrors of war on November 11. And that's a good thing to do. Too bad the War to End All Wars didn't. Fittingly, it’s also Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday, who was born November 11, 1922. Vonnegut saw his share of war, having survived the fire bombing of Dresden in February of 1945, which he famously writes about in has first truly successful novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969.

And, of course, Vonnegut remains one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, bringing us such books as The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night, and Breakfast of Champions. In all, Vonnegut wrote 14 novels, and though some are definitely better than others (such as the previously mentioned five), all of them are worth reading. More than once.

Three of Vonnegut’s books were made into full-length movies, and not one of them very good. And that’s probably because there are just certain novels that are all but impossible to make into a decent movie. Take Slaughterhouse-Five, which I couldn’t get through, even though I’ve tried to more than once. What with Billy Pilgrim coming unstuck in time, and the Tralfamadorians taking Billy back to their home planet to live with Miss Montana sometime in the future, while flipping back to Dresden in WWII, and then the present day, and then back again, and then... which is what happens when you become unstuck in time. It works in the book. Not in the movie. The same is true for Breakfast of Champions, which starred Bruce Willis, an actor I have great respect for, but the movie was tedious at best. Only Mother Night, starring Nick Nolte, even came close to being OK. Still, it’s not a movie I want to see again.

The best Vonnegut movie, though, wasn’t a Vonnegut movie at all. It was Back to School, starring the great comedian Rodney Dangerfield. In the movie Dangerfield plays a rich father name Thornton Mellon who returns to college to support his son. Not above cheating, Thornton hires Kurt Vonnegut to write a paper about... Kurt Vonnegut, which Vonnegut actually delivers to him in his dorm. Thornton’s professor gives him a failing grade on the paper, though, stating that he clearly knows nothing about Vonnegut.

So, yeah. Don’t watch the movies. Read the books. And read them again. Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007. And so it goes.

Cartoon of the Week

Flies Under the Radar

Stuff

The History of the Future: The End of Sagging

It was in the summer of 2032 that the dress fashion known as "sagging" came to an abrupt end. As one fashion critic stated, sagging, which featured wearing one’s trousers no higher than somewhere well below the crotch, “was just taken too far.” A group of young men in Detroit began the short-lived fad of “dragging,” which was simply putting only one foot through one’s trousers and then dragging them as one walked. The fad lasted a little over two weeks before others, seemingly all at once, came to the sudden realization of just how fantastically stupid that was. What followed was the equally sudden realization of just how stupid sagging was, as well. And that was followed by what became known as “neo retro anti-sagging,” where the trousers were increasingly worn higher and higher in an effort to prove that the wearers definitely were not sagging, and that anybody whose trousers were worn lower than theirs was considered sagging, and that person was therefore what one fashion pundit described as “dweebified.” Wearing a belt around one’s neck was briefly popular, and surprisingly very few people were asphyxiated. The fad peaked with the adherents wearing their trousers so high that they had to unzip their flies to see. A few purists, who became known as “those assholes who keep running into everything,” refused to peek out of the fly, stating that it was demeaning. The height of one’s trousers suddenly became irrelevant by the spring of 2034, when the craze of church hats – a miniaturized, sanctified steeple that one could wear on one’s head, and thus be in church always – captured the public whim. See Eldridge’s concise history of fashion, How Dumb Can We Get? (Holy Grail Press, 2034)

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