New Moon Edition June 2024
What’s the most amazing thing you ever learned? Something that blew your fuse. A factoid that rattled your cage and still today won’t settle gently in the brainpan. There are more than a few contenders that come to mind.
How about carnivorous worms in Antarctica that generate heat to tunnel through ice in search of living things (like penguins, one supposes) they can invade and consume parasitically. Can that be real? I remember reading about it somewhere.
Quantum mechanics has plenty to offer, such as being in two or more different places simultaneously. The best of them, though, might be the famous Coming and Going Star lampooned by Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live many years past, when that curious celestial body was determined by science to be hurtling toward us and away from us at exactly the same speed. Talk about approach-avoidance.
There are so many others in this mysterious place we inhabit. Which would be your choices? Leave them in Comments and we’ll reprise the best in a future column.
Language. It’s an ongoing mystery, too. Ongoing because it continues to evolve and change. Mystery because one wonders if it worsens or improves in the process. If you write professionally or even carefully for pleasure, it’s a challenge to navigate the nips and tucks of grammar modified in motion. Even the Style Guide be stylin’ these days.
Singular subjects become plural objects because we quit defaulting to the male gender. Okay, I think I understand how that works. Now gender itself is passé. And challenging. As a writer I want to understand how that works in our language. Can someone be they or can they be someone? We’re searching for a pathway that incorporates what is new into what is traditional speak.
Nuance and double entendre are fading into obscurity, too. What Lenny Bruce was arrested for saying on stage is now common parlance on television. All those earthy blues singers with their “money makers” shaking and their “biscuits” baking are vestiges of a time before blatant profanity was welcomed in the people’s parlors. Change is the one certainty in life and whether we can keep pace is the question.
One thing that never seems to change is the love of lists. The 10 Best Cities If You’re Left-handed. 20 Worst Jokes by Republicans. 5 Stress-Tested Ways to Leave Your Lover. One Place Nobody Goes. 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.
Here’s the top 10 songwriters according to Rolling Stone Magazine, which carries a lot less credibility these days than that vaunted rag likes to believe. Over the years, it has brought us journalism that was daring and criticism that took a whack at making sense of popular culture. That was then.
But it hasn’t aged particularly well. It’s been a long time since I’ve followed it and when I saw a recent copy in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, it was like the spawn of Cosmopolitan bred to People.
This list is arguably on point, though, assuming the category is rock music, and there is a Mount Olympus of that genre’s talent assembled for consideration. We might ask whether Bernie Taupin and Elton John were overlooked. Who else comes to mind as a legitimate contender? Holland-Dozier-Holland? What about Brian Wilson? He’d be on my list. Who else would be on your Top Ten? And who would you bump?