Bob Lancaster

Bob Lancasterhttp://www.arktimes.comen-US60Sluice thishttp://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=4c0e109e-aae0-4571-92b6-2d4e95620285I?ve been writing newspaper columns for 44 years, and it was recently pointed out to me that the word ?sluice? has never appeared in a single one of them.Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMTbob@arktimes.com (Bob Lancaster)I've been writing newspaper columns for 44 years, and it was recently pointed out to me that the word ?sluice? has never appeared in a single one of them. That's now been corrected, of course. There are people out there who keep track of such things. And they have the technology now so that you dassent argue with them, even if you were of a mind to. I don't think my long avoidance of ?sluice? means that I've had an unconscious prejudice against the word all this time, but it might. I've been made aware at different points along the way that I was similarly shamefully if unknowingly prejudiced against any number of words and expressions and people, places and things? cowbirds, for example, and Cabot, and geezers, and hyperbole, and cliches. Thanks, thanks a lot, to those of you who keep me apprised of my shortcomings in this regard. I wouldn't be surprised if at this very minute Glenn Beck were found researching a tip that there's not one mention of ?sluice?? in the entire canon of Mousey Dong. Finding that to be the case, Glenn might go on to say, for effect, ?Coincidence, then?? Not likely!,? and proceed to assume guilt by association, and, as is his habit, pin a hammer-and-sickle decal on my avatar there on his board. That's the routine these days. God help me if his research turns up the additional ?coincidence? that neither ?sluice? nor any of its German cousins appear a single time in any of Joe Goebbels' propaganda or in a single one of Leni Riefenstahl's films or in a single one of Nietzsche's books. That would cook my reputation's goose for sure. Or my goose's reputation. A proved Nazi connection is better than a proved Commie one. It's like Kramer and the midget doing rock, paper, scissors and one of them asks, ?What beats rock?? and the other says, ?Nothing beats rock,? so from then on they both do rock ad infinitum and wind up in a perpetual tie. Nothing beats a proved Nazi connection. My long sorry record of discrinination against ?sluice? also has surely confirmed the anti-abortionists' worst suspicions about ol'moi and about my, as they call them, ilk. ?Sluice? comes up often, perhaps inevitably, in their discourse ? it suits their grotesque imagery precisely and well ? and what does that tell you about the chronic accusatory absence of it in mine? The same meddling searcher for ?sluice? noted additionally that he'd been unable to locate a single ?tenebrous? in all the Ol' Moi corpus. ?What gives?? he demanded. ?It seems a perfect word for your windy diatribes.? When there's a choice between a longer, less common word like tenebrous, and a short, more common one like dark, I always go with dark, I informed him. I learned that from George Orwell. Or E. B. White. From one of those usage mavens. Doug Smith, maybe. That being the case, he might also have asked about ?preciosity.? I had a better answer for ?preciosity,? which the online dictionary defines as ?overrefinement in art, music, or language, esp. in the choice of words? ? making today's discussion of it esp. apropos. I used it once, and was proud to do so, in a stately piece of literature that I submitted for publication as a news article in the Pine Bluff Commercial. This was a long time ago. And I was a lot more vocabularily ambitious and promiscuous than I am here in crepuscular senility. As I recall I was complimenting a Rison pig farmer? ? or it might have been the Monticello Ford dealer (in long-term memory, all the quotable regional goobs tend to merge) ? for his preciosity in preparing for weather emergencies.? The word I meant was probably ?prescience?? but who can say in retrospect? The Commercial editor who proofed this masterpiece was John Thompson, who will verify this account if you care enough to look him up. He balked at ?preciosity? as his job description required him to. What was it, exactly, he wondered. I suggested smarmily that he look it up, which he forthwith did, and in his dictionary, which would have been the Webster's Seventh New Collegiate, the first definition of preciosity was this ?1. fastidious refinement.? So he changed it to that. He had me publicly complimenting a Rison pig farmer's fastidious refinement, I excrement you not. Now I'll be the first to admit that ?fastidious refinement? probably lit more bulbs among Southeast Arkansas newspaper readers than ?preciosity? would have. But it grieved me, and deflated me considerably, that it accomplished the task under my byline. I'd like to say I learned a valuable lesson from the experience, but I didn't.? I'm a big fan of swineherds, going back to the semi-divine ones in Homer, but I've never known one who was fastidiously refined. Not a one. The same with small-market Ford dealers. They are often of a nature that makes them more companionable than a hacking cough. But fastidious?? Refined? No, they are not that. Netlorehttp://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=d33d0166-3919-4699-aade-70232b437c65Things I wouldn?t have known if Al Gore hadn?t invented the Internet. Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMTbob@arktimes.com (Bob Lancaster)Things I wouldn't have known if Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet. (I can't vouch for the veracity of all of them, but it's still good stuff to??know if, like Aristotle or Ken Jennings, you aspire to know it all.) • There are 2-million dust mites on a typical bed. • Notable people who have discussed hypnotizing chickens, according to a website of that same name, include Helmut Kohl, Werner Herzog, Al Gore, Steve Fairnie, Will Smith, Friedrich Nietzsche (in ?Thus Spake Zarathustra?), Federico Fellini, Ernest Hemingway and Criss Angel. Unmentioned but undoubtedly best is Charles Portis in ?Norwood.? Record time for a chicken to remain hypnotized is 3 hours 47 minutes. • It was only after the arrival of their third that the Duggars learned that young'uns aren't brought by the stork. • Tennesseeans get just about the quality of representation you'd expect from a congressman named Zach Wamp. • An unusually tense Presbyterian minister in New Jersey invented the Graham cracker in 1829 in the belief that God had revealed to him a combination of host ingredients that would kill enthusiasm for masturbation in young communicants. Old Dr. Kellogg in Battle Creek thought several decades later that his new-fangled corn flakes would serve the same purpose. Of course they were both right. The wicked practice petered out early in the 20th century and is now virtually extinct. • On the other hand (pardon that), most often web-recommended aphrodisiac foods are figs, oysters, avocados, and bananas. Most often cited as wilters or poopers: cherries, barbecue, tofu, and 5 minutes of watching ?The View.? • There were six TV Lassies during the 19-year series, all of them taped-up female impersonators, or imdoginators. All six of the Francis the Talking Mule movies had a male immuleinator hinney named Molly in the starring role. 9Lives has declined to say how many finicky lookalike Morrises have come and gone or what their gender was. • Janis Joplin's favorite pain-killer (Hunter S. Thompson's as well, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's) was Wild Turkey 101. Among the comments on Pearl's Wikipedia vita is the scurrilous allegation that she once dated Bill Bennett, the world's slimiest man, way back when she was still sober and he was still sane.? • Despite No. 412 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, there is no record of anyone named Billy Joe McAllister ever having jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, which was dismantled in 1972. • There are more bacteria on your body right now than there are people in the United States. • The playwright George Bernard Shaw was a Socialist of the types that were big fans of the rock-and-roll singer Fabian (Forte). • Armadillos make fair to middling potted meat. If you get to them within eight hours of their having been run over. • Walmart now sells caskets online. • Lenny Bruce once described a hung acquaintance as having a tallywhacker of a size that it looked like a baby's arm holding an apple. • Ruth Madoff is reported to have joined the human race, using 50 cents off coupons to buy breakfast burritos at Taco Bell. • Give or take 1.93 million, nearly 2 million people attended the big tea-bagger march on Washington. • Stephen Hawking died at least five times in the past year. • All 605 people who live in Austin, AR, are kin to one another. • Just for the record, there was no late-night benediction at the Y'all Come Back Saloon. • Even if the Supreme Court finally excludes Manger Babe and all the religious trimmings, Christmas will still have the traditional mas part, which includes mistletoe, tree, Grinch and dog, and TV weather radar tracking Santa's sleigh on mas eve.? • The concept of boredom didn't exist among American children before 1955. • John McCain was the first major-party presidential nominee to say publicly that he didn't know how many houses he owned. President Lincoln once confided privately that he didn't know how many mail carriers the Pony Express had, but that's a horse of a different color.? • Moonlight doesn't cause skin cancer. • The astronomy pioneer Tycho Brahe of Denmark made himself a metal nose to replace the original, lost in a midnight swordfight. He also had a boarder dwarf he kept under the kitchen table to scurry out on cue and snatch food from astonished dinner guests. And he kept a pet moose in the house until it died from injuries sustained when it got drunk one night and fell down the stairs. • It was estimated in 1993 that filling burger orders at McDonald's restaurants necessitated the annual slaughter of 10 million cows. Sounds low to me but does explain the Eat Mor Chikn campaign. • Alta Faubus was the last Arkansas First Lady to keep yard fowl at the Governor's Mansion. ? Blown awayhttp://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=0222b426-e3b4-4df2-93e7-70e115faf2c7I?ve suddenly run out of opinions.Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMTbob@arktimes.com (Bob Lancaster)I've suddenly run out of opinions. For an opinion columnist, that can be occupationally disadvantageous. But I can't help it ? it's come to seem to me that just about all the latter-day opinion-mongers are blowhards. And I don't want to risk being remembered by my friends and grandchildren, my heirs and assigns, as one of those. Lord, there are so many of them any more. Like the zombies in ?Zombieland.? Too many opinions, like the too many notes in Figaro. Most of them, the contemporary ones, I mean, deriving from a slew of additional opinions expressed by like-minded blowhards in so-called opinion polls. Once in a while even Justice Thomas has one. Only to find expression his have to be mimed. And most of them should be in ALL CAPS. You have to go loud ? including in the sense of outrageous ? to even hope to be heard over the din. Nothing of the unhurried, the meditative, piddling along, unsure where you're going but curious and attentive ? like LaSalle ? like this. You could do that from Elia right up to the mad scramble's commencement but not anymore. Now it's blow hard from the gitgo. Entertaining even an ellipsis of Learned Hand uncertainty is not an option. You can't worry about getting it right or wrong when the whole ball game is git-r-done and git-r-moved. If you have to, you can come back later and ?clarify,? the newspeak for recant. So for the moment I'm shucking opinion altogether, along with my shoes, and side-streaming the Ol' Moi canoe over to the next sandbar, where I plan to set a spell while the torrent roars on by. Put my feet up. Chew on a jimson weed. Mull fall. Take stock. Ah, but in the peace and quiet of unopinionation, with this gymnasium-size space to fill up, what's a columnist to do who has a tabula rasa where his brain used to be? • I'd tell some jokes if I knew any, but I don't have the art, never once, in a long life, insofar as I know, having made a single person laugh by cracking one. And the jokes I like are simply too slow developing here in the Blowhard Epoch. For example, Mr. Clemens told his classic Grandfather and the Ram joke with such glacial deliberation that he actually fell asleep on stage, and snoozed there easily for a considerable time, before he got around to delivering the punchline. Imagine that on PTI. • Or I could call in sick and have them subject you to a guest blowhard. • Or? with just a smidgen less of dignity I could fish up out of the Ruskinesque must one of the thousand old failures ? they're all failures, wishful thinking aside ? and give it another lap, a tactic made semi-respectable by overuse on TV,? which not only repeats programs occasionally but continues to repeat them hundreds and thousands of times. Some TV shows actually get better in re-runs, but that seldom happens with reprised? informal journalism of this ilk, which, like left-over pork, loses something each time it's reheated and re-served. At least in my unopinion it does. I've tried to keep busy this past week looking for topics that I can feel OK about not having an opinion about. ??? One that I found was plastic or paper in the supermarket checkout line. Here's the transcript: ?I don't care. You pick.? ?We're not allowed to do that, sir.? ?How come?? ?I couldn't say. It's policy.? ?Well, I shouldn't have to decide. I'm already clinically stressed from all the shopping decisions back yonder at the dairy case.? It was suggested we could flip a coin, as in ?No Country for Old Men.? Or name a designated decider, the role for which George W. Bush once nominated himself. Or submit to binding arbitration. With me across the negotiating table from the bag boy, who in this case is about 93 years old and has the incurable habit, when you choose the plastic, of tying the top flaps together in an absolutely un-untieable granny knot so that when you get the bags home you have to rip them open with your bare hands or with some pinking shears, and you always wind up collaterally ripping open an enclosed flour sack or sugar sack and before you get the stuff put away you've scattered it all over the kitchen and down the hall into the parlor and halfway out to the woodshed, and varmints are popping out of baseboard holes to scarf at scattered granules. It's almost enough to make you see the attraction of blowhardery, I swear. But comes a point when those waiting in line behind you start rolling their eyes and grumbling, calling you a prick, and so forth. So you have to choose your battles.? I remember when we got our groceries at the commissary in a big old towsack, which Pap then slang over his shoulder and lugged home. Walking home, of course, toting the poke. Cut through the field, crossing the crick at the ford. Couldn't have done that with paper or plasic but that burlap is tough. And roomy. He could've th'owed a nice-sized shoat in there for ballast and it wouldn't a been a whole lot harder to fotch. ?