I am the Wig Man! Goo goo goo joob!

I'm unusual among Marylanders in that I am not running for the U.S. Senate this year. According to the sample primary ballots in today's paper, 10 Republicans and 18 Democrats are running, plus who knows how many third-party candidates. I guess that's what happens when a five-term incumbent decides to retire.

In a crowded field, Republican candidate Daniel Vovak stands out, as these photos demonstrate. Wherever he goes, Vovak wears a George Washington-esque white wig. Asked why, he explains: "It evokes the Whig roots of the Republican Party and its reliance on the founders' version of the United States Constitution." Besides, he says, it's great publicity.

Vovak's campaign website seems to be down, just like R.J. Reynolds', but Wikipedia is meeting the needs of the Republic by giving him comprehensive coverage.

I deeply admire Vovak's opposition to the Maryland state flag, which he rightly calls "the ugliest flag in America." He adds: "In fact, after further study, I have concluded Maryland has the ugliest flag in the world."

I also deeply admire Vovak's announcement that he has hired a psychic to direct negative energies toward the GOP front-runner in the Senate race, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele. "My volunteer campaign staff deduced it was less expensive to hire a psychic campaign manager who would curse Michael Steele than to spend a half million dollars on consultants," Vovak says. "Nancy Reagan used a psychic, and I admire her. We got a good deal on a great psychic."

I disagree, alas, with Vovak's position on Pluto, which he says should be declared a planet by Congress. I fear this would be a slippery slope. Next thing you know, Congress would declare that H20 is the symbol not for water but gold, or that the value of pi is officially 12 because that was Roger Staubach's number with the Dallas Cowboys.

On the other hand, I deeply admire that Vovak has a position on Pluto.

Most of all, I deeply admire Vovak's crusade to have himself listed on the ballot as Daniel "The Wig Man" Vovak and not Daniel "Wig Man" Vovak, which is how he is indeed listed. Apparently the state of Maryland drew the line at "The," because one must draw lines somewhere, lest chaos reign. In his statement denouncing the loss of his "The," Vovik omitted every occurrence of "the." Brilliant tactic should be emulated by other campaigns at first opportunity, as most routine announcements gain great interest by absence of common word, and think of savings on paper alone!

Some scoff at the Wig Man's chances in the Sept. 12 primary. No way the GOP will go for that, you say. I say: You never know.

Blundering into Berlin

In a recent interview with the Florida Baptist Witness ("Publishing Good News since 1884"), U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla., said she opposes secular government and supports a theocracy instead. The separation of church and state is a lie, the U.S. Senate candidate said:

... We have to have the faithful in government, and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics, and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women, and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected, than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended, and that certainly isn’t what God intended. ... If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin.

Amid the ensuing furor, the Harris campaign released a statement saying, in effect, "Jews are OK, too," but letting the church-state comments stand. The statement included a quote from Harris' current campaign manager:

As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I know that she encourages people of all faiths to engage in government so that our country can continue to thrive on the principles set forth by our Founding Fathers, without malice towards anyone.

To clarify, this was Harris campaign manager Bryan Rudnick speaking, not Harris campaign manager Jim Dornan, who quit in November 2005; or Harris campaign manager Jamie Miller, who quit in April 2006; or Harris campaign manager Glen Hodas, who quit in July 2006.

Her congressional staff also has been remarkable for turnover. Since Harris took office in 2003, she's been through four chiefs of staff and four press secretaries.

The first ex-Harris for Senate campaign manager, Dornan, told The Palm Beach Post, "I have never in my life worked for somebody like her, ever, and hopefully I'll never have to again. ... She was an equal opportunity abuser." He told The Associated Press the Harris campaign is "one of the most disastrous ever run in the United States."

I reminisce about all this because Katherine Harris, "disastrous" campaign and all, easily won this week's primary and now is the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida. Ain't politics grand?

I am reminded, as so often, of the movie Casablanca. Conrad Veidt calls Humphrey Bogart "just another blundering American," and Claude Rains replies: "We musn't underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918."

All those Florida Republicans who have been backing Anyone But Harris now have to decide: Vote Harris, or vote Democrat? If they close ranks and back the party, as party members used to do, the laughingstock could have the last laugh, and blunder her way straight to the U.S. Senate.

Cranesville Swamp

Sydney and I had a wonderful time Sunday afternoon tramping around Cranesville Swamp in neighboring Garrett County, in far western Maryland along the West Virginia border.

This remarkable subarctic swamp formed during the last Ice Age and has been preserved intact the past 15,000 years in a quirky "frost pocket" that keeps the place colder and wetter than normal, and a haven for animal and plant species normally found nowhere south of Canada, including the southernmost tamarack forest in the United States.

We heard about this place before we moved to the neighborhood this summer, but we figured we'd better go see it quick, while it's still there. Like every other spot in North America, the Alleghenies are getting warmer, frost pockets and all.

Sydney and I especially enjoyed the 1,500-foot boardwalk over the peat bog, which is 3 feet deep in spots. That's impressive, since peat is formed by sphagnum moss growing and flourishing in the same spot for thousands of years. This is the least invasive boardwalk I ever saw, set at bog level and barely two people wide. In many places, the vegetation is reaching up through the planks to claim it.

The bog's surface is a thicket of shrubs and ground plants that teems in summer with bees and butterflies and, alas, flies, which ignored Sydney in order to feast on that lumbering buffet just behind her, namely me.

Other colorful inhabitants of the swamp and its woods of red spruce and hemlock include the tiny saw-whet owl, which could fit in the palm of the hand, and the sundew, a carnivorous plant that lacks the Venus' flytrap's press agent.

No, I didn't take any photos. The camera is in the shop, though it should be back Any Day Now.

More than 1,500 acres of the swamp and environs has been bought by the Nature Conservancy, which has planted thousands of red spruce and white pines since 2002, to replace trees unwisely logged at mid-century. The Conservancy also maintains the boardwalk, a network of single-file walking trails and a muddy parking lot that holds maybe a half-dozen cars. Big crowds of people aren't really wanted there, as the ecosystem is too delicate. Fortunately, the place is an hour off the interstate and impossible to find without close attention to the excellent directions on the Nature Conservancy's website.

That the Nature Conservancy needs all the help it can get probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. Here's the website again.

Slithering away from Snakes

In reply to Mr. Cavin's comment below, I'll happily shake on Snakes on a Plane being a flop but not a bomb, a distinction I admire. Clearly Mr. Cavin and I are brothers, as we both care so much about such things.

I confess that I haven't seen the movie, and don't intend to; it never interested me as a movie, only as a business phenomenon. Keith "Reel Fanatic" Demko has seen it, and he comments:

To me, the flick delivered exactly what it promised, just a big ball of B-movie fun.

'Nuff said!

More Snakes than bucks

Mr. Cavin writes:

Based on information I read at The New York Times, I was under the impression that Snakes on a Plane was reaping the norm for a late summer horror release, and that any illusion of its poor performance was due to hopes being inflated by the internet hype phenomena (a lesson apparently no one took home after the halfhearted opening weekend of Steven Spielberg's AI). Certainly SOAP isn't bombing, though, just merely normal.

This argument reminds me of Joan Crawford's in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Joan Crawford: You wouldn't be able to do these awful things to me if I weren't still in this chair.

Bette Davis: But you ARE, Blanche! You ARE in that chair!

True, Snakes on a Plane wouldn't be a belly flop if it hadn't been the most-hyped Internet phenomenon in Hollywood memory, with 31 million Google hits (as of a minute ago) compared to 8 million for the movie of the summer, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. But it WAS, Blanche! It WAS!

According to the Internet Movie Database, here are movies that did better on opening weekend this summer than Snakes on a Plane, which did $15 million. First I list the title, then the opening-weekend gross.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest $135 million

X-Men: The Last Stand $122 million

The Da Vinci Code $77 million

Ice Age: The Meltdown $68 million

Cars $60 million

Superman Returns $52 million

Mission: Impossible 3 $47 million

Talladega Nights $47 million

Click $40 million

Scary Movie 4 $40 million

The Break-Up $39 million

Over the Hedge $38 million

Nacho Libre $28 million

The Devil Wears Prada $27 million

Miami Vice $25 million

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift $23 million

Monster House $22 million

Poseidon $22 million

Little Man $21 million

You, Me and Dupree $21 million

Silent Hill $20 million

Step Up $20 million

Lady in the Water $18 million

World Trade Center $18 million

Invincible $17 million

The Omen $16 million

RV $16 million

"Let's make a summer action movie starring Samuel L. Jackson, hype it until its very title becomes a catchphrase on the lips of millions, open it on an August weekend with no competition, and make about half as much money as Nacho Libre" is not a recipe for Hollywood success, however you try to spin it.

Snakes on a Plane wound up making the same opening-weekend box office as Barnyard, made by people so stupid they don't know that bulls do not have udders.

Its first week, Snakes on a Plane grossed $20 million. Its second week, $6 million. At this rate, will it still be theaters a fourth week?

To paraphrase Bette Davis again: What. A. Flop.

(For what it's worth, the only other airliner-in-peril movie this summer, itself overhyped, grossed only $11 million its opening weekend. But United 93 already has grossed more than twice its cost; that seems a forlorn box-office hope for Snakes on a Plane.)

Conversation overheard in Frostburg

Two guys in an athletic facility:

"Do you get Martin Luther King Day off?"

"That ain't a real holiday. Now, if we had a James Earl Ray Day ..."

Authentic American voters! There you have 'em, folks.

Snakes lacks legs

Before the movie Snakes on a Plane opened, my hero F. Brett Cox wondered aloud:

It'll be interesting to see how the movie does after all the hype.

Well, now we know: It bombed. The opening-weekend gross was $15 million, less than a third of what the virtually hype-free Talladega Nights raked in its first weekend.

Amid all the opinion pieces about why the movie tanked (precious few of which concern themselves with whether the movie was any good), has anyone speculated that the recent mid-Atlantic terror scare has put people off airliner-in-peril movies?

Everyone's talking about Little Georgie

I laughed loudly at this Arthur D. Hlavaty post, and was only mildly ashamed.

Christopher Rowe, meanwhile, is right in remembering that in Robert Lawson's children's book Rabbit Hill, the lyrics of Little Georgie's song come complete with a melody. I can't read music, alas, so it could be sung to the tune of "Happy Birthday" or "To Anacreon in Heaven," for all I know.

Christopher adds:

I sing little songs too. In fact, a lot of times I make up a little song for whatever story I'm working on; the one for "The Voluntary State" even made it into the text.

Do you mean Tonight we'll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee? I am delighted to know this. It reminds me of the various creation myths in which the gods sing a world into being.

Kip W., meanwhile, recalls that Lawson was featured years ago in an exhibition of children's book illustrations at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va. I have visited the Chrysler only once and had not thought about it in years, but it's a fine museum, highly recommended. Kip W. adds:

I remember in 8th grade, snickering because Lawson's drawing of a gangster called "Fish-Eye" looked a lot like one of my teachers.

Now I want to see the illustration! What book was it in?

More "German" and "French"

Trent Hergenrader writes, in part:

This is almost on-topic, but German Chocolate Cake gets its name from the type of chocolate (German's Sweet Chocolate) used ...

I did not know that. The story is told here at the invaluable Snopes.com.

During the First World War, I wonder, was it renamed "liberty chocolate cake"?

Trent also alerts us to the obscure word "cataglottism," meaning French kissing. He adds:

Had I only known this in high school, so much would be so different today...

My knowing that word in high school would have helped me not at all. I knew many terms for acts I was at no risk of actually enjoying. I would, however, have inserted the word into snarky remarks: "What's the matter? Cataglottism got your tongue?"

Boy: Tales of Childhood

I was taken aback by Roald Dahl’s memoir Boy: Tales of Childhood, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been; this is the author of Switch Bitch, after all. With rare exceptions, all Dahl’s childhood memories are awful: surgeries without anesthetic, a car accident that cut off his nose, and above all, vicious beatings by sadistic schoolmasters, one of whom went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Dahl writes:

By now I am sure you will be wondering why I lay so much emphasis upon school beatings in these pages. The answer is that I cannot help it. All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely. I couldn't get over it. I never have got over it. It would, of course, be unfair to suggest that all masters were constantly beating the daylights out of all the boys in those days. They weren't. Only a few did so, but that was quite enough to leave a lasting impression of horror upon me. It left another more physical impression upon me as well. Even today, whenever I have to sit for any length of time on a hard bench or chair, I begin to feel my heart beating along the old lines that the cane made on my bottom some fifty-five years ago.

On a cheerier note, I was pleased to learn in Boy that young Dahl and all his classmates at Repton were tasters for the new confections being developed by the Cadbury chocolate company:

Cadbury's were using some of the greatest chocolate-bar experts in the world to test out their new inventions. We were of a sensible age, between thirteen and eighteen, and we knew intimately every chocolate bar in existence, from the Milk Flake to the Lemon Marshmallow. Quite obviously our opinions on anything new would be valuable. All of us entered into this game with great gusto, sitting in our studies and nibbling each bar with the air of connoisseurs, giving our marks and making our comments. "Too subtle for the common palate," was one note that I remember writing down.

Young Dahl's daydreams about how wonderful it would be to work in the inventing-room at Cadbury's resulted, of course, in his second children's book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 35 years later.

More information german to the measles

Somewhere upstream, I declared that the G in "german measles" ought to be lowercased, since it means german as in "germane," not German the nationality. Beth replies:

Is your source really sure it's from germanus or is this a folk etymology? I'd wager a guess that it's German measles just because this is a colloquial way of indicating "not true/not standard/from elsewhere" -- like Welsh rabbit or French kissing or Dutch courage.

A touch, a touch, I do confess!

Neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor Webster’s New World Dictionary gives the origin of the term "German measles," but both uppercase the G, and the OED goes further by listing the illness under "German" with a capital G, not "german" with a little g. So Beth’s argument is looking pretty good, and Ye Humble Blogsmith is feeling more humble than usual.

Can anyone point us to a definitive origin of "German measles," or is this one of the (countless) terms for which no such definitive origin is known?

As for whether "German measles" might have been a jingoistic way of saying "faux measles," it’s interesting that the earliest appearances of "German measles" cited by the OED are medical journals of the late 19th century, the Bismarck era, when anti-German sentiment may have been at high tide.

Still, the term isn’t as obviously insulting as "Welsh rabbit" or "Dutch courage" or "Irish taxi" (a wheelbarrow). And "French kiss" seems, to modern sensibilities, downright complimentary!

Wendy houses

Saturday a week ago, while reading Roald Dahl’s memoir Boy: Tales of Childhood, I was pleased to stumble across a British phrase new to me: “Wendy house,” meaning a child’s playhouse. I made a mental note but forgot to mention it to Sydney.

The next day, Sydney told me she just had stumbled across an interesting British phrase in Barbara Vine’s novel A Dark-Adapted Eye: “Wendy house,” meaning – well, you know what it means.

Wendy houses get their name from Wendy in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Upon the publication this year of Alan Moore’s long-awaited novel Lost Girls, about the sexual adventures of the fantasy heroines Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, the phrase “Wendy house” may gain a whole new meaning.

Little Georgie Sings a Song

We're happy that our new neighborhood has an abundance of small wildlife: groundhogs, chipmunks, squirrels and, especially, rabbits. One of our neighbors spotted seven rabbits under a single tree a few nights ago, but we commonly see five or six during our early-morning or late-evening walks.

Soon after we moved in, Sydney dubbed the area "Rabbit Hill," and whenever a baby rabbit hopped across our path, she cried, "Little Georgie!" She was aghast when I got neither reference. "You mean you never read Rabbit Hill when you were a child?" she asked. When I told her I never even had heard of Rabbit Hill, she tracked down a copy at the library and thrust it into my hands.

So now I personally can attest to Rabbit Hill, written and illustrated by Robert Lawson, being a lovely book. It's about the little animals of the pastures and woods waiting expectantly for the New Folks to move into the Big House, in hopes the New Folks prove to be kind and generous with such things as their garden and their garbage. The moral is "There is enough for all," and so there is. Lawson set this book, first published in 1944, on his own farm in Connecticut; like E.B. White's Charlotte's Web and Walter R. Brooks' novels about Freddy the Pig, it's an enduring children's book about farm life written at mid-century by a publishing-industry veteran long resident in New York City.

Most interesting to me, for personal reasons, was Chapter 3, "Little Georgie Sings a Song," about the youngest member of the rabbit family:

Little Georgie lay back in the warm grass and sang his
song --
New Folks coming, oh my!
New Folks coming, oh my!
New Folks coming, oh my!
Oh my! Oh my!
There weren't many words and there weren't many notes, and the notes just went up a little and down a little and ended where they began. Lots of people might have thought it monotonous, but it suited Little Georgie completely. He sang it loud and he sang it soft, he sang it as a paean of triumph, a saga of perils met and overcome. He sang it over and over again.

How admirable the word "paean" in a book aimed at 10-year-olds! But I digress. This description of Little Georgie's song perfectly fits Sydney's little songs, too.

Most people don't know this, but she makes up and sings little songs about things that make her happy. For example, we like to vacation in Kill Devil Hills, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and we generally rent the same condo, year after year. As we approach the condo, Sydney sings:

It's our condo!
Our little condo!

Transcribed like that, it doesn't look like much, but it suits both Sydney and me completely, and its melody does indeed go up a little and down a little and end where it began. Sydney doesn't remember when she started habitually singing these little songs, but I'm convinced they come from her reading about Little Georgie when she was a child -- or, even earlier, having her mother read to her about Little Georgie. Little Georgie probably was one of the first writers and musicians of her acquaintance.

(For a very different take on New Folks moving into a neighborhood teeming with rabbits, read Kelly Link's brilliant story "Stone Animals," in her brilliant collection Magic for Beginners.)

Mencken

I just finished reading Marion Elizabeth Rodgers' terrific biography Mencken: The American Iconoclast (Oxford University Press, 2005). The writings of the late H.L. Mencken have enraptured, exasperated and obsessed me since I stumbled across his essay "The Sahara of the Bozart" as a teenager; Rodgers brings the Mencken I knew to vivid life but also reveals many other Menckens as well, Menckens I never dreamed existed.

Rodgers might well have subtitled her book The American Contradiction. Mencken said awful things, publicly and privately, about African-Americans and Jews, things that he genuinely believed; yet he crusaded against the Klan when it was at the peak of its political power, and lobbied on Capitol Hill for an anti-lynching bill when even the Roosevelt administration turned a deaf ear. A thunderous agnostic, he heaped more ridicule upon religion in all its forms than any other public figure in American history; yet he knew more about the Bible than some of his drinking-buddy theologians, and he enjoyed nothing more than a good tent revival, where he sat on the front row and lustily sang every hymn from memory. He prided himself on being, first and foremost, a reporter's reporter, interviewing more people, doing more legwork and churning out more copy than youngsters 40 years his junior; yet he lost all interest in the story of his career, the Scopes "monkey trial," and went home to Baltimore before the verdict even came in. He assailed his fellow Americans as a "timorous mob of goosesteppers" and publicly argued the political and cultural superiority of his ancestral land, Germany, not only during the First World War but during the Second, at serious risk to his career, his freedom and his life; yet the magisterial research project to which he devoted much of that life, The American Language, was a triumphant declaration of independence for his native tongue and a thousand-page tribute to the seething kettle of classes and races that had created it.

Remarkably consistent across his half-century of fame, however, was Mencken's amazing prose style. He idolized Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw, and it shows, as does the influence of Ambrose Bierce; but no one in the English language ever ranted like Mencken. His screeds are their own subgenre. Harlan Ellison, Hunter S. Thompson and Bruce Sterling, to name but three of Mencken's obvious descendants, are timid souls compared to H.L. at gale force.

On each page, Rodgers cherry-picks three or four glorious Menckenisms, for example his assessment of the dumbing-down of American politics: "We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." Mencken may be better served by excerpts than by full reprints; at length, even his most laudable fits of indignation can become exhausting, self-defeating. As I read Rodgers' book, I found myself jotting down the ones that seemed to comment, not on 1916 or 1936 headlines, but on 2006 headlines:

We [Americans] posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant -- and throw beer bottles at the umpire when he refuses to cheat for our side. ... We deafen the world with our whoops for liberty -- and submit to laws that destroy our most sacred rights. ... We play policeman and Sunday-school superintendent to half of Christendom -- and lynch a darky every two days in our own backyard.

Europe sees Americanism, in brief, as a sort of Philistine uprising against the free spirit of man -- as a conspiracy of dull and unimaginative men, fortuitously made powerful, against all the ideas and ideals that seem sound to their betters.

Once the world is made safe for democracy, all that will remain will be to make democracy safe for the world.

The kinds of courage I really admire are not whooped up in war, but cried down, and indeed become infamous. No one, in such times ... ever praises the man who stands out against official balderdash, and seeks to restore the national thinking, so called, to a reasonable sanity. On the contrary, he is regarded as a shabby and evil fellow, and there is not much protest when he is punished in a summary and barbaric manner, without any consideration of the evidence against him. It is sufficient that he refuses to sing the hymn currently lined out. That alone is enough to condemn him.

We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.

What becomes of the old notion that the United States is a free country, that it is a refuge for the oppressed of other lands?

We need Mencken today more than ever, and not only medicinally; he is marvelously funny, and his torrential vocabulary and thundering rhythms are a mother lode of inspiration for any writer or speaker. He is also an absolutely American creation, essential to any understanding of our often-invoked, often-ignored national heritage, whatever that turns out to be. Yet I get the impression he's not widely read, and that most of his books are out of print. That no Library of America set of Mencken exists is a serious omission; I hope someone is diligently working on that massive task. Mencken, of course, would have jeered at that sentiment, too. "One civilized reader," he wrote, "is worth a thousand boneheads." Reading Mencken, I'm never quite sure in which category the Sage of Baltimore would pigeonhole me: anointed among the civilized, or cast among the boneheads. That he still can cause such unease, more than 50 years after his death, is the best reason to read him.

Capclave in October

Sydney and I plan to be at Capclave, Oct. 20-22 in Silver Spring, Md. The author guest of honor is Kim Stanley Robinson, and others scheduled to attend include Catherine Asaro, Susan Casper, Dennis Danvers, Gardner Dozois, Laura Anne Gilman, David Hartwell, Peter Heck, Klon Newell, Patrick and Teresa Niesen Hayden, Paul Park, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Darrell Schweitzer, Michael Swanwick, etc. Y'all come!

More Kevin Smith confessions

In reply to my confession that Sydney and I own a Dimension Collector's Series DVD of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, my hero Brett Cox writes:

But will you both be going to see Clerks II? Jeanne's already told me I'm on my own for Snakes on a Plane.

Do you know, I haven't even seen the original Clerks yet? That's too bad, considering I have seen Mallrats. Seeing Clerks II before I see Clerks just seems wrong.

As for Snakes on a Plane, I suspect that it'll be just you and a few million of your friends.

Come to think of it, though, I wonder whether recent news events will hurt the popularity of that venerable subgenre, the airliner-in-peril movie, as briefly happened after the Sept. 11 attacks.

A Carter Family hint

On the topic of the Duncans' visit to the Carter Fold in Virginia, Andy Wolverton writes:

I've always thought that you could write a great Carter Family story... (slight, not-so-subtle hint) Maybe for that next collection?

Thanks, Andy. Interestingly enough, I already decided to claim the Carter Fold trip as a business expense.

Measles, sort of

My hero Barry Johnson writes:

Here's an interesting bit of fact that I just learned myself last week, over a dinner conversation with a physician. "German measles" aren't really measles. Who knew?

I did not know this, either, but I am delighted to learn it, and you inspire me to look it up. "German measles" is another term for rubella, which isn't measles but resembles measles, hence the "German" -- not a reference to Germany but from the Latin "germanus," meaning "similar" (as in the English word "germane"). Those doctors and their Latin!

I guess this means I have to buck the AP Stylebook and its fat ally, Webster's New World Dictionary, and spend the rest of my life lowercasing the G, since "german" is not a geographic reference: hence, "german measles," not "German measles."

This sort of thing buoys my spirits for hours on end.

Hey, Barry, while you were having dinner with that physician, did you ask about that mole on your back and that ache in your toe and that sore place in your mouth, the way I always do? Got to grab the health care where you can.

No more "freedom fries"

This should have been bigger news: French fries and French toast are back on the menu in the cafeterias of Capitol Hill, three years after they were renamed "freedom fries" and "freedom toast" by two Republican congressmen indignant over France's opposition to war in Iraq.

Today, 60 percent of Americans are just as opposed to war in Iraq as the French ever were; one of the two "freedom fries" advocates, Bob Ney of Ohio, just bowed out of his re-election campaign amid an ongoing corruption scandal (though you wouldn't know it from his website); and the other, Walter Jones of North Carolina, now favors a pullout of U.S. troops. "I’m more concerned about terrorism south of the border than I am in Iraq," Jones says.

During World War I, amid a wave of anti-German sentiment, patriotic Americans similarly renamed things. Hamburgers became "liberty sandwiches," dachshunds "liberty hounds," sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" and -- my favorite -- German measles "liberty measles." (If they hated Germans so much, why not blame the measles on them?) "Freedom fries" are receding just as rapidly into obscure history. The war will be with us much longer.

The Carter Fold

On Saturday, Sydney and I rode with her family to the Carter Family Memorial Festival at the Carter Fold in Hiltons, Va.

The Carter Fold is an 800-seat music pavilion built into a hillside a few yards from the cabin where A.P. Carter was born and the general store that Carter ran in his later years, long after the original Carter Family musical group had broken up. Old-time, bluegrass and country musicians, mostly local and regional, perform at the Fold every Saturday night, and once a year dozens of them converge on the place for the festival.

Both the Fold and the festival were started in the 1970s by Janette Carter, daughter of A.P. and Sara. It was A.P.'s dying wish that the Carter Family's music, and the music that inspired them, would not be forgotten in the valley the Carters have called home for generations.

This was the first festival without Janette, who died in January at age 82, but her work is being carried on by her children, Dale and Rita. For this year's festival, Rita even made the pinto beans and cornbread, just as her mother did for so many years.

Anyone interested in old-time music should make the pilgrimage to the Fold at least once. Even today, Hiltons is a fair approximation of what my parents used to call the Back of Beyond, i.e. proverbially remote. It's a 40-minute drive from the interstate, along a dauntingly twisty two-lane highway. With the exception of a couple of houses, the Fold pretty much has that part of the Clinch Valley all to itself. How much more isolated the homestead must have been in 1927, when A.P., Sara and Maybelle braved the death-defying, daylong drive to Bristol to audition for Ralph Peer!

This year's festival lineup included the Tennessee Mafia Jug Band, the Old Dominion Cloggers, the Eastern Tennessee State University Bluegrass Band (which boasts a young Japanese woman on fiddle), and my favorite band name in some time, Fescue. The pavilion was packed, and hundreds more people milled around outside, slurping ice cream cones (Pet is still the brand of choice, as it was at A.P.'s store), listening to impromptu jam sessions, and exploring the general store and cabin, both of which are Carter Family museums now.

Some of the most celebrated artifacts are elsewhere -- Sara's autoharp, for example, is in the (excellent) Country Music Hall of Fame museum in Nashville -- but there's plenty of neat stuff to look at in Hiltons. Sydney was most impressed by a couple of June Carter Cash's dresses ("She was so tiny!"), while I gravitated to A.P.'s upright piano and his Underwood typewriter. When no docent was looking, I reached out and lightly depressed the "D" key -- not enough to tap the roller; just enough to feel the key, for a moment, push back. I learned to type on a Royal, myself.

I would post photos, had I remembered to take the camera!

An essential book on the Carters, and on much else besides, is Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, by Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg. Read it; heed it; and meet us at the Fold sometime, y'hear?