Flotsam
flot·sam–noun
1.the part of the wreckage of a ship and its cargo found floating on the water.
You guys send me so much excellent e-mail, and give me so interesting things to link to, that sometimes I lose something in the shuffle, and by "shuffle" I mean "my shitty organizational skills."
So here are some assorted items that I've been meaning to mention for a while.
Over two years ago, Ed Quinn e-mailed me and recommended a film called "'Tom Dowd And The Language Of Music." I ordered the DVD, lost it, and it took me over two years to finally see the movie, but it's terrific. Tom Dowd was a legendary recording engineer and producer for Atlantic Records, and it is just amazing to see how the process of recording an album has evolved. If you're interested in music, this is a fascinating film.
Amazon link: Tom Dowd & The Language Of Music.
I typed "coal slaw" (so smooth) into a post a few months ago, and Ashley Crum wrote in and said it was an "eggcorn." He sent me a link to The Eggcorn Database, and there are some very funny entries.
I mentioned Louis Theroux at some point (I think), and Joe Wojitas sent me a link to a quote from Theroux about his trip to America:
"'Have you ever argued with a member of the Flat Earth Society?' a self-help guru named Ross Jeffries once asked me. 'It's completely futile, because fundamentally they don't care if something is true or false. To them, the measure of truth is how important it makes them feel. If telling the truth makes them feel important, then it's true. If telling the truth makes them feel ashamed and small, then it's false.' My experience on my trip has borne this out. On the list of qualities necessary to humans trying to make out way through life, truth scores fairly low...in the end, feeling alive is more important than telling the truth....We are instruments for feeling, faith, energy, emotion, significance, belief, but not really truth."
That quote is so brilliant that I've been meaning to work it into a longer post, but it always seems to veer heavily into politics, so instead I'm just going to put it up here.
I mentioned Bob Sapp becoming a celebrity in Japan as a wrestler/kickboxer/MMA fighter. Joshua Zatkin-Steres sent me a link to Gajin Smash, which is a blog written by an American teaching in Japan. I've read it in the past, and it's a fascinating look at Japanese culture as written by an outsider. It's often profane, frequently hilarious (any story about "kancho") and generally very entertaining. He has another perspective on the celebrity of Bob Sapp, and it's a much more complicated story than the "American guy hits it big in Japan" profile that I linked to a few weeks ago.
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