Author Archives: sean

Armistice Day

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I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Gin’n’Tonic

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Gin'n'Tonic

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian ‘chinanto/mnigs’ which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan ‘tzjin-anthony-ks’ which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.

What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

–Douglas Adams — The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Searching for the perfect pub

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When I was eight years old, I went to the UK with my parents.  My father was on sabbatical from the university he taught at;  we spent four months touring France, England, Scotland, and Wales.  France was a destination because my father was working on a book;  the UK was on the itinerary for a multitude of reasons, undoubtedly including a desire to introduce me to my cultural heritage.

I remember visiting a small rural pub in Cornwall after a long day’s journey touring through the countryside.  My parents ordered beer – I ordered an orange squash – essentially orange juice. But this being a British pub, and not altogether used to children, the pints arrived before the orange squash. The day had been hot, and long. I had tasted beer before, so my mother let me have a sip of her pint while we waited – something which would probably land her in prison if it occurred in 2013.

The beer was cold, and delicious, and I drank half of it before I could be stopped.

Pub culture in the UK is very different from bar culture in the US. Bars are apart from society, not an integral part of it – in keeping with our Puritan roots. Instead of an extension of the home, bars are more commonly depicted like Moe’s, Homer Simpson’s hangout. Yet this small pub in Cornwall had room for an American family with an 8-year old child, tired from a long day and looking to relax.

The UK has changed quite a bit since 1976.  On my last visit in 2009, the two Horse Guards outside Whitehall were a female soldier and a soldier of what in the UK would be considered Afro-Caribbean descent – a big change in the last 30 years.  But the best thing about societies is that they adapt – sometimes for the worse, occasionally for the better.

Paul Moody and Robin Turner’s [amazon asin=1409112675&text=The Search for the Perfect Pub] paints a picture of Britain’s pubs of yesteryear through the lens of George Orwell’s Moon Under Water, and attempts to track its course in the 21st century. There is some rough sailing and heavy weather’ but some of the unique properties of the British pub will see it safe into the 21st century.