There is a continual assault on the English language. The intertunnel, and especially typing with your thumbs into a Portable Pandora’s Portmanteau, has led to the destruction of many words, including “led,” which is now misspelled lead uniformly. It’s right up there with vise/vice, loose/lose, and spelling et cetera “ect.” If you point out any of these errors, you are immediately enlisted in the shutzstaffel. Language evolves, you’re lectured. It never occurs to the lecturer that it can also devolve.
So lately the hipsters have glommed onto the term “supper club,” and want to use it to describe ghost kitchens, or informal meals shared by a group of people who use “deck” as an adjective. I won’t have it.
You see, instead of resurrecting a perfectly good term like supper club and debasing it, they should resurrect supper clubs, period. Our parents and grandparents got to go out to eat once in a while and hear live music and turn their ankles dancing. I wish we could.
But as the losing coach said, and I paraphrase, “Larry Bird isn’t walking through that door, and neither is Michel Legrand, or Sacha Distel.” Michel went to his reward after 86 busy years, and is no doubt waving down from a cloud on high to the lava pit his agent is doing the backstroke in. Sacha exhausted himself by trading in Brigitte Bardot for an Olympic skier, and checked out at 71. If he didn’t die happy, he wasn’t paying attention.
Joe and Nic’s Road Trip YewToob channel is a rara avis. They do the most useful thing you can find on the intertunnel. They go places, point the camera at what they’re looking at, tell you what they’re looking at, and report as much information as they can find about where they are. If the news media ever did this, they don’t do it now. Joe and Nic do.
They kind of specialize in going places others don’t, and for good reason. They favor abandoned places, and rundown places. They have the stones to go places like Gary Indiana and Detroit, and do not appear to be carrying sidearms, so they’re braver souls than me. They’re also brave enough to visit Belfast, Bangor, and Augusta, Maine, and tell the truth about them: i.e.: they’re pretty pleasant places to be.
It’s fun to hear them scratching their heads over crime stats in Belfast. They’re accustomed to crimes per thousand citizens, and Belfast has 47 crimes last year. Total. Welcome to Maine, kids.
We’re fairly familiar with Belfast, although it’s quite a ways away from our hovel in western Maine. Our children performed at the Belfast Harbor Fest one year. It was held in a giant circus tent in the park by the harbor.
Joe and Nic travel down the road to Bangor. Bangor’s a bigger town, and has a history of being a bit rough and tumble, all the way back to when it was lumber central for Maine exports. But it’s still a plenty safe place. The downtowns in these towns are mostly made up of handsome brick structures. They’re fascinated with the second best writer in Maine, who dwells there, but they’re from way out of town, so they’re forgiven. They mispronounce Orono, where the largest campus of UMaine is located (OR oh no). Our son attends UMaine, although it’s the campus in Augusta where he lays waste to the President’s List.
They mosey on down to Augusta to finish up, or Ogguster as we call it. It’s the state capital. We go there from time to time. We mostly press on down the road to Hallowell, which is an offbeat little strip of shops and restaurants. Ogguster has a handsome downtown, but truth be told, most of the burg is the usual gutbucket stripmall wonderland.
They visit the capitol building, which from the exterior looks like it belongs to a state with more people in it. When they get inside, they notice that it’s got a spare, no-nonsense Mainer vibe.
Joe and Nic sound like pleasant people. They should stay in Maine. But buy better books.
The police as an institution are so thoroughly ingrained in the public’s mind that it’s easy to overlook the fact that a professional police force is a fairly recent development. Before professional policing, there were many ad-hoc assemblies of people with varying amounts of authority, organized and paid for by this or that individual or organization, and ultimately relying on nothing more than overwhelming force to perform their duties.
Sir Robert Peel came up with the idea of an official police force in England in the early 19th century. The nickname “Bobbies” is a riff on Peel’s first name. So an official, organized police force is only about two-hundred years old. America more or less followed along with the organization of police in the same way as Merry Olde.
There were ancient laws in England that instructed every freeman to have certain weapons on hand and use them when called upon to serve king and country. That goes back to Henry II. Constables were appointed to call out the citizenry when required to restore order, and watchmen have been looking out for crooks, fires, stolen property, lost dogs, and various other breaches of public security for a millennium. Eventually sheriffs were sworn in to keep jails, collect taxes, and generally keep order over larger areas of the country. This office caught on in the American west, as well, giving birth to lots of good movies, and to Jamaica, where Reggae confessions eventually became popular.
The old ways led to mobs of criminals or disgruntled citizens clashing with loosely and quickly organized mobs of authorities. Civil disorder, whether due to outright criminality or not, was crushed with extreme prejudice, as they say, and only rarely with a detour to any judge when a tree was handier. Peel thought things could be improved if the general public thought that a policeman was just like them, only professionally interested in keeping order continuously. In other words, a policeman is just supposed to do what any good citizen would do in his place, but pay attention to nothing else while the general public got on with their lives.
Robert Peel came up with what he called “General Instructions” given to all policeman in London starting in 1829. Here they are:
To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
That sounds pretty good to me. However, it doesn’t sound even 1% like the approach to policing of any current police force I know of in the United States.
Farewell happy fields, Where joy forever dwells: hail, horrors!
-John Milton, writing on a Monday, I’ll wager
So we’re leaving Mérida .
We were over two hours early for our flight. We got evicted from our rental house early in the day, and security screening at the aeropuerto took less time than we had any right to expect. We took an Uber ride to the airport. We’d never Ubered before we went to Mexico, but it’s very much a way of life in Mérida. Today’s driver was a cute young woman, a first for us. We had been carted to and fro by a cadre of amiable men of various sizes and shapes and ages for the rest of the week. She listened to peppy Mexican pop the whole ride and was generally jovial and made us even less enthusiastic about leaving, if that’s even possible.
We visited parts of the airport we missed the first time, because we’re walking Spanish out of the country this go-round, instead of invading it. We walked through long, spacious and airy corridors, all floored in that nifty tawny stone they have all over the place. If it were tile, it would be a dreary wasteland of patterned patternless ground to cover, but each tile is lightly veined in endless variation, with the occasional substantial splotch of renegade stone mixed in by an unseen artist a million years ago or so.
There are multiple checkpoints, each manned by formidable musclebound military police with automatic weapons, looking like they haven’t heard a good joke since high school. Just kidding. Why does everybody think Mexico is Mad Max with tacos? Only the little strip of dirt on either side of the US border is a disaster zone filled with enough violence to compete with east Saint Louis. In Mérida, each waypoint is staffed with diminutive beauty pageant runners-up in smart sportscoats and too much makeup for their young years. They smile and apologize for their poor English skills using a vocabulary unknown to valedictorians in American schools. They just ask you if you have any food or foolishness in your luggage, and then send you off along the line with cheerful smiles.
Eventually you reach the final boss, who smiles broadly if you attempt any Spanish, no matter how feeble the assault on his language. If you’re expecting an interrogation, you’ll be disappointed, unless being asked if you had a nice visit counts as one. He dutifully stamps your passport and sends you on your way into the concourse.
The concourse had many strange things appurtenant to it. You could actually buy one of those ridiculous pool-cover-sized sombreros covered with sequins and other assorted tacky flair. It’s exactly the kind of hat no one in the country will be caught dead in. They all wear what my wife and I started calling “hippy-hoppy” trilbys, if they wear any headgear at all. Panama hats are definitely a thing here. They’re actually called jipijapa hats, but it comes out sounding like hippy-hoppy to our gringo ears. Selling Panama hats to tourists is the second most common job in Yucatan, I think, after making them, I guess. I suffered through so many sales pitches for them I could recite one from memory. I’ll spare you a full recitation. You can only hear that a hat was made by hand by children in a subterranean cavern so many times before you interrupt the sales pitch and offer to drive to the cave and get those kids out of there. This stops the sales pitch dead, generally. They are nice hats, though, but too rico for my blood.
There are cake shops in the mall. My wife puzzled over them. Who wants to buy a giant cake in an airport? It was mysterious enough as a concept, but when we saw a woman buy a whole stack of them, and watched the clerk sorta duct tape them together into a tower of confectionary Pisa, we went from curiosity to downright disbelief. You’re bringing a pillar of cake onto a plane as a carryon? Some people are built different than us, is all we could figure.
Then we encountered, finally, real fear. Terror, almost. We’d been warned by everyone about Mexico, and they were finally right. We ran smack dab into a fire-breathing, wirehaired goblin, his huge mouth agape, his raiment in tatters, beckoning us to our doom. Yup, Guy Fieri has a restaurant in a Mexican airport.
We had two hours to kill, so we ate in there. You have to sort of unhinge your jaw like a snake to get your mouth around the hamburgers. They come wrapped in a paper winding sheet, which was somehow appropriate, because you’ll need a stent for dessert if you finish the thing. They served us lemonade in a crystal skull, for obscure reasons. I’ve never sipped non-alcoholic drinks from the craniums of my enemies, or even my friends. I have to admit that sticking your thumb in an eye socket makes it easier to grip a beverage.
By arriving so early, the correct gate was still in use for another flight on another airline. “Viva” is another airline around there. We were on AeroMexico coming and going. It was very buttoned-down and efficient. I gather Viva is a cut rate carrier for shorter hops and vacations to places sensible people avoid, and similar destinations. I don’t really trust an airline with any form of enthusiasm in their name, like Viva! I don’t care for any excitement added to my air travel. I generally eschew any wild and wacky hijinks at 20,000 feet. I prefer airlines named like serial killers. I think they should even have middle names, like Wayne, to further banish any attempts at conviviality.
All the remaining steps in our travel home were steps down. The further we got, the more annoying and unpleasant things became. Atlanta was a zoo. The AeroMexico flight arrived early, which is a blessing when you have another plane to catch. Of course Atlanta didnt have a gate for it. We taxied to and fro all over the gigantic tarmac carpet, while Atlanta tried to make up its mind about about where to park our plane. By the time we got off, we had to scurry to make it to the next flight. The airport security personnel were literally crazy. At one point, we were made to go through one of those interminable switchback mazes designed to handle overflow crowds, even though there were none, just to approach the machine that x-rays your luggage. The whole time, a female linebacker shouted over and over, “We hain’t got no trays! Put everything in your pockets in yo luggage. We hain’t got no trays!” At the next checkpoint, two security personnel were breakdancing and rapping, while a third waved us past wordlessly.
The flight was a misery, but we expected that. The weather had turned cold. We got off the plane in the middle of the night in Portland, a dreary, desolate place. It was raining in sheets, and we couldn’t find our way out of the parking area. We came up against one barricaded exit after another, and finally discovered a self-serve stanchion that would process our parking ticket. It cost more to park for a week at that airport than a meal for two at the most expensive restaurant in Mérida .
The machine intoned: PLEASE inSERT your PARking ticket, over and over, in a crazy Teletubbies singsong. Of course the machine didn’t work. We tried several times, without any luck, until either a homeless man or a parking attendant without portfolio (they’re stamped at the same mill in Portland I gather) walked up to our window and told us our ticket must be dirty. He wiped it on his greasy camouflaged poncho, and failed to get it to work, with extra steps this time. He suggested we back up, and head to the only open attendant booth in the airport.
The woman in the booth was about two feet from us, but somehow didn’t see us as the minutes passed by on the clock. She was very busy, because no machine anywhere on the premises was working, and she was yelling instructions to travelers unseen into a microphone, and pressing various buttons with vigor. I was starting to get peevish about being ignored for so long. I’m sure her spider sense started tingling, and she opened the window between us, and my anger immediately morphed into pity. Her booth was wired to lord knows how many self-checkouts, and she could hear every one say, PLEASE inSERT your PARking ticket, over and over, all at the same time. I wanted to rescue her more than a hippy hoppy child laborer in a cave, I tell you what.
We drove home in silence, exhausted, hours in the car added to our traveling penance. When we got to the stop sign about a thousand yards from our house, the timing belt in our old Volvo let go, the valves stayed open, and the pistons slammed up into them and destroyed the engine.
Our car is perhaps more sensitive than us, but we understood how it felt. It would rather commit suicide than go back home.
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Somebody said that it couldn’t be done —
But then, with a grin, he replied
He’s never been one to say it couldn’t be done —
Leastways, not until he has tried.
So he buckled right in, with a bit of a grin;
By golly, he got right down to it.
He tackled The Thing That Couldn’t Be Done!
And goddammit but he couldn’t do it.
— Anonymous
The human race loves to travel far afield from familiar things. It yearns for discovery. Sometimes the voyage is as simple as doing a crossword puzzle, just to see what words might appear on a grid. Other times you’re suffering from scurvy and sunstroke while Vasco da Gama tries to figure out which way is east, and asks you for the hundredth time if you smell curry, too. The urge for discovery is the same, only the circumstances and the stakes change. It’s the same reason you watch Nicholas Cage movies on Tubi. It’s very, very doubtful, but there’s an off-chance that something interesting might be there, so you go exploring.
And so it went with our little thought experiment: What’s My Line. I offered two photos I took on the Paseo de Montejo in Mérida, Mexico, and challenged my readers to guess what function the building served, just by looking at it. The urge for discovery ran deep in the comments, and many tried to divine the building’s use. But a riddle that goes unsolved after many attempts just gets annoying, so I’ll spill the beans.
Here are the pictures again:
Of course the stakes were very high. A Don Rickles cookie was in play if anyone could guess what was going on inside this building. Many intrepid souls stabbed it with their steely knives, but they just couldn’t kill the beast. The guesses ranged from amusing to understandable, but not very close to the mark. There’s a reason for that, and I’ll explain it, along with the answer.
You see, I knew no one would guess the answer, because I didn’t have any idea what was going on when I passed by the building for reals, more than once. I marveled at it, but I didn’t understand it. In true explorer fashion, when I couldn’t puzzle it out, I went in and asked. And got an education, so to speak.
The reason that I couldn’t figure it out is the same reason nobody else could figure it out. Our American minds have been marinating in our own cultural formaldehyde that we can’t see things properly any more, or even imagine things anymore. We’re boiled frogs.
That building is a school. An elementary school, I think, my Spanish skills are poor, and the different levels of schooling in Mexico is obscure to me. That’s it, a children’s school, nothing more. When I asked, I figured I’d misheard, and asked again. Is it a museum of an old elementary school? Nope. A fancy private school? Nope. Just an elementary school. I stood inside that open vestibule you see there, and inside was a beautiful greensward, lined with a colonnade with classrooms doors in a row. That flowering bush tumbling over the wall on the exterior rambled all around inside, too.
I didn’t recognize it for what it was for the same reason my readers didn’t. It didn’t look like a medium security prison, like it would in the United States.
Month: April 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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