It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard’s pear tree. [1]
Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?
* * *
Department Of Gender War, Schmender War
Dateline 1: Late last week. Scrolling through news headlines from the online newspapers moiself subscribes to [2], t rying to find something distracting…but instead (of course?) came upon something that frosted my butt. A headline mentioned the term, *gender wars.* That set my teeth on edge, until…
Dateline 2: Monday, circa 8 am. Scrolling through my one social media outlet, looking for, finding, as one occasionally does, an I-couldn’t-have-put-it-better encapsulation of a manufactured distraction to a real problem:
A “gender war,” like all wars, is a patriarchal construct of male domination.
* * *
Department Of A Blast From The Past
Dateline: January 2025. New Year; new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month). It turned out that moiself liked this enough that it was a regular blog feature for 2025. Will it continue throughout 2026? Time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.
This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?! [3] friend gave me, all those years ago, [4] as to why I should be writing a blog: a blog would serve as a journal of sorts for my life. Journal/diary-resistant moiself would have some sort of a record, or at least a random sampling, of what was on my mind – and possibly what was on the nation’s mind – during a certain period of time.
Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago January, to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )
Here is an excerpt from my blog of 12-8-17 ( The Elbow I’m Not Ignoring ). This one caught my attention as it is now, technically, [5] a memory of a memory:
Department Of Yet Another Blast From The Past
AKA, An Incident I Haven’t Thought About In A Long Time
Specifically, Crazy Bicycle-Riding Man ® .
Dateline: one afternoon, a long time ago in a galaxy at a university far, far away ( UC Davis. ) I was on campus; my first morning class had let out and I had three or so hours before my next class’s midterm exam. Instead of returning to my (off-campus) apartment for lunch I decided to splurge [6] and get a sandwich from the campus Coffee House and do my last-minute studying for the exam on the campus Quad. ‘Twas a glorious spring day; I could have easily spent several hours happily parked by a mini grove of fir trees on the acres of green grass, along with other students studying, eating, napping, or tossing a Frisbee back and forth…
…but after about 45 minutes I had to move as I just couldn’t take it anymore.
What had begun as a curiosity – what I thought at first was perhaps a stunt or prank – morphed from snarky entertainment into torture by seemingly infinite repetition.
A young man with curly, shoulder-length brown hair was riding a balloon-tire beach bicycle back and forth across the quad length, from north to south and then east to west, all the while singing the Gordon Lightfoot song, If You Could Read My Mind. He didn’t sing the entire song, only a portion of it: [7]
I never knew I could feel this way
And I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back
That’s it. Thirty-seven words, which he kept repeating singing. Over and over. And over.
It was… fascinating, at first. But ultimately tedious. After about fifteen minutes, Crazy Bicycle-Riding Man’s path took him within a few feet of me and I caught a glimpse of his glassy blue eyes and realized, He is going to keep doing this until he either passes out or someone makes him stop.
I felt a brief twinge of sorrow for the guy’s obvious…disturbance. But whether or not the man’s break from reality was drug-induced or the result of a mental health crisis, I (like the other students I saw leaving the Quad in droves) was young and impatient, and my sympathy eventually dissolved into annoyance. I lasted another half hour before I gave up and took my books to the library to finish studying.
After all these years, I remember what Crazy Bicycle Riding Man was singing but haven’t a clue as to how I did on the midterm for which I was studying. Which is perhaps the healthiest way to pass through this world, n’est ce pas? [8]
This is what the bicycle looked like. Unfortunately, this is not what Crazy Bicycle Riding Man ® looked like.
* * *
* * *
Department Of A Good Read Spoiled
Sub Department Of Censorious Scrooge Podcast
Dateline: Monday; throughout the day, listening to a podcast while doing various chores. Moiself was delighted to find out that the podcast The Allusionist was doing a special episode: a reading of A Christmas Carol. [9]
Charles Dickens’ beloved novella was published in 1843. Up until about a decade ago, for a period of over 20 years I would reread A Christmas Carol every year, one stave [10] a night, starting on December 20. The Allusionist podcast host Helen Zaltzman read the story with occasional/select verbal annotations – using quick, sotto voce asides to explain Olde English terms, items, concepts or words ( e.g. bedlam; lugubrious; brazier; workhouse/poorhouse ) – which might be unfamiliar to contemporary listeners.
I’m very familiar with the story, and without thinking about it started reciting some of the dialog from memory, until moiself was astonished to hear Zaltzman censoring a crucial piece of the story’s dialog.
It happened when Zaltzman was reading Stave Three; specifically, the scene when Ebenezer Scrooge and The Ghost of Christmas Present are watching the Christmas Eve gathering at the humble abode of Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit. Cratchit’s wife and children are awaiting the return of Bob and the youngest child, Tiny Tim, who’ve gone to a church service. Frail Tiny Tim has an unnamed debility; he needs leg braces and a crutch to walk. When Bob and Tiny Tim arrive home they are joyously greeted by the other children, who whisk him off to another room to see the Christmas pudding cooking, while Mrs. Cratchit asks her husband how their beloved Tim behaved during the outing.
“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
That is how Dickens wrote the dialog. Here is how the podcast host read it (my emphases re her censorship and insertion):
“…he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was ‘disabled – sanitizing a word’ – and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made disabled beggars walk, and blind men see.”
Really.
It floored me. I was already on the floor (exercising), which was a good thing because I might otherwise have fallen over, first from the surprise, and then the indignation.
She didn’t just do what I just heard her do…right? I’ve listened to The Allusionist podcast long enough to know that its host (Zaltzman) has sanctimonious speech constable tendencies…even so, it smacked my gob.
What kind of a self-crippling, blue-nosed, censorious, patronizing mindset led Zaltzman to decide that we in the 21st century cannot interpret or handle the 18th century vocabulary employed by the 18th century author of a classic, beloved story, and that she must protect us from such vocabulary?
And, justifying her censorship, she notes that she is sanitizing a word.
Sanitizing.
Who told Zaltzman that cripple/crippled/lame are dirty words, in need of disinfection? Also, as to her substitution, the term disabled was not used until the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. And, as MH said, that evening when I told him why my happy-all-day mood ( “I’m getting to listen to A Christmas Carol!” ) had been sullied, “Who decided crippled was unacceptable?”
Evidently Zaltzman decided that word is a pejorative. But crippled can be – used to be – simply descriptive. The terms handicapped or disabled cover an incredible spectrum – describing Tiny Tim as disabled tells you little about his condition. Tim could have been disabled by poor eyesight, or hearing loss, or cognitive or emotional difficulties or a speech impediment or a seizure disorder or…. Crippled is more specific: the reader knows that Tim’s mobility has been compromised. Dickens used the words that were in use, for those who had difficulty walking/couldn’t walk at all, at the time he wrote the book (and Zaltzman managed to annotate many other of Dickens’ words, without *censoring* them).
Many years ago I listened to several interviews with/retrospetives about the fiction writer Andre Dubus, who had recently died. Years before his death, Dubus had been hit by a car and crippled – *his* description. When Dubus was asked by interviewers (and he often was) why he chooses to refer to himself as a cripple or someone who had been crippled, Dubus explained that, as a writer, he appreciated the simple and utilitarian descriptiveness of the term. He was, in fact, crippled – he could no longer walk. The term provided factual, useful information, and was in no way critical or insulting to him.
Oy vey. As Tiny Tim might say, God Bless us, every one (and flaming atheist moiself would not attempt to censor that character, or put other words in his mouth). But I could not finish listening to the podcast. Helen Zaltzman, bah humbug.
And by bah humbug, I mean, “What the fuck?!?!?!?”
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [12]
* * *
May you not be plagued by the humbug of censorship;
May you realize that grown-ass adults to not need you to sanitize
words that *you* find objectionable;
May you have, or one day obtain, fond memories of a bicycle-riding troubadour;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Specifically, in the pear tree daughter Belle purchased and (with the help of MH) planted many years ago
[2] The Oregonian; The LA Times, The NY Times; The Washington Post…at least one of which may be cancelled by the timme you read this.
[3] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.
[4] Was it really over twelve years ago?
[5] Due to the fact that I’m re-running it.
[6] Working at the school library to put myself through school, any non-home procured food – even a simple sandwich – was (or felt like) a splurge.
[7] The chorus? Verse? Bridge? Root canal? Help me out, musically literate people.
[8] Not to show off in front of Gallic illiterates, but n’est ce pas? is French for, “The birdhouse smells like stinky feet, does it not?”
[9] specifically, the novelization of the script for The Muppet Christmas Carol, which followed the book almost word for word.
[10] The word Dickens used for chapter.
[11] Via (NPR; other online literary and newscasts)
[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
