Moore is in the company of a crew of Norwegians, who have been telling jokes and now expect him to reciprocate:
"This is unfortunate for me, as I can only ever remember one joke at a time, which in this particular case was unfortunate for everyone.
"Here is the joke. An Eskimo is driving across the tundra, when steam hisses out from under the bonnet and the car glides to a halt. He calls up the Inuit AA, and a breakdown truck appears. The mechanic opens the bonnet to be greeted with further spectacular vapour billows, and following a brief diagnosis looks up at the motorist. 'Looks like you've blown a seal, mate.' 'No,' says the driver, nervously fingering his upper lip, 'it's just frost on my mustache.'
"I personally find this joke endlessly entertaining, but as the punchline tailed away before a sea of faces wearing inappropriate expressions -- some utterly blank, some promptingly 'Please go on'-ish -- I realized too late it had been a poor choice in the situation. It depended on an understanding of the twin meanings of the phrase 'blown a seal,' both reasonably colloquial. My audience's failure to grasp either meant I now would be required to explain in detail an obscure act of bestiality and its graphic aftermath. These were people I had known for less than 36 hours. The closest I'd come to establishing a rapport was to be sick on one of them.
GIG: AMERICANS TALK ABOUT THEIR JOBS, edited by John
Bowe, Marisa Bowe,
and Sabin Streeter (reviewed July 2005). Fascinating collection
of, well, Americans talking about their jobs. Everyone from a
McDonald's worker to a CEO to a prostitute (plus an Elvis impersonator
and an EPA employee -- and no, sadly, neither of them is me) gets a
couple of pages to give us a glimpse into their lives. The most
repulsive isn't the taxidermist, the poultry factory worker, or the
carnival worker -- it's the high school basketball coach, a slimy,
arrogant jerk at a Catholic school who boasts about breaking recruiting
rules and getting alumni to illegally pay a foreign student's tuition
and clearly couldn't care less about his students' education (he also
teaches at the school and sneers, "Anybody can teach. You've got
the book there -- you just read it the day before and you memorize it
and you -- teach it, you know? I mean I graduated from college
and stuff, so it's not hard" -- yeah, those kids are getting a quality
education). A few jobs later, it's the turn of a WNBA star, who's
humble, honest, and hard-working. Of the two -- professional
basketball player and high school coach -- who'd have thought the pro
would be the role model?
Anyway, it's a great book, which I highly recommend to
everyone. (It's also fun to come up with your own similar
description of your job.)
A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS,
by Dave Eggers
(reviewed 5/29/00). What
David Foster Wallace would be if you took away his intensely annoying
tics.
Or what Danny Drennan would be if you took away his instinct for
judicious
self-editing. This hyper-ironic memoir by one of the founders of Might
Magazine (who currently publishes McSweeney's)
eventually
wears thin, but for much of the book it's funny and
self-conscious.
Considering it's about how the author's parents died when he was 22 and
he was left to raise his 7-year-old brother with no real marketable
skills,
it's not at all mawkish-- if anything, it veers too far the other way,
trying too strenuously not to be self-pitying. But it gets
annoying
when he's TOO self-conscious, writing long, over-dramatic scenes and
then
saying he only made them up to put them in the book. Funny once,
not funny 20 times.
THE ILLUSION OF ORDERLY PROGRESS, by
Barbara
Norfleet (reviewed 6/19/99) isn't
worth buying unless you're really
into bugs and/or photography, but if you find it in your library or
bookstore,
it'll entertain you for a good ten or fifteen minutes. It's a
bunch
of photos of colorful dead bugs posed in tableaux captioned with
cryptic
titles (or maybe they're allegorical, Tim). I realize that
description
doesn't sound too appealing, but really, it's pretty cool.
JOURNEY OF THE PINK DOLPHINS: AN AMAZON
QUEST, by Sy Montgomery
(reviewed 8/7/00).
Another travelogue, as Montgomery goes to the Amazon to see the pink
river
dolphins. Sometimes gets too New Age-y, with overly romantic
rhapsodies
on the circle of life or something, but when you get past those parts,
it's a fascinating account of the cultural and natural oddities of the
Amazon. Montgomery and her traveling companion seem like the kind
of women you would want to travel with -- resourceful and tough, yet
not
above worrying about how they look in a bathing suit.
THE KID, by Dan Savage (reviewed
8/7/00).
My brother heartily recommended this book,
and I liked it, but it left me unsatisfied. For those of you who
don't know, this is sex columnist Dan Savage's account of his and his
partner's
attempt to adopt a baby. What I really wanted, and never got, was
WHY they wanted a baby. I mean, they have to go through so many
hoops
and worry so much about what their parents, friends, society, etc. will
think -- you would think he could articulate a compelling reason.
Instead, he jokes about needing material for a book and insists they're
not doing it out of altruism or out of a need to have someone who will
love them unconditionally, but that's about it. I'm so
dissatisfied
by this because I wonder what it is that makes people want
babies.
Women theoretically have a maternal instinct (though obviously in some
of us it's channeled toward animals), and I've heard otherwise
intelligent
men talk about carrying on their name or bloodline or something, but
neither
of these apply to a gay male couple adopting a baby. But, despite
this major gap in the foundation of the book, it's well written and
entertaining,
even for baby-phobes like me.
THE KNOW-IT-ALL: ONE MAN'S HUMBLE QUEST TO BECOME
THE SMARTEST PERSON
IN THE WORLD, by A.J. Jacobs (reviewed Aug. 2005). Funny and
educational account of Jacobs' attempt to read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica.
I identify with a lot of his sentiments (he's a former Entertainment Weekly writer and
frets that he knows too much about pop culture and not enough about
important stuff; he yearns to go on Jeopardy!;
he's insanely competitive), aside from his obsessive desire to have a
baby. He weaves interesting nuggets from the Britannica into his tale, so you
learn stuff. Like that Jesse James was shot in the back while he
was at home "adjusting a picture."
MEN MY MOTHER DATED AND OTHER MOSTLY TRUE TALES, by
Brett
Leveridge (reviewed 9/6/00).
The first part of this collection of essays -- "Men My Mother Dated" --
is a hilarious series of brief sketches of Leveridge's mom's dating
life
in the '50s. The stories are terrific, funny and succinct, and
the
dates border on the unbelievable: there's the knife thrower, the
14-year-old who proposes marriage, the Cyrano-nosed guy -- oh, and Jack
Kerouac. I think it's summed up quite nicely by a quote on the
back
from NPR's Ira Glass: "It's amazing what an ingenious man can
achieve
with a high school yearbook, a word processor, and an Oedipal
complex."
Unfortunately, the "Other Mostly True Tales" part of the book is
eminently
skippable. Trite, dull, painfully uninsightful essays about
pointless
stuff, and only one or two good lines in the whole batch.
MONGO: ADVENTURES IN TRASH, by Ted Botha (reviewed
June 2005).
Interesting and entertaining book about the stuff people throw away and
the folks who retrieve it. It's fascinating to read about not
just what gets thrown out, but what you can find digging through dirt
from construction projects. It'll make you look at piles of trash
on the curb and actually think about pawing through them. Not
that I've done that or anything.
MY GOODNESS: A CYNIC'S SHORT-LIVED SEARCH
FOR SAINTHOOD, by Joe
Queenan (reviewed 5/29/00).
If you think my movie reviews are harsh, try reading some of Queenan's
stuff sometimes. He uses his Philadelphia upbringing as an excuse
for a great deal of this nastiness but admits that a lot of it is just
his personality, so he makes a vow to be nicer and do some good.
It's a bit too long and somewhat repetitious, and he either misses the
point or is satirizing the point (it's hard to tell which), because
what
he gets out of helping various causes is a smug sense of virtue rather
than any real pleasure at helping people. Which is exactly what
he
lambastes in the likes of Susan Sarandon, so it may be part of his
satire.
It's a good skewering of the frenzy of cause-related marketing out
there,
and it's very funny throughout (like how he decides, after switching to
Working Assets long distance, that it would be wrong of him to call his
right-wing friends because they would be inadvertently subsidizing
lefty
causes by talking to him -- only later does he arrive at the conclusion
that because they are conservative, they are probably evil, and he
shouldn't
be talking to them at all).
OTHER PEOPLE'S DIRT, by Louise Rafkin (reviewed
8/17/99). A housekeeper (and pathological
clean freak) tells stories of cleaning strangers' houses -- how she
interprets
what she finds, etc. Pretty funny.
SHIP OF GOLD IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA, by Gary
Kinder (reviewed
1/5/00). Absolutely
amazing true story of the deep-sea recovery of the Central America,
which
sank in 1857 with 21 tons of gold on board. The whole project,
from
conception to execution, was put together by one extraordinary
engineer,
Tommy Thompson, whose small, poorly funded team managed to do what no
other
entity, including the US military, was ever able to do: pinpoint
the wreck's location, create an underwater vehicle capable of working
at
depths of 10,000 feet, and recover artifacts from a wreck in deeper
water
than the Titanic. It's a fascinating story of American ingenuity
and ambition, very long, but worth it.
SLOUCHING TOWARD FARGO, by Neal Karlen
(reviewed
8/17/99). A nifty reportage by a
disenchanted Rolling Stone reporter who's
sent to dig up dirt on Bill Murray
via the bush-league baseball team the actor partly owns, the St. Paul
Saints.
Karlen can't bring himself to do the hatchet job, though, after hanging
out with the team -- instead he writes this entertaining account of his
time with them, which coincided for a brief period with Darryl
Strawberry
playing with the Saints to prove he was drug-free. It goes a
little
too long and gets redundant, but it's fun.
THIN ICE: COMING OF AGE IN CANADA, by Bruce
McCall (reviewed
5/23/99), is a funny, touching
memoir of the inferiority complex attendant on growing up
Canadian.
Sometimes it gets awfully depressing -- his father by turns coldly
ignores
him or witheringly belittles him, and his mother is a quiet alcoholic
--
but he has a clever turn of phrase. Especially if you like to
make
fun of Canadians, and who doesn't?
TRAVELS IN A THIN COUNTRY, by Sarah
Wheeler (reviewed
1/5/00). Nicely written,
often funny narration of the author's trip through Chile.
Chock-full
of cultural, environmental, historical, and natural information.
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