The Eyebrow Thing

Have you noticed the "eyebrow thing"? I mean the way some people (mostly young males, for some reason) combine a frown with wrinkling their brow in order to arch their eyebrows into a kind of inverted V? I ask myself what exactly is this supposed to convey? Bewilderment? Sadness? There doesn't seem to be a specific time or place when this expression is considered appropriate. I was walking by a Dairy Queen the other day, and a young man reading a book in the window suddenly looked up at me with that expression on his face. Puzzled by something he had read? Practising? I'll never know. I do know this, though: Do it often enough for long enough and you'll be getting Botox injections for those wrinkles and frown lines.

Which reminds me: A friend of mine once met a famous cosmetics maven who didn't have a visible line on her face. "I know her secret", she said to me afterwards, "she keeps her face a mask and shows no expression at all."

Well, either that was her secret or she had had so much cosmetic surgery her face had become a mask.

Travel Writing

I like to read travel writiers. Not just the Paul Theroux tell-it-like-it-is kind, but the kind that write for in-house magazines and Sunday newspaper travel sections. You know, the sort of person who always writes nice puff pieces and never ever has a bad experience. "The only thing wrong with an inside cabin on a cruise ship is that you don't know what time it is." To which my response is "The only thing wrong with washing your hair in the toilet is that there's no hot water." I wonder why everything is so rosy to these people. Is it because their whole travel experience is paid for by someone else? There can't be that much Prozac in the world.

I once went on a bus tour in Europe. The first thing we heard from our tour guide was that although all tips had been prepaid, he just knew we'd want to do something nice for Tony the driver, because today is his birthday. When I compared notes with other people, it turned out that Tony and the tour guide took turns having birthdays every trip. Why don't these things happen to the happy-wappy people who write for the auto club magazine? Why don't they lose luggage on Air Canada on a flight that only goes to one place from that city?

The best travel writer who ever wrote died recently. His name was Norman Lewis, and that man not only told the truth, but did it elegantly. Here's a sample in parting: "The moon came up; the breeze died away, and we lay motionless on a sea that glistened with phosphorescence, white as a frost-flecked desert. The sail stretched above us like a dark wing, cancelling out the stars." (from "A Voyage by Dhow").

Overbites

Overbites

Thank the stars, the "lisping madness" has left us. For a while there, I thought every letter s was going to be transformed into an f. It started (I guess) with some influential people deciding that it would be cool to look like they had an overbite, even if they didn't. Also, it seemed nice to just lisp the letter s a little to sound cool. The trouble was, as with all fads, that too many people wanted to join in, and too many of them were too lazy to try to do a good job of it. So, we had a lot of substituting F for S, resulting in some pretty filly founding wordf for a while, fuckfeff being among the worst. Then, not having a natural overbite, some of these poor dweebs didn't know whether to lisp or not, resulting of lisped "sh" and "ch" sounds as well - "actually" was pretty hard. It reached its peak for me when an English teacher I met decided that rather than be subtle, he would just lift his lip and pronounce all s's with his teeth on his lower lip. I thought he was snarling at me at first, since he'd never talked that way before, then I realized he just wanted to be trendy and relate to his students, at least in his own mind. Anyway, it has pretty much faded away, to be replaced with the next group madness, to be the subject of my next diatribe.