The Layover Trilogy: The Rosetta Stone

Five hours into my eight-hour layover in LAX, I have begun a new game of Travel Scrabble with my companion. Travel Scrabble is compact and ridgy so that the tiles will snap into place and not become dislodged if the board were to, say, suddenly sail through the air toward the Cinnabon dumpster. The board is clear. I have one vowel and two possible three-letter words. I had already decided to take at least fifteen minutes for my turn in order to give my companion some much-needed time for reflection. After a minute I have bored myself and snapped down my word. My companion leans back, cracks his fingers, and settles in like a bear in winter. I drift.

We are in the international airport. The Estee Lauder ad for Perfectionist wrinkle lifting serum shines from every single wall. But wait! Could it be? They are not the same. Yes: each one is in a different language. A completely different alphabet! My lord. It is the Rosetta Stone. Right here in LAX. A good scholar could, given enough time, discover the key that unlocks almost any language. Could discover how to say "New! The first wrinkle lifting serum to use CP+R technology" in every tongue known to mankind. Right next to the English version is an ad using some kind of characters. Letters in our alphabet correspond to sounds, so that speech can be transcribed. Characters may have nothing to do with sounds. They're called characters because they're like little personalities all to themselves. They're pictures. Of things, mostly. So there may be a stroke that depicts "tree" and another that depicts "woman" and we're supposed to know if this character represents Mother Nature or Dry, Scaly Skin. Not only that, but instead of reclining comfortably across the page like letters, the characters are strung up by the neck, and it's up to us to see how they're hanging. The system is almost completely inscrutable to all but about two billion people, so this is a rare opportunity for someone with a lot of time between flights to crack the code.

It's not easy. The stroke for tree, for instance, can mean tree, or maybe, because of implied height, "basketball-player," and the stroke for sky can mean sky, or, possibly, the concept of "strategy," which apparently used to sound like the word for sky a few centuries ago; and with the addition of a small dash halfway up the tree-stroke on the right ("squirrel"), suggesting quick movement, gives us the character tree-squirrel-sky, or "pick-and-roll offense." Not to be confused with the character with the squirrel-dash placed higher near the sky ("bat") or at the base of the tree ("plummet," "rabies," or "a walk in the park"). It is a system without mercy. Sloppy penmanship dooms the author to obscurity.

This Rosetta-Stone business is serious scholarly work. It takes a lot of concentration, and there is no guarantee a person can pursue it and prevail at Scrabble too, especially when playing with a man who has no sense of the passage of time. Especially when he has a nicer rack.

Look! There is a whole little mob of characters on the Korean version, all corresponding to the compact English "New!" I study, and after a few hours, its mystery is revealed: Dear Leader on a pedestal, Dear Leader on a pedestal with X's over his eyes,  and then Dear Leader on a pedestal again. A native speaker will get it right away. But what a load to lug around, in place of new!--a slim dart of a word from a git-er-done language. New! Crisp, sharp, pins its meaning to the mat and rolls off, ready for action. Yeah, baby. That's my language. Big, muscular, agile English, all swagger and punch, and home to a thumping vocabulary, a treasury of words stolen from everyone and everywhere, the echoes of one conquered people after another. And words admired from a thousand voyages and stashed into the luggage on the way home. They're all ours now, nimble, sly, supple, and all of them slingable. Like the choice chunk of Middle English that I could sling at this Scrabble game right now. If I had a "U."

The Wicked Glitch

A few of you have written to me to let me know my little email notifications have been showing up in hieroglyphics. "Murrmurrs," it starts out, and then elaborates thus: !--[if gte mso 9]!--o false 18 pt l8 pt o false false false...

Et cetera.

Well, it's catchy, all right, but it's not ideal, from the standpoint of communication. I admit that. I feel a twinge of apprehension, and then I launch my standard response to anything I don't understand, which is to pretend everything's fine. Walk in bleeding from the armpits and pixilated with a purple rash, and I'll tell you "oh that! I had that before. It's nothing. You'll be right as rain in no time." Then comes the whump sound and soon you and your suit are stretched out in a box. I embrace denial as a life strategy.

My computer's view of me.

And in things related to computers, sometimes it works out. Sometimes you just have to turn off the machine and give it a good night's rest and everything's sunshine and waffles the next morning. I wrote back to my concerned readers. "Yeah, I don't know what that's all about," I wrote. "Sometimes the Google Blogger platform just has an epizootic. There's no explaining it. Anyway, it's nothing in my control. Thanks." It suits me to think that nothing is in my control. The alternative is to consider that it might be, but I'm too stupid to fix it. And my preference leans strongly toward feeling not stupid. It's odd: I'm comfortable being ignorant of the mysteries of the universe, with no urge to make up a cast of deities to give it some order, but when it comes to computers I believe in a whole pantheon of gremlins and bogeymen and eagerly await the Armageddon wherein the mighty glitch-slayers prevail against the viruses and hackers and we all live happily ever after in the Cloud.

So I kick the can down the road. "I'll look into it," I say, "just as soon as we get to the bottom of this fiasco in Benghazi." I have been led to believe this is a grown-up approach.

Besides, it's not really a problem, I tell myself. People can still click on the title and it will go straight to my blog. They know that, right? Then I remember the people who complained that my posts are funny but they're really short and end in the middle of a sentence, and I realize that no, some people don't actually get that at all.

You can set up your email notifications to deliver the entire post, or just a snippet that cuts off after a certain number of letters. I chose the snippet because I want people to go to my blog where they trip the magic people-counter. But I've never been completely thrilled with the notification. For one thing, although I put my posts in at 3AM every Wednesday and Saturday, Google doesn't fire off the alert until later in the evening. "Let's do dinnertime," Google says, with the sensibilities of a telemarketer.

Then I looked at my people-counter and discovered that my audience has dropped off quite a bit in the last couple months. So I logged into Blogger Help Forum and typed out my question. I had no real hope this would work out. Even if someone did hammer out a reply, it would come with instructions that I'm thirty years too old to understand, and I would give up, feeling irritated, which I prefer to feeling stupid. "First, determine the ID or class of the relatively positioned column, clear your browser's cache/cookies, and then simply add the following between your style and /style tags..." it would say, and I would say, "go fuck yourself."

But, miracle of miracles, the next morning I had an email in the King's English from a glitch-slayer explaining that it appeared I was cutting and pasting my posts into my template from a Microsoft Word document, and that led to a formatting problem. And gave me a set of intelligible instructions to counteract this. I don't know what "formatting" means, but they had me. I do write my posts in Word and when I first started blogging I tried to paste them into the template, but they went straight to hieroglyphics, so I got in the habit of retyping them instead. But faced with putting in six posts in advance of my trip to New Zealand, I tried the cut-and-paste again, and lo, this time it worked. Cool! Sometimes Google improves things on its own, and it appeared it had. Except, apparently, it still sent all its spare hieroglyphics to the email notification.

So if some of you are reading your first Murrmurrs in months because you read "--[if gte mso 9]!" and you thought I'd lost my touch, settle in! You've got some reading to do. Pootie and I will be here playing Scrabble Twister until you've caught up.