Idio

Spending time with brothers is an occasion to see your mannerisms
expressed in others, idio-synchro-cies.

DC

To return to DC is just to see which ghettoes have been gentrified
lately. The gap between have and not remains shocking. The boundary line
only creeps east a little at a time.

Operations

Kafka quote - there are some things we could never get over, were it not
for the operations of time.

I am looking at streets where I used to live and ... nothing. I remember
little, feel less, yet those days were vivid, intense and harsh at the
time. But now, it's gone, all done.

Physical Memory

When you return to a place after 25 years, your eyes may not remember,
but your body does.

Need to Know Basis

I am at the airport, heading back east. The airport is the one place
where you most need to know the time, and there are no clocks anywhere

Endless Flow

On Lulu.com's bestseller list, you will find "How to Become an Alpha Male", for only $47.97 per copy ... and check out this teaser:

"Dubbed "The lazy man's way to easy success with 20 or more women a month," How to Become an Alpha Male is the no-risk, never-fail blueprint on how to 'magnetically' attract an endless flow of beautiful women to you... without ever having to play their games or deal with rejection."

Not so sure how I'd feel about the "endless flow" - I guess you would need to buy the sequel to find out how to turn off the spigot.

Also, do you like the bit about "their" games? Of course "we" would never do such things. But I'm not certain if these games apply to all women or just the "beautiful" kind.

What's In A Name?

Let us say you are about to meet a friend's new boyfriend for the first time. Let us say you have heard nothing about him, except that he's "nice", or he's "smart", or he's "a good guy". Whatever. Now let's say you have heard his first name. Now what do you think?

This is no Freakonomics bit about how your first name affects your earning potential (tell that one to the John Smiths of the Dark Ages). This is no "Gawd how could they give a kid a name like that! What are they, retards?" This is no, ha ha is that a girl's name? Nope, this is just about your first impression, given a name. My brother will know what I mean when I tell you, the boyfriend's name is ... Diego.

Diego?

Don Diego de la Vega?

Zorro?

Dashing, Romantic, Handsome, Daring, Suave Diego? Woah. Suddenly you are excited to meet this new boyfriend. This is not the Roger, Bill or Dave of previous introductions. This ... is Diego.

Except that we heard it wrong. His name isn't Diego. It's Jacob. Not the unusual, daring, charming choice, but the common, typical, number one name for boys for the past twenty years. Oh. Jacob. Okay. Is he nice? Is he smart? Is he a good guy?

Snapshots

For the cover of the paperback version of 'Time Zone' I put together a collage of old photographs. One of my favorites is of my in-laws holding their baby grandson - I can guarantee you it never occurred to either of them that someday some of their grandchildren would be "black". Seeing how family changes the race equation in people's hearts is really something beautiful. I almost want to propose enforced miscegenation to get this thing over with once and for all, but my wife reminds me of the skin-tone issue. There is probably no end.

Romancing the Down and Out

It's a long tradition in the arts - romancing the down and out. You can idealize them on the sunny side (O Henry, Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen), you can idealize them on the seamy side (Caldwell, Bukowski, Tom Waits, Jon Wayne). Either way it's an old game, but when it comes down to it, as soon as you stray from the individual character and delve into a character type, you've lost it.

Multiple Skinning of Cats

My week at work so far:

1. solve problem. deploy solution on server A. It works :}
   
2. deploy solution on server B. It fails :{
   
3. solve problem completely different way. deploy solution on servers A and B. It works :}
   
4. deploy solution on server C. It fails :{
   
5. solve problem yet another completely different way. deploy solution on servers A, B, and C. It works :}
   
6. decide not to deploy solution on server D. I mean, come on, already. enough is enough :}
   

Exceptional

Out in the world, having adventures ...

Ham and Cake

I thought it was quaint when I read in a Hardy Boys book that Mrs Hardy decided to cheer up her poorer friends by baking them "a ham and a cake". Seems like Senator George Allen has encountered this same combination - exposed of having Jewish relatives, he makes a show of having a ham sandwich for lunch. He's been running as a sort of california-bred but dixie-loving good ol' boy, and now he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He made some racist remark (macaca??), proudly flies the confederate flag, and says that people who claim he's a racist are only attacking him because his grandfather was Jewish! Now he says he didn't event know his grandfather was Jewish until he read it in the news a month ago, yet he's been talking for years about how his father was imprisoned by the Nazis. Maybe for being a lousy ukulele player? He says he never thought to ask why.

And you thought politicians were smooth.

I've got a tip for the guy. Some of my ancestors were Jews who migrated from Germany somewhere around the 1830's, and moved to Tennessee, so, not only were they Jews, but they were also on the wrong side of the Civil War. It could happen! Who knew?

Blogfire

I came across a bit of a blogfire yesterday, between two contemporary american writers (Sara Gran of saragran.com and TayariJones of tayarijones.com). Ms. Gran had made the comment that she did not know of many contemporary African-American writers, and that there could be many reasons for this, including her own ignorance (I would have stopped right there).

She also gave the impression that she thought that maybe African-American publishers (!) aren't doing a good enough job of promoting, and that there really aren't many contemporary African-American writers (!!!) and that maybe that's because so many African-Americans are illiterate (!!!!!!!).

Oh, so many feet, so few mouths.

Ms Jones has some disagreements about these notions.

Substitute "women" for "African-American" - how would that sound?

I don't know of many contemporary Turkish writers - why is that? (I suppose I could find out about them if I tried)

--------------------------------------------

Well, sometimes you like what a person writes but you wouldn't necessarily like them as people, and sometimes you like somebody as a person but you wouldn't like their writing, and that's okay.
I've enjoyed Sara Gran's books, but her blog often makes me want to run screaming from the room (if you could run screaming from a website). There are other writers whose fiction makes me cringe, but I enjoy their blogs.

Also, it's interesting that once someone is invited into the literary establishment, how their opinions begin to resound around that particular world. They write about each other and that world and they all read about each other and that world. Outsiders want in. Measurements are made. It's a glass cage of writerliness, yet it's one where rock-throwing is encouraged.

Doomed

Yes, once again the word of the week is "doomed". We here in the West are "doomed". Doomed if we do and doomed if we don't. Dooming someone (verb?) is not hard to do. Just say "you are doomed". This happened to my family not too long ago. My mother invited my cousin out to dinner, but it was for a friday night, and she was unaware that this guy's friday night dinners were a hugely critical piece of his whole world structure (religion, of course - how else can "doom" come into the picture?). Well, he decided that she did know exactly the significance and she was trying to undermine and even destroy his faith (i guess ...), so he pronounced her and her entire family "doomed". As far as I know, we are all still doomed. I'm not exactly sure when and how this dooming will occur and what form it will take - maybe it's the reason I've never won the lottery, or maybe it's the reason I missed that light on El Camino Real last week. Perhaps there's a bag of spinach with my name on it lingering on some grocery story shelf somewhere. Do not know. But then, doom seems to be my destiny, if it's just another word for death. If they're saving it up for the next world, then fine, go ahead, if it makes you feel better. Doom all you want.

Respect

Questions:

1. Do people have to earn your respect? (or do you start out treating them with respect, and they can only lose it?)

2. Do you think people merit respect for what they have done in the past (or for what they are doing right now? in other words, how much does past merit outweigh present demerit?)

3. Do you believe in tokens of respect? (how do you express it? is respect to bow and scrape? is it respect to treat someone the same as you expect to be treated yourself?)

Atento!

Needless to say, I was both surprised and profoundly discouraged when I came across this Wikipedia entry concerning my novel:

"Begun in the spring of 1823, and spanning continents as well as generations, this haphazard, sprawling mess was left to flounder incoherent and incompleted on the internet. Consisting mainly of prologues, meta-prologues and brief, confusing introductions to characters of uncertain relevance, 'Macedonia' was best described as 'a method in search of a madness'.

The distinguished meso-american botanist, Pedro Trevelyan, is said to have conceived 'Macedonia' during a bout of malaria contracted while traveling by stage coach through the jungles of Uruguay in search of a cure for hiccups. Later, Lady Daphne Verguenza picked up the thread and added some peculiar chapters of her own concerning a vague presidential assassination plot. Macedonia Fabricatta, the legendary Italian horticulturalist and riverboat queen, was somehow interpolated into the true historical events surrounding the unprecedented appointment of the first female radio broadcaster in the history of the americas.

Some time after this, a decidedly European twist forces the novel to flounder in a sequence of dreams which meander through Catalonia, Normandy and the Baltic. These dreams, the fevered offshoot of a popular movie about a ragtag group of lesbian rugby players from the outback who overcame vast obstacles in order to become the first ragtag group of aboriginal lesbian rugby players to be featured in a major film, often involve images of snakes and baths and rainbows.

Fortunately, one is spared from further developments along this line, for the novel veers unexpectedly into patchy monologues concerning a theory of the novel, metaphysics, and the author's sense of duty to his imaginary yet devoted readers. Finally, the piece comes to rest on the rocky shores of a retelling of the Iliad, dressed up in the modern garb of adoption, delivery vans, pop-tarts and ingratitude.

Not for the faint of heart, this grueling episode bears all the hallmarks of mid-nineteenth century twaddle, including a romance between a poet and a duck, after which the reader is invited to participate in a book tossing contest to see how far they can throw the very novel itself. This I was happy to do, and my copy is now resting peacefully at the bottom of the small pond that graces my neighborhood."

I don't know what to say. Of Wikipedia I can only comment, caveat emptor. You get what you pay for.

Wake Up Call

This morning, 6 AM

dad

dad

Dad

DAD

DAD

DAD

Come wipe my butt!

Not Lost

UPS lost a package they were delivering to me, but according to their website, they didn't actually lose it. They say "your package has experienced an exception".

(i may not have my package, but at least my package is having experiences)

The Big Book of Resentment

(from Macedonia)

All of us carry a big book of resentment around with us wherever we go. At appropriate times, we open it up, and log another entry. Someone is better-looking than we are. Someone beats us at cards. Surely they were cheating. We were going to say something, but then someone says it first. We would have said it better, but now it's too late. Someone gets a bigger slice of pie, and we like pie.

It isn't necessarily a book of big resentments, it's that the book is big because there are so many of them, and they accumulate from very early days, when we're babies and things are not exactly how we want them to be. We do not like this food they are stuffing in our mouths, but we have no words to tell them. We push away the spoon and they think we are being cute.

Someone cuts in the line ahead of us. Someone gets a better seat. Someone came into the restaurant after we did and look, they already have their food and we do not. Someone got the promotion after we worked our butts off but they were bigger ass-kissers. We deserved a gold star but only got a silver one because some other guy pushed us and we pushed back and we got caught not them.

We want to sleep, but someone wakes us up. We want to go, but someone's taking too much time getting ready. We want to use the bathroom, but someone else is in there. We want noodles, we get rice. We ordered the blue, they shipped the green.

We've got a lot of entries and one of these days we're going to sit down and organize them into nice little categories and add things up and find out who it is who ripped us off the most. Was it the weather? Was it the city? Was it the school? Was it mom and dad? Was it the obnoxious little sibling or the obnoxious older one? Was it the boss? Was it the so-called friend? Was it God almighty who after all is pulling all the strings behind the scenes if you believe that kind of thing.

Some resentments we write in blood red ink. These can never be erased. Others are merely penciled in. Some are only notes we planned to fill in details later, then forgot.

The book gets heavier all the time. We carry it around. We bring it out for show and tell at lunch with friends. Some resentments are shared with others. Some are ours alone. Some we never talk about. Others we bring up all the time. How interesting. Tea cups made of tin foil.

We love our book. In some ways it is who we are. If we lose it, let it go, than who do we become? Selfless, without memory, without pain. We might as well be clouds.

Video of the Day

today, a link to Manu Chao's video for the song Me Gustas Tu

Two Kinds

There are two kinds of bloggers - innies and outies.

Micro Man

Pay close attention. Details are the essence of the matter. This philosophy can be applied to anything and everything. Micro Man is the master of minutia. Give him an inch, he'll take it, one millimeter at a time. Give him an hour, he's got you all day long.

If you ask him a question, be prepared for a voluminous response. If you ask for advice, you'll never hear the end of it. Micro Man not only knows the details, he knows the details of the details. He always gets to the bottom of the problem, and then to the bottom of the bottom. Don't be in any hurry. Micro Man is not.

Did I mention that whatever it is it must be perfect in every way? Otherwise, Micro Man will throw it out. He'll keep going and going until he gets it right. There's no other way to stop him. Words have no effect.

At work the Micro Man drives everybody crazy. His projects are always late. His meetings are always eternal. His emails are measured in pages. He considers every angle. He discuses every consideration. He plans every plan and plans the planning of those plans. Infinite regression is no stranger to the Micro Man.

Sometimes he can be stumped. Getting dressed in the morning can be hard. There are advantages and disadvantages to every possible combination of wearable items. Likewise, meals are problematic. Where another might just grab something and go, the Micro Man can not. It is fortunate that he has but one possible route to drive to work. When two approaches yield identical results, he can by stymied completely. He must find the optimal solution or die.

When dealing with the Micro Man, you must become a Micro Manager yourself. Don't say anything that may give him an opening. Don't ask him for anything, especially if there are time constraints. Don't start a conversation he will not be able to complete. Think before you speak to him, and then think twice. Will it be worth it? How will I be able to get away?

Micro Man is a time-eating trap. You might see him glancing over, hoping to ensnare. Look away! Look away fast. You have better things to do.

Nature Ain't What It Used To Be

a trilogy

1. yet another "rare" white buffalo was born today, ushering in yet another era of peace and prosperity

2. reminds me of a native american former colleague of my wife's, who once explained to her that, if she were a native american, she would "really be able to appreciate" the sight of a duck flying across the freeway.

3. also recalls an actual quote from an actual interview with Axl Rose some years ago. He interrupted a question to say , "woah, a blue jay. that means someone just died" (my neighborhood is home to flocks and flocks of blue jays, so i guess we're really laden with meaning)

The Neifi Index

A rare sports break, to reference The Neifi Index, a statistic invented by King Kaufman at salon.com that measures how poorly a team does when it plays a certain player, versus how well it does when they keep him on the bench. The award is named after Neifi Perez, a utility infielder who has a rather amazing history of demonstrating this statistic. When he plays, his teams lose. When he doesn't play, they win, to such a remarkable degree that it's astounding he ever plays at all. And not only that, the winning percentage of his team, when he plays, is very often quite similar to his own lousy batting statistics. Say he gets 2 hits for every 10 at bats. At the same time, his team wins only 2 games out of every 10.

There is bound to be a business corollary here - the track record of a company's decisions whenever a certain executive is involved in making it, or the failure rate of public companies corresponding to the presence of a certain board member. There are certainly programmers whose addition to a project can inexorably doom it. This I have seen for myself

Public Records

You can locate pretty much anyone, it seems. http://www.publicbackgroundchecks.com is one of many sites where you just enter the name and BAM their whole life history appears in outline. for a mere twenty five dollars you get more. The information is not always accurate. This site had 11 listings for myself. In most of them my age is correct, but one listing has me as 105 years old (evidence of time travel? will I be living in San Francisco at age 105 as this finding indicates? serious doubts arise). Another entry has an address for me at Stanford. I do "go to" Stanford every day on my way to work, but I don't actually "go to" Stanford. And I never lived there. Curious.

Deprivation

When you cannot sleep, you're not good for much.
When you have not eaten, you can't do much.
When you're cold, and tired, and hungry, and have no home, and have no place to go, it's hard to keep to your senses.
It's a truism to say that torture doesn't work.
It works all right.
When you need things, basic things, you do what you need to do.

Most of the time we people who have things have what we need. We are warm, we are fed, we sleep well, and we talk and talk and talk. Easy for us to say.

Very Important People

Now there's a new way to tell if you're a very important person or not. Type your name into an instant messenger window. Does your name resolve into a link? If so, you're importance is on the level of lindsay lohan and paris hilton.

The Vote

When I can vote for an agnostic, socialist, divorced mother of three for President, that's the day I'll get excited about it.

From Salon's Broadsheet today:
Chile just keeps getting cooler. First they elected awesome agnostic socialist Michelle Bachelet their first female president. And now they're making birth control available to all women and girls 14 and older. The especially great news is, "birth control" includes both standard contraceptives and emergency contraception. And when we say "available," we mean available free of charge. Plus, young women will be able to get prescriptions for the pill without parental authorization.

But I live in the United States of America, where I can choose between one arrogant rich white guy and another.

Sisyphus@Home

Spending the weekend dismantling and remantling Bionicles (thanks to the boy's birthday, we now officially have way too many of the things)

The movie will star Adrien Brody and Jennifer Connolly as us. The title, "The Day The Yard Stood Still". In act one, we watch the weeds grow. In act two, we bitch about it. In act three, we agree we really don't mind - weeds are plants too, you know.

New Word of the Day

When you have some piece of corporate outerwear, and you cover up their logo with a patch of another symbol, you are "re-schwagging".

Who Are These People?

Something I've wondered about for awhile ... All of those naked people online and in print, who are they? There seem to be millions, so if you live in a city or town of any size, some of them must be people you see every day. And then there's this:

(09-08) 12:12 PDT Snyder, Okla. (AP) --

The police chief, the mayor and a councilman in this small town resigned Friday amid an uproar over nude photos of the chief's 300-pound, tattooed wife that she posted on a Web site.

More Likely

Researchers have discovered that men are more likely to be men, whereas women have a greater tendency to be women. In related news, canines are apt to be caninical.

The Ultimate Plot

One or two of you may want to follow the progress of Macedonia: The Novel. Just follow the link if you do. Like TimeZone and The Futile Epikles, it will be a dance around a theme for as long as I like it. For starters, check out the Introduction to The Ultimate Plot

Dismantled

My son spent the evening quietly and diligently dismantling all of the Bionicles we had spent the past several days constructing. When he was done, he suddenly burst into tears, and remained inconsolable for a few minutes, mourning the deaths of his little lego friends.

Fortunately we had already taken snapshots of all of those deemed "picture-worthy".

The Essential Fanatacism of the World

"Eterna" has a prologue entitled "El Fanatismo Esencial Del Mundo".

One of my favorite sayings (albeit from Nietzsche) is that "life is no argument, because the conditions of life could include error". This can serve as a pre-rebuttal (prebuttal?) to intelligent design, by simply denying the 'wonderfulness' of creation. What if it's all just a big mistake?

But the new thought, from the title of this entry - what if fanatacism really is an essential quality of being human? Some people argue that there is a genetic basis for religion (my wife and I had a big fight about this. It's funny what we fight about. Nothing important, ever, but trivial things? Oh yes).

What if being insane is fundamental to being alive?

Ahmadenijad says if you don't follow God's path, you're doomed. Silly man. What if you're doomed if you do and doomed if you don't?

But he, by being a fanatic, may be closer to the essence of humanity than I, with my beloved detachment. It takes a Darwin to notice that pigeons don't perch, or willingly roost, on trees. All he had to do was pay attention, observe. It takes something else to believe that the creator of the universe periodically pays visits to nobodies and tells them The Truth with a capital T. Ain't no way to test that.

One blade of grass says to another - the way that I'm bending is The Way. Follow me!

Homages

I have a new (and shameless) homage to Borges, called The Infinite Space, based on a true story of neighbors.

I'm also considering a shameless homage to Macedonio Fernandez, in which I will write 59 prologues to a novel that will never be written, with introductions to characters who will not be in it, and descriptions of plot twists that will not occur.

Brutaka

Avatar of the Week. I'm informed he is the King of Bionicles. That's good enough for me.

Revenge of the Nerdly

A new search "engine", chacha.com uses live human searchers to aid your internet search. The pay is really really lousy (for Americans) and just begs for out-sourcing. The idea is pretty good. Lots of people need help searching on the net. Why not get that help from other people, who have some expertise? And have it done through instant messaging so you're not just wasting your time. If the pay was better (from $5 to $20/hr max, are you kidding me?), I'd consider doing it myself. Surely you could work from home all the time doing this. Maybe a partial retirement plan ...

Holiday Tongue Biting

Things I'm Probably Glad I Didn't Say (Too Loudly) This Weekend

Could you tell your dogs to shut up a little more quietly, please?

Um, I don't give a FUCK about you and your ex-wife's problems, okay?

I said I liked the photo you took. I didn't say I wanted a thirty minute lecture about how you took it.

It's soccer practice. It's kindergarden. It's the first time. Don't you think it's a bit soon to be giving up on your child?

We just wanted your kid to come visit. We were hoping that you'd go away.

Slave Labor Day

From a post by Father Dad, the idea of a slave labor day. My thoughts, [with quotes from Wikipedia articles on Serfdom and Slavery]

Africans were brought here (to America) to be slaves. Europeans came here to be free of slavery. But we don't hear too much - aside from 8th grade history perhaps - about the European version of slavery (serfdom). I've always wondered if it isn't racism behind the different terminology itself. This is all I'm talking about here - how the use of the word 'serf' conceals the slave past of most Europeans from American consciousness.

Many white Americans are descended from people who were bought and sold with the land they were required to live on. This may be especially true of most people of Russian heritage, where the vast majority of the population were serfs until not much more than a hundred years ago. ["Imperial Russia was a land of peasants, which made up at least 80% of the population. ... Serfdom remained the practice on the most part of territory of Russia until February 19, 1861"] These people were often conquered and absorbed, as opposed to being stolen and transported, but more people than would like to admit are descended from slaves.

My original guess was that the word 'serf' came into common usage in order to distinguish white from black slaves (hence racism as the origin of its usage). According to my Webster's dictionary, the word 'serf' comes from the Latin 'servus', meaning 'slave', and came into usage around 1480. The word 'slave', interestingly, comes from 'Slav' (1250-1300) because Slavs (as in Yugoslavia) were commonly enslaved in the Middle Ages.

The African slave trade came about after the virtual eradication of Native Americans in the Caribbean, Brazil and the American South and grew especially by the 1600's - "the current meaning [of serf] was first used in 1611" (Wikipedia)

White Americans are taught about 'serfdom', but as the remote past, not as their actual ancestors. Wikipedia says "In England, it lasted up to the 1600s and in France until 1789. In Eastern Europe the institution persisted until the mid 19th century ... Serfdom remained the practice on the most part of territory of Russia until February 19, 1861".

Words are powerful not only in what they express, but in what they obscure.

Font Police

So of course I designed this blog to use the Papyrus font (for best results, use bla bla bla), and nobody seems to have it anyway. But if you want, you can get it (TrueType) from here -

Take It Easy, White Folks

My friend Chopper always wanted to get a bumper sticker like that - Take It Easy, White Folks!

Nowadays the Green Scare's got all sorts of people in a tizzy. I even saw one right-wing blogger freak about the unfortunate Afghan man who ran over several people during a psychotic driving episode last week in San Francisco. Never mind that people can be mentally ill regardless of their nationality or religion, this blogger was screaming, see? see?

Heck, everyone with an Arabic sounding name might as well be put in an internment camp, er, sent back across the border, um, shipped back to Africa, er, put on a slow boat to China, um, goddammit, put on a reservation or something. I mean, everybody knows that America is for the white, the fat, the dumb, and the goddam judeo-christian tradition (well, maybe without so much of that judeo stuff) and we know all about how segregation, discrimination and out-and-out racism works wonders, solves all problems, and it's the American way, by gum.

Ever notice when things aren't going so well, there's always someone darker to blame?

Reminds me of a certain movie genre I liked to call "white people screwing darkies in the tropics" (WPSDT). Can you think of any? For starters, I present "The Year of Living Dangerously".

Living In A Box

I've always remembered what I read about Leonardo Da Vinci preferring to work in a small room with no windows. He wanted to be close to and alone with whatever it was that was inside and wanted out. He took this from the idea that all great things begin small and in a dark place.

There was a period where I wrote and recorded a lot of songs, and the best I ever did at this was during the time when my 'studio' was a tiny walk-in closet with no windows and no light. Nowadays these little blog entries occur during the free moments (literally, moments) I have between job, commuting and family time.

A friend mentioned that he needed "to have about 3 solid days away from work before I can write anything for others worth reading". Not having that, ever, (he has three small children), he may want to try a different approach, like writing small things in the short periods of time he does have. These writings may or may not be "worth reading" (though I will always want to read them) but might be worth doing anyway.

Living in a very small box of a house (another friend remarked, oh, our houseboat in Amsterdam was bigger than this), always in the midst of my family, I've found there's something to be said for just being yourself and doing the things you do, regardless of the circumstances.

The Green Scare

This is what I'm calling the new Islamo-panic sweeping the nation.

3 Stages of Organic

1. Delight: Everything we serve is organic! (actual chef quote)
2. Excuse: There's a beetle in your salad? That's because we only use organic lettuce (actual waiter quote)
3. Apology: Is the coffee any good? It's organic, you know. (actual barista quote)

Orwellian?

Mitt Romney says stem cell research is 'Orwellian' - I think he means 'Huxleyan'. It's 'Brave New World', not '1984'.

Mitt Romney is "Antediluvian'