Radio Blah Blah

It is to my unending shame that I have yet to donate any money to KUT, my local NPR station.

Or at least that's what I've thought until recently. The stories have done nothing for me lately, with the ever-present exceptions mostly coming from Marketplace.

To wit: this morning they wasted half of my drive to work talking about the sequel to that wretched film, Night at the Museum. I don't know whether the Smithsonian will benefit from its popularity, nor do I care. That that travesty of a dungheap, to say nothing of a movie, warrants a sequel means that the moviegoing public belongs in a museum of things so ridiculous they're almost worth staring at.

A possibly more putrid example is a story from May 6 about the economic effects of the Sichuan earthquake a year later. On the face of it, it seems an exciting story for me, as it combines, potentially, two of my favorite subjects: geology and economics. Naturally for NPR these days, though, it is five minutes of aural torture. M. Block and A. Kuhn talk to two workers who are working very hard or trying to find work and come to no conclusion whatsoever. They can't come to any conclusion that you or I couldn't come to by tooling around China for a couple of days, because all they do is talk to two people. And then they admit, 4:11 into the piece, that they indeed have nothing to say except "Wow, China is big!"

Now, there's something to say for honesty, but there's even more to say for the editorial gumption to admit that uhh, I don't have anything to say about the economic impacts of the earthquake, so let's run a different story.

It's a good thing I am not paying for this.

How Yusuf Islam Broke My Heart

King of Trees, by Cat Stevens, is a very good song - a little melodramatic, maybe, but very good, music- and lyrics-wise. However, my original interpretation of the lyrics was better than the real thing, which I deciphered listening closely one day, and have confirmed by Googling the words. The official version, first verse:

He was the King of trees
Keeper of the leaves
A deep green god of young
Love stained memory
We used to meet by him
Far from the hustling town
I loved you
Now they've come to cut you down

Like I said, a little melodramatic. The thing is, though, that I had translated the ultimate line above as now I've come to cut you down, lending the song a whole guilt-racked, age-coming-of, Giving Tree quality that's really touching. As it turns out, however, it's they've, not I've, giving it a whiney, pop-star, I-(Stevens)-want-to-live-in-Candyland feel that's cute but relatively shallow.

But he did write

I wish I had, I wish I had
The secret of good and the secret of bad
Why does this question drive me mad?
'Cause I was taught when but a lad
That bad was good and good was bad

So he gets a pass.

Couldn't/Could Not

The difference in meaning between could not and its contraction just dawned on me:

The meaning of Hank could not eat the steak is ambiguous, but the meaning is clarified in Hank couldn't eat the steak. The likely meaning of the former sentence is that Hank was unable to eat the steak, as from being too full or out of time, but it could mean that recovering beef-addict Hank managed not to eat the steak that was placed before him and therefore is showing great signs of progress. The latter sentence can only mean the former explanation.

In summary, negatives are funny things, and great examples of why infinitive splitting is perfectly acceptable: Make sure not to turn right at Albuquerque lacks the definitive admonition of Make sure to not turn right at Albuquerque. If some grammar prude, in the middle of New Mexico, says to me that former sentence, I'm taking it easy which way or whether I turn.