Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Lefty Lucy

“Lefty loosy, righty tighty.”

In the grand scheme of things, the mnemonic device is bigger than the wheel.

Without the essential human desire to remember, there'd be no song, no math, no poetry. And who'd bother with the effort of writing nursery rhymes, let alone teaching them to the little darlings, if it wasn't a stealthy way of conditioning them to a life of lists and due diligances and multitasking? Call it generational pay-off. Actually, to put this on a cosmic level, one school of thought suggests that nursery rhymes aren't child's play at all but the remnants of a vast prehistoric system of oral history as well as oral science.

So myth is actually math, and preschool is more like undergraduate studies, as it turns out.

Personally, the thought of science through rhyme makes me queasy. Although I don't mind a bit of practical rhyme and reason in the privacy of my own home, especially since I tend to be hoplesssly dyslexic about such life-and-death matters as turning the radiator knob the right way.

“Lefty loosy, righty tighty.”

Too domestic, however, for a respectable band name. Now, swap in a proper name and voila— instant street cred. Who is Lefty Lucy? It's up to you: a fetching two-fisted suffragette, sister to Riveting Rosie, city-slicker cousin to Norma Rae. Or maybe a gal cab driver with a fatal penchant for left turns. How about that beefy chick down the block who joined the local Legion Post boxing association? Ah, I've got it: a cross-dressing hitman. I'd say that fits the current post-Brokeback zeitgeist...

Monday, February 06, 2006

The Glorious Dead


From a soot-tinged monument adrift in mad London. Courtesy of M. Thibodeau, who observes, “Whatever, man. They’re dead.”