Former Super Hero

La 姐妮 asked me what it means to be a "former superhero."

Once apon a time, in grad school, we were dirt poor, due to the university's policy of keeping us dirt poor. Internet was poorly understood at the time, so entertain ourselves we would rollerblade slowly, eat ice cubes, and try to improve our belches by mouthing something inspiring. We usually tried to belch the word "freedom," which ended up sounding like "Rita" or "Frida."

One of several insane things we did was to create a mythology, the Super Brown Friends.

(All of my friends were brown people, except for Christine. And I would say, oh Christine, you're our one white friend! And she would say, yah, because I have a car. Ha ha it was only half true.)

Anyway, in the Super Brown Friends, we were grad students by day, but with secret super powers, which we cultivated into superhero identities. D was "Superchic" which was appropriate, because she was really into her super-look. I'm not sure what her super powers were, but I seem to remember she had an A-line dress. Whatever that means. Of course, to bug her, we called her "Super Chick" instead of "Superchic." Ha ha.

Me, I was the Knight Of Brownness. For my super powers, I had super hearing, I could speak everybody's languages, and I knew certain ancient power words which I could speak that would break windows or knock down bad guys with. Superchick, to annoy me, would abbreviate my name to KnOB, which I would correct immediately, "KNIGHT of BROWNness!

Then there was JWolf, who had an escapist fantasy of transforming into a wolf and running away. She was dating SpiderM, who earned his super identity by climbing out of my second story window, scaled the building around to J's apartment, crawled into her window and unlocked her front door.

As superheros, were were always being called to battle the evil General Blanco of the Great Hegemony. We were always too baffled to kill him. And, invariably, on our way to the battle, we would always run into That White Guy, a character who was always wearing shorts, in the dead of winter. We would say, Aren't you freezing? And That White Guy would happily respond, Actually, it's not that bad....

Bacon links

So the Accidental Hedonist is posting about bacon now, so I have to chime in.

When I was in Ann Arbor, I ate at Pizzeria Uno's two or three times. (What's with the obligatory apostrophe-S on restaurants? I find it gringoriffic.) Usually I ordered something called the Spinaccoli, because spinach and broccoli are good on pizza, even to this carnivore.

Once, when I was particularly homesick, I called them up to order a Hawaiian pizza. For those of you who are not blessed to be from the Washington, a Hawaiian pizza to us means Canadian bacon and pineapple. However a Google Images search and a Wikipedia article seems to indicate that the use of Canadian bacon is not universal. Here in Washington, it's always Canadian bacon and pineapple.

Yes, I know many of you out there who cry blasphemy putting fruit on pizza. You should email someone about that.

Anyway, I was homesick in Ann Arbor, and I thought a good old fashioned Hawaiian pizza would be comforting. So I called them up, and they had never heard of a Hawaiian pizza.

The difference in Pacific Northwest English and Midwestern English is not apparent to others, but to me the difference is huge, usually in vowels. But we also have different lexical items (i.e., parking garage vs. parking 'structure'), and most shocking to me at least were the variation of cultural artifacts. For example, people who live east of Montana have never seen or heard of a maple bar, that gross bloated fried raft with a maple glaze.

Hawaiian pizza is another one of these cultural artifacts that was unknown to the guy I was ordering pizza from. No problem, I'm a linguist, I will circumlocute.

"I want a regular cheese pizza with Canadian bacon and pineapple."

"Um..., we have pineapple...."

"And do you have Canadian bacon?"

"Um..., we have bacon, I don't know if it's from Canada..."

First of all, my name is not 'um.' "Listen, do you have ham?"

"Um..., yah, we have ham..."

"Ok, I want you to make me a regular cheese pizza with ham and pineapple."

(Skeptical) "Um... ok, one pizza with ham and pineapple..."

So apparently these people don't say "Canadian bacon." They might well have called it something else, but I didn't stick around long enough to find out. I wanted out of that flat, bland, creepy town that white people seem to adore.

They don't know about Canadian bacon. They don't know about maple bars. They certainly don't know about espresso.

To be fair, they did have something I had never heard of, a "yeast ring." Or even a "chocolate yeast ring." It's a kind of doughnut, that to me sounds itchy. To me a yeast ring looks like this:

"It's not that bad. "

The local anchors are teasing the weather wonk about wearing shorts in the cold weather. "It's not that bad," says the weather wonk.

In grad school, we invented a mythology, and one of the characters was "that white guy" who always wore shorts no matter how cold it was outside. Invariably "that white guy" would respond, "actually, it's not that bad."

It's now a little before seven, and my school's late start still hasn't been listed on tv. I'm sure the website hasn't been corrected either.

I cranked up the heat, to see if my heater would respond. It has. Why did it punish me for the two coldest days of the year? I'll have to turn it down again when I go to work.

This commercial cracks me up.