The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Kind of a boring update, because I did pretty good on my “don’t buy any new books in April” pledge; I think the only books that are new to this month are the Nicky Drayden book (because I can’t pass up a new Nicky Drayden book) and Amanda Gorman’s speech.
I will probably allow myself to buy some books again in May, but only after I’ve worked my way through at least four or five more of these.
I told this story on Twitter just now, and after much searching discovered that somehow I have never told it on the blog. So:
I gotta drive to Bloomington now. Back tomorrow.
The news has just broken that the sweaty, incoherent, oil-haired ghoul known as Rudy Giuliani has had his home and office raided by the FBI. I am at the point where I just want someone involved with the Previous Administration to go to fucking jail, and I don’t especially care who it is so long as they don’t come back out alive. I want literally anyone from that administration to see some kind of punishment. I don’t even care if it’s legal. The rack. Guillotine. Toss some fucker out of an airplane without a parachute. An Iron Maiden. Public flensing. I don’t care. You may remember that this particular evil motherfucker literally propositioned someone he thought was a teenager for a blowjob on camera fairly recently and absolutely nothing happened to him.
Enough. Hurt one of these motherfuckers. Just pick one.
I quit the IU thing, and I’m about to turn down an offer for a summer school position, mostly because we want to sign the boy up for a bunch of summer camps and I can’t take him to said camps or pick him up from said camps if I’m at a school halfway across the city for six hours a day. The money would be nice (and the IU money would have been nice, and the IU money plus summer school money would have been really nice) but I think I need to prioritize my kid, who has spent most of the last year at home, being outside and interacting with other children. Plus, y’know, if I don’t do summer school, I get June off, and I kinda need to learn calculus this summer so spending this summer teaching myself math might be a good way to spend those hours where he’s at camp.
(Googles “free online calculus course”)
I spent some time at work today going through– not taking, necessarily, just reading through– a practice exam for this test, and the questions fell into two categories: 1) Questions that I knew how to answer immediately, and was 100% certain I would be able to answer correctly, and 2) questions that I didn’t even know how to start, and would have no clue how to answer. Some of those will be easily fixed by some study; one question, for example, began with “Given that A|B,” and that | symbol is not something that is used in eighth grade Algebra and I don’t have the slightest idea what is meant by it. I’m not worried about figuring it out, though, and once I know what A|B means, the problem didn’t look hard. Then there were the multi-part questions where I didn’t know how to do anything, and … well, that might be trickier. There were zero questions that I looked at and thought “I can probably figure that out, if I needed to.” Everything was either “I got it” or complete cluelessness.
I have not, after a day away from the kids, quite recovered my chill. We will see if tomorrow replaces it or not; either way, I’m not working Friday, as my wife is having LASIK surgery and I’ve taken the day off to make sure she gets there and back and has someone around to do shit if she needs it. It won’t be as hot tomorrow either, and I’m always much closer to being human when it’s not hot. This is, now that I think of it, another reason for me to not do summer school, because I’ve worked in the building summer school is in before and I’m pretty sure that I remember it not being fun in June. Tomorrow is the last day of testing and then there’s only, like, seventeen days of school left. I can make it. This ought to be a piece of cake, frankly.
He said.
I do not plan to watch the President’s speech tonight, although I feel like I should. Why? Because the motherfucking thing starts at 9:00 PM, and that means that by the time it’s over and I’m done monitoring Twitter it will be well and truly past my bedtime. Sleepy Joe, my ass. Sleepy Luther can read a transcript tomorrow sometime.
My nephew is here, having arrived into the world at around 5:15 yesterday evening; he is of normal size and proportion and in possession of all of the various bits he is supposed to be in possession of. Mom and Dad are also fine, if perhaps slightly dazed. They live much closer to her family than to ours; it’s going to be a couple of weeks before we’re able to go up there and meet him, and I spent a good chunk of last night fighting off a wave of surprisingly intense jealousy that her people were getting to see the new arrival so much earlier than us until I talked to my brother on the phone and he pointed out that, because of Covid, they weren’t allowed any visitors at the hospital, and so nobody other than my brother and sister-in-law are going to get to interact with him until they go home, which should be tomorrow.
My first thought when I saw him was that he got his nose from our side of the family, and then I looked more carefully at my brother’s nose and decided that I didn’t have any idea what the hell I was talking about. I’ve always halfway suspected people just pick a facial feature and a relative when they say things like that, and it entertained me how fast the reaction was on my part and how utterly nonsensical it was when I thought about it. He has the same baby nose as every baby.
Today was exhausting. It’s the first really warm day of the year around here, topping off at around 82 degrees, and my building does not do ventilation all that well; the windows open but it does a lot less good than you might think, and I spent basically the whole damn day sweating. On top of that, the math portion of the ILEARN started today, and my group was quite clearly Over It by the end of the test, despite the fact that every time I walked around and read questions over people’s shoulders it was stuff we had covered recently. Like, this quarter, if not actually in the three weeks I’ve been back.
Insert every rant I’ve ever ranted about how the fuck do you not remember this and what are you people doing that you can know how to do something on Tuesday and act like you’ve never seen it before on Wednesday. By the time we got to eighth hour I was so sweaty and crabby and hot that I actually gave them the period off, because however I was explaining my shit to them today it wasn’t sinking in; my kids were, no shit, having trouble with questions like is this line going up or down all day, and I just cannot right now, at all.
Then in between the bell ringing at the end of the day and getting out of the building I had to deal with two entirely different situations in which a student was bawling and inconsolable and figure out what the hell was wrong and what I could do to fix it, one of which involved a quick parent phone call because the kid was convinced his parents wouldn’t believe him about what had just happened.
I’m in my sleep shorts and a tank top right now, and I don’t wear tank tops. That’s how Goddamned tired I am. Thank God I don’t have any kids tomorrow; I need to get my equilibrium back.
Or maybe it is. How would you know? There’s no way to know, they all look alike.
I am, in fact, rather impatiently awaiting the birth of my first nephew and first nibling; he is not here yet, but from what I hear he and his mother have been working on it since about 7:30 this morning. While I’m sure I’m not remotely as excited as my brother and my sister-in-law, I have thought of little else all day. There hasn’t been an update in a little while (and I made it clear to each and every one of my classes that I would be checking my phone constantly and basically dared them to have anything to say about it) so hopefully that means everybody got busy real quick. 🙂
The new parents aren’t wild about pictures of lil’ dude being spread all over the internet so I probably won’t post any pictures of him once he’s here, but I might post pictures of somebody else’s kid so y’all can pretend.
Who else is excited about something right now?
I have accomplished nothing this weekend, which has been spent mostly reading books I wasn’t really enjoying and lazing about and moaning.
On the plus side, I expect to find out that I have a new nephew sometime tomorrow. So that’s all good.
(They won’t let me post pictures, so I’ll have to find one of a similar newborn. Y’all won’t know the difference.)
This is another one of those movies where reviews are probably entirely unnecessary, but whatever. Our most current re-up of HBO Max was basically done for this movie and for Godzilla Vs. Kong, and we haven’t watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters yet, so we’ll probably get that one done before I cancel it again. I was kind of surprised at how much I’ve been looking forward to seeing this; I’m not the biggest Mortal Kombat fan out there by any stretch of the imagination, although I have lots of good memories of the first two games. Scorpion was my main in the first game, as he had the easiest special moves to pull off, and I was all about Baraka in the second game, although I could play anybody in a pinch. The first movie was on IU’s movie channel all the time so I watched the hell out of it, and I don’t think I’ve seen whatever sequels there were for it– I think there was at least one, and there might have been a couple.
Anyway, this movie needed to do two things: it needed to look good, and there needed to be good fight choreography. That’s basically it! I get those two things out of a movie called Mortal Kombat, and I’m gonna be happy with it. And I was! There was something weird going on with the backgrounds in some of the scenes, as if the green screening came in a little bit too fuzzy or something, and there was almost a soap opera thing going on at the beginning that makes me wonder what the frame rate was, but in general the effects were good, especially when some of the more outlandish characters like Goro showed up.
And the fight choreography? Chef’s kiss. I have no complaints at all. It’s well-shot, even the fights in darkest areas you can always see who everyone is and what they’re doing, and the movie has a great sense of space and pacing whenever two people are fighting. The two standout fights are not surprising: between Goro and Lewis Tan’s Cole, a character who hasn’t actually appeared in any of the games, and between Sub-Zero and Scorpion. But it’s all solid, and the nods here and there to actual game moves and lines are cheesy but it works. The acting in this movie only had to not be ridiculous; the story, seeing as how it’s kinda stuck with the idea of Mortal Kombat, is only as ridiculous as it has to be and not a whole lot more. I mean, the story and the lore of this series has kind of disappeared up its own ass over the years, and you need to remember that the entire central conflict of the whole umpteen-game series stems from the decision to palette-swap one of the original characters. Everything in Mortal Kombat had to be kool (shut up, I kan’t not do that) before it had to make sense, and the movie more or less feels the same way.
The acting and the plot isn’t getting in the way of the fighting and the costumes and the monsters, is what I’m saying here. And Kano is an absolute Goddamn delight. I want a Kano movie. And I want to go back in time and refilm the entirety of Iron Fist with Lewis Tan as Danny Rand. I wouldn’t risk covid to see this in a theater under any circumstances, but this is pretty much exactly why streaming media exists.
I don’t think that my wife actually realized what she was doing last night when she told me Shock-G had passed away. We still don’t know why; the most recent news I’ve heard was just that he was found in a hotel room. He was 57.
Here is the thing to realize about Shock: he is the guy on the left in that picture, with the zebra-striped hat. Here is the other thing to realize about Shock: he is also the guy on the right, in the big hat, sunglasses, and prosthetic nose. We call that guy Humpty Hump.
Humpty Hump and Shock-G are the same guy.
I have told this story somewhere before, I’m sure: I was, and remain, a huge fan of Digital Underground, as well as a huge fan of Tupac Shakur, who got his start with them. Everything you’re going to read about Shock is going to talk about Digital Underground’s debut album, Sex Packets, and the breakaway hit from that album, which was The Humpty Dance. For my money, their second album, entitled Sons of the P, is not only the group’s magnum opus but perhaps the single most underrated album in the history of hiphop. That album is burned into my bones. I will still remember lyrics from it when I have forgotten my own name.
I did not realize that Shock-G and Humpty Hump were the same guy until a few years ago.
Y’all need to realize that all of this was before the internet. I didn’t watch a lot of MTV, so my main exposure to DU was through their music. And not only do Shock and Hump’s voices sound distinctly different, but they layer their voices over each other and duet each other all the time on their albums. I’m listening to a song right now called Arguin’ on the Funk that is literally just a track of Shock and Humpty yelling at each other. Shock regularly used body doubles, both on stage and (obviously) in pictures so that he and Humpty could appear in the same place at the same time. They’d both be on stage at the same time, Shock doing all the rapping and the guy playing Humpty just lip-synching. Or sometimes he’d just put on the nose and glasses mid-song and switch parts. (And sometimes he’d have Tupac on stage doing the Shock-G parts, too.)
And then I randomly saw this interview, recorded in 2002 (although I didn’t see it until much later,) where he’s telling stories about Tupac, and … well, the whole interview is worth watching, but forward to about 1:25, where his voice shifts down into Humpty’s register for just a few seconds:
And … mind. Blown.
I had no goddamn idea. None. And yeah, I feel like a dumbass, but I maintain that if you knew these guys in a pre-Internet, pre-YouTube era, there was no fucking reason to see through the game. Like, they’re literally climbing all over each other on the videos. They’re both there. And, sure, they look alike, but the one dude is wearing the big glasses and the fake nose, so you’re basically just going by the jawline.
(This is why Superman being Clark Kent is not remotely as inconceivable as people believe, by the way. I never realized that Shock-G and Humpty Hump were the same guy because I had no reason to even imagine that to be the case. Superman and Clark are the same thing.)
It sounds like a gimmick, I know. But the guy was brilliant, and Digital Underground’s music was next-level. Like a lot of these pieces, I don’t know how to end this. We’re damn near exactly five years out from losing Prince, and I think that’s the last time a musician’s passing hit me this hard. I wasn’t ready for the world to not have Shock-G in it any longer, and 57 was way too fucking young for him to leave.
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