A Hollywood Dream Job

How would you like this as a dream job: scrapbooker for a Hollywood celebrity?

According to the August 14, 2006 issue of Time magazine, action-movie actor Bruce Willis "hired a childhood friend to be his personal scrapbooker," a job that involved "organizing treasured photos, videos and memorabilia in exchange for free room and board" at the actor's home in Los Angeles. A good deal, right?

Here's the unfortunate part. Willis ended up suing his childhood friend, also named Bruce, reported Time, "for $1 million."

Why? Because his friend, continued the magazine,"threatened to sell Willis' personal effects and write a tell-all book...unless Willis paid him $100,000 and bought him a car." A great show of gratitude and friendship, right?

It would be interesting to learn, eleven years later, the outcome of Bruce Willis's lawsuit. And whether or not he hired someone else for the scrapbooker job. He might have decided to do the scrapbooking himself or hire a family member.

Unusual Names

I have worked as a phone interviewer for a national public opinion research firm in New York for nearly seven years. And during that time I have come across very unusual names that have appeared on the computer screen such as Pansy Nettles, Tyrell Thrower, Sunshine Brown, Sylvia Tickles, Anthony Amen, Michelle Cheese, Cha Cha Bryson, and William True.

A Bad Movie's Tell-Tale Sign

You can usually tell that a movie is a real turkey when print ads quote critics you've never heard of representing publications you've never heard of.

Harlem, Then And Now

Speakeasies, drag balls, the Cotton Club, literary salons, Alexander Gumby's bookstore, hot jazz. All of these activities and venues and much, much more were a significant part of Harlem's social scene in the 1920s. This historical period is now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance, or the Harlem Awakening, as one scholar in Negro Digest magazine preferred to call it, was an intellectual and cultural movement--involving literature, art, music, and the theatre--out of which emerged such notables as writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay; musicians Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters; and artist Aaron Douglas, to name a few.

What's happening in Harlem today has been called by real estate developers, "the second Harlem Renaissance." Actually this "second renaissance," if it can be called that, is really about real estate, gentrification, and displacement of longtime residents.

The attempt to rename Harlem by calling it SoHa (an acronym for South Harlem) to make it more trendy and attractive to gentrifiers is designed to erase the glorious history of an area called the Capital of Black America, an area that has contributed a lot culturally to America as well as the world. Thankfully there are those in Harlem who are rebelling against the renaming of this world-famous community.

Learning About The Human Eye Via A Grammar Textbook

Recently, while browsing through an old English grammar textbook, published in 1958, and designed for ninth-grade students, I learned something very interesting about the human eye--that we actually see the world upside down.

In a ten-sentence sample essay about how the eye sees objects, sentence seven begins, "Do you know that pictures of things around you enter the eye upside down?" The next sentence explains that "Your brain reverses the images for you." I never knew that.

To verify the accuracy of that bit of information, I asked my ophthalmologist about this and he confirmed it. So it is possible to learn something about biology even from an old grammar textbook. And what I learned underscores how amazing an organ the brain is.

Searching For The Word "Upscuttle"

I recently flipped through an old, battered dictionary that I own with the express purpose of looking up the definition of  "gulag." My search was prompted by a radio interview I  had heard that detailed the brutalization of inmates by guards at an upstate New York prison.

That brought to mind the late "Grandpa" Al Lewis, a former cast member of the 1960s sitcom, The Munsters, and his comparing American prisons to gulags, or Soviet prison camps, on his weekly New York-based radio show on WBAI.

While looking up the word, I found a slip of paper tucked inside the dictionary on which I had written the word "upscuttle" and the name of the person I had heard use it, conservative talk show radio host Barry Farber. I probably heard him use the word sometime in the 1980s when he was on the air late nights on New York's WMCA. ("Upscuttle" is not a word you hear every day.) Unfortunately, I neglected to write down how he used the word in a sentence.

I searched for the word in the same battered dictionary, but I couldn't find it. Neither could I find it in five other dictionaries in my apartment, including the Canadian Oxford Dictionary and a huge dictionary that weighs almost as much as a ten-pound bag of sugar.

Here is urbandictionary.com 's definition of "upscuttle": "When everything in a given area seems to go topsy-turvy at once. A sudden capsizing of circumstances and conditions."

What Do You Call A Massachusetts Resident?

I knew that a person from New York State is called a New Yorker, a person from California is called a Californian, and a person from Texas is called a Texan. But what do you call someone who hails from Massachusetts or Connecticut? None of my dictionaries were helpful on this particular question.

So I finally consulted the ever trusty Internet to solve this mystery and learned a new word--demonym. 

What is a demonym?  It's a word used by geographers to describe where a person comes from. The website I consulted via my cell phone listed the demonyms for all fifty states alphabetically.

I learned that a resident of Connecticut is a Connecticuter and a person from Massachusetts is a Massachusettsan. Do the people in those states know this? The next time I talk to someone from either of those states I will ask them.

Here are some other demonyms: if you are from Iowa, you are either an Iowan or an Iowegian; if you call Illinois home, you are an Illinoisan (pronounced, I assume, Ill-leh-noy-an) or an Illinian (pronounced, again I assume, Ill-len-nee-an); a resident of Maine is called a Mainer or a Maineaker

(pronounced either Main-ah-ker or May-nee-ack-er). The last one sounds a little insulting. Maineite or Mainester might be better. And if you are firmly rooted in the state of Wyoming, you are a Wyomingite.

I now know --as well as lexicographers, I hope--what to call persons living in Connecticut and Massachusetts.