Ah, the weekend! Things have been pretty quiet around here today- my housemates went off to hunt wild mushrooms on the coast, so the dog and I sat around playing Scrabble® all afternoon. I think I won, but God alone knows what the dog’s opinion is. I suppose the dog knows, come to think of it, but I’m sure I don’t. I know she loves me because she’s a dog and dogs ARE love, and that’s good enough for me. I heard Molly Ivins on the radio during the last Scrabble® session- is it just me, or does she sound heavily drugged lately?

No, it’s not just you- she sounded kind of whacked, too. Seriously, though, Drifty- the woman died a week ago of breast cancer. –Ed

Yeah, thanks, Ed. That’s too bad- she was a funny lady. Keeping an open mind won’t be easy, of course, but I’m not going to let this great loss turn me against breasts. That’s a promise. Listen folks, I don’t hate Crocs®, and anyway I think that tempest in a teapot has finally boiled dry, but just in case… I don’t mind adding a little fuel to the fire- here’s one more reason to loathe those un-shoes: The nostril-like holes all over them sometimes catch and hold little bits of life-debris which remind you of something you wouldn’t want to leave hanging out of your nose. What do you do? Well, the offending bit of whatever must be picked out unless you want to take off the sandal and shake it. Today I picked at what I thought was a bit of fluff in a hole and BLAMMO! I yanked a thread out of one of my expensive merino wool ankle socks. Don’t know what I mean? It was a snag in the sock, which when tugged upon became a bigger snag, sort of a yarn hernia. So that’s why nobody should wear Crocs®. Had I been wearing real shoes, I never would have seen the snag. Or at least a Crocs® basher might argue so. I’m pretty sure some of you are thinking I’m an oaf (snicker!) of the lowest pedigree for wearing socks with my sandals, but I have no more respect for that line of fashion-fascism than I do for the anti-Crocs® fever. And by the way I don’t wear Crocs®- they cost too much. I wear the cheap copies. So hate me for that, too. I could live on a diet of hate and grapefruit. Man, I love grapefruit. Especially good grapefruit.

Drifty- the HR people Googled your particulars and all they could find on San Pronto was a book review for a collected poetry volume called Maraca, by Victor Hernandez Cruz, which cited these lines:

San pronto no se wis windos can el claus de la/ mañananana.

Well, they’re all monoglots over at HR, so they put it into BabelFish and got this back:

San not wis soon windos dog claus of the mañananana.

which didn’t help very much. Do you have any idea what this means? And where is San Pronto, anyway? That’s what they really want to know.

-Mgmt

Yeah, thanks, Mgmt. Nope, I have no idea. It’s poetry, so I’ll probably need to read the whole thing before I can begin to understand it. One can’t get anywhere by looking at a line or two in isolation, can one? I have the book in question on order from my local public library- that usually takes a week or so- and I’ll get back to you when I’ve read the poem and had a chance to digest it. In the meantime, tell HR to get stuffed- they don’t need to know anything about me since I’m not drawing any pay or other benefits. But I love a mystery, so I’ll take this on just for fun. I’ve done some checking around and this poet is apparently famous- along with some other Nuyorican poets for jumping back and forth between Spanish and English within one piece of work. I can understand that, since I’m a neorriqueño myself (well, technically a quarter-Rican), though I speak almost no Spanish, and it’s not even Puerto Rican Spanish, but the typical Bay Area Spanish that you have to know just to understand street names. Does that answer the part of your question about where San Pronto is? No? Well, it’s less than three statute miles from here, but worlds apart. You might say it’s a state of mind. As I was saying, some of my family speak a wild mixture of Spanish and English, so this sort of thing doesn’t freak me out- I just have to listen carefully to several people at once and ask a lot of questions if I want to know exactly what Tio Nestor is supposed to have said to the unprintable who sold him a broken pay phone sometime in the early 1970s. Anyway, there’s some semi-scholarly blather available on the whole dual-language-as-weapon-and-refuge thing here if you’re interested. I read four or five pages of it, and I’ll go back and finish when I have some of the poet’s work under my belt. OK, as for San pronto no se wis windos can el claus de la/ mañananana. … I don’t know, the world’s greatest microprocessor (the thing between my ears) can’t get its tentacles all the way around this, even in the pre-BabelFish configuration. I’ll wait for the book. Anyone else have thoughts on this? Drop us a note.