What is it with software that automagically transforms the ASCII smiley symbol — 🙂 — into an leering yellow circle? MS Word does it by default, as does Opera mail now, and WordPress — and those are just the ones I’ve run across lately. _They are not the same thing_. If I wanted an actual smiley face, I’d have used a freakin’ yellow crayon.

I was there at the dawn of the “:)”. Before Jabber, before AOL IM, before ICQ, before Powwow, before a few other things that I can’t remember right now, there was xtalk on UNIX machines, just a bunch of ascii and a split screen and the ability to chat with people across campus or at other colleges in real time, for free, with text — at the time, it was revolutionary, and wicked cool. Anyway, I took part in all those early debates about whether the use of the smiley was an important tool in a new medium or a blight on the English language, and rolled my eyes when the debate surfaced again and again every couple of years after that. No need to resurrect it now: any linguist worth his salt will tell you that stuff like “:)” doesn’t arise because the unwashed masses feel like debasing the language, but because there’s a gap in communication that needs to be filled. They serve a vital purpose, definitely in chat, often in email (and similarly short, unrevised written communication) as well.

(In line with that point, it just occurred to me that I have never — and would never dream of — using a smiley in an actual blog post, but use them freely in the comments.)

Back in the days of xtalk and similar venues, “:)” came into being because it was the simplest way, with a limited character set, to denote a smile. There was probably some thought given to the association with little smiley faces that junior high girls would put in the notes they pass during class, but they came to serve a much broader role than just reinforcing how cute the guy in the front row in Algebra is. The “:)” and similar emoticons (did that word ever stick?) quickly became symbols in their own right, triggering responses in readers for what they were, not because they vaguely resembled sideways facial expressions.

Meanwhile, the full-on circular yellow smiley face has never died as a symbol all its own, “Alan Moore’s efforts notwithstanding”:http://www.timemachinego.com/linkmachinego/images/watchmen_smiley.jpg. Whereas “:)” indicates “Take what I should said with a grain of salt / not entirely seriously,” the raw smiley indicates ‘Don’t worry — be happy!” or “It’s Perky Time!” As symbols, they have _diverged_. Considerably. And so it makes no sense whatsoever to replace one with the other in electronic communication now, just because we can.

Thankfully, with all the software I mentioned earlier, it’s possible to turn off the autosmilification. It will be a dark day when that option is lost. But if “sites like this”:http://www.windweaver.com/emoticon.htm are any indication, that day may not be far off.

Some of the local theaters have thoughtfully organized a “Reel Moms” program, whereby they reserve a theater (11:00 on Tuesdays) for a baby-friendly audience. The volume is turned down a little, the lights aren’t quite so low (though still low enough), and, most importantly, if your baby cries you won’t have an usher encouraging you to leave. I’ve been waiting eagerly for a chance to catch such a showing with Ella, but what’s held me back week after week is that the movies they pick have sucked. About half of them have objectively sucked, while the other half were clearly selected to appeal to the core demographic: young mothers. My taste in movies doesn’t have a lot of overlap with your average young mother, it seems. But this week, to my pleasant surprise, the Reel Moms Film of the Week was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

And so it was that Ella and I found ourselves surrounded and hemmed in by that most curious of species, the Georgetown Mother. Your average G.M. is thirty-three years old and is equipped with the following:

• An impeccable haircut.
• A physique bearing little if any indication of recent pregnancy, as well as expensive clothing designed to highlight this fact.
• An incredibly gi-normous stroller/car seat/space shuttle combination device, larger and heavier than many European automobiles. These are wheeled to the front of the theater, whereupon the cockpit module is ejected to be carried up to the seats. I believe the cockpit modules tended to be Graco, not Prada. But the purses were definitely Prada.
• (inferred) An SUV in the parking garage with sufficient space to carry the previous item, i.e. Andromeda-class or larger.

• Oh yeah. The baby.

  The Georgetown Mothers tended to arrive alone but quickly located and joined their cliques, of which there were several. It wasn’t immediate clear how they were organized—perhaps by which side of Wisconsin Ave they live on? While generally peaceful, the cliques did clash over the most valuable seats in the theater: the single row immediately in front of the stadium seating. These seats were valuable because there was room next to them to fit all but the very largest stroller/car seat/shuttle combos, thus saving the mother the trouble of maneuvering hers down to the front. One particular mother was saving several such seats for the other members of her clique, who had not yet arrived. This struck a couple other cliques as clearly unfair—not so much so as to necessitate violence, but clearly within the threshold for making Catty Remarks as they walked by.

  While the Georgetown Mothers were the clear majority in the theater, there were a number of ordinary mothers as well, plus a handful of couples who had the shellshocked look of those still on maternity/paternity leave. I was the only solo dad in the house, and was clearly something of a curiosity. For mothers, Georgetown and otherwise, social norms dictate that you converse with other mothers in the theater within speaking distance and exchange vital statistics about your respective infants, ending the conversation with an exclamation appreciative of the “cuteness” or “adorability” of the other mother’s child. But it is not at all clear whether the same mores extend to fathers. Consequently I didn’t talk to very many people, which was just as well because Ella was insisting on standing on my lap and constantly rotating to try to see where all the crying sounds around her were coming from. She found the whole situation very intriguing, right up until when the movie started—that’s when she fell asleep. She woke a couple times to watch for a bit, slouching carelessly in my lap and staring at the screen with sharp attention paradoxically combined with callous disregard. (She’ll make a great film critic someday, if she chooses.)

  And the movie? We finally have a Potter film that does the books justice. It is, in turns, beautiful, scary, and wonderful, whereas the first two movies never got beyond “lackluster” and “vaguely suggestive of beauty, terror, or wonder.” It has its weaknesses, but I want to see it again (minus the soundtrack of crying babies, hopefully) before I do any quibbling. Cuaron, like Jackson, has proven that he can make the jump from indy greatness to big-budget greatness while keeping his directing chops in the process. He’ll be one to watch. I’m seriously bummed that he won’t be directing Goblet of Fire.

  Purely for the sake of anthropological interest, I think I’ll make my next Tuesday visit to the Reel Moms-friendly theater in Tyson’s Corner—a medium drive instead of a long walk. How will the Northern Virginia Suburbia Moms differ from the G.M.s? I’m guessing less Prada but even bigger vehicles, if that’s even possible.

This afternoon, as I was ambling through the French Quarter, two young, extremely attractive smiling young women wearing short skirts and halter tops came running at me. They stopped mere inches away and extended their arms as if to caress me. My first thought was: “Still got the moxie!” My second (more accurate) thought was: “Oh yeah. The baby.”

It was Ella they were after, of course, who at that moment was dangling from the Baby Bjorn and drifting off to sleep in a way that the two young women found absolutely, as they exclaimed in their sultry Spanish accents, “Adooooooorable.”

They weren’t the only ones this weekend. There were the hot French oncologists in the elevator, and the bikini-clad college students who snuck into the hotel swimming pool. They just can’t seem to keep away from me — as long as I’m holding Ella. Wouldn’t you know it: at the moment when trying to pick up strange women is at its most inconceivable, I have the ultimate babe magnet. I’m pretty sure that qualifies as “actual irony”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001941.html, doesn’t it?

Is there a word for something that meets even your very high expectations? If there is, it’s probably German and has at least six syllables. If there isn’t, it’s a prime candidate for one of “Robin Laws'”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/robin_d_laws/ Neologisms of the Moment.

New Orleans has been good so far, but most of it has fallen short of my (admittedly high) expectations. Until this morning, that is. 9:30 AM on a Sunday is not the right time to visit Cafe Du Monde, because it’s full of tourists — the right time would probably have to be around five in the morning after an all-night bender. It was crowded, and the service was pretty bad, and Ella was squirming up a storm. At that moment I thought to myself: “_nothing_ in New Orleans has been as good as I thought it would be.” But then came my cafe au lait and beignets — they were just that good, and more. A definite ________.

See, I told you we need a word for that . . .

UPDATE: Today is a good day for ________. This time it’s the red beans and rice at Huey’s Diner, served with a big slab of andouille sausage. A tad pricey (for a diner) but absolutely worth it. Plus, the place has free wi-fi. Groovy.

UPDATE: Don’t miss the heap o’ recommendations down in the comments! UPDATE: Er, that’s recommendations for stuff to do in NO, not ideas for the word I need . . .

UPDATE: Ladies and gentlemen, “we have a word”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000451.html!

It’s hard to believe that, at six months, Ella will remember none of what happens to her these days, and for many months to come. Maybe what she sees and hears does stick with her, though, lurking somewhere in her deep unconscious. I hope so, because that means that some part of her will remember tonight: up way past her bedtime, sitting on the floor in front of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, in a crowded, sweaty room that’s indistinguishable from how it appeared eighty years ago.

She was somewhere beyond tired, enjoying a second wind, and watched the band with wide blue eyes. As is the often the case with Ella, the band noticed her, the people next to us noticed her, as did the people in front of us and behind us. Pretty soon the band was fighting to regain the attention of everyone who was busy watching Ella listen to the music.

After their opening number, the frontman said “I know what we gotta play now,” and they launched into “Babyface.” He sang right to Ella, and then the guy on clarinet stepped up and played his solo to her too. She obliged them by remaining transfixed, and everyone who could see her—including the people in line out front, peering in through the grimy windows—was smiling.

Maybe it’s better if she doesn’t remember that part, for the sake of her ego. But we’ll never forget it.

Just a month after being added, Ginmar’s “A View from A Broad”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/ginmar/ has been promoted to the Top Five. This means somebody else had to _leave_ it, but Wonkette’s silly obsession with Washingtonienne made that an easy choice. Honorable Mention goes to God of the Machine for his “flaying of _Tintern Abbey_”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000550.html, but no one else on the Top Five stumbled last month, so there’s no room for promotion just yet.

Ed Heil has moved his blog — well, started anew, actually. His new home is “The Blog That Goes Ping”:http://goesping.org/.

And that’s it — maybe the blogroll is actually stabilizing!

Here’s the first paragraph (sorry, I can’t bring myself to say ‘graf’ yet) of the WP review of _Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban_:

It’s not just the child actors who look all grown up in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” The filmmaking does, too. “Azkaban,” the third installment in the Harry Potter series, is everything the first two films were not: complex, frightening, nuanced. The Potter purists who were so sorely affronted by the choice of Chris Columbus to direct the first two films expected great things from Alfonso Cuaron — director of the Oscar-nominated “A Little Princess” and “Y Tu Mama Tambien” — and they are not likely to be disappointed. “Azkaban” is so much more sophisticated visually, and in terms of storytelling, that it’s hard to believe the source material is the same. It’s not perfect, or even close, but it delivers on the promise of J.K. Rowling’s novels to a far greater extent.

That’s where I stopped reading. Music to my ears. Can’t wait to find out if it’s true.

. . . in the space of ten minutes at the Convention Center in “New Orleans”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000433.html:

* Two middle-aged doctors trying to one-up each other with tales of exorbitant swag and junkets showered on them by drug companies.

* A cluster of young doctors (med students?) looking over the schedule, helping each other identify the worthwhile industry-sponsored symposia amid all the ones that are there to shill for a product.

In cancer care, just like everywhere else, you’ll find all kinds.

It should come as no surprise that there exists a place on the Internet where people can record “Googlewhacks”:http://www.googlewhack.com/: two dictionary words which, when put into Google, return one and only one search result. (A few clarifications and additional restrictions are listed as well.)

Anyhow, I got a nice email from an intrepid whackfinder letting me know that Polytropos has been whacked, but if I mention the two words that did it I suppose it wouldn’t be a googlewhack any more. So go to their website and look up googlewhack number four hundred sixty-nine. (UPDATE: Oops. The numbers change, so that’s no way to find it. So go to the page in the 400’s and search for “Rachel” — the one located by Rachel from London is the one.)

It strikes me that blog authors would have a better than average chance of locating googlewhacks, since they could think/skim back over odd words they’d used recently and then search for them in combinations.

It would also be trivially easy to _create_ googlewhacks by deliberately putting highly unusual words in the same entry. I suspect such metagooglewhacks would be illegal, but perhaps only if the author was the one who reported them.

. . .

Wow — I just spend a few minutes trying to find a googlewhack, and it’s hard! So in the spirit of public service, I’ll toss one out for others to find:

autochthonous rolamite

. . . at least, that’s what it is this week. The annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology attracts 27,000 cancer physicians, researchers, staff, policy wonks, and pharmaceutical company stooges. And among them glides another, underdressed and slightly out of place, with a baby strapped to his chest: me. The traveling nanny.

Impressions of Bourbon Street, at 5:30 on a Thursday afternoon right after a thunderstorm:

Underwhelming. All the infrastructure is there: bright lights, loud music, old buildings, readily available alcohol everywhere you look. But there’s not that many people out and about yet, so the effect is like being in an amusement park just after closing, when the people are gone but the rides are still turned on. The locals are at ease, of course, and there’s some folks who are just working hard at getting drunk and could care less about ambience. But it’s kind of sad to see the clusters of guys standing on the corners, drinks in hand, looking around and waiting for the party to start.

Stuff on the to do list: a stroll down Bourbon street at a more appropriate hour, a visit to Cafe Du Monde, a visit to the aquarium — where, according to the brochure, you can _touch the freakin’ sharks_ . . . I am _so_ there — and a quick stop at Harrah’s Casino to see if they have any backgammon games going. (Not all of those will be with Ella, obviously.) Other recommendations are welcome, though, being carless, I won’t be able to get out of town for a swamp tour or things of that ilk.

UPDATE: I touched the shark. Lame. It was this dinky little shark in a shallow pool — one of the kinds that didn’t even move. _No_ danger whatsoever. Felt like sandpaper, just like everybody says. Ho-hum. The rest of the aquarium was groovy, though. Gorgeous jellyfish. Lots of sharks in the Gulf of Mexico exhibit.