Deus X-Files

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Deus ex post facto: plot twists and other dilemmas …

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In classical drama, the term deus ex machina refers to a plot device wherein a plot problem is suddenly solved by the arrival of a previously unannounced character who supplies the answer or solution. “But don’t you know? That’s your brother!” would be a line delivered by a deus ex machina character, thus helping our hero avert or defeat a troublesome situation.

When a playwright or a novelist needs to fix an intractable plot puzzle, he or she might resort to the tool, which is Latin for “god from the machine,” or “you couldn’t figure it out for yourself with the characters you’d created, so you punted,” but audiences since ancient times have tended to see through the fix. “Where did HE come from?” More often than not nowadays, it is used ironically, but when you find yourself reading a book and seeing lines delivered by a character that you do not remember being introduced to, your inattentive reading is not to blame. That character really was not there 20 pages earlier.
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Today in History: Sept. 26

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For the first time in U.S. history, the two major party nominees for President of the United States debated on this date in 1960. It was also the first time the two nominees would be seen together on television.

Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon met in Chicago; the two held three more debates through the fall that year. Howard K. Smith moderated.

Senator Kennedy had spent the day preparing for the debate with close aides and then rested. The Vice President had not prepared, was recovering from the flu, and, perhaps worse, re-injured one of his knees on the way to the studio. (The swelling had just gone down when he banged it in into his car door.) Nixon refused makeup and did not shave just before the debate, so his 5 o’clock shadow stood out under the hot TV studio lights, as did his heavy sweating, which was caused by either his flu, the pain from his knee, or the heat from the lights.
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Pretending to Understand

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

No one who asks the question, “What’s your problem?” is expressing an invitation to join them in the quest for a solution. It is a statement costumed as a question. In linguistics, this sort of accusation-posing-as-a-question/concern is known by a linguistic term that I have not yet researched and may not get to today. “Accusation-posing-as-a-question,” or APAQ (™ pending) works for me, though.

It is aggressively passive-aggressive only almost approximately one-hundred percent of the time that it is uttered. The person speaking the non-rhetorical non-question is profoundly certain of one thing, is philosophically sure of this, however: That they are not now doing, nor have they just been doing, nor were they about to do, something that falls in the range between perplexing to annoying to criminal.
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