Suddenly, 10 things.

1. The blog has a theme today. This is something that happens sometimes, and at the point when I notice I use my "blog has a theme today" tag and — if I'm in the mood — I try to construct a 10-item list on that theme. As the post title indicates, the theme is: "sudden."

2. "Three gunmen, who have been hired to assassinate the President, hold a family hostage while waiting for their target. Interesting B film which focuses on psychopathic killer well-portrayed against type by Frank Sinatra." It's titled "Suddenly," and you can watch it in its hour-and-15-minute entirety here.

3. In the phrase "all of a sudden" (or "all of the sudden"), "sudden" is a noun. But we never use the noun in any other context. It's hard even to try to do that, even though it's obvious that the noun means something that is sudden. I challenge you! (By the way, I grew up around people who used the less common "all of the sudden," and it took me a long time to accept the dominance of "all of a sudden.")

4. Good writers should know that "suddenly" is a cheeseball word. One of Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing is "Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose.'" I agree but would make an exception for intentional and delightful cheesiness, as in: "Why do birds suddenly appear/Every time you walk near?"



5. Hearing that, Meade suddenly says "Hey, don't forget, Bissage named his blog Suddenly Bissage." Bissage was a dearly beloved commenter on this blog who disappeared one day, when the uncooperative dear became uncooperative. I've tried to call him back: "Come back, Bissage. We're counting oranges again. Remember? 42. 42. 42..." To no avail.

6. Analyzing sentences in "The Great Gatsby" — the old "Gatsby project" — there was a day, a couple years ago, when we lit upon: "Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season, suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed." About that "suddenly," I said: "This lone female is suddenly joined by numerous men. Though the unnamed men never get definition as individuals, they presumably get one-on-one dates with her, since the numbers match up: half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men. This is the kind of 'dating' one associates with a prostitute." What would Elmore say about that? I'm inclined to justify anything in "The Great Gatsby" as exactly what it has to be, so I want to say that the "suddenly" is hilarious, but why? Perhaps because it's absurd — 6 men popping up in a sequence on each day within a season of days. Presumably, those men and more are always there, seeking dates with Daisy. It's her whimsical option — exercised suddenly — to accept the dates and put them in sequence, 6 per day, day after day. It's an endless flow, not sudden at all. The suddenness is in Daisy's waking up again in this twilight universe.

7. "Sudden death" — to refer to a method of tie-breaking — goes back to 1834, according to the OED, which found the quote: "‘Which’, said he, ‘is it to be—two out of three, as at Newmarket, or the first toss to decide?’ ‘Sudden death’, said I, ‘and there will soon be an end of it.’" Wikipedia has a page on the topic, with specific details on 16 different sports/games and: "Sudden death may instead be called sudden victory to avoid the mention of death, particularly in sports with a high risk of physical injury. This variant became one of announcer Curt Gowdy's idiosyncrasies in 1971 when the AFC divisional championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins went into overtime." Ha. That didn't catch on. If you're that anxious about someone getting hurt, why are you watching?

8. Meade laughs at something he wrote in the comments to "We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends": "I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/And just for that one moment I could be you/Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/You'd know what a drag it is to have vomit in your shoes." And my response to that — because I'm working on this list here — is to do a word search for "suddenly" at bobdylan.com. One of the great ones comes up — "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding":

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

9. Sudden infant death syndrome. To be distinguished — we hope! — from infanticide. "The misdiagnosis of infanticide as SIDS 'happens all over... A lot of doctors and police don't know how to handle it. They don't take it as seriously as they should.'" Said Jamie Talan, co-author of "The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine and High-Stakes Science." That book is from 1997. That's a controversy that seems to have melted away.

10. This is a 10-point list so we must stop here. Did I miss something you were hoping for? "Suddenly Susan"? "Suddenly Seymour"? "Suddenly, Last Summer"?