We lived our little drama

In Alabama, a state that seems to exist primarily so Mississippi has somebody to look down on, it must have seemed for decades that it took everything you could do just to make things go from bad to worse a little slower. A whole lot of people hunkered down and bided their time. They did their work. That’s the story. You hang on, treat everybody right the best you can, and some days you catch a break. So when everything turns to shit, remember you’re not expected to fix it all. But you’re not permitted to just walk away either.

Guest Rant: Yehudi Menuhin

“This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people… who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.”

Check your Eloi privilege

Time travel stories are cool, but they’re not really science fiction; they’re pure fantasy. As I like to say, if we were going to have time machines ever we’d have had them always. We get our little tastes of it, though. Like every time you wake up you’ve travelled another day into the future. And what is dying but moving your entire life into the past? All that without a clumsy machine and the problems of finding a recharging socket in the Pleistocene. And even if you invented a time machine, someone would get to the patent office before you.

jockies or boxers

For most guys, the guy things you enjoy are the ones you learned from your father. If your dad took you fishing, you like fishing. Same for hunting, bowling, or ambitious and ultimately destructive appliance repair. Also football; I really couldn’t care less about it which is how I emulate my primary male role model. Nowadays more and more folks are unfollowing the NFL, their reasons split along ideological lines. On the left it’s the brain injuries while on the right it’s the whole anthem thing. Tell me why you hate football and I will tell you how you vote.

64.7

I’m amazed at how many otherwise well-informed people don’t know their own cephalic index. This is the ratio between the length of your cranium and its width. Under about 75 is considered “long-headed” (dolichocephalic), from 75 to around is 83 “medium-headed” (mesocephalic), and over that you’re “short-headed” (brachycephalic). I believe we should identify fiercely with those who share our cephalic index, forming clubs united around this meaningless skull number. We could have picnics! We could make up insults! (“Shorthead” is already pretty good.) We’ve tried unifying our species, and failed. I say let us divide anew along mind-bogglingly irrational borders.

go 'round again

Here’s something I noticed. If you walk around one block, the distance covered is four blocks. If you walk around two blocks, the distance is six blocks. Now, go around four blocks. That’s an eight block walk. Okay, how about three? Well, the distance around a three block enclosure, whether a long rectangle or an el shape, is also eight blocks. I have checked and rechecked this, with an actual dog. I probably shouldn’t let this bother me. I should probably use my brain for having interesting ideas that benefit all humankind. But we’ve tried that, and it doesn’t help.

a horse splashes

Did you know there was a 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon, ten years before the one with Humphrey Bogart? Me neither. So apparently, you can do remakes as long as they’re so good they turn the original into a footnote. Like Jerry Lewis was funnier than Ish Kabibble. And Johnny Weissmuller was better than Elmo Lincoln, even though the latter’s name conjures up delightful images of a cute Muppet delivering the Gettysburg Address. They keep trying to remake King Kong, though, and it just can’t work. It’s always too literal, like when somebody tries to tell you their dream.

I admit, I'm astounded.

Why assume that any decline in literacy is a cultural disaster? Most people were just reading crap. Here’s a heaping dollop of pulp fiction, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, September 1930:  “Now Sarka could see plainly the dome of his laboratory, and from the depths of him welled up that strange glow which Earthlings recognize as the joy of returning home, than which there is none, save for the love of a woman, greater.” I’d like to dig this writer up and sock him in the nose. Every word in that sentence, even the tiniest preposition, is screaming “let me die.”

Boo

If you were planning on doing the ever-popular William Howard Taft this Halloween, your time is running short. You can always paste on a fake mustache, but gaining 200 pounds can take several weeks.  As to scary spooks, listen: A lot of times, when you’re spending the night in a vacant old house, a talking parrot will get inside a human skull and poke its wings out the earholes. So you get a flying skull making ghostly sounds. Relax. It’s nothing to be afraid of. However, any time flames start shooting from the eye sockets, then you have a situation.

PTSD

Did you ever have a sort of accident or disaster or other adrenaline bomb go off in your life and you’re lucky enough to walk away and you think you’re okay but maybe minutes later you notice your sock is full of blood or the next morning you’re so stiff you can’t move or months later you have bad dreams that wake you up? I think that’s what America’s legacy of slavery keeps doing to us. Now we are being told, as I understand it, that it’s only acceptable for black men to kneel when white men tell them to.

Credo

I marvel that after millennia of human development nobody has ever invented anything to effectively replace the shoelace. I wonder if some Asian people are smug about their fork skills. I usually accept that I should live in the moment, but that can change from moment to moment. I worry that if we repeal any constitutional amendments it will renumber the rest, thereby rendering a lot of legal precedent dangerously opaque. I hope there’s an afterlife, but only for bad people. I think a really good cantaloupe tastes like a baby might if your wife would let you eat them.

no joke

Oh for fuck’s sake. Look, here’s a great idea: If you’re considering shooting into a crowd of strangers and then shooting yourself, just reverse the order. Simple. About two thirds of U.S. gun deaths (about 60 out of the daily 90) are suicides, so you’ll be in good company. That’s all I got. I’ll go back to wringing my hands now, be funny next week. Oh yeah. One more thing; this can’t be just me. When I hear about terrible crimes and they don’t know who did it yet, I say to myself, “Please let it be a white guy.”

I'm talking to you, gillman.

You know how fatigue makes you feel heavy? This is not a subjective phenomenon. The proof: a child weighs more when tired, and continues to gain mass the sleepier they get. Physicists seeking elusive dark matter should check inside a napping toddler. Carrying people around is hard, so if I was a monster, I would try to suppress my natural inclination to pick up a young woman in a nighty or swimsuit and lug her around. It just slows you down, and you’ll really need both of your hands free to fight off hordes of peasants with torches and pitchforks.

Your mileage may vary

As I’ve previously observed, Britain can’t actually leave Europe. That’s because it’s stuck on the same continental plate. But if they really want independence from the continent, they could revert from the metric system to the imperial, joining the exclusive club that includes Myanmar, Liberia, and the U.S.A.  Although metric has some big advantages: Instead of inches they use centimeters, only about one fifth as long. And kilometers are only 62 percent of a mile. So your car is faster, your penis is bigger, and marathons are easier to run. But at the lumberyard, the 2x4s are really flimsy.

This is just sad

Could it be that 100 words is too many? Once a week too often? How lazy, exactly, can one person get? Pretty lazy, it turns out. Lazy enough to transcribe a couple of post-its from the periphery of the monitor:

Did you hear about the career diplomat who was called back to Washington after decades in South Asia? He was disoriented. Worse, a head trauma caused him to lose all memory of his time there. Indonesia

I have a special form of synesthesia which whenever I hear anybody talk about it I perceive them as a pain in the butt.

Better Late Than Ever

As your source for the late breaking up to the minute news you need to start your day, I feel bad about waiting so long to bring you this: "Iron-60 is an iron isotope with a half-life of 2.6 million years, but was thought until 2009 to have a half-life of 1.5 million years.” Holy crap! Then this: “Remnants of Iron-60 found in fossilized bacteria in sea floor sediments suggest there was a supernova in the vicinity of the solar system approximately 2 million years ago." For some reason the use of the word “vicinity” in this sentence is hilarious.

Just bad planning

We’re cutting 11 percent from the National Science Foundation’s budget, because, firstly, these science people do things we can’t understand, and things that mean nothing to us are therefore meaningless. Like Portuguese or Canadian Football. Second, we are very disappointed in the science we’ve been getting so far, such as the squandered promise of the laser beam, which instead of incinerating hordes of bug-eyed monsters as they exit their shiny spaceships is used to frustrate cats and highlight important features in PowerPoint presentations. Lastly, our astronomers should have scheduled this eclipse for a weekend, when more folks could enjoy it.

Locale Hero

I think I’ve mentioned the excellent interstate pastime of seeing the names of imaginary celebrities on exit signs, like silent film stars Victoria Luxora and Darien Whitewater. Now there’s Amherst Oberlin, “The Blacksmith Poet,” once much-anthologized but today nearly forgotten. In the little New England town where he lived and died, he was less known for his verse than for his bespoke orthopedic horseshoes.

Here’s the first stanza of his best known work, “To a Daffodil:”

O how shall I sing of the daffodil
That blooms in yonder yard?
Its petals pale, its leaves a-dew,
It makes my pecker hard.

like lipid pools

This is not a news site, but sometimes a breaking story pushes our regularly scheduled blather to the back burner. This is one of those times, because of the big oil spill in Hong Kong. It’s a palm oil spill, from a ship collision off the coast of mainland China. A disgusting amount of this essential Oreos component has fouled ten busy beaches. Two thoughts. First, isn’t that, like, built-in suntan lotion? Secondly, I believe this is the first time this year I’ve seen the phrase “rancid smelling sticky white clumps” used to describe anything outside of the West Wing.

Now in the pipeline

Elon Musk (whose name sounds like a truly wretched aftershave) says he has “verbal government approval” to build a superfast Hyperloop transportation system to whisk passengers between New York and Washington D.C. in less than 30 minutes. A Hyperloop is an underground tube within which passenger cabins are literally sucked from place to place. It’s reassuring news for all the folks who fear that aloof coastal elites are oblivious to the troubles of small-town America. If Mr. Musk (a forgotten Beatrix Potter character) can pull this off, the heartland will be flyover country no more. It will be tunnel-under country.

One for the ages

Doris Day got a special surprise this past April when on her 93rd birthday somebody dug up her birth certificate and told her it was her 95th. So she had to skip 94 entirely, which must have felt weird. If you have to skip a year in your life, probably 14 would be my first choice. I’m sure Ms. Day would not be offended if I mention that 95 is real old. Also very old: Olivia de Havilland, who is 101. And Issur Danielovitch (Kirk Douglas) is 100 years old. I assume that he no longer does his own stunts.

Fucking, Austria

Wall Street is named after a long-gone wall. There’s a road called Watertown Plank Road, which started out as a plank road (well, duh) between Milwaukee and Watertown, Wisconsin. My buddy JP saw the old planks when they tore it up for resurfacing when he was a boy. Near to my house we have Lapalco Boulevard, which started out as the access road to the Louisiana Power and Light Company. I said all that to say this: Until I saw an exit sign on I-55, I had not known there was a place on the outskirts of Memphis called Whitehaven.

Want me to change the channel?

First this update. A global consortium of news organizations is meeting in Brussels to decide once and for all how they’re going to pronounce “Qatar.” Now, about hospitals. They like to build them with big windows looking out over some pleasant vista. For the lucky customer lying on the bed while enjoying a life-threatening ailment, this is sort of useless since what they’re looking at is ceiling tiles. The window is for visitors, to give them something to say. “They feeding you alright?” “Say, you got a great view from up here.” Anything’s better than “Jeez, are you gonna die?”

Mad, am I? Bwahahahaha.

You know those machines where they put a silvery helmet on your head and another one on a chicken and ZAP your mind goes into the chicken while your body starts pecking around for grubs? I want one of those. I would hook it up to a long-distance phone line and use it to visit relatives in distant cities. Back at the house, I would simply spread newspaper on the floor and sprinkle a bunch of cracked corn everywhere. Sure, the family would have to get used to talking to a chicken. But it would save a lot of driving.

Also, "trust me," which means nothing.

A dashboard is called a dashboard because that was the term for the front of a buggy that keeps mud from the horse’s hooves from splattering you. It’s still called “film school” because “movie college” sounds stupid. My grandpa called the refrigerator an icebox and my tricycle a velocipede. It’s like we repurpose old words because we’re afraid of running out of noises to make for all the new stuff. But if you visit any tavern at closing time, you’ll hear plenty of words just begging for a definition. Fnarf and blararararh are out there, waiting to be given meaning.

We mourn the loss of civility.

In 1856, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death. He broke his cane to pieces on Sumner’s head. Sumner, a radical abolitionist, had recently made an anti-slavery speech that Brooks found offensive. Sumner suffered head injuries that plagued him the rest of his life; Brooks was fined $300 and received dozens of replacement canes from supporters. Sumner came back and kept talking. He said, “Say, sir, in your madness, that you own the sun, the stars, the moon; but do not say that you own a man.”

Lift the film from my eyes

In movies, gunshots often cause something called a “flesh wound,” which is no big deal although it really smarts. This can’t be right. Neither is the next step, which is finding a very drunk doctor and making him drink a pot of piping hot coffee so he can dig out the bullet. Having experienced the effects of alcohol and caffeine, I can report that they do not in combination qualify one to perform shade tree surgery. Could the movies be wrong? Will we not in our blasted and arid post-apocalyptic future be somehow motivated to wear goggles and fingerless gloves?

Also: bob and loco

“Plumbum” sounds like slightly naughty term of affection. It’s not, though; it’s Latin for the element lead. Pliny the Elder named some flowers Plumbago, maybe because the white dust on the leaves reminded him of white lead, a terrific but poisonous pigment. Plumbago is also an archaic word for graphite, which looked like lead ore to the folks who mined it in Seathwaite, England. They first used it to mark sheep, an early pre-subway form of graffiti. But there’s never been any lead in pencils. There’s plenty in water pipes, though, so the folks who fix them are called plumbers.

Not even gymnosophy

I’ve never enjoyed anything with the word “gym” in front of it. Gym class, along with gym teachers, did not appeal to me at all. They demanded a lot of unnecessary movement, while the outside world offered a treasure trove of sedentary occupations involving Mad magazine and Milk Duds. And gym class tended to provoke more breathing in one class period than I liked to do in an entire day. I believe that building upper body strength can shift one’s center of gravity, leading to potentially hazardous instability. Anyway, who wants broad shoulders? They make your head look so small.

This makes me very, very happy.

On January 1, 1802, the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts presented President Thomas Jefferson with a 1,234 pound cheese, known as “The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese.” It was engraved with the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” and came with a letter certifying that “the cheese was procured by the personal labor of freeborn farmers with the voluntary and cheerful aid of their wives and daughters, without the assistance of a single slave.” That’s what America once was and God willing, can be again. Free cheese. Free people. Grandiose and looney gestures that actually make absolutely no sense at all.

Wait for it...

You’re walking home from the tavern. You have enjoyed as much Pabst Blue Ribbon as you can possibly contain. The quickest way home is across the park, right over the Little League diamond. It’s dark. There’s a small cinderblock equipment shed, and you’re passing right behind it. Hm. This is probably a good place to urinate. Definitely. So okay, stand at the wall and – wait – is that a flashlight? Is it pointed directly at your crotchal region? Yeah. It’s the security guard, who was standing in front of the little building. Next time, walk once around. Loop before you leak.

Snake oil helps it go down easier.

Vitamin B12 is an important nutrient, abundant in meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. Rabbits are vegans, and they have evolved a strategy for getting enough B12. There are bacteria in the large intestine that excrete the vitamin, but that’s too far down the alimentary canal for effective absorption. So bunnies eat their own poop, accepting halitosis as the cost of avoiding a dietary deficiency. Hence the phrase “hare's breath escape.” Feces is a rich source of B12. It’s good to know that even with the excellent health care their high office affords them, House Republicans are still taking their supplements.

As predicted by the prophet Costner

Okay, so what happens is the sun shines on the oceans and evaporates water and makes clouds. And then it rains everywhere, including on land, which is largely water soluble. So some of the land melts and runs off into rivers. And the rivers flow downhill until the water ends up back in the ocean. And when it gets evaporated again, it leaves all those bits of the surface world behind. Doesn’t it seem like the water cycle would eventually dissolve all the dry land and wash it down into the sea? Is this something I should be concerned about?

It's not plagiarism; it's sampling.

I don’t know why I bother. All the good writing has already been done, creating a rich natural resource. It’s just a matter of judicious harvesting. Like I found 58 percent of today’s rant on Wikipedia, ripe for the cutting and pasting: “Handfeeding or touching large barracudas in general is to be avoided. Spearfishing around barracudas can also be dangerous, as they are quite capable of ripping a chunk from a wounded fish thrashing on a spear, or out of the arm which is holding the spear. Humans are not on their preferred menu, but haste can lead to confusion.”

Because expired meds might be dangerous

Imagine you have your head in the refrigerator and notice that the cottage cheese is about to pass its sell-by date so you grab a spoon and some celery salt and sit down and eat that stuff until you feel soggy and morose. Arkansas was going through something like that with their death penalty drugs; they needed to hurry up and kill eight people in 11 days before their poison expired. I’m picturing Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson sitting on the edge of his bed reading the Viagra bottle and saying, “Honey, we need to have intercourse seven times before May.”

Stravinsky! Gandhi!

Here’s an experiment you can conduct in the privacy of your own head. Find a photo of Pablo Picasso as a young man, an early picture of George Szell, and one of 30-year-old Henry Miller. Okay, now compare what they looked like as old men. Holy crap! They’re like, um, triplegangers. I call this MFC (Male Facial Convergence) and it strikes an alarming percentage of us. Beyond a certain age there’s just three basic models: Geezer, like the previous examples, codger (Mao, Churchill) and coot (George Burns, Amiri Baraka). Of course, there’s also a strong family resemblance between all newborns.

Finally, an actual rant.

Leaf blowers are a great way to create a market for small engines and gasoline. They’re perfect from the seller’s point of view – a solution that creates its own problem. You blow leaves and other garden detritus over your property line, and your neighbor has to fire up his own leaf blower. You could always use a broom and rake, but that would be cheaper and quieter, plus those are food-fueled technologies which improve the user’s health and reduce gym expenditures. Better to buy something to address the sense of need created by the previous purchase. Like I said. Perfect.

Retroactive advice

Saturday was voting day, a small election to choose between three lawyers who want to be civil court judge. Nobody shows up for these; probably the candidate with the biggest family has the edge. I voted for the one whose campaign invoked Faith the least. The next day I saw a Vermont license plate, pretty rare down here. The motto was “Green Mountain State,” which is sort of silly, because that’s what “Vermont” means. Like if Pennsylvania’s said “Penn’s Woods State.” Then I passed a leftover sign that said “Vote Today.” And I thought, “Actually that should say ‘Vote Yesterday.’”

You finally lay your burden down

The first LP I ever bought was called The Beatles' Second Album. I must have recently turned 10. Took it home, put it on the turntable. My dad’s stereo was, as we used to say, bitchin’. A McIntosh 240 into a pair of AR 2a speakers, which if you had that stuff today you could sell it a collector and use the money to buy it back. Anyway, the first song started with this great guitar intro and then George Harrison’s reedy double tracked voice came in and that was it. “Roll Over Beethoven” is still my favorite Beatles’ song.

Oh, ick.

Look, you don’t have to like anything about Steve Bannon and his ideas to concede that he is an educated, intelligent, accomplished, and imaginative creature. Yeah, he’s some kind of monster. He’s also a working-class guy who’s managed to earn a couple of master’s degrees and had successful careers as a naval officer, an investment banker, a media executive – before becoming maybe the most powerful grownup in the entire world. He gets paid to tell a rich kid what to do. Tough gig. I’m guessing probably the hardest part of the job is concealing his utter contempt for Donald Trump.

Candyland

If you’re like me, you’ve had it pretty good so far. We got to watch Howdy Doody and Whirlybirds and Man from UNCLE. We listened to Chuck Berry and Brenda Lee and Sheb Wooley, noshed on McDonald’s and Hostess and Bonomo Turkish Taffy. They dressed us in Keds and Levis, drove us around in Fords and Chevys and Oldsmobiles and Kaisers, immunized us against polio and smallpox and diphtheria and pertussis and tetanus. We had Schwinns and Yoyos and Silly Putty and Barbies and GI Joes. Nobody’s ever had it better. Ever. So where did all this meanness come from?

Writing feverishly

When a really terrible viral infection started killing off millions of people in 1918, Europe was still having what we call the First World War (they called it the Only World War). To keep up wartime morale, newspapers in countries like Germany and England didn’t report on the deadly epidemic. But Spain was neutral, and those death tolls were made public earlier. So that’s why it got called Spanish Influenza, though it actually may have come from Kansas. Graham crackers also come from Kansas, and are sometimes given along with lukewarm tea to people who have the flu. Coincidence? Perhaps.

My golden hour

I like going to Walmart, because that’s where America is. One time I was in the Walmart in Lewisburg, West Virginia, and a little girl said, “Come on, Daddy, the shoes are over yonder,” and he said, “Alright.” Bet nobody says yonder at Nordstrom. Yesterday I rode to the one on Tchoupitoulas and we were all cheerfully bumping into each other and saying excuse me and I got 11 dollar pants and a cellophane package of Israeli tea biscuits. The package fit nicely in my shirt pocket, so I rode my bicycle home at dusk, eating cookies all the way.

Nope

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

Ramshackle!

It’s not the hats. You can tell the good guys because they spend their days teaching young’uns how to whittle and helping schoolmarms off stagecoaches. Bad guys, when they’re not kidnapping the daughters of ranchers whose spreads lie over rich veins of gold, tend to sit around in ramshackle hideouts playing cards and drinking whiskey. They lie and cheat and are not nice to their horses. It’s not like the two sides on a checkerboard. It’s asymmetric, like two different games. To win, the bad guys have to kill the good guy. Good guys win simply by remaining good guys.

Moot and rhetorical

Questions for this week: Are all the angry white men going to stop being angry now that they’ve run the table? Or is being angry the whole point? Will we finally get back all the guns that Obama took away back in 2008? Will the pace of global warming accelerate as a consequence of the tremendous friction of 38 dead presidents spinning madly in their graves? And finally, how could anybody imagine that a smart businessman would pay somebody in Moscow to piss on him when there are millions of Americans who would be happy to do it for free?

Also pants without sewing

You can dig in your heels all you want, but if like me you are a member of the Biggest Generation you’re on a steep slick slide to oblivion. The void looms ahead. For some of us, it feels like the bright promise of decades of fatalism is finally paying off. Whee! Meanwhile there’s a lot of loose talk about staying independent in our Golden Sunset Years, which is really crap if you think about it. Seriously, for your whole life you’ve had shelter without building, bread without baking, meat without slaughter. It’s been assisted living from the git go.

Stealth bummer

We’ve had ninjas all wrong. The real deal is they make themselves invisible in whatever environment they‘re in. For some theater production in the past, the director dressed his sneaky murderer as a sceneshifter, because audiences were used to seeing these figures in black lurking around the set and wouldn’t expect them to interact with the plot, much less kill somebody. So what we think of as a ninja costume is just a Japanese stagehand outfit. To be really ninja-like, you’d want to dress as someone truly invisible. Like a homeless veteran. On a busy corner. With a cardboard sign.