Even Educated Fleas

We've all seen those bumper stickers that explain the appropriately puntastic ways in which members of a specific demographic clade “do it.” They are remarkably unfunny, and also if you then pass the vehicle to which they adhere, the driver is usually revealed to be someone with whom you could not remotely imagine doing “it” even if said human was dipped in nectar and rolled in cocaine. Assuming, of course, that “it” means what I think it means. This is all a clumsy setup for two great bumper sticker ideas: “Prostitutes do it for money,” and “Literalists eschew coy euphemisms.”

Fallback

Daylight Saving Time was the invention of one G.V. Hudson, an English-born New Zealand entomologist and postal clerk whose collection of insects, the largest in New Zealand, is housed in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and who was furthermore a member of the 1907 Sub-Antarctic Islands Scientific Expedition, a voyage which led to the rescue of the survivors of the shipwreck of the Dundonald, who had initially subsisted on the raw flesh of the mollymawk, a medium-sized albatross with a distinctive salt gland above the nasal passage that excretes a saline solution from the nose. Wikipedia, baby.

Just William

There's a new movie about an old subject. Somebody thinks Shakespeare was written by somebody other than Shakespeare. Every time this comes up, the new candidate is always better educated, or of a higher class, than the historical Bard. Because, see, they teach this stuff at college, and the actual Will Shakespeare simply wasn't qualified to write at a university level. But unlike tenure, talent is capricious. You can't learn it or earn it. And genius always attracts small minds seeking to reduce it to their own scale. Next you'll try to tell me that Bob Kane didn't write Batman.

Wrong to work state

I like things simple. I like to decide what my position is on a whole class of ideas all at once. That way I can know what my opinion is just by checking to see who is on which side. So right now, Alabama has me flummoxed. That's because an unintended consequence of their new and scary immigration law is to make it absolutely clear that one reason we eat so cheap is because we have people working for us for less that we'd take ourselves. And I'm thinking any difference between slave labor and slave wages is purely semantic.

Waiting for "Lefty," maybe

One of the things that starts to dawn on a guy as he grinds his way through his sixth decade is that if he was ever going to get a cool nickname he would probably have gotten it by now. More than likely, there will be no Pee Wee, Doc, or Big D for me. Not Sparky, Bucky, Lucky, or Duke. Not Scooter, Skeeter, Slats, Slick, Slam, or Slim. No Shorty, Sleepy, Specs, Spike, Spud, Tiny or Tubby or Chubby or Chink. Nickname acquisition is a young man's game: George Foster wasn't more than 29 when got tagged with Pops.

Prime Example

Last week I wrote my 250th rant in a row, which I didn't notice until now. That's a lot of rants. It's a good time to pause and reflect. I feel that I have thus far accomplished as much as any one man could hope to achieve in terms of keeping the public eye focused on extremely large watering cans and also gigantic pencils. I have written about the best way to buy bananas, what I think of Jerry Lewis, and interesting things I've noticed while riding my bicycle. Admittedly, there has also been a certain amount of trivial filler.

Pet Theory

Your choice of pet says a lot about you. Like, getting a dog means you crave unconditional devotion, and keeping a cat indicates you're a sucker for emotional abuse. So what does ferret ownership signify? It certainly makes a statement, something on the order of, “I have so little personality that I prefer to be represented socially through a proxy rodent.” It's still a better pet than a rabbit, though. Did you know those cute floppy eared little balls of fluff eat their own babies? They also eat their own poop, redigest it, and poop it out again. Nature's postmodernists.