Off my chest.

I have a lot to feel guilty about. As a Jew, I’m told I had a hand in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. I’m of white European descent, so I have to bear responsibility for enslaving, colonizing, displacing, or exterminating entire cultures. Born male, there’s no way I can deny my tacit culpability in the injustices of the global patriarchy, while as a human being I have to accept my complicity in what’s shaping up to be the biggest extinction event since that cyanobacteria thing. Also, I’ve always felt I was a big disappointment to my mother, so there’s that.

For instance Grote Reber

Long before you and I were born, everybody in town knew how to do everything. You might not be good at baking bread or shoeing horses, but you at least understood the gist of it. Kids bought magazines that showed them how to build their own full-sized gliders and crystal radios. The big deal last week was the 75th birthday of the transistor, an apparatus which you simply cannot build at the kitchen table. I can’t find the choke on my car’s dashboard. It’s not pleasant to admit that one is hopelessly stupid and incompetent, but there you have it.

Pubbekatahetuvada

Don’t blame me if I keep coming back to topic of free will. Everything up to now has led to it; I have no other option. To support my position, let me point to the utter lack of even a single instance where the present is not a direct result of the past. Look, I’m not saying you can’t make a decision; I’m just suggesting that you don’t have any choice about it. Here’s a fun thing – if anyone ever tells you they believe in free will, you should respond by saying, “I knew you were going to say that.”

Impossible?

They should call it the Unnecessary Burger. To me, fake meat is stupid; there is no reason to expend resources to come up with half-assed ersatz versions when it’s so easy to just forgo some menu items. There are a lot of delicious things to eat that aren’t meat. So here’s a parallel: As we try (half-heartedly) to reduce fossil fuel dependency, maybe it’s not necessary to come up with greener private cars, sustainable airliners, eco-friendly skyscrapers. Maybe just live different lives. It’s crazy to think that we can change everything while surrendering nothing. Hey, whaddya know? An actual rant!

Liechtenstein

If you were to encounter the word “Superfosfatnyy” in the course of your research, you might assume at first glance that it signified some arcane process which purified certain important chemical elements which had heretofore been lost in previous refining operations but in future would be made available in bulk as an essential ingredient of some important component in an emerging technology that was destined to accelerate our journey toward a cleaner and greener energy-efficient future. You’d be wrong, though. Superfosfatnyy is a district of the city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan, one of only two doubly landlocked nations on Earth.

Affectionate Spectrum

Some people, you like them so much that it would be okay with you if they moved permanently into the spare room as long as they did their share of dishes. There are some people who are welcome to pretty much walk into your house whenever they feel like it, whereas some other people are totally welcome in your house but you would like to invite them ahead of time. And then some people, you try to invite them over to visit strongly enough so they know you like them but not so much that they actually ever show up.

Popular Science

Physicists break down the forces that drive the universe into four fundamental interactions. As I understand it, the strong force is what makes it so hard to get plastic five-gallon buckets apart while the weak force is all that’s keeping you from eating all the cookies. A third force, the electromagnetic interaction, only occurs when a grade school teacher has you wrap wire around a nail. Under no other conditions is this force to be observed in day-to-day life. The fourth force, gravity, is when you try to keep a straight face while somebody explains their paleo diet to you.

Six strings good, four strings better.

I always say you can play the guitar but you have to work the bass. The strings are fatter, the amplifiers are bigger, and you have to stand in the back watching guys with better hair get all the glory while you doggedly hold the music together. I remember one time, while we were playing, somebody actually tossed ladies’ underwear at me. It landed at my feet. And I’m like, “I loaded all this heavy crap in, I’m up here working my ass off so you can have a good time, and now you expect me to do your laundry?”

Tallebudgera Alleygators

Hey baseball fan. Are you dreading the end of the World Series, after which you’ll have no reason to watch your television? Let me offer some alternatives: Caribbean baseball is a great option, thanks in large part to a man named Pedro Miguel Caratini, whose namesake cocktail consists of gin and carrot juice. And for the adventurous there’s Australian Rules baseball, which is played during their summer, when it’s winter here. It’s a very similar game to our own national pastime. The biggest difference is that, as a result of Coriolis forces, they run the bases in the opposite direction.

Baby steps

We’ve talked about binding energy, right? About how all matter tends over time to undergo fusion or fission into Iron-56 (or Nickel-62, which sounds like a crappy alt rock band) and how absolutely everything will turn to iron in the far future. The really far future. The really, really far future. Right now the universe in which we live is about 14 billion years old, give or take. Which is old, sure, but nothing compared to the 10^15,000 years or so it might take for its final conversion to nothing but iron stars. We live at the dawn of time.

Are we not men?

You know what’s weird that I found out? Yeast, the single-celled organisms that turn sugar into alcohol and thereby make human life endurable, evolved from multicellular fungi. Maybe your conception, like mine, was that evolution tends to select for increasing complexity. If so, we were both wrong. The best way I can explain it, without getting too technical, is that stuff just does stuff. It’s like how the Mississippi has tributaries up north and distributaries down here. Things come together. Things come apart. And popular attributes like bilateral symmetry are as permanent and intentional as clouds that look like bunnies.

population 455

I won’t pretend there aren’t a lot of downsides to becoming an older person. That would be disingenuous and also you wouldn’t believe me. But I’m also aware that the aging process brings with it certain gifts – call it wisdom if you must, or a more mature perspective, or simply the moderating effects on the psyche of decades of accumulated experience. All I know is that the me of today is less likely than the me of decades past to dissolve into a fit of uncontrollable snot-nosed giggles upon discovering that there is such a place as Dry Prong, Louisiana.

The Kalashnikov of twang

I’m going to write about Leo Fender, America’s greatest inventor. If this is of no interest to you, feel free to fast-forward to next week. Okay. Henry Ford created the first car that normal people could buy, the Model T. It’s been obsolete for about a century now. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. That’s obsolete too. Leo Fender sold his first Telecaster around 1950 and the identical instrument is available today from his corporate inheritors and scads of other makers. It’s the Platonic ideal of electric guitars, perfect and irreducible. He nailed it, right out of the gate.

It's the little things

People feel sad or afraid or dissatisfied a lot in their lives and what they’ll tell you is that they want to be happy but I’m not sure I know what that means. See, if you were happy your whole life you wouldn’t notice any more than a fish would say something like, “Man, I am so wet.” What we all need to do, I think, is recognize and embrace those fleeting moments where we find ourselves absolutely, unreservedly, ecstatically happy, which is how I felt when I read the following headline: “Tiny swimming robots treat deadly pneumonia in mice.”

No decoder rings yet

The United States Space Force is the newest, the smallest, and the goshdarned cutest of America’s Armed Forces. Everything they do is all about space! Like, the Chief of Space Operations, military head of the Space Force, lives in an official residence called Space House at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, Washington, D.C. The headquarters of the U.S. Space Force is called the Space Staff. The Space Force has three field commands: Space Operations Command,  Space Systems Command, and Space Training and Readiness Command. The Space Force has its own governing doctrine; “Spacepower: Doctrine for Space Forces.” It’s all just too adorable.

Shane. Stay away.

He says he sticks his neck out for nobody but you know he’s just fronting. He acts hard because he’s been hurt. Look again closer. You can see in his eyes that before long he’ll be laying it on the line for the little people – saving the ranch, leading the charge, taking the rap, stopping a bullet. You’ll want to thank him but by then he’ll be gone. No messy goodbyes, no socks on the floor, no “Dad, we’re taking the car keys” for him, not ever. A hero is a guy who ruins it for the rest of us.

common sense

Yesterday was a day of driving the car, with a lot of the driving taking place in the hills of east Tennessee. And at one point, there was a series of terrific downpours, just blinding torrents of rain that had everybody switching on the flashers and slowing way the hell down. Then, boom, clear and dry and sunny, then wham, another monsoon. Like that. Disconcerting. But then it cleared up for real and that’s when I saw a sign that said “use caution in wet conditions,”  and I thought, well, they should have put that sign back where it’s raining.

It’s okay, I’m a dad.

One time I wanted to move this great huge rock from my backyard up to in front by the driveway to paint the house number on it. It was terrifically heavy so my plan was to put a big iron bar across a block of wood and just ootch it over a bit at a time. But my buddy Nathaniel, who is enormously big and strong, happened to stop by and he just bent over and picked up the rock and carried it over to exactly where I wanted it. And I thought to myself, “Well, better Nate than lever.”

Based on a true story

Imagine you were to make it your business to write something of marginal interest on a weekly basis and further imagine you applied the peculiar discipline of an invariant length of exactly 100 words. You might assume that the primary challenge would be to limit your verbiage so as to express yourself adequately while maintaining your self-imposed brevity. But some ideas are very small and demand few words. Today’s challenge is to expand the following content to the requisite length: To step on a raisin barefooted is an unpleasant sensation all out of proportion with the severity of the injury.

-sigh-

First, let me clarify right out front that I have no wish to minimize anyone’s suffering. No wait. That’s wrong. What I meant was, it’s not my intention to make light of the pain and discomfort that any given individual or group of individuals may be experiencing. Language is tricky. Like when non-rhotic English speakers write “erm” when they mean “um.” Or how >tsk tsk<, invented to approximate a clucking sound, is now pronounced “tisk tisk.” Language has derailed my original intent here when all I wanted to do was mention that the term Monkeypox Czar sounds funny to me.

for years I was smart

I was wrong to assume the term “pooka,” as applied to Harvey the invisible six-foot rabbit, was a cute invention of the writer; it turns out that these mythical shapeshifting critters have been around for a good long time in Ireland from whence their legend has spread. Come to find out, for example, that the character Puck in a A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of them. So the playwright Mary Agnes McDonough Coyle, who I’m guessing had a few Irish ancestors, was simply using the appropriate term to describe Elwood P. Dowd’s friend. I find that oh so pleasant.

11th Commandment

When thou drivest in thy vehicle and encounter another who approacheth in the opposite lane, thou shalt, without taking the right hand from the steering wheel, lift the first two fingers of said hand in a gesture of cordial greeting and acknowledgement. Two is the number of the fingers thou shalt lift – not one, for to lift a single finger is insufficiently neighborly and may, depending on the finger, be a source of grievous offence, however neither shalt thou lift three fingers which is presumptuous and overly familiar. Two fingers and two fingers only shalt thou lift to thine neighbor.

Batteries not included

You can’t blame life for not making sense. Our lives are absurd exactly to the extent that our expectations are proven wrong. Still, I understand what you’re trying to say and I often feel the same way; I’m just quibbling here. But the world itself neither makes nor doesn’t make sense. Sense is a human artifact and it’s up to you to make sense of life in the same way you make castles of sand. So the world consists of stories, the beach contains innumerable castles, every pencil is full of pictures, and cows are basically hamburgers upholstered in leather.

Amygdala hijinx

You can’t know how you’ll react under stress. Reflex takes over and your deepest truths are revealed. I’d like to think I’m the kind of person who throws himself on the grenade, who runs straight at the guy with the gun. I want to believe I’d give my rations to the kids and nursing mothers, that I’d give up my place on the last train out. Or in an example of a less desperate circumstance, I hope that if I am ever called upon to make the ceremonial first pitch I manage to lob it cleanly into the catcher’s mitt.

Could be discommodious

Somewhere in some office there is somebody who decides to put the word “flushable” on a product, and so directs somebody else to print “flushable” on a label so as to cause the word “flushable” to appear on innumerable packages. The fact that this product should not actually be flushed is no big deal to them; it’s as easy as putting the word “delicious” on something disgusting. These people don’t know you and do not care about you at all. And even if you could find them, there is no way you could legally compel them to pay your plumber.

An argument for hybrid vigor

I was looking at some historic pictures of different dog breeds, from late in the 19th century, and you know what? The characteristics that make those different kinds of dogs look like they do are much less pronounced than today’s examples of the same breeds. Today’s wrinkly dogs are wrinklier, the dwarfy ones are dwarfier, and so forth. And of course, they also tend to suffer all the sequelae of inbreeding: tumors and bad hips and respiratory difficulties and also sometimes bad brains. It’s a cruel experiment in eugenics and enforced racial purity, and nothing to be proud of, boys.

Compared To What

Right now the best we can hope for is terrible. Awful people are getting exactly what they want at the expense of perfectly decent folks who are getting screwed in ways that range from mildly annoying to absolutely horrific. Seems like everybody I know is stressing out like never before because of what feels like a gathering confluence of nightmare scenarios coming home to roost in a shitstorm of tortured similes and mixed metaphors. But I say don’t panic. And I say that not because things ain’t so bad but because they were never all that good to begin with.

Jung America

Did you used to read comic books? Remember Bizarro? He was like the shadow version of Superman; everything about him was the opposite of the Man of Steel. It was played for laughs and eventually they dreamed up a whole Bizarro World, where everything was a parody of mid-century middle-class American life. Like, the Bizarro dad would wear a frilly apron and wash dishes. Hilarious! Anyway, I’ve decided that this right here is Bizarro World, with everything backwards. In this world, the same government that can’t tell anyone to wear a face mask can force them to have a baby.

Life is like a metaphor

When you think about it, life is like a new pair of shoes. They’re uncomfortable at first and need breaking in. It’s an awkward phase. But after a while they both feel good and look good. You strut around looking snappy. Inevitably, after a time they start to become scuffed and worn, but at the same time they’re actually getting more comfortable. This is the best part, so you find yourself putting some effort into keeping them going. Early repairs yield promising results, but subsequent fixes are tenuous, transitory, and ultimately unsatisfactory. Finally they fall apart completely and that’s it.

Lives of the Philosophers, Pt. 9

Bertrand Russell looked exactly like you might imagine an English philosopher looking. No. Wait. I’ll go so far as to say that he looked exactly like a casting director might want a character actor to look as he cast about for someone to portray an English philosopher. I’ll even specify  a lazy and unimaginative casting director, unless that’s redundant. We are told that Bertrand Russell was extremely intelligent, yet he was married four times to four different people. On the other hand, he wrote “Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him,” which is pretty dang brilliant.

Caste mark

When I read a crossword clue that said “Napa excursion” for eight letters, I immediately thought “parts run.” The correct answer was “wine tour.” I should have known; this was in the New York Times, which is not generally considered the news source of record for America’s grease monkeys and shade-tree mechanics, especially since the demise of the Saab, which company I believe made it a policy to exclusively employ philosophy PhDs or published poets in their service departments. Plus, their three-cylinder engine would actually run backwards if you hooked up the wires wrong. And adjusting the valves was challenging.

Well, duh

Here’s a science headline I just read: “Prehistoric people created art by firelight, new research reveals.” On reflection (teehee) I do not find this particularly illuminating (harhar). Our prehistoric Paleolithic ancestors created their cave art in caves, places which are notoriously dark. And although your average Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon had a lot of the same stuff as us (opposable thumbs, big brain case), they didn’t have light bulbs. In fact, when people needed light, something (wood, tallow, oil, paraffin, gas) had to be on fire right up until around the time my great-grandparents were born. (Unless they used their cellphones.)

With age comes wisdom.

You know how sometimes you and some running buddies would get into maybe a little too much Everclear and non-prescription pharmaceuticals and get it into your heads that it would be a lot of fun to go joy riding in a vehicle that didn’t belong to you? And if you were ever young you’ll recall the exhilaration of evading the pursuing law enforcement officers before bailing out and heading home to sleep it off. It doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes, the authorities seem to anticipate your every move, always one step ahead. It’s hard to steal a streetcar.

Or Pigskin Blucher?

Does everything have to be about something? Can’t a work of art stand as a thing unto itself, without reference to any external touchpoint? Shouldn’t it be possible to create a brave new oeuvre of pure prose, unsullied by topic or intention, free from the limitations imposed by any perceived imperative to communicate an idea or transmit information? Must all human endeavor be shoehorned into the narrow confines of pure utilitarian functionality like a great big monkey foot jammed into a narrow and inflexible cordovan wingtip? I hope not. Because I’ve not got the vaguest idea what to write today.

I can only hope.

I found out on NPR, which has never lied to me, that the common word beginning with “G” that we have customarily used when referring to Romani people is a hurtful racial slur. Bad news for Django Reinhardt emulators the world over who may need to change the name of an entire musical sub-genre. Ditto for a cool Curtis Mayfield song and a certain industrial vacuum cleaner. And possibly my opera “Meredith, or How The Elephant Lost Her Stripes” will, on the basis of a single scene, be subject to widespread protests and calls for its withdrawal. Assuming anyone notices.

Epic

Okay. Bear with me. Ithaca, New York, is named after the Greek island where Odysseus, alongside his son Telemachus, killed a whole houseful of suitors who were sniffing around his wife Penelope while he was away. Ithaca, New York, is not home to the world’s largest watering can. That’s in Utica. Ithaca, Michigan, is named after Ithaca, New York, and it’s where you’ll find Pencil Craft LLC, providers of high-quality giant pencils. Pencil Craft owner Vic Flegel offers several sizes, all of them featuring real wood, real graphite, real pink rubber erasers, and genuine copper ferrules. They are surprisingly affordable.

Let's all know more knowledge!

It turns out that you contain more than 50 glands. And some of them have extremely funny names. Like Meibomian gland, Ebner's glands, and the unforgettable Glands of Zeis. Research has revealed that each gland produces its own specialized goop that does something vitally important, at least for the tissues and organs in its immediate vicinity. As an example, if you didn’t have saliva glands you’d have nothing to spit. As it is, they are so active that the average human swallows between 1 and 1.5 liters of saliva every day. Fortunately, not all at once, from a big mug.

Some grosser than others

Probably as you begin a new week there’s a bunch of stuff you want to get done, like transcending your gross physical form and becoming a spotless being of pure light and energy. It’s a tall order, but here’s a great way to start! Invite some Black Angus cattle into your home; treat them like family. Encourage them to share your simple vegan diet and to participate in ongoing discussions around how best to create a humane, ethical, sustainable future for the planet we all share. Then, when you have bored them to death, chop them up and eat them.

Like Clockwork

Did you know that when they first instituted time zones (so trains could keep schedules as they crossed longitudes) some people objected because as far as they were concerned their actual local solar noon defined “God’s time?” But to no avail; where I live, it won’t actually be noon today until about 13:08. And they’re seriously talking about making daylight saving time a year-round thing and my question is why not leave it alone and just start work and school earlier? Because at my age, springing forward is unappealing. I may not have an hour and eight minutes to spare.

I'm Gonna Be Strong

Call me squeamish, but simply hearing certain words spoken aloud can make me queasy. Oddly enough, among those words are “squeamish” and “queasy.” Nearly as bad: Gene Pitney’s voice, mayonnaise on corned beef, and the taste of strawberry Quik. Also among the things that make me squirm, that I find embarrassing and cringe-inducing, is when people say “out of” when they mean “from.” Unless you’re William S. Burroughs or a character in Guys and Dolls, it’s dumb. “They’re a small marketing consultancy out of Des Moines,” just sounds silly –unless by “small marketing consultancy” you mean “murder for hire operation.”

The Old Reliables

When I write this stuff, I try to avoid being too topical in my choice of subject matter because I want to leave a deathless legacy of universal human truths. I want the readers of the fall-flung future, resplendent in their gossamer tunics, to remark to one another (whether in Esperanto or through telepathy) that this particular long-dead scribe (me) had an astonishing grasp of the human condition and it just goes to show that the more things change the more they stay the same. That’s why my rants emphasize misery, cruelty, greed, and stupidity. They’ll never let you down.

Stickywilly

My dog picks up a lot of Stickywilly during our perambulations, during the Stickywilly season. This weed is also known as Goosegrass, Cleavers, Clivers, Bedstraw, Barweed, Hedgeheriff, Hayriffe, Eriffe, Grip Grass, Hayruff, Catchweed, Scratweed, Mutton Chops, Robin-run-in-the-Grass, Loveman, Tongue Bleed, Goosebill, and Everlasting Friendship. But me, I like to call it Stickywilly. Reportedly it is edible and after you’ve tried it you should get back to me on that. Not much of a rant today I guess. I’m a little distracted. You know what Vladimir Nabokov said? He said, “Unfortunately, Russians today have completely lost their ability to kill tyrants.”

I suggest a dark gritty reboot

If you think about it, it’s pretty incredible that I’ve been writing and posting these things pretty much weekly since January 2007 without once mentioning Mr. Magoo. Well, dammit, that stops as of right now. Because I just learned that in 1997 there was a quickly forgotten live action Mr. Magoo movie starring Leslie Nielsen. A little follow-up reading reveals that it was an unfunny piece of crap. Of course it was. Leslie Nielsen? What were they thinking? There is only one living actor capable of taking on this iconic role and doing it justice. That man is Malcolm McDowell.

Stuff envelopes at home!

It’s like playing Russian Roulette without spinning the cylinder. Like playing catch with a hand grenade. The way a financial bubble works is that each successive buyer has to be stupider than the one before them. This is why I’m not getting involved in this whole crypto thing. Who could I sell to? The only people I know who are dumber than I am have already bought in. I’m going to put my money into something with a proven track record, like Beanie Babies or chinchillas. Or I’ll just sit tight till that Nigerian prince comes through with my dough.

Cosmo Allegretti was Mister Moose

 

Bet you didn’t know that Hugh “Lumpy” Brannum, who played Mister Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo, was at one point the bassist for Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, and that the Waring Blender was named for that selfsame bandleader. Why do I mention this? Well, I read a witty quote from JBS Haldane (“Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.”) and then I googled him and noticed that he looked remarkably like Captain Kangaroo. So, like all great discoveries, there was an element of chance involved.

Science serving humanity

Scientists collaborating at Tufts and Harvard have made an amazing medical advance. I quote: “On adult frogs, which are naturally unable to regenerate limbs, the researchers were able to trigger regrowth of a lost leg using a five-drug cocktail applied in a silicone wearable bioreactor dome that seals in the elixir over the stump for just 24 hours. That brief treatment sets in motion an 18-month period of regrowth that restores a functional leg.” Sure, it’s a limited study, and still in trial stages. But for those of us who enjoy frogs’ legs, this could be very big news indeed.

Spicy Stories

I rang the doorbell, didn’t I? Because he can. I never had five dollars before. I just wanted to tell you your sign fell down. You’re gonna hate Wednesdays. Got singles for a ten? Scream all you want, I’m keeping the umbrella. Paint my house. Go ahead, it’s your cow. Now we’re banned from Ikea. I don’t know, I never looked. Dang, my watch is an hour fast. You don’t come here just for the hunting, do you? Well, son, your mother is spoiled. Twenty dollars, same as in town. It’ll keep the sheet off your legs. I’m telling everybody!

Check the couch cushions

So I was reading about mammals – actually most everything you’ll ever read, from the New York Times to Great Expectations, is about mammals – but I mean I was reading about mammals as critters, when I came across this sentence: “This group of vertebrates ranges in size from tiny shrews or small bats weighing only a few grams to the largest known animals, the whales.” And I see where they’re going here, wonders of nature and all, but do they really have to specify that whales are the largest known animals? Are there possibly larger, unknown ones? Where are they hiding?

Lower your expectations... more.

So, I went to a wedding the weekend before last and one of the folks there tested positive so I hunkered down and then got a drive-through test and felt kinda crappy so I cancelled my dental appointment for this morning but then the test came back negative so I guess I just had some generalized crud and the dentist it turns out hadn’t filled my slot so I’m headed over there in a couple minutes which is why I don’t have time to write a rant, just this lame excuse. Maybe I should re-christen these the “100 word alibis.”