Not every idea makes the cut

Sometimes the universe displays a marvelous synchronicity and other times it does not. Like, yesterday there was big cockroach in the kitchen (Which I failed to kill and now it’s lurking somewhere in there) and my thoughts naturally turned to E. G. Marshall, who was fatally attacked by roaches in that one movie. So I did my due diligence and found that his actual name was Everett Eugene Grunz, which made me think of Judy Garland who was Frances Ethel Gumm, and of course there was Samuel Gompers who read aloud to his fellow cigar makers... so that went nowhere.

99% will get this wrong!

Eat the foods you love! Plumbers hate this one simple trick! Here’s the secret investment strategy Wall Street doesn’t want you to know! Throw away your toothbrush and do this instead! Say goodbye forever to electric bills while you sleep! Try this just once and you’ll never go back to Woolworth’s! This special gravy washes away liver toxins! Do this and watch your wrinkles! Raise chinchillas and feed them to your emus! Tap into the exploding market for crumpled cellophane! Turn your urine into gasoline! Rent the inside of your head to eyeless amphibians! Why would I lie to you?

Ooo. Sick Burn.

First off, I want to say that I recognize the difference between personal property and private property. Like, my toothbrush is mine but to say that some acres of the surface of the world are mine is maybe crazy. Culturally accepted, legally documented, but fundamentally crazy. King Canute illustrates this in an enduring and endearing apocryphal anecdote. Anyway, we can go for a stroll above the house and see evidence that people have been having unauthorized fun in our woods. Vienna sausage tins, Little Debbie wrappers, stuff like that. Also Coors Light cans. So at least they’re not drinking beer.

Our Motto: No Topic Too Trivial

Whereas British speakers say “in hospital,” Americans are more likely to say “in the hospital.”  What I’d like to point out is that they’re both kinda goofy usages. First the Brits: Why not use an article there? You wouldn’t say “I ate a delicious meal in restaurant.” (From what I’ve heard of English food, you might never need to say this.) Fellow Americans, don’t be smug, for neither would you say “I ate a delicious meal in the restaurant.” The proper usage, I think, would be “in a hospital” or if you tend to drop your aitches, “in an ‘ospital.”

Tread Softly

Here’s an anecdote defining either grace under pressure or confusion between causation and correlation: The artist Neon Park went to the doctor because his hands felt numb and was told he had Lou Gehrig’s disease. He said, “I never even played baseball.” Allen Park, on the other hand (and this is unrelated) is a suburb of Detroit and home to the Uniroyal Giant Tire, “the largest non-production tire scale model ever built, and one of the world's largest roadside attractions.” You can’t actually visit it, but it’s clearly visible from Interstate 94, from whence travelers are afforded a passing glance.

tenpo suno pona

See, I don’t pay attention and that’s why I’m just getting around to learning about Toki Pona. That’s a new language invented in 2001 by a Canadian linguist named Sonja Land. At first there were 120 words but in the intervening 22 years that has swollen to 137, which is still pretty manageable as long as they don’t allow it to become the insidious harbinger of a looming tsunami of lexical bloat. And there you see why a language of 137 words is obviously not for me. I’d be repeating myself before I’d even finished my first cup of coffee.

NYU surgeons say what?

When one reads a headline that says “Pig kidney transplant in brain-dead man marks advance, NYU surgeons say,” one must ask oneself, “Advance over what?” Call me overcautious; I’m not at all sure a world that includes pig kidney transplant in brain-dead man is in any sense an advance over one that does not include pig kidney transplant in brain-dead man. I’m sure I speak not only for myself but for a sizable contingent of my fellow citizens when I say that in contemplating the advances we hope for, pig kidney transplant in brain-dead man is not top of mind.

Librorum Prohibitorum

I just read a book about books, and one thing I found out is that in the 16^th century, when the Vatican banned certain passages in let’s say a text by Copernicus, some people would draw a line through those parts lightly so that they could still be easily read. That way, you could see what it was that was being forbidden. So maybe libraries should add stickers that identify a book as one somebody wants removed, explaining who they are and their reasons. That seems fair. That’s the difference between a war of ideas and a war on ideas.

Chalk one up for justice

Everybody likes art, I guess, but the world of Fine Art is alien territory for many of us. Inexplicable. For instance, Irv Novick draws a comic book story for whatever the measly page rate was in the ‘50s and then Roy Lichtenstein blows it up big and he’s the celebrated Pop Artist. That’s like taking credit for playing somebody else’s record back but much louder, which I guess is the art of the DJ, also inexplicable to me. I like scenes rendered directly from life. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the work of a few of America’s most talented courtroom sketch artists.

inexplicable

When the public-relations machine kicks into high gear, every news outlet in the world decides independently that all you need is more breathless coverage of this one and only important thing. Like this summer, you don’t hear about anything but GPM J1839–10. That’s this deep space object that emits bursts of radio energy like a pulsar but at much longer intervals which makes it unique and inexplicable. According to John Timmer, a science writer with a way with words, “The list of known objects that can produce this sort of behavior is short and consists of precisely zero items.”

My name is Bill, let’s start a band!

Seeking musicians named William to form a band called the Willams which will play exclusively from the songbooks of Larry Williams, Hank Williams, Andy Williams, Pharrell Williams, Vanessa Williams, Don Williams, Zach Williams, Deniece Williams, as well as that one song from the first Jesus And Mary Chain album. Must have pro equipment, reliable transportation, and a secluded & secure rehearsal space/crash pad where I can stay. I’ll let you know where you can pick me up, as I will need a lift. Also, I don’t eat pork or Brussels Sprouts. (Except Canadian Bacon on Hawaiian Pizza) (LOL) (hint hint)

white and straight and regular

Is it just me or do Steven Tyler and Janet Jackson look more and more alike every year? Well, beauty standards are normative; they’re called “standards.” Nobody goes to a cosmetic surgeon to look more like Abe Vigoda. That’s why people in the pictures have teeth so white and straight and regular that it looks like they’re all sharing the same set of dentures. I have no problem with anybody modifying themselves in any way they choose but you maybe want to rein it in a bit when your statue at Madame Tussaud’s starts looking more realistic than you do.

Regimbartia attenuata

Some weeks I have a hard time finding personally meaningful topics for these tiny essays which although they are short I like to think they are pithy, sort of like the concentrated foods the Mercury astronauts took with them during the earliest days of human space flight. Not today, because I just read about a species of water beetle that when a frog eats it, it simply “traverses the amphibian’s throat, swims through the stomach, slides along the intestines and climbs out the frog’s butt, alive and well.” And that’s pretty much how I feel every day of my life.

A simile is like a metaphor...

Life is kind of like the Asian Super Buffet when you get back to your table and realize that you’ve put more on your plate than you can ever finish. Life is sometimes like calculus where you’re pretty sure you missed an important prerequisite that would have prepared you better for the material being presented. Life can feel sort of like dental surgery where your best course of action is to convince yourself you’re not there. And life can be a lot like miniature golf in that there are always going to be people who insist on taking it seriously.

Big News

Fitzgerald, Georgia, has 9,006 people, 3,346 households, 1,932 families, and one unfinished 62-foot topiary chicken. According to the newspaper, back in 2019 the mayor had a vision for his city’s future that included a big chicken, and at first the people were all excited but then they kind of lost heart, I guess, and then a new mayor said, “This thing just was not being finished, and it just became this albatross,” which no it didn’t, it’s still a chicken. Then he said, “I think we’re done with oversized animals,” which may be the saddest sentence in the English language.

sorry not sorry

I made up a joke. It’s a whole lot of ladder for a pretty short slide, but bear with me. See, breast implants are problematic because putting foreign materials inside your body is a weird thing to do. So scientists have worked out a procedure that takes a tiny sample of your own breast tissue and clones it and grows it into an implant that once installed will settle right in without concerns about the body rejecting it because it’s the actual same stuff. And this requires highly specialized vessels in which to grow the implants: tanks for the mammaries.

a bitter pill to swallow

I had an extremely serious psychosomatic disorder and so was prescribed the most powerful placebo they make. It made me feel like I felt better. The problem was that I developed a psychological dependency on it and when my supply ran out I didn’t want go through what I imagined withdrawal might be like. That’s what led me to shady clandestine transactions with some pretty sketchy people. A guy sold me what he swore was the real stuff, but I think it was stepped on. The question is, with what? I don’t really care; I paid him with Monopoly money.

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night

Unions exist to see to it that workers get their fair share of the value of their labor. But what happens when the value of that labor falls to near zero? The jukebox, the synthesizer, disco, karaoke, all contributed to destroying the market for the blue-collar musician. Go to wedding anymore and instead of a band you’ll see one jamoke with a laptop. Now the TV writers are worried that AI will take their jobs, and I don’t blame them. When it comes to stamping out endless streams of the same old crap the machine is always going to win.

The Slipstick of Redemption

It’s a low point when you realize your life is driven more by aversion than hankering. I don’t want to watch my television or get on an airplane. I don’t want to eat at McDonald’s or break in a new pair of dress shoes. It feels like my bucket list is all negatives. That’s no way to live. But here’s the thing: humans could be defined as the monkeys that seek. There are always unscaled peaks, unsailed seas. Metaphorically, of course. I prefer to avoid literal climbing or sailing. I would, however, like to learn to use a slide rule.

This

If you are reading this, you can be sure that for some reason or another I haven’t the slightest idea what to write about and so have opened the sealed envelope containing the Emergency Desperation Rant which I had hoped never to use. It means that even such compelling topics as Very Big Pencils, The Lives of the Philosophers, or Unpleasant Aspects of Aging (Cranky Geezer Monologues) have failed to stimulate any fruitful mentation. It means that this meaningless dollop of verbiage is all you’re gonna get. And it means I now have to prepare a new Emergency Desperation Rant.

this scrunching behavior

Some thrifty biologists enjoy working with planaria, a genus of flatworms, because you can chop them up and each piece grows into a whole new flatworm which means you only ever have to buy one. Some experiments have involved grinding them up and feeding them to their peers to see if memories could be transferred in this way. Which – Eeeww – but also this later reassessment: “Subsequent explanations of this scrunching behavior associated with cannibalism of trained planarian worms were that the untrained flatworms were only following tracks left on the dirty glassware rather than absorbing the memory of their fodder.”

In which the author proposes a droll jape

Here’s a thing I’m definitely going to do: Go into a local tavern on a Tuesday and order some tacos and eat them and leave. Then the next day I’ll go back and order some tacos and when they say, “We only have tacos on Tuesdays,” I’ll say, “Oh, okay, I’ll come back yesterday.” Now if the same person doesn’t wait on me the zany effect of my little jest will be somewhat muted, and also probably somebody’s already done this, or maybe they have tacos on Wednesdays. So there are downsides. However, I will get to eat some tacos.

Lives of the Philosophers, Pt. 10

Leszek Kołakowski lived from 1927 until 2009, so in a sense he is the least dead of any of the philosophers we have heretofore highlighted. This guy is brilliant; I’m watching as he apparently without effort dispenses with the life’s work of one after another of the giants of Western thought. Under his close scrutiny the entire endeavor seems to fragment into a tangle of mutually exclusive absurdities. So, thanks. I had thought that at least I could claim to know nothing, but now I’m not so sure. Life is pretty okay if you don’t think about it too much.

Unforgettable. That’s what you are.

Don’t you hate it when a non-profit solicits you in the mail and they give you some crap gift right up front in an attempt to guilt-trip you into making a donation? (Dear Doctors Without Borders: I send you money to provide medical care to needy people and you spend it on these low-quality tote bags. Stop doing that.) The Alzheimer’s Association just did that to me. They sent a bunch of those return address stickers because we all send so many letters these days. But that’s not the best part. They also enclosed (wait for it…) a memo pad.

Again with the shame

Last week I apologized for neglecting to inform my readers of an important national holiday and surmised that perhaps as a part of the celebrations there would be posed scenes with static costumed performers reproducing important events from our shared history. This is called “tableau vivant” in the French language and I notice now that I used an incorrect plural. It should be “tableaux vivants.” I sincerely hope that you can forgive me for any distress my error has caused. Also, it should be noted that both final consonants are silent and the plural is pronounced exactly like the singular.

U.S. Patent 19,783

I’m sorry. I feel that I’ve let you down. National Pencil Day was last Thursday and I’m only telling you now, when it’s too late to join any of the pencil-themed festivities which doubtless proliferated all around this great nation of ours. I envision crowds of school children lifting their shining faces to a cloudless blue sky, each waving a bright yellow Dixon Ticonderoga in time with the splendid brass band playing a rousing march. Possibly the presentation of tableau vivants depicting such milestones as Hymen Lipman’s 1858 patent of the attached eraser. I wouldn’t know. I missed it too.

to be clear

There once was a time when people who wanted to denigrate Chicago as a gray depressing rustbelt shithole would characterize it as “two Clevelands,” which I’m here to say is no longer true. Based on the latest census figures, Chicago today is closer to seven Clevelands.  I refer to Cleveland, Ohio, my home town; our nation is rich in Clevelands. North Carolina has two. Not to be outdone, Wisconsin boasts five places called Cleveland, with an aggregate population of 4,727, thereby outnumbering Cleveland, Georgia, home to 3,511 people, which is, to be clear, larger than any single Cleveland, Wisconsin, alone.

non trivial

Here’s a rule of thumb: Try to worry only about unimportant things like the designated hitter rule or pre-torn jeans or pre-made pancakes in the freezer section (seriously? have we come to this?) or why is this package of X-acto blades impossible to open without an X-acto blade? The really important issues are those where you have to just bear down and do your best, but not worry. You ought to divert your entire capacity for worry into the most trivial of concerns. I think it’s best to sweat the small stuff, because the big stuff will break your heart.

it's not a sonata

I guess the easiest way to start writing anything is to begin without a plan. That eliminates a lot of that time-consuming thinking and lets you get right to the important task, which is putting down one word after the other. Of course, about halfway through you have to start asking yourself, “How am I going to finish this?” And that’s where a rookie can find themselves blocked or stumped or flummoxed. Here’s a pro tip for the lazy: Symmetry is your go-to form for bringing any sort of creative work to a close. That’s the easiest way, I guess.

He also discovered the thoracic canal.

Although he died on August 27th, 1574, we still remember Bartolomeo Eustachi because he described these little tubes we have in our heads that connect our throats with our ears. “Eustachian” is not a descriptive adjective, and though gone almost 450 years Bartolomeo’s name is spoken by pediatricians every time a kid gets an earache. It makes one wonder about one’s own legacy. Today all the tubes have names so I think after I’m gone if I’m remembered at all I’d like for people to be able to say, “Wow, just like that, huh? He never knew what hit him.”

A brush with greatness

While we’re on the topic of Anthony Burgess I would be negligent were I not to bring up the fact that while his writing was very very good his combover was very very bad. Very very very bad. Spectacularly bad. Simply terrible. He must have known it; to arrange one’s hair in such a manner requires the use of a mirror. Why did he do it? Maybe by the time he noticed he felt it was too late to go back. Maybe he did it to torment us. Or maybe he had some kind of bet going with Zero Mostel.

In which I blame my parents

“Please, Please, Please” is a 1956 single by James Brown and the Famous Flames. It’s a tremendous record. I just listened to it three times in a row and, seriously, James Brown is so good it’s ridiculous. Nafloyd Scott plays guitar. Nashpendle Knox plays saxophone. Unlike the people who named me “Dave,” the parents of these two musicians were obviously committed to making this a more beautiful and interesting world in which to live. I’m not making fun here; I mean it. If I had been blessed with a name like Nashpendle, I might have done something with my life.

Don't read this

Would you buy an item that included instructions that strongly advised against putting it to the only use for which you might be moved to acquire it? Like if potato chip bags came with a warning that said, “Do not put this product in your mouth and chew it up and swallow it.” If there was a sticker on your dashboard that said, “Under no circumstance is this vehicle to be used for transportation.” Or socks had a tag that read, “For God’s sake, don’t even think about putting these things on your feet!” So what’s the deal with Q-Tips?

Minigolf with pipefitters

For some reason, they tend to wrap up interviews with writers with a question about which three writers, living or dead, you would invite for dinner. First off, I think live ones. Okay, okay. You know what would be awful? Octavia Butler, Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson. Excruciating. Anthony Burgess, Anne Tyler, Charles Portis? That might be congenial, but really you’d want to invite incompetent writers because the best ones have put everything they have to say down on paper. It’s actually a profoundly silly question; why not ask for the names of three dentists with whom you’d like to bowl?

Willpower

It’s been a weird three years. I’ll bet I’m not the only one who kind of let themself go. It doesn’t take long to get used to interfacing with the outside world through electronic devices, lounging around in baggy sweats, grazing on comforting snacks. There are consequences. Looking down over my torso, I see that I’m sort of bulging over my belt around my entire circumference. It’s time for some self-discipline.  “Buddy,” I sez to myself, “turn off the screen, get up out of that chair, and get your butt down to the Salvation Army to buy some larger pants.”

If I was a bicycle

If I was a bicycle, I think I would be happiest when somebody’s butt was on my saddle, when I could feel their hands on my grips, when my pedals were being firmly pushed as I flew weightless over smooth pavement. Also, even though it might be a bit uncomfortable, I believe I could learn to enjoy having my tires pumped up and thumbed; less pleasant would be having my bearings packed. I would want to be rolling always for the sense of stability and balance rolling engenders. That’s how I think I would feel if I was a bicycle.

On the other hand

Art directors and designers sometimes flop an image to make a more pleasing layout. Most times, if it’s a landscape or still-life, there’s no problem. Sometimes, like if there’s distant signage that looks all Cyrillic or some guy in a stock photo has his pocket square on the wrong side, it’s slightly jarring. But what do I care. But look here – you can’t do that to musicians if the instrument is in the picture. It’s just wrong. Unless you’re designing materials for a Jimi Hendrix tribute where you might be specifically asked to do so. Then it would be okay.

Continuing

on the topic of H. G. Wells-style time machines probably the real flaw in imagining them is that they’re based on a Newtonian concept of the nature of time and space which don’t get me wrong works just fine for our normal quotidian needs but while describing pretty comprehensively our shared perceived reality does not do diddly when it comes to the occult which is not to say supernatural truths beyond our human ken. Look here. Newborn babies are visitors from the future who have forgotten everything. That’s why they stare at you curiously for a moment before recognizing you.

vast cool and unsympathetic

The Invisible Man and The Time Machine are cool stories but they don’t hold up to serious scrutiny. Like, if you were truly invisible your retinas would be transparent so you’d be blind, anyway blind people would find you easily because to them everybody’s invisible. I’ve already shot down the whole idea of time machines by pointing out that if we were ever going to have them we’d have always had them. Still, it would be cool to buy up a bunch of fidget spinners at yard sales and go back to 2017 to sell them for a tidy profit.