Also, accordions

We’ve had some pretty loony ideas. I mean collectively – not just me and my immediate family. “Let’s visit Thomas Edison’s boyhood home,” is not all that weird. But what about “Why not boil up these tiny lobsters with some hot pepper and wash ‘em down with beer.” “Hey! We could set fire to these leaves and suck the smoke into our lungs!” “I’ll bet this special powder could drive a small chunk of metal through a tube fast enough to punch a hole right through a human!” And, “Walking is so slow. Let’s sit on these enormous powerful excitable animals.”

The generic knockoff? Blue Fentanyl.

There’s this magazine in my house that features many pictures of extremely thin young women wearing shoes that if the Spanish Inquisition was to threaten me with them I would without hesitation deny my God. Presumably, the reader is encouraged to strap these implements onto her own feet. Voluntarily. Meanwhile, the folks at Yves Saint Laurent are advertising a perfume called Black Opium. I see what they’re going for. Edgy. Exotic. Illicit. But let’s just say no. They need a new brand name that’s drug free but still as glamourous, forbidden, and darkly seductive as substance abuse. Maybe “Bowel Cancer.”

We name names

Some people have names that seem to predetermine their careers. Like, once there was a boy named Wally Cox, and he wanted to be an actor. So he did that, but first he had to change his name to Bud Cort because there was already an actor named Wally Cox. See, two actors can’t be in the union with the same stage name. (Musicians have no such rule, so we can have multiples of Bill Evans.) Then there’s Heinrich Hertz. I suppose if your family name means “cycles per second,” you inevitably grow up to do some kind of science.

And mimosas?

Stephen Jay Gould said interbreeding a chimpanzee with a human being would be “the most potentially interesting and ethically unacceptable experiment I can imagine.” I believe this shows a lack of imagination. What about creating a hideous chimera that was simultaneously a breath mint and a candy mint? Or an unnatural garment that combined the functions of shirt and jacket? Suppose a twisted genius were to bring together the attributes of a fork and a spoon in a single utensil? What if it occurred to some rogue restaurateur to combine breakfast with lunch? What if it included a jazz trio?

I'm not old. I'm prewashed.

It was awful chilly (for here) so I put on my leather jacket when I went to the coffeehouse. And one of the young folkies said, “Hey, is that vintage?” I looked at it and said, “Well, it is now.” It’s weird when stuff you got new is a collector’s item. The thing is, once you’re done growing everything fits forever and some things take forever to wear out. It depends on how much use they get. Like, my dress shoes and work boots will probably last the rest of my life. I‘m pretty rough on the leisure wear, though.

Poetic license

You need a license to be a plumber or electrician or HVAC technician. (See? Poetic.) You also need a license to cut people’s hair or paint their nails. You need a license to sell beer or to go fishing. You need a license to help somebody get born and another to embalm them when they die. Dentist, detective, dietician? Licensed. From head to toe, optometrist to podiatrist, you need a license. Locksmiths, massage therapists, hair braiders – hair braiders! – need licenses. Mimes and buskers, too. And, of course, you need a license to drive a motor vehicle. Those things are dangerous.

Conditional clause

Some people say there’s no such thing as a stupid question. I would like to ask them why they say that. I would like to ask over and over, because any question gets stupid if you ask it enough times. Like shouldn’t beheaded mean the exact opposite? What does Chanel No. 4 smell like? Why isn’t anything old-fangled? Is Shigella really the legit name of a bacterium or is that just the Yiddish word for it? That’s about it. Oh. Yeah. One more thing. Does anybody actually think this is what the founding fathers meant by a well regulated militia?