The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has obtained secret minutes of the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) meeting from a few years back when they decided to award the 2008 Olympic Games to China's capital city of Beijing. This august body is internationally known as the arbiters of clean gamesmanship, guardians of the Olympic spirit of fair play and an organization that awards Olympic hosting duties to the city that will best uphold these lofty ideals, at least within their own headquarters. Elsewhere, they enjoy a less than savory reputation as a politically driven propaganda machine and a money hungry organization of elites hiding behind the mantle of promoting sporting purity while pursuing their real agenda of separating nations and individuals from as much of their hard earned as they possibly can. So far, so good.
When Beijing was selected the chairman of the IOC called the meeting to order with the following words: "Esteemed colleagues: We are here to cast our final votes on the finalist cities for the 2008 Summer Olympics. We will consider all our usual criteria; accessibility to sports fans, Olympic-worthy venues and a strong dedication to the highest ideals of fair competition... Mr. Recording Secretary, fill in the rest with the usual high-minded horse shit for the record. You know the drill. Now gentlemen, let's get down to business. Any objections to Beijing?"
A delegate: "Well sir, are you aware of their government's record of human rights abuses, their heinous treatment of Tibet, their record of ignoring international copyright laws, their censorship of the the press, their unbelievably flagrant pollution of their own nation and their immediate neighbors, the political prisoners, the child labor..."
Chairman: "Who's the new guy? And is he aware of the thickness of the envelopes China handed each one of us? I don't recall anyone turning those down! And is our novice colleague aware of the billions more in store for each of our firms when it comes to constructing all the facilities they'll need? We don't want to get burned again like when we awarded the games to some cities that already had a shitload of sports complexes, hotels, mass transit, plentiful housing for Olympic villages, modern media centers and stadiums. It was all we could do to clear a couple of million apiece in kickbacks..."
The new guy: "Mr. Chairman, may I remind you of..."
Chairman: "Whatever it is, keep it to yourself, sir. Everyone here knows that China's economy is growing faster that Larry King's prostate. And we all know that nobody gets to vote on how all that dough is spent. We're talking zero accountability here, gentlemen. We're talking no criticism from the media, we're talking the score of our lifetimes!"
The new guy again: "But Mr. Chairman, it is well known how unsuited Beijing is the Olympics. I have a study before me detailing their lack of sports facilities, mass transit, hotels...."
Chairman: "Bingo! Did you think the construction company you work for got you appointed to the IOC committee to make sure the gymnasts have enough talcum powder? They ponied up some serious dough to the rest of us for the right to a piece of this humongous pie. This is the big leagues, young man! Leave the preaching and the hand wringing to the U.N. and get with the program here."
The new guy: "The program, sir? I was under the impression that our mission here was to ensure that the Olympic Games would be awarded to the most deserving candidate city, the one that will best personify the ideals of fairness, openness and international brotherhood!"
Chairman: "One of you guys want to wise up this sob sister before I puke all over the podium?"
A veteran IOC member: "Listen up, Earnest! You wok for the largest road building firm on the planet. Have you seen the pathetic roads in China lately? You guys play your cards right, you're paving China for the next decade, and your own driveway with gold! I represent a huge international mass transit corporation. What I see is beyond these games is 1.3 billion potential commuters. See that guy over there? His company builds gigantic huge swimming pools and water parks all over the world. Who the hell did you think dreamed up Synchronized Swimming, dolphins? Otters? The gentleman to his left owns a company that erects stadiums and race tracks. On his right is the CEO of Mega Hotels, and next to him is the a partner of Intertel, the premier builder of state-of-the-art media and communications facilities. You getting the polaroid here, Pollyanna?"
The new guy: "Yes, sir, yes I think that I am! The IOC is merely a sham to siphon off billions of dollars from the honest citizens of the host nations, not caring a bit about the athletes or the fans or the ideals of a level playing field and..."
The veteran member: "Your point being...?"
The new guy: "Mr. Chairman, Misssss-terrrrrr Chairman! Allow me to go on record to state my vehement objections to this sham and mockery..."
The veteran member: "Before you sprain your conscience, Gomer, there's one more colleague I'd like to point out. See the fellow over there, the one with the eye patch and the scars? That's Lance Boyle, head of Rabid Deployment, the largest private mercenary corporation on the planet. His boys have decided the outcome of half the small foreign wars you don't hear much about for the past 30 years. Guess who's company is handling security at Beijing?"
Chairman: "You were saying, sir....?
The new guy: :" Never mind, Mr. Chairman, and please excuse my outburst, sir"
Chairman: "Like it never happened, son. So, we're all agreed, then? Beijing it is for the summer of 2008! Let the record reflect a unanimous vote. The contracts are ready for signatures, men, the offshore shore accounts await the wire transfers. Let the games begin!
July 30, 2008
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 122
In loving memory of Jeanne Mulligan:
The best thing about memories is that we can mentally edit them to eliminate a lot of unpleasantness. The truth is that nobody's "Good Old Days" were a bed of roses, neither simple nor free of stressful and dangerous ordeals. It is the fact that we have survived to tell the tales and learned bitter lessons without becoming bitter that makes the old days so sweet. Coming through life's gauntlet in one piece is what makes us strong, and retaining our decency and humanity in spite of all the pain and loss that life hands us makes us walking miracles, every one. Keep the memories you cherish, and recall them any way you like, you have earned that right and it speaks well of you that you do not dwell on past suffering. In a world of darkness and light, seeking the light is always the better deal, hands down, and a fine legacy.
The best thing about memories is that we can mentally edit them to eliminate a lot of unpleasantness. The truth is that nobody's "Good Old Days" were a bed of roses, neither simple nor free of stressful and dangerous ordeals. It is the fact that we have survived to tell the tales and learned bitter lessons without becoming bitter that makes the old days so sweet. Coming through life's gauntlet in one piece is what makes us strong, and retaining our decency and humanity in spite of all the pain and loss that life hands us makes us walking miracles, every one. Keep the memories you cherish, and recall them any way you like, you have earned that right and it speaks well of you that you do not dwell on past suffering. In a world of darkness and light, seeking the light is always the better deal, hands down, and a fine legacy.
HOTELS IN SPACE AND JET PACKS. NOW WE'RE TALKING!
For those of us wondering where our Great Scientific Future went, there's good news on the horizon. In the space of two days it has been announced that there will soon be sightseeing tours of space and that within a year a practical jet pack will be introduced. Richard Branson, of Virgin Airlines and hot-air balloon fame, has unveiled the first jet of his two-vehicle space tourist bus, telling the world that within 20 years there will also be a Space Hotel orbiting the planet and offering side trips to the moon. Then John Schwartz of New Zealand, of no fame at all until now, unveils his personal jet pack and the news that it will be on the market within the year. Now we're cooking!
Naturally in this ying and yang world, good news is always accompanied by bad news. The bad news is that only the wealthy can afford to participate in this Brave New World of Tomorrow. One feels like an isolated tribesman in some impenetrable rain forest watching jet planes fly overhead, wondering why he's still stuck in a loin cloth with a blow gun and a bow and arrow, squatting in his straw hut for months on end during the rainy season eating dried iguana meat. But at least it's a start.
For those of us weaned on watching men walk on the moon, futuristic World's Fair exhibits and optimistic predictions of a high tech, galaxy-striding society of mankind going where no one has gone before, well, the present has been decidedly pedestrian, cell phones and world wide webs notwithstanding. We see a world choking on the fumes of fossil fuels and fighting over the last few drops, making constant war on one another and plagued with mass starvation. The last chapter of our history books depicting a Jetsons type existence for humanity never did come to pass. For some reason our exciting space exploration program has devolved into a cargo business delivering satellites to orbit the earth and beam reality shows into our living rooms. At least they did put a giant telescope out there to send us tantalizing pictures of what might have been.
So now we're not only disappointed, but plagued with moronic TV shows and teased with fantastic photographs of the Final Frontier we'll never see. What happened to the plans of creating giant space stations to use as launching pads, gravity-free springboards to the Universe? What about mining asteroids for treasures and combing the galaxy for adventure and colonization? And back here on Mother Earth, where's our flying cars, our moving sidewalks, sky high playgrounds, the giant glass-enclosed super farms to feed the world? Here we are still washing our own smelly internal combustion cars, with no robots in sight to do our chores and help the kids with their math homework!
But there's still a glimmer of hope. When automobiles and air travel were first introduced, only the wealthy could afford these luxuries. What's needed now is a new Henry Ford, a mass-production genius to build affordable gadgets so the average person can get in on the Space Age action. Who needs another damned iPod? Nobody but teenagers can figure them out anyway. Give us some clean energy sources, some way to get around other than 5 miles per hour traffic jams, a couple of robots to order around or even a kitchen that cleans its own damn self. Something, anything, Throw us a futuristic bone here!
Maybe to a lot of people, Richard Branson and John Schwartz are eccentric lunatics wasting their time and money, but it's their time and money to do with as they see fit. A lot of people thought the Wright brothers were nuts too, and who knows? Maybe they were a couple of guys you'd cross the street to avoid. But does anybody reading this know anybody who has never flown, something that was considered impossible when some people who are still alive were born. And who was nuttier than Benjamin Franklin standing in the rain with his kite trying to attract lightning? Or Neil Armstrong trusting the scientists who sent him there to actually set foot on the moon? Let the daring lunatics get busy and deliver the future.
Naturally in this ying and yang world, good news is always accompanied by bad news. The bad news is that only the wealthy can afford to participate in this Brave New World of Tomorrow. One feels like an isolated tribesman in some impenetrable rain forest watching jet planes fly overhead, wondering why he's still stuck in a loin cloth with a blow gun and a bow and arrow, squatting in his straw hut for months on end during the rainy season eating dried iguana meat. But at least it's a start.
For those of us weaned on watching men walk on the moon, futuristic World's Fair exhibits and optimistic predictions of a high tech, galaxy-striding society of mankind going where no one has gone before, well, the present has been decidedly pedestrian, cell phones and world wide webs notwithstanding. We see a world choking on the fumes of fossil fuels and fighting over the last few drops, making constant war on one another and plagued with mass starvation. The last chapter of our history books depicting a Jetsons type existence for humanity never did come to pass. For some reason our exciting space exploration program has devolved into a cargo business delivering satellites to orbit the earth and beam reality shows into our living rooms. At least they did put a giant telescope out there to send us tantalizing pictures of what might have been.
So now we're not only disappointed, but plagued with moronic TV shows and teased with fantastic photographs of the Final Frontier we'll never see. What happened to the plans of creating giant space stations to use as launching pads, gravity-free springboards to the Universe? What about mining asteroids for treasures and combing the galaxy for adventure and colonization? And back here on Mother Earth, where's our flying cars, our moving sidewalks, sky high playgrounds, the giant glass-enclosed super farms to feed the world? Here we are still washing our own smelly internal combustion cars, with no robots in sight to do our chores and help the kids with their math homework!
But there's still a glimmer of hope. When automobiles and air travel were first introduced, only the wealthy could afford these luxuries. What's needed now is a new Henry Ford, a mass-production genius to build affordable gadgets so the average person can get in on the Space Age action. Who needs another damned iPod? Nobody but teenagers can figure them out anyway. Give us some clean energy sources, some way to get around other than 5 miles per hour traffic jams, a couple of robots to order around or even a kitchen that cleans its own damn self. Something, anything, Throw us a futuristic bone here!
Maybe to a lot of people, Richard Branson and John Schwartz are eccentric lunatics wasting their time and money, but it's their time and money to do with as they see fit. A lot of people thought the Wright brothers were nuts too, and who knows? Maybe they were a couple of guys you'd cross the street to avoid. But does anybody reading this know anybody who has never flown, something that was considered impossible when some people who are still alive were born. And who was nuttier than Benjamin Franklin standing in the rain with his kite trying to attract lightning? Or Neil Armstrong trusting the scientists who sent him there to actually set foot on the moon? Let the daring lunatics get busy and deliver the future.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 121
Real men don't give a damn about somebody else's sexual orientation or ethnic makeup. We are what nature made us. It's those creeps with freckles who are shredding the fabric of decent society. The Freckled insist on flaunting their lifestyle in front of our children and pushing their own Freckled Agenda on the rest of us. The mind recoils.
RIDDLES
How did they grow the second seedless watermelon?
Exactly how many days did it take to build Rome?
You would think that the Indians who sold Manhattan to the Dutch for twenty four dollars would have figured something was fishy with the deal. Dollars weren't even invented for another 150 years or so. Shouldn't they have demanded guilders? Or were they referring to daalders? One and a half guilders was equal to a daalder. If that's the case, well, the Dutch still got themselves one hell of a bargain.
If global warming happens, will geese still fly south in October out of habit?
In this sensitive age of political correctness, are dwarf stars called little stars by regular sized ones?
What is the difference between an FBI Agent and an FBI Special Agent? Have they been recruiting the mentally challenged and giving them shiny badges? That's a commendable gesture, but one hopes they don't give these Special Agents real guns too. Or any cases that are really hard to solve. That would just be cruel.
Do witch doctors accept health insurance? And do they have to carry malpractice insurance when they hang out their shingle? You know, just in case the usually reliable buffalo-dung-mixed-with-snake-venom-and monkey-urine poultice doesn't cure beriberi in one of their patients and they get sued.
Unexplained in the Bible is just how the Israelites managed to take forty years to travel around 200 miles. Didn't they think to drop bread crumbs or something so that when they passed the same sand dune for the eighty-seventh time they'd know they were going in circles again? Crawling backwards on your belly you could manage 200 miles in a couple of months, tops. And these are the people upon which 3 major religions are founded?
Do dancing bears know they're dancing?
Similarly, when people watch lions and tigers in the circus, are most of them disappointed if the night they attend isn't the one when the big cats decide they've had enough of this crap and tear the lion tamer to shreds? Is there any other reason to watch these sad shows except for the hope of some good old fashioned vigilante justice?
Do judges carry their little gavels around with them outside the courtroom? Seems like a good way to get the waiter's attention in a restaurant.
Does new Hampshire have their license plates made by prisoners like some states? If so, that "Live Free Or Die" motto has to be pretty irritating.
Are dairy cows smarter than cows raised for beef? It would seem so, given their respective fates.
Do devil worshippers look forward to their Hellish rewards after death? Small wonder their missionary efforts are pretty ineffective.
Is there a more frustrating craft than Master Coffin Maker? All your best work gets buried in dirt a couple of days after it's sold, then slowly rots away.
If monkeys and birds know in advance when earth quakes and tsunamis will strike, why don't the scientists replace their sensitive seismic instruments with a few monkeys and sound the alarm when the monkeys beat it out of there in a hurry.
Exactly how many days did it take to build Rome?
You would think that the Indians who sold Manhattan to the Dutch for twenty four dollars would have figured something was fishy with the deal. Dollars weren't even invented for another 150 years or so. Shouldn't they have demanded guilders? Or were they referring to daalders? One and a half guilders was equal to a daalder. If that's the case, well, the Dutch still got themselves one hell of a bargain.
If global warming happens, will geese still fly south in October out of habit?
In this sensitive age of political correctness, are dwarf stars called little stars by regular sized ones?
What is the difference between an FBI Agent and an FBI Special Agent? Have they been recruiting the mentally challenged and giving them shiny badges? That's a commendable gesture, but one hopes they don't give these Special Agents real guns too. Or any cases that are really hard to solve. That would just be cruel.
Do witch doctors accept health insurance? And do they have to carry malpractice insurance when they hang out their shingle? You know, just in case the usually reliable buffalo-dung-mixed-with-snake-venom-and monkey-urine poultice doesn't cure beriberi in one of their patients and they get sued.
Unexplained in the Bible is just how the Israelites managed to take forty years to travel around 200 miles. Didn't they think to drop bread crumbs or something so that when they passed the same sand dune for the eighty-seventh time they'd know they were going in circles again? Crawling backwards on your belly you could manage 200 miles in a couple of months, tops. And these are the people upon which 3 major religions are founded?
Do dancing bears know they're dancing?
Similarly, when people watch lions and tigers in the circus, are most of them disappointed if the night they attend isn't the one when the big cats decide they've had enough of this crap and tear the lion tamer to shreds? Is there any other reason to watch these sad shows except for the hope of some good old fashioned vigilante justice?
Do judges carry their little gavels around with them outside the courtroom? Seems like a good way to get the waiter's attention in a restaurant.
Does new Hampshire have their license plates made by prisoners like some states? If so, that "Live Free Or Die" motto has to be pretty irritating.
Are dairy cows smarter than cows raised for beef? It would seem so, given their respective fates.
Do devil worshippers look forward to their Hellish rewards after death? Small wonder their missionary efforts are pretty ineffective.
Is there a more frustrating craft than Master Coffin Maker? All your best work gets buried in dirt a couple of days after it's sold, then slowly rots away.
If monkeys and birds know in advance when earth quakes and tsunamis will strike, why don't the scientists replace their sensitive seismic instruments with a few monkeys and sound the alarm when the monkeys beat it out of there in a hurry.
July 28, 2008
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 120
Many of us lament how our lives turned out. Well, the fact is that your life hasn't turned out yet if you're still around to lament your fate. You never know what tomorrow will bring, or what you might bring to tomorrow. All things are possible within and without us so don't put any periods on the sentence or write any amens just yet. See you tomorrow.
RICH OLD WHITE GUYS JUDGE US, FIND US WANTING
So Phil Gramm gets fired by John McCain for calling the American people "a bunch of whiners." This former Congressman and United States Senator from Texas who is now cashing in big time as vice-chairman of UBS Investment Bank somehow caught the ear of the John McCain presidential campaign. They recruited Mr. Gramm to promote McCain's message to the common working people of America. Odd choice. Here's some of Mr. Gramm's famous quotes from well before he shot himself and Mr. McCain in the foot with his "nation of whiners" diatribe.
"Has anyone ever noticed that we live in the only country in the world where all the poor people are fat?" - from his first Senate campaign in 1984
"Most people don't have the luxury of living to be 80 years old, so it's hard for me to feel sorry for them." -responding to new Social Security proposals that would hurt people over 80, presumably life hogs who ought to just graciously die, all five and a half million of them.
"We're going to keep on building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." - referring to the Texas Republican Party.
"I'm carrying so much pork I'm beginning to get trichinosis." -bragging about all the millions of dollars in Federal taxpayers' money he siphoned off for unnecessary vanity projects in his home state of Texas.
"I have as many guns as I need but not as many as I want." -presumably he was hoping to acquire the new Democrat Terminator hunting rifle from Smite & Lesson.
"Anybody with 2.1 billion dollars has to be taken seriously." -referring to fellow rich old white Texan, H. Ross Perot, no doubt wondering how he could relieve the scary crazy Mr. Perot of some of that dough.
So while Senator McCain's campaign quickly told Mr. Gramm thanks but no thanks, you'd think they'd have done their homework on the guy. It seems that rich old white guys with a lot of power aren't subject to the same scrutiny as the rest of us when applying for a job. Look at John McCain himself, worth upwards of 30 million and claiming to be the voice of the working classes (!), somehow pulling off that masquerade to become the Republican nominee for president. McCain has had a long political career that has seen him abandon his principles again and again in his quest for the brass ring of the presidency.
So to pick a sleazy piece of work like Gramm to be his spokesmen seemed natural, even though war-hawk Gramm sat out the Vietnam War with 5 draft deferments, the same number of years McCain spent being tortured in a Prisoner of War camp in North Vietnam. So even on such a basic and personal level, McCain has sold his political soul to the rich old white guys in this nation who judge the people of America and find us wanting. How they have the balls to do so is another matter, since they are blessed with the finest, hardest working and most basically decent set of citizens on the planet, men and women whose life labor, sacrifices in war and generous spirit have made their privileged and powerful lives possible. You'd think these guys would be falling all over each other to thank Americans and to offer them honest service in the high offices they occupy.
Guess again. These fat cats complain that we're not making them even fatter and more secure, and then ship our jobs overseas to impoverished nations who will kick back the lion's share of their workers' salaries to these corporate princes. John McCain also opposes expanded rights for wounded veterans, inexplicably forgetting the years of surgery and physical rehabilitation the United States Navy paid for to make him whole again after his hellish ordeal. He also opposes education benefits for veterans, maybe figuring they can all go to the U.S. Naval Academy for free like he did because his father and grandfather were admirals. Doesn't work that way in the real world you were never a part of, sir. Neither the military, as honorable as it is, or Congress, as dishonorable as it can often be, are a part of the real working world of ordinary citizens.
So we find McCain's campaign team and close advisors chock full of the kind of people he once claimed to oppose; lobbyists, political saboteurs and rich old white guys bent on preserving and making permanent the ruling elite created and nurtured by the Bush The Younger administration, a ruling elite that has managed to place over 90% of the nation's wealth in the pockets of less than 1% of its people, where 30 million citizens, 10% of us, are living below the poverty line in the most prosperous nation in the history of mankind. Time to ditch these old bozos and send them off to the golf course or one of their many palatial homes while many of us move heaven and earth in order to hang on to our own. We don't need another parade of gray men in gray suits reeking of ulterior motives. Obama for President in '08 and defeat for as many entrenched Senators and Representatives as possible. Public office is not a guaranteed job for life, nor it is a license loot the public treasury.
"Has anyone ever noticed that we live in the only country in the world where all the poor people are fat?" - from his first Senate campaign in 1984
"Most people don't have the luxury of living to be 80 years old, so it's hard for me to feel sorry for them." -responding to new Social Security proposals that would hurt people over 80, presumably life hogs who ought to just graciously die, all five and a half million of them.
"We're going to keep on building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." - referring to the Texas Republican Party.
"I'm carrying so much pork I'm beginning to get trichinosis." -bragging about all the millions of dollars in Federal taxpayers' money he siphoned off for unnecessary vanity projects in his home state of Texas.
"I have as many guns as I need but not as many as I want." -presumably he was hoping to acquire the new Democrat Terminator hunting rifle from Smite & Lesson.
"Anybody with 2.1 billion dollars has to be taken seriously." -referring to fellow rich old white Texan, H. Ross Perot, no doubt wondering how he could relieve the scary crazy Mr. Perot of some of that dough.
So while Senator McCain's campaign quickly told Mr. Gramm thanks but no thanks, you'd think they'd have done their homework on the guy. It seems that rich old white guys with a lot of power aren't subject to the same scrutiny as the rest of us when applying for a job. Look at John McCain himself, worth upwards of 30 million and claiming to be the voice of the working classes (!), somehow pulling off that masquerade to become the Republican nominee for president. McCain has had a long political career that has seen him abandon his principles again and again in his quest for the brass ring of the presidency.
So to pick a sleazy piece of work like Gramm to be his spokesmen seemed natural, even though war-hawk Gramm sat out the Vietnam War with 5 draft deferments, the same number of years McCain spent being tortured in a Prisoner of War camp in North Vietnam. So even on such a basic and personal level, McCain has sold his political soul to the rich old white guys in this nation who judge the people of America and find us wanting. How they have the balls to do so is another matter, since they are blessed with the finest, hardest working and most basically decent set of citizens on the planet, men and women whose life labor, sacrifices in war and generous spirit have made their privileged and powerful lives possible. You'd think these guys would be falling all over each other to thank Americans and to offer them honest service in the high offices they occupy.
Guess again. These fat cats complain that we're not making them even fatter and more secure, and then ship our jobs overseas to impoverished nations who will kick back the lion's share of their workers' salaries to these corporate princes. John McCain also opposes expanded rights for wounded veterans, inexplicably forgetting the years of surgery and physical rehabilitation the United States Navy paid for to make him whole again after his hellish ordeal. He also opposes education benefits for veterans, maybe figuring they can all go to the U.S. Naval Academy for free like he did because his father and grandfather were admirals. Doesn't work that way in the real world you were never a part of, sir. Neither the military, as honorable as it is, or Congress, as dishonorable as it can often be, are a part of the real working world of ordinary citizens.
So we find McCain's campaign team and close advisors chock full of the kind of people he once claimed to oppose; lobbyists, political saboteurs and rich old white guys bent on preserving and making permanent the ruling elite created and nurtured by the Bush The Younger administration, a ruling elite that has managed to place over 90% of the nation's wealth in the pockets of less than 1% of its people, where 30 million citizens, 10% of us, are living below the poverty line in the most prosperous nation in the history of mankind. Time to ditch these old bozos and send them off to the golf course or one of their many palatial homes while many of us move heaven and earth in order to hang on to our own. We don't need another parade of gray men in gray suits reeking of ulterior motives. Obama for President in '08 and defeat for as many entrenched Senators and Representatives as possible. Public office is not a guaranteed job for life, nor it is a license loot the public treasury.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 119
Contrary to popular wisdom, you can compare apples and oranges. They are both fruits, they both grow on trees, both make delicious juice and both can be found in most people's homes. One big difference is that oranges rarely show up on teachers' desks, and another is that apple pie is considered especially American while oranges are seldom baked into any pies, no matter what their national identification. Also, no one ever seems to go bobbing for oranges. See, we just compared apples and oranges and the sky didn't fall in and life goes merrily on. Perhaps tomorrow we'll tear the "Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law" tags off of some mattresses and really tempt fate.
I KEEP FORGETTING I'M NOT IN KANSAS
With those words Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz reacted to a talking apple tree, one that was pretty upset at having its apples plucked off. She was hanging with the her new bud, the Scarecrow, who was a pretty sharp cookie who tricked the apple tree into pelting them with some tasty apples. While chasing down the apples Dorothy discovered the rusty Tin Man, and she and the Scarecrow proceeded to revive the unfortunate metal man with a handy oil can. Turns out they found their new friend right in the nick, since just then the Wicked Witch of The West showed up and hurled a fireball at the Scarecrow, no laughing matter to a man made of dried straw. Mr. Tin Man extinguished with blaze with his funnel shaped hat, and they all bonded and sang another song.
Sounds reasonable, no? Now you add a Cowardly Lion and Dorothy's tiny dog Toto to the mix, and you've got a real posse to be reckoned with as they battle the forces of evil while making their way down the Yellow Brick Road towards Emerald City to see the Wizard, where they plan to petition the Great and Powerful Oz to grant them their wishes. Dorothy needs a home, the Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Man a heart and the Cowardly Lion wants courage. The Dog? Well, like most dogs Toto doesn't really want much of anything but to lay around and lick himself and get fed.
Long story short, they make it to Emerald city and the Wizard turns out to be a fraud, but they defeat the Wicked Witch and then realize that they had everything they were seeking all along if only they had looked within themselves. The Scarecrow got his brain, the Tin Man his heart, the Lion his courage and Dorothy got to go home. Toto was too busy eating, licking himself and napping to notice that anything at all out of the ordinary had transpired, but barked happily anyway.
When L. Frank Baum wrote his illustrated children's novel in 1900 he told us that we all have the power within ourselves to find what we seek. Well, Mr. Baum, where's the fun if we don't have to get out on some sort of whacky Odyssey every so often? And what's with the L., Frank? What the hell does the L stand for? If it's such a terrible name, why not just go with Frank and drop the L altogether? Is that what your own self inventory told you about yourself? That you're an L. of a guy? Well, in my book you're pretty okay, even if you do have a slight identity crisis. Anybody who can give us The Wizard of Oz has to be alright, even if his first name is really Lyman. Sorry, L. Frank, I hope you're not upset.
Oz is where we all find ourselves from time to time, that surreal otherworld that finds us all out of sorts, where trees talk, scarecrows and tin men come to life, evil witches pursue us and the guy who's supposed to set things right turns out to be a bumbling fraud. Sort of reminds one of life in America under Bush The Younger, with America not feeling like home anymore. There's your wicked witches in Cheney and Rumsfeld, the armies of flying monkeys are the legions of fascist Christians calling for blood, anyone's will do, the grumpy talking trees are the nasty TV talking heads calling everyone who doesn't agree with them un-Ozian. And then there's the Wizard himself, The Great Bumbler, Bush The Younger; inarticulate, venal and casually murderous.
The Munchkins are Congress, cowering at the specter of wicked witches and appeasing the Wizard, meekly surrendering the basic human rights of their citizens, rights hard won by the blood and sweat of previous generations of Munchkins. The good witch Glinda is the Democratic party, wielding limited power and seeing the world through rose colored glasses while the wicked witch hurls fireballs at innocents, blithely pronouncing all will turn out for the good while doing little to implement change. The Wicked Witch's immediate henchmen, those in charge of the marching Ow-ee-Ow guys, are the Joint Chiefs of Staff doing the bidding of evil witches Rumsfeld and Cheney, and they'll be the first to thank Dorothy when she slays the Wicked Witch, and act like they had no choice but to serve their evil mistress and offer their fawning services to her. Dorothy should give them all the boot, and give the flying monkeys the back of her hand too.
So, who's Dorothy in all this? Is it Obama? McCain? No, she's us, the people of Oz, those of us who must find our home within our hearts. If we want to get back to Kansas, or California or Texas or New York, the same places we've always known and loved but now seem like alien territory, we've got to do it ourselves and not rely on wizards or witches or ruby slippers. Americans know what American freedoms are supposed to be. We know how our government ought to be behaving, and that the image we project to the rest of the world is a product of what we do, not what we say. We Dorothys have to insist that the new Wizard and set of Munchkins we send to Emerald City this November knows what Oz is supposed to be all about. We have had the power inside us all this time to get back to Kansas. Let's click those ruby slippers together and go home. Aunty Em is waiting.
Sounds reasonable, no? Now you add a Cowardly Lion and Dorothy's tiny dog Toto to the mix, and you've got a real posse to be reckoned with as they battle the forces of evil while making their way down the Yellow Brick Road towards Emerald City to see the Wizard, where they plan to petition the Great and Powerful Oz to grant them their wishes. Dorothy needs a home, the Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Man a heart and the Cowardly Lion wants courage. The Dog? Well, like most dogs Toto doesn't really want much of anything but to lay around and lick himself and get fed.
Long story short, they make it to Emerald city and the Wizard turns out to be a fraud, but they defeat the Wicked Witch and then realize that they had everything they were seeking all along if only they had looked within themselves. The Scarecrow got his brain, the Tin Man his heart, the Lion his courage and Dorothy got to go home. Toto was too busy eating, licking himself and napping to notice that anything at all out of the ordinary had transpired, but barked happily anyway.
When L. Frank Baum wrote his illustrated children's novel in 1900 he told us that we all have the power within ourselves to find what we seek. Well, Mr. Baum, where's the fun if we don't have to get out on some sort of whacky Odyssey every so often? And what's with the L., Frank? What the hell does the L stand for? If it's such a terrible name, why not just go with Frank and drop the L altogether? Is that what your own self inventory told you about yourself? That you're an L. of a guy? Well, in my book you're pretty okay, even if you do have a slight identity crisis. Anybody who can give us The Wizard of Oz has to be alright, even if his first name is really Lyman. Sorry, L. Frank, I hope you're not upset.
Oz is where we all find ourselves from time to time, that surreal otherworld that finds us all out of sorts, where trees talk, scarecrows and tin men come to life, evil witches pursue us and the guy who's supposed to set things right turns out to be a bumbling fraud. Sort of reminds one of life in America under Bush The Younger, with America not feeling like home anymore. There's your wicked witches in Cheney and Rumsfeld, the armies of flying monkeys are the legions of fascist Christians calling for blood, anyone's will do, the grumpy talking trees are the nasty TV talking heads calling everyone who doesn't agree with them un-Ozian. And then there's the Wizard himself, The Great Bumbler, Bush The Younger; inarticulate, venal and casually murderous.
The Munchkins are Congress, cowering at the specter of wicked witches and appeasing the Wizard, meekly surrendering the basic human rights of their citizens, rights hard won by the blood and sweat of previous generations of Munchkins. The good witch Glinda is the Democratic party, wielding limited power and seeing the world through rose colored glasses while the wicked witch hurls fireballs at innocents, blithely pronouncing all will turn out for the good while doing little to implement change. The Wicked Witch's immediate henchmen, those in charge of the marching Ow-ee-Ow guys, are the Joint Chiefs of Staff doing the bidding of evil witches Rumsfeld and Cheney, and they'll be the first to thank Dorothy when she slays the Wicked Witch, and act like they had no choice but to serve their evil mistress and offer their fawning services to her. Dorothy should give them all the boot, and give the flying monkeys the back of her hand too.
So, who's Dorothy in all this? Is it Obama? McCain? No, she's us, the people of Oz, those of us who must find our home within our hearts. If we want to get back to Kansas, or California or Texas or New York, the same places we've always known and loved but now seem like alien territory, we've got to do it ourselves and not rely on wizards or witches or ruby slippers. Americans know what American freedoms are supposed to be. We know how our government ought to be behaving, and that the image we project to the rest of the world is a product of what we do, not what we say. We Dorothys have to insist that the new Wizard and set of Munchkins we send to Emerald City this November knows what Oz is supposed to be all about. We have had the power inside us all this time to get back to Kansas. Let's click those ruby slippers together and go home. Aunty Em is waiting.
July 27, 2008
LOVE IS COMPLICATED BUT IT'S THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN
Probably the best thing about humanity is our capacity to love. Each other, that is, not chocolate donuts or baseball or dancing or fast cars or reading or any of the other bazillion things we humans enjoy. Enjoyment is one aspect of love, especially when we seek to share what we enjoy with another person. That's where the love comes in, the sharing. There was a hit song many years ago that declared "What the world needs now, is love, sweet love." Sounds pretty sappy and simple, but was it ever truer than now?
With love comes laughter, understanding, forgiveness, fascination, elation, joy, wonder and fulfillment. Not many reasons to look for the complaint department there. Love is also demanding, forcing us to bring out the best within ourselves, conquering any selfishness, greed and mistrust we may harbor within us. Love wishes no ill will on another. Love opens your heart to endless possibilities within yourself, giving you a glimpse of the vastness of your human soul. Love is never small, never binding. It's huge.
Nothing affects us in life like love. Anyone who has had their heart broken can testify to the flip side of love, its absence, its loss, as empty and devastating a feeling as a person can experience. There you are, your heart so full of love for another, but they do not return it and you are lost, nowhere to put all the love inside of you. The temptation is to lash out, to deny that love is real and to build a thorny wall around your heart so that no can ever break it again and cause you so much intolerable pain. But that rarely happens, and the poor souls who achieve that bitter isolation are to be pitied.
What happens to most of us is that time heals our hearts and we love again, a courageous act and an exercise in trust and faith in our fellow human beings. We know instinctively that they are worthy of our love and we are worthy of the love they give to us, and so again we roll the dice. And again we collect the rewards of giving our vast reservoirs of love to others. Getting love in return is the byproduct of sharing your love, and the fierce and powerful love we give one another shapes our lives.
When we look at the greater world and the apparent absence of love our hearts recoil at the horror and inhumanity that seems to prevail. Wars, mass starvation, hatred and misunderstanding between nations of humans seem to be the order of the day. But this world is filled with people with an identical capacity for love as our own, and no wish to cause harm or to be harmed. Violence and hatred are aspects of misunderstanding and alienation, the absence of love. Can we throw love at the problems of the world like naive children? We should, because nothing else seems to be working, and the opposite of love is hate. Why go there when we know from long and painful experience where that train is headed?
Sharing food is love, sharing knowledge is love and healing the sick is love. A kind word to an angry man is love. A willingness to learn about another way of life is love. Tolerance is love. To love only those who agree with you is not true love, it is supreme selfishness, while true love is generous. How could it not be when so many opposites attract? There has never been a human being born in this world who has not felt love, or tragically, its absence. Either way, love has had a profound effect on every human life. First and foremost in our dealings with one another we must assume that there is love, we must give it and receive it unashamed, for love is not weakness, but our greatest strength.
When we approach another human being with mistrust and hatred, we are condemning that relationship to narrow, bitter conflict. When we open with love, we throw open the doors to endless possibilities for mutual understanding and respect, for love is also respect for oneself and others. We have all seen how powerful is love's opposite, hate, and the misery and death it has brought to our lives. That absence of love is simply love unfulfilled, the dark face of mankind's love and the incredible energy of love turned towards destruction and murder. There is an insatiable passion in destruction, white hot searing energy that lashes out and murders, maims, starves and enslaves other human beings. Love turned inside out.
There is no hate in a being without the capacity to love. The animal that devours another feels no hatred for its victim. But man is not an animal. If we did not love so powerfully, we could never destroy so wantonly. The lion kills only the prey that it will eat, never slaughtering simply because it can. In the absence of love, that is precisely what man is capable of doing. To quote John Lennon singing about our most basic human instinct: "Love is the answer, you know that for sure." Or as Jesus said of the Commandments: "The greatest of these is love." Sounds simple, but it's not. It takes courage to love. Destruction and violence is the easy way out, the way of the coward. Love may be complicated, but it's the only way to conquer ourselves and the evil in this world. Be brave. Share your love.
With love comes laughter, understanding, forgiveness, fascination, elation, joy, wonder and fulfillment. Not many reasons to look for the complaint department there. Love is also demanding, forcing us to bring out the best within ourselves, conquering any selfishness, greed and mistrust we may harbor within us. Love wishes no ill will on another. Love opens your heart to endless possibilities within yourself, giving you a glimpse of the vastness of your human soul. Love is never small, never binding. It's huge.
Nothing affects us in life like love. Anyone who has had their heart broken can testify to the flip side of love, its absence, its loss, as empty and devastating a feeling as a person can experience. There you are, your heart so full of love for another, but they do not return it and you are lost, nowhere to put all the love inside of you. The temptation is to lash out, to deny that love is real and to build a thorny wall around your heart so that no can ever break it again and cause you so much intolerable pain. But that rarely happens, and the poor souls who achieve that bitter isolation are to be pitied.
What happens to most of us is that time heals our hearts and we love again, a courageous act and an exercise in trust and faith in our fellow human beings. We know instinctively that they are worthy of our love and we are worthy of the love they give to us, and so again we roll the dice. And again we collect the rewards of giving our vast reservoirs of love to others. Getting love in return is the byproduct of sharing your love, and the fierce and powerful love we give one another shapes our lives.
When we look at the greater world and the apparent absence of love our hearts recoil at the horror and inhumanity that seems to prevail. Wars, mass starvation, hatred and misunderstanding between nations of humans seem to be the order of the day. But this world is filled with people with an identical capacity for love as our own, and no wish to cause harm or to be harmed. Violence and hatred are aspects of misunderstanding and alienation, the absence of love. Can we throw love at the problems of the world like naive children? We should, because nothing else seems to be working, and the opposite of love is hate. Why go there when we know from long and painful experience where that train is headed?
Sharing food is love, sharing knowledge is love and healing the sick is love. A kind word to an angry man is love. A willingness to learn about another way of life is love. Tolerance is love. To love only those who agree with you is not true love, it is supreme selfishness, while true love is generous. How could it not be when so many opposites attract? There has never been a human being born in this world who has not felt love, or tragically, its absence. Either way, love has had a profound effect on every human life. First and foremost in our dealings with one another we must assume that there is love, we must give it and receive it unashamed, for love is not weakness, but our greatest strength.
When we approach another human being with mistrust and hatred, we are condemning that relationship to narrow, bitter conflict. When we open with love, we throw open the doors to endless possibilities for mutual understanding and respect, for love is also respect for oneself and others. We have all seen how powerful is love's opposite, hate, and the misery and death it has brought to our lives. That absence of love is simply love unfulfilled, the dark face of mankind's love and the incredible energy of love turned towards destruction and murder. There is an insatiable passion in destruction, white hot searing energy that lashes out and murders, maims, starves and enslaves other human beings. Love turned inside out.
There is no hate in a being without the capacity to love. The animal that devours another feels no hatred for its victim. But man is not an animal. If we did not love so powerfully, we could never destroy so wantonly. The lion kills only the prey that it will eat, never slaughtering simply because it can. In the absence of love, that is precisely what man is capable of doing. To quote John Lennon singing about our most basic human instinct: "Love is the answer, you know that for sure." Or as Jesus said of the Commandments: "The greatest of these is love." Sounds simple, but it's not. It takes courage to love. Destruction and violence is the easy way out, the way of the coward. Love may be complicated, but it's the only way to conquer ourselves and the evil in this world. Be brave. Share your love.
July 26, 2008
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 117
Never judge a book by its cover. Unless, of course, the cover features Fabio holding some cleavage-baring damsel in distress in his arms by some stormy seashore with the wind bowing their hair around and a meaningful, faraway look in their eyes. In that case, judge away. The book is piece of crap.
LAND OF THE 99% FREE
In The United States of America, Land of the Free, one in every hundred adults are in prison. With less than 5% of the world's population, America has nearly a quarter of the world's prison population. What's up with us? Are we that much more prone to being criminals than the rest of the world? Are there simply too many things against the law here? Or, barring that, too many things that are against the law that require incarceration as the only possible punishment rather than, say, a stern talking to?
It seems that it America, anything worth doing is worth overdoing, and the results don't always reflect the frenetic effort. Our prisons are now part of a vast industry, with 1% of our population serving as the raw material and most of them doubling as the end product. And that end product is hardly worth bragging about; petty criminals becoming better criminals, troubled youngsters emerging as hardened sociopaths, the costs of maintaining one in a hundred people in jail bankrupting our society both financially and morally. And for what? Half the time it's drug violations, hardly something worthy of a jail sentence, not when there's all these drunks running around free as a bird.
The only difference between drugs and alcohol is the laws on the books around here. This is a nation that at one time outlawed alcohol, thus rendering 90% of the population potential felons. That didn't work out at all, what with everybody flouting that law and vast organized crime networks becoming wealthy by providing the nation with booze. The same sort of murderous thugs are the people supplying America with drugs, while alcohol is sold by mostly mild-mannered store clerks, with the nation's various state, local and federal governments taking the lion's share of the proceeds in taxes on alcoholic beverages.
By making drinking legal again, exactly no extra alcoholics were created. It's the same with drugs. Make them legal and there won't be a single extra junky in America next year and the government will reap untold billions in sales taxes on recreational drugs. The way it works is this: approximately 10% of the population is afflicted with the disease of addiction, no matter what the status of the laws governing their substance of choice. 10% of the people in the United States consume 90% of all alcoholic beverages. It's no different with drugs. That same 10%, most of them increasingly cross-addicted, consume 90% of the illegal drugs.
Which is not to say it's a desirable state of affairs to be a raging alcoholic, just that it's a legal state of affairs and a pragmatic choice in America for booze to be legal so that you wouldn't have to lock up 10% of the people instead of just the 1. And locking people up in prison ought to be reserved for only the most dangerous criminals, those who pose a real danger to people and society. In every society there's no shortage of those: Killers, rapists, bank robbers, burglars, embezzlers, kidnappers, arsonists, con men, the ultra-violent, the incorrigible thieves and the corrupt business and political leaders who subvert our society.
There should not be anybody in prison for having fun, so long a that fun harms no one else. Prostitution is a good example. When we have the arrogance to think we can legislate and incarcerate the world's oldest profession out of existence it's time for a reality check and a major reassessment of our decision making skills. Turns out we're not a nation of Solomons in the meting-out-of-justice department. Hell, didn't Solomon, Mr. Justice Personified, have himself a vast harem of women, many of whom he purchased? What are we not getting here in America that we have the balls to lock up one in every 100 people?
Must be a huge hangover from our Puritan beginnings. Couple that with the existence of a whole lot of fire-and-brimstone judgmental and fundamental Christians in the halls of power and you've got a prison system designed not to reform anybody, but to send them to a mini-hell in the absence of the Divine power to consign them to the actual fiery depths. And there are too many among us who would gladly do just that if they could only convince God to delegate that authority to them. Burn your sinning ass for all eternity! If that's not a criminal impulse, then what is? And if you are poor or a minority citizen, your odds of being sent to mini-hell are far greater than one in a hundred. If you are rich the chances of you ever seeing the inside of anything other than a holding cell after your arrest are remote. So the whole process is skewed and Justice isn't blind, she's on the take, for sale to the highest bidder like the prostitutes we like to put in the slammer.
As far as nations go, we're still relatively young one, but we've reached our adulthood so it's time to act like grown-ups and not try to punish everybody who doesn't like to play the same games we do like some petulant brat. Most of what other people do is their own damned business so long as it's not harming others or being shoved down your throat. As far as addicts go, there's treatment available for what is identified by medical authorities as a disease, not a crime. For the murderous drug dealers, sure. Lock them up, they've murdered somebody.
But if you make drugs legal, there won't be any more drug cartels or violent street gangs selling drugs to minors. There will be mild mannered clerks in stores selling the drugs and paying big taxes and checking their customers I.D., just like in the liquor stores. Make prostitution and pornography legal too, except of course the child varieties. If you don't happen to like drugs, prostitution or pornography, fine. Then don't participate! It's not like pornographers and harlots take one look at you and can't wait to get a piece of that action! Don't flatter yourself. Maybe there's something you like to do that others find distasteful but harms no one else. Should you go to jail too when popular opinion turns against your particular pastime?
In some nations the people who own guns go to jail, whether or not they commit crimes with them. Imagine how many Americans would get locked up if that were the case here? In this country you probably know fewer people that don't own guns than do. So maybe it's time to tell our legislators to stop creating so many damned laws and start earnestly repealing a bunch of them. One in a hundred citizens in prison in unconscionable and way too expensive.
A society can and must regulate morals to a degree and has an obligation to establish courts of law and protect society from the harm that criminals do. But we don't get to outlaw homosexuality, prostitution or addiction any more than we get to outlaw freckles or being left-handed. That's an impossiblity. Let's just grow the hell up already and recognize we're a large nation in a large world and there's bound to be a lot of things that get on our nerves. There's just not a lot of these things that we can lock in a steel box and pretend they've gone away. No, we've made it a lot worse with our criminal academies. We've spent too much money, hurt too many people and created a monster we must now dismantle. Tear down those walls, America.
It seems that it America, anything worth doing is worth overdoing, and the results don't always reflect the frenetic effort. Our prisons are now part of a vast industry, with 1% of our population serving as the raw material and most of them doubling as the end product. And that end product is hardly worth bragging about; petty criminals becoming better criminals, troubled youngsters emerging as hardened sociopaths, the costs of maintaining one in a hundred people in jail bankrupting our society both financially and morally. And for what? Half the time it's drug violations, hardly something worthy of a jail sentence, not when there's all these drunks running around free as a bird.
The only difference between drugs and alcohol is the laws on the books around here. This is a nation that at one time outlawed alcohol, thus rendering 90% of the population potential felons. That didn't work out at all, what with everybody flouting that law and vast organized crime networks becoming wealthy by providing the nation with booze. The same sort of murderous thugs are the people supplying America with drugs, while alcohol is sold by mostly mild-mannered store clerks, with the nation's various state, local and federal governments taking the lion's share of the proceeds in taxes on alcoholic beverages.
By making drinking legal again, exactly no extra alcoholics were created. It's the same with drugs. Make them legal and there won't be a single extra junky in America next year and the government will reap untold billions in sales taxes on recreational drugs. The way it works is this: approximately 10% of the population is afflicted with the disease of addiction, no matter what the status of the laws governing their substance of choice. 10% of the people in the United States consume 90% of all alcoholic beverages. It's no different with drugs. That same 10%, most of them increasingly cross-addicted, consume 90% of the illegal drugs.
Which is not to say it's a desirable state of affairs to be a raging alcoholic, just that it's a legal state of affairs and a pragmatic choice in America for booze to be legal so that you wouldn't have to lock up 10% of the people instead of just the 1. And locking people up in prison ought to be reserved for only the most dangerous criminals, those who pose a real danger to people and society. In every society there's no shortage of those: Killers, rapists, bank robbers, burglars, embezzlers, kidnappers, arsonists, con men, the ultra-violent, the incorrigible thieves and the corrupt business and political leaders who subvert our society.
There should not be anybody in prison for having fun, so long a that fun harms no one else. Prostitution is a good example. When we have the arrogance to think we can legislate and incarcerate the world's oldest profession out of existence it's time for a reality check and a major reassessment of our decision making skills. Turns out we're not a nation of Solomons in the meting-out-of-justice department. Hell, didn't Solomon, Mr. Justice Personified, have himself a vast harem of women, many of whom he purchased? What are we not getting here in America that we have the balls to lock up one in every 100 people?
Must be a huge hangover from our Puritan beginnings. Couple that with the existence of a whole lot of fire-and-brimstone judgmental and fundamental Christians in the halls of power and you've got a prison system designed not to reform anybody, but to send them to a mini-hell in the absence of the Divine power to consign them to the actual fiery depths. And there are too many among us who would gladly do just that if they could only convince God to delegate that authority to them. Burn your sinning ass for all eternity! If that's not a criminal impulse, then what is? And if you are poor or a minority citizen, your odds of being sent to mini-hell are far greater than one in a hundred. If you are rich the chances of you ever seeing the inside of anything other than a holding cell after your arrest are remote. So the whole process is skewed and Justice isn't blind, she's on the take, for sale to the highest bidder like the prostitutes we like to put in the slammer.
As far as nations go, we're still relatively young one, but we've reached our adulthood so it's time to act like grown-ups and not try to punish everybody who doesn't like to play the same games we do like some petulant brat. Most of what other people do is their own damned business so long as it's not harming others or being shoved down your throat. As far as addicts go, there's treatment available for what is identified by medical authorities as a disease, not a crime. For the murderous drug dealers, sure. Lock them up, they've murdered somebody.
But if you make drugs legal, there won't be any more drug cartels or violent street gangs selling drugs to minors. There will be mild mannered clerks in stores selling the drugs and paying big taxes and checking their customers I.D., just like in the liquor stores. Make prostitution and pornography legal too, except of course the child varieties. If you don't happen to like drugs, prostitution or pornography, fine. Then don't participate! It's not like pornographers and harlots take one look at you and can't wait to get a piece of that action! Don't flatter yourself. Maybe there's something you like to do that others find distasteful but harms no one else. Should you go to jail too when popular opinion turns against your particular pastime?
In some nations the people who own guns go to jail, whether or not they commit crimes with them. Imagine how many Americans would get locked up if that were the case here? In this country you probably know fewer people that don't own guns than do. So maybe it's time to tell our legislators to stop creating so many damned laws and start earnestly repealing a bunch of them. One in a hundred citizens in prison in unconscionable and way too expensive.
A society can and must regulate morals to a degree and has an obligation to establish courts of law and protect society from the harm that criminals do. But we don't get to outlaw homosexuality, prostitution or addiction any more than we get to outlaw freckles or being left-handed. That's an impossiblity. Let's just grow the hell up already and recognize we're a large nation in a large world and there's bound to be a lot of things that get on our nerves. There's just not a lot of these things that we can lock in a steel box and pretend they've gone away. No, we've made it a lot worse with our criminal academies. We've spent too much money, hurt too many people and created a monster we must now dismantle. Tear down those walls, America.
July 25, 2008
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 116
When bill collectors are hounding you about some bill you cannot pay, contact them directly and tell them that this whole episode has been quite upsetting and you'd like to put it behind you as soon as possible. Insist that they send you the "Final Notice" bill already so you can get on with your life without those rude pests bothering you all the time. File it in the round file and move on.
DOPOTO REPORTS: 12 USEUL TIPS FOR EVERYDAY PROBLEM SOLVING
The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has taken some time out from our exhaustive investigations into the Readily Apparent to share with the public some of the wisdom we have gained from our extensive research. The following are some useful tips for coping with some ordinary but vexing problems that come up so often in so many lives. Below, we have listed a dozen common problems that affect many people, along with suggested solutions. No need to thank DOPOTO, we're just doing our job here:
1.) When a grizzly bear attacks you, play dead. No sense pretending there's going to be a different outcome, so this way you get used to the idea.
2.) On really hot days, a handy way to cool off is to steal a luxury car and ride around with the air conditioning cranked up, enjoying some exotic music on the satellite radio. When you're sufficiently relaxed and cooled off, you can then sell it to a chop shop and buy yourself a really big air conditioner with the proceeds.
3.) It is important to tell your children the truth. When Junior asks in a loud voice "Why is that man so fat?," explain to him gently and patiently that the man is a greedy pig who eats way too much food and is too lazy and stupid to exercise and will die very soon. Eventually he'd have figured that one out for himself so don't let there be any lingering resentments.
4.) The odds of getting rich quick from the real estate programs on TV are slim. The same with all those "build wealth quickly" infomercials and schemes e-mailed to you on the internet by total strangers. If you need some fast cash, go with the tried and true; ski masks, a friend with a pistol, a note to the teller and a reliable getaway route. Sometimes low-tech is the way to go and the learning curve is not all that steep.
5.) When a Mormon comes to your door to try and convert you, immediately start preaching Devil worship to them. Odds are it will be a short encounter and you can get back to watching the Jerry Springer Show episode with the brawling transvestite dwarfs before you missed much of the action.
6.) A good way to protect your home from burglars is to steal decals and warning signs from an established alarm company and display them prominently. No confusing codes to remember and no high monthly bills to pay. One important reminder: Make sure all the signs are from the same company!
7.) If a raccoon is visiting your yard and raiding your garbage cans, don't attempt to capture it, they can be quite dangerous when cornered and many of them carry rabies and other dread diseases. The humane thing to do is kill it quickly with a shotgun, a weapon that doesn't require you to be Annie Oakley in the marksmanship department, so a safe distance can be maintained while you blast that filthy pest into oblivion.
8.) When on a blind date, always pick a restaurant with a side door, preferably an exit located near the rest rooms. After about forty minutes or so, they'll get the hint and be stuck paying for your lobster while you're headed elsewhere to have some fun.
9.) When somebody is engaging in a loud cell phone conversation in an inappropriate place, don't make a scene. Simply pull out a pad and pencil and pretend to be taking detailed notes of their conversation, maybe ask them to repeat their last statement every so often or ask how you spell that word. That should cut the ordeal pretty short.
10.) When your child refuses to eat his vegetables, don't traumatize the little tyke with facts and figures of how many children are starving in this world. Simply pull out the boarding school brochures and watch those greens disappear!
11.) When your neighbor pulls out a few dozen pictures of their grandchildren for your inspection, ask them if they are selling the kids and what's the price. Tell them you know a discreet and reliable black market adoption lawyer and for a small middleman's fee you will take them all off their hands, except of course for that ugly one with the big ears and crossed eyes. You won't be bothered a second time.
12.) When dining on your company's expense account, always order the steak and a bottle of rare, expensive wine. Odds are they're going to ship your job to India or hire some young punk who makes less than you very soon anyway so you might as well enjoy it while it lasts. Bon appetit!
We here at the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious hope that these tips have been helpful to our readers. We hope from to be able to take some time out from our heavy work load to provide this valuable public service on a regular basis. As the late, great Elvis Presley would often say: "Thangya... thangya verra muhh."
1.) When a grizzly bear attacks you, play dead. No sense pretending there's going to be a different outcome, so this way you get used to the idea.
2.) On really hot days, a handy way to cool off is to steal a luxury car and ride around with the air conditioning cranked up, enjoying some exotic music on the satellite radio. When you're sufficiently relaxed and cooled off, you can then sell it to a chop shop and buy yourself a really big air conditioner with the proceeds.
3.) It is important to tell your children the truth. When Junior asks in a loud voice "Why is that man so fat?," explain to him gently and patiently that the man is a greedy pig who eats way too much food and is too lazy and stupid to exercise and will die very soon. Eventually he'd have figured that one out for himself so don't let there be any lingering resentments.
4.) The odds of getting rich quick from the real estate programs on TV are slim. The same with all those "build wealth quickly" infomercials and schemes e-mailed to you on the internet by total strangers. If you need some fast cash, go with the tried and true; ski masks, a friend with a pistol, a note to the teller and a reliable getaway route. Sometimes low-tech is the way to go and the learning curve is not all that steep.
5.) When a Mormon comes to your door to try and convert you, immediately start preaching Devil worship to them. Odds are it will be a short encounter and you can get back to watching the Jerry Springer Show episode with the brawling transvestite dwarfs before you missed much of the action.
6.) A good way to protect your home from burglars is to steal decals and warning signs from an established alarm company and display them prominently. No confusing codes to remember and no high monthly bills to pay. One important reminder: Make sure all the signs are from the same company!
7.) If a raccoon is visiting your yard and raiding your garbage cans, don't attempt to capture it, they can be quite dangerous when cornered and many of them carry rabies and other dread diseases. The humane thing to do is kill it quickly with a shotgun, a weapon that doesn't require you to be Annie Oakley in the marksmanship department, so a safe distance can be maintained while you blast that filthy pest into oblivion.
8.) When on a blind date, always pick a restaurant with a side door, preferably an exit located near the rest rooms. After about forty minutes or so, they'll get the hint and be stuck paying for your lobster while you're headed elsewhere to have some fun.
9.) When somebody is engaging in a loud cell phone conversation in an inappropriate place, don't make a scene. Simply pull out a pad and pencil and pretend to be taking detailed notes of their conversation, maybe ask them to repeat their last statement every so often or ask how you spell that word. That should cut the ordeal pretty short.
10.) When your child refuses to eat his vegetables, don't traumatize the little tyke with facts and figures of how many children are starving in this world. Simply pull out the boarding school brochures and watch those greens disappear!
11.) When your neighbor pulls out a few dozen pictures of their grandchildren for your inspection, ask them if they are selling the kids and what's the price. Tell them you know a discreet and reliable black market adoption lawyer and for a small middleman's fee you will take them all off their hands, except of course for that ugly one with the big ears and crossed eyes. You won't be bothered a second time.
12.) When dining on your company's expense account, always order the steak and a bottle of rare, expensive wine. Odds are they're going to ship your job to India or hire some young punk who makes less than you very soon anyway so you might as well enjoy it while it lasts. Bon appetit!
We here at the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious hope that these tips have been helpful to our readers. We hope from to be able to take some time out from our heavy work load to provide this valuable public service on a regular basis. As the late, great Elvis Presley would often say: "Thangya... thangya verra muhh."
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 115
Anybody who thinks they have all the answers hasn't asked enough questions.
THE BLUNDER OF IT ALL
Is there anybody out there who hasn't pulled a real bonehead move every so often? I mean a real beaut, a whopper of a mistake (first marriages don't count, that's only practice.). Sure, we've all been there, even the geniuses who built the Hubble Telescope and sent it into space to take all those great pictures of the Universe we keep seeing in magazines and on the internet. When they first sent it up, they realized they had installed the lens backwards and had to send up a guy with a tool kit to flip it around. Boy, his bill must have been pretty steep, with probably a nice tip thrown in to keep the snarky comments to himself. So even to the smartest among us, these things happen.
Mistakes are part of life. Usually they wreak havoc in our lives but once in a great while, they work out just fine. One that worked out quite nicely is in Italy. Would anybody ever go out of their way to visit The Tower of Pisa? Hell, no! Not when there's so much else to see in Italy. But you make a fundamental engineering mistake and Bingo, you've got the world famous tourist attraction The Leaning Tower of Pisa. And it's handily located a not-too-long tour bus ride across the top of the boot of Italy to their other great mistake, Venice, the city with canals for streets that tourists just have to see before it inevitably sinks beneath the waves of the Adriatic Sea one of these days.
Built atop 118 small islands, it wasn't meant to be such a watery place but the engineers apparently neglected to factor in the laws of gravity, the nature of the underlying soil and the corrosive workings of the tides of a major body of water. The city as the world knows it today was built after the Roman Empire and their superb architects and engineers went south, otherwise it would just be another quaint Italian city that wasn't half flooded and sinking a few inches a year and as such would not be able to compete with the grandeur of Rome, Florence, Naples and Genoa for the tourist dollar. But let the place start to sink, flood the streets with sea water, add some singing Gondoliers and voila, you've got Venice, a must-see romantic destination raking in the dough.
The Great Wall of China is another huge mistake that is paying off big time centuries later with heavy tourist traffic. Stretching 4,000 miles long and built over a thousand year period starting in the 6th century B.C., The Great Wall was designed by various Chinese Emperors to keep out Mongol invaders. That didn't work out so well for China as Mongols over the centuries pretty much invaded, pillaged and looted China at will, much to the chagrin of the various Chinese Emperors and really pissing off the non-royal Chinese workers who spent untold thousands of lifetimes building the damned thing. But there it is, the only man-made object visible from outer space, and a huge mistake.
Then there's mistakes that don't work out so well. Take New Orleans, for example, one of America's great and most unique cities. Well before Hurricane Katrina tried drowning it and President Bush the Younger (speaking of huge mistakes) tried to declare it the Venice of the South, New Orleans was struck by another devastating storm. The year was 1721 and it was still a relatively small settlement under French control. When the town was destroyed, the governor of the colony, a Frenchmen with the impressive name of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, showed himself to have not so impressive decision skills when he ignored the urgent pleas of everybody else that lived there to rebuild New Orleans on higher ground right nearby. He figured that he had the longest name and so the decision was his to make and New Orleans has been living behind levees ever since, just waiting for the Gulf of Mexico to engulf it. So much for impressive names. It's a better deal to settle for impressive common sense any day of the week.
So, be thankful that the blunders we make are not of the leaning tower variety or the huge-mistake-visible-from-outer-space category, to say nothing of building a couple of cities destined to be drowned sooner or later. Okay, so you drank too much at the Christmas party and told your boss what you really think of him. Big deal! There's other jobs out there. So what if you thought it would be a great idea to get the name "Spike" tattooed on your butt and your husband Fred isn't so crazy about it? Happens to the best of us. And that time you found out that the captain of the football team was every bit as tough as he looked? Well, that was all part of the learning process in life's rich pageant, and you learned to keep your big mouth shut too, didn't you? Stands to reason, what with your jaws being wired together for 3 months, no? Well, at least we didn't put the lens in backwards on a multi-billion dollar space telescope. Ah, the blunder of it all!
Mistakes are part of life. Usually they wreak havoc in our lives but once in a great while, they work out just fine. One that worked out quite nicely is in Italy. Would anybody ever go out of their way to visit The Tower of Pisa? Hell, no! Not when there's so much else to see in Italy. But you make a fundamental engineering mistake and Bingo, you've got the world famous tourist attraction The Leaning Tower of Pisa. And it's handily located a not-too-long tour bus ride across the top of the boot of Italy to their other great mistake, Venice, the city with canals for streets that tourists just have to see before it inevitably sinks beneath the waves of the Adriatic Sea one of these days.
Built atop 118 small islands, it wasn't meant to be such a watery place but the engineers apparently neglected to factor in the laws of gravity, the nature of the underlying soil and the corrosive workings of the tides of a major body of water. The city as the world knows it today was built after the Roman Empire and their superb architects and engineers went south, otherwise it would just be another quaint Italian city that wasn't half flooded and sinking a few inches a year and as such would not be able to compete with the grandeur of Rome, Florence, Naples and Genoa for the tourist dollar. But let the place start to sink, flood the streets with sea water, add some singing Gondoliers and voila, you've got Venice, a must-see romantic destination raking in the dough.
The Great Wall of China is another huge mistake that is paying off big time centuries later with heavy tourist traffic. Stretching 4,000 miles long and built over a thousand year period starting in the 6th century B.C., The Great Wall was designed by various Chinese Emperors to keep out Mongol invaders. That didn't work out so well for China as Mongols over the centuries pretty much invaded, pillaged and looted China at will, much to the chagrin of the various Chinese Emperors and really pissing off the non-royal Chinese workers who spent untold thousands of lifetimes building the damned thing. But there it is, the only man-made object visible from outer space, and a huge mistake.
Then there's mistakes that don't work out so well. Take New Orleans, for example, one of America's great and most unique cities. Well before Hurricane Katrina tried drowning it and President Bush the Younger (speaking of huge mistakes) tried to declare it the Venice of the South, New Orleans was struck by another devastating storm. The year was 1721 and it was still a relatively small settlement under French control. When the town was destroyed, the governor of the colony, a Frenchmen with the impressive name of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, showed himself to have not so impressive decision skills when he ignored the urgent pleas of everybody else that lived there to rebuild New Orleans on higher ground right nearby. He figured that he had the longest name and so the decision was his to make and New Orleans has been living behind levees ever since, just waiting for the Gulf of Mexico to engulf it. So much for impressive names. It's a better deal to settle for impressive common sense any day of the week.
So, be thankful that the blunders we make are not of the leaning tower variety or the huge-mistake-visible-from-outer-space category, to say nothing of building a couple of cities destined to be drowned sooner or later. Okay, so you drank too much at the Christmas party and told your boss what you really think of him. Big deal! There's other jobs out there. So what if you thought it would be a great idea to get the name "Spike" tattooed on your butt and your husband Fred isn't so crazy about it? Happens to the best of us. And that time you found out that the captain of the football team was every bit as tough as he looked? Well, that was all part of the learning process in life's rich pageant, and you learned to keep your big mouth shut too, didn't you? Stands to reason, what with your jaws being wired together for 3 months, no? Well, at least we didn't put the lens in backwards on a multi-billion dollar space telescope. Ah, the blunder of it all!
July 24, 2008
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 114
There are few sadder sights than forty-something year old men trying to dress and act like teenagers. They always get it all wrong. Why not go whole hog and act like an infant? Babies are also bald, pot-bellied and clueless.
THE FAT GUY OLYMPICS
On the eve of the politically charged Summer Olympic Games in China, the announcement that Yao Ming will play for China's basketball team gives that nation hope of winning the gold medal in that sport. Now, the fact that Yao is seven feet, six inches tall and a major star for the Houston Rockets in America's National Basketball Association, the very zenith of basketball competition, doesn't change the fact that the average Chinese athlete stands about knee high to Yao Ming and that China is the last place one associates with basketball dominance. While Yao is a world class talent and by all accounts a heckuva nice guy, he's coming off a broken foot that ended his season several months ago, dashing any hopes Houston had of winning an NBA title. So between that injury and his half-pint teammates, don't look for China to improve on their previous best 8th place Olympic finish. The basketball position of "small forward" takes on a new meaning there, like the whole team plus one really tall guy.
Then you have the United States, home of basketball, fielding Dream Teams of established NBA professionals and standout college basketball players just as talented as Yao Ming and every one of them really tall. While many people decry the fact that professional athletes were included in the Olympics in recent years, it's simply a reflection of reality. In order to compete at that level in any sport, an athlete needs to work and train on a full-time basis, and in the meantime he or she needs to eat, pay the rent and travel all over the place from game to game. Somebody's paying these people, and paying them quite well. There haven't been any pure amateurs in the Olympics since the 1920's, and they all stunk, their "records" routinely being broken by today's 12-years olds.
The fact that nations take these games so seriously has always made a joke of the amateur status of athletes, with many countries spending fortunes on training and fielding the best possible teams of athletes. The only recent exception was the Jamaican bobsledding team from a couple of Olympics ago, a welcome comic relief from the grim do-or-die spirit of these games. So, in order to bring back the spirit of true amateur sportsmanship, why not hold the Fat Guy Olympics next time? Let regular people who hold regular jobs and play sports as a hobby compete for medals. While no world records are likely to be set in any sport, the entertainment value will be far greater.
Start off with Fat Guy Basketball, pitting teams of working stiffs against each other, older guys who like to get together a couple of nights a week and wheeze their way through a basketball game over a couple of beers, sneaking a cigarette or two during the time outs, which by the way, will have to be doubled or tripled to allow these pot bellied amateurs to catch their breath, have a cold one and brag on their cell phones to their families on how they are kicking serious butt. The rules of the game would also have to be altered or relaxed, and no one should look forward to a lot of fast breaks and slam-dunking. There will be much arguing and a few "do-overs," but the results will be pretty amusing and a true reflection of what amateur sports are like.
The Fat Guy Olympics can also include so-called sports like golf, bowling, darts and pool, games that require little exertion and at which many fat guys excel. Pin ball might be a good bet, too. The heck with all that sweaty running around and jumping over stuff, that's for the young and fit professionals. Races in the Fat Guy Olympics will be no longer than say, the 20 yard dash, or the 20 yard saunter, and to maximize the competitive juices, have the race end at a buffet table loaded with tasty treats. If you want to see a fat guy move real quick, there'd better be some chicken wings at the end of the race.
In the swimming pool competitions, forget the 300 meter butterfly or the platform diving. Make the swimming races once across the pool, again with a reward at the finish line, say a keg of beer. As for diving, there could be a Cannonball competition, see who can make the biggest splash. The Cannonball event would favor the tubbiest athletes, as would the Freestyle Bellyflop. Judges would award medals according to the size of the splash, spectators soaked and the loudness of impact. That's a lot more fun than Synchronized Swimming, a real snooze of a "sport" that can be appreciated only from directly overhead, where nobody but the cameraman gets to sit.
What about gymnastics in the Fat Guy Olympics, you say? Well, what about it? That's for graceful kids with serious talent who do it full time and this is the Fat Guy Olympics, so let's not get all purist. You want to see serious injuries here? Just the limbering up exercises will send our Fat Guys to the emergency room, never mind all that tumbling and flipping and contorting. Besides, those little girl gymnasts are all kidnapped from their families at age 5 and sent to live with sadistic coaches with bad breath and furry eyebrows until they are 16 or 17, at which point they are over the hill and finally taught to read. Then they marry some creepy politician with pedophiliac tendencies who has bad breath and furry eyebrows and their lives become even more miserable, if that's at all possible. No, thanks.
There's always the boat races. Not the rowing kind, of course. Please! That's for young Ivy League college boys from wealthy families. You take a bunch of small motorboats in identical states of disrepair filled with too many people, all of them drinking beer and whiskey and insisting that they be allowed to take the wheel. The first one out of the channel and into open water without capsizing wins. Extra points will be awarded for the skillful avoidance of competing motorboats going in circles as the crew fights over the driver's seat. And at the finish line? What else, more food and beer!
So there you have your Fat Guy Olympics, one proudly sponsored by Budweiser, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, and featuring competitors to which the average person can easily relate. No interviews with laser-focused young bundles of sinew and testosterone with absolutely nothing on their minds but their own narrow interests. Fun guys having a good time is what we'll see, and a feeling that, unlike watching the regular Olympics; "Hey, I could do that!" And who knows, the Chinese National Basketball team just might be able to win the gold at these games. I wouldn't count on it, though. Those fat guy amateurs can be pretty vicious with the elbows and tripping their opponents. And when there's beer and food ads a reward, don't rule out a lot of punches being thrown too.
Then you have the United States, home of basketball, fielding Dream Teams of established NBA professionals and standout college basketball players just as talented as Yao Ming and every one of them really tall. While many people decry the fact that professional athletes were included in the Olympics in recent years, it's simply a reflection of reality. In order to compete at that level in any sport, an athlete needs to work and train on a full-time basis, and in the meantime he or she needs to eat, pay the rent and travel all over the place from game to game. Somebody's paying these people, and paying them quite well. There haven't been any pure amateurs in the Olympics since the 1920's, and they all stunk, their "records" routinely being broken by today's 12-years olds.
The fact that nations take these games so seriously has always made a joke of the amateur status of athletes, with many countries spending fortunes on training and fielding the best possible teams of athletes. The only recent exception was the Jamaican bobsledding team from a couple of Olympics ago, a welcome comic relief from the grim do-or-die spirit of these games. So, in order to bring back the spirit of true amateur sportsmanship, why not hold the Fat Guy Olympics next time? Let regular people who hold regular jobs and play sports as a hobby compete for medals. While no world records are likely to be set in any sport, the entertainment value will be far greater.
Start off with Fat Guy Basketball, pitting teams of working stiffs against each other, older guys who like to get together a couple of nights a week and wheeze their way through a basketball game over a couple of beers, sneaking a cigarette or two during the time outs, which by the way, will have to be doubled or tripled to allow these pot bellied amateurs to catch their breath, have a cold one and brag on their cell phones to their families on how they are kicking serious butt. The rules of the game would also have to be altered or relaxed, and no one should look forward to a lot of fast breaks and slam-dunking. There will be much arguing and a few "do-overs," but the results will be pretty amusing and a true reflection of what amateur sports are like.
The Fat Guy Olympics can also include so-called sports like golf, bowling, darts and pool, games that require little exertion and at which many fat guys excel. Pin ball might be a good bet, too. The heck with all that sweaty running around and jumping over stuff, that's for the young and fit professionals. Races in the Fat Guy Olympics will be no longer than say, the 20 yard dash, or the 20 yard saunter, and to maximize the competitive juices, have the race end at a buffet table loaded with tasty treats. If you want to see a fat guy move real quick, there'd better be some chicken wings at the end of the race.
In the swimming pool competitions, forget the 300 meter butterfly or the platform diving. Make the swimming races once across the pool, again with a reward at the finish line, say a keg of beer. As for diving, there could be a Cannonball competition, see who can make the biggest splash. The Cannonball event would favor the tubbiest athletes, as would the Freestyle Bellyflop. Judges would award medals according to the size of the splash, spectators soaked and the loudness of impact. That's a lot more fun than Synchronized Swimming, a real snooze of a "sport" that can be appreciated only from directly overhead, where nobody but the cameraman gets to sit.
What about gymnastics in the Fat Guy Olympics, you say? Well, what about it? That's for graceful kids with serious talent who do it full time and this is the Fat Guy Olympics, so let's not get all purist. You want to see serious injuries here? Just the limbering up exercises will send our Fat Guys to the emergency room, never mind all that tumbling and flipping and contorting. Besides, those little girl gymnasts are all kidnapped from their families at age 5 and sent to live with sadistic coaches with bad breath and furry eyebrows until they are 16 or 17, at which point they are over the hill and finally taught to read. Then they marry some creepy politician with pedophiliac tendencies who has bad breath and furry eyebrows and their lives become even more miserable, if that's at all possible. No, thanks.
There's always the boat races. Not the rowing kind, of course. Please! That's for young Ivy League college boys from wealthy families. You take a bunch of small motorboats in identical states of disrepair filled with too many people, all of them drinking beer and whiskey and insisting that they be allowed to take the wheel. The first one out of the channel and into open water without capsizing wins. Extra points will be awarded for the skillful avoidance of competing motorboats going in circles as the crew fights over the driver's seat. And at the finish line? What else, more food and beer!
So there you have your Fat Guy Olympics, one proudly sponsored by Budweiser, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, and featuring competitors to which the average person can easily relate. No interviews with laser-focused young bundles of sinew and testosterone with absolutely nothing on their minds but their own narrow interests. Fun guys having a good time is what we'll see, and a feeling that, unlike watching the regular Olympics; "Hey, I could do that!" And who knows, the Chinese National Basketball team just might be able to win the gold at these games. I wouldn't count on it, though. Those fat guy amateurs can be pretty vicious with the elbows and tripping their opponents. And when there's beer and food ads a reward, don't rule out a lot of punches being thrown too.
July 22, 2008
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 113
Yes, the lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lion is the only one getting up afterwards. Feeling pretty satisfied too after such a tasty and easily obtained meal, most likely looking forward to some triumphant roaring and a good, long nap.
DOPOTO REPORTS: MYSTERIES ABOUND IN TANZANIA. ALBINO HUNTING AND WITCH DOCTORS
We here at The Department of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) figured that the trade in tiger parts and tiger farming for dubious medicinal purposes in China is about as backwards as you can get in the 21st Century. It turns out that's not the case. Tiger farming has been outdone easily in the backward and macabre department by the use of human bodies in good luck potions. In Tanzania, witch doctors (!) seek out human albino body parts. Since March of this year, 25 albinos have been murdered with machetes, the latest being a 7 month old baby butchered on the orders of a witch doctor. Their belief is that potions made from the legs, hair, hands and blood of a human albino can make a person rich quickly. No mention is made of the fact that in Tanzania nobody seems to get rich other than witch doctors selling expensive albino potions.
Tanzania, a nation blessed with fertile land, seaports, gold and diamond deposits as well as natural gas reserves, somehow manages to place 178th out of 192 places in per-capita income in the world. That nation makes Haiti seem wealthy by comparison. Not a huge surprise in a country that has witch doctors and kills and dismembers albinos for luck. What is a mystery is why no one has taken their machetes to the witch doctors yet, presumably the traditional Tanzanian method of lodging a medical malpractice complaint. No further study of that question is currently planned at DOPOTO, content in the knowledge that Tanzania is really far away and the people there are too poor and too distracted by albino hunting to travel here. Our official position is that this is one of life's mysteries, but the truth is that we really don't want to know. The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious has, however, issued an official warning to Johnny and Edgar Winter not to tour Tanzania any time soon.
This tawdry fiasco has led DOPOTO to briefly explore another mystery, the proliferation of machetes in Third World nations. Outside of cutting sugar cane and clearing thick jungle brush, the machete has few practical applications, although it has been widely adapted as "the poor man's sword." Why any man, poor or otherwise, would consider using a sword in today's world of laser-sighted rifles, machine guns and heat-seeking missiles is a further mystery and perhaps a ready explanation of why some armies are a lot more effective than others.
There is some evidence in nations with a high rate of illiteracy that clever enemies have convinced some armies that the Geneva Convention prohibits the use of firearms in warfare, even going as far as waving an official looking piece of paper at them (which in reality, is a flyer for an aluminum siding contractor) to convince them to use only machetes in their war or face annihilation by United Nations troops armed only with blue helmets. Primitive illiterates being an extremely superstitious lot, have a paralyzing fear of blue helmets and so agree to lay down their guns and use only machetes. After that, the war usually goes pretty smooth for the side that can read and uses modern weapons. So perhaps the solution in Tanzania is to arm all albinos with automatic weapons and bolt a cowbell around the witch doctors' necks as an early warning system. We here at DOPOTO do try to help wherever we can, no matter how strong the temptation to roll into a fetal position and wail at the madness of this world.
Tanzania, a nation blessed with fertile land, seaports, gold and diamond deposits as well as natural gas reserves, somehow manages to place 178th out of 192 places in per-capita income in the world. That nation makes Haiti seem wealthy by comparison. Not a huge surprise in a country that has witch doctors and kills and dismembers albinos for luck. What is a mystery is why no one has taken their machetes to the witch doctors yet, presumably the traditional Tanzanian method of lodging a medical malpractice complaint. No further study of that question is currently planned at DOPOTO, content in the knowledge that Tanzania is really far away and the people there are too poor and too distracted by albino hunting to travel here. Our official position is that this is one of life's mysteries, but the truth is that we really don't want to know. The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious has, however, issued an official warning to Johnny and Edgar Winter not to tour Tanzania any time soon.
This tawdry fiasco has led DOPOTO to briefly explore another mystery, the proliferation of machetes in Third World nations. Outside of cutting sugar cane and clearing thick jungle brush, the machete has few practical applications, although it has been widely adapted as "the poor man's sword." Why any man, poor or otherwise, would consider using a sword in today's world of laser-sighted rifles, machine guns and heat-seeking missiles is a further mystery and perhaps a ready explanation of why some armies are a lot more effective than others.
There is some evidence in nations with a high rate of illiteracy that clever enemies have convinced some armies that the Geneva Convention prohibits the use of firearms in warfare, even going as far as waving an official looking piece of paper at them (which in reality, is a flyer for an aluminum siding contractor) to convince them to use only machetes in their war or face annihilation by United Nations troops armed only with blue helmets. Primitive illiterates being an extremely superstitious lot, have a paralyzing fear of blue helmets and so agree to lay down their guns and use only machetes. After that, the war usually goes pretty smooth for the side that can read and uses modern weapons. So perhaps the solution in Tanzania is to arm all albinos with automatic weapons and bolt a cowbell around the witch doctors' necks as an early warning system. We here at DOPOTO do try to help wherever we can, no matter how strong the temptation to roll into a fetal position and wail at the madness of this world.
July 21, 2008
BACK TO NATURE, MY ASS
Are we Green yet? Did we miss anything? The G-8 summit in Japan is over and they promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically over the course of the next 30 years or so, or when all the pricipals are long dead or out of office. They offered no specifics at all, just a vague notion to stop poisoning ourselves by doing, oh, we don't know,... Green Stuff, yeah, good old healthy Green Stuff! Looking forward to next year's meeting where we can decide to end disease, poverty, war and starvation over the next, say... 75 years, yeah, that oughta do it. Thank you, thank you very much.
G-8 stands for the Group of Eight, presumably the 8 most industrialized and polluting nations, and the wealthiest, too. These self-appointed elites of the planet are France, The United States, Canada, Russia, The United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and Japan. They used to be G-6 until Russia and Italy were invited into this exclusive men's club. In recent years they are unofficially G-9, the ninth member being a representative of the European Union who takes part but cannot host a meeting or cast a vote, as if these votes mean anything anyway. There's nothing binding in these photo-op meetings, and bedsides, they don't speak for China and India, two giant and growing economies that represent almost 37% of humanity and together contain 41% of the world's poorest people.
So maybe next year they ought to have a G-10 meeting in the laughable hopes that India and China will cease their safety-free polluting ways, those nations currently sending up industrial black clouds of gunk far surpassing those of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sheffield, England back in the heyday of non-regulated industrialism in the Western World. The Industrial Revolution produced as much slow death as steel until those nations set some rules for dumping toxins into the water and atmosphere and started, with much corporate resistance even until this day, to clean up their acts. Many industries just threw up their hands and shipped their polluting operations to nations that wanted money more than the health of their citizens. So maybe G-192 is the way to go, 192 being the number of member countries of the United Nations.
Forget returning to Mother Nature for answers like some drug-addled hippies in a Volkswagon van and a tepee and a vague notion of organic living. It was always technology that solved mankind's problems, from fossil fuels that made modern living possible, to scientific labs curing diseases to air conditioning that made life bearable and productive in hot climates. Don't forget the huge building projects to build sanitation facilities that have saved more lives than all the world's doctors combined, simply providing clean water. This technology has almost never come from the halls of any government, but from private individuals and groups of people. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone for the benefit of the government. Henry Ford didn't produce affordable automobiles on his assembly lines because the mayor asked him to. What governments can do, though, is to provide money for researchers and stay out of their way.
Farming in the United States is not the world's most productive per-acre because our farmers work sunup to sunset. Everybody's farmers do, but our farmers use an impressive arsenal of science and technology to constantly improve their yield and renew the fertility of their land. The results speak for themselves and America feeds a goodly portion of the globe. So with petroleum running out and the demand for it climbing every day, who will solve the energy and pollution crisis threatening the whole world with catastrophic climate change? Here's a clue; it won't be a committee and it won't be any government officials. It will be some really smart and dedicated people working on a problem that fascinates them, and people who will expect to make a lot of money from their inventions. This isn't a comic book where Superman saves the world for nothing.
And not only is this world being poisoned, but it's starving, too, to the tune of 36,000 deaths every single day. So growing our own gasoline might mean losing valuable farmland and then 100,000 deaths a day might be the norm, as if even one starvation death on a bountiful planet is normal or in any way acceptable. So maybe all those dreams of corn being our energy savior amounts to a death sentence for thousands a day. Is that okay with G8? Or anybody? And again, the answer is not less technology, but different technology and plenty of it.
Maybe by making water desalinization a simpler and cheaper process the people who live in dry climates might use the sea to grow their food. There are over 350 million people living in the Sahara and its surrounding dust bowl, and they're not moving to anyplace more hospitable anytime soon. Many of the nations there import 90% of their food staples, and with fuel being so expensive and farmland being lost to bio-fuels, food is getting too expensive for them and they're pretty much screwed without a long-term solution. So maybe some of these oil-rich tyrannies can pony up some dough before the oil taps dry up and they're back to making their own shoes and traveling from oasis to oasis on camel back reminiscing about the good old days when they ate caviar for breakfast and the Western world forgave them for enslaving their women.
That might involve building universities that teach more than religious fairy tales and leaning heavily on the knowledge and technology of the Western nations they consider infidels, but tough crap. Western nations are not crazy about buying oil from them either but they do anyway so that their people can live at a certain standard. That's supposed to be the name of the game for governments, protecting their citizens, not eating caviar for breakfast at the mortal peril of their nation's future. And helping your neighbor when he is starving is not only a good moral principle but a practical policy in case the shoe is on the other foot someday. Whatever religion you subscribe to, they all acknowledge that what goes around, comes around, whether they call it karma or do-unto-others or what-have-you. To have good neighbors you need to first be a good neighbor.
And in this global economy and increasingly smaller world, everybody is your neighbor. In anybody's neighborhood, the 8 richest of them don't get to set community policy for everybody else (Okay, maybe they do, but that's another problem people need to work on). And when those 8 neighbors don't commit to obeying the new rules themselves, well, they shouldn't be all that shocked when a brick or two sails through their windows. No one man can build a subway system or a Panama Canal, but a whole bunch of them sure can. But when those subways and canals are threatened with being underneath the melted ice cap-swollen oceans because we refuse to stop burning fossil fuels, maybe a whole bunch of us should collaborate on some new technology that keeps the seashores right where they are otherwise Mother Nature just might decide to irrigate the Sahara herself with a hundred feet of sea water.
And let's try not to be too disappointed if the new technology doesn't resemble some Utopian idea of vast green meadows and forests renewing themselves eternally while God's creatures frolic in the sun. That was what the planet was like before humans took over and multiplied ourselves like those Biblical grains of sand. And that's what it will return to if we join the dinosaurs and dodo birds on the extinct list. It's not the planet that is in any danger, it is us. Any volunteers for disappearing forever? Can I get a show of hands here? No? Okay, then let the scientists get busy and stop making vague promises that have no basis in reality and dreaming naive Green Dreams that don't take the great mass of humanity into account.
G-8 stands for the Group of Eight, presumably the 8 most industrialized and polluting nations, and the wealthiest, too. These self-appointed elites of the planet are France, The United States, Canada, Russia, The United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and Japan. They used to be G-6 until Russia and Italy were invited into this exclusive men's club. In recent years they are unofficially G-9, the ninth member being a representative of the European Union who takes part but cannot host a meeting or cast a vote, as if these votes mean anything anyway. There's nothing binding in these photo-op meetings, and bedsides, they don't speak for China and India, two giant and growing economies that represent almost 37% of humanity and together contain 41% of the world's poorest people.
So maybe next year they ought to have a G-10 meeting in the laughable hopes that India and China will cease their safety-free polluting ways, those nations currently sending up industrial black clouds of gunk far surpassing those of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sheffield, England back in the heyday of non-regulated industrialism in the Western World. The Industrial Revolution produced as much slow death as steel until those nations set some rules for dumping toxins into the water and atmosphere and started, with much corporate resistance even until this day, to clean up their acts. Many industries just threw up their hands and shipped their polluting operations to nations that wanted money more than the health of their citizens. So maybe G-192 is the way to go, 192 being the number of member countries of the United Nations.
Forget returning to Mother Nature for answers like some drug-addled hippies in a Volkswagon van and a tepee and a vague notion of organic living. It was always technology that solved mankind's problems, from fossil fuels that made modern living possible, to scientific labs curing diseases to air conditioning that made life bearable and productive in hot climates. Don't forget the huge building projects to build sanitation facilities that have saved more lives than all the world's doctors combined, simply providing clean water. This technology has almost never come from the halls of any government, but from private individuals and groups of people. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone for the benefit of the government. Henry Ford didn't produce affordable automobiles on his assembly lines because the mayor asked him to. What governments can do, though, is to provide money for researchers and stay out of their way.
Farming in the United States is not the world's most productive per-acre because our farmers work sunup to sunset. Everybody's farmers do, but our farmers use an impressive arsenal of science and technology to constantly improve their yield and renew the fertility of their land. The results speak for themselves and America feeds a goodly portion of the globe. So with petroleum running out and the demand for it climbing every day, who will solve the energy and pollution crisis threatening the whole world with catastrophic climate change? Here's a clue; it won't be a committee and it won't be any government officials. It will be some really smart and dedicated people working on a problem that fascinates them, and people who will expect to make a lot of money from their inventions. This isn't a comic book where Superman saves the world for nothing.
And not only is this world being poisoned, but it's starving, too, to the tune of 36,000 deaths every single day. So growing our own gasoline might mean losing valuable farmland and then 100,000 deaths a day might be the norm, as if even one starvation death on a bountiful planet is normal or in any way acceptable. So maybe all those dreams of corn being our energy savior amounts to a death sentence for thousands a day. Is that okay with G8? Or anybody? And again, the answer is not less technology, but different technology and plenty of it.
Maybe by making water desalinization a simpler and cheaper process the people who live in dry climates might use the sea to grow their food. There are over 350 million people living in the Sahara and its surrounding dust bowl, and they're not moving to anyplace more hospitable anytime soon. Many of the nations there import 90% of their food staples, and with fuel being so expensive and farmland being lost to bio-fuels, food is getting too expensive for them and they're pretty much screwed without a long-term solution. So maybe some of these oil-rich tyrannies can pony up some dough before the oil taps dry up and they're back to making their own shoes and traveling from oasis to oasis on camel back reminiscing about the good old days when they ate caviar for breakfast and the Western world forgave them for enslaving their women.
That might involve building universities that teach more than religious fairy tales and leaning heavily on the knowledge and technology of the Western nations they consider infidels, but tough crap. Western nations are not crazy about buying oil from them either but they do anyway so that their people can live at a certain standard. That's supposed to be the name of the game for governments, protecting their citizens, not eating caviar for breakfast at the mortal peril of their nation's future. And helping your neighbor when he is starving is not only a good moral principle but a practical policy in case the shoe is on the other foot someday. Whatever religion you subscribe to, they all acknowledge that what goes around, comes around, whether they call it karma or do-unto-others or what-have-you. To have good neighbors you need to first be a good neighbor.
And in this global economy and increasingly smaller world, everybody is your neighbor. In anybody's neighborhood, the 8 richest of them don't get to set community policy for everybody else (Okay, maybe they do, but that's another problem people need to work on). And when those 8 neighbors don't commit to obeying the new rules themselves, well, they shouldn't be all that shocked when a brick or two sails through their windows. No one man can build a subway system or a Panama Canal, but a whole bunch of them sure can. But when those subways and canals are threatened with being underneath the melted ice cap-swollen oceans because we refuse to stop burning fossil fuels, maybe a whole bunch of us should collaborate on some new technology that keeps the seashores right where they are otherwise Mother Nature just might decide to irrigate the Sahara herself with a hundred feet of sea water.
And let's try not to be too disappointed if the new technology doesn't resemble some Utopian idea of vast green meadows and forests renewing themselves eternally while God's creatures frolic in the sun. That was what the planet was like before humans took over and multiplied ourselves like those Biblical grains of sand. And that's what it will return to if we join the dinosaurs and dodo birds on the extinct list. It's not the planet that is in any danger, it is us. Any volunteers for disappearing forever? Can I get a show of hands here? No? Okay, then let the scientists get busy and stop making vague promises that have no basis in reality and dreaming naive Green Dreams that don't take the great mass of humanity into account.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 112
Funerals are for our benefit, not the dead guy's. He's past all that. Nothing we do for them or say about them makes a dime's worth of difference to the dead. They're pretty indifferent, to say the least, and completely unresponsive to praise or displays of affection. Do something nice today for somebody still breathing and tell them you love them. If they don't appreciate it or blow you off, well, you tried. That's one less funeral you have to attend when the time comes or one less guest to make a fuss over your dead carcass if you go first.
July 20, 2008
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 111
There's something about wild horses, there just is. Majestic, beautiful, graceful, spirited, powerful, indomitable yet elusive, they touch our imaginations as do few other wild creatures. From magnificent primitive cave paintings to Frederick Remington sculptures and canvasses, we have have been trying to capture their essence for millennia, yet still they move in their own separate reality, galloping for sheer joy, free, forever free. May they always touch our souls and haunt our dreams, just beyond our reach. Free...
WILLIS HAVILAND CARRIER, GREAT AMERICAN
Let us take time out from dodging the extreme heat to thank one Willis Haviland Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning. Without this man's efforts Arizona would still be populated by cranky prospectors and the bleached bones of stray cattle and I'd be even more miserable in the summertime than I usually am. A hundred degrees is way too hot for a species like humans who came of age during an Ice Age. Maybe that traumatic history is why so many of us gravitate toward tropical climates, some ancient visceral instinct to try to stay warm in a world of mile-thick ice. Most of us (my hand is raised) enjoy our four seasons and endure the blazing Summers basically moping around in a foul mood slinking from one air conditioned space to another. Thank you, Mr. Carrier.
When tropical weather comes to New York City where I live, as it does every summer for a month or two, I am reminded why countries that are hot all the time are fairly backwards compared to cooler places. Who's got the energy to build a great civilization when it's blazing hot all the time? By the way, Willis Carrier grew up in the Snow Belt of western New York State, not in any of the hot parts of our nation. The people there were having their brains fried a little too much to invent anything other than moonshine whiskey to try and take their minds off the intense heat. They'd sit on their porches during their unbearable summers feebly waving paper fans at their faces, swatting flies and getting hammered on corn liquor. And who could blame them?
Since Carrier's invention the Sun Belt has seen a huge increase in population and productivity. For my money, those people can have the heat. Until they air condition the whole of the Sun Belt, indoors and out, I'm staying put in New Yolk City, where at least I know there's a cool Autumn and cold Winter ahead as my reward for surviving another blazing Summer. There's also lots of air conditioned movie theaters and museums and the like around here. Those New Yorkers with money beat it out of here for the mountains or some balmy seashore, but for the rest of us we build our own strategies for beating the heat. Mine is basically moping around not doing all that much.
Others like to go to our many beaches or public swimming pools. Summer in New York is great for kids, and there's a lot of breezy parks around for them to get into Summertime kid mischief. For older guys, there's also plenty of girl watching to be done, what with the weather dictating that the females wear very little, and New York ladies do it in high style as only they can. And it's always a gas to watch some of these worldly, sophisticated ladies reverting to giggling little girls when the ice cream man comes around ringing his bell.
All in all, Summer's not too horrible when you think about it, especially once the sun goes down. That's when Coney Island is at its exotic best, when Yankee Stadium is an electric emerald cathedral and when the musicians pull out their guitars and congas in Washington Square Park while the pretty girls dance. New York City is still the best place in the planet, any time of the year. But still I salute Willis Haviland Carrier, inventor of air conditioning and for that reason alone, a Great American.
When tropical weather comes to New York City where I live, as it does every summer for a month or two, I am reminded why countries that are hot all the time are fairly backwards compared to cooler places. Who's got the energy to build a great civilization when it's blazing hot all the time? By the way, Willis Carrier grew up in the Snow Belt of western New York State, not in any of the hot parts of our nation. The people there were having their brains fried a little too much to invent anything other than moonshine whiskey to try and take their minds off the intense heat. They'd sit on their porches during their unbearable summers feebly waving paper fans at their faces, swatting flies and getting hammered on corn liquor. And who could blame them?
Since Carrier's invention the Sun Belt has seen a huge increase in population and productivity. For my money, those people can have the heat. Until they air condition the whole of the Sun Belt, indoors and out, I'm staying put in New Yolk City, where at least I know there's a cool Autumn and cold Winter ahead as my reward for surviving another blazing Summer. There's also lots of air conditioned movie theaters and museums and the like around here. Those New Yorkers with money beat it out of here for the mountains or some balmy seashore, but for the rest of us we build our own strategies for beating the heat. Mine is basically moping around not doing all that much.
Others like to go to our many beaches or public swimming pools. Summer in New York is great for kids, and there's a lot of breezy parks around for them to get into Summertime kid mischief. For older guys, there's also plenty of girl watching to be done, what with the weather dictating that the females wear very little, and New York ladies do it in high style as only they can. And it's always a gas to watch some of these worldly, sophisticated ladies reverting to giggling little girls when the ice cream man comes around ringing his bell.
All in all, Summer's not too horrible when you think about it, especially once the sun goes down. That's when Coney Island is at its exotic best, when Yankee Stadium is an electric emerald cathedral and when the musicians pull out their guitars and congas in Washington Square Park while the pretty girls dance. New York City is still the best place in the planet, any time of the year. But still I salute Willis Haviland Carrier, inventor of air conditioning and for that reason alone, a Great American.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 110
Who says there are no miracles? Keith Richards is still alive, isn't he? Still touring with The Rolling Stones too, still doing crazy things like falling out of a coconut tree and landing on his head, and making no apologies for being Keith Richards. What else do you need to know? Okay, here's another: Check out a baby for a while, any baby anywhere. Miracles surround us always. Act accordingly and show some damned reverence.
FUN WITH WORDS
The English Language is a fluid thing, changing with the times. If it wasn't, we'd still be using words like doth and thou and goeth, sounding like some wig head English hambone from a costume drama or a character from Biblical times. Or we might hang on to more recent idioms like twenty-three skiddoo, swell dame, gat and the cat's pajamas and sound like we were in a black and white movie starring Edward G. Robinson. Our slang and idioms date us, and in many ways dictate our lifelong sensibilities. Some words last for generations, like cool, although before it meat hip it meant aloof and uninterested to previous generations. In the 1930's, when you said "She was a cool customer," that meant she wasn't buying what you were selling, as they so illustratively phrased it.
And until recent decades, the word "gay" had a very different meaning, and now that lighthearted and descriptive word is forever lost to the English language except to describe people living "alternative lifestyles," another euphemism for homosexuality. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just don't appropriate the language to make something seem other than what it really is. Calling a spade a spade seems to be a thing of the past. Indeed, not many people today know the difference between a shovel and a spade. Well, a shovel is a tool for digging, and a spade is either a card suit, or a black guy if you're of a "certain mindset," code for racist. Hey, everybody knows that minorities must be described today with that most confusing and ambiguous of labels: "People of Color." What, like white people are transparent? While Nigger, Spic, Towel-head, Camel Jockey, Dago, Mick and Kike are rightly of the menu, I was just getting used to African-American, Latino, Oriental, Native American and what-have-you. Doesn't take long to fall behind the times, which is why I try to stick to proper English, so far as that's possible today.
One cool thing about passing slang and idioms was that they painted a very clear picture. Like when Shakespeare described a woman trying a little too hard to throw off suspicion for something she did, rather than act surprised and cool about the accusations: "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." In the 1930's, a person suspected of wrongdoing but acting smug and untouchable was someone that "butter wouldn't melt in his mouth." Real cool, frigid even. But if they were exposed, say, back in the early 1900's, they "got their comeuppance." Colorful language, very concise and painting a vivid mental picture.
So what's happening today on the slang front? What's the 4-1-1? Lots of things, like the new code for sex, "hitting it" or wanting sex, "I gotta hit that." That's pretty funny, if a bit impersonal, but not much more so than "wanting a piece of that" or "getting it on." On the general idiom front, however, English is taking a beating in the usage department as we move away from clarity and use words more as tools of deception, the very opposite of what language is meant to be, an accurate means of communication representing an improvement over grunting or barking or whatever it is early humans did to communicate to each other that they were hungry or wanted to hit that.
Government and corporations are the biggest culprits when it comes to using words to deceive, using terms like "downsizing" to replace "you're fired, and so is your whole department." When your business is ill-managed and losing its shirt, turning out inferior products and bleeding red ink, it's not really so bad as all that if you call it a "market adjustment." In a way, that has some truth to it: people have adjusted quite well to buying your competitors' products. "Outsourcing" is a nice way of saying that the company's leaders have decided to betray the loyal workers who made them wealthy by shipping their jobs overseas. The fact that this is an underhanded deed is illustrated by these companies' insistence that their foreign service representatives use assumed names like Freddy and Joan when doing business with English-speaking customers, like we're all falling for that routine when their accent is thicker than an executive waistline.
The government has been having fun with words for a long time, and now that it's largely staffed by corporate treasury looters, the sky's the limit, to use an old but effective euphemism. My personal favorite? Hard to say with all the rich choices, but I'll have to go with "Alternate explanation" to describe a blatant lie. What was wrong with the old lie code word "misstatement?" And how about "Strategic realignment" for retreat? "Miscommunication" is code for fouling things up in every possible way. "Earmarks" is the polite new phrase for "pork barrel," the practice of loading worthy legislation with hundreds of tax-wasting vanity appropriations of our money by greedy politicians. "Economic downturn" is the phrase used to avoid the reality of the recession they caused with all their miscommunication and earmarks.
As for the rest of us, we seem content to turn nouns into verbs. I suppose this started back in the 1960's and early 70's, when people were too high to think of a verb for having a good time, and so appropriated the word party and invented "partying." Then along came parenting, mentoring and now texting. What's next, "mealing" for eating? "Eviling" for being a rat bastard? How about "oafing" to describe the process of being too lazy to use a dictionary? You don't even have to lift one of those voluminous volumes anymore, just mouse click on your computer to find out the proper spelling, definition and usage of any word. There's also a thesaurus in there for finding perfect synonyms. Of course that might mean taking valuable time away from our texting in neo-shorthand, so let's just keep on having fun with words until they lose their meaning altogether. I'll just be goodbying you now.
And until recent decades, the word "gay" had a very different meaning, and now that lighthearted and descriptive word is forever lost to the English language except to describe people living "alternative lifestyles," another euphemism for homosexuality. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just don't appropriate the language to make something seem other than what it really is. Calling a spade a spade seems to be a thing of the past. Indeed, not many people today know the difference between a shovel and a spade. Well, a shovel is a tool for digging, and a spade is either a card suit, or a black guy if you're of a "certain mindset," code for racist. Hey, everybody knows that minorities must be described today with that most confusing and ambiguous of labels: "People of Color." What, like white people are transparent? While Nigger, Spic, Towel-head, Camel Jockey, Dago, Mick and Kike are rightly of the menu, I was just getting used to African-American, Latino, Oriental, Native American and what-have-you. Doesn't take long to fall behind the times, which is why I try to stick to proper English, so far as that's possible today.
One cool thing about passing slang and idioms was that they painted a very clear picture. Like when Shakespeare described a woman trying a little too hard to throw off suspicion for something she did, rather than act surprised and cool about the accusations: "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." In the 1930's, a person suspected of wrongdoing but acting smug and untouchable was someone that "butter wouldn't melt in his mouth." Real cool, frigid even. But if they were exposed, say, back in the early 1900's, they "got their comeuppance." Colorful language, very concise and painting a vivid mental picture.
So what's happening today on the slang front? What's the 4-1-1? Lots of things, like the new code for sex, "hitting it" or wanting sex, "I gotta hit that." That's pretty funny, if a bit impersonal, but not much more so than "wanting a piece of that" or "getting it on." On the general idiom front, however, English is taking a beating in the usage department as we move away from clarity and use words more as tools of deception, the very opposite of what language is meant to be, an accurate means of communication representing an improvement over grunting or barking or whatever it is early humans did to communicate to each other that they were hungry or wanted to hit that.
Government and corporations are the biggest culprits when it comes to using words to deceive, using terms like "downsizing" to replace "you're fired, and so is your whole department." When your business is ill-managed and losing its shirt, turning out inferior products and bleeding red ink, it's not really so bad as all that if you call it a "market adjustment." In a way, that has some truth to it: people have adjusted quite well to buying your competitors' products. "Outsourcing" is a nice way of saying that the company's leaders have decided to betray the loyal workers who made them wealthy by shipping their jobs overseas. The fact that this is an underhanded deed is illustrated by these companies' insistence that their foreign service representatives use assumed names like Freddy and Joan when doing business with English-speaking customers, like we're all falling for that routine when their accent is thicker than an executive waistline.
The government has been having fun with words for a long time, and now that it's largely staffed by corporate treasury looters, the sky's the limit, to use an old but effective euphemism. My personal favorite? Hard to say with all the rich choices, but I'll have to go with "Alternate explanation" to describe a blatant lie. What was wrong with the old lie code word "misstatement?" And how about "Strategic realignment" for retreat? "Miscommunication" is code for fouling things up in every possible way. "Earmarks" is the polite new phrase for "pork barrel," the practice of loading worthy legislation with hundreds of tax-wasting vanity appropriations of our money by greedy politicians. "Economic downturn" is the phrase used to avoid the reality of the recession they caused with all their miscommunication and earmarks.
As for the rest of us, we seem content to turn nouns into verbs. I suppose this started back in the 1960's and early 70's, when people were too high to think of a verb for having a good time, and so appropriated the word party and invented "partying." Then along came parenting, mentoring and now texting. What's next, "mealing" for eating? "Eviling" for being a rat bastard? How about "oafing" to describe the process of being too lazy to use a dictionary? You don't even have to lift one of those voluminous volumes anymore, just mouse click on your computer to find out the proper spelling, definition and usage of any word. There's also a thesaurus in there for finding perfect synonyms. Of course that might mean taking valuable time away from our texting in neo-shorthand, so let's just keep on having fun with words until they lose their meaning altogether. I'll just be goodbying you now.
July 19, 2008
TRICK QUESTIONS
People often ask what's more important, money or happiness. What kind of stupid question is that? Give me the money, thank you, and I'll figure out a way to be happy, no problem. Then they tell you that money can't buy you happiness. What? Well, I'd sure like to field-test that whacky theory.
Others ask whether there is any meaning to life. Let me clear that one up for those tortured souls right now: There's plenty of meaning to life, it's just not the same in any two lives. To many of us, a huge part of the meaning of life is avoiding angst-ridden jerks who ask dumb-ass questions. Those people should pretty much hang out with each other and leave the rest of us alone to do as we will and enjoy our lives without looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Some ask what God looks like. That's easy. He's an old guy in robes with a long white beard who hurls thunderbolts around from time to time. Haven't these people ever seen any old oil paintings? That mystery was cleared up centuries ago.
And then you get the question I love most: "What's wrong with you?" Well, how much time have you got? The list is fairly lengthy. You'd better sit down. I'll go make some coffee, we're going to be here awhile.
We're people and we ask a lot of questions and that's as it should be. That's how we learn, that's how we get important information and that's how we find out about each other. Questions. It's a dim bulb indeed who doesn't ask plenty of them. But sometimes we ask trick questions that have no meaningful answers, like the money or happiness deal or the what's wrong with you bit. Here's one: "How many times do I have to tell you?" That usually means you're not doing what somebody else wants you to do, or that you weren't paying attention. Repetition usually doesn't change much about either of those scenarios.
Sometimes, being human, we try to pull a fast one and get caught. Then someone always asks you "Did you think you could get away with that?" Well... yeah, I sure did. Wasn't that friggin' obvious, you bozo?
We all sometimes ask questions we already know the answer to, like "What was I thinking?" That always follows some bonehead move on our part. In fact we know exactly what we were thinking, and when we ask that question it's just an admission that we were thinking something really, really dumb at the time but went through with it anyway, thinking that, yeah, I can get away with this. These things happen.
And some questions women pose to men have no good possible answers, like: "Does this dress make me look fat?" Now, there's a potential powder keg disguised as an innocent question. Or how about "Do you notice anything different about me?" when you don't notice a dime's worth of difference and now your mind is racing but nothing's coming to you. (New haircut? Did she lose a few pounds? Gain some? Nah, she'd never ask that if she gained a few. Must be a new outfit or something. Quick, quick!) But now it's too late since you didn't think fast enough and stalled too long or guessed completely wrong and you're quickly labeled as an insensitive lout, which, in all fairness to women, is not always an inaccurate assessment.
Which is why male/female relations are often conducted in code. Men are fairly oblivious but women notice everything so they speak to us in shorthand: "Are you cold?" means "I'm cold, make it warmer in here." "Is it stuffy in here?" is your cue to open a window. "Don't you love Periwinkle Blue?" means that you'll be spending your day off painting that color on your walls, maybe hanging matching curtains too. "Do you want Italian or Chinese?" means two things; A.- You're going to a restaurant tonight, and B.- It will be Italian food, the first choice mentioned.
"How long have you had those blue jeans?" means you're not going to have them much longer. Ditto "How can you stand that ratty old recliner?" Say goodbye to old reliable and remember it fondly while you're trying to get comfortable in your new modern, angular and iron-hard armchair while you're watching a ball game. "How was your day?" means you should say "Just fine," and then shut the hell up and listen to how her vexing day went. "What are you thinking about?" means "Are you thinking about me? About us?" so it's best to have a supply of stock answers handy so you don't have to admit you had absolutely nothing on your mind.
And never, ever reply when asked about your former lovers. Better the cold shoulder that the white hot eruption produced by any possible answer you might come up with. Ladies, do the same when your man asks that question. It's nobody else's business and a completely ridiculous question fueled by insecurity and designed to start a huge fight. Might as well ask somebody "Who's a better cook, my mother or your mother?" That's the grown-up equivalent of the school yard boast: "My Dad can beat up your Dad!" Everybody knows that their Mom is the best cook in the world and their Dad can beat anybody else's Dad. Why pop anybody else's balloons? These particular lines of questioning are harder to crack than than the DNA code and remain an eternal mystery, so until we figure it out it's best to keep our own counsel. Private thoughts are the way to go here, no matter how foreign a concept that may be to some of us.
And it's not only man-woman communications that's skewed with our unanswerable questions. It's human-to-human relations, no matter what our relationship or lack of one. Who hasn't asked a perfect stranger "Is is hot enough for you?" What's that supposed to mean and what do we expect in reply? Maybe "No, I'm from Hell, and I wish it was a whole lot hotter up here. Oh, by the way, I've come for your soul. This way, please..." Might serve us right for asking another trick question.
Others ask whether there is any meaning to life. Let me clear that one up for those tortured souls right now: There's plenty of meaning to life, it's just not the same in any two lives. To many of us, a huge part of the meaning of life is avoiding angst-ridden jerks who ask dumb-ass questions. Those people should pretty much hang out with each other and leave the rest of us alone to do as we will and enjoy our lives without looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Some ask what God looks like. That's easy. He's an old guy in robes with a long white beard who hurls thunderbolts around from time to time. Haven't these people ever seen any old oil paintings? That mystery was cleared up centuries ago.
And then you get the question I love most: "What's wrong with you?" Well, how much time have you got? The list is fairly lengthy. You'd better sit down. I'll go make some coffee, we're going to be here awhile.
We're people and we ask a lot of questions and that's as it should be. That's how we learn, that's how we get important information and that's how we find out about each other. Questions. It's a dim bulb indeed who doesn't ask plenty of them. But sometimes we ask trick questions that have no meaningful answers, like the money or happiness deal or the what's wrong with you bit. Here's one: "How many times do I have to tell you?" That usually means you're not doing what somebody else wants you to do, or that you weren't paying attention. Repetition usually doesn't change much about either of those scenarios.
Sometimes, being human, we try to pull a fast one and get caught. Then someone always asks you "Did you think you could get away with that?" Well... yeah, I sure did. Wasn't that friggin' obvious, you bozo?
We all sometimes ask questions we already know the answer to, like "What was I thinking?" That always follows some bonehead move on our part. In fact we know exactly what we were thinking, and when we ask that question it's just an admission that we were thinking something really, really dumb at the time but went through with it anyway, thinking that, yeah, I can get away with this. These things happen.
And some questions women pose to men have no good possible answers, like: "Does this dress make me look fat?" Now, there's a potential powder keg disguised as an innocent question. Or how about "Do you notice anything different about me?" when you don't notice a dime's worth of difference and now your mind is racing but nothing's coming to you. (New haircut? Did she lose a few pounds? Gain some? Nah, she'd never ask that if she gained a few. Must be a new outfit or something. Quick, quick!) But now it's too late since you didn't think fast enough and stalled too long or guessed completely wrong and you're quickly labeled as an insensitive lout, which, in all fairness to women, is not always an inaccurate assessment.
Which is why male/female relations are often conducted in code. Men are fairly oblivious but women notice everything so they speak to us in shorthand: "Are you cold?" means "I'm cold, make it warmer in here." "Is it stuffy in here?" is your cue to open a window. "Don't you love Periwinkle Blue?" means that you'll be spending your day off painting that color on your walls, maybe hanging matching curtains too. "Do you want Italian or Chinese?" means two things; A.- You're going to a restaurant tonight, and B.- It will be Italian food, the first choice mentioned.
"How long have you had those blue jeans?" means you're not going to have them much longer. Ditto "How can you stand that ratty old recliner?" Say goodbye to old reliable and remember it fondly while you're trying to get comfortable in your new modern, angular and iron-hard armchair while you're watching a ball game. "How was your day?" means you should say "Just fine," and then shut the hell up and listen to how her vexing day went. "What are you thinking about?" means "Are you thinking about me? About us?" so it's best to have a supply of stock answers handy so you don't have to admit you had absolutely nothing on your mind.
And never, ever reply when asked about your former lovers. Better the cold shoulder that the white hot eruption produced by any possible answer you might come up with. Ladies, do the same when your man asks that question. It's nobody else's business and a completely ridiculous question fueled by insecurity and designed to start a huge fight. Might as well ask somebody "Who's a better cook, my mother or your mother?" That's the grown-up equivalent of the school yard boast: "My Dad can beat up your Dad!" Everybody knows that their Mom is the best cook in the world and their Dad can beat anybody else's Dad. Why pop anybody else's balloons? These particular lines of questioning are harder to crack than than the DNA code and remain an eternal mystery, so until we figure it out it's best to keep our own counsel. Private thoughts are the way to go here, no matter how foreign a concept that may be to some of us.
And it's not only man-woman communications that's skewed with our unanswerable questions. It's human-to-human relations, no matter what our relationship or lack of one. Who hasn't asked a perfect stranger "Is is hot enough for you?" What's that supposed to mean and what do we expect in reply? Maybe "No, I'm from Hell, and I wish it was a whole lot hotter up here. Oh, by the way, I've come for your soul. This way, please..." Might serve us right for asking another trick question.
July 18, 2008
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 108
Don't fret when an elderly loved one experiences dementia. Envy them. To a senile person, everything is new again, and they are as children seeing the world for the first time, their eyes wide with wonder and their minds filled with endless questions. But on the practical side, maybe sewing their address into their clothing and having all family members wear tags and with their name and family relationship printed in large block letters (e.g.- JACK, YOUR SON or MILDRED, YOUR WIFE or BILLY, YOUR WISE ASS GRANDSON and so forth) might be a good idea. Other than that, be glad of them. There's many a family who wishes their elders were still with them, no matter what. Love them hard when they need it the most, just like they did for you so many times without a second thought. Take care of your own.
A SWEEPING SAGA OF ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE
When I see that description of a book for sale I move on to the next offering. Sweeping sagas of romance and adventure usually involve two impossibly attractive star-crossed lovers named Gabriella and Dirk jetting from continent to continent trying to right some grievous wrong done to one of them by some heinous corporate villain who's kidnapped Gabriella's physicist sister who holds the secret to the villain getting to dominate the world's governments and financial markets or some other such claptrap. And of course they move heaven and earth, rescue one another from certain death several times, have lots of hot sex and slay many dangerous thugs in order to rectify the situation before defeating the bad guy and living happily ever after in a seaside villa. No, thanks.
I'd almost rather read another Tom Clancy pre-fab spy thriller. Almost. But it's summertime now, and we all need to stock up on our light summer reading fare, and one of Clancy's cookie-cutter tales of implausible intrigue and mass slaughter knocked off by one of his assistants using his patented intrigue-novel formula just doesn't fit the bill. Steven King is out of the question too. Who needs a thousand pages of being creeped out on a balmy afternoon? That guy ought to be medicated or something. And forget the cascade of tell-all books by former officials of the Bush The Younger administration that explain everything about the criminal activities perpetrated by our government these past eight years except why they waited for a multi-million dollar book deal to spill the beans instead of standing up for what is right when all this stuff was going on and saving the nation much grief. That's like reading a book by Frank James blaming everything on Jesse but neglecting to say why he didn't stop him after his first murder and bank robbery and waited ten years to tell the story, after Jesse James was dead and their criminal enterprise went bust and he needed another huge payday.
So, what's on the reading list over here at the headquarters of bobcrespo.com? I'm glad you asked. Here's a short list of breezy summer reading you might like to get your hands on to while away your afternoons on your porch since the high price of electricity puts a crimp in your air conditioning budget and the price of gasoline sort of makes that road trip to the seashore completely out of reach. Consider these tomes:
THE WIT AND WISDOM OF DOCTOR PHIL, by Doctor Phil McGraw - The best thing about his book is that it's very short and has lots of pictures of Oprah in it; fat Oprah, medium Oprah, thin Oprah and back to the fat Oprah that America loves best. Doc Phil is all about the pandering.
THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING OZONE, by Al Gore - Mr. Gore, frustrated by the lack of world response to his book and his Oscar-winning movie about global warming, turns to the mystery genre to dramatize the problem. The best thing about it is that you can find it in the bargain bins, since it failed to sell very many copies in it's initial printing. In this gripping tale, Val Bore, a former Vice President of the United States turned private eye, lands the case of a lifetime when a beautiful but mysterious blonde shows up in his office telling an unlikely tale about her missing husband, corporate secrets and corruption and coverups at the highest levels of government. Follow the action as Val Bore skillfully runs down one lead after another, solves the case easily, names all the culprits, wins the Detective of The Year award but nobody cares, nobody gets arrested, nothing changes and he doesn't get any hot sex from the beautiful but mysterious blonde.
TRUMP: THE BOOK, by Donald Trump - Read all about Donald Trump and his adventures in media land, building tall buildings in a single bound, sweeping a series of airhead gold-digging bimbos off their feet, firing shallow yuppie apprentices left and right and acting smaller than anyone in history ever has who had all the advantages in life this man has enjoyed; born rich as Croseus, blessed with more publicity than Elvis Presley, living out his every dream in public and plastering his name in 40-foot high letters on every fifth tall building in the United States. On second thought, skip it. What is there left to know about Donald Trump? You won't hate him any less after reading 200 pages of his tiresome boasts. Maybe more, if that's possible.
MILLI VANILLI- AFTER THE FAKE MUSIC, by Milli Vanilli - Remember that pop duo that was big in the late 80's and early 90's? Well, don't feel bad, neither do most people. What distinguished them was their complete lack of distinction and the fact that they were stripped of their Grammy Award when it was revealed that they didn't do any of their own singing on their hit records and lip-synched their way through live performances. Apparently their thick German accents that made them sound more like a pair of Henry Kissingers than modern day Marvin Gayes finally betrayed them. One of them wound up dead of an overdose in 1998, either Milli or Vanilli, nobody really knows (or gives a rat's ass). Grippingly ghost-written by an anonymous writer, this little morality tale apparently fell on deaf ears as the recording industry continues to create fabricated pop stars who can't sing. Go figure.
SOME LIKE IT HOTTER, by Karl Rove - Mr. Rove, until now reticent to admit his role in shaping the policies of the Bush The Younger administration, documents his efforts to get the government to do nothing about greenhouse gas-emitting pollution and halting all official efforts at finding alternative energy sources to fossil fuels. Mr. Rove goes public now since it appears that a good chunk of his corporate profits and bribes will be going to defense attorneys since he decided to defy Congress and not answer their subpoena to testify about his shady activities in a non-elected and non-appointed job. Those Dream Teams of famous lawyers cost millions apiece. Having been squeezed out of the ultra-lucrative Hole In The Head Gang by gang leader Shotgun Dick Cheney, Rove has accepted the equally rewarding commission from Exxon-Mobile to write this rebuttal to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" in which he extolls a rosy future of comfortably warm climates for the entire world (and shove it up Cheney's mechanized butt). The first chapter is entitled: "A World-Wide California" and it goes downhill from there. There are a lot of good laughs in there, though, even if they are unintentional, like when Rove insists that Bush The Younger was actually in charge of anything besides clearing the brush from Texas, an endeavor that would take many hundreds of lifetimes to accomplish, but one well suited to President Rain Man. Take your comedy wherever you can find it.
MIDDLE AGED GUYS FROM BROOKLYN RULE, by R.R. Crespo - This fascinating book profiles a sexy, handsome and witty middle aged musician and writer from Brooklyn named Bob Crespo. Alright, I made this one up, but what the hell, why can't I jump on the shameless self-promotion band wagon like everyone else? You can however, on this very page, click on my SONGS menu or the STORIES & ESSAYS bar and check out my work. This middle aged guy from Brooklyn is back in the studio recording some new songs (doing my own playing and singing, too, thank you very much) and they're coming out just fine, and I DO rule. When the lovely wife lets me, that is. In the meantime, enjoy your summer reading, folks.
I'd almost rather read another Tom Clancy pre-fab spy thriller. Almost. But it's summertime now, and we all need to stock up on our light summer reading fare, and one of Clancy's cookie-cutter tales of implausible intrigue and mass slaughter knocked off by one of his assistants using his patented intrigue-novel formula just doesn't fit the bill. Steven King is out of the question too. Who needs a thousand pages of being creeped out on a balmy afternoon? That guy ought to be medicated or something. And forget the cascade of tell-all books by former officials of the Bush The Younger administration that explain everything about the criminal activities perpetrated by our government these past eight years except why they waited for a multi-million dollar book deal to spill the beans instead of standing up for what is right when all this stuff was going on and saving the nation much grief. That's like reading a book by Frank James blaming everything on Jesse but neglecting to say why he didn't stop him after his first murder and bank robbery and waited ten years to tell the story, after Jesse James was dead and their criminal enterprise went bust and he needed another huge payday.
So, what's on the reading list over here at the headquarters of bobcrespo.com? I'm glad you asked. Here's a short list of breezy summer reading you might like to get your hands on to while away your afternoons on your porch since the high price of electricity puts a crimp in your air conditioning budget and the price of gasoline sort of makes that road trip to the seashore completely out of reach. Consider these tomes:
THE WIT AND WISDOM OF DOCTOR PHIL, by Doctor Phil McGraw - The best thing about his book is that it's very short and has lots of pictures of Oprah in it; fat Oprah, medium Oprah, thin Oprah and back to the fat Oprah that America loves best. Doc Phil is all about the pandering.
THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING OZONE, by Al Gore - Mr. Gore, frustrated by the lack of world response to his book and his Oscar-winning movie about global warming, turns to the mystery genre to dramatize the problem. The best thing about it is that you can find it in the bargain bins, since it failed to sell very many copies in it's initial printing. In this gripping tale, Val Bore, a former Vice President of the United States turned private eye, lands the case of a lifetime when a beautiful but mysterious blonde shows up in his office telling an unlikely tale about her missing husband, corporate secrets and corruption and coverups at the highest levels of government. Follow the action as Val Bore skillfully runs down one lead after another, solves the case easily, names all the culprits, wins the Detective of The Year award but nobody cares, nobody gets arrested, nothing changes and he doesn't get any hot sex from the beautiful but mysterious blonde.
TRUMP: THE BOOK, by Donald Trump - Read all about Donald Trump and his adventures in media land, building tall buildings in a single bound, sweeping a series of airhead gold-digging bimbos off their feet, firing shallow yuppie apprentices left and right and acting smaller than anyone in history ever has who had all the advantages in life this man has enjoyed; born rich as Croseus, blessed with more publicity than Elvis Presley, living out his every dream in public and plastering his name in 40-foot high letters on every fifth tall building in the United States. On second thought, skip it. What is there left to know about Donald Trump? You won't hate him any less after reading 200 pages of his tiresome boasts. Maybe more, if that's possible.
MILLI VANILLI- AFTER THE FAKE MUSIC, by Milli Vanilli - Remember that pop duo that was big in the late 80's and early 90's? Well, don't feel bad, neither do most people. What distinguished them was their complete lack of distinction and the fact that they were stripped of their Grammy Award when it was revealed that they didn't do any of their own singing on their hit records and lip-synched their way through live performances. Apparently their thick German accents that made them sound more like a pair of Henry Kissingers than modern day Marvin Gayes finally betrayed them. One of them wound up dead of an overdose in 1998, either Milli or Vanilli, nobody really knows (or gives a rat's ass). Grippingly ghost-written by an anonymous writer, this little morality tale apparently fell on deaf ears as the recording industry continues to create fabricated pop stars who can't sing. Go figure.
SOME LIKE IT HOTTER, by Karl Rove - Mr. Rove, until now reticent to admit his role in shaping the policies of the Bush The Younger administration, documents his efforts to get the government to do nothing about greenhouse gas-emitting pollution and halting all official efforts at finding alternative energy sources to fossil fuels. Mr. Rove goes public now since it appears that a good chunk of his corporate profits and bribes will be going to defense attorneys since he decided to defy Congress and not answer their subpoena to testify about his shady activities in a non-elected and non-appointed job. Those Dream Teams of famous lawyers cost millions apiece. Having been squeezed out of the ultra-lucrative Hole In The Head Gang by gang leader Shotgun Dick Cheney, Rove has accepted the equally rewarding commission from Exxon-Mobile to write this rebuttal to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" in which he extolls a rosy future of comfortably warm climates for the entire world (and shove it up Cheney's mechanized butt). The first chapter is entitled: "A World-Wide California" and it goes downhill from there. There are a lot of good laughs in there, though, even if they are unintentional, like when Rove insists that Bush The Younger was actually in charge of anything besides clearing the brush from Texas, an endeavor that would take many hundreds of lifetimes to accomplish, but one well suited to President Rain Man. Take your comedy wherever you can find it.
MIDDLE AGED GUYS FROM BROOKLYN RULE, by R.R. Crespo - This fascinating book profiles a sexy, handsome and witty middle aged musician and writer from Brooklyn named Bob Crespo. Alright, I made this one up, but what the hell, why can't I jump on the shameless self-promotion band wagon like everyone else? You can however, on this very page, click on my SONGS menu or the STORIES & ESSAYS bar and check out my work. This middle aged guy from Brooklyn is back in the studio recording some new songs (doing my own playing and singing, too, thank you very much) and they're coming out just fine, and I DO rule. When the lovely wife lets me, that is. In the meantime, enjoy your summer reading, folks.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 107
Sigmund Freud said there are no coincidences. That observation is on a par with wondering whether or not a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if nobody's there to hear it. Of course it does and of course there are coincidences, and we all experience them often. Makes you wonder if old Doc Freud got out all that much between fretting about his mommy complex and ingesting massive amounts of cocaine. Now there's a recipe for paranoia, and paranoid people never think anything is a coincidence. But don't try to change them, they'll just think you're plotting against them. Besides, they're quite amusing just as they are, and we need all the entertainment we can get.
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
You don't really need a reason to be cheerful, it is its own reward. When you consider that the only alternative is to be cheerless, it seems like a no-brainer. Yet there are many among us who need concrete reasons to be upbeat. They look around and see their banks collapsing, their globe warming, the world in general either at war with one another or starving to death, their gas tanks representing a major investment and the fact that the leader of the free world is the mildly retarded puppet of a gang of homicidal corporate thieves. Sure, it can look bleak out there, with Russian Roulette seeming more and more like a viable option. But be of good cheer, people. Nobody likes the company of a sourpuss. There's one more reason to either cheer up or get even more depressed. It's your call.
Let's take a walk on the sunny side of the street and examine the reasons to be cheerful, shall we? There's the crisis in the Middle East, for example, or rather, the many, many crises that continually plague the Middle East: tribalism, racism, sexism, poverty, suicide bombings, religious governments, extremism, warfare, you-name-it and if it's bad they've got it over there. What's to be cheerful about all that? Simple: You don't live there! Unless you're unfortunate enough to be a soldier in today's world, you'll never have to go to the Middle East and experience the human misery and the tragedies of misunderstanding that plague the tribal dimwits that inhabit that godforsaken dust bowl. What's not to like about that? You're here and they're over there! Beautiful. Life is good.
Oh, but the economy at home is in a shambles, you say. Oh yeah, is that why you're so overweight? If the economy is in such dire straits, how come you're not missing any meals? You want to see lousy economies, look at the international news reports where what you notice most about the people in some countries are their ribs and their skeletal facial features. You don't hear them complaining about the high price of gasoline. To them, gasoline is what their government uses to fuel the trucks and helicopters that bring the soldiers to their villages to shoot them dead before they burn their villages to the ground using more gasoline, so to those unfortunates, the higher the price of gas, the better off they are. Why be anything but horrified by this state of affairs? Once again; Bingo! You don' live there! Send Sally Struthers ten bucks to shut her up and go back to channel surfing for another rerun of Law and Order.
But what about global warming, you say? Well, what about it? Has anybody ever actually met a Polar Bear? Very few that did have lived to tell the tale. They'd just as soon eat you as look at you. It seems those behemoths are rarely anything but ravenously hungry, and beside, with them all drowned and out of the way there'd be a lot more baby seals around for us to club to death for their attractive pelts. Not that we'll need them to keep warm in the new hot climate, but they will make nifty beach blankets for the oceanside resorts in Ohio and Nevada. California and Florida will be a scuba diver's paradise, problematic New Orleans will be gone for good and Cincinnati just might be the new Venice, with no competition from the old Venice, which will finally meet it's inevitable fate and sink into a watery grave!
There's a whole lot to look forward to! There will be a lot less land around but on the other hand most of the world's population will have drowned with the polar bears so that means fewer mouths to feed! The glass will be nearly full! The endangered species of ocean fish will bounce back strong with all the food they'll have to eat, the formerly starving human masses and whatever other land animals join them in the drink. And America will have pretty much most of our nuclear arsenal still intact so we can keep on bossing the world around, however much of it is still above water. And think of all the hydroelectric power we'll have on tap! With Canada ice melting, the Mississippi will be a two miles wide and moving like the rapids in the Delaware River. The Gulf of Mexico will be twice the size with half of Mexico under water and the Rio Grande will become a raging torrent so the problem of illegal immigration is solved too!
And if you happen to be a map-maker, well, there's boom times ahead since none of the continents will look remotely the same. They'll be tiny in comparison to today's world and we'll need new maps for everywhere on earth. And if you live in the Sahara, the good new is that it won't be a desert anymore. Of course the bad news is that it will be it will be part of the Mediterranean Ocean, which will graduate from being a mere sea, but your vexing days of trying to eke out a living in the burning sands will be over. Permanently. Drought won't be a problem anywhere anymore, good news for Arizona and the rest of the dusty American Southwest, and that's a plenty good enough reason to be cheerful.
Those of you who make a living charting the oceans will be very busy indeed since there will be so much more of them to chart, and the great oceanic currents that determine the planet's weather like the Gulf Stream will be altered too, so meteorologists can look forward to boom times as well. Our huge skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, Petronas Towers and the Shanghai Bank Tower can be converted to lighthouses in the portion of them that rise above the waves, navigational aids for mankind's seafaring survivors. And winter coats and snow shovels will become curious antiques from a bygone age. Who knows, maybe even global warming will spell the end of hockey, that most vexing and boring of sports. Now there's a real win-win situation and another sound reason to remain cheerful.
Let's take a walk on the sunny side of the street and examine the reasons to be cheerful, shall we? There's the crisis in the Middle East, for example, or rather, the many, many crises that continually plague the Middle East: tribalism, racism, sexism, poverty, suicide bombings, religious governments, extremism, warfare, you-name-it and if it's bad they've got it over there. What's to be cheerful about all that? Simple: You don't live there! Unless you're unfortunate enough to be a soldier in today's world, you'll never have to go to the Middle East and experience the human misery and the tragedies of misunderstanding that plague the tribal dimwits that inhabit that godforsaken dust bowl. What's not to like about that? You're here and they're over there! Beautiful. Life is good.
Oh, but the economy at home is in a shambles, you say. Oh yeah, is that why you're so overweight? If the economy is in such dire straits, how come you're not missing any meals? You want to see lousy economies, look at the international news reports where what you notice most about the people in some countries are their ribs and their skeletal facial features. You don't hear them complaining about the high price of gasoline. To them, gasoline is what their government uses to fuel the trucks and helicopters that bring the soldiers to their villages to shoot them dead before they burn their villages to the ground using more gasoline, so to those unfortunates, the higher the price of gas, the better off they are. Why be anything but horrified by this state of affairs? Once again; Bingo! You don' live there! Send Sally Struthers ten bucks to shut her up and go back to channel surfing for another rerun of Law and Order.
But what about global warming, you say? Well, what about it? Has anybody ever actually met a Polar Bear? Very few that did have lived to tell the tale. They'd just as soon eat you as look at you. It seems those behemoths are rarely anything but ravenously hungry, and beside, with them all drowned and out of the way there'd be a lot more baby seals around for us to club to death for their attractive pelts. Not that we'll need them to keep warm in the new hot climate, but they will make nifty beach blankets for the oceanside resorts in Ohio and Nevada. California and Florida will be a scuba diver's paradise, problematic New Orleans will be gone for good and Cincinnati just might be the new Venice, with no competition from the old Venice, which will finally meet it's inevitable fate and sink into a watery grave!
There's a whole lot to look forward to! There will be a lot less land around but on the other hand most of the world's population will have drowned with the polar bears so that means fewer mouths to feed! The glass will be nearly full! The endangered species of ocean fish will bounce back strong with all the food they'll have to eat, the formerly starving human masses and whatever other land animals join them in the drink. And America will have pretty much most of our nuclear arsenal still intact so we can keep on bossing the world around, however much of it is still above water. And think of all the hydroelectric power we'll have on tap! With Canada ice melting, the Mississippi will be a two miles wide and moving like the rapids in the Delaware River. The Gulf of Mexico will be twice the size with half of Mexico under water and the Rio Grande will become a raging torrent so the problem of illegal immigration is solved too!
And if you happen to be a map-maker, well, there's boom times ahead since none of the continents will look remotely the same. They'll be tiny in comparison to today's world and we'll need new maps for everywhere on earth. And if you live in the Sahara, the good new is that it won't be a desert anymore. Of course the bad news is that it will be it will be part of the Mediterranean Ocean, which will graduate from being a mere sea, but your vexing days of trying to eke out a living in the burning sands will be over. Permanently. Drought won't be a problem anywhere anymore, good news for Arizona and the rest of the dusty American Southwest, and that's a plenty good enough reason to be cheerful.
Those of you who make a living charting the oceans will be very busy indeed since there will be so much more of them to chart, and the great oceanic currents that determine the planet's weather like the Gulf Stream will be altered too, so meteorologists can look forward to boom times as well. Our huge skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, Petronas Towers and the Shanghai Bank Tower can be converted to lighthouses in the portion of them that rise above the waves, navigational aids for mankind's seafaring survivors. And winter coats and snow shovels will become curious antiques from a bygone age. Who knows, maybe even global warming will spell the end of hockey, that most vexing and boring of sports. Now there's a real win-win situation and another sound reason to remain cheerful.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 106
There are few better feelings than getting an extra gum ball out of the candy machine. On the other hand, putting in your money and getting no gum ball is devastating. In both cases we look to the heavens to praise or curse them for the turn in our fortunes. Get a grip, it's just a gum ball, and the heavens don't even take notice.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
