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| A eclectic Blog for people who like ketchup on their truffles. |
| Forrest Gump may have been on to something when he revealed the day of the week on which people died. “She died on a Saturday.” or “She died on a Tuesday.” In a recent article in the prestigious Journal of This, That, and The Other Thing, Dr. Grant Mony, Direct of Research at the prestigious Underground Basement Institute To Chart Health Undulations, waxed eloquent on the relationship between our health and the days of the week. Hoik! Ptui! was fortunate to get an interview with the very busy Dr. Mony. Hoik! Ptui!: Dr. Mony, Good morning. Dr. Mony: Goodness gracious! Is it morning? I haven’t been topside for days. Lots of disease up there, you know. Hoik! Ptui!: Tell me about it… Well, on second thought don’t tell me about it. What I’d like to talk about is the correlation you’ve claim between death and the days of the week. Dr. Mony: Yes, my research team and I have discovered a positive correlation between death and the days of the week. Everybody dies on some day of the week. The data is irrefutable. Hoik! Ptui!: But, Dr. Mony, everybody dies someday. Dr. Mony: Precisely! But it was generally thought these people died of disease. The research conducted here at UBITCHU indicates no relationship between disease and death at all. Many people get diseases and they don’t die, but eventually, one of the days of the week is going to kill you. That fact that some people have a disease at the time of death may be a mere coincidence. Hoik! Ptui!: Well, what about hours in the day, or minutes in the hour, or seconds in a minute? Do these increments of time also cause death? Dr. Mony: We don’t know. That’s why so much more research needs to done. What if we could prevent death simply by eliminating the thirty-third second in each minute of every day? The potential for saving lives is enormous! Hoik! Ptui!: History has shown that everybody dies, an—” Dr. Mony: History! Blistory! Just because up until now everybody has died doesn’t mean that everybody dies. I think Americans know this fact intuitively. There is a, well, I'll just call it folk wisdom, that’s says it's OK to live unhealthy disease-ridden lives as long as we don't die from it. That's why so much of our health costs are about prolonging death rather than prolonging our lives. Hoik! Ptui!: What do you mean? Can you give us an example? Dr. Mony: Take cancer. We spend billions of dollars each year trying to cure cancer. We may never find a cure for cancer, but we already know how to prevent cancer: clean up the environment, take the stress out of our stressful lives, improve nutrition and get the chemicals out of our food, and so on. In this country, few people are interested in accomplishing the goals I just listed, even though those steps are known not only to prolong life, but also to improve the quality of life. What this tells me is that people don’t mind getting cancer, they just don’t like dying from it. That’s why so many health care dollars are spent on keeping people alive after they’ve got cancer rather than helping them not get the disease in the first place. Hoik! Ptui!: You’re talking about poking a hole in time. How do you poke a hole in time? Dr. Mony: We don’t know that yet. Probably the same way one cures cancer. The point is that much progress has been made in the search for a cure for cancer because so much money has been spent. A similar effort should be made toward eliminating particularly lethal increments of time. That’s why the National Institute of Health grant process should be overhauled to give facilities like UBITCHU more in grant dollars. Hoik! Ptui!: OK. Say we eliminate Tuesdays, wouldn’t that just increase the death rate for Mondays or Wednesdays or some other day of the week? Dr. Mony: We don’t know yet, but think of it like that arcade game where you bang down one little lamb's head only to have another one pop up. If you’re fast enough, you can bang down all the little lamb heads and win the game. The point is that we need funding so we can get back to banging sheep. Then we’ll just see what happens. Hoik! Ptui!: But now you’re talking about eliminating time entirely! Dr. Mony: Well, killing time is what we’re all about here at UBITCHU. Hoik! Ptui!: And also apparently, applying for grant money. Dr. Mony: Precisely. |
| Sometimes, after a man loses his job, he also gets kicked to the curb by the old lady. While I find that sad, I’m not blaming the old lady. God knows we men do little enough around the house when we’ve got a job. Of course there are a few men who like housework. For their wives, having her old man lose his job can be a godsend, but most of us men manage to do even less after we get laid off than we did before. What part of “I’m not working right now.” don’t you understand? Let me make clear from the beginning that if you can stay in the house, stay in the house! If you get tossed out on your ear, the first thing people expect you to do is move and find work elsewhere. Men hate moving, and moving doesn’t get you out of anything. You just get another bill, for child support. Children are important. If you get laid off, one of the first things you need to do is find out if you have any. Ask your wife for a headcount and their names while she’s still in sympathy mode. Later on, she’ll probably demand that you watch those people, so learn to recognize them on sight. A friend of mine was laid off and his wife told him he had to watch the kids, something about saving on daycare. He didn’t know how many kids he had, so I told him he had two sets of twins and tricked him into watching my kids too. Before he realized what was going on, I had saved enough money for a trip to Hawaii. Once you know who belongs in your house and who doesn’t, it’s good to learn a few standard phrases. You don’t really need to speak the same language as your children, because they’re going to ignore you anyway. You just want to have something you can holler at them as they go by. I like: “Did you clean up your room?” and “Finish you homework.” Be careful with the standard phrases though. My wife heard me using “Finish you homework.” on my son and shouted at me, “He’s not potty trained yet, fool!” How was I supposed to know that? The kid was 18, I figured he should have had homework. Another thing you want to establish as soon as you get laid off is whether or not you’re really unemployed. There are some guys who are so talented and flexible that they’re never truly out of work. They’re the sort who lose a senior accountant position at Arthur Anderson today and tomorrow they’re roofing. They may not bring home as much bacon, but they’re still bringing home something. If you’re still bringing home bacon ends, you’re not unemployed. If you’re still bring home bacon bits and pieces, you’re not unemployed. If you’re bringing home a few bacon rinds, you’re not unemployed. But if you can’t even bring home the greasy bag the bacon bits and pieces were shipped in; in other words, if all you’ve got in unemployment insurance, then you’re unemployed. If you’re really unemployed, the first thing you want to do is buy some time. A good way of buying time is pretending to start a business. Pretending that you’re starting a business is pretty much like starting a business, except it doesn’t require any money. If you had enough money to start a business, why would you want to. You’d be independently wealthy and you could just retire to beach somewhere. But if you talk a good game, you can pretend to start a business for a good two or three months before you have to put up or shut up. That’s two or three months when you’re still your family’s hero, which means the kids are still in daycare, you slacking off on that “Honey do” list, and she’s still coming home and fixing dinner. You’re just sorta hanging out with the guys, having a great time and recapturing your lost youth. After a couple of months, the business thing will play itself out, and you’ll have to make a choice. Pick whatever for you is the lesser of two evils. Option A is watching your kids and doing housework. Option B is looking for a job. I say, you’ve had two good months, so just start with Option B. After a couple of weeks of Option A, most guys are so desperate for Option B that they’ll take any job at any pay. And that’s exactly what employers are after these days. |
| As a young man, I was in The United States Air Force. I can’t understand why anybody would ever want to be in any other branch of the military. My underwear supports me on that point. When I went through what passes for basic training in The Air Force, we wore white underwear: just regular briefs and boxers that can be bought in any men’s store in any mall. My older brother, who was in The Army, tells me they had to wear green underwear called skivvies. My younger brother next to me in age was in The Marine Corps. He claimed Marines had to wear brown underwear. I can understand it for a bunch of toddlers, but why should any group of grown men be force to wear green or brown shorts. I can’t help but wonder if they came with a big, yellow polka dot in the front. Why then, are Marines called leathernecks. I thought it was because the Germans claimed Brown Shirts before World War II, but the Marines could have become The Brown Shorts instead. And why are The Army known as Doughboys. If they gotta wear green shorts, sounds like they’re not eating enough dough. Maybe they should be known as Veggieboys. In all fairness, I should point out that back in the day, all the services used to wear khaki. But khaki isn’t brown. It just looks brown to the untrained eye. I didn’t believe the brown underwear thing. I suspected my brother was pulling my leg and having a good laugh offending my delicate Air Force sensibilities. So I got on the web and googled Marine Corps Uniforms. What a relief, no brown underwear in sight. But as soon as it got better, it got worse again. There was a link for Marine Corps kilts. I clicked on the link, and there was the cutest little plaid skirt! Now you can call it anything you want, but a kilt is just a an above-the-knee skirt for men. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) But why would a US Marine need to wear a kilt anyway? Is there a US Marine Corps dashiki for African-American Marines? Or how about a US Marine Corps turban for Sikh Marines. I’ve never seen a male Marine in a skirt, but if I did see one in a skirt; the idea of a skirt being worn over brown shorts by a man who thinks his shit don’t stink, would make me run away. Just run away! I was so upset that I googled Marine Corps Underwear—I know! I feel so dirty.—and it turns out I was right all along. My brother was pulling my leg. Marines don’t wear brown underwear at all, at least they’re not issued brown drawers in boot camp. They are issued green skivvies, just like The Army, and they are also issued white briefs, just like normal people. And when I think about it, for people shitting in enemy infested woods, skivvies make sense. If their commercials are to be believed, even when they’re not in the woods, solders in The Marine Corps and The Army do a of climbing over walls and swinging on ropes over little mud puddles. You could break a nail doing that stuff, not to mention getting awfully dirty. That’s the advantage of whites. White shorts make a man more efficient. For example, while you’re running that extra rinse cycle to get the bleach out is the perfect time for painting your toenails that perfect shade of Air Force blue or Old Glory red. A good airman should be multi-tasking, always multi-tasking. My youngest brother was in The Navy. There is almost a whole generation between us, so we've never talked about what color underwear they wear in The Navy. I do know that if I hadn’t gone into The Air Force, my second choice would have been The Navy, because there are places in The Navy where it’s almost like being in the Air Force. I will give this to The Marines though. I googled Marine Corps Uniforms, and on the first click, I got an entire site of Marine Corps uniforms. Googling the uniforms of any other service led me into sites where I had to click several times and then log in. The Air Force threw up a site full of badges, insignia, and patches. I guess if push came to shove, I could use the patches like a fig leaf. I can do that because my underwear supports me |
| Sometimes a cultural change comes along that I find frightening. Living in Tucson, I’ve noticed that as we give more streets Spanish names, the street names have become longer and longer. I hate long street names. Every time you write a letter, you have to spend half an hour on the return address. When I lived in Illinois, the street names were almost always short: one, two, or three syllables, and that’s it. Here in Arizona, I run along Paseo de Diego Puerta. In Illinois, that would be Door Street. We made a sentimental exception for Dr. Martin Luther King. There are Dr. Martin Luther King Drives all over America, but everybody just calls them King Drive. If native Americans hadn’t had such long addresses, they might have been able to write letters to their friends warning of the depredations of the white man, but here’s a typical Indian address. This one is from Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow: By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis. Dark behind it rose the forest, Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, Rose the firs with cones upon them; Bright before it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water. How would you like to be the mailman delivering a letter from Hiawatha to his grandmother? I can just see poor, old Nokomis sobbing in her teepee, “Why doesn’t he write?… sniff” Today that whole thing would have been Lake Street. My ex-wife is from St. Thomas, USVI. They have some pretty strange street addresses down there too. They’re like British addresses or something. My in-laws lived on something called Agnes Fancy. A street name should provide an answer, not raise more questions. I find myself asking, who is Agnes? And what’s fancy about her? It kinda makes sense when you realize that the only town was in a hole surrounded by hills. I guess each one of the hills had a name, and that’s how they got their addresses. Lots of people don’t know this, but the uniforms of our modern day mail carriers were inspired by those hills. You see, back in the day, everybody on the island of St. Thomas was descended from pirates and runaway slaves, so they all had spyglasses. There was no postal service for the hills surrounding the main town of Charlotte Amalie, so the postmaster would just throw all the letters for the hill folks onto the big lawn in front of the post office. The people living outside of town owned such good telescopes, they could look down from their front porches and read the names on the envelopes. If they received a letter, they had to walk down to town and then climb back up the hill. I’ve climbed the hills around Charlotte Amalie, and after the first thousand steps straight up, you start looking for a better way. Now of course we have cars. Back in the old days, there were no cars, so the hill folk taught their donkeys to read and sent the donkeys into town to fetch back the mail. The donkeys didn’t mind. The job sure beat the hell out of carrying heavy loads of produce to and fro. They walked slowly going and coming, and more often than not the mail was late. But it was a workable system until one of the donkeys started picking up the wrong mail. The problem was solved by fitting that donkey for glasses, and the system was working fine again. But you know how donkeys are. Donkey see, donkey do. Soon every donkey on the island just had to have glasses. The mail was getting expensive because eye glasses are expensive. And of course some of the frames for the glasses were bigger than others, which set off a competition among the donkeys as to who could get the biggest frames. Pretty soon every donkey on the island was wearing big, old Elton John sunglasses. Then some of the donkeys started accessorizing, and pretty soon every ass on the island was in big, old Elton John sunglasses and a wide-brimmed, straw hat, all of which cost a fortune. As if the mail wasn’t moving slowing enough already, the donkeys used to stop when they met each other and discuss the latest fashions. But you know how donkeys are. They liked to chew as they listened, and sometimes they’d accidentally eat the letters. So in addition to being slow and outrageously expensive, now the mail service was undependable. Disgruntled Virgin Islanders started walking around in tee shirts that said, If I had known, I would have picked up the mail myself. Finally the hill folk had a big meeting about the mail carriers and fired every one of their asses. So the poor donkeys were back to just being farm donkeys, and donkey mail has long been replaced by snail mail. But the United States Postal Service has never forgotten the traditions started when asses were first put in charge of the mail. That’s why even today, mail carriers dress in those gray slacks that are the same color as a donkey. Is it any wonder that the Postal Service is going bankrupt? The least we can do is help out by keeping the addresses short. |
| Thanks for being patient during my last two profanity-laced fits of anger. One thing I've learned about writing is that if you write honestly for any length of time, you will eventually dredge up your own demons. That's really the source of my anger and frustration: all the times I should have been in the streets standing up for what's right and instead I was kicked back on the couch with a beer. But I drink pretty good beer, so at least that's something. I have the time for getting more involved, but after a lifetime of letting somebody else do it, sloughing off has become second nature for me. I'm like a baby in that I fuss and cry until somebody gives me a bottle of Jack Daniels and then I go back to sleep. Somewhere in the world, there's some kind of calendar, maybe Mayan or Egyptian or somthing like that, on which today is New Year's Day, so I'm making a New Year's resolution. I'm going to take one issue that I think is important, and instead of just writing about, I going to do something about it. |
| I wrote an “Open Letter to Women” yesterday. I should have written an open letter to men instead. This morning, I reread yesterday’s entry, and it was nothing but a malignant, rage filled, and unfortunately, typical male response to violence: more violence. Men, including it seems, me, have devolved since caveman days. Grok and Oog at least had a fight or flight response, but today it’s just fight or fight. All I can say in my defense is that, after watching the video of a woman in Iran dying of a gunshot wound, the testosterone must have been flowing fast. What really bugs me as a man is that it’s on us. We’re the ones behaving badly. Women aren’t, as a rule, running around hurting people. Women and children are just the victims of our misbehavior. Why can’t we stop misbehaving? Maybe because we can’t discipline ourselves to suppress the urge to hit back. During the Cold War days, the only way the men running The Soviet Union and The United States could preserver the peace was through the policy of MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction. We couldn’t do better than that! The world still lives in fear of the nuclear specter, and we, at least the men anyway, haven’t learned anything. North Korea and Iran are working their asses off so they can join the nuclear club. Maybe that’s why we fear equality for women. Maybe we fear that women can do a better job of running things than we can, so we have to keep women down. In this country, in the places where men hang out, bars and barber shops and such, we often speak pridefully of how far our women (our women? Hmmm.) have come and of what other things they should be allowed to do. There are different ways of keeping a person subjugated. Some are less harmful than others, but they are all harmful. On the streets of America, there’s a bumper sticker that says, “It shouldn’t hurt to be a child.” Telling isn’t it that there’s no bumper sticker, at least I’ve never seen one, that says, “It shouldn’t hurt to be a woman.” For where I sit, as world leaders, men are nothing but a shit sandwich. We suck! Most of the children an women hurting in the world are hurting because of men, from that asshole dictator in N. Korea to Mexican drug lords, acting a fool. There’s enough of everything in the world to go around, but we still gotta fight and kill and maim just for kicks. When are we men going to face the fact that we’ve screwed our world up royally, and just maybe, we should just SHUT THE FUCK UP for a while and give women a chance at doing what they always do: clean up our mess? We’re obviously too dickless to clean up after ourselves. But why listen to me? My entry from yesterday puts me somewhere south of a Neanderthal. My reaction to violence is still to fight violence with violence. I like thinking of myself as a lion, you know guardian of the pride and all that, but at the end of the day, I’m just another testosterone driven crybaby: a man who can’t turn the other cheek, and can’t nurture anybody or anything that doesn’t contribute to my own personal posterity. And I’m not the only one! If I had put a gun into Neda’s hands, I hope she would have thrown it on the ground. Women have the strength to do that. Where’s our strength? |
| The evening news showed a woman, dubbed as Neda on the internet, getting shot down in the streets of Tehran. What really pisses me off is not that Neda got shot, but that she didn’t have a gun herself. The man who shot her is probably in some room somewhere jerking off to pictures of Neda dying in the street, and all the women of the world can do is moan, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” What exactly, THE FUCK, is wrong with women? All this despicable, crazy shit that we men do is all about you. All of it! And NO, it’s not about loving you or protecting you or nurturing you, it’s about controlling you and keeping you beneath us. It’s about the high that we get knowing no matter how weak a man is and no matter how much crap he has to take from other men, somewhere close, there’s a woman weaker than he is. And he can literally own her and fuck—and I don’t just mean physically—her whenever he feels like it. It’s good to be a man. And sometimes, we have to waste a perfectly good piece of ass to keep it that way. That’s what shooting Neda was all about. I bet the shooter went home to a docile little woman, who rushed about bringing his dinner to him and otherwise sucking his butt. That’s why I’m so disgusted! And the same shit goes on this country. “Pro Life” is all about keeping women in their place. Most of the “Pro Life” spokesmen that I see on TV are men. No matter how you feel about the issue, why should any man have any say in it at all? Yet most of these spokesmen have an adoring cadre of Uncle Tom women hanging on their every word. I’ll bet that right now, somewhere in the world, a whole boatload of women are getting their asses whipped, or getting raped, or getting their clits hacked off (probably by other, compliant women) without the benefit of anesthesia, or all of the above, just because they’re female. And you look to men for protection! It’s like Mob protection: We have to hurt you sometimes, or you might stop feeding us. It’s like that joke: Most women think men are fucking idiots, and we men agree because most of us are fucking women. How much abuse are you going to take before you say enough of this shit! How much abuse are you willing to take before you stop agreeing that every organ of government or society concerned with the management of violence be controlled by men? No women in combat roles in the military. And women agree with that. Could you make it easier for us? There are men willing to fight beside you, but how can we fight beside you, when you won’t even fight for yourselves? Men blow up abortion clinics, but the servers hosting the websites extolling men to blow up the clinics never get blown up. Abortion doctors get terrorized and gunned down, but the terrorists—always male—never get gunned down. During every national campaign, there’s the moment that makes me want to puke, when a female reporter asks a male candidate what he’s doing to support the advancement of women. The male candidate always starts grinning and spinning. A truly honest answer would be for him to just whip his dick out and piss on her. What’s she doing ASKING! Neda died in the street because of men behaving badly. Her death simply underscores the point that, in every country on Earth, men have carte blanche to behave badly. Until the Nedas of the world and their mothers and their sisters and their daughters take the guns into their own hands, they will continue dying in the street or the bedroom or wherever men choose to kill them. Some say the unrest in Iran is about politics, some say it’s about religion. But all religion and all politics is about two things, power and pussy. For men, having the first has always guaranteed the second. |
| How many times have you asked someone where they lived, and they answered “At the bottom of an ocean of air”? I’m guessing none. The history of mankind is the history of a species trying to isolate itself from its environment. We live in apartments (an interesting word in its own right) or houses. And be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. Not even planet Earth. Humans measure wealth by how well they are separated from nature. Nature is full of thunderstorms and lightning and poison ivy and polar bears. Oh, my! Anything can happen outside, but inside you’re safe as long your building is earthquake proof. The denser and more modern our buildings, regardless of what was sacrificed in the building of them, the richer we are. No matter how fresh the air you breathe, if you live in a wattle hut in Kenya, you are by definition poorer than someone living in a slum in the United States, even though you may own more cattle than the slum dweller. Only when the slum gets so bad that slum dwellers are dying from diseases caused by a horrific accumulation of human and industrial waste along with the debris from the last earthquake are they considered poorer than the wattle hut dweller. Because of the beam in our own eye, no American can point to the splinter in somebody else’s eye when it comes to despoiling the environment. Especially when all of our trash is caused by greed. Cleaning up our own house, (the seabed, that we call America, at the bottom of the ocean of air) is already well within our technological capabilities. And we don’t do it. You’d think in a country where 90% of the people claim to be Christians, that’s one of the first things we’d do. Jesus Christ told us that the love of money is the root of all evil. If the love of money is the root of environmental decay, then ruining the environment is evil. Despite the best efforts of the Catholic Church, Americans are not overpopulating anymore, but we are over consuming. We must get our resource consumption in line with the size of our population. We are now at a tipping point. Many Americans are prepared to sacrifice in the short term for the long term health of the planet, but many religious and business groups stand against environmental regulation. I can understand the business opposition, just not the religious opposition. |
| One of the things most people in this society are guilty of is not respecting what other people do. We think we can out plumb the plumber, out roof the roofer, or out edit the editor. And perhaps our thinking is correct as long as we have enough time for the project. As part of my new, well thought out, certain to be effective, self-marketing campaign, I’ve decided to publish a novel on Lulu. I not sure about my figures, but I think the average Lulu book generates fewer than ten sales, so this is not about money. Since it’s not about money, I’m not about to pay someone to edit my novel. I figured the job would take me a day or two at the max. After all, I wrote the damn thing. Well, it’s been a week and I’m not done yet. Mea culpa. I’d rather blog than edit, but this isn’t like working in some shit job, where you can slough off. I’m so fixed on the task at hand, that I look up and whole day is gone, and I’ve spent the whole thing in front of this computer! And in no way do I think I’ll end up with a perfectly edited novel. That’s acceptable to me. I’ve read many commercial works in which I’ve found a few typos and grammatical errors. But I would like a nice, smooth read. After all, my name is on it. But I now understand why it costs so much to have a book professionally edited. Mea maxima culpa! Incidentally, I do have a plan, or should I say scheme, or should I say fantasy, for eventually making money from publishing on Lulu. And my plan involves me editing my own work. Pray for me. |
| As a rule, I avoid living in a country where the person in charge has a title like The Supreme Leader, Der Fuhrer, Il Duce, or The Decider. George “Dubya” Bush took me by surprise with that “The Decider” thing, and it just reinforced my opinion of leaders who give themselves pretentious titles. Any time you hear one of those titles, you’re looking at crappy government. Another really bad sign is having a generalissimo in charge, Where does the “issimo” suffix come from anyway? The first issimo I ever heard of was Franco of Spain, so I’m guessing it’s Spanish. But then that Chinese guy, Chiang Kai-shek, was a generalissimo too. Maybe Chiang picked it up in a Mexican food restaurant or something. African leaders are hands down the worst leaders in the world and they have the most pretentious titles. Mobutu of Zaire wanted to append his name with a long string of hyperbole, including “The cock who leaves no hen intact”. American leaders are RELATIVELY SPEAKING a good bunch. They go for familiar nicknames rather than titles. Like William Jefferson Clinton goes by Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan is just Ronnie. That might work for African leaders as well. Robert Mugabe would be Bobby Mugabe. Isn’t that cute? How could somebody named Bobby Mugabe be mean? Iran is run by a guy who is The Supreme Leader and GRAND Ayatollah. Same guy! The progressives of Iran are now taking him on. Good luck with that. |
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