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Rants December 5, 2010

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1. The name of the book I paid 50 cents for today is Everyday Life Through The Ages. On page 17 I see a picture of the Venus of Willendorf which was carved in Austria 24,000 years ago. You might not remember the name --- Venus of Willendorf --- but I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of her in books. Beneath the picture of this grotesquely fat representation of a woman, we read, “The swollen breasts, buttocks and abdomen…may represent a mother goddess worshipped by Stone Age people.” It might just as well indicate that fast food restaurants predated the pyramids by 19,000 years.

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2. Someone compiled a list of 100 books that should be read and my friend Heather who lives way out in Missouri sent it to me. Although The Count of Monte Cristo was on the list, Heather said she’d never read it. The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most interesting and captivating and well written books you are going to find. George Bernard Shaw said, "Dumas was... a summit of art. Nobody ever could, or did, or will improve upon Dumas's romances and plays.” The last time I was in France I made it a point to visit the Château d'If which was the setting of this story I’d read many times since I was 12. And just today I learned that Mark Twain even visited the Château d'If 142 years before I did. My favorite line from The Count of Monte Cristo is one my father quoted to me over 60 years ago. And please remember, you’ve got to read this to really savor it. I can’t really do it justice. You’ve got to read it. The hero, The Count of Monte Cristo, visits the banker to open an account and tells the banker he wants limitless credit. With the all the audacity of stupidity, the banker says, “No problem, even if you were to ask for a million…” Whereupon the hero says, “A million? Of what use would I have for such a trifling sum. Why I carry that much in my wallet,” and he whipped out a couple of half-million bills. Nowadays about the only people in our country able to do that are the war contractors. Don’t bother to see the movie. I’ve seen the movie two or three times and you should know that the movie is as terrible as the book is good.

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3. How to swim. How to cook. Ever see a headline like that over an article? If the author is getting paid by the word, he or she is likely to beat around the bush for as many pages as possible before telling you what you want to know. But sometimes, if you are lucky, the article gets right down to business. You knew I was going to give you an example, and here it is. The headline said, “6 Useful Steps to Tackle Procrastination.” And immediately below that it said, “Stop reading this article and go to work.”

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4. The name of the website is Dumb Little Man and for the time being Dumb Little Man is taking the place of my daily read in the Encyclopedia Britannica --- which over the years has given us dozens of interesting things to talk about. Today the lead headline in Dumb Little Man asks, “Are You an Emotional Packrat?” I read the entire article but because it was about storing away emotional rubbish there wasn’t a single thing in there that could be of interest to you or me. --- Unless one compared the compulsion to constantly ruminate unproductive thoughts with the compulsion to respond to or forward vacuous emails. I don’t know about you, but I know I spend too much time answering emails. If you’ve looked in your email box lately you know that you have too many friends with nothing better to do than forward trivial email. On the other hand, you look forward to hearing from some friends who never write unless they are forwarding an exceptional article or have something of substance to say. If someone has been kind enough to send you a personal note, do you feel that you should reply in kind --- or at least acknowledge it? So -- how do you handle your hundreds and thousands of emails? And while we’re talking about how to practically utilize our time, tell me if you’ve ever taken a real vacation --- or were you carrying your cell phone?

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5. The other day I turned on the TV. It was my plan to watch the evening news. But the evening news had been put on hold. There was a football game on television instead of the evening news. What kind of a country do we live in, when a football game can take precedence over an important news program that is going to tell me in detail about the latest celebrity to say something that wasn’t politically correct, have an affair, go to jail, or die of a drug overdose. Only when it has been taken away do we realize how much we count on our national news service to inform and educate.

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6. When I called a friend in Holland the other morning he immediately asked me if I had read Wikileaks. When I Googled Wikileaks I learned that Wikileaks is the secret history of the illegal invasion of Iraq. Now everyone in the world can read how the imperialist George Bush and his terrorist friends squandered over a trillion borrowed dollars, sent young Maine boys off to die and impoverished our country while blowing up over 66,000 civilians who were often sleeping in their own beds. Under ideal conditions war is just another quiet, lucrative American business, but now, because of Wikileaks, everyone in the world is able to read about the “insurgents” who multiply with every direct hit to grandma’s bedroom. I’m partial to insurgents because my ggg gfather As you might expect, those here in the land of free speech profiting from the war don’t want you --- or the people in Holland or anywhere else --- to think about its sanguine aspects and are urging their political lackeys to shut down the Wikileaks web site. If you read the inflammatory language Congressman Peter King recently used to describe Wikileaks it probably reminded you of that old bully, Joe McCarthy, who, by simply babbling, without a shred of evidence destroyed the lives of thousands of people. Because Congressman King obviously buys his suits from the same tailor as Joe McCarthy, his calling Wikileaks “a foreign terrorist organization,” motivated me to send them four dollars.

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7. Dress to look slim. That’s what the ad in the magazine said. V necklines will draw eyes away from fuller faces. That’s what it said, and added that V necklines will make shoulders seem wider and waists slimmer. Why do women articulate these disingenuous complaints about their weight? How can they say they are concerned about their weight even as they wolf down cookies, chips or chocolate? You know someone who will do anything to lose weight or look slimmer --- except stop eating those sweet things that are loaded with salt or calories. True, some of our friends have given up and just don’t care anymore. Yesterday at a birthday party I saw a woman who was built like an apple. She was walking away from the goodies table with a heaping plate of cake and ice cream. A V neckline would have simply made her look like a cracked egg. You can imagine what her husband will have for an obituary: “John Smith died quietly at his home yesterday, surrounded by his wife.” But I want to thank that woman for looking like an apple. The world would be an incredibly uninteresting place if every woman looked like Sandra Bullock.

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8. It can be statistically proven that people come in three sizes: large, average and small. Because most of the women used in television commercials are no more than skin stretched on very small bones, the American woman has been conditioned to place herself in the large category. You can't look at a television commercial without realizing that someone is trying to make women dissatisfied with the way they look, smell or feel. This is why even the most sensible woman might be tempted to lose weight --- to diet. Have you ever lived with a person who eats nothing but salad? After a week you beg them to wolf brownies or at least put enough chocolate sauce on their lettuce to make them sociable. A man who lives on the coast of Maine tells me that his wife dieted faithfully for three weeks without losing a pound. She got so cranky that he started avoiding her --- he even fell asleep drinking his nightly hot chocolate in front of the TV and stayed on the couch all night. And then, night after night, his wife lost weight. It was two or three weeks before a doctor figured out why. The television ads for weight loss had made her so sensitive to calories that she'd been gaining half a pound every night just by smelling the hot chocolate on his breath.

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9. During a coffee break between sessions at the Applied and Therapeutic Humor convention in Panama City, an attractive young girl pressed herself up against me and took me by the hand. Even when I was young, girls didn’t press their bodies up against me, so I was somewhat surprised. I said to her, “What do you do?” And she said, “I’m a hospice nurse. I comfort old men by holding their hands while they are dying.”

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10. Did you know that Santa Claus is richer than Daddy Warbucks? I’d really never given it any thought until I Googled Daddy Warbucks, Asp, Punjab, just to see what they’d been up to lately and learned on the forbes.com website that Daddy Warbucks is worth 27.3 billion. I was also surprised to see that this once aged icon is now only 52 and young enough to be my son. Would you be surprised to hear that Lex Luthor is only worth 10.1 billion although he went to MIT? Daddy Warbucks has a BS from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook, so you might want to keep that in mind should you ever be pressed to help one of yours with an educational decision. You don’t even know who Charles Montgomery Burns is so I’ll tell you. He owns the nuclear power plant where Bart Stimson or is it Simpson works. He went to Yale, according to this web site I found, he is worth 8.4 billion and he bought the Frank Gehny-designed Springfield Concert Hall from the city and turned it into a prison. Oh, Santa Claus is the world’s richest fictional person and if you want to consult my source to get the website so you can read more you can ask to get my weekly newsletter, The Whine & Snivel, and read about it there, or you can Google Daddy Warbucks Punjab Asp. You might be interested to know that Santa Claus is richer than Daddy Warbucks because being immortal, the elf employees don’t require health insurance.

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11. Did you know that there are two groups of people who are attacked and killed by dogs in the United States? One group consists of children from one to ten years old. Between the ages of ten and forty, probably because by the time you’re 10 you’ve been nipped a few times and are more wary as well as limber, you stand a pretty good chance of not being killed by a dog. In your forties and fifties you’re fairly safe. But when you turn 61 the statistics are against you again and your chances of getting chewed up by your neighbor’s family pet increase. Including all groups, around one of our neighbors succumbs to dog bites every nine days. Then we read that in this country around 81 people die every day from guns. You can correct my math, but I think that in the United States you are 800 times more likely to be blown away by an irate neighbor than you are to be dispatched by his dog. So if your neighbor’s snarling dog almost parts his chain every time you walk by, remember that it could be 800 times worse --- your neighbor could have a gun.

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12. Here’s something that turned up in my email that is so bad that I know you want to hear it. The king of Assyria was running low on cash after years of war with the Hittites. His last great possession was the Star of the Euphrates, the most valuable diamond in the ancient world, so he went to Croesus, the pawnbroker, to ask for a loan. Croesus said, "I'll give you 100,000 dinars for it." The king said, "But I paid a million dinars for it. Don't you know who I am? I am the king!" Croesus said, "When you wish to pawn a Star, makes no difference who you are."

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