Things I hope you don't hear today.

"You got a letter from the IRS."

"It's an emergency company-wide meeting."

"We have to talk."

THUNK THUNK THUNK [from automobile]

"You should get that looked at."

"HOW COULD YOU FORGET?"

"Ooh, that ain't gonna be cheap."

"Well, we can probably save some of your teeth."

"You have the right to remain silent..."

“They’re going to name a disease after you.”

“In my office. Now."

“I wanted to warn you, but it’s too late anyway.”

"Everybody's mad at you."

"This is NOT A TEST of the Emergency Broadcast System."

"It's the worst case of [FILL IN BLANK] I've ever seen, that's for sure."

"DUCK!"

"So... Remember last Saturday? Well, I just tested positive..."

Any Bon Jovi song.

Dunderland.

You all know I enjoy a good meme, and I'm willing to tolerate some memes that are affirmations. (Although not many.) But I will not tolerate even good-intentioned stuff that advances ignorance.   

When I see something with such active ignorance as this above exhibit, it makes me angry. 

Two facts:

1) Lewis Carroll's work fell into public domain more than a century ago; 

2) Nothing, and I mean nothing, is less trustworthy online than quotations. 

Quotations are the fact-checkers' bugaboo, as I have written before, and mainly because no one seems to care at all if they are accurate, as long as they advance an idea. I promise that the thing they mostly advance is ignorance. 

Take the above example. I love Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but this quote has nothing to do with it. 

Now, it may be that in one of the many adaptations, pastiches, homages, parodies, sequels, and other rip-offs of Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a character actually gives a damn about Alice and would say something banal like the above. But in the actual book, where Wonderland is a bizarre and disturbing place, all the characters besides Alice are either:

1) Virtually Useless, or 

2) Total Jerks. 

Here's my breakdown: 

VIRTUALLY USELESS

White Rabbit, Mouse, King of Hearts, Bill, Dormouse, Frog-Footman, Duchess, Mock Turtle, Gryphon, Knave of Hearts, Cheshire Cat (arguably also a Total Jerk)

TOTAL JERKS

Caterpillar, Queen of Hearts, Mad Hatter, March Hare, Dodo, the Pigeon, the Cook

Some of the characters, even the Jerks, are helpful to Alice, but all of them are by design unpredictable and thus unlovable. 

Okay, but maybe it was from somewhere else in the Carroll oeuvre? Maybe a letter he wrote to Alice Liddell, the inspiration for the Alice books?

I followed a thread on Reddit that claims the quote can be found in an Emilie Autumn book, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, the title of which sounds as far away from anything life-affirming as imaginable, but who knows. I haven't read it, nor can I find a preview of it, so I can't confirm the quote. The book is on Amazon, but Amazon doesn't do previews of books anymore. And you know what? I don't care where it's from -- except that it is not from Lewis Carroll and sounds like nothing he ever would write. He would have thought Wonderland too dangerous to be a fun place to visit, let alone to identify with happiness. He knew no one there gave a damn about Alice's feelings. He ought to know -- he invented it. 

It's too much to ask people to look into these things before reposting, but man, the complete uninterest in accuracy these days just makes me sad. 

Januargh.

The winter months are like the sadistic drill instructors of popular culture. You’re happy if he’s just screaming and threatening and insulting, not actually beating the ever-lovin’ stuffing out of you.

Poor Izzy always gets up when I do, which is a rough deal for a dog owned by an insomniac. His morning walk could come at any time between three and seven a.m. He’s ready for it.

But he was not ready for the pounding rain this morning. 

I will gladly take the rain over negative Canadian type temperatures or sleet or a foot of snow, but this rain proved to be a deluge too far. Izzy went off the porch, peed, and turned us right around and came back. He’d had enough. I couldn’t blame him—unlike me, he carried no umbrella, and the rain was bouncing back into his face. 

The funny thing is, and I blogged about it back then, his late relative Nipper would not have stopped. Nipper was indifferent to the elements. He was going to get his walk or playtime in first thing in the morning no matter what. Blizzard, hurricane, ice storm, tornado, volcanic eruption, did not matter. He had the spirit of an Olympic athlete. His owner, not so much. 

And I was kind of relieved that Izzy is more like me. Screw this rain, we’ll try again later. That’s my boy! 

Magnus and AI.

By curious coincidence, two comic book characters by two different publishers were born just over sixty years ago, characters whose adventures centered around robots and artificial intelligence. And the characters had the same name: Magnus. 

The Metal Men were created by comic book veteran Robert Kanigher and appeared first in 1962. They were a team of six robots invented by Dr. William Magnus, each made of, named for, and with the physical and chemical characteristics of one metallic element -- Gold, Platinum, Tin, Mercury, Iron, and Lead. Each robot was self-aware and rational and had a distinct personality corresponding to its element (Lead was dumb, Mercury was snarky and egotistical, Gold was pure of heart, Iron was a bruiser, Tin was cowardly, and Platinum, the female type, was a sweetheart). In a way, these really weren't robots or even androids; depending on the era in which they appeared, they were tiny computers called Responsometers that not only served as the robot brain, but also caused quantities of the metal element to cohere into a humanoid shape around it. Inventor Magnus was a stalwart pipe-smoking type, but also had a tendency to lose his mind (or have it taken over) through the years, even building evil robots. Nevertheless, the heroes of the book, the bots themselves, were friendly and were friends to humanity, so AI was good; evil machines were an exception and frequently their opponent. 

Gold Key comics' Magnus, Robot Fighter of 4000 A.D., taking place in that far-future date when people forgot A.D. is a prefix, starred a very different kind of Magnus. American comic books are all about the superheroes now, but in the 1960s the field also had science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, humor, war, Western, and other genres represented. Magnus, Robot Fighter was obviously an SF title, by second-string publisher Gold Key, which is probably best remembered for its many TV show comic book adaptations like Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek. 

Magnus, created by writer/artist Russ Manning, took place in a fully-realized futuristic Earth, in which the world's enormous human population was completely dependent on robots -- leading to tyrannical robot rule. Magnus was specially trained to be able to fight and destroy these mechanical monsters, with his bare hands if necessary, in his quest to free mankind. 

Here artificial intelligence is the enemy of the heroes. But Magnus was helped by artificial intelligence that was good -- and in fact had been trained to be a robot fighter by a robot called 1A. 

This Magnus first saw print in 1963, and his adventures ran until 1977 -- a tremendous run for a non-DC/Marvel/Disney/Archie comic book. 

But why were both main human characters named Magnus? It's a famous and heroic name (Latin for Great, as in Carolus Magnus, better remembered as Charlemagne), but not common. Did Russ Manning pick up the name from the Metal Men's creator? If he did, I can’t find evidence. Manning died from cancer at the age of just 52 in 1981, so it's too late to ask. While Kanigher was based in New York, Manning lived and worked in California his whole life (I believe), so it's not like they met up to shoot the breeze and swap ideas at the Comic Book Tavern. Maybe Russ saw the Metal Men book and the name stuck in his head without him realizing it. Or maybe it's just one of those weird coincidences. 

Since the rights to the characters have never been owned by the same company at the same time, there's never been a crossover that might give some fictional background to the two Magnii. However, that did not stop the guys at Super-Team Family, the site that makes fake comic book covers for stories that should have happened ... but DIDN'T!

Artificial intelligence would never be the same! 

Nimrod.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to call someone stupid and had run through the greatest hits already (stupid, moron, retard, idiot, dumb, dimwit, brainless, dim bulb, dumbass, birdbrain) you might ultimately land on nimrod. We had no idea we were calling him this guy.

Real Nimrod

Poor Nimrod. We don't know too much about him, but in the Book of Genesis (chapter 10), we learn the reputation for which he was remembered for thousands of years:  

8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.

9 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.

10 And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

Thus Nimrod was a mighty hunter, a king and the founder of great cities. 1 Chronicles 1:10 reiterates his fame, and Micah 5:6 refers to the long-gone king's area as "the land of Nimrod." 

He was probably as famous as Orion the Hunter was in Greek mythology. Orion got in a lot of trouble, but wound up as a constellation, so he had that going for him. You wouldn't imagine someone saying "You're such an Orion!" 

The name Nimrod was even more cemented in the public consciousness than Orion's, back when we were a Bible-studying culture. H. D. Rawnsley's 1903 reminiscences, Lake Country Sketches, mentions Sir John Crozier, who owned a fox-hunting lodge in that bucolic English area. Crozier is remembered as "a North Country Nimrod."

The North Country Nimrod in question

 

Hobart Caunter's book Legendary & Romantic Tales of Indian History (1885) has a chapter called "The Mahomedan Nimrod," concerning "Mujahid, the son of Mahomed Shah, sovereign of the Deccan," who "was remarkable for his courage and amazing strength of body." Not someone to call a Nimrod, if the name was insulting. 

And let us not forget that Ernest Shackleton, a great explorer of the frozen wastes, sailed a mighty whaler named Nimrod on his 1908 expedition to Antarctica -- one of many intrepid vessels by that name.  

So what happened so unjustly to Nimrod? You probably know. As Ken Zurski noted on the site Unremembered History, in the 1940 Looney Tune cartoon "A Wild Hare," "a wise-cracking rabbit named Bugs Bunny called his nemesis Elmer Fudd a 'poor little nimrod,' a sarcastic reference to Fudd’s skills as a hunter." In fact (and was disputed online quite a bit), the line does not appear in that cartoon. It was not Bugs that called Elmer "my little Nimrod" -- that heap of irony apparently came first from Daffy Duck, in the 1948 short "What Makes Daffy Duck." 

Neither I nor any other kid knew who Nimrod was -- even kids from churchgoing families might be expected to miss a name so briefly mentioned in the Bible -- and Daffy's snottiness seals the deal. The phonemes of NIMrod trip easily off the tongue with disdain, so a kid who didn't know better would just take it as an insult. Plus, it rhymes with dimwad, which sounds very much like a euphemism for dickhead.

Fake Nimrod

In much the same way as irony turned "Entrance of the Gladiators" from a thrilling scene -- mighty warriors prepared to face dismemberment and death in battle -- into clown music, so did the ironic use of the name Nimrod in a Warner Brothers' cartoon turn the mighty hunter into a clown himself. 

I very much doubt that anyone will ever film a biblical epic in the English language entitled Nimrod at this late date. Even Merriam-Webster has as a definition for the name "Idiot, Jerk (slang)".

Alas, poor Nimrod! How unfair is life! To start out a mighty hunter and king, and end up as a Fudd due to ignorance and irony. 

Oh, Nimrod! Oh, humanity! 

Electric heels.

One of the things I miss least about working in an office is getting to the office and getting home from same. Since most of my career was spent commuting via public transportation and shoe leather, the winter was the worst. Heavy coat, heavy boots, sloppy streets, grumpy New Yorkers. A regular winter wonderland. 

In those days I would keep a cheap pair of loafers in my desk -- one of those Payless pairs or the like that seemed to be made of compressed Hefty bags. That way I wouldn't be clomping around the place all day in my boots. The downside was that the plastic shoes, combined with winter air so lacking in humidity that it actually sucked water out of our skin, plus industrial carpeting, made the static electricity awful. I would carry a quarter in my pocket to tap against door handles to avoid getting shocked. The sparks between quarter and handle were often quite visible. I'd think, Isn't this how the Electric Eel on Underdog got his powers?

Believe me when I say how happy I was to not have a job that required working outdoors on such days. The reward of working outside on lovely days instead of being stuck in an office did not make up for having to labor in the freezing cold and rain and snow on tough days. But still, the static electricity was annoying. I think you could have stuck balloons on the wall without even rubbing them on your hair. Just carry one around for a while. 

Of course, my imagination and lack of scientific rigor expected more spectacular effects -- people's hair on end like they were hugging Van de Graaff generators; laptops shorting out at desks in a shower of sparks; the network being brought down by massive power surges; the combination of shocks and polyester clothes and negative humidity causing spontaneous human combustion. Fortunately real-world science is a little more forgiving than that. 

Winter still has lots of perils, so be careful out there, especially if you live in a land of ice and snow as I do. And if you work in an office, be careful in there. I'm not saying spontaneous human combustion is an actual danger, but the odds may be a titch north of zero. 

Willy Wrongka.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I hate Willy Wonka. I don't know why others like him so much. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory scared the hell out of me as child when we read it in second grade, and the Gene Wilder movie was even worse.

That new Wonka movie that came out last year seemed to make a pretty good bit of money ﹘ $511 million worldwide against a $125 million budget, according to Wikipedia, And yet Kellogg's went with O.G. Wonka on its Froot Loops tie-in. 

Why? Did Timothee make a separate deal with General Mills? 

Poor Post -- stuck with the Johnny Depp Wonka.

My wife thinks I'm nuts for disliking the Gene Wilder movie, but she didn't grow up being told she was a spoiled brat all the time. I was certain that if Wonka lured me into and trapped me in his awful factory, I'd wind up squirrel food, or drowned in chocolate, or turned into a giant cantaloupe, or suffer some other bizarre and cruel fate. And my parents would figure I had it coming. Well, he was a spoiled brat.

Nothing against Wilder, mind you, who did a great job in the movie, and most assuredly has had a great post-life career as Wonka in the wide world of memes. For example:

Wonka has gotten far removed in many ways from Dahl's conception, I guess. And yet, while I have heard word-banning idiots want to alter his text so they can continue to milk it for dough without offending anyone (except, I guess, oversensitive kids like I was), I suppose the books will be with us for some time. 

Author Roald Dahl made a fortune writing children's books, but I think he despised children. However, I think he despised adults more. He killed enough of them in his stories for grown-ups (although "Lamb to the Slaughter" seems to be the only one of those anyone reads anymore) and I suppose he killed a few of them IRL as a fighter pilot in the war. He won three Edgar Awards for his mystery stories, and hosted a show called Tales of the Unexpected, which ran in the US in syndication. It was an anthology show that featured adaptations of adult mystery and crime stories by him and other writers like Robert Bloch and Saki.  

A couple of years before he died, Kingsley Amis wrote his Memoirs, which in addition to telling his own story devoted chapters to various people including other writers. It was an excellent job of dumping a chamber pot over the heads of his fellows as he headed for the final curtain, very much in Amis style. Roald Dahl gets his own chapter--he had died in 1990, a year before Memoirs came out. 

Amis describes the fabulously wealthy Dahl descending in a helicopter at a Tom Stoppard house party in Iver. This was the 1970s, when Dahl's kids' books were at their hottest and he flush with Hollywood cash. It was the only time Amis recalls meeting the man. 

     "What you want to do," he said, "is write a children's book. That's where the money is today, believe me." ("Today," as I said, was quite some time back.)
     "I wouldn't know how to set about it."
     "Do you know what my advance was on my last one?" When he found I did not, in fact had no idea, he told me. It certainly sounded like a large sum. 
     "I couldn't do it," I told him again. "I don't think I enjoyed children's books much when I was a child myself. I've got no feeling for that kind of thing."
     "Never mind, the little bastards'd swallow it."
     Many times in these pages I have put in people's mouths approximations to what they said, what they might well have said, what they said at another time, and a few almost-outright inventions, but that last remark is verbatim.    

Seems like a long way from Dahl to Froot Loops, but frankly, I have found most British authors of the twentieth century to be rather Froot Loops in various ways. So maybe not such a stretch.

The anti-wad.

Every now and then some average person comes up with an invention to solve a minor vexing problem, a problem so common that everyone knows about it, but it’s just annoying, so no one ever thinks to solve it. This person is just one of the faceless masses, and yet shows a spark of inspiration that is truly something special. 

Like Tomima Edmark, the inventor of the TopsyTail, the inventor makes something that takes off and makes them rich, inspiring us all. We may not think that we could come up with a clever invention, but we're always glad to see one of us make good. 

But the big question is: Does it work?

Well, the TopsyTail (now owned by Conair) has a proven record, and I am proven to have virtually no hair, so there's no point in me fooling with that. But what I do have is laundry, and like everyone else I am frustrated by how the top sheet and/or the fitted sheet will conspire in the washer and dryer to ball up and net the rest of the load, keeping everything from getting clean and dry. 

Until now! (Maybe!)

Wad-Free is a simple but clever device intended to keep your sheets well-mannered on washday. The pack comes with two Wad-Free dewadders, or perhaps they should be pre-unwadders — plastic squares with nubs. You attach each corner of the sheet to a corner of the Wad-Free, and off into the washer with it! 

Of course my wife bought it, but it was up to me to test it. I made up a load with some socks, a couple pair of sweatpants, some T-shirts, a bunch of pillowcases, a fitted sheet, and a top sheet. The latter two were fitted with Wad-Frees, and a simple operation it is to do. (The educational video noted on the instruction card is barely over two minutes long, but isn't really necessary.) Then I put the whole load in the front-loader on the Power Wash cycle, to test if the Wad-Free would hold on in such violent conditions. 

And waddaya know (har!) -- it did! 

Moreover, neither sheet got balled up and captured other wash items. So far the Wad-Free was working perfectly. But the dryer is the real test -- that's where most sheets will form a ball of damp clothing while going round and round. Would Wad-Free free us from the wads?

Almost a perfect yes!

Strangely, the only thing that got wadded up in the bottom sheet was the top sheet. None of the other articles got bunched up, and everything got dry. Also, had I dried the load on a gentle cycle as recommended, it's possible even the sheet mix-up would not have occurred.  

Amazing! 

Wad-Free is the invention of Cyndi Bray, who took to the show Shark Tank to get investors. I don't watch the show, but I will give them credit for investing in this one. As I said, a simple solution to a common problem, but a solution no one had seen before. I would not have guessed that pinning the sheet corners would have prevented wadding such as (what Cyndi calls) the Tornado Wad (tangled ropes), the Hostage-Taker Wad (things inside stay damp), or the Burrito Wad (everything stuck inside, everything stays damp). Good for her, and much success to her company, Brayniacs. 

Let me leave you with the Wad-Free slogan, which I think we can all agree is a winner: 

Truer words are seldom spoken.

I like me too.

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," then presumably coughed a little and raised his eyebrows, looking around with a smile.

I'm not sure that poets have the clout anymore to make statements like that. But that's just fine -- there are plenty of other vocations in which the practitioners have a self-regard that would make Caligula seem like a shy, modest type. 

"Little ol' me? I'm just a kindly 
emperor, trying to help the people."

Journalists seem to have an enormous self-regard. Maybe they always did, feeling that with the power of their words they were able to assume an authority that required neither education nor invention, just the vote of the public when it purchased the newspaper. Since Watergate, their self-regard as truthtellers in a corrupt world has inflated as respect for the profession and evidence of its independence has cratered. Reporters on the whole seem to be happy lapdogs for the people they like, covering up things here and attacking on command there, whose mistrust by the public grows daily. (Was anyone surprised when the Newseum closed?) And yet if you read a book by a reporter on reporting, he'll tell you that he's not important, the story is, and also, ME ME ME. It's a tour de force of the author's humblebrag, with a few lectures on his Journalistic Ethics tossed in. 

Saints never tell you they're saints. 

Perhaps this egotism is purposeful puffery for journalists, designed to dispel the creeping fear that they really are useless loudmouths. Could be. 

Teachers have really gotten out in front of their skis on this one as well. Yes, they are important for the education of our children (when they do it), and most teachers I know are great people who love what they do. But when did some of them begin to think they were more important than the children's own families? While it's true that a bad family can turn out a bad kid, one bad teacher can corrupt a whole passel of them. Ironically, a little humility goes a long way to earning respect and trust. 

Sometimes I get the feeling too many of them took Plato's Republic seriously, thinking that philosophers ought to be the monarchs and children should be taken from their parents for education. They ought to remember that it might be a nice place to visit, but they wouldn't want to live there. 

Money handlers as a class do not consider their large sums of money adequate recompense for their work. They also demand the respect of the public for the genius that they possess. If you were smart, you'd be rich too! seems to be the thought. They needn't worry -- rich people will always get their tuchuses polished by those who want to know their secrets. They never have to see the disdain of those who find their egoism tiresome, their methods dubious, their gospel damaging. They never have to hear the moans of those who despise how they use their cash for charitable purposes and have to live with the consequences. 

Politicians are and have always been the worst of the lot, able to convince themselves of the good they are doing while stuffing their pockets and crushing the lives of citizens they are meant to serve. I'll give them this -- if people were always coming to my door and begging me for special favors, I'd begin to think less of humanity as a whole. Perhaps that's the best argument for term limits -- as a means of preventing cynicism and hatred among the ruling class.

Successful actors and other performers are perhaps the most revolting of them all. The love of the fans ought to be enough, but the appetite of the ego grows with the feeding. They must be world-changers as well and loved for it. It usually makes them pretty tools for the faddish fanatism of the day. This would be harmless, but it inevitably requires telling us little people what we ought to be doing. Yeah, we all just love that.  

And what of the humble novelist, who sweats away in his little garret, chipping away at his stories like a sculptor trying to draw the angel from the coarse stone? Like moi, in other words? Do we not think that we are hot stuff, and expect to be respected for it? 

Meh -- not me. As with poets, maybe there was a time when the novelist was a person of some societal rank. A million lousy novels and a million good but forgotten books since, those days are gone. Now only a pinpoint of wildly successful and wealthy authors would expect that kind of obsequiousness, and they fall into the money handlers category. The rest of us prefer love to respect. (Although a little money is nice, too.) 

Bad words.

As usual, those on the Left are portraying themselves as champions of banned books, but not giving the facts behind the books the Right want banned -- which are only and specifically graphic sex books from kids' libraries. Seems like a reasonable ask.

On the other hand, conservatives are not the ones who subject books to diversity and sensitivity readers. These new drugs on the market are paid by publishers to read books before they go to press and flag things that might be offensive or triggering to readers. But only certain readers, as we shall see. 

Obvious ones are, of course, words insulting to ethnicities, but there's definitely a hierarchy in place. Words that have been used to insult blacks are out entirely (unless maybe if used by a black author). Even if an evil character uses the word, it cannot be allowed in print. Words offensive to Latinos face automatic ejection as well, but may not bring the ban hammer down on the author. I'm told it's all about context.) Words that insult Asians of any type may be used if important to the story. Jews and other whites (all Jews are now whites even if they aren't) are fair game. 

Wops, Micks, Dagoes, Krauts, Squareheads, Hebes, Polacks, Rednecks, Crackers, and so on -- use them all you want. And as a white guy I have no problem with that. Here's a little white secret: We use those terms on one another, even within our own families.

Some ethnic words have to go, we are told. But there are many words that you might not know are ethnically insulting that are also banned. Cakewalk, for one, has a historical background that makes it (all together now!) problematic. Master bedrooms are no more, as you may have heard. And don't talk about slaving away on a project, even for comic exaggeration, even if you had a Castilian ancestor sold into slavery by the Barbary pirates. 

Of course, insulting words about sexual orientation are right out. So is misgendering -- and this can be a bear trap for the unwary, as there are now more genders than Baskin-Robbins flavors. This also means you can't use any collective noun that implies gender -- not just the long-despised mankind but also guys as in Hey, you guys! Even ladies and gentlemen, which used to cover everyone, is insulting because it leaves out those who do not conform to either or who choose multiple genders. 

Let us not forget the words that are banned because they might offend the differently abled. Bruce Springsteen can no longer be blinded by the light; he may be dazzled or find it difficult to see but not blinded. Never mind that the light actually caused a brief loss of vision; the verb is no longer allowed. Similarly, deafening is out. Dummy is no good anymore, not because it offends the mannequin-American community, but because it was used to make fun of deaf-mutes. 

Crippled? Are you kidding? Banned for life.

What about the crazy people, you ask? Well, you are now banned for using the word crazy. Mental illness isn't funny, buster! Wacko, looney, nuts, ga-ga, all those words are problematic because insane people need love too, right up until the moment they shoot up a school. (Then it's the gun's fault, anyway.) 

Don't expect to get away on technicalities. Words that sound like banned words are also banned, even if there's no connection. A guy lost his job for using the word niggardly, which comes from Middle English and Norse (hnøggr, meaning stingy). Merriam-Webster even warns against its use -- not that it can bring itself to use the word that it sounds like. As for spick-and-span, its origin is "short for spick-and-span-new, from obsolete English spick spike + English and + span-new" -- but you'd best drop it anyway. I'm surprised KIK Consumer Products still uses the brand name Spic and Span.

🔨🔨🔨🔨🔨

Most of you know I'm a pretty nice guy, and I genuinely try to be respectful to everyone. But I'm also respectful of the idea that speech must be free, and not restricted among adults for any trivial reason, least of all because someone might get annoyed. (Christians have been getting annoyed for 2,000 years and no one worries about our feelings.) Adults have the freedom to not listen to or read something we don't like. If its very existence bothers us, we need to grow up.

I have one simple message, and if you never remember anything else I've written, I would ask you to remember this: 

Do not take seriously the claims about banning books by people who are set on banning words.

Thank you and good day!

Cold heart, hot dog.

Springtime is on my mind

Flowers blooming, all the time

Smell the roses

Smell the grass

Old man winter can kiss my ass

                            --Spinal Tap, "Springtime"

Yay, winter.

The people who dig the snow
Are usually not those who dig the snow

Yesterday was fairly nice, mostly sunny, high in the forties, so global warming will kill us before the year is out. All the snow we'd had earlier in the week had melted but for some piles here and there. 

Unfortunately that left Winter's sickly child, Mud, all over the joint. And the dog had just gotten a pro grooming for the first time in two months. 

He's a hairy beast, and we never let him go that long normally. His fuzz gets matted and clumped, and that's no good for him. We ought to brush him out daily, but none of us would like that, least of all him. We're lucky to have a great groomer who has a knack with the hairy dudes like him. 

But in December, we skipped his usual monthly groom. Why? Because it would have been close to Christmas, and a lot of people who wouldn't normally get a dog groomed by a pro do so when company is coming or when cute pictures with Santa are going to be posted. Also, they might want to board the dog for a few days, or take advantage of doggie daycare (a service our groomer also provides), and that's where the rub is. Because we were a little nervous about this new and mysterious respiratory disease that's going after the dogs. 

The disease is dangerous and disconcerting. It's similar to kennel cough, but the cause is unknown thus far. I have heard of no cases diagnosed here in New York yet. Of course, the usual warnings apply, to keep your dog away from places where lots of other dogs congregate -- like the groomer or the boarder or the dog park. Since you can expect a lot of dogs in these places around the holidays, my wife suggested we skip a month. 

So we skipped December. Izzy was not a huge mess when the time came for January's cleaning, but yeah, he was ready, all right. Off we went yesterday for his early-morning appointment.

He dealt with it with his usual combination of love and panic -- I think he loves the groomer but hates the grooming. I picked him up a few hours later and he looked and smelled awesome. Having him riding in the backseat was like having an seventy-pound air freshener. 

Aaaand then there was the mud. 

The mud was neither very deep nor very squishy, but I have one strongly enforced rule: Stay clean for ONE DAMN DAY after I drop serious lettuce on your bath. It meant keeping pup away from the muddy edge of the sidewalk. The advantage I had was that he was too exhausted from the grooming to need a lot of exercise in the afternoon. 

So he's clean; apparently disease-free; my wallet is lighter; and there are no blizzards in the forecast. If you're in the Hudson Valley and your car is musty, I will rent out the fuzzy air freshener at cheap rates. He will even leave dog hair behind to keep the odor alive. 

Act fast: It rained last night and he could get muddy at any moment.

Earthworm jimmied.

Today's post is a bit of a rebuttal to my own post on warning labels from the other day, as you shall see.

🔬 🔬 🔬

You learn a lot of lessons in school, many of which are not the ones you're specifically taught. 

My wife was telling the story of Frog Dissection Day in her high-school biology class, where her lab partner actually fainted, leaving her to face the frog alone. The bio teacher filled in as her "partner," but of course he was not going to do any of the work. I think the frog had a better day than my wife did. 

The year I took biology in high school, the school system was too broke for the Fetal Pig. There was a well-known progression in bio lab over the course of the school year: Earthworm, Frog, Fetal Pig. It had been that way through history, right up through the year before mine. But New York City was in the midst of one of its financial crises, and so we were down to the worm and the frog. 

I actually missed frog day; I don't think I was too skeeved out to go, so I suspect I was actually sick that day, not playing hooky. But I do remember Earthworm Dissection Day. Vividly.

Unlike my wife's bio class, we got four lab partners to each worm. I must confess that this was no advanced science class; it was just the required class. It was not a smarty pants nerd class full of Future Physicians and Amateur Golfers of America. So the studentry was real mixed bag. 

Speaking for myself, I had no idea what was going on. What's inside an earthworm, anyway? Earth? Gray pudding? They can't really have organs, can they? I dreaded finding out. 

Nevertheless, the day came, and the four of us at my table were staring down at the largest earthworm I had ever seen, dead and stretched out on a board. 

The girls on our team didn't want to touch it. They were of the classic Brooklyn F--- that I ain't touchin no f——- worm variety. I certainly didn't want to do anything to make myself look stupid in front of these kids -- being a A/B student was the only thing I had over them. And the other boy was a tall galoot who could have been a jock but had instead chosen a career as a stoner, the kind of guy that could flunk a course in breathing. So things looked pretty grim.

Then, as the worm turns, so too came the most unexpected turn of events.

The dumb guy picked up the tools, looked at the diagram, and with no words, started in gently. With no help from the rest of the team, he did an absolutely gorgeous job on the worm. He sliced it to the right millimeter, then peeled and pinned back the skin as gently as a breath of spring, leaving the deceased annelid's organs on display like an exhibit in a museum. At other tables the students were descending into chaos, their worms looking like they'd been sat on. Our worm's innards were so clearly delineated you could have taken a photo of it for a textbook. Out of nowhere this teenage boy made us all look like we knew what we were doing.

Had this been a hobby of his? Or could this have been a life-changing moment, the moment this guy decided to smarten up and become a doctor, a pathologist, a coroner, or a serial killer? I have no idea who he was or what became of him, so I cannot hazard a guess. But as he pulled forth the worm organs, so too he pulled our fat out of the fire, and I have always been grateful. 

It's a reminder that you really can't judge someone's insides entirely by their outsides.

And I certainly never have looked at earthworms the same way again.

I salute you, worm dissection guy. I'm sorry I missed what was probably a virtuoso performance on the frog. I only hope that you went on to use your amazing surgical prowess productively, and for good, not for evil. 

Warning labels.

 

For a long time I've been annoyed with bumper stickers, even if I agree with their sentiments -- but most of the time I don't. They're either bragging or threatening violence, or just being rude. Isn't there enough rudeness as it is?

Worst, of course, are the political loons who are determined to stick something with their cause on every exposed quarter-inch of the car. But that at least serves a purpose -- as a warning label.

For a long time I've thought that people ought to come with warning labels. Some are provided by nature -- red hair, for example. (I know, I know -- just because I had universally bad luck with redheads doesn't mean they're all crazy or evil. Maybe it means they have good taste!)

Nowadays people are thoughtfully providing their own warning labels so you know who the crazy ones are. Weird hair color, bizarre tattoos and lots of 'em, industrial size hunks of metal as piercings -- all these are as helpful as a pantload of poop to identify people with whom you want to maintain distance. 

If that's how they want to express themselves, that's A-OK. We believe that free speech is a right that comes from the God that made us. I, of course, expect the same protection of my right.

It would be a different case in the fictional nation of Fredtopia, where Benevolent King Fred rules with a kindly philosophy but an iron fist. Automobiles would be permitted no more than three bumper stickers. They could have any message they wanted -- Down with King Fred, Fred = Jerkface, King Fred Shags Wildebeest -- that's where the benevolent side comes in. But the presence of a fourth bumper sticker means a twenty-four-hour warning to remove one. If the offending excess sticker remains, the car is impounded, stickers above the number three removed by random selection, and the car returned upon receipt of the appropriate fine. Repeat offenders will face escalating fines and points on their licenses. 

Benevolent but firm. 

In other words, King Fred's message is: While we appreciate your freedom of speech, the Crown will remove signs of public insanity in the interest of keeping the peace. 

 

On that note, King Fred would also have unmuffled vehicles policed. Your car or pickup runs at 100 decibels, you get three days to muffle that bastard. On day four the vehicle is impounded and used for trebuchet practice. Silence, like the Crown, is golden. 

No cook no cry.

Sorry I've been away from the blog for a few days. I was asked to look at a short book as a favor -- a rush job that didn't pay much but seemed like an important book on economics and national security. And it is, but it was also a horrible mess and took many hours. So, I'm finally done with that, and here I am. 

And I'm here to tell you: All you need is glove. 

The NoCry glove is a machine-washable kitchen glove that supposedly is cut-resistant. It protects the thumb, index, and middle fingers -- three of our most popular fingers.  

It was another Christmas gift. Why? Because I cut off a nice hunk of skin on my left index finger while cooking in November. Bled like crazy. I'm so right-handed that I barely know I have a left hand most of the time, but after I cut the tip I discovered how many times I use that left index finger in the normal course of the day. And that is: A lot.

The white fingers on the gloves are the reinforced cut-resistant ones, so the ring and pinkie fingers are still on their own. The instructions are fairly comical, but they certainly do get across the point that these gloves will not turn you into Iron Man. 

I don't think anyone expected the gloves to make one chain-saw proof, but the warning not to use them with power tools is interesting. If they interfere with your grip, why use them at all? But I suspect the manufacturers just want to warn us off the false sense of security that comes with wearing non-chain-saw-proof gloves while wielding chain saws. I have no idea. 

The interesting thing is, these gloves are a product of Thailand. I've gotten a lot of weird instructions in products from China, but I have to say, I think the Thais beat the Chinese on that front. This cartoon was included in the package: 

Okay, so, the meteorite just missed the dinosaur, and unlike the one that theoretically wiped out the dinos, this one seems to have been made of Nerf and tossed from twelve feet away. But what did it land on? Is there someone in the crater? All we see is a cuffless glove, a tag, and... an electrical wire. (These are not electric gloves.) The little demon uses this as an opportunity to plug (ha!) the extended warranty.

So, do they work? I don't know! I haven't had to chop things lately, and when I did I forgot to try them. I expect they work fine, but I wonder about the loss of manual dexterity from those big square fingers. It may make kitchen work slower and more annoying. On the other hand (maybe literally), the gloves at least keep the chef aware that care is needed -- which itself will help prevent common dangers like Bagel Finger, Avocado Palm, and maybe the worst of all, Mandoline Hand. 

Safety Last! is a great Harold Lloyd thrill comedy, but not a slogan for cooking. Trust me on that.

Crypto hunker!

We're expecting our first "plowable" snowstorm here this upcoming weekend, which has the weather whackos on the news acting like it's a free Rolling Stones / Taylor Swift concert in Central Park. "It's been 298 days since our last measurable snow event!" Yeah, you know why? It’s not that thing that rhymes with Lowball Dorming. It’s because that was when March happened. We don't usually get big snowfalls in April or May.

Now it's early January. We didn't get any snow in December. Which is completely normal for New York's lower Hudson Valley. And it's exceptionally normal for New York City not to get snow in December. I grew up there and never saw a White Christmas. Lots of rain. (No one dreams of a Clear Christmas.) 

People should not be getting their dresses up over their heads over the weather. 

They need instead to be hysterical about something important: Money! 

Yes, friends, it's time again to remind you that Fredcoin is the world's most awesome cryptocurrency, the kind that has seen no arrests or indictments, the kind that has an amazing track record of retaining its value. Worried about the winter? Afraid that a blizzard will cave in your roof, avalanche your car, rip off your porch, insult your mom? Wherever will you find the money to deal with all that? (Especially Mom, who will be so upset she'll want to buy shoes.) Well, it's Fredcoin to the rescue! 

Ask yourself: Self! Doesn't money get you through rough times better than rough times get you through money? And of course the answer is: Yes! So you need a safe way to invest your currency. Don't just leave it hanging around. The US government makes your dollar worth less every day. But it can't affect the United State of Fred! Fredcoin will hold your cash against the determined amount of Fredcoin, which will be there when YOU need it, when YOU want it! Not when the punks in Washington say you can have it! 

So thumb your nose at Old Man Winter. Thumb, I say, thumb! And send a bundle of your annoying money to me. You will immediately receive an e-certificate stating your investment in Fredcoin. Then watch the magic happen! Laugh at blizzards! Chuckle at storms! Give yourself a hernia over squalls! Tell sleet to kiss your fartin’ behind! With Fredcoin in your corner, you can't go wrong! 

Fredcoin! The Crypto for All Seasons!  

Oh, Brave New Year, that has such people in it.

Okay, today we play Fun with Doomcasting. 

One of the things conservatives dread is the concept of social credit -- that delightful Chinese Marxist system of ruining the lives of people who do not toe the government line in every way. Disagree with Xi, show interest in Falun Gong, request more pay from your job, and you may find yourself unable to get a decent place to live, a vehicle, a loan, or anything else that ought to be decided by a proper financial credit system.

 

We know there are people who think it would be a good idea here in America. But there are two things we ought to keep in mind: 

1) It is already here unofficially, in the media; 

2) Your social credit score does not start at a baseline and go up or down -- it starts at nothing. You have to earn credit. You actually have to out-earn your fellows.

I've seen it in correspondence among editors and writers when some topic of Sensitivity comes up. Everyone panics a little, and each tries to provide a wokier-than-thou solution. In one story, there was a question about a trans woman whose boyfriend dumped "her" for unknown reasons. Would that make him a transphobe? Because the idea that a man might rather date a woman than a man dressed as a woman would mean he's some kind of evil hater. (Try reversing that -- "So the lesbian doesn't want to date a man dressed as a woman; is she a transphobe?" -- and watch the panic set in.) 

Even worse is medical writing, where we supposedly need to be grown-ups, but we are not. This is because we are no longer men and women, but AMABs and AFABs. 

You remember a few years back when the medical press was having kittens because it turned out that women's heart-attack symptoms were different from men's, and coronary studies always looked at men? It started the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women campaign twenty years ago. Well, now you may Go Red for AFABs, but you'd better drop the "women." 

If we must discuss distasteful subjects like ovarian or prostate cancer -- distasteful because no surgery on earth can give you ovaries or a prostate, yet we have to describe the patient population somehow -- we must refer to Assigned Male at Birth or Assigned Female at Birth. Like the doctor just decided which sex the baby should be. "We're fighting godless commies in Vietnam; better make some more boys today."

But we know that's only a stopgap, because there are campaigners who want to prevent the assignment of sex at birth. A baby should just be registered as "a baby" and it will tell us what it is later. That demand does not come from some lunatic fringe group; it is from the American Medical Association. 

So much for the idea that medical needs are different between boys and girls, and not knowing the difference is dangerous. Better the child should die than be misgendered, or gendered at all. 

What will we do when nothing is assigned at birth? Call them PWOs and PWPs (People With Ovaries/People With Prostates)? 

If you've ever been in a group blamestorm you know how this happens. Everyone is nervous; everyone is scared of being labeled something bad; everyone has to try to top the others, and as fast as they can. Temperance, consideration, sobriety of thought -- these are not considered virtues. We saw that in the wicked Tweetfest following the monstrous October 7 attack on Israel -- after the initial rush to lunacy was over, with its concurrent ratchet effect, the wiser ones silently deleted their Hamas-supporting Tweets. Others doubled down, more frantic than before. This is not adult behavior. 

I don't know where this mania ends, but I suspect it will require a lot of trial lawyers to start suing the ever-loving crap out of the perpetrators of insanity. We're starting to see a little of that, but not enough. Come on, you greedy bastards! There are billions to be made from this. Wise up and get suing! 

P.S.: I guess my social credit is deep in the negatives now. It was bound to happen sometime. It may have happened a long time ago. 

2024?

Sorry for being so short today -- I actually had written a longer post that totaled all the things I hated about 2023 and all the things I expect to hate about 2024. But who wants that?

Instead I'll just wish you all a happy new year, and please accept my deepest thanks for visiting my blog. It's a humble blog, with much to be humble about, but it's mine, and you're reading this, and I'm thanking you, so there we are.

Good luck and God bless! Off we go into the wilderness of a new year! 

hooray.