A pause.

I'm afraid circumstances are requiring me to announce a hiatus in this blog.

No, not that kind!

Sadly, it's not a vacation, nor a big book tour (ha!). I just have a lot that must get done this next week and no time in which to do it. I hope to be back next Saturday, but plan to post again if the situation worsens. 

Please enjoy the rest of your April!

George & Dragon.

Today is the feast day of St. George. You know -- dragon killing dude. That's pretty much the only thing anyone (including me) thinks of. And yet he's the patron saint of England, Catalonia, and Moscow; there are 26 towns named for St. George, including the seat of Richmond County in New York; and the cross of St. George -- red cross on white banner -- can be found all around England. The Coptic Church calls him the Prince of Martyrs, and he is even revered by Muslims. There is a statue of him on the grounds of the United Nations building in Manhattan, slaying a "dragon" made of actual pieces of US and Soviet missiles, a Russian gift in 1990. But who was he? 

Like several early saints in the church, such as Christopher, his legend had a tendency to crowd out the facts. He was the real deal, whom Pope Gelasius I canonized in 494. Here's what the Saints & Angels page says:

George was born to a Gerontios and Polychronia, a Roman officer and a Greek native of Lydda. Both were Christians from noble families of the Anici and George, Georgios in the original Greek, was raised to follow their faith.

When George was old enough, he was welcomed into Diocletian's army. by his late 20's, George became a Tribunus and served as an imperial guard for the Emperor at Nicomedia.

On February 24, 303 A.D., Diocletian, who hated Christians, announced that every Christian the army passed would be arrested and every other soldier should offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods.

George refused to abide by the order and told Diocletian, who was angry but greatly valued his friendship with George's father.

When George announced his beliefs before his peers, Diocletian was unable to keep the news to himself. In an effort to save George, Diocletian attempted to convert him to believe in the Roman gods, offered him land, money and slaves in exchange for offering a sacrifice to the Roman gods, and made several other offers that George refused.

Finally, after exhausting all other options, Diocletian ordered George's execution. In preparation for his death, George gave his money to the poor and was sent for several torture sessions. He was lacerated on a wheel of swords and required resuscitation three times, but still George did not turn from God.

On April 23, 303 A.D., George was decapitated before Nicomedia's outer wall. His body was sent to Lydda for burial, and other Christians went to honor George as a martyr.

That sounds like a brave but very typical saint of the early church, willing to go to a horrible death rather than renounce Jesus Christ. 

So... what about the dragon? 

Here's the story:

There are several stories about George fighting dragons, but in the Western version, a dragon or crocodile made its nest at a spring that provided water to Silene, believed to be modern-day Lcyrene in Libya.

The people were unable to collect water and so attempted to remove the dragon from its nest on several occasions. It would temporarily leave its nest when they offered it a sheep each day, until the sheep disappeared and the people were distraught.

This was when they decided that a maiden would be just as effective as sending a sheep. The townspeople chose the victim by drawing straws. This continued until one day the princess' straw was drawn.

The monarch begged for her to be spared but the people would not have it. She was offered to the dragon, but before she could be devoured, George appeared. He faced the dragon, protected himself with the sign of the Cross, and slayed the dragon.

After saving the town, the citizens abandoned their paganism and were all converted to Christianity.

Obviously there is at least one thing in the story that's deeply weird -- the idea that the men of Silene said to themselves, "We're clean outta sheep; what do we do? Go fight the dragon? Nah, that's crazy talk. Let's just feed him the girls." Although to be fair, that was probably one hell of a dragon (or crocodile).

No disrespect meant to St. George or the other martyrs of the church, but I kind of think that without the tale of bold St. George killing the dragon he would not have nearly the same popularity. Sober men of the church revere the saints who gave their lives for Christ, but all guys like the story of a dude willing to kill a dragon and save the princess.

Laff away your gut!

When my doctor says, "You ought to lose weight" I say "Har har HARDY har har!"

Why do I say that? It's obvious that with my back and my general shape I am not going to go to the gym to flail around on the weight machines willy-nilly. If someone were to ask me, "How do you perform a standing dumbbell cobra with alternate arms?" my answer would be to hire a guy.

But you see, my plan is to laugh my way into good shape! 

You may laugh at that. Good! It's good exercise. Hey, I've got science on my side here.

While doing some research for work I came across a 2006 study from the London International Journal of Obesity. It's called "Energy Expenditure of Genuine Laughter." According to these chucklesome boffins, "Genuine voiced laughter causes a 10–20% increase in EE [energy expenditure] and HR [heart rate] above resting values, which means that 10–15 min of laughter per day could increase total EE by 40–170 kJ (10–40 kcal)."

That's great! I can just laugh my way to health. I love to laugh; I love to read and watch funny stuff. And I'm not talking about the sarcastic ha-ha I do when I look at "news"papers or the clapter that follows feeding the crowd some bit of political stuff they like. I'm talking gut-busting laughs that make me crawl to get tissues as I try not to knock over any beverages. Damn straight that burns calories!  

Now, you're probably wondering how long it will take for me to hyuk hyuk all my lard off. Let me do some math here.... If we take the old formula that states 3,500 cal (or kcal) = 1 pound, and 15 minutes of laughter burns 40 calories... 87.5... per hour, 21.875... round up to 22 (close enough).... 

Looks like if I laugh around the clock for 46 days straight I'll be in excellent shape.

Um.

Hm.

Ah.

I wonder how many calories you burn by crying?

Fred's Book Club: Such Tripe!

It is Wednesday, which is Hump Day, and that means it's time for the Humpback Writers, our serious book feature with the silly name. To date no actual humps on the writers have been detected, despite our best efforts. In fact, today's author/artist, while being a bit advanced in years, still has no sign of back problems, as one can see on his Web page. 

Yes, today we're profiling British cartoonist Bill Tidy, and specifically one book-length installment of his long-running cartoon saga, The Fosdyke Saga (a takeoff on the novel and TV series The Forsyte Saga). And if you stay to the end of today's post, you'll see an interesting connection between this comic strip and a notorious case currently in the papers.

When I was a kid, I loved comic strips, especially the funny ones. What would prove to be my favorite form was not the straight gag or the adventure stories, but the rarest and most difficult -- the continuing story that still had a daily punchline. Strips like Thimble Theatre and Little Nemo were known for it, but they were long gone. It was a vanished breed in my youth, at least in America, but across the pond Bill Tidy had been writing and drawing one since 1971 for the Daily Mirror. The Fosdyke Saga featured the various adventures of the Fosdyke clan, Britain's greatest tripe-selling family, and their ongoing struggles in the Edwardian era and beyond, especially against the nefarious rival Roger Ditchley. The adventures centered around selling tripe, promoting the public's awareness of tripe, inventing new uses for tripe (tripe parachute!), fending off various wicked persons, and acquiring rare tripe-related objects for their tripe museum (on the book cover above you can see the South American tripe pyramid, composed completely of dried tripe). 

From the front matter

I bought the above book (the last in the series) at the Forbidden Planet store in the Village. While a lot of the humor (or humour) was lost on this young American at the time, I still thought it was brilliant, funny, endlessly inventive, and a veritable a circus of great characters.

Tidy maintained interest with cliffhangers and rotating storylines. In one adventure in the book above, adventurous son Tom Fosdyke has been dispatched to the Arctic Circle to seek the Arctic Tripe Snake!

Meanwhile, in Manchester, youngest and strongest son Tim has had a breakdown following a plot of Ditchley's to convince the Fosdykes they are haunted! Unfortunately the doctor leaves much to be desired....

Meanwhile Jos, head of the family, is stuck in a pub, where he is spying on a devious plan to rob a bank and pin the blame on his own horse, the mighty and faithful Tripeworks!!!! (!!!)

I loved the format and desperately wanted to create a comic strip like that for the American market. Unfortunately by the time I was coming of age, newspapers were starting to die and the comics pages were shrinking, a shadow of what they once were -- and that was before the Internet just about delivered the coup de grace. 

But that came much earlier for Tidy at the Mirror. In 1984 the Mirror was acquired by Robert Maxwell, MP, who didn't think Bill Tidy was funny, and cast him out. Tidy had been at the paper since the fifties, so this was a pretty big blow. The thing that saddened Bill most was that he'd planned to extend the Fosdyke adventures much longer:

“It was a very sad day when, with forty years of the Fosdyke story told, the Mirror’s new management decided to axe the strip [in 1985]. Fosdykes at Dunkirk, The Salford Blitz, the place of tripe production in the Marshall Plan, the possibility of free school tripe under the terms of the 1944 Education Act. All these stirring events are ready chronicled and simply need the light of day — a nation waits.”

But alas, that was the end. The Fosdyke saga, which had been adapted into radio plays, a TV show, and a stage play, came to a close. And people wonder why hardly anyone eats tripe anymore.

Here's the kicker I mentioned at the top: Robert Maxwell, who later annoyed New Yorkers by buying the Daily News, perished in 1991 in a bizarre incident where he apparently fell off his yacht naked while peeing in the ocean (as one does). Murder and suicide were ruled out (hmm); death by heart attack that caused drowning was the coroner's deduction. Maxwell had defaulted on a fifty million pound loan, which set off a feeding frenzy among his creditors, and his publishing empire came to the same fate as did he, minus the peeing.

More recently, Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine has been much in the news. As I write, she still faces serious charges for her dealings with the late Jeffrey Epstein, who probably did not kill himself. That story is, shall we say, tripe. The question is whether she can bargain her silence for freedom, based on the high rollers that went to Pedo Island under her watch. 

But on goes Bill Tidy, drawing and doing many other things, and God bless him. His is the kind of saga one should emulate, not that of the strange and awful Maxwells. 

Silly-con valley.

 

The BodiSocc, a one-piece garment, is becoming popular among Silicon Valley types
who hate dealing with laundry.

You know they'd go for it because it:

• features technologically advanced fabric
• is anti-cultural
• is good for the lazy
• has a stupid name
• is childish

A little love and a lotta hate.

Today I'd like to address a more serious, more meaningful topic than I did yesterday, when I discussed dingbats running around accusing people of racism. I don't have time for that silliness on a Monday morning. No, today I wish to address those things on which there is no middle ground; things that generate devotion in a few while sparking hatred and disgust in the rest. 

What inspired this topic was this:

I accidentally brought home a bag of hazelnut coffee from the store, a bag someone had left on the shelf with normal human coffee. I didn't realize it until much later when I saw it in the cabinet at home. Then it went straight off to the local food pantry before it could cause any harm. 

I dislike hazelnut coffee more than any other flavored coffee. My wife does even more so, for reasons I discussed the last time I addressed the hazelnut menace almost four years ago. I actually like hazelnuts, but that overwhelming odor mixed with coffee is just no good. I think many people feel the same way. In fact, it's one of those things that a small group loves beyond measure while the rest abhor with a hatred that makes Emperor Palpatine look like St. Francis. 

What else fits this profile? How about anchovies? Fans of anchovy pizza are few but strong in their desires, which is why anchovy pizza can still be found. The Anti-Chovy party is just as strongly opposed. My wife has a friend in the former camp who can't get her preferred pie because the rest of the family is in the latter camp and won't stand for it. Just the odor ruins the meal, like the guy who nukes fish in the lunchroom microwave. Maybe that's just an American reaction, though; people in Italy seem to enjoy their anchovies. I wonder -- do other regional foods like surströmming, haggis, and lutefisk enjoy wide popularity in their native countries, or are they also mostly shunned as they are here?

Veganism as a class should fit into this, although there is a buffer group of vegetarians. Are the vegetarians further divided between those who think vegans are cool because they're hard-core and those who think vegans are jerks who act all superior because they snub ice cream? Since there is an in-between question, we'll have to say that while some vegan foods do fit into this little-love/lotta-hate divide, veganism itself doesn't.

So what does? Well, it's not just ingestibles that cause this strong divide. Many niche interests do. Without going into miscellaneous fetishes, I think we can list these:

Opera

Bridge (contract or auction)

Wicca

Insects

Swedish cinema

Fly-tying

Most of these are harmless pursuits, but all of them leave me cold. I'd rather spend a night in solitary confinement than have to deal with any of them for an evening. But I don't condemn anyone for liking them -- no, not even the Swedish cinephiles.

What do you think? Do you know of anything that a few people adore that all others despise? 

Words without meaning.

A friend of mine got all grumpy because of some fool online. I told him if he was going to let things like that get to him, he was guaranteed to be grumpy all day, every day. 

He made the mistake of commenting on a YouTube video. I know, I know, but he meant well. The video is was a clip from The Red Green Show, a favorite of mine, Canada's gift to the lost art of manhood. Here's Red telling us about his idea to look younger with a fake ID.

Funny? My buddy thought so. He commented something to the effect that he thought it was a great idea to use a fake identification to seem good for his age, but with his luck it would be of an Asian woman. Because my friend is a white man.

Some jackass pops right up and says "Whoa, racist much?"

Now, if you watched the video, which Asshat obviously did not, you see that joke right up front -- Red saying that when he was a teenager, his fake ID was not too successful because it "said I was a 27-year old Oriental woman." IT WAS RIGHT THERE IN THE VIDEO, and my pal was just playing off the gag. And for that, a kneejerk weenie in Mom's basement with a diaper on his head says....

He did defend himself, telling the moron that A) it was funny because he does not look like an Asian woman and B) watch the video. 

I said he shouldn't have bothered. Penectomies like this guy wait all day to drop the R bomb on people online; it's what they live for. Facts be damned. They're miserable people and they deserve to be, but don't let them be contagious.

Besides, it's a known fact that the word racist is now officially meaningless, much as Orwell discovered the word fascist to be by 1944. In both cases a serious term for an idea antithetical to human dignity has been used so loosely by hucksters and the enemies of civilization that it means anything, and thus nothing. We all know how the game is played now. If you see people as they look, you're racist. If you see people as human beings and ignore physical incidents like skin color, you're racist. If you strive to understand the experiences of people of different races, you're "othering" them or playing the white savior and -- guess what? Starts with an R... 

In order to use racism as a weapon, the concept has had to be defined up to the point where it can be deployed against those whose antipathy toward those of other races is nonexistent, or so minuscule it could not be detected with an electron microscope. Here's how the scale looks as used with other human blights:

Racism --> everybody is racist
Famine --> everybody is starving
Pestilence --> everybody has plague
Addiction --> everybody is continuously stoned
Murder --> everybody would kill other people if they could get away with it

When famine means I can't find my favorite flavor of Baskin-Robbins, the word means nothing. (Whatever happened to the Blueberry Cheesecake ice cream anyway, Baskin? Robbins?) And as K-Von, the world's funniest half-Persian comedian, has said, "Leftists are using the word racist as a catchall for everything."

Racism still has something vaguely to do with race, but calling someone a racist now ought to have lost all its punch. Like Orwell's finding of fascist, it basically means someone of whom I disapprove. Since it is most often fired off by pinheads with nothing better to do, or cranks, slicksters, or academicians, one cannot take it seriously anymore. It's probably worth considering that if stupid people who hate civilization attack you unfairly, you're probably doing something right.

Rain.

This means nothing to anybody, because it's about the Mets, but they've already had seven postponements due to bad weather or Chinese Death Virus this season and we're just over two weeks in. Last night in Denver they were postponed by snow.

Mr. Met doesn’t have a Snow Delay test card.

It doesn't even mean much to me, because I haven't seen a single pitch so far. First, I've been doing a lot of my own work, so I haven't had a chance to watch a bunch of guys who make more money in the time it takes them to adjust their jocks than I do all year. Second, when I was planning to watch a little baseball, the games were delayed and then postponed. And third, Major League Baseball is run by blithering nincompoops who hold their fans in contempt, which makes me very unlikely to want to spend any time with the league. 

The main reason I was thinking about this at all was that I glanced at the National League East standings and was surprised to see that the Mets are in first place. With three painful losses and all those missing games, the Mets have the only winning record in the division at 5-3. (One of the five wins was on a blown call, but when you're the Mets you have to take the breaks when you get them.)

The Mets have played the fewest games in the division at 8; the Nationals have played 10, the Marlins and Phillies 12, and the Braves 14. It's preposterous. 

As you would imagine, the Mets have a lot of doubleheaders coming up now, starting today against the Rockies, if they aren't snowed out again. 

Mets fans are always pleasantly surprised to see the team in first place, because it doesn't happen a whole lot. We savor it while we can. Or at least we do when the commissioner isn't alienating fans with his jackassery. 

For me, I know that this lead won't last, and that it's unlikely I'll watch any baseball this year anyhow. I am too busy scrambling to make a living, unlike the greedy slobs who populate the league. No one needs them, and the league needs to figure that out. We shall see if they get the message. 

Bat cart!

You know, I enjoy my weekly run to the grocery store. I actually do. It is fulfilling in a primal way. I'm a hunter-gatherer, hunting for bargains, gathering the frozen scallops and the Nature Valley bars. Get a real satisfaction from stocking the fridge and the pantry. 

And yet, I too feel that the task is a little humdrum, a bit mundane. I wonder how other guys might accomplish the same thing in a more intriguing way. 

Other guys like... THE BATMAN!

As you can see, with the Bat Cart, Batman is prepared for any dangerous situation that may arise in the supermarket without looking conspicuous. And, as comic book readers know, trouble just seems to find our heroes, even in such anodyne situations. The Penguin's robbing Frozen Foods! Catwoman's in the Pet Needs! The Riddler is changing signs around! King Croc is in Seafood! Have no fear; the Caped Crusader is here. 

It ought to go without saying that James Bond's shopping cart, designed by Q, is identical in every way save the Bat Signal. Q did try installing an oil slick, but since the cart is pushed, it made Bond slip and fall. Cleanup in aisle 007! 

I certainly would enjoy playing with a cart like this, but I suspect that it would get me in trouble quickly. The knockout darts would definitely be used if the dude in front of me had, say, 20 items in the 12-or-less line. Someone blocks the aisle? Bat-tering ram. And then I'd want to drive it home, which would probably play hell with my glass spaghetti sauce jars in pothole season. Great Rao! 

I'd better leave the souped-up carts to the experts. At this point in life I'm just glad to have one with four wheels that can be cajoled to move forward at the same time. 

The next step.

Fred's Book Club: And What About Shrinky Dinks?

It's Hump Day! And that means it's time for our Wednesday book feature, the Humpback Writers! It's the stress of carrying Wednesday on their backs that causes the injury, you know, and.... Oh, skip it. I'm thinking of changing the name of the feature to the U#TIG’Hd836& Writers, which will make about as much sense. 

Today we go back in time, back to our younger days, or even the days before we were born, to ask the musical question... Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?

Freelance journalist Gael Fishingbauer Cooper and PR agent Brian Bellmont created this project, and publisher Perigree turned it into a book in 2011. It's a fabulous collection of things pegged to the 1970-1990 era, especially for things that kids loved. That's an important feature, because most of us are at least a little nostalgic for the world of our childhood, and because nothing goes in and out of fashion faster than kid stuff. 

The book is a series of articles, arranged alphabetically, about the things of the past, and at the end of each there's a summation of its status in the current time (as of 2011), written as its "X-Tinction Rating." Here's one:

TIME FOR TIMER

TV was pretty lecturey in the 1970s and 1980s. Somewhere along the line, someone panicked that kids weren't eating proper snacks and decided the way to solve that was to offer nutritional advice from a yellow blob of fat with spindly legs and a ginormous hat. Thus, the birth of Timer, a disturbing but memorable PSA star whose segments were apparently dashed off by a bored but starving copywriter who had to make deadline before he could hit the drive-thru for a Big Mac.

     Timer's most memorable video has him "hankering for a hunka cheese," but any kid who needed to be shown how to place cheese between two crackers was really too dumb to be allowed to watch TV. In another, Timer takes a tour of the stomach and then apparently just gives up, encouraging kids to eat random leftovers out of the fridge. "Sunshine on a Stick" oversells the result by half, as it's just orange juice frozen in ice-cube trays. Timer also shows up in a segment demonstrating toothbrushing, which is odd when you consider that his teeth are as yellow as the rest of him.

 

X-TINCTION RATING: Gone for good.

REPLACED BY: Nothing. Television networks have since decided that kids can eat random food out of the fridge without frightening cartoon guidance. 

You get the idea. Each little profile is snappily written, with good humor, and appropriate kudos for products and other cultural phenomena that really came through.

Not everything is X-Tinct, either. Take those Shrinky Dinks:

SHRINKY DINKS

Invented in 1973, Shrinky Dinks brought into play the one appliance that Mom never really wanted you to mess with: the oven. In fact, the whole Shrinky Dink process seemed kind of like a joyous, don't-tell-the-parents experiment. Melting plastic on a hot cookie sheet without getting yelled at? Sign us up! 

     Shrinky Dinks never looked like they were going to work. You colored in the shape, be it a Smurf, Mr. T, or a rainbow-maned unicorn, threw it on a cookie sheet, and hoped for the best. Watching through the oven door, you were convinced you'd done it wrong and nothing would ever happen when suddenly it started to curl up like an old sheet of fax paper. It twisted, and then fixed itself, and the end product was tiny, bright and colorful, and thick and strong. As with Homer Simpson and his Flaming Moe drink, fire made it good.

     Few kids really knew what to do with Shrinky Dinks once they were shrunky dunk. One can only have so many zipper pulls, key chains, and napkin rings, after all. But no one ever thought about that when they were watching the plastic writhe in its little kitchen torture chamber. Sometimes the journey is indeed way more fun than the destination.

X-TINCTION RATING: Still going strong.

FUN FACT: In the 1970s, superheroes were the bestselling Shrinky Dinks theme; in the 1980s, it was the Smurfs. 

And indeed, in 2021, Shrinky Dinks are still out there, making kids ask themselves: What shall I create? And why is the oven door so grungy? Can't see nothin'!

As I noted, the book covers all sorts of cultural items, like typing classes, Bicentennial mania, Roosevelt Franklin, Jolt Cola, Halloween costumes "with unbreathable plastic masks," killer animal movies, Judy Blume books, and Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo. If you were alive and aware in the United States in the two decades covered, there's some cultural resonance for you in this book.

The authors have since moved on with their careers. They did a sequel book about the nineties, which looks like fun, but the original Web site for the project has been allowed to turn into a cobweb. I guess my looking back at this book that looks back at the past is like being nostalgic for Happy Days ("Fascination with the 1950s" is an entry in the book as well, by the way). 

And say -- before I close this entry, whatever DID happen to Jell-O Pudding Pops? Well, despite their popularity in the eighties, thanks to pitchman Bill Cosby (whose life went in the toilet after this book was published), the company had trouble making a profit from them. Then, "the Jell-O name was later licensed to Popsicle, which reintroduced the Jell-O Pudding Pops in 2004. Sadly, sharp-eyed eaters say its just not the same." And have since been discontinued. 

Well, sic transit Jell-O Pop mundi, I guess.  

Goo housekeeping.

It's happy homemaker time again, boys and girls! Today we're not going to wash our fine washables; we're going to dust our fine dustables. That is to say, we're going to try a product I got in my Christmas stocking, one designed to pick up dust from all sorts of surfaces... or maybe it's intended to turn into a giant town-eating blob. Could go either way.

ColorCoral, made in China (just like COVID-19!), is billed as a cleaning gel on Amazon, a gel that can be smushed on any surface and removed along with the dust, and used again and again. That's it. The jar comes with no instructions but a drawing of a hand pressing the gel onto a keyboard. Amazon's page has some details, however: 

【Universal Fit】ColorCoral cleaning gel, simple and convenient cleaning kits for PC/laptop keyboard 💻 and other rugged surface, such as the car vent 🚖, camera 📷, printer 📹, telephone 📠, calculator, Instrument 🎺, speaker 🔈, air conditioner, TV 📺 and other appliances.

【Safe Cleaning Gel】This universal dust cleaner is made of biodegradable gel, no sticky to hands, smells sweet with lemon🍋 fragrance, no stimulation to skin👌.

【Easy Dust Cleaning】Make sure your hands are dry and clean, 👉 take a piece of the cleaning gel, 👉knead it into a ball, press the cleaning gel slowly into the keyboard, car vent and rugged surface and then pull out, the dust would be carried away with the cleaning gel.

【Reusable】The keyboard cleaning gel could be used repeatedly till the color turn to dark 🌚 or it become sticky, then you have to replace the gel with a new one 🌝. After cleaning, please stock the cleaning gel in cool place. (📌Don’t wash the gel in water.)

【In the package】1* universal cleaning gel, we provide the cleaning gel with 💯100% money back guarantee, if you find the package broken, the cleaning gel dirty, or any other quality issues, please contact us through message 📩, we promise you a free replacement and a full refund.

Soooo... All right! Let's try it!

Right off, we can see that it is a gel, all right. And it does have a slight lemon scent. But don't eat it! (The jar does warn against that.)

I broke some off and pressed it on and about my dusty keys.

I have to admit it worked -- somewhat. It got the obvious dust, but not the more stuck-on bits of debris. (No, it's not salsa stains or anything like that. Well, maybe coffee.) I think the ColorCoral is okay, but for dusting, I think a can of air will do the trick faster, easier, and more thoroughly. Also more expensively; not sure why cans with nothing but air cost more than $5 and don't last long, when spray cans full of actual stuff cost a lot less. I suppose there's a reason. The ColorCoral gel is $7 but can be reused quite a lot. However, I did not find it to be the miracle cleaner I'd hoped. 

It's back in the jar for you now, ColorCoral! Maybe I'll dust some of my bookshelves with it. Meanwhile, it stays tightly closed. Steve McQueen is not around to defeat it this time. 

The pokey.

So I got it yesterday. The jab, the poke, the stick, the needle, the vax, the Bill Gates chip, the stab, the Warp Speed, the shot in the dark, the shot in the arm. I got #1 on the Pfizer hit parade. I go back for #2 on May 2. Good job, Pfizer!

Or should I say, good jab!

It was actually a bit inconvenient to go on Sunday, but when Governor Corleone started to allow people who are not elderly whom he didn't kill, people who didn't have preexisting relevant medical conditions (a bad back doesn't count), people who aren't healthcare workers, and people who aren't in prison or group houses or schools (six of one...) to get the shot, I signed right up and grabbed the first available date, which was April 11. They were going fast. 

The pokers were giving out the jab at the community college twenty miles from home. The US Army was directing traffic, herding thousands of people through in orderly fashion from one checkpoint to another. It was incredibly efficient, completely contrary to the image of military screwups that pop culture has portrayed over the decades. The military and healthcare personnel were unfailingly polite. The shot didn't even hurt. Afterward I felt a little tired, a little cold-like symptoms, but that was as likely from the cold and rainy walk from the far lot to the college and the miserable drive as from the shot itself. The injection point hurts today like young Foreman gave me a friendly punch on the arm. 

Of course, the clever public health people are still sharing horrible headlines about how COVID-19 variants or anti-vaxxers will keep us in deadly danger forever anyway. I do worry about those who fear the vaccine, but I don't blame them. After all, in 2020 prominent Democrats said they wouldn't trust the vaccines because they didn't want the president to get any credit, but now they expect everyone to get in line. It's a pity no one ever pays a price for such public malfeasance, but here we are. (Google has memory-holed this news story, but it's an easy find through DuckDuckGo.) I do encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, just to stop the madness. 

God knows when things will get back to normal, but I and the rest of the public are more sick of these living conditions than we are of the Chinese Death Virus. We're also pretty goddamn sick of public health weasels (sorry, that's an insult to weasels) and politicians (who are an insult to humanity) making this much more difficult than it needs to be. I am getting vaccinated not because I fear the virus, but just to take myself out of the pool of possible spreaders, and help inch us a little closer to the day that the Communist Chinese's gift to the world is behind us. Put the Wu Flu in the rearview.

Get them swans!

The swans are back at the lake! Can swan-upping season be far behind? 

Swan-upping is not a sport -- perhaps it's better described as an activity or a job -- that one finds here in the States, but it has been going on for centuries on the Thames. I shall let Dr. Wiki explain:

Swan upping is an annual ceremony in England in which mute swans on the River Thames are rounded up, caught, ringed, and then released.

     By prerogative right, the British Crown enjoys ownership of all unmarked mute swans in open water. Rights over swans may, however, be granted to a subject by the Crown (accordingly they may also be claimed by prescription). The ownership of swans in a given body of water was commonly granted to landowners up to the 16th century. The only bodies still to exercise such rights are two livery companies of the City of London. Thus the ownership of swans in the Thames is shared equally among the Crown, the Vintners' Company and the Dyers' Company.

By "ringed," they mean an identifying ring is placed on each swan's leg. In the old days a mark would be carved on each swan's beak, some of them annoying complex -- annoying to the swanherds and, presumably, the swans. The Queen made headlines in July 2009 when she attended the ceremony, the first English monarch to do so in hundreds of years. Of course, it was cancelled last year due to Chinese Death Virus. 

Now, you may be wondering, what do they want with all those swans? Lunch? But no -- while in medieval times one might find a roast swan at a feast, today it's mainly done to check the health of the birds. Like all cool things in England, it has gone squishy. And yet it's still no easy task. Swans are large, larger up close that people might think, and usually ill-tempered and not inclined to be upped. 

The term "upping" seems curious; here is what the Royal Family itself has to say: 

A flotilla of traditional Thames rowing skiffs, manned by Swan Uppers in scarlet rowing shirts and headed by The Queen’s Swan Marker, wearing a hat with a white swan’s feather, row their way steadily up the Thames. ‘All up!’ they cry as a family of swans and cygnets is spotted, and the Swan Uppers carefully position their boats around the swans, lift them from the water and check their health.  The Swan Marker’s iconic five-day journey upriver has been an annual ceremony for hundreds of years, and today it has two clear goals; conservation and education.

Meh -- sounds like a waste of time to me, if you're not going to bother to eat some of them.

If upping you will go, you'll need a good swan hook. These traditionally looked like shepherd's crooks, because you want to get a good grab on the swan but not actually be that close to the damn thing when you do it. You can buy a modern swan hook for a mere $170 at Rescue Technology, and hook all the swans you can reach.

I first got wind of swan-upping via the inimitable Will Cuppy, whose article on the topic -- "Swan Upping, Indeed!" -- had run in The New Yorker in 1935, and was included in his book How to Attract the Wombat. Here's the start of his essay:

I was a fool to give Swan-upping a second thought. I won't say I should have ignored it. You can't ignore a thing that is called Swan-upping. The moment I heard it, I should simply have said, "Swan-upping, eh?" or "Fancy that!" and gone about my business, instead of spending an afternoon in the Public Library reading about Swans.

     Swan-upping sounds like a custom that should have been quietly dropped around the time of, say, Ethelred the Unready. But it has not been dropped -- that's the whole point. Indeed, it flourishes, quite as it did on July 16th, 1308, when Edward II issued a commission of oyer and terminer about some Swans belonging to John de Fitzgerald, who kept his birds on the Waveny, at Mendham, Suffolk.

Maybe I too was a fool to give swan-upping any notice, but he's right; once you've seen it, it makes you think. Sorry about that.

Slick.

Bahb loved to cruise for chicks in his Pachy L-Phant 3000 with the racing stripes.

 

Pots o' dirt.

I have four pots o' dirt on the porch now, each with seeds, trying again to shame Spring into getting things going. I think it's starting to work; yesterday the high was 71!

Two of the pots stand astride the stairs leading to the porch. These contain bell pepper seeds, which turn into big leafy plants all summer. They look great, green and lively and dramatic. And then you get delicious red bell peppers. If they grow at all, that is. If not, those guys who bag the dirt for Scotts Miracle-Gro will hear from me. I haven't forgotten your persecution of an employee for engaging in a legal activity in his own home, Scotts. Fail me and you'll be hearing from my lawyers.

On notice

The third large pot o' dirt contains seeds for grape tomatoes. We got a lot of good tomatoes out of that pot last year, but I made two mistakes -- I started late and I didn't get a tomato cage to tie up the plants. Tying them to the porch railings was a disaster. It lolled all over the place like a drunken green octopus. I got a cage yesterday that can stand in the pot and hold the plants up. Of course, the wind may blow it all over, pot and all, and I won't be able to sue Scotts for that.

The last pot o' dirt is the saddest. When our junior dog Nipper contracted lymphoma this winter, we made an appointment to take him to a vet in the next county that specializes in dog cancer treatment. Two days later we cancelled the appointment -- Nipper was too far gone. They were kind enough to send a condolence card with a little packet of forget-me-not seeds. I planted the flower seeds yesterday in honor of our little one, gone too soon. A good dog is never forgotten. 

Nipper, 2016–2021; forever young.

We're doomed! Again!

Yesterday's cheerful headline in an e-mail from Medscape: 

Tsunami of Death and Disability to Follow Pandemic?

Betteridge's Law of Headlines says "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." According to Wikipedia's article on the Law, "Phrasing headlines as questions is a tactic employed by newspapers that do not 'have the facts required to buttress the nut graph'." So let's see if Medscape's report can support this shocking implication. 

The article itself has a different header: "Post-COVID Wave Ahead of Death, Disability From Chronic Disease". But the first paragraph tells the tale:

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States will likely face a tsunami of death and disability from common chronic diseases that will affect society for decades, Robert Califf, MD, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), writes in an article published today in Circulation.

Oh, bother. What chronic diseases?

Califf says the impending tsunami of chronic health conditions — with cardiometabolic diseases, including heart disease, obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes at the crest — demands swift and comprehensive action.

Califf thinks an "Operation Warp Evidence" (cute, huh?) will be needed for "more real-time, in-depth tracking of chronic health conditions, akin to the rapid data dashboards that were quickly implemented and hugely successful in the tracking of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths." In other words, what will save us is the tracking of our fat, monitoring of our fat, and knowing who is fat. Because all the conditions in the "tsunami" come from sitting around the house and eating, adding to our personal spread while we were trying to stop the spread. 

Here's my favorite part:

The authors of an accompanying commentary note that the healthcare system has risen to the challenge of three simultaneous pandemics — COVID-19, economic disruption, and social injustice — even as many inherent fragilities have been exposed.

The "social injustice" pandemic is a self-serving lie that attempts to cover up the public health profession's complicity in encouraging morons to riot and burn last year. What else did they do for that "challenge" but make excuses for the damage in human suffering and property damage? Are we all social justiced up now, thanks to the healthcare system rising to the challenge?

Clowns like these authors are as packed full of self-regard as a jar is of jam. 

From a New York standpoint I can say they failed on every count, including "rapid data dashboards that were quickly implemented and hugely successful in the tracking of COVID-19 cases," because the information apparently wasn't used. If it had been, Chinese Death Virus patients would have been put on the hospital ship sent by Trump, and the field hospitals set up in Central Park and in the Javits Center, rather than stuffed into nursing homes to infect others. 

All we can gather from this is that nice sinecures will be procured with our money to track how fat and sick we're all getting, so our doctors (if we bother to go) can tell us to eat "veggies" and go for walks, like they always have, while many of us will nod and go back to our freaking Carl's Jr. Super Star with Cheese. Everything becomes kabuki theater after a while, doesn't it?

To their credit, a number of doctors in the comments section took issue with various parts of the report. It makes me think that there is a growing divide between the professional yappers in government medical services and the doctors who actually work with patients. If so, that's good -- because the only thing that will bring these useless tax suckers to heel is if their fellows reject and shame them. 

Fred's Book Club: Cheeky Devil!

Well, hello there! You must like to read, huh? You're doing it right now! And you're in the right place for our book feature, the Wednesday "Hump Day" feature we call the Humpback Writers, although nary a hump remains to be found. Hey! Get your mind out of the gutter!

Today's novel is an unusual bird, a surreal comedy from 1943 that is still hilarious. You know the author best (if at all) as writer and creator of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. But before he wrote the Dobie Gillis stories that became a movie and later a TV show, he wrote this, his first book:

Max Shulman took the title from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem that every schoolchild would have known back then, left off the "of tan," and pegged it to his novel about a dumbbell named Asa Hearthrug and his freshman year at Shulman's alma mater, the University of Minnesota. Calling this book a novel is kind of a stretch; it is a book-long comedy of the college scene, unsurprising since Shulman made his name as a humorist in college. 

You get the feel for how the book is going to go straight off the front matter, in the Author's Note: 

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. The University of Minnesota is, of course, wholly imaginary. I think it would be of some interest to the reader to know how I happened to pick the name "Minnesota."
     It is a combination of two Indian words -- "Minne" meaning a place where four spavined men and a minor woman ate underdone pemmican, and "sota" meaning the day the bison got away because the hunter's wife blunted his arrows in a fit of pique.
     The combination of the two words means little, if anything, but the reader must consider that they are the only two Indian words I know. 

And we're off to the races.

Our book opens as Asa says farewell to his parents before his sojourn at the university. He also must bid a touching good-bye to his sweetheart, Lodestone La Toole:

Then I was beside her, and my funny little crooked smile gleamed across my bronzed face, and my brooding gray eyes crinkled at the corners. "Lodestone," I said simply.

     "Asa," she breathed, for that was my name.

     She was in my arms. Our lips met. Time crashed wildly about us as the entire universe was resolved into our wild embrace. I was laved in the fragrance of her. I knew a pulsing, mounting ecstasy, Then suddenly I was still, at peace in a pastel world. 

     "I'm hungry," said Lodestone at length. "Can't we get something to eat?"

     "Not now, my own. I haven't time. I must leave you in oh, too short a time to go to the University of Minnesota."

     "Maybe we could just get a hamburger. That don't take long."

     "I am going," I continued, "and yet I am not going. For you will always be with me. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I shall always think of you."

     "There's a White Castle down the road a piece. They have real nice hamburgers. It don't take them hardly no time to fix them neither."

Alas, soon our Asa is in college, and before you know it, swept into the Alpha Cholera fraternity, confused by professors, and prey to a femme fatale.    

I felt a prod in my ribs. Turning, I saw a dark-eyed, finely mustached girl in a close-knit burlap dress. "Hey," she whispered, "you know what sociology is?"

     "The study of how people live together," I answered.

     "Nah," she said. "It's the study of how the working class is oppressed under the capitalistic system."

     The professor fixed us with a baleful eye. "If you two don't mind," he said, "I'll go on with my lecture."

     "Tool," hissed the girl.

Yes, this is a member of the students communist party, Yetta Samovar. Or so she calls herself, having taken the name from a hero of the Soviet workers' paradise.

"She was the first Soviet woman to operate a power crane," said Yetta. "One day while working at the Dnepropetrovsk dam she leaned out of her crane to wave a greeting to a young man whose bed she shared and with whom she had become quite friendly. She leaned too far. Down she plunged into a block of newly laid, quick-drying concrete. Her last words as the concrete hardened around her were, 'Solidarity forever!'"

Asa's fraternity brothers struggle to save him from the grip of the communists by setting him up with another woman, named Noblesse Oblige. Asa falls in love with both. But what of sweet and hungry Lodestone La Toole? How will Asa decide? 

Asa is also put forward by his Cholera brothers to run for freshman representative to the student council -- can he win? What about the student newspaper? Why are they yelling all the time? ("Tear out the front page! I just got the results of the intramural chess matches.") 

It's a fast read and very funny, and while time has changed college culture to be even worse than it was in 1943, rest assured that it should all be recognizable to a student in any era.

I have to confess that the copy pictured above is not mine; mine is a 1948 three-in-one edition that I got from the Strand for $4 (price tag still inside). The collection includes Barefoot Boy, World War II home-front sendup The Feather Merchants, and the further adventures of Asa Hearthrug in The Zebra Derby.

I just want to mention one more gag, this from The Zebra Derby, in which Asa goes to war. In that book we find out that Asa's father is named Max Hearthrug. Max Shulman includes this footnote:

There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!

And sure enough, in the course of The Zebra Derby we meet Max Pilfering, Max Onus, Max Clodde, Max Nipthung, Max Stagecraft, etc. etc.... and the return of Yetta Samovar! 

With jokes like these, you should read something else?

So is Brenda Lee.

On April 6 we celebrate National Sorry Charlie Day.

According to National Today, keeper of the kooky kalendar keys for kakamamie kelebrations, Sorry Charlie Day is only tangentially connected to the famous animated StarKist Tuna spokesfish for which it is named. It is a day that "allows us to pause and reflect on the rejections we’ve faced throughout our lives." 

Cathy Runyan-Svacina started National Sorry Charlie Day out of admiration for Charlie the Tuna’s remarkable attitude in the face of rejection. Having recently experienced rejection herself, Runyan-Svacina thought it would be good to spend a day acknowledging rejection and understanding how we can move on from it.

It's not the worst idea for a fake holiday. There have been a lot of successful people who have faced rejection and fought to overcome it. Tom Brady rode the bench in college and was a sixth-round draft pick for the NFL. Fred Astaire's first screen test was a notorious disaster. Nixon lost two major elections before winning the presidency. Okay, maybe Nixon's not the best example. 

The point is that we, like Charlie the Tuna, should take heart when we face rejection. We can learn from our failures if we don't just mope and blame others. We can try better, try smarter next time. We can improve and overcome. It's what builds the steel in our souls. And one day, my friends, one day someone may say Yes, we want tuna that tastes good, and you ARE the tuna that tastes good!

So Charlie continues to try and -- let's face it -- continues to fail. Or does he? Normally an Atlantic Bluefin tuna fish in the wild can live no more than forty years; Charlie is still going strong at sixty. And you know, if Charlie had been accepted by StarKist, he would have been so much tuna salad a long time ago. We must ask ourselves: Does he really consider it a success to be eaten? Or does he just want to bring attention to the StarKist brand? If the latter, you win, Charles. 

All this is starting to make me think about lunch; I wonder if we have a can of tuna in the pantry....

Umm... Sorry, Charlie.

🐟🐟🐟🐟🐟

NB: Classic Crenshaw reference in blog post title.

Come on Spring, you idiot!

Short post today; busy weekend, busy Easter. But I'm sure you'll find something of fascination below. (Note: Fascination not guaranteed.)

One of the weekend tasks was to try to shame the season of spring into action. Not that there was a lot of reason to complain; the mornings were gorgeous. The week ahead looks good, although I did wear the winter coat out with the dog this morning. 

My weekend plan was to get a jump on the spring projects and move things along. After all, Mets fans missed out on opening weekend thanks to the Chinese Death Virus, so I had to do something.

What I did was, put down some of that mulch I bought. I put it around the trees. I also wanted to hammer in some fertilizer spikes for trees and shrubs, but found that the ground was still frozen about three inches down. Those spikes are just compressed fertilizer; they do not penetrate hard surfaces well. So I abandoned that task, although the mulch is nice.

Closer to the front, the lovely and talented Mrs. K wanted to replace some mums, which take all summer to pop up and last a brief time, with shrubs. I got some little firs, but I did not put them in yet. There's an issue with symmetry that needs to be resolved. See, it's not obvious, but one end of the porch is a little longer than the other, and she would like that to not be obvious. While we puzzle this out, the firs remain in pots on the porch.

Also in pot news: I planted my bell pepper seeds in pots. Too early for this zone, but I don't care. I was late with my cherry tomatoes last year and we missed out on some late harvest. Get moving, spring!

I oughtn't to tempt fate, though. Here's a scene from last May 9:

Another 2020 joy

Latest snowfall I've ever seen here. Killed all the daffodil and rhododendron blooms. Went away fast, but the damage was done. 

What will 2021 bring? I don't know, but I'm giving it the gimlet eye. Prove me wrong, spring!

Here comes non-Santa!

I always felt a little bad for the Easter Bunny. 

No, really. He's always way behind Santa Claus, the Christmas Kahuna. Even kids in families that don't celebrate Christmas love Santa, but there's no love for the Bunny there. 

There are a lot of reasons for this.

1) Santa comes to visit at Christmas, when Jesus was a baby. Christmas is fun! The Bunny comes at Easter, after we killed Jesus with agonizing, brutal torture, but He returned from the dead to save us. Kids have a tough time grasping that. Hell, adults have a tough time grasping that. 

2) Santa's got the tunes. I cannot begin to count all the pop songs that mention Santa. What does the Bunny have? "Here Comes Peter Cottontail." There are others, but they're hardly well known. And they never bother to play them on the PA at the supermarket.

3) Santa's mythos is much better developed. We know where he lives, who is married to him, who works for him; we know how he gets around, and even the names of his animals; we know what he does and why he does it, and the methods used in his distribution; we know what he wears, how he keeps his hair, and what he likes to eat. As for the Easter Bunny, we know he brings eggs, hard-boiled or chocolate, and other candy because... I'd have to look it up.* Where does he live? Who are his friends? What's with the Technicolor hen fruit, anyway? Bizarre.

4) Santa is fat and fuzzy when you see him around. On the rare occasions you see people in a big bunny suit, they look like freak show golems made from old bathmats. With those big, dead eyes. Children scream and run. Santa is almost never scary.

5) Santa's got the loot. The Bunny may bring such toys as can fit in a basket, but Santa can come through with a bike. Maybe even a BB gun. On car commercials it seems like Santa might drop off a BMW. Easter Bunny can't do that! He's just a bunny! He can't even drive!

I guess EB will always have to be number two, but he tries plenty hard. So do his helpers. A friend of mine was putting together Easter baskets with his wife for their various grandchildren, and right at the end they found a sawbuck that did not make it into a plastic egg. God forbid all the children got a ten spot and one didn't! So they had to go through the baskets and open every plastic egg that didn't rattle until they figured out which kid had almost been slighted. It's hard work, being an Easter Bunny.

So we salute you, Easter Bunny! As thankless as the job may be, at least you're not the Tooth Fairy, dealing with old teeth. Or the Great Pumpkin. Now that's a crummy gig.

🐰🐇🐰🐇

*According to Dr. Wiki, "Originating among German Lutherans, the 'Easter Hare' originally played the role of a judge, evaluating whether children were good or disobedient in behavior at the start of the season of Eastertide." There's a lot more at the link, but it's all weird.

Ain't it the truth.

 

Fast acting.

I don't have much to say today, Good Friday, that I didn't say yesterday in cartoon form, except to add: I'm HUNGRY!

Well, all right, I'm not hungry, yet. But as an American who has never had to go a day without food because there was no food available, I'm not used to the fast that falls on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. I'm totally spoiled that way, and I wish everyone on earth that privilege. 

The rules are, as outlined by the bishops: 

For members of the Latin Catholic Church, the norms on fasting are obligatory from age 18 until age 59. When fasting, a person is permitted to eat one full meal, as well as two smaller meals that together are not equal to a full meal. The norms concerning abstinence from meat are binding upon members of the Latin Catholic Church from age 14 onwards.

If possible, the fast on Good Friday is continued until the Easter Vigil (on Holy Saturday night) as the "paschal fast" to honor the suffering and death of the Lord Jesus and to prepare ourselves to share more fully and to celebrate more readily his Resurrection.

I didn't know this latter part about the fast continuing to the Saturday Vigil, which usually begins around eight in the evening here. Dude, that's like, four meals I'm missing, with just one meal in between! And no snacks! And no meat! Do I look like John the Baptist to you? Camel hair is not my color!

Of course, fasting has been a crucial part of Christian teaching, and that of every major religion. Self-denial is paramount in learning obedience to God, and to putting our egos in their proper and healthy place. What the Catholic church urges us to do is nothing compared to the Ramadan fast observed by Muslims, where not even a drop of water may be consumed from sunup to sundown. Because it is keyed to lunar cycles, it is celebrated (if that's the word I want) at different times of the year each year. When it falls in June or July, it must be murder. And it goes on for a month. 

Some people these days fast for bodily rather than spiritual health. Harvard Health has some good things to say about this practice, and it has shown great promise, especially in fat rats. And I say: It's about time those rats got off their tails. 

Along those lines, today, April 2, happens to be the feast day (so to speak) of St. Francis of Paola, founder of a strict order in the 15th century. 

Humility was to be the hallmark of the brothers as it had been in Francis' personal life. Abstinence from meat and other animal products became a "fourth vow" of his religious order, along with the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Francis instituted the continual, year-round observance of this diet in an effort to revive the tradition of fasting during Lent, which many Roman Catholics had ceased to practice by the 15th century. The rule of life adopted by Francis and his religious was one of extraordinary severity. He felt that heroic mortification was necessary as a means for spiritual growth.

He lived to the age of 91. Some might suggest that he felt like he lived to the age of 391 with a diet like that, but that wasn't what he was about. 

Meanwhile, back home, our parish has had some outstanding pastors, but they seem to have had different takes on food. The one we had when we moved here looked like he'd never missed a meal in his life; one after him looked like he'd never eaten a real meal. The current one is somewhere in the middle. 

Well, I am sure I can endure this hunger situation, and could even if it went until Saturday night. There is a world of difference between hunger when you don't know where your next meal is coming from and hunger when you see Snickers eggs and braised lamb shanks at the end of the tunnel. 

I feel like a guy playing at being needy, but maybe that's better than never giving the state and consequences of true need any thought at all.