No capisce?

Over the last couple of decades I have been pushed further into Grumpy Old Editor territory by the claims of political correctness, as it was once known. From the time I heard that African American would no longer be hyphenated but Irish-American would, I knew something was going on that was not dictated by logic or reason but by emotion and power. And indeed, from those humble beginnings have come no end of mischief. (I refer to the reader to my discussion of AFABs and AMABs in April, for example.)

One preference that irritates me for very practical purposes is this: that foreign words are no longer supposed to be set in italics when appearing in English text. You surely have seen passages like this in books in the past:

"Pardon me, Passepartout, have you seen the ticket office for the next stage of our journey?" 

"Alas, M. Fogg, la billetterie is shuttered for the day." 

In this pretend passage from the Verne work, we can gather what Phileas's helpful companion is saying and we have possibly learned some French vocabulary as well. But the insidious thing I have done with italicization is othered the French by making their language look like some weird -- well, foreign thing. And boy, won't the French be mad! I'm sure they never do anything like that to non-French words in their own text!

My point is, the italicization of a foreign word was never intended to make any non-English speakers feel like they didn't belong; it was intended to alert the reader that the word is in another tongue and help the clarity of the text. 

There are a number of foreign (I'm sticking to foreign over non-English) words that look the same as English words but are not -- and that's where clarity is threatened. Try this passage:

Mr. Van der Plotz ran up to me in quite a state of distress. "You shall not believe this!" he said. "I was minding a beer near the stream when suddenly an angel pulled at my shirt! I was slim enough to realize it was a roof! Fortunately, the man was aloud, and I was able to leap into the stream, escaping with no more than a bad, although my boots are coated in blubber. It quite upset my rooster!"   

From our example, it seems Mr. Van der Plotz has lost his senses. But let's identify which words were actually in his native Dutch by the use of italics.

Mr. Van der Plotz ran up to me in quite a state of distress. "You shall not believe this!" he said. "I was minding a beer near the stream when suddenly an angel pulled at my shirt! I was slim enough to realize it was a roof! Fortunately, the man was aloud, and I was able to leap into the stream, escaping with no more than a bad, although my boots are coated in blubber. It quite upset my rooster!"

"Oh!" I said. "You were watching a bear when a fishing rod snagged you? But you were smart and saw that it was an attempt at robbery! The man was elderly, so you were able to escape into the stream, suffering only an unexpected bath and muddy boots. And now your schedule is all upset."

"That's what I said!" he huffed. 

Yes, this is a silly example, but I hope it makes the point -- we treat foreign words as foreign in text because they are. We'd all like to be able to read any language, but that's not how life works. In most nations on Earth you will find only one or two common languages, and having limited language in a populace is useful for -- what's that word again? Yes, clarity. In a book, a reader needs a helpful indicator that a word has arrived from a language different from that in which the bulk of the text is written.

The war on precision and clarity in the supposed service of removing offense is itself offensive. This nonsense is brought to us from our universities, of course, paid for by tax dollars, outrageous tuitions, and rich people who should know better. If the intent was mainly to sow confusion, what more could the academicians do? The ivory tower has become a Tower of Babel.

Working through Labor Day.

Happy Labor Day! I'll be working all day, thanks very much. Someone has to keep the engine of commerce running. YOU'RE WELCOME.

Alas, the life of the freelancer. Assignments come in at random and deadlines are deadly. But it's all right; I had no social plans for today. Working on a holiday never bothered me unless I was missing a party I wanted to attend, and as I've gotten older, I have found precious few events that meet that particular criterion. 

Pardon me if I've told this story in this space before: When I was in college I worked for a time as a general dogsbody for a small midtown office that did a lot of mailings, and I mean a lot. They did not observe Columbus Day, but the post office certainly did. However, in Manhattan at least, the post office itself did not sleep; its windows were shuttered and its postmen were at rest, but the big sorting offices were still open. If a company wanted to get a dozen sacks of mail into the system that day, they just had to bring it to the loading dock and it would be cheerfully accepted. All they needed were the sacks, a big dolly, and a dopey college student who needed the money.

Well, if you've ever done this kind of work, you discover quickly that getting the four wheels of a dolly to play nicely together is like getting the band into the studio after the third album flopped and the tour disintegrated into fistfights. You also discover that, as smooth as they look in most places, the sidewalks of Manhattan are in fact pitted and furrowed as a centenarian's face; that the smallest amounts of litter can jam a little wheel; that the curb cuts may be and should be perfect for wheelchairs but are not wide enough for dollies; that mailbags love nothing better than to swing freely from the handle to which you tied them and drag on the ground or at least throw off the dolly's forward impetus; that the sewer grates are sinking everywhere and love nothing better than to reach out and take a bite out of a small and errant wheel. I don't remember how many blocks it was, but it was too many. Still, I got there, and delivered the goods, and the dolly and I made it back safely. 

So it's not a bad thing to work on the holidays. But it's a lot easier to do it at home, doing research on your laptop for pay, than to be shoving an uncooperative dolly through the pitiless streets of the naked city to deliver pamphlets to be mailed, most of which would be thrown away upon reception.

I still maintain that everyone in college should have a job like that. Or at food service or delivery, or something else low-paying and unexpectedly challenging. It teaches humility, but also self-respect, which is far better than ballooned-up pride that contains a deep sense of inadequacy. Plus, you might get a funny story out it. 

A YALE man?!?

Little known fact: A hundred years ago or so, Adolf Hitler was a student at Yale. 

Nah, just joshin'. Klara Schicklgruber's baby boy never set foot in the United States. This is just clipart from a collection of same from the 1910s through 1920s, when no one had heard of Adolf (and what a blissful state that is in retrospect). Back then so-called normal men might sport that whiskbroom mustache that has been thrown in the same trash heap as the swastika, and good riddance. 

Hitler may never have gone to Yale, but now it seems Yale and our other elite universities have come to Hitler. Yale didn't get in the same hot water as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did recently for their tolerance of ferocious antisemitism and support of terrorism, but Yale's response was meager, and now the worst offender on the faculty is in line to become the new university president.

And the Ivies wonder why normal Americans hate them?

Of course, if we all just celebrated National Brotherhood Week in our hearts and year-round, none of this would have happened. 

The National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice) was founded in 1927 to combat bias in America, and launched the first National Brotherhood Day in the 1930s. It was expanded to a whole week in 1936. Mostly it is remembered now for the parody by Harvard professor Tom Lehrer, as the whole concept of brotherhood had become irrelevant by the 2000s and the event no more. Because obviously we all love one another now. 

No, stop laughing. If they tried to relaunch National Brotherhood Week now, it would be condemned for being sexist and patriarchal. What about sisterhood? What about non-binary personhood? What about foreign nationals? What about non-binary foreign nationals?  

So, hate is humming right along these days. However, it no longer comes mostly from dumb bigots in rural America; it is much more common in the cities and in the ivy-covered halls of academia. 

What will it take to make our educated class stop being so full of hate? I don't know. Maybe the Harvard guys could try to stop hating those Elis for a start. And maybe our university students could try to stop hating their university founders and all of America. Not likely, though -- those kids just LOVE to hate. 

Forgotten men.

After thinking of the vanished Little Pete a couple of weeks ago, I got to thinking about a few old men I knew early in my so-called career who have always kind of stuck in my mind. I thought I'd share a few with you, starting with a man I'll call Gabe.

When I was in college I worked a couple of days a week as a general flunky for a small office in midtown. I was never quite sure what they did, but it appears in retrospect that they held and managed real estate in different spots in the nation. One of my jobs was distributing the mail, and we would get newspapers from all over. On my breaks I would read the papers, see which funnies were running in places like Ocala or Kansas City. Everyone there was really nice to me, which was impressive, because I had some classic screwups in that job. Like throwing out cartons of flyers that were due to be mailed, and breaking a toilet while trying to put on a new toilet seat. (A little hole in the rim can become an attractive fountain when you flush!)

Gabe was the founder, I think, and had the only private office, one of those walled-off corner ones of the kind common then, where the walls didn't reach the ceiling. He seemed to me to be about a hundred years old. He would come in late, get greeted by everyone, take off his hat, go into his office, and -- do nothing, I think. His son was running the place. Gabe was, as I would come to find out, out of it. He didn't bug anyone, but he couldn't do anything. The man was senile, I guess, but he didn't cause trouble and he wasn't mean. 

Gabe (Dickens version)

One day he cornered me while I was sitting in my area -- the back room, where real estate flyers and the like sat in boxes on large metal shelves, or piled on skids, waiting for mailing. I may have been stuffing envelopes, something I did a lot of in that job and others in years to come. Gabe came over and sat next to me to tell me about his idea for a new business, one that was going to fill a niche, and bring some serious money into the firm.

His idea was to publish a new kind of business directory -- as he spoke we were sitting in front of a library of the (then lucrative) Thomson business directories -- and gave an example of how it would work. Say, if one were to be in the bicycle parts trade, you’d have a directory for manufacturers, suppliers, and customers. And from that point on I have no idea what he was talking about, because as far as I could tell he had just described exactly the books on the shelves next to us. He promised to keep me apprised of the situation, as good opportunities would come forth. I thanked him. It was the only conversation we ever had. 

It wasn't much longer before Gabe left this world, and immediately after sitting shiva his son moved into that corner walled office. It still seemed pretty cold to me, going in that fast, but I imagine Gabe’s son had put up with a lot in Dad's later years and just wanted to move on with things. 

All of it to say, we men can have an awful time letting go of work, even when we don't need to do it, even when the work doesn't need us anymore, even when we have nothing left to offer.

I've never forgotten Gabe, though, and he did teach me a lesson. And he gave me another thing about old age to be scared of. 

We'll revisit this topic another time soon. Meanwhile, Gabe, rest in peace. 

Entering the workfarce.

Hello, young graduates. I congratulate you on surviving whatever school you have just or are about to just be ejected from, to find yourself spreadeagle in the center of the road of your new career. 

You may be tempted to just take a little time off, figure out what you want to do, before you commit. This is the first time you had nothing expected of you since preschool, right? Why not relax, hang out this summer, play videogames, and freeload some more off Mom and Dad? 

DON'T DO IT! It's a trap! I understand that you don't want to start a whole new grind right now, but do you really want to punch your ticket to Loserville? Trust me: Loserville has a high population, but it's still the loneliest place on earth. If you get cozy being a lump all summer, you'll still be cozy being a lump in the fall. It gets harder the longer you hang around. Have you earned the right to live off someone else's effort as an adult? Of course not. 

Now, don't fret; it's not as awful as it may seem. Your first job may be horrible, but you know what? It's not like your grammar school. You can leave. You can find a different job. You're young; your skillset is growing. You're not cast into a highly specialized role. Just don't go back to the sofa. 

There are a few other things I think you should keep in mind, some of which maybe no one had to think about decades ago because they were not an issue. But for your career health and mental health I recommend the following bits of wisdom.

🛠 If work was fun, they'd call it play.

🛠 Do your best even if the job is lousy. It's good for your self-respect to establish good habits. 

🛠 Your workplace is not like family, no matter what they tell you. This is important. Startup companies can have that feel, but it's illusory. Say you join software startup TwoGuysAndAParakeet.com, working long hours to develop some damn business software (we don't make things anymore in America, we make software to help other people make things, usually somewhere else). At first it's exciting, and you feel very close-knit. Trust me: The rounds of fund-raising will end and PyroQEET.com will be launched, and the first time quarterly earnings projections fail, your "family" will have no problem divesting itself of you.

🛠 It gets worse than that. You know the people in high school who always kept score, who never forgot a thing you did and would use it against you? They're out there working too now, and they have not changed. Pettiness and backbiting are fun ways for some people to liven up the day. 

🛠 When it's really bad, remember that rampant workplace politics are the sign of a sick organization. Get out!

🛠 Don't be too impressed by so-called serial entrepreneurs. It's not that they fail a lot -- most new businesses fail -- it's that they chase that excitement of a new venture like some people chase new love, and like those people they cannot be trusted in the long haul. Plus, when they do fail, it's usually on someone else's dime. And you're the one who's out of a job.

🛠 Do not expect to or even desire to want to bring your "whole self" to the job. If the company tells you that it wants to engage your "whole self," they're wholly full of crap. No one wants to deal with anyone else's detritus at work, and everyone's "whole self" includes sacks of detritus. No one cares, and that's okay. We were never meant to find personal fulfillment at work, unless the work itself is that fulfilling, and even then, leave the personal stuff at home where it belongs. 

🛠 And on that note, there is a very good chance that you will have to pick between the personal fulfillment of a great job and the actual fulfillment of your bank account. The really satisfying jobs don't pay as well as the others by and large for the simple reason that people will do them for free. I'm not advising you which to pick if you find yourself at that crossroad. Either choice is all right. 

So there you go, my young friend. You can take my advice or leave it. I'm not wealthy, and no one is asking me to do any TED Talks, but I can assure you that part of the reason is that I did not adhere to these tips for my own rambling path in life. 

Do you want to have a good career or not? Then you must learn not only from the successful but from the rest of us as well. We know a lot, believe me. 

Science and the self.

My wife and I were wondering about a friend who does actual science work in an actual lab with actual mice. I thought he might have a doctorate, but we'd never asked him and he's not the kind to brag. She said maybe not. Maybe a BS?

"You can't just let any old undergraduate go playing with the mice!" I said. 

"It doesn't take a master's degree to play with mice!" she recounted.

"No, but it has to be someone with an actual career! A bachelor's might think the mice are cute and take one home, and then what? Lab leak! Like COVID! You need someone who's really invested in his career, someone whose career, when you have to destroy it, means something!"

I have a lot of jumbled thoughts this morning connected to these things. For example:

1) Our friend is a thoroughly competent guy. He's not omnicompetent like Batman, but he knows what he knows and he acquits himself properly, be it grilling or fantasy football or judging craft beer. He does not know electrical work, for example, so he hires someone who does when a project involves that. So I have to believe he's not the type to let a disease leak from the lab. (Don't worry; he doesn't work in a virology lab anyway.)

2) Anyone who still holds to the ideal that scientists are Vulcans, purely motivated by logic and the greater good, needs to talk to our friend and others like him. The lab is run by scientists, but that doesn't help. There is still plenty of ego, squabbling, and poor administration. 

People are people, and one of the things most people are poor at is being in charge of other people. That's why teaching leadership is a huge industry in itself -- although from what I've seen, the rules of leadership taught usually veer wildly between the obvious and the chest-pounding rah-rah. I've met a few really good supervisors and have come to suspect management is a talent rather than a skill. You can build on a talent by teaching skill, but without the talent there's not that much to go on. Take a bad and tone-deaf singer, give him lots of singing lessons, and you may get a passably competent karaoke-night hero. Think of that as your average manager. 

3) And think of that when you hear about the growth of the administrative state. An organization is not improved by stuffing it to the gills with managers. Despite that, stuff away we do: 

And this is before the COVID cash started to roll in. 

I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. 

As schools continue to release more troubled snowflakes into the world, confused by the simplest things, short on actual firm knowledge, covered in degrees and debt, large on self-esteem but no genuine self-respect, I expect we will have more regrettable incidents caused by workers with tons of managers but no actual management. 

I hope the next "lab leak" incident will be nothing worse than a common cold. That may be the best we can hope for. 

Mailbox of doom?

We all know, or should know, that ATM use has its risks. People in urban areas (what we used to call cities) are routinely warned to be cautious when using any sort of cash machine, especially at night and especially in dodgy neighborhoods. Dumb punks will rob you as soon as you have your dough, even force you to take out more. Smart punks will use skimmers to get your card data and clear out your accounts. When security cameras were placed in the machines and the surrounding areas, they helped deter some of these bad acts, at last for a while. However, these days our big-city district attorneys don't seem much interested in prosecuting even violent crime, so why should the criminals worry?

And even in places where they do prosecute theft and violence, you might get jugged. 

Jugging is the delightful practice wherein the punk follows the ATM user for some distance, sometimes far from the point of cash withdrawal if by car, and when the victim is in a less secure location, helping himself to the cash. 

"The robber then follows the customer outside the establishment before taking the money from the victim or breaking into the person's vehicle, most often at a new location but sometimes outside the bank," as the Austin American-Statesman describes it. "'There, they are approached, threatened with violence, or assaulted while the suspect demands the money or aggressively takes the cash bag,' the Austin Police Department said in a statement."

So the common ATM is increasingly a hotspot for crime. But what of the more mundane, totally anodyne United States Postal Service mailbox? 

Glad you asked!

"Whether you’re sending holiday cards or gifts, or just mailing your monthly rent check, you may want to avoid using those large, blue collection boxes—at least for the next few months, United States Postal Service (USPS) officials have advised," writes Elizabeth Yuko at Lifehacker. Well, that's all right; no one sends any mail around the holidays, do they?

You'll be hard-pressed to find the relevant press releases from the USPS's own site, which has a tendency to BAD REQUEST you out of anything that isn't brand-new, but according to KY3 in Springfield, Missouri, here's the problem:

Before you drop an envelope in one of those blue boxes, United States Postal workers want you to keep a few things in mind.

USPS reported an increase in thefts from these boxes during the holiday season. Here are a few precautions to make sure your gifts are delivered.

First, look at the time of the last collection for the day on the front of the blue box. Make sure you are putting your mail in the boxes before that time. You don’t want your letters or packages sitting overnight or over holidays and weekends when thieves could target the boxes.

“One of the best things that you can do is hand it off directly to your postal carrier, obviously, then it’s already in their hands, and it’s into the system,” said United States Postal Inspector Paul Shade. “The other option would be to take it directly into the post office. And obviously, it would have to be during regular business hours, but that’s the most secure way to protect your mail.”

Yeah, well, the one time we had something stolen in transit it was a Home Depot gift card in a birthday card, and it was stolen right out of the USPS processing center in Brooklyn and used at a Home Depot in that borough before we even knew it was missing. Of course we filed a complaint, but we never heard anything -- and of course the money was gone forever. So your trusty postal worker, especially some asshat hired to help out during the busy season, may also not be so trusty. 

Still, I guess it's better than leaving anything in a secure mailbox, which is secure. Everyone knows tampering with the mail is a federal offense, and that means real trouble, right?

Ha. Yeah.

What's going on out there? We can't use ATMs, let alone the bank itself. We can't answer our doors, because burglaries are on the rise, especially in cities. Every house in America is getting security cameras, willfully pushing along a dystopian end of privacy for the fear of violence and theft. And now we can't use the friendly blue mailbox? Meanwhile, despite the cameras and guards, retail giants like Target are losing hundreds of millions because they can't stop organized shoplifting rings; no one gets arrested and no one goes to jail. (I'm no fan of Target, but this is ridiculous.)

You know, the whole rampant crime issue was supposed to be the real needle-mover on the midterm elections, and is certainly a prime issue with which most adults have been grappling. But there seems to be a lack of understanding among freshly minted idiot voters. In City Journal, John O. McGinnis writes: 

When I get together with friends, the conversation often turns to their children’s political views, which are almost always significantly more liberal than theirs. Sometimes, their children’s stances are so far to the left as to baffle them. The daughter of one friend supported prison abolition, but she could not explain to her father how this policy could possibly work in practice.

This last bit really caught my eye. I've heard the term "prison abolition" before, and when it's accompanied by the slightest attempt to suggest a replacement for imprisonment, it's a thin goo of psychological service promises and equity spending. 

We've been using psychology on criminals for over a century; we've been social-spending out the bazooty since LBJ's Great Society; and yet crime and our cities become worse. There will always be human beings who would rather steal than work; there will always be psychopaths who want to kill and destroy; there will always be sociopaths and narcissists who think they deserve whatever they can take; and there will always be people whom a decent society will have to incarcerate to protect the innocent. Attempts to reform the guilty are admirable and important, but they are a distant second to providing protection for the innocent and justice for the injured. Anyone who can't understand that has been educated beyond intelligence and into a world of pure emotional nonsense. 

In the end, there are only three ways I know of to keep bad actors away from their victims:

1) Lock them up for a period society finds fair for their crimes;

2) Butcher them and drop them in mass graves (a favorite of socialist revolutionaries, who like to throw in political opponents as well); or

3) Let the beasts run wild and force everyone else to live imprisoned behind high walls, sharp cameras, barred windows. 

Hey, kids! You're all about the fairness. Does choice #3 seem fair to you? Does it seem like equity that your grandma can't leave the house, or mail you a check from the postal box? Maybe your college professor or online influencer or favorite musician has his or her head up his or her behind? Just a thought.

Fredcoin: Perfect for school!

Greetings, cryptocurrency fans! Fred Key of Fredcoin here, reminding you that Fredcoin is the very best cryptocurrency to use when sending your offspring back to school. 

What? You didn't know that Fredcoin is better than cash for students?

Of course it is! Why, as an example, here are just some of the advantages of establishing a Fredcoin account for your college student as you send them back to that den of inebriation, STDs, and indoctrination that we call college: 

💰 You can set up the account so that no alcohol can be purchased with it. Conversely, if you're a Kennedy uncle, you can set it up so only alcohol can be purchased with it -- help the kid sow some wild oats before settling down into a doomed marriage. 

💰 You can set it up for use at the college bookstore, where Fredcoin automatically calculates the 1.5% return the kid will get when he cashes in the books at the end of the semester. 

💰 You can set it up with the college meal plan, authorizing only use on healthy foods, guaranteeing the kid will barely use the account at all. 

Only a handful of institutions of higher learning are accepting Fredcoin so far, but that's bound to change soon. Currently you can enroll your child in any of these fine schools using Fredcoin: 

🎓 Wossamotta University, Minnesota

🎓 Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge

🎓 University of Woolloomooloo

🎓 Starfleet Academy (at least I think that's what the application said)

So don't delay, friends! Convert those silly dollars into rock-solid cryptocurrency with Fredcoin today! 

No men.

I heard about a young lady, a daughter of a friend of a friend, who graduated high school this year with a plan to practice living away at college. She and her pals got jobs in a beachfront town and rented a house; they would work and pay their own way and be responsible like grown-ups should be. 

But they made one fatal and entirely, completely, 100% avoidable mistake. They allowed some guys to rent with them. 

I'm kidding about the picture--this is from a show about hoarding--but not about the boys. One of the things that made this young lady quit her job and come home in July was that the boys were absolute pigs and refused to do a thing around the house. They just left their crap everywhere and never scrubbed a dish. If I know my gender, they probably left a lot of beer cans everywhere as well. And this was all foreseeable for anyone who has ever been 18 years old. 

I don't mean to blame the victim. Of course these slobs should have pulled their weight in the beach house. But it is to be expected that boys won't, certainly not in their first away-from-home digs. I have to guess that these boys and girls were not romantically entangled, or the girls could have used their wiles to get the boys to behave like they should. Not that the women should have to, of course; I'm just saying it would have worked. 

Unsupervised men are pigs. Not all, no. Just by and large. Especially when they first get out from under Mom's thumb. Hell, if these boys were actually paying their share of rent on time I'd be surprised. 

I remember visiting a friend at college in my own university days; he lived in a house with other undergrads, each worse than the next, subsisting on cheap beer and frozen potpies. While I was there two housemates got in a play-fight in the kitchen and body-slammed the table, which did it no good at all. These things don't generally happen in women's houses. 

Another friend I visited lived in a similar arrangement; a few doors down his girlfriend lived in a house with some women. It was like staying with Oscar and visiting Felix.

My point is, people will say that in these enlightened times we need not worry about mixing young men and women in co-ed housing, but I say: Be wise, women. For your own sanity, if nothing else, don't share a roof with these uncivilized heathens until they get some civilizing. The summer you save may be your own.

Bucks and dogs.

Bloomberg Opinion got a world of heat earlier this month for publishing helpful tips for peasants trying to deal with inflation while making under $300,000 per year. Writer Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at a so-called college called the New School of Social Research (most New Yorkers know what a joke that place is), had a whole heap o' tips for us plain folks out here in trailer park America, such as eating lentils instead of meat and selling our cars to take public transportation. 

The incredible shrinking
dead presidents

A lot of people among the 99% of Americans who make less than $300K seemed to take issue with the statement, including myself. We're complaining not just because of the pain we feel now, not just because we watch whatever money we may have saved become less valuable by the day, but also because we know this inflationary trend was entirely avoidable by the government not making all the hubristic blunders it has made since 2019. So being lectured by the kind of people who made the errors is kind of off-putting.

Many plain folk know just fine how to deal with inflation. Hunt your own meat. Don't buy scallops. Skip the brand-name goods for store-brand items. Don't go out to the movies or to pro sports. Don't go on Disney vacations of any kind. Make jokes to keep your spirits up. And vote against the morons of our terrible upper class who put us in this predicament.

One stupid statement among several made by the "professor" is this: 

If you’re one of the many Americans who became a new pet owner during the pandemic, you might want to rethink those costly pet medical needs. It may sound harsh, but researchers actually don’t recommend pet chemotherapy — which can cost up to $10,000 — for ethical reasons.

I searched for le mot juste to describe this and finally found it: Bullshit. I do not believe that veterinarians don't recommend pet chemotherapy, and I don't know what "researchers" she's referring to. Medical scientists? Animal activists? Economists? Vegans? Who the hell is she talking about? Certainly any decent vet will tell a pet owner if chemo is a lost cause and is just worsening or prolonging the pet's agony. That's what they did for our Nipper, and we let him go.

But Tralfaz is a totally different story. When he turned out to have cancerous lumps, including one that occluded his eye, we were advised to try lomustine for six months. One dose per month. Cost: $125 a month. An expense that might be tough for some households, no question, but not a deal-breaker by any means. Moreover, he has responded magnificently to the drug. The lumps are gone, including the one that occluded his eye, and he's doing fantastic. I had prayed he could get one more good winter with us, his favorite season, and he did, and he's still going strong. Moreover, he has had no side effects that I can tell. Not even an upset stomach. The worst part was just getting him to swallow the pills whole.

Had we listened to Dr. Asshat and her "researchers," I am certain we would have saved a few hundred bucks and Fazzy would be dead by now. 

Now, pardon me, because I'm going to go take both of my happy, healthy dogs out for a nice, long walk. 

P.S.: Undergraduate tuition and fees for a year at the New School is $73,376. I have a great idea to help the students there save money....

Peacocks on a mission from God.

Friday was National Peacock Day, as our friend and Certified Dad Joke Expert PLWoodstock mentioned in the comments yesterday. Actually, I have been able to find no reference to the weird holiday on all my usual Weird Holiday calendars, but let's just roll with it. After all, it was a day for Peacocks of the basketball variety, as a small private college, St. Peter's University in Jersey City, slipped past powerhouse Purdue in the men's NCAA basketball tournament to move into the Elite Eight. The 15th-seed Peacocks became the lowest seed to ever get that far. It was one of the most thrilling, nail-biting games of any kind I have ever seen. 

My disinterest in basketball is well known; just a sport that, like hockey, never grabbed me. That's changed in the last week, at least temporarily, since one of my oldest and dearest friends is an alumnus of St. Peter's. In fact, he was on the last football team the school ever fielded, since (dare I say) their success rate on the gridiron was exceptionally compromised. However, he is thrilled to follow his old school's playoffs, and we old pals, being scattered about the tri-state area now, have been watching each game together virtually while keeping a running chat going via texts. It's been a lot of fun. 

I asked my friend if he knew why the team's mascot is the peacock. He didn't know, although he'd heard that the grounds used to have a lot of peacocks hanging about. That seems odd, since the peacock is not native to the Americas. Moreover, St. Peter's avian symbol is the rooster or cock, after Christ's warning that Peter would deny Him three times before cock crow. 

I suggested that the name came from Pete cock, which seems unlikely but is kind of funny. (Keep it clean, boys.) 

Actually, it seems that the peacock, like the pelican and many other animals, has a history of Christian symbolism. The site Jesus Walk lists some examples of peacock symbolism in Christian art, for example, but nothing specifically associated with St. Peter. 

When I was a kid, the local zoo had a couple of African peacocks wandering around. They were fun to watch, but the males seldom put on the classic display. It's usually done to scare predators, and of course to attract mates. 

"Helllloooo, ladies!"

There's quite a spectacle on the court, though, as the young men of St. Peter's are playing an energetic brand of basketball that thrills my basketball-loving pals, most of whom can barely stand the modern NBA's current brand of three-point showboating and bricked foul shots. 

I root for the Peacocks unreservedly in their battle against the Tar Heels tonight. Fight fiercely, Peacocks!

I have also noted that, since it is Lent, St. Peter's is on a mission from God. I think we have to understand that that's the case. Villanova is still in the mix, but it's time for a more humble Catholic college to step forward. St. Peter's has gotten the call.

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?

The meaning is clear.

PROFESSOR DECLARES SNOW "CLEAR"
Cites "Accuracy" and "Hegemony"

Duckfoot Ridge, CO (1/28/21) -- Dr. Edwina Raige, professor of Meteorological Phenomena and Related Grievances at Duckfoot Ridge College, has announced demands to the weather community, media, and public at large that snow no longer be referred to as "white," but rather "clear." 

"Any scientist knows that snowflakes are made of frozen water, and thus are not white, but clear," said the professor at a conference today. "Only anti-science idiots and people with a vested interest in White Supremacy call snow 'white.' Today I demand that all references to snow be changed to describe it as clear rather than white."

Dr. Raige provided reporters with a list of "stupid, prejudicial, anti-science, patriarchal, pro-White, anti-BIPOC examples of the idea of white snow in Western culture," with preferred, pro-human pro-science replacements, including:

Whiteout weather warnings

Clearout weather warnings

 Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow

Mary had a small quadrupedal, ruminant mammal whose fleece was clear as snow 

Ivory Snow detergent

Elephant Bony Tissue Frozen Water detergent

"White Christmas"

"Clear Eurocentric Historically Problematical Annual Event"

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves  

Snow Clear and the Seven Persons of Small Stature 

"Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow" 

"4.572 Meters of Crystalline Clear Frozen Water"

"Removing the toxic whiteness from our idea of snow will remove toxic whiteness from a primary part of our vocabulary and thought," said Dr. Raige. "It not only is a blow for scientific accuracy, it is also a blow against the white cisgender supremacist hegemony." 

The Weather Channel was among the first to agree to use Dr. Raige's new formulation, citing "her impeccable credentials" and "her living in Colorado where they get a lot of the whi-- uh, cold stuff." MSNBC and CNN concurred. All three were then soundly thrashed on social media for assuming Dr. Raige's gender.

Fred's Book Club: I Wanna Rock!

Welcome back to another episode of the Humpback Writers, the book feature that explores anything between two covers that I own in my library. No humps have actually been observed, even in cases where our books have dealt with biology or other sciences. If you are an author and we write about your book and you do have a hump, please inform us or the proper medical authorities. 

Today we're back on the science beat with a book that I don't know why I still own or why I thought of it today. It was purchased for a college course that I recall with some fondness. However, as this class was well outside my field of concentration, please bear in mind that any statements I make about geology below may not be accurate.

"Of all the objects in nature, minerals are among the most readily available for study and, because of their immense variety and intrinsic beauty, have always been items of interest and curiosity." -- from the foreword

Rocks and Minerals: A Guide to Field Identification, by Charles Sorrell with illustrations by George Sandström, was first published in 1973 by Western Publishing, the company best remembered for the Little Golden Books that every American encounters in childhood. Simon & Schuster now owns the Little Golden series, following Western's demise, but St. Martin's owns the Golden Guides, including this one, which is still in print. My edition was not the first -- I did not go to college in 1973, thank you -- but I don't think the book has changed much in close to 50 years. It is what it says, a paperback guide to take into the field to identify rocks and minerals you may encounter. Here's a typical spread:

Our class required this book, and another textbook that I sold back to the bookstore for a pittance. This one I kept, probably because it was only $7.95 and they'd give me zilch for it, but also out of curiosity. I liked walking about the woods, and I suppose I thought I might go marching into the brush one day seeking out interesting rocks and minerals. That has never happened, or at least not yet. If it does, this book will be good to have.

This is the kind of book one acquires when one is a senior and nearing graduation and is informed that one is three credits shy of the math and science requirement and will not graduate on time without great effort. Of course, when I say "one" I mean "I." I had thought that my Computer Science studies counted as science, but as far as the degree program believed, they counted as electives. I could have taken nine credits of something I liked instead of nine credits of Computer Science, damn it!

Well, that's all COBOL under the bridge. I had to do an emergency class, and was informed that the school was offering some one-month intensive classes, three hours a day, through which I could fulfill my requirement and graduate in June. Rocks, Minerals, and Gems -- or as I came to call it, Rocks for Jocks -- would satisfy the dean. I think the other students were in the same jam as me. None of them were science majors.

One of the things I remember best from our genial professor is his unit on molecular structure and the formation of rocks and especially crystals. It seemed to me like crystals looked the way they looked right down to the molecules, as seen on the illustrations above. If humans were like that, I guess we'd look mostly like H2O molecules, or so I fancied. 

I did not choose the above spread at random, however. You will note the descriptions of zincite, and especially zincite with franklinite. Franklinite is an oxide mineral rarely found on its own, and is usually embedded in something else. It was discovered at a mine in Franklin, New Jersey, and is sought, or was, mainly for the zinc and manganese it accompanies. The reason I bring this up is that toward the end of the month-long class, the professor put us on a bus to go across the river to Franklin to see the Franklin Mineral Museum, which exists to this day (although current closed for Chinese Death Viral reasons). It would be the last school field trip I would ever take.

As it turned out, we didn't all fit on the bus, so two guys from Jersey who'd driven to college said I could ride with them. This turned out to be an interesting ride, as they had a cooler of beer with them, which we enjoyed on the hour-plus drive to Franklin. However, it did make the museum tour more boring than it should have been, because all I wanted to go was go back to the beer and swap more stories with my newfound friends. But we saw a lot of rocks, a mine reconstruction, a film about the mining industry in New Jersey, and it was just fine. In the end, since the Jersey boys weren't going back to the city after the trip, I had to ride the bus back to town, sobering up as half the class napped.

I have one other souvenir from that class besides the book -- somewhere, I know not where, I have a small white rock I found at the museum, studded with little black crystals of Franklinite. And with that, my undergraduate science education came to a close. 

WINning?

This American artifact may ring a bell for those who lived through the 1970s.  

For those whom 1974 is as distant as World War II or the reign of Ramesses II, here is the story, from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan: 

President Gerald R. Ford inherited a nation in dire economic straits. A debilitating recession that combined high unemployment and a stagnant economy with rampant inflation posed many difficult challenges. With a degree in economics and 25 years of Congressional budgeting experience, President Ford plunged headfirst into the crisis. His first and most public move was to combat inflation. He declared inflation “public enemy number one.” Ford’s economic advisors devised a Whip Inflation Now or WIN program in the fall of 1974. It focused on a variety of voluntary anti-inflationary initiatives that individual citizens and businesses could embrace. Early enthusiasm for the program generated massive quantities of handmade and mass-produced material, including buttons, signs, clothing, stickers, ephemera, and much more. Unfortunately, enthusiasm waned by the New Year as the program failed to generate the results people had hoped for and the program quickly died out.

Inflation was and often is pretty damn serious. At the time it was a disaster for people on a fixed income, like many who had been paying into the Social Security fund for thirty years. The dollars that they received were worth far less than the dollars they had paid in; a dollar in autumn 1935, when Social Security was implemented, was equivalent to $3.65 in autumn 1974, but the recipient got that same dollar back -- which had depreciated by 83 cents, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Inflation Calculator. News stories of little old ladies surviving on cat food led to the general cheerfulness of the era. 

And the little old ladies were just the tip of the dwindling iceberg. Inflation was eating invested money faster than it could be returned, which was discouraging all sorts of investments. As Amy Farber of the Federal Reserve Bank writes: 

In October 1974, with consumer inflation running at more than 10 percent annually, President Gerald Ford gave a now famous speech (watch video or read text) in which he proclaimed: “There is only one point on which all advisers have agreed: We must whip inflation right now.”

    “Whip Inflation Now” was not just a speech—it was a public relations campaign to enlist American citizens to hold back the increases in wages and prices of the 1970s, supposedly by increasing personal savings and taming spending habits. The symbol of the campaign was the large round red button with bold, white uppercase letters: W I N.

    According to the American Presidents blog, “The campaign did not work as President Ford had hoped. Inflation remained a threat to the economy well into the Reagan presidency … the pins were widely mocked and it gave Ford’s opponents an easy target for criticism.” 

Was the WIN campaign a failure? Economists may argue the point, but I think by every conceivable measure there's no question that it was. Inflation got worse into the late 1970s, and Ford's successor (just like his two predecessors) were incapable of formulating a policy that went beyond Ivory Tower economics and rather encouraged economic growth. This appears to be at least to be part of the massive, crushing failure of academia to teach the truth from at least the start of the postwar era to the present day. They were and are in love with socialism, and every policymaker who falls for that inflicts misery on his constituents.

I believe most of the disastrous ideas of public and social policy have come out of Western universities. I'm far from alone in that belief. Maybe WIN would have looked better in retrospect if a non-nuclear nation had declared war on us, just as FDR's New Deal looks like an economic powerhouse because war was breaking out and someone had to make all those tanks and planes.

For Ford, personally, the WIN campaign was a disaster. People may note that WIN was mocked, and Ford made fun of by Chevy Chase (a one-time show business personality), but most Americans thought Ford was a decent man. There was a lot of talk (in my family, for one) that if Ford had not pardoned Nixon he might have been elected in 1976, but I have my doubts. I think Ford was right on that one, that most Americans didn't want a Nixon clown show trial sucking all the oxygen out of the room. 

I think if Ford had not studied economics, and had a better plan than a vague FDR-ish call for normal people to go out and whip inflation (how does one do that? No one who was an adult at the time has ever been able to explain what they were supposed to do), the economy might have improved. He still would have had an uphill fight in 1976, with the swine flu disaster and the general hatred and fear of Washington everywhere, but an improving economy might have saved him from the juggernaut that was James Earl Carter. Despite everything, Ford carried 27 states in the election, but lost by about 1.7 million votes and got clobbered in the Electoral College.

I mention all this today not just because it's an excuse to talk about what was briefly a major cultural item -- WIN buttons -- but also to show that good intentions and college degrees don't always make for good results, especially in government. Reagan was an economic wonder in spite of rather than because of his economics degree from Eureka College; he spent decades learning about economics in the real world as his acting career dwindled. And Trump's bachelor's is also in economics, but I'm not sure he ever paid much attention in school. He probably learned more about economics at his father's knee. 

In the end, you can call for the people to rise up and whip that inflation, beat that poverty, conquer that cancer, declare war on bad weather, stop the tide from going out, but some battles can't be won by good intentions. 

Suits me.

One rainy night in June, my parents loaded the family into the car and drove off to buy me two suits. I had recently graduated from college. This was another gift, after so very many they had already given me.

Along the way a tire blew out. Dad got the car to the side of the road. I was going to help put on the spare, but Mom wouldn't let me. I had dress shoes on; I was going to be measured, going to try on jackets and pants; I had to stay neat and dry. My poor dad got soaked jacking up the car with us in it, changing the tire, somehow always keeping his cigarette lit no matter how hard it poured.

At the venerable clothing store, I was given the workup by the tailor. No off-the-rack here. Not when it came to formal and business wear. Colors were chosen -- one black, one blue with pinstripes. Chalk marks flew up and down the legs and arms like drawings of little birds. Maybe a tie or two selected as well. Ready in a week. And so was my kit prepared for the launching of my brilliant career.

It was an era where no man on earth would have gone to an office-job interview in anything less than a suit and tie and shined-up shoes. But even then, my parents' gift seemed very old-fashioned. I wasn't the first in my family to graduate college; although my parents had never gone to college, I wasn't even in the first in the car that night to have graduated. It was not that they were stuffing me into a uniform and insisting I bring home the bacon. It was that they were proud of me, something they didn't say in words, but that gift, that rainy night, showed me their pride more than anything words could have said. I wore both suits at least once a week for years as I commuted into Manhattan and went to work.

I bring this up because I gave away the blue suit yesterday.

The black suit was a lighter, almost summer-weight fabric, and eventually I wore it out. The blue pinstripe was stronger, and it survived everything but my appetite; I got too fat for it. I always swore I was going to drop the weight and wear it again, but I never did, even when I was jogging, even when I gave up beer. Nowadays, following my back injury, I can only do gentle exercise, if walking two big burly dogs can be gentle, and without exercise I have never been able to drop anything more than a few pounds. It was time to let this suit go.

Here's the thing -- I have plenty of old clothes that need to go. Others can use them; some of them are in very good shape. Some I've never liked even if they fit. Why should I keep them? And a suit, cleaned and still in good condition, ought to be in every man's closet. I have suits that fit. Someone could use that blue pinstripe; in fact, I just this morning saw an article on a charity that needs suits. But for years I wouldn't part with it, mostly for sentimental reasons. Yesterday I decided it had been long enough. My parents have been gone for quite a while now. My suit may be a little out of date, but there's nothing wrong with it. So I put it in the clothes collection box down at the church.

I hope it brings someone else good fortune. It certainly was always good for me. When I wore either of those suits, I always felt like a million bucks, or at least a few hundred grand.

Now I'm looking at other things with which I can part. Funny, but when I let that suit go at last, my first thought was, I think I can let anything else go now, too.

J-skool play skool.

Journalism itself has been in the news of late, partly because there have been more layoffs of journalists at places like Vice Media. And if you find it hard to believe that a place like Vice Media actually employs journalists, you're not alone. Poor, poor Disney.

This kind of news story sparks some hilarity from some of the older guys in the game, like P.J. O'Rourke and Andy Ferguson, and (a bit younger) Kyle Smith. They have reminded me of a few points of importance:

1) Journalists have gone from being tough, man-of-the-people guys to pesky do-gooders who might have joined the Peace Corps in other times.

2) The movie version of All the President's Men is the main reason why. No modern journalist thinks he or she is doing his job unless he gets a Republican to leave office in shame. Every intern covering the town council tax revision meeting dreams of it.

3) In the olden days, reporters all learned the craft by covering boring meetings and writing obits, but now they arrive with master's degrees! and expect to start closer to the top. Even if they write like drunken buffalo. And because they have not learned the basics of the job, most of them have wasted untold thousands on that degree in journalism (at "J-school") and, with the shrinking market for journalists, can never earn enough to justify spending the money.

And in my experience in the field, I would add:

4) Many of these kids came from rich or at least way-upper-middle-class families, because no family like mine would have put up with footing the bills while the kid took an unpaid internship at some media outlet that pays more to blow-dry an anchor's hair in a week than to develop young talent, if it said talent even exists. This puts the young journalist in the awkward position of having been spoiled rotten and yet still exploited.

5) Also, one must add a note from President Obama's own Deputy National Security Administrator, Ben Rhodes: "The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing."

They literally know nothing, but think they know everything, so much of it that they are too full to add any more. Liberal Arts programs are in the business of filling up heads with intellectual Twinkies so there's no room for a porterhouse. In fact, journalists think they can tell us how awesome Communism is and rewrite history, which leads me to think it's not just the under-30s who literally know nothing.

Therefore, I offer the free course below for all journalists of every age, because I think most of them have demonstrated the need for it.

Of course, the main bit of wisdom I would offer the youth of America is: Don't plan to be a reporter; find something to do that you like better and that pays more. Whatever you do, don't pay a place like Columbia a small fortune for a useless credential. Or let your parents do it.

Fred's Book Club: Eats!

Welcome back to our Wednesday "Hump Day" feature, the Humpback Writers, wherein we showcase books by authors who have had the bad luck to be brought to my attention and therefore unfairly labeled as "Humpback." I know, it's dumb, but I've been doing this for months and it's too late to change now. 

Today we're continuing this week's food theme with an actual cookbook, and an old one at that:

On Campus Cookbook: For the Non-Kitchen Cook is a long out of print tome that was created to help the college student, living in the dorm, to cook real, actual food using the simplest tools of the day -- blender, hot pot, and toaster oven -- which one might be able to keep in or sneak into one's dorm room. Tabletop microwave ovens had been around a long time when this book came out, but the author, Mollie Fitzgerald, an undergrad at Duke at the time, doesn't even mention them. I don't know why, but a lot of chefs eschew them, finding that they cook poorly and often unevenly.

So, okay, you may be thinking, Fred wants to do a cookbook because Thanksgiving is coming up. Why this ancient book that is directed at people living in student housing? And a jolly good question it is, too!

Back in the Cretaceous Era I was working on the student newspaper, in the Features & Arts pages, when we got this book in as a review copy. At the time I could not boil an egg without turning it into soup. So I suggested to the editor in chief that it might make a funny piece for me to take the book home and try to make a dinner with it, anticipating disaster. There were seventy recipes in this slim volume; surely I could choose an appetizer, main dish, side dish, and dessert to ruin. He said sure.

Not only did I not make a disaster of a meal, but the buddy who agreed to be my fellow guinea pig thought it was delicious. And so did I. Thus began an interest in cooking that has stayed with me to this day.

I don't want to include a photo of the pages of my copy of the book, which, as with all beloved cookbooks, are quite messy; let me just take the liberty of writing up two of them so you can see how simple Mollie Fitzgerald made it for the befuddled cook with limited equipment:

Artichoke Dip

14-oz. can artichoke hearts, drained well and cut into small pieces
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt or garlic powder
Choice of crackers

1. Preheat the toaster oven to 425°F.
2. Combine all the ingredients, except the crackers, in the order given in a medium-size aluminum foil baking pan or an ovenproof serving dish.
3. Bake the artichoke dip for 25 minutes or until the top is golden brown and bubbly.
4. Remove the dip from the oven and allow it to cool for a few minutes before serving on crackers.

Makes 3 cups

Lemon-Broiled Chicken

4 boneless chicken breast halves, or 4 to 6 other pieces
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter
3 tablespoons lemon juice, or the juice from 1 fresh lemon
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon honey (optional)
1 tablespoon soy sauce (optional) 

1. Rinse the chicken pieces and pat them dry. Place the chicken in an aluminum foil baking pan so that the pieces are touching. Set aside.
2. Combine all the remaining ingredients in your hot pot on medium low heat. Once the butter has completely melted, unplug the hot pot and pour the liquid over the chicken.
3. Broil according to [the instructions from your toaster oven; the book gave detailed instructions but most ovens come with instructions -- you want the chicken browned on both sides, basically], basting several times with the sauce. Spoon a little of the sauce over each piece of chicken as you serve it.

Serves 2 to 3

The Lemon Broiled Chicken's sauce is great over rice, so make extra. Do include the honey and soy sauce.

This is haute cuisine for dorm food. (College students: That's haute, French for elevated, not hawt, but the stuff will be hot, so don't burn yourself.)

The theme of my article turned out to be how a good cookbook can help anyone turn into a passable home cook. The editor liked the piece, and ran it, too.

When people tell me they can't cook, I remind them that no one was born cooking, and that anyone can get a core of twenty or so recipes that they can make from scratch to feed the family. Next week, a lot of people in America will be cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the first time and panicking about it. They shouldn't. It really isn't that hard if you keep it simple and pay attention to what you're doing. The On Campus Cookbook was a great help to get me going.

This is, I believe, Mollie Fitzgerald's only book; she's actually gone into the family business, doing high-priced travel to exotic destinations, and is apparently the firm's fly-fishing expert. She did me a good turn with this book, though, and if she ever decides to write another, I'll buy it.