WHY A DUCK:

(From the Marx Bros., "Cocoanuts")
Hammer [Groucho Marx]: ... Now here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: Why a duck?
Hammer: I'm all right. How are you? I say here is a little peninsula, and here's a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: All right. Why a duck?
Hammer: I'm not playing Ask-Me-Another. I say, that's a viaduct.
Chico: All right. Why a duck? Why a--- why a duck? Why-a-no-chicken?
Hammer: I don't know why-a-no-chicken. I'm a stranger here myself. All I know is that it's a viaduct. You try to cross over there a chicken, and you'll find out why a duck. It's deep water, that's viaduct.

Lots of people argue about politics; in fact, arguing about politics is one of the great pleasures, if you can call it that, of American life and has been since the founding of the Republic. Very few people other than academics, though, actually argue about the political philosophies that underlie those arguments; most people prefer to concentrate instead on the day to day maneuvering and staged news events that constitute the foam on the surface of the political sea. I think more people would talk about political philosophy if someone kept the academics out of the discussion altogether, since most of them are fairly liberal, if not actual left wingers of one sort or another; professors are, as a rule, annoying the way your neighbor’s kids are annoying, which is too say all the damn time and never more so than when they let that damn dog of theirs wander around the neighborhood peeing on your mother’s azaleas, but that’s another story; and left wingers, like any other insecure religious believer, like to shout down anyone who disagrees with them. This makes them disagreeable to be with on the whole, especially if they are Marxists, since they may mistake you for an oppressed proletarian and try some brand new lines of agitprop on you to gauge their overall effectiveness, hoping to stir some good old fashioned revolutionary class struggle with a pernicious but otherwise fairly harmless kulak counter-revolutionary capitalist running dog like your local Korean fruit stand owner before they go home to the suburbs and eat some vegan quiche for supper.

I bring this up because one of my co-workers, a graduate student who wants to work with children after she gets her masters degree, for reasons that elude me at the moment (you can skip the next bit if you want and start up with and I; you won’t miss anything important); the concept of willingly working with children always reminds me of great souls like Father Damien or Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, living saints who spend their lives working with lepers or condemned prisoners or advertising executives; you’re happy that someone works on behalf of these poor unfortunate wretches, and you’re equally happy, if not even more so, that the someone who works with them isn’t you; and I (welcome back to the main part of the sentence; the weather here is fine, sunny and high in the low 70’s with a chance of showers later tonight) found ourselves talking about Marxism for some reason. We discussed the great dogmas of that great secular faith: dialectical materialism, the surplus value of labor, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the class struggle and the inevitable triumph of the workers, religion as the opiate of the masses, and then she posed a question about the central tenet of the Marxist faith. She was skeptical of many Marxist claims, and one may say that in the light of recent history she has every right to be skeptical, and she wondered aloud if anyone had ever done a systematic and scientific examination of the factors involved in the Marxist conundrum of why a duck?

Indeed, one may well ask why a duck and not some other species of waterfowl? The question of why a duck is an old one, as I am sure you know, predating the existence of Marxism by at least a millennium. In the Middle Ages, schools of philosophy contended bitterly over the question, with angry mobs of students coming constantly to blows in the streets of Paris and Bologna and cheese with mustard, with many a university suspended from competition for years because of irregularities in recruiting star philosophers. The medieval nominalists held that only the individual duck existed, that ducks as a class merely reflected the individual duck down to the webbed feet, the quack, and the insatiable drive to sell supplemental health insurance. The medieval realists believed that ducks derived their inherent duckiness from their being part of the greater class of ducks and from owning a really cool motorcycle, which then, as now, was a babe magnet, and that the individuality of specific ducks was less important than the larger category of duck to which all ducks belonged...yeah, I know, this is all a bit much, but it was the Middle Ages, remember; there were no movies, no television, much less cable TV, no computer games or any computers to play them on. They had to do something to pass the time and arguing about whether ducks came by their identity through their individual characteristics or through their membership in the National Hockey League was a good way to kill a year or two. Remember how dumb you’re going to look to your descendants a thousand years from now and cut these people some slack, okay? Medieval peasants, to round out the argument, thought that both schools of thought had a good deal of merit, intellectually speaking, but most held to the opinion that no matter which school’s argument was the more valid, ducks still tasted pretty damn good when you could catch them, particularly if damp and moldy rye bread is all you’ve had to eat since you were a kid.

Marxists, as a rule, follow the realist approach to the question of why a duck. Such categories as class and duck, after all, are human constructs, after all, templates that are dishwasher safe and won’t break even if hurled at a wall by a happy Greek dancing to the theme music from Zorba the Greek at a wedding he's not paying for; free food does that to people sometimes. In any case, this reduction of ducks to a mere category, one of many, suits the philosophical bent of most Marxists, who seem to despise most species involved in the insurance business, but this aversion has little or nothing to do with the larger question of why a duck. The most popular answer of the twentieth century was I don’t know, I’m a stranger here myself, but I feel that in our more modern age we can safely say, without fear of contradiction, why the hell not a duck, and to say so with great confidence. Now why Marxists loathe the insurance business so much is another question entirely, and one beyond the scope of this essay, but the dislike appears real enough, based on the historical evidence of the past century. I find it hard to think of a twentieth century Marxist state where I’d feel comfortable selling life and property insurance, given the usual Marxist prejudices about life and property.

A TREATISE ON THE RIGHTS OF PLANTS: Now I would prefer not to point fingers here, but there’s a great, yes, even an abyssal, a word I am using here for the first time, even though it's the wrong word to use here, given that I will not be talking about a credibility gap as I originally planned to, but something else entirely, but I like abyssal, so it stays in; I like it because it is both short and polysyllabic, unlike polysyllabic, which is not short, but is definitely polysyllabic in the best sense of the word; (end of digression; thank you for your patience. If you have lost your place, something that is always possible, given the length of these digressions, please start from the last word in this digression from the digression. Ready? Okay, here we go...even a tremendous) double standard at work in American public life. We do not choose to recognize this double standard for fear it will ask us for money or the use of the family car on Saturday night, but whether we recognize it or not, the double standard is there, when it is not next door annoying the neighbors’ dog. On the one hand, society castigates athletes roundly for their use of steroids, and rightfully so, I think; the habitual use of performance enhancing substances compels the average sports fan to wonder if what they are watching at sports venues and on their television sets is the result of training, hard work, and the human desire to excel, or the entirely predictable outcome of ingesting this year’s line of new and improved pharmaceuticals.

The abuse of steroids and other such drugs calls into question the validity of every sports record broken over the past few years, for when one wishes to debate whether Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds was the better home run hitter, Ruth’s supporters can point out that he achieved his record without any help from his pharmacist, unless you include bartenders, hot dog vendors, bookies, tarts, trollops, harlots and strumpets as falling under the rubric of pharmacist; it’s a mental leap, to be sure, and there’s no small amount of cognitive dissonance involved, but you can always scrape the dissonance off your shoes on the welcome mat outside before you come in and track it all over the carpet. And yes, I know about Hank Aaron hitting more home runs than Babe Ruth; I was in the bathroom when Aaron hit number 715; but Aaron’s always lived a clean, upstanding sort of life devoid of drugs, drinking, and the usual causes of scandal, with plenty of exercise and good nutrition, and if I used him as an example then I couldn’t use the words strumpet and trollop in this sentence, as the underlying concept behind those words was more or less obsolete by the time Aaron hit his last home run back in the 1970’s, and I was looking forward to working them in somewhere before the end of this sentence of three to six months in the county jail.

That Major League Baseball, among other professional sports, is finally doing something to restore some credibility to the playing field is belated, to be sure, but welcome nonetheless. This new determination to do something about artificial enhancement in professional sports stands in direct contrast with the widespread attitude of ‘everyone does it so it must be okay’ one finds everywhere in agriculture. There is not a category of fruit and vegetable anywhere in the country that growers, often with the connivance of major agribusiness and chemical companies, have not enhanced using chemicals that would get any athlete caught using them banned from their sport immediately, if not kill them outright. Yet these very same chemical companies routinely boast in television commercials on public television, among other places, which is supposed to be commercial free, but isn’t, not by a long shot, about how their product will turn any plant from arugula to zucchini into a full-blown, oversized, record-breaking, pistil-packing behemoth of botany.

This laissez-faire attitude towards chemical enhancement raises all manner of disturbing questions about modern American society, if you think about it too much. How can the nation’s youth, the future movers and shakers and insurances executives trying to get out of paying off the policies on all that moving and shaking, acquire a decent respect for the principles of fair play and good sportsmanship when 4-H clubs throughout the land encourage the youngsters in their charge to use artificial means to bolster plant growth in order to win blue ribbons? As Napoleon once pointed out, some people will do amazing things just to get a piece of ribbon, but should we in our modern age encourage unethical behavior simply because a short faux Frenchman thought it was a good idea two centuries ago? And this casual attitude towards chemical, and now genetic, alteration of plants bespeaks a dark and disturbing undertone in out attitudes towards plant life in general.

We scream foul when a ballplayer uses a steroid; a few days ago in New York the police arrested a group of men for doping a racehorse, yet no one says anything about the horrors routinely inflicted upon plants. Even the average vegan, one of a group who should take an ethical stand against the abuse of plants, will shout vigorously against genetically modified food and then go straight home and eat organic spinach for supper. The vegan so caught out will proclaim the organic nature of his spinach, but the spinach’s background makes no difference here; organic or not, it is still sacrificed on the altar of human need, often with oil and vinegar or some organic ranch dressing, if there is such a thing. The spinach does not care why the vegan eats it; the vegan’s motivation for eating the spinach is not the point here; the spinach, in its death throes, knows only that the vegan is eating it, and so it perishes in the same state of atavistic horror we would feel watching a great white shark devour our best friend, but not our best friend’s annoying little brother; human solidarity stretches only so far. Obviously the care and loving kindness vegans lavish on animals is not extended to fruits and vegetables, which vegans treat with the same utilitarian ruthlessness that the rest of us treat pigs and cattle, although we treat our fellow flesh-eaters without the snotty self-righteousness that marks the vegan’s relationship with others.

There are few groups in American life more smugly annoying than vegans, always excluding the American Library Association and the editorial board of the New York Times, of course, and having to watch vegans on television always, for me, at any rate, makes me wish I could emulate the woman in the Roald Dahl story who clubs her adulterous husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb and then, after cooking it, serves the evidence to the police officers investigating the husband’s death. If you haven’t ever felt that way then you’re a better person than I am. There’s nothing I can do about vegans except wish they could all perish horribly under a ton of cold cuts, I suppose, but I keep these opinions to myself; we live in a democracy and even herbivores have rights, as long as they have two legs.

PEACH PIE: Well, now that the citizenry of our happy little burg (who are none too happy at the moment, given that there is nowhere to park due to the blizzard) are halfway done with the truly monstrous chore of digging ourselves out from under all the snow dumped on us over the weekend, which really means that people are shovelling snow out of their driveways and tossing it into the middle of the street, something which drives me up the wall no end, but enough of that, it is time to stop and reflect on some of the finer things of life, to which end I recommend that all of you folks go over to the blogroll and click on Cooking and Writing, and when you arrive there, Leilla, the owner and operator of said blog, will show you how to make a perfect peach pie, a peach pie that will calm the soul of even the most tired and disgusted wretch wearied even unto a slipped disk from shovelling the vast amount of snow that has deliberately fallen into America's roads, driveways, and parking lots. Do this quickly before she throttles her brother with a spatula.

TROJAN NEWS: The reportage here is almost superfluous, I think; the Spanish police arrested some hacker for computer crimes, but I love the title of the article: Police Nab Creator of Webcam Trojan, combining as it does equal parts of criminology, pornography, and contraception in one pithy phrase. Reading the article after such a great title is actually something of a let-down.

FIRST SIGNS OF SPRING APPEARS: It is winter here in our happy little burg, as it is everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of the year, proving once again that your roving reporter…well, I don’t really rove in any actual sense of moving physically from one place to another without much rhyme or reason and only for the pleasure one takes in seeing new things and meeting new people, although I did go to New Jersey once for my uncle’s funeral, but I don’t think that actually qualifies as roving in any larger sense of the word. My uncle, may he rest in peace, he did some serious roving, all the way from Ireland to Canada and New York and then to the suburbs of northern New Jersey, there to settle down and raise a family and enjoy the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the span of life God allotted him, and eventually, after his fourscore years, came death, as it must for all of us, and then burial, which is the order you hope this process occurs in; the alternative is too gruesome to think about unless you produce horror films, in a cemetery surrounded by a strip mall, a beer distributorship, and a chiropractor’s office, where all the tombstones are set flat on the ground so as to make it easier for illegal aliens from Jalisco to mow the grass. Well, whether I rove or not is not the point; what is the point, and I have been asking myself that very question since I started writing this, is that it is winter and I have noticed that it is winter, thereby proving that my grasp of the incredibly obvious remains as firm as ever.

Even in the midst of this brutal season, however, with the temperature and the snow falling faster than a teenager’s self-esteem at the arrival of their first zits, the very first sign of spring appears, rousing in even the most winter-weary breast the hope of warmer and happier days ahead. Yes, indeed, in the words of the immortal Shelley, and no, I don’t mean Tommy Kowalski’s sister, either, but the English poet of the same name; Shelley, I mean, not Kowalski, obviously, English poets named Kowalski being few and far between; “…if winter comes, can spring be far behind…” a line of verse that brings up all sorts of unrepeatable connotations when used in the same sentence as Shelley Kowalski’s name and can only mean that the income tax forms have finally arrived at the egregious mold pit that serves as our community’s public library.

Yes, they have arrived, a dozen or so heavy cardboard boxes chock full of forms and instruction books, all of them landing by the side of my desk with a thud, a crash, and enough boom to start an oompah band of my very own, all of them reminding you and me that while the snow may reach our lower lips before the winter is through, in a few short months the snow will have vanished, along with most of what you’ve managed to save this past year if the government has any say in the matter. Yes, we can hear the soft but soon to be strident call of the taxman throughout the land these days, reminding us all that before the purveyors of ICBMs and pig museums, snow removal and space shuttles, public schools and kudzu suppression can grab for their share of the tax pie, there must be some pie for them to grab. And it is with this great truth in their pointy little heads that the good folks at the tax assessor’s office go out into the not very mean streets of our happy little burg—well, the tax assessors think they’re mean, for reasons that do not surpasseth understanding, as you will see-usually with someone from the housing department in tow, looking for that now almost mythical creature, the taxpayer who can shell out more than he’s paying now.

Such a creature is hard to find; they are both wily and cunning, often at the same time since those words are synonyms, but they are no match for the intellectual giants of municipal government when the issue of police overtime is at stake and the tax base as it currently stands won’t allow the city to give the cops another raise. So they must rake in the public pelf in some other manner, usually by property reassessment, which here in our happy little burg is highway robbery committed by the city so they can fix the potholes in the highway they’re robbing you on.. This is a simple procedure in which the tax assessor says your house is worth more than it was a year ago and therefore you should pay more taxes on it. You can complain about the reassessed value of your house if you choose to, but your complaint goes to the relevant branch of city government, which is the tax assessor’s office, and they’ve already made up their minds that you have to pay more. You can complain about this arrangement if you want: it’s a free country and if it makes you feel better about yourself then, by all means, complain till you’re blue in the face…but you still have to cough up the money.

To add insult to injury, and why should you just be insulting when you can really screw someone over big time, the lads from the housing department will not only concur with the reassessment, but they’ll let you know that your house is in violation of the city housing code and that you will have to pay fines for violating a housing code you didn’t even know the city had. This particular twist to the story began in 1953, when the municipal solons, in their infinite wisdom, decided to pass a housing code. Other small cities had them and we wanted to keep up with the times by having one too, whether or not we actually needed one; civic pride can be a tremendous motivator. Of course, having passed the housing code, our happy little burg being the sort of live and let live place that it is, no one bothered to enforce it for forty years. Over the course of those forty years, nature, human and otherwise being what they are, violations of the code sprung up like skunk cabbages in spring, pullulating (and yes, I did get that word out of the Reader’s Digest Improve Your Word Power) all over the place. Some landlords had nine families living in a one family home, stuffing the odd relative into the closets and attic, and even charging the mice and cockroaches rent. No one is quite sure why there were no truly disastrous fires in the city during this period of non-enforcement, but there weren’t, which the devout among us credit to divine intervention and the cynical to our dumb luck. I am more likely to credit the blessings of the Almighty in this, as nobody’s luck is that dumb for that long.

Well, the slumlords, and some honest citizens as well, to be fair, shrieked loudly when they heard that the city was enforcing the housing code, reassessing the tax rolls, and in general doing things that a lot of people would prefer they not do, since it would jack their taxes up. The municipal government raised the property taxes anyway, and then reassessed everyone’s property so they could raise the taxes again; they needed the money, they said, and now was the best time to do it, now being only a couple of months after election day when the terrifying prospect of not being an incumbent no longer hung over the collective head of the city council, and the public would have four years to forget how much their taxes had gone up.

So, yes, it is winter, and no, I won’t go off on another long digression about my uncle, and the signs of spring are beginning to show themselves, and if this particular sign is not to your liking, well, remember that pitchers and catchers report next month, and nothing in life is as certain as death and baseball.

CALL THE AAA: This, of course, brings up the inevitable question of where is the nearest gas station with a tow truck and how much will they charge to pull this thing out of the mud?

LOW CARB BLOGROLL: And I have added a whole bunch of new links to the blogroll, along with the pickle and French fries. These are sites that I have come upon in my travels throughout the blogosphere, some of which deal with my personal interests like Catholicism; others went on because I thought the blogs were amusing and thought that maybe you would like them too. Michelle Malkin and Belmont Club are here to show that I can deal with serious matters from my perch here on the right wing, whereas Randy at Beautiful Horizons is still wondering what he, a true blue no two ways about it New York blue state liberal (although I am sure he would dispute such a broadbrush categorization; he'd be right, of course, but compared with me that's what he is...of course, compared to me Presidet Bush is a dangerous lefty), is doing stuck here with the pitchfork brigade. I've also added Irish Elk, although I'm not certain why; he runs a serious Catholic blog there, but he's got the Wodehouse Society on his blogroll and any friend of Bertram Wooster is a friend of mine, dammit!

A COROLLARY INFARCTION: If I may put aside my clown’s outfit for just a moment, I’d like to say something about my previous posting here. I think it says something about the infinite malleability of language that those people who most vociferously defend an otherwise indefensible status quo that damages children, especially poor children whose parents are the least able to protect them from such abuse, are called liberals, whereas those who regard a system that damages such children as shameful and call for radical changes in that system are regarded by these very same liberals as retrograde conservatives of the very worst sort.

A LITTLE LEARNING: Kids are a lot more selfish than they used to be. Time was, when a kid came down with an extremely communicable but otherwise harmless disease, the first thought that ran through their minds, other than if someone put monkey urine in the medicine your mom shoved into your mouth with a tablespoon it would taste a whole lot better, was that they should get to class as soon as humanly possible and spread the disease around so everyone could get a day off. Such a child became a immediate celebrity of sorts in the classroom and in the halls like the captain of the football team or the head cheerleader, someone everybody wanted to be with, a juvenile Santa Claus of sorts, at least until we came down with whatever he had. Kids in those days regarded spreading infectious diseases to their classmates as one of their civic duties as children; in some Communist countries, in fact, a child’s refusal to spread such diseases to their classmates caused that child to become an object of suspicion and fall under the watchful eye of the secret police, who would note any other signs of willful individualism taking precedence over the child’s duty to the needs of the socialist collective will.

Not anymore. In our health conscious age a sick child stays home with his personal computer and his games and his television and can only talk to their friends over their cell phone, making it impossible to spread anything except computer viruses, and if you need a day off from school then let’s face it, they don’t count. No, a child sick with a mild case of conjunctivitis, say, can go anywhere their little heart desires, anywhere at all, to the mall, to grandma’s house, even to the egregious mold pit that serves as our happy little burg’s public library, anywhere they want, except to school, where their presence and their microbes are most wanted.

One must wonder then at the efficacy of compulsory education laws that compel a child to go to school when they clearly do not want to go, and state health regulations that force a child to stay home when they are sick and therefore the most eager to go and see their classmates. In this situation, parents should ask if having school authorities label their children as “sick” or “ill” or “not feeling well” will damage their children’s self-esteem and disturb their relationships with other children, as these children will in all likelihood see their classmate’s staying home as a profoundly antisocial act and a betrayal of class solidarity.

Given these circumstances, it would appear to the disinterested observer, and if you have one of those please let me know, I sure can use one around here, that my original thesis is almost certainly untrue and therefore libelous in a non-class action sort of way (forget it; I have no money, but I am typing this up on a computer using Microsoft Word 2000, so you can sue Bill Gates instead; he’s got lots of money. One caveat, however: his lawyers are sharks. Real ones) So if children are not more selfish than they used to be, and I am sure you are happy to hear that bit of news, what is forcing them to engage in behavior that damages their ability to play well with others?

The answer is in the word “forced.” Sick children are forced to stay away from their classmates by an education establishment obsessed with packing more and more children into schools with smaller class sizes, which means hiring new teachers and expanding the education budget, an arrangement the teachers’ unions love since increased education spending means more members for them. The child, sick or otherwise, in such a scenario is little more than the bedrock upon which an entire corrupt system is based, the yearly influx of Black Angus, if you will, that keeps the abattoirs of pedagogy going night and day. What then should American parents do to free their children from a system that interferes with their socialization?

Coerced compulsory education must end. The whole rotten system depends on compelling the child to go to school by legal fiat. This is an antiquated concept at best and a pernicious one at its worst. Freeing children from the dead hand of compulsory education would end the need for ever more and more schools since the schools would only educate those who want an education, thereby cutting the already overburdened taxpayer’s school and property tax bill, and allowing the otherwise listless mass of students to pursue other career options like surrogate motherhood and narcotics trafficking. Ending compulsory education would pry away the tenacious and parasitical grip the teachers’ unions hold on American education and the Democratic Party and allow children, who, along with the dead, are the largest group of second class citizens in this country, to at long last enjoy the blessings of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You know, I just re-read that last sentence for the third time and it’s only now occurring to me that this diet Pepsi I’m drinking has an odd taste to it…

NUMEROLOGY: Numbers are everywhere these days, usually very large numbers meant to impress the heck out of us, and to tell the truth, a good many people do find big numbers impressive. I don’t think too many people would think much of McDonalds if their signs said hundred served or thousands served or a couple of guys from Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey showed up last Wednesday for a burger and some fries and argued about whether or not they wanted to get a vanilla or a chocolate shake with that. No, we want to see the billions and billions served sign outside under the golden arches, as if the late Carl Sagan was the founder and leading shill for the fast food giant and there was a Big Mac for every star in the cosmos.

Once upon a time in America, McDonalds’ signs would actually tell you how many burgers they’d served. There’d be two billion one year and four billion the next year and so on and so forth, until the total number of served burgers exceeded the total population of the planet Earth by a factor of about a dozen or so. They stopped giving a specific number after that, because if it’s clear that everyone on Earth should have gotten at least one burger by now and they haven’t gotten it, then it’s equally clear, given the evidence available at my local Wal-Mart every Saturday afternoon, that a whole lot of people in this neck of the woods and maybe elsewhere as well have gone back for seconds and thirds and maybe a couple orders of super-sized French fries as well.

Other numbers try to deceive us, while others do their level best to scare us silly. The Russian writer Vassily Aksyonov once wrote that Americans are in love with horrifying statistics, the scarier the better. There is a book, the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which is so full of horrifying statistics that I am surprised it is not permanently number one on the New York Times bestseller list. The book gives the number of annual homicides and the ten leading causes of death in the United States and the number of illegitimate births and just how many alcoholics and diabetics and broken homes and the numbers on so many varieties of social dysfunction that reading it is guaranteed to keep you up to all hours of the night wondering what’s going to come first, hell or the hand basket. In fact, with so much social dysfunction going on from one end of our great republic to the other, it is amazing that anyone can call the average American family average anymore, since the last twelve people this description applies to will, no doubt, shortly wind up on a television talk show trying to explain the odd behavior of average people to millions of uncomprehending viewers.

Prices are another set of deceptive numbers, but we are usually all too willing to go along with them, although most people are loath to admit it. We want the deception; we know the seller is lying to us, he knows that we know he is lying, and we all pretend otherwise. The only reason that the whatever it is you want and shouldn’t buy with the kids’ lunch money is priced at $99.99 is that you want to tell yourself later that you got it for less than a hundred dollars, thereby negating the very loud and voluble complaints of whoever it is that’s going to hit the roof when you tell them that little Johnny is going to have to beat up some smaller kid for their money or do without lunch this week. The deception here suits the buyer just fine for the time being. Regrets will come later when the bill arrives and the warranty on the whatever it is he bought runs out, which usually occurs simultaneously, something that doesn’t happen in nature very often.

Part of the problem with the barrage of numbers we face these days is that it takes a truly staggering number to get our attention anymore, and numbers that big have a problem of their own: people tend to tune them out after the first two or three times they hear them. That’s because all such numbers tend to be even numbers, and even numbers are inherently less believable than odd numbers. I’ve seen any number of hucksters claim that they’ve changed tens of thousands of lives with whatever it is they’re selling and that you too, for the paltry sum of $49.99 can join this happy horde of unspecified tens of thousands as well. These guys seldom do well and after a few years of beating their heads against the wall quit the racket entirely and go into another, better paying field of criminal endeavor like loansharking or politics. There is a simple explanation for their failure: even the most unintelligent of potential suckers sees in the invocation of the unspecified tens of thousands something of the slippery and therefore the phony. No one believes this con artist because no one believes his even numbers. But how much closer to getting your money would this guy be if instead of some incredibly vague even number he could look you straight in the eye and say that you too could have entire life changed, just as the 267,439 other people who’ve had their lives and their bank balances changed by him and the whatever flummery / pie in the sky / swampland in Florida / week old fish he is peddling this week.

The odd / even number conundrum is known to science, who regrets ever meeting the conundrum or loaning him that money to get his car repaired. During the nineteenth century, members of a British surveying team calculated that Mount Everest stood exactly 29,000 feet high. Confronted with the unlikelihood that anyone would believe such a round and even number, the members of the surveying team added another couple of feet onto the mountain so no one would question their calculations. But this false standard could not stand forever, not in the face of modern science. The Himalayas are young pups by mountain standards, only a few million years old at most, a product of India’s having one too many on a Saturday night and colliding with Asia out in the parking lot. In 1999, the National Geographic Society and some organization from Boston that wasn’t the Red Sox recalculated Everest’s height as 29,035 feet, which only goes to show you the real benefits good nutrition and clean living will have on a growing boy. The wise and numerate reader will no doubt have noticed by now that the new height is neither unbelievably round or suspiciously even, but is rather a completely odd number, and therefore worthy of our respect as the acme of geological and topographical truth.

BRAKES, OR THE LACK THEREOF: I know that there are veritable hordes of automotive cultists who will damn me to the deepest part of Henry Ford’s pit of motorized perdition for saying this, but I wish there were some way to eliminate that peculiar abomination, the anti-lock braking system. Before everyone jumps up shouting about what a terrible Luddite I am and how dare I say such a thing about this wonder of American technological genius, or that I must be some sort of ignorant backwoods troglodyte out to resurrect the pretty little surrey with the fringe on the top and the velocipede from the dank and musty storeroom of technologies left behind by the forward and inexorable march of human progress, let me just say that while I do not loathe anti-lock brakes as much as I loathe liver in any of the permutations that aren’t supposed to taste like liver but do anyway, no matter how many onions you put on the meat, or even asparagus in either its green or white variety, I certainly do not loathe said anti-lock brakes less. And that’s saying quite a lot.

Over the course of my driving life, which covers some thirty years now if you include those adolescent years when I had to wheedle the family car away from my parents, I have developed a simple, civil, and mutually beneficial relationship with my brakes. This relationship is based on one central premise: when I press my foot down on the brake pedal I expect the car to slow down and then, at a point designated by myself, to come to a complete stop. In return for this service, I will keep my part of the bargain and maintain the brakes in the style to which they have become accustomed over these many years. It is, as I said, a simple, readily understandable relationship, in which I get what I want, i.e. selected automotive inactivity, and the brakes get what they want, i.e. new, improved, and often overpriced rent free pads at the time and place of the brake’s choosing.

We have no illusions about this relationship or each other at this point, but live in a sort of peripatetic harmony with one another. I lead my life; the brakes do as they please when I am not around; and we meet when I need to use the car. I think at this point we stay together for the sake of the car and for no other reason. As for the expense, well, there’s little that anyone can do about that, of course; all such relationships run into money; there’s simply no way around that. But in return for this extravagant outlay of money I expect something in return. I expect instant, mindless, absolute obedience to my craving for deacceleration at red lights. I expect that brakes will, nothing more, nothing less, stop the car whenever I feel the need to stop the car.

Instant indulgence of my inertial needs is not what I get from my automobile’s anti-lock braking system. The name itself should have tipped me off that there were troubles coming my way in great battalions. Brakes were once just brakes; an anti-lock braking system is brakes plus several relatives telling the brakes what a cheap bastard I am while sponging off of my money. I am willing, up to a point, to put up with the expensive and annoying little extras that having an anti-lock braking system entails, even if they are robbing me blind behind my back. What I am not prepared to tolerate is the snotty attitude I get from the brakes nowadays.

When I put my foot down on the brake pedal I expect the car to stop. That’s it; no ifs, ands, or buts about it at all. It’s as simple as that. I do not expect the brakes or the attendant anti-lock system to cure an infectious disease or end hunger in the Third World or plumb the deeper mysteries of quantum mechanics or even understand what the hell I am talking about in this essay, but I do expect them to stop the car. To me, this is their reason for being, the purpose the Ford Motor Company installed said brakes and their related anti-lock system in the car in the first place. So I don’t expect a long, drawn out debate complete with a moderator and a bunch of guys who will, no doubt, be major political figures someday but who are, at the moment, just a bunch of pimply faced geeks and wonks who couldn’t get a date to the junior prom if they waved a fistful of fifties in the red light zone of your choice saying, resolved, we should stop the car because the horse’s patoot behind the wheel is slamming on the brake pedal because the jackass from out of state in front of him just decided to stop in the middle of traffic and get his bearings, and don’t you just hate it when that happens? All I want is for the car to stop, period, end of story. This, and nothing else, is what I expect.

What I expect and what I get, however, are two different things, and that this abyss between theory and practice is the fault of the anti-lock braking system. There are few sights more terrifying to the average American motorist who is doing his civic duty and stopping at a red light than the sight, in his rear view mirror, of an automobile advancing towards the rear of his car at a fairly good speed and noticing that the driver of the second car is pumping his brakes with tremendous vigor and with absolutely no effect. The drivers of these autos are recognizable by their distended eyeballs and neck muscles, clenched teeth, and the look of utter horror frozen on their faces. With more extreme cases, identification is possible by noting the right foot protruding through the automobile floorboards and the third set of skid marks on the road. In such circumstances one is apt to think that if it worked for Fred Flintstone it might work for you, however odd that might appear to the casual observer.

I am not sure why the anti-lock braking system is called that; it seems a misnomer at best and false advertising at worst, since the purpose of such a system is obviously not to stop the car but to annoy the hell out of you first, and then give you a good scare and then stop the car if the system feels up to it today. Winter driving with anti-lock brakes is the worst, especially driving in snow, since it’s clear that the brakes don’t want to work in this weather and would just as soon be in Miami soaking up some sunshine on the beach instead of driving along at twenty miles an hour in mostly stop but some go traffic on roads that someone, and by someone I mean the guys in our happy little burg’s vaunted highway department, should have plowed and salted by now.

When I am driving in winter conditions I do not want to discuss the advisability of stopping the car at certain times with my brakes, which I believe I’ve already made clear here. A cardiac surgeon does not discuss the finer points of heart transplantation with his scalpel, nor does a fighter pilot engage in a discussion of the development of fighter tactics since Oswald Boelcke formulated the first set of such rules during the First World War unto the present day or have a discussion of the finer points of Thomas Aquinas’ theory of the just war with his weaponry. No, this does not occur; the surgeon’s scalpel cuts, the fighter pilot’s guns and missiles fire, and all of this without the prolonged pumping and violent swearing that accompanies the use of an anti-lock braking system on a snowy road. I don’t know who dreamed this abomination up, but whoever he or she are they deserve no special thanks for foisting this thing on the unsuspecting American motorist. You know, now that I’ve given it some thought, a velocipede doesn’t sound half bad.

LIBRARIES: I feel pretty much the same way about libraries, and not just because they are my bread and butter...although that helps, of course.

TRUTH WILL OUT, AS USUAL: As you may have guessed from all the linking I did today, I haven't a damn thing to write about. Every so often I run into these dry patches where nothing seems to work, all the ideas I had for posts fail to take shape and ideas I thought would gel remain an amorphous blob uncongenial to the sight and unpleasant to the taste buds. At times like this, one can only put the head down and face into the wind and hope that something pops into your head soon. Until then, read some Gogol, rent Duck Soup on VHS or DVD, or take a nap. It'll make the time pass more quickly.

THE BLOGFATHER, AS IT WERE: Well, despite the Moscow Times' not so great review of this translation of Dead Souls, I think everyone should read Gogol in as good a translation as you can get your hands on. He is worth the reading, although I might be a tad prejudiced (my nom de blog derives from a Gogol story, for those of you who didn't already know that).

If you're looking for a good introduction to Gogol, let me suggest The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, whose translation of Dead Souls is the one the Times is slamming with faint praise in the link above. It is impossible, of course, to catch all the Russian wordplay in English, but you can discern enough to know that a wonderfully comic mind is at play and that all you have to do to keep up with that mind, always assuming that you can keep up, on its adventures through 19th century Russia is to simply keep reading.

SCHOOL DAYS: Spanish researchers have determined that properly trained rats can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese. While the long term benefits of bilingual rats are as yet unclear, the researchers believe that a properly educated rat has a better chance of getting a job and is less likely to engage in anti-social behavior than an undereducated rat.

HEAVEN, I'M IN HEAVEN: It's amazing the lengths some people will go to in order to make a point.

KVETCH IN PEACE: I don’t want to complain here…well, that’s not really true, is it? I am complaining and no amount of cleverly written obfuscation can hide that fact. And why should I hide it? The squeaky grease gets the wheel, as they say, and isn’t it amazing how much they know when you consider they dropped out of high school when they were twenty-four? Yes, I’d say they’d triumphed over their circumstances and getting them to do that wasn’t easy, not by a long shot, I’ll tell you. In any case, I don’t know why I’d try to obfuscate here if I didn’t have to; I am complaining because it is my God-given right to complain even if I have nothing to complain about, although having something to complain about while you are complaining about it usually helps; it adds focus to your complaint.

The true focus of my complaint, in case you haven’t guessed it so far, is the large number of unnecessary things people have to put up with every day. There are more of these unnecessary annoyances to put up with every day and they seem to have infiltrated every nook and cranny of daily life. Take the pins you find in shirts, for example. I got two very nice shirts for Christmas and I’ve worn them to work the past couple of days. The shirts fit nicely; no cause for complaint there; but after taking them out of the plastic bags they came in I pulled enough pins out of both shirts to hold an injured linebacker’s knees together. I’m sure all those pins served a purpose once upon a time, but pinning a shirt down like a frog in a high school biology class is scarcely necessary; the shirt is going nowhere. Three or four pins are sufficient; twelve is just wasteful.

Credit card bills are another great exemplar of the unnecessary. I use two cards consistently, which is to say, after the recent holiday season, that I am up to whatever your favorite portion of the human anatomy is in debts that I’ll finish paying off next December, just in time to start the process all over again. Every month I get an envelope from these credit card companies with enough paper stuffed inside to write War and Peace on. Well, maybe not War and Peace, but it’ll take on almost any other nineteenth century Russian novel that you care to mention. Of the printed matter in the envelope, only one sheet is dedicated to the task of bills everywhere: how much I owe the credit card company, when I have to get the money to them, and what is the minimum amount of money they will accept for not damaging my credit rating and making it impossible for me to live a normal life in the credit obsessed world of American life and commerce. The rest of the stuff in the envelope is superfluous.

For example, I don’t go anywhere so I don’t need frequent flier miles and even if I did use them, I doubt the not quite 24 carat gold and almost real diamond jewelry will help me entice any of the local native girls the way that good old fashioned iron nails enticed many a Tahitian maiden to part with her virtue when Captain Cook landed there on his way around the world back in 17something or other. I don’t need a day planner bound in real imitation leather; my day doesn’t need organizing. I get up, I eat breakfast, I go to work, I come home, I eat dinner, I watch television, I go to bed. When your life boils down to seven basic activities, there isn’t much call for a book to help you organize it. I don’t need a ceramic pen or to acquire points for a bicycle that I am never going to use even if I somehow managed to get the thing and I am not too interested in special protection from thieves; I already have credit cards I can’t afford; and I am completely uninterested in a combination short-wave radio and CD player that will fit in a space the size of New Jersey.

That last thing is the most annoying of all because not only is this product unnecessary, the place where it is advertised is just plain annoying. The ad for this wonder of entertainment technology is invariably stuck on a piece of paper on the back of the envelope you send your check in. I’ve torn the envelope trying to get rid of that piece of paper, which is more than a little frustrating, and the idea of them trying to sell me something while I am trying to pay off the last batch of unnecessary stuff I can’t afford is not only annoying, but on some deeper level, insulting as well.

We are awash in unnecessary words too, like aglet and xylophagous. An aglet is a common, everyday item; it’s the plastic or metal tip at the end of your shoelaces; but no one knows what an aglet is or uses the word so why do we bother with the word at all? Why have it around at all, occupying space in the dictionary that could go to a more deserving word? And at least aglet is easy to say and has some practical utility; when was the last time you heard anyone use the word xylophagous in a sentence? Xylophagous describes the culinary preferences of the humble termite; it means wood-eating, but if you wanted to describe something as wood-eating wouldn’t you just call it wood-eating and not some long Greek word known only to sesquipedalian Greek pest exterminators and Scrabble champions, who invented the word to help them get rid of the X tile and get a truly massive number of points on a triple word score?

But the most annoying thing about these unnecessary annoyances is just that: they are unnecessary and they are annoyances. They do not provoke rage or wrath, which are grand dramatic emotions suitable for dramatic occasions, but only the petty irritation you feel when you’re calling your insurance company to make a claim and you are now listening to their automated phone answering system’s ninth option menu in three minutes. At times like this it’s hard not to believe that the whole point of such unnecessary annoyances is to make you go away, since the people you are trying to reach obviously regard you as the unnecessary irritation and would just as soon not have to deal with you at all. All of these annoyances, or course, will raise your blood pressure to an unhealthy level. Most doctors, including mine, say that in order to avoid spikes in your blood pressure you should avoid stress wherever possible, but it is hard to take this particular bit of medical advice seriously when the doctor is charging you seventy dollars just for the privilege of sitting in his waiting room.

EMMATHEODD: Well, I didn't think she was very odd; in fact, I thought she was pretty cool, although I am sure she thought I was a middle-aged dork whose taste in popular music died in the 1970's with the arrival of Bruce Springsteen. In any case, she is the only online person I have ever met in real life and she has been doing the online thing for much longer than I have and is knowledgable in the ways of all things computerish and therefore I am adding her site, Caoine, to the blogroll. I am also sure when she gets a load of the rightwingers on the roll she will demand to be removed posthaste, so enjoy her site while it is still there.

HAPPY NEW YEAR: New Year’s Day has come and gone for another year, happily enough, marking the end of yet another holiday shopping season. There’s still another six days of Christmas, of course, complete with lords a-leaping and drummers drumming and pipers piping, but at this point if the lords go a-leaping to pipe and drums the neighbors will call the police and have them arrested for disturbing the peace. People will only tolerate the holiday mosh pit for so long before it starts grating on everyone’s nerves.

And let’s face it, for all the talk of the twelve days of Christmas, everyone knows that these days we’re stuck with thirty official days of Christmas, starting with Thanksgiving, and then there is the unofficial Christmas shopping season, which begins on Labor Day now and will probably start on the Fourth of July in a few years. So by the time New Year’s Eve rolls around we are all ready to shout Happy New Year, kiss our nearest and dearest, sing Auld Lang Syne even if we don’t know what the hell the words mean, and then say the hell with it for another year. Think about how fast you stop saying Happy New Year; does anyone say it after the first week of January? Say it during the third week of the month and people will look at you as if you had more than a few screws loose. And it’s probably no coincidence that the third week of January is about the time you forget all about the resolutions you made on New Year’s Eve and have that extra slice of blueberry pie to top off the three you’ve already had.

The first day of January didn’t always have these problems. For centuries January 1st wasn’t New Year’s Day at all; March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation, or Lady Day, as people called it before Billie Holiday got a hold of the name, was New Year’s Day. This caused a widespread confusion among people used to starting months on the first and led to a widespread demand for calendar reform by the seventy-nine people in medieval Europe who actually cared about this sort of thing. The peasantry of the time was a bit suspicious of the whole concept of calendar reform, the words day, night, spring, summer, fall, and winter comprising their whole conception of time.

January 1st was just the seventh day of Christmas, content with its seven swans a-swimming and probably a good deal happier without all the added stress and responsibility Pope Gregory XIII decided to dump on it. Gregory decided without so much as a by your leave from anyone that the calendar needed reforming and that he was just the man to do the reforming. Because of Gregory and his need to show off, students of comparative literature are stuck with the anomaly of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes dying on the same date, but not the same day in 1616. Reform is a good thing every so often, but reformers tend to go overboard with it. If he really wanted to reform something he should’ve started with Popes using the same names over and over again. I mean, really, thirteen Gregorys, thirteen Leos, twelve Piuses, and twenty-three Johns? This shows a definite lack of papal imagination and bodes ill for someone running a large multinational body like the Roman Catholic Church. No one is suggesting they name themselves Pope Harmony or Pope Sunshine, unless they are bishops from California, but there are plenty of unused papal names out there. Try Pope Francis or Pope Patrick or Pope Thomas, for example. Since Peter there’s been 265 popes; they should do something so the faithful can pick them out of the papal mob as it saunters by.

Part of the problem is that New Year’s, with its quick countdown and sudden midnight rush, is a hit off the old holiday crack pipe. No sooner has the holiday arrived then it disappears, and let’s face it, all the excitement of the day comes on New Year’s Eve, New Year’s itself being little more than an excuse to watch college football and test hangover remedies.

Perhaps the solution to this problem lies in the large scale Hispanic migration to the United States. With its cultural gift giving emphasis on the Feast of the Epiphany, or Tres Reyes (Three Kings, and not the movie of the same name, although it makes a nice gift) in Spanish, and the spread of the celebration into Anglo America, retailers will have another chance to make good on bad Christmas sales, and the vast majority of children will certainly welcome another chance to get that bicycle that Santa Claus forgot to bring on Christmas Eve. Children will inundate post offices throughout the land with pleading letters to the Three Kings and leave fresh hay and water outside their homes for the Kings’ camels. One imagines that some kids will try to play Santa Claus and the Three Kings off of each other, in order to see who will bring the adorable little hobgoblins the best toys. The only people likely to object to this stretching of the already nearly infinite and way too expensive Christmas season are parents, and one can assume that a well-directed ad campaign aimed at their children will have parents surrendering in droves to the incessant whining of their progeny in no time at all, thereby insuring healthy sales and a booming economy for many years to come. It will be a boon to education as well, as children learn to whine in English and Spanish in order to cover all the linguistic bases.

With a powerful Thanksgiving and Christmas preceding it, and a robust Three Kings Day supporting it from the rear, New Year’s will at last have the psychic support necessary to become a great holiday. The days of being simply an excuse to get drunk will come to an end. Thus will New Year’s Day take its proper place in the proud panoply of American celebration, ending forever its status as a Christmas afterthought, the happy holiday you'd prefer not to think about, an undeserving day that somehow hit the chronological jackpot at best, and at worst, the perhaps unwitting cat’s-paw in a fiendish papal plot to kill time before it kills us.