LIONS AND TIGERS AND PIGS, OH MY!: A good friend of mine, who for reasons best known to herself actually chose to become a librarian, as opposed to drifting into the profession like I did, informs me that a pig’s orgasm lasts for half an hour and that during the mating season a lion may copulate with a lioness as many as fifty times in a given day. Faced with the pig-lion karmic conundrum, my friend says that she would rather come back as the pig, her thinking being that quality beats quantity every time.

I beg to differ. First, how does anyone really know how long a pig’s orgasm lasts? What if they’re just faking it to make their partner feel good about themselves and to justify smoking more than one cigarette once the fun stops? The other thing I would want to know is who is timing the pig’s orgasm and just how does one enter such a field of scientific endeavor? When we were kids many of us wanted to be scientists (I didn’t; I wanted to be a racetrack announcer at Belmont) and explore the mysteries of nature, discover cures to dangerous diseases, and uncover the existence of hitherto unknown planets. I am sure that no one who actually became a scientist imagined the day that they would be standing off to one side with a stopwatch in their hands watching two horny hogs get it on and knowing that whatever else they might do to advance human knowledge, this particular fact will be what they are remembered for.

Let’s go a little further then and look at pigs and lions etymologically. Lions are leonine (appropriately enough), proud, arrogant, overbearing, majestic symbols of imperialism and of the New York Public Library, where the stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, look down from their perches on 5th Avenue and wonder as they survey the passing throng, can any of you idiots actually read? I strongly suspect that they feel this way because, despite their many protestations to the contrary, both of them are Boston Red Sox fans.

The words describing pigs, on the other hand, are almost all pejorative. Where lions are noble, pigs are filthy; where lions are proud and majestic, the king of beasts, pigs are filthy treyf haram loathsome swine that wallow in their own muck like a bunch of pigs. In fact, the only positive words you can use about pigs are words like these: bacon, ham, prosciutto, sausage, pork chops, pork loin, chitlins, pig’s knuckles, pickled pig’s snout (big in Vietnam), arroz con gandules y pernil, etc., etc., you get the picture. I find it hard to think of a similar set of synonyms for lions. There’s the story of Samson killing a lion and later finding a beehive in the lion’s skull, but the bees were not eating the lion; they were only renting until something more affordable came along, so I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count. Upon further reflection, I don’t believe there is a similar set of words for lions in any language that has lions in it, a thought that leads me, at long last, to the point of this screed, which that while orgasm is a wonderful thing, a point we can all agree upon, I’m sure, you will enjoy the orgasm more, however long it lasts, when you know that you are not going to be Sunday's dinner.

However, in my opinion... 

WAR: The Dalai Lama said yesterday that war is outdated, which I am sure a great many people would agree with as a general proposition; I know I certainly do. Now, maybe it's my imagination, but there appears to be an awful lot of people wandering the highways and byways of the world these days who don't seem to agree with the Dalai Lama's opinon, however, and until they come around to His Holiness' way of thinking I suppose the best thing to do would be to keep an eye out for those folks and make sure we have plenty of ammo on hand. Reagan had it right when he said, trust but verify.

MUSIC MEME: Someone passed this meme over to Fran at Eternity Road this and, for reasons best known to himself, he has passed it on over to me. I was a little crestfallen when I saw the topic of the meme; you will see why in a minute.

1. How much music do I have?

None. I don't buy CDs, tapes, eight tracks, vinyl, cassettes, or whatever the current audiorecording technology is. If I did buy them, the technology would be obsolete the next week and I wouldn't be able to play the music anyway. So I don't buy them at all. I listen to classical music on WMHT out of Schenectady; all of my serious music listening is done in my car on my way to and home from work.

2. What was the last CD I bought?

I've never bought a CD. I think the last record I bought was something by Creedence Clearwater Revival back in 1973. No, now that I think of it, the last record I bought was Springsteen's Born to Run in 1975 or so. I wore the needle out listening to that.

3. What am I listening to right now?

Right now? As in here at work? Well, I'm listening to Paul Whiteman and his orchestra play Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, in a version recorded in 1927. Lots of pops and hisses, which are annoying but inevitable when listening to records that old. I found the link over at Irish Elk

4. Name five songs that mean a lot to me.

As Time Goes By: Anything with Ingrid Bergman is great.

Once Upon A Time: Tony Bennett's version is the best.

Aquarela do Brasil: Disney put this in his wartime Good Neighbor Policy salute, Saludos Amigos. When I hear this song, it always reminds me of that movie and of Brazil, a place so magical that bunches of bananas can turn into toucans with a back beat in less time than it takes for one of my relatives to ask for money and me to say no.

One For My Baby: is there anyone better than Sinatra? I doubt it. I miss Frank.

Ran Kan Kan: how can you stay still listening to this? I miss Tito, too.

5. I'm passing this meme on to...

The high command of the blogosphere informs me that it will not be possible for me to pass this meme on to anyone else, given the many improvements in antibiotics made possible by genetic engineering. So I guess this portion of the epidemic ends with me.

APPLES AND LAWNS: As I write this, an apple fell not very far from the tree. The apple was a literal apple, the kind that you can eat or mash into applesauce or throw at the neighbor’s dog when it stops in the middle of your yard to take a dump, and not some hackneyed made in China literary device that I picked up at the local Circuit City at 10% off to help me move this thing along. Now the apple did not fall very far from the tree because my lawn got in the way; lawns are like that, as I am sure you’ve noticed by now. Literal apples fall not very far from the tree all the time here in our happy little burg; this is upstate New York, after all, or at least it was; the Westchester suburbs are metastasizing north at a fearful pace these days and will eventually swallow us whole, as a python consumes a rat, but for the time being we are still fairly rural, except where we aren’t, and so some of us still have apple trees in front of our houses. My tree produces Golden Delicious apples and those apples are not only golden, they are totally organic. I suppose I should accept the kudos of those people who believe in the superiority of natural and organic foods taken directly from the tree or from the soil over the processed stuff you get in the supermarket; one should always be gracious when receiving a compliment, I think, even when the compliment is wholly undeserved. The reality is that, as far as I am concerned, organic is a euphemistic way of saying that I don’t do a damn thing for this tree; I don’t water, feed, maintain, or otherwise care for this tree in any way. I’ll take the apples when they come, of course, but if the tree produces apples or not it’s all the same to me.

The lawn, however, is a different matter entirely. I know that I am not letting the cat out of the bag, the pig out of the poke, or sinking a ship with a loose lip (sorry, I ran out of bagged animal clichés there; I was going to try a wombat out of a womb, a viper out of a violin case, or a something out of a something, but nothing really came to me; even the violin case is stretching the whole concept a bit, given that it’s not really a bag) when I say that, in general, lawns are among the most narcissistic, whiny, lazy, passive-aggressive little snots it has ever been my misfortune to deal with. Unlike my apple tree, which plays well with others its own age and requires very little from me except that I not go after it with a chainsaw in a fit of rage, my lawn’s constant need for attention and perpetual emotional neediness becomes, after a while, irritating beyond the limits of human patience. It seems that no matter what you do for the damn lawn it is never enough, and when one combines a powerful sense of entitlement coupled with an overwhelming sense of personal inadequacy and feelings of persecution fueled by hormonal swings one fears for the safety of one’s doors, since they will get slammed shut on a regular basis.

Clearly, homeowners must set guidelines for their lawns and must, I think, strictly enforce them; there are simply too many opportunities, as I am sure we would all agree, for a lawn to get itself into serious trouble these days. The homeowner today must also face, as homeowners of an earlier age did not, the baleful influence of a media that simultaneously shapes and panders to the unreal expectations of what a “perfect” lawn should look like. It doest not matter that the vast majority of lawns in the United States do not look like the lawns shown in such schlocky magazines as House & Garden or Architectural Digest; the beautiful images in those magazines create their own demand. Many lawns look at those images and wonder, why they can’t be like the lawns in the pictures, without realizing that the tremendous investment of time, energy, and money someone invested to create that “perfect” lawn are simply beyond the more modest means of most homeowners in this country.

And, as in all vicious circles, having set the botanicosocial wheel in motion, it will prove next to impossible to stop. Having fostered the demand through well-placed advertising in the magazines mentioned above and others like them, there are any number of businesses ready, willing, and able to exploit the personal insecurities of those readers for their own gain. It is no accident that advertisements for weed-killers seem to account for every other ad on television during the spring, for example; the companies making these herbicides time the ads to appear during the height of the dandelion season, when lawns across the nation are driven to near madness by the sudden eruption of yellow all over themselves. Most homeowners know that trying to reason with your lawn, to say that dandelions are an inevitable part of a growing lawn’s life, to just wait and they will be gone soon; your lawn knows, with the certainty of a religious fanatic and his brother, the insider trader, that dandelions are unsightly, unfashionable, and worst of all, definitely not cool, a formulation the wisest of homeowners could not defeat logically with a ten volume set of Aristotle. The lawn knows what it knows, and that’s all there is to it.

And then, as we all know, there is the lure of the forbidden. You may do your best to raise a good lawn, give it a good start in life, spend hours worrying about it day in and day out for years on end, and before you know what’s going on your lawn’s gallivanting about the countryside with that lawn from down the street. You know the one I mean: the scruffy one that looks like no one’s mowed it for a couple of months, the one with all the crabgrass everywhere you look and ragweed so tall that it could give an allergic giraffe a bad case of hay fever. That’s right; after all the weeping over the dandelions and the fortune you spent straightening the white picket fence and getting the crabgrass plucked out by the roots because all of the friends were having it done and life would be intolerable otherwise and it was all your fault, followed by the inevitable slamming door, what shows up on your doorstep? Crabgrass, acres and acres of crabgrass, and not a job prospect in sight as far as the eye can see. It’s enough to make a homeowner want to pull his hair out, if they’ve still got any after all the stress the lawn has put them through over the years.

BELTS: My niece, who is the source of all things actually worth knowing in this world, as opposed to the sort of boring information about boring grown-up stuff that I spend my days imparting to the denizens of our happy little burg, tells me that the whole low-riding no belt look is finally going the way of all flesh, that only stoners and the incredibly out of it still cultivate this particular look, and that belts, whose fall from grace no doubt saved many a hapless steer's hide, are finally and long last coming back. This comes not a moment too soon, in my opinion. While this particular fashion looks great on those whose anatomy can support it; no one could object to Halle Berry wearing such an outfit, for example; on the vast majority of young women it looks at whatever the level beyond absolutely hideous is, revealing things about those rirls that no one in their right mind is interested in seeing. Sometimes I want to stop these women in the street and ask, what the hell are you thinking wearing that sort of thing in public? You could give a sumo wrestler a run for his money and you think baring your spare tire makes you look sexy? Think about it for a second, would you? If running around with your gut hanging out made anyone look good, don't you think that guys would have picked up on this fact by now? Do you really want to see tens of millions of guys wandering around the streets with their bare beer bellies hanging over the top of the pants and enough ass crack showing to run a train through? No you don't, and neither does anyone else, so hitch up your damn pants, missy!!!

CATS: I think of myself as a fairly normal, straightforward sort of person, a person without most of the quirks and crotchets that make even the most unimportant person of some vague interest to the passing swarm of biographers. I suspect that the intense blandness of my personality is due to my almost twenty years in the civil service, where one’s supervisors look askance at the junior parasites even having a personality and having a major quirk like playing the bassoon or collecting 17th century German language Nepalese tofu recipes is nothing less than career suicide. So the ambitious civil servant, and they do exist, although not, for some reason, in the post office or your local department of motor vehicles, learns early on to suppress any and all vestiges of individuality and to reduce their personality to the psychological consistency of overcooked peas, which sounds none too appetizing and probably explains why such glop gets served to infants; it is difficult to complain about the menu when your vocabulary is nonexistent or, at best, limited to mama and dada, who are feeding you the stuff in the first place.

So it was with a sense of the surreal run slightly amok that I overhead some of my fellow inmates here at the egregious mold pit discussing their pets. Now, before every animal lover reading this takes the coach section of umbrage to give me a piece of their minds, I just want everyone to know that I love pets…well, I like pets, most of them, anyway. I am very fond of fish, since you don’t really to do very much for them, and we once owned four or five six-toed cats, which my father kept outside all year round. He didn’t want cats in the house; he regarded cats in much the same way as he regarded the neighbors’ kids, as useless mouths who showed up at his door while he was trying to get some sleep to mooch a free meal. And so we never fed them, the cats, I mean, not the neighbors’ kids—Mom insisted on feeding our friends whenever they showed up, which was suspiciously often, now that I think of it, and she didn’t care to hear what Pop had to say on the subject. Pop went along with her on this because he wanted to keep peace in the house, but this grudging largesse did not extend to the six-toed cats. Cats were predators, he said; he knew that because he’d seen umpteen episodes of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom that said just that, that all cats are predators; and if they were predators then they could just stay the hell outside and damn well predate; he was supporting enough open mouths and bottomless bellies as it was without keeping healthy carnivores in tuna fish and catnip.

In any case, I sort of drifted into this conversation without really meaning to; I’d gone back to my miserable warren to get a drink of anything with a lot of caffeine in it; librarians do not enhance the institutional dignity of the public library by keeling over at their desks for a quick coma, if for no other reason than the library-using public is not apt to regard such down time as a proper use of their tax dollars. The conversation had apparently been going on for some time, with two of my co-workers listening to a third talking at length about a local veterinarian’s skill at feline orthodontics and how reasonable his rates for removing one of her cat’s molars were. I must admit that I found the whole concept of a cat having dental work done somewhat odd, given that I did not know that dentistry for cats existed as an organized field of professional endeavor, but it seems that is, and a very lucrative one at that.

I hadn’t realized before this conversation; well, I haven’t realized a lot of things before most conversations, for one reason or another, and I am sure this one got by me due to a profound lack of interest on my part; but a scandalous number of cats in the United States, perhaps even a majority of the feline population, are totally without any form of dental plan. Cats exacerbate this problem by poor dental hygiene, possibly a societal reaction to not having opposable thumbs, and living on a diet virtually guaranteed to foster tooth decay in laboratory rats, which form a major part of the laboratory cats’ diet.

My co-worker discovered the problem with her cat when she (the co-worker, not the cat; cats are not really stoic creatures, but they do have a habit of keeping things to themselves, rendering them unreachable by most conventional methods of psychoanalysis) saw that her cat had red gums. I asked if this was significant; I have never been close enough to a cat to look inside its mouth—I don’t believe in that sort of thing unless it’s a long-term relationship—and the co-worker gave me the eye-rolling, head-swiveling, omigod exasperated look that women display when a man says something particularly dumb. Teenaged girls do this look better than almost anyone else you care to think of; my niece, for example, who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get me to see the benefits of popular music since the release of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album, spends an equally inordinate amount of time giving me and everyone else in the room this look, as if to say how can I be related to someone so utterly clueless?

The red gums, my co-worker informed me, in a tone of voice that suggested that she had better things to do with her time than to bring me up to speed on the widespread problem of poor cat orthodontia, were a sign of the gum disease gingivitis, and a sure sign, I think, that here cat has not been gargling with Listerine as often as it should be.

And what were her thanks for doing all of this for the cat? Nothing apparently, not even the slightest sign of appreciation. In fact, the cat scratched and hissed and bit as she (again the co-worker and not the cat) tried to give the ungrateful beast (the cat, not the co-worker, for a change) its meds. Yes indeed, Shakespeare had it right when he almost wrote that how much sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless cat with a toothache. Serpents, on the other hand, if you can use such a phrase when referring to a creature without hands, legs, or visible appendages of any kind, usually have an excellent dental plan, as well as the usual health and life insurance, as well as a good portfolio of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. They also spend more on new cars than other folks do; serpents being snakes with an education, they would just as soon not deal with used car salesmen, who remind serpents too much of their own more uneducated cousins and whom, the whom here being used car salesmen and not their cousins—what can any of us do about our relations, really, except deny that we know them when the bill collectors call at our houses looking for them—your average serpent regards with the same cold loathing that most people reserve for loud drunks, school superintendents, and the more than occasional politician. Perhaps I should get out more often; conversations about cats’ molars wouldn’t seem so strange to me then. I suppose someone has to tell the cat to rinse and spit.

"The common people are worth dying for until you bunch them together and give then a cold once-over, then they impress the impartial observer as being slightly bovine, with a large percentage of vegetable tissue." --George Ade, 1886-1944

There is a context for the bit of heartland wisdom quoted above and I will get around to letting you folks in on it just as soon as I've got my blood pressure under control again.

WE'VE GOT GAS!: It is August here, although in all probability you won’t be reading this until sometime in March—laziness is my besetting sin, I fear, if you want to look at this in theological terms—but right now it is August here, as it is everywhere else as I write this, chronology being the unimaginative concept that it is, and while their elders gasp under the burden of sweltering heat and air noisome with the smell of sweat and rotting roadkill and having the consistency of chocolate pudding without any of the accompanying rich and creamy sweetness, happy high school graduates here in our happy little burg are busily preparing themselves for their freshman year at college. This is usually a bittersweet time, as mothers try to reconcile themselves to the loss of one of their precious babies and fathers steel themselves for the inevitable long-distance and reverse the charges, operator calls in the middle of the night pleas for additional money to tide the graduate over to the week after mid-terms. The younger siblings will regard the graduate’s exit with a weepy eye and a droopy lip, and there will be hugs and kisses and promises to write or to call as often as possible, and while the graduate wallows in this overheated bathos of sentimentality, the siblings, the very siblings who cling so strongly to the graduate and plead with him or her not to leave them, are all the while plotting with Machiavellian intensity the one against the other to secure the graduate’s room for themselves. Thus we see that all is as it ever was, the rhythms of life continuing on as they ever do. The parents send forth their children, who is their turn will send forth their children,”…the thing that hath been, is that which shall be; and there is not new thing under the sun…” as the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes.

This is nonsense, of course, but it’s a little late in the day to call the Preacher on it. The Preacher could get away with this sort of rot because he didn’t quit his day job as king of Israel and consequently did not have to shell out a fortune for gasoline. It’s easy for guys that high up in the civil service not to worry about such things; not only do they make more than most people, they have access to your money as well, and it’s easy not to worry about gas prices when someone else is footing the bill. When you have to pay for your own gas you are likely to have a different perspective on the matter.

For many parents throughout the nation, this different perspective requires some difficult and painful choices as they weigh the cost of their children’s education against the requirements of their automobiles, and as this is America, in all too many cases the family’s immediate transportation needs win out over the long term educational requirements of the college bound student. College admissions offices throughout the country report that more and more qualified applicants are declining to enter colleges that require more than a half a tank of gasoline to reach, a practice which, if allowed to spread, will invariably shrink the pool of available undergraduates to a geographic bare minimum.

Faced with this threat to their long-term economic viability, colleges are finding new and innovative ways of getting potential students to attend their schools. The State University of New York’s main campuses at Albany, Binghamton, and Buffalo, for example, are now offering a free oil change, tire rotation, and three free gallons of gasoline for every out of state applicant who opts to attend the three university centers; out of state applicants who wish to attend one of the other SUNY schools like Purchase, Brockport, and New Paltz will get more or less the same deal, except that they will have to pay half-price for the gasoline. New York residents will get the Albany/Buffalo/Binghamton deal, along with a set of glasses emblazoned with the SUNY logo.

In the Ivy league, where the competition is particularly fierce, Harvard is not only offering parents a full tank of gas at 1955 prices, but throwing in a large beach towel, a set of steak knives, and coupons for a free lube job every five thousand miles or so. Yale, not wanting to fall behind in the hunt for warm, paying bodies, is now offering every accepted applicant two years’ worth of free car washes as well as free brake pads and a half-tank of free gas. Princeton, by contrast, is offering applicants very little beyond a three-year supply of those pine tree shaped air fresheners. While this may be due to a certain snootiness on the part of some Old Tigers, the inside scoop on this skimpy inducement package is that Princeton’s admissions office believes that playing up Princeton’s location in New Jersey, where for reasons no one fully fathoms, gasoline is thirty to forty cents cheaper than it is in neighboring New York, will encourage many students and their families to attend who would otherwise look askance at the idea of spending time and money in the Garden State.

There is a sadder aspect to all of this, however much we may choose to ignore it. The need for gasoline is now so great that many people are now taking out second mortgages on their houses and raiding the kids’ college tuition money in order to buy a full tank of gas. Loan sharks are now doing a thriving business as people desperate to keep their vehicles on the road borrow the Mafia’s money at the usual exorbitant rates of interest and the FBI reports that the number of assaults by loan sharks on hapless over their heads in debt motorists has skyrocketed exponentially over the past few months. In such a world, with gas deprived petroleum addicts thinking of nothing but how and where to get their next full tank of gas or heating oil, it should come as no surprise that a college education is now seen by many as a bourgeois superfluity, unneeded and largely unwanted by the masses. Many high school graduates are skipping college at this point and waiting for better economic times, a decision that might damage many an institution of higher learning in the short run and will certainly annoy the graduate’s younger siblings no end: they were counting on getting that vacant room.

THE MODERN AGE: We live in a modern age; this is a silly thing to say, of course, since all ages are modern to the people who live in them. I’m sure that even during the Dark Ages people thought that they were so much more modern than anyone else, even more modern than the ancient Romans, for example, and they could point to the great heaps of pig muck piled neatly by the front holes of their spacious and naturally air conditioned hovels as proof positive of their modernity and overall civilizational superiority to a bunch of toga-wearing heathens. Leaving the question of dung pile heights as prima facie evidence of societal and cultural advancement for another day, I think we can all agree that we do, in fact, inhabit a modern world and that the United States, for good or for ill, appears to a good portion of the world’s population as the very avatar of modern postindustrial civilization.

What defines this modern civilization? Speed, I think. More than any other quality, speed, the need to get things done and to get them done now, and then move on to the next thing, dominates the modern world. In such a world traditional ideas of right and wrong, of what constitutes the good life, the role of the sacred, and the once firm foundations of a culture based on customs stretching back into the past, shrivel under the constant pressure and then are brusquely shoved out of the way as impediments to the ever relentless forward thrust of modern life. In such a world, slowness and inconvenience, which were the standard operating modes of humanity ever since that guy in the monkey suit bludgeoned a warthog for breakfast to the tune of Also Sprach Zarathustra, now constitutes the modern equivalent of deadly sin, a mala in se as deadly as pride, as contemptible as sloth, and as irritating as that kid with the wet diaper three rows behind you who insists on screaming in your ear while you are trying to watch the movie. It is this comfort with speed and rapid change that renders American culture particularly well-suited to cope with the demands of this new modern civilization and makes the United States the world’s first hyper power, as one French politician put it, although someone with enough time on their hands could make the case that any group of people as heavily caffeinated as Americans are at ten o’clock in the morning are less a hyper power than simply hyper; the mass ingestion of stimulants will do that, you know.

With a people so used to the swift pace of modern life, a society geared to accept and profit from the ever-increasing velocity of societal and technological change as they surge through all of our lives, the idea that it could otherwise is profoundly shocking, almost heretical, in fact, and draws the most intense sort of reaction from people you would not think would react in such a way. I bring this up because it is increasingly clear that many people in the new integrated global economy are simply not on the same page as the rest of us.

The reason for this very roundabout way of getting to the whole point of the matter is that globalization has its malcontents, and one of them is our children’s librarian. For the past several weeks the staff of this egregious mold pit has had to listen to her rant about the incompetence of mechanics, the boneheadedness of auto dealers, and the vagaries of modern communications, when it is abundantly clear that all she wants in life at this point is for someone to fix the air conditioning unit in her car. Now, I should point out that this behavior is not the norm; the children’s librarian is a lovely woman who genuinely enjoys working with children, as opposed to some of our staff, me, in particular, who regard the idea of working with children with the same enthusiasm most people regard the idea of ramming a red hot fork into their left eye, but for the past month or so her car dealer and his attendant mechanics have driven her to distraction with reasons why they can’t fix the air conditioning in her car. At the moment, the main reason for the mechanical inaction is the lack of a part, this part not being in stock anywhere in the United States, Canada, or Mexico. In point of fact, this part is not in stock anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. From Point Barrow, Alaska, to the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego, the Americas are singularly devoid of this part, except for those parts already installed in other cars of this make, whose owners know how rare those parts are and will not surrender them no matter how wonderfully our children’s librarian works with their children.

The one place in the world that has an excess of this part, a place burdened with more air conditioning units that running them all at the same time is prohibited by law lest blizzards occur in the middle of July, is a small city about a hundred miles north of Shanghai called Eggs Phooey No; at least, I think that’s the correct Romanization of the name—it was breakfast time and I was trying to translate and give the waitress my order at the same time, so I may have lost something in the translation. But Eggs has air conditioning units and the parts thereof for every manner of motorized transport from go-karts to main battle tanks. The city fathers are happy to let anyone anywhere who evinces even the slightest interest in the subject of automotive air conditioning and even those who don’t care one way or the other know that you can get anything you need in the automotive air conditioning line right there in Eggs; they’ve been known to forcibly detain tour buses in the city just to make sure that everyone on board has an opportunity to find out about the great bargains on automotive air conditioning units and their parts in Eggs and to hold prolonged philosophical conversations with the detainees about the importance of automotive air conditioning in the modern world, in much the same way that your brother—in—law will go on and on and on at Thanksgiving about how things are going in the restaurant supply business and you thank whatever higher power you pray to that Thanksgiving is only once a year because whatever else in life may be true, the one thing you can absolutely certain of is that you have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the restaurant supply business and how it is doing these days.

Now, you may be thinking, what’s the problem here? Have the dealership order the part and have the folks in Eggs ship the part; why the prolonged wait? Because they’ve done that already, but the part is in China and our children’s librarian is ensconced here in our happy little burg, and East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet without the prodigious consumption of antacids drunk straight out of the bottle. Having ordered the part, of course, is only the first step of this story; actually getting the part before the children’s librarian begins melting like the Wicked Witch of the West in the movable sauna she drives to work every day is another thing entirely.

The good people of Eggs have heard of the many businesses that swiftly ship goods around the world when those goods absolutely, positively have to be there overnight; they just don’t use them much. No, the folks there in Eggs are traditional people, not much for new-fangled foreign ways of doing things. They didn’t like the old-fangled Chinese way of doing things, either; they just didn’t like fangling, new or old; it seems too much like doing the tango, and has there ever been a great Chinese tango dancer? Can you think of one right off the top of your head, really? I didn’t think so.

The part is on its way, of course; they have assured my co-worker of that on numerous occasions, but given the old fashioned way they do things in Eggs the part is on its way here in the old fashioned way: via camel caravan over the Silk Road. As you read this, there is a camel with an air conditioning unit strapped to one of its humps slowly, and I mean very slowly; a camel can go from 0 to 30 miles an hour whenever the beast feels like it, but it seldom does, which makes me wonder why camels are not as big a presence in the civil service as they could be, seeing as how they already have the correct attitude towards their work; (VERB ALERT!!!: The main verb of this sentence is about to appear; please remain calm, speak softly, and set your cell phones to vibrate. Please remember also that taking flash photographs of the verb here in its natural environment is against the law) winding its way across the desert sands to fabled Samarkand of the blue tiled mosques and the red tailed mosquitoes. There, in the shadows of the minarets, sharp-eyed Armenians will buy and sell, trading with equally sharp-eyed Uzbeks and Uighers and Kazakhs, and the occasional none too bright Mongol who wants to install some air conditioning in his yurt. From Samarkand the part will make its way, providing that there are no sandstorms, bandit attacks, and American air strikes, towards the West while the children’s librarian, usually a level headed woman not easily upset by life’s travails, goes into an extended five minute rant about how this stupid part is constantly causing her hair to frizz up. I am not certain of the details of this; I have arrived at that point in my life where I am glad that I still have a (mostly) full head of hair; if it frizzes up, I won’t complain—you’ve got to have it to complain about it.

And that’s about where things stand now. The part is still somewhere out on the Silk Road somewhere between God only knows and no damn clue, and the children’s librarian has taken to reading the scary sections of the US tax code to small children, thereby traumatizing them for life. She is now thinking of renting her car out as a weight-reducing machine, or of tossing some sand and a bottle of water and telling everyone that she’s got her own beach now. She is basically an up person who thinks that when life hands you a lemon you take it back to the dealership you bought it from. It won’t get that damn part here any quicker, but I imagine it makes her feel better.

THE FIVE TOED SLOTH: ENDANGERED OR MERELY LAZY?: The pictures below are, of course, simply an excuse to fill up space in the absence of anything else to put there. Ordinarily, these dry spells are the result of my having absolutely nothing to write about; in this case, however, I have plenty to write about; there are two pieces on the griddle at home even as I sit here typing away; it’s just that I’ve been too damn lazy to get on with it and finish them. Sloth sloth sloth sloth, nothing but damnable sloth, is keeping me from finishing those things up and getting on with other, more pressing matters at hand. I ought to be ashamed of myself, indeed I should.

In the meantime, here’s a story the monsignor told in his homily at Mass on Sunday. It seems as though there were these two brothers, the products of a devout, churchgoing family, and there were both the worst hellions ever dropped on a planet well known for the quality of its hellions. After one misadventure, the nuns brought the boys to the parish priest for a good talking to. The nuns brought the younger of the two brothers in first, and the parish priest went on and on about how could someone from such a good family be so bad. “Where is God in your life, young man,” the priest asked again and again. “Why is God missing from your life?” The young man said nothing, nothing at all, except when he was agreeing with the good father about what a horrible little snot he was. After a while, the priest got tired of talking to such a dumb lump of preadolescent flesh and told him to leave and send his brother in. As the younger brother left, he passed his big brother in the hall and quickly whispered, “Be careful in there; God is missing and they think we had something to do with it.”

Hey, I think there's something stuck in the exhaust pipe... 

You know, I think maybe I should have taken the elevator 

You know, guys, someday summer's gonna be over...

CIVIL SERVICE, ENGLISH: Miriam has a group of British lords a-leaping, unless the lords are a-laying in that carol, and why is Carol here a-laying and a-leaping with lords instead of getting home to the kids, and while Carol is being a-leapt and a-laid the lords are complaining about the tomatoes and why it is the government can't say what it means about the tomatoes in language the people who have to eat the designated tomatoes can understand. A Rosicrucian mystery, to be sure.

MS. BURNS: I don't usually go around recommending other blogs. It's not that I am trying to cut down on the competition, although that's not such a bad idea, now that I think of it, but because of the nature of this blog: essays don't really require links, at least I don't think so. If a piece is good then it can stand by itself; if it isn't then no amount of pointing to someone else's blog will help it. Now that I have given all the usual caveats, and having thus established that I am a passive aggressive snot filled to the brim with false modesty, I think that Samantha is a knock down funny hoot and a half and I'm pretty sure you will, too. So get you over there posthaste and enjoy.