LAZINESS, SLOTH, AND THE POLITICAL DEAD: I’ve been thinking that my being on vacation shouldn’t prevent me from adding a post or two to The Passing Parade. I don’t have anything else to do, so why shouldn’t I invest some time and write something for the blog, I thought. I promptly suppressed this thought; in fact, I dropped a dime on it to the FBI and now this loathsome corrupter of vacations is on its way to Guantanamo, which is sunny and warm and where he’ll get three hots and a cot for as long as Dubya says so…maybe this wasn’t such a bright idea, after all, now that I think about it. In any case, the local newspaper of record, a rag that traces its journalistic pedigree back to the 1780’s, has conducted a study, yes, indeed they have, they have conducted a study. These dolts lost my father’s obituary and their website is a mass of electronic dog flop, but they have the resources to conduct a study of the voter rolls here in the Vampire State. It should come as no surprise to anyone who is a long time student of politics here that the local newspaper of record discovered, to its shock, horror, and chagrin, that there are large numbers of dead people still on the voting rolls and that many of these people are still active in our state’s political life. Personally, I see no reason why the dead should be deprived of their civil rights simply because of a permanent lack of life skills, but then that’s just my opinion. I was going to write something about this report, but the more I read, the more familiar the whole thing seemed to me. Upon further checking, I find that I have commented on this phenomenon before, and so instead of thinking of something new to say about the matter this link should send you over to my previous post* in no time at all. Other than that, the vacation has been going nicely so far; the weather’s been nice and I just love raking all of those goddam leaves up. Ah well, into every life a little leaf must fall, I guess.

*As this link will not bring you directly to the post, just click the link and scroll down towards the bottom of the page to Elections and the Dead. Thank you for your cooperation.

RAIN AND OTHER CONCEITS: Well, it’s pouring rain here in our happy little burg, and the wind is gusting up to forty miles an hour, so I am looking out my window as I write this and enjoying the sight of pedestrians trying to shield themselves from the assault of horizontal rain. Horizontal rain is not a phenomenon many people in this neck of the woods are used to dealing with; most people here regard vertical rain as the barely tolerable norm and see no reason why they should accustom themselves to the existence of horizontal rain. Consequently, most of the people passing by my window are holding their umbrellas in the forward position like Roman soldiers holding their shields against a charging Celt, and then occasionally lifting the umbrella over their heads to protect themselves from rain that isn’t falling that way. The gap between the physical reality of horizontal rain and the psychological norm of vertical rain has caused the destruction of three umbrellas and much vile language on just the part of Main Street I can see from my chair. You may not find this particularly funny, of course, but then, I am easily amused.

This leads, somewhat illogically, to the subject of vacation, which I will be taking for the next week. I realize that for the constant viewer the difference between those days that I am working and the ones I am vacationing is, to all extents and purposes, practically nil, since on the days I work I don’t usually write and on those days when I am vacationing I don’t usually write. I am not saying that you will see the difference between the paucity of posts not written when I am working and the paucity of posts not written when I am on vacation, but in the latter case, I have a viable reason for not posting more often, whereas in the former it’s just me being lazy as usual.

NEW BLOG: If you are interested in what goes on down there deep in the heart of Texas, then I suggest you go over to Dick Stanley's fine Texasscribbler blog and take a look at what he has to say about life, politics, and other important things down Texas way and throughout this our Great Republic.

HONEST ABE AND THE METS: One of the many consequences of living in New York is that whenever the Yankees and the Mets are both doing well the talk of sportswriters and sports fans turns almost inevitably to the possibility of a Subway Series. Now I know that there are many readers of The Passing Parade who, for reasons of nationality or taste or simple apathy, may think that a Subway Series is some sort of weird multimeat sandwich on freshly baked wheat or Italian bread put out by the eponymous fast food franchise, and if you buy a bag of chips and a bottle of Coke with your Subway Series sandwich you will get the meal deal and ten percent off the purchase price. If this is your idea of a Subway Series, then I assure you are gravely mistaken.

No, a Subway Series is not a sandwich; it is a sporting event. A Subway Series occurs when two New York teams play each other in baseball’s World Series, and before anyone mentions it, yes, I do know that the World Series is something of a misnomer, since unlike the World Cup, only American teams and the Toronto Blue Jays get to play in it. It is, however, our sport, and we get to call the championship series any damn thing we want to. The Subway Series got its name, obviously enough, because two New York teams don’t have to travel very far to play each other; they can just take the subway to the ballpark.

The glory years of the Subway Series came after World War II and ended in 1956. In those years, the three New York teams, the Yankees, the Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, played each other in nearly every World Series, with the exception of 1950, when the Philadelphia Phillies made it to the Series and lost to the Yankees, and 1954, when the Cleveland Indians team that won 111 games in the regular season lost four straight games to the New York Giants. But for most New York baseball fans, the Subway Series only and always meant the Yankees and the Dodgers, with the Dodgers always losing, with the one glorious exception of 1955. The Yankees won (again) in 1956, after which the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants left the Empire State and headed west to California, there to become the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. The Subway Series, it seemed, had become one with Nineveh and Tyre.

But all was not lost. No indeed, New Yorkers worked like furies to bring National League baseball (Major League Baseball has two leagues, the National League and the American League. The New York Yankees are in the American League; the Dodgers and the Giants were, and their current Californian incarnations still are, in the National League) back to New York, and in 1962 they succeeded in forming a brand new baseball club, the New York Metropolitans, an unwieldy mouthful that the fans quickly shortened to the New York Mets. There was little chance of a Subway Series with the Mets in 1962, however, even if Casey Stengel, the Yankees’ manager during the glory years after the war, was now managing the Mets. In their first year of existence, the New York Mets forged a record of gross incompetence and general nincompoopery scarcely equaled in the annals of organized sports, losing 120 games out of a possible 162, and leading the aforementioned Mr. Stengel to wonder aloud, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

Having reached the bottom of the baseball barrel in their first season of existence, the Mets forged ahead, and lost only 111 games in 1963 and 109 games in 1964, all of which pointed to a gradual shift towards the barely adequate, until in 1969, that annus mirabilis* of New York sports, the Mets won the World Series and became the champions of the baseball world. The Mets returned to the Series in 1973, losing to the Oakland Athletics, and won again in 1986, beating the Boston Red Sox in one of the most dramatic series in modern memory. But there was still no Subway Series, nothing to remind the New York baseball fan of the glory years when New York dominated the baseball universe.

Until 2000, that is, when after 44 years in the wilderness, the Mets and the Yankees finally faced each other in the World Series. The Yankees won, and Mets fans have been thirsting for a rematch ever since. This year was going to be the year it happened. This was the year when the two New York teams were going to clobber all the opposition and go mano-a-mano for the championship. That there were other teams competing for a place in the World Series hardly seemed to compute among Mets and Yankee fans and the media that feed their baseball addiction. Newspapers filled square feet of newsprint with the speculation with who was going to win, baseball blogs spewed terabytes of fan bile and opinion into cyberspace, everyone knew that this was the year that the Mets would finally beat the Yankees or that this was the year that the Yankees finally got back the championship they hadn’t won since 2000, everyone KNEW this was the year and everyone said so vociferously. And so it was that in 2006 the World Series will be a replay of the 1934 and 1968 World Series: the St. Louis Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers will be playing for the championship, the Mets and Yankees having been eliminated. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln said it best, in his homely way, when he noted “…the hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until after the egg has been laid.”

* 1969 was the year when the Mets won the World Series, the New York Jets won the Super Bowl, and the New York Knicks won the NBA Championships. Only the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League did not win a championship that year, and the Rangers would continue their habit of not winning the Stanley Cup until 1994, 54 years after their previous win.

FOR SHAME, SIR, FOR SHAME!: I am a Muggle. I am not sure when I became a Muggle; I don’t remember applying for the position; frankly, I do not know if being a Muggle pays anything beyond a pro forma stipend that wouldn’t keep a starving church mouse alive for a week; nor do I remember my parents ever encouraging me to become a Muggle when I was a boy. I do not remember spending long nights looking out my window at the stars on a school night when I should have been in bed asleep and hoping that someday, somehow, I would measure up to the great American tradition of heroic Muggles stretching back to the Pilgrim Muggles and become a Muggle myself. I cannot say, as Shakespeare’s Falstaff didn’t, that the villainous company of Muggles hath been the ruin of me, that in my youth overwhelming adolescent peer pressure compelled me into the short and violent life of a Muggle, and I am reasonably sure that I cannot blame my parents or society at large for my Muggleocity. There is no, so far as I know, no great tradition of Muggling in my family, and in the same vein, I am quite sure that I do not know any Muggles personally nor do I think that there are Muggles among my co-workers or my neighbors. In short, until I learned the truth of the matter, I would have said that, in all likelihood, that our happy little burg was one of the very few completely Muggle-free areas here in this our Great Republic. I was wrong. I am a Muggle.

I learned of my unfortunate condition from young Josiah, the eldest progeny of one of my mother’s friends. Josiah’s parents, as happy a pair of post-yuppie professionals as you would ever care to meet, used to live up the street from my mother, but they have since moved across the river to a suburb of the slough of urban despond directly across the river from our happy little burg. Their current removal from this side of the river to that, however, has not kept them, Josiah, and the rest of his incredibly noisy siblings from appearing on my mother’s doorstep on a regular basis. Young Josiah is a studious lad, when he isn’t playing computer games or doing crossword puzzles or torturing feral cats with a red hot fork, constantly reading books, magazines, newspapers, cereal boxes, and the like. He does not wear glasses now, but you can rest assured that he will need them at some point in the very near future. Josiah is engrossed nowadays in the Harry Potter books, reading the books over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over (yes, I am overdoing the overs, no two ways about it, but in this case I am using the repetition to make a valid literary point, so bear with me, please; it will end soon, I promise) and over and over again (see? I told you it would end soon), until the original hardbacks have fallen apart and their paperback replacements have all but disintegrated under the constant wear and tear. I am fairly certain that the boy has most of Ms. Rowling’s oeuvre committed to memory at this point and if there is a greater expert on the comings and goings of Master Harry Potter and his cohorts at the Hogwarts School then that person is unknown to me. It was in this, his expert capacity, that the lad declared me, to my everlasting shame, a Muggle.

Why must I bear this loathsome sobriquet? Why must I bear this literary mark of Cain, when thousands who have never read The Postman Always Rings Twice get a free ride from this malevolent prepubescent munchkin merely because they’ve read a few pages of his favorite books? Apparently, the source of young Josiah’s stereotyping me as a Muggle is this: as a librarian, I have complete access to all of the Harry Potter books whenever I want them. I can even check these books out to myself for the next ten years and not have to worry about paying overdue fines on them when I finally deign to return them. And yet, despite this awesome power, I have never, ever, at no time, and in no manner whatsoever, even bothered to pick up one of Ms. Rowling’s books, much less read one of them.

For this most vile, loathsome, and unnatural crime, I am a Muggle, a condition made all the worse because I have no excuse for my Muggledom, no mitigating circumstance that would somehow soften or otherwise explain my continuing in such a pernicious state when I can clearly raise myself from my current semi-Hobbesian Muggleish condition and become a useful member of society. I did not choose to become a Muggle, of course, nor can I say that I was born to it; it just sort of happened somewhere between my graduation from high school and my fortieth birthday. I can understand the lad’s disappointment, however. When I was just a boy reading my eyes out of my head, the librarians seemed like figures of infinite power and wisdom to me. They had access to all the books and all the knowledge in the world, whereas I had to make do with what I could get my hands on. Now that I am a librarian myself, and by definition have access to any book I want, I seldom read anything more profound than the New York Post. I suppose it’s a lot like working in any chocolate factory other than Willie Wonka’s: after spending my day finding, organizing, weeding, and otherwise maintaining a collection of books (approximately 35,000 at last count), the last thing in the world I want to do when I get home is actually read one of the things. I just want to turn on the television and veg out, and for this the boy condemns me to the scurrilous, if not scrofulous, ranks of Muggledom. He used to like me when he was a mere tyke, of course, but now that he is older I fear I am a grave disappointment to him. I suppose I shouldn’t tell him that there’s no Santa Claus yet. I will let someone else bear that burden, I think.

BLATANT SPEED RIPOFF COMING YOUR WAY: It is a slow day here in our happy little burg. The sun is shining, the leaves are turning, and the kids, happy to be free of school for at least a couple of days, are busy beating the crap out of one of their confreres in the middle of Main Street. I don’t really have anything to say at the moment, except that my brother went for a nuclear stress test the other day. This is a test of the cardiovascular system, or so I am told, and involves the doctors pumping the test subject full of some sort of radioactive goop and then making the subject walk on a treadmill while x-raying them, or maybe I’ve gotten that part of it wrong. I know an x-ray is involved in some way in this whole thing and so are treadmills, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the subject had to do a good impression of Charo as well. In any case, this test hardly seems very stressful to me, and my brother, who has always been the very picture of health and robustness, thought the test was not stressful at all. If the doctors really want to stress someone with atomic energy, I would suggest that they stop farting around with this sort of mealy-mouthed piddling with radioactive goop and just wire a two megaton warhead to the treadmill and tell the test subject that the thing will go off if they stop running. To my mind, this test will jack your stress level up faster than almost anything else you can think of, with the possible exception of finding out the IRS is auditing you for back taxes.

MY APOLOGIES: Rusty over at Solarvoid points out that I spend a good deal of time here at The Passing Parade apologizing for not posting more often. In fact, if you made a study of this sort of thing, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t—if the government is prepared to pay for photographs of Jesus submerged in a bottle of day old piss then they’ll certainly finance something as silly as this—my guess is that if I spent more time not apologizing for not posting and used the time to post, I wouldn’t have to apologize so often for not posting or for trying to figure out why there are no black Amish people. Obviously, this is not a problem that many people will devote much time pondering, but it does make me wonder sometimes.

Another thing I wonder about is the ethanol in my gasoline. I don’t know why I am paying so much more for my gasoline when 10% of what I buy isn’t gasoline at all, it’s extortion money for the agribusiness lobby. The government ought to scrap this regulation, and the sooner the better, or if they are all so hell-fired insistent that we put ethanol in our gas tanks then the least they could do is supply the ethanol and the beer nuts so the public can mix their own fuel. Providing a tax break for those people who want their fuel complete with the big chunks of pineapple, a maraschino cherry, and that silly little paper umbrella is purely optional at this point, but with enough political support and a big press campaign it could happen; anything is possible, and the shift would pump a lot of money into Scotland’s economy while touching off long-dormant debates about whether you can get better highway mileage from a single malt Scotch whiskey or from a single grain whiskey, which has a higher octane, or whether you should avoid this debate altogether and buy a good American bourbon instead. As a corollary to this, no one ever bothered to answer my query about whether or not having all that ethanol in my gas tank is really such a good idea in the first place. A 10% ethanol level seems pretty high to me and I would just as soon not have a New York State trooper stopping me on some lonely stretch of the Thruway some rainy night and impounding the car because it was out partying all night with his friends and got caught driving home under the influence.

JUST A THOUGHT: I have seen the future, as Lincoln Steffens famously didn’t say, and it is more than a little bizarre, to say the least. Who would have thought, even ten short years ago, that it would be possible someday to have a political sex scandal where no one involved actually had sex with each other? The advances in immorality these days are nothing less than mind-boggling, I tell you. In other news, I am trying to ascertain if the Biblical prohibition against eating meat sacrificed to idols extends to wearing socks that our children’s librarian has used as a sock puppet pig. I am pretty sure that it doesn’t, that a polyester sock is still polyester even if used for a porcine purpose, but I want to be sure about that.

MEDICAL HISTORY: Charlie Hatton offers an in-depth look at an important, but sometimes overlooked, aspect of medical history.

SOME OBSERVATIONS: I don’t know; I must be missing something here. While what Rep. Mark Foley of Florida did is not excusable and he deserves the obloquy now falling on him and his reputation, it seems to me that a lot of the Democrats calling for his head today are the very same people who, eight years ago, were telling us that sex didn’t matter. Given that Mr. Clinton actually did have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, and that Mr. Foley is, to date, accused of nothing more than sending dirty e-mails to Congressional pages, there appears to be a discrepancy in the reaction coming from the Democrats. It may well be that sending lurid emails to a minor is a more serious crime than Presidential fellatio, but the last time I looked thought crime was still an Orwellian literary device and not an actual offense. Unless, of course, the standard has shifted since the last time we went down this particular road and now sexual behavior does matter, especially a month before the mid-term elections.

I also hear that Bob Woodward has written a book entitled State of Denial, wherein he charges that the Bush Administration’s Iraq strategy is, and has been since the beginning of the war, profoundly flawed. Mr. Woodward is now out on the talk show circuit flogging his newest tome, which he is certainly entitled to do, this being America and all, but I don’t think I’ll be buying his book any time soon. There’s just something about the idea of paying thirty dollars for information I can get for fifty cents in the Daily News that I find deeply unappealing.

NOTHING REALLY: We all have our vices—these failings are simply part of the human condition, I fear—and the worst of mine is an intense laziness ready to manifest itself at any time of the day and night. If there is a way of getting out of doing something, I will try to find it, and if I cannot find a way then I will use a tremendous amount of mental and moral energy inventing a new way of avoiding whatever it is that I don’t want to do this week. I dislike this part of my personality; sloth is not the most attractive quality you can have in our overscheduled, hyperactive, always up and at them modern American society, nor in any other time or place, either. It also leads to my always having things that need finished not getting done at all, or getting done at the last minute, when the hastiness of the result is evident to all and sundry. So it was with my 600th post here to The Passing Parade. I’ve already cut back on the number of original posts I do to almost one a week, and this past week I couldn’t even sit down at the desk long enough to bat something new out. I spent a good part of the week wondering what excuse I could give everyone for not posting something new when the Pope, God bless him, riled the always risible Islamic hornet’s nest and gave me an excuse to pull some old material out of the electronic graveyard. Serving leftovers all the time, however, is not a good idea; people will begin thinking of The Passing Parade as the rerun channel, and this is not a good thing for the long-term health of any blog.

In my defense, though, I must say that things have been singularly quiet here in our happy little burg, so there hasn’t been a lot to write about. This past week the city conducted its annual homage to the awesome power of Gina DiNapoli’s breasts* and the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for a pittance found itself at the center of a very small-scale art scandal. One of our local shockers of the bourgeoisie managed to do just that by hanging an American flag in our front window. This work came complete with a CD player wherein the observer could look upon the flag while listening to someone recite Walt Whitman’s I hear America singing, a poem written before the advent of American Idol and cell phones, and today, unfortunately, there is no one of Whitman’s stature to write the modern response, I wish to Christ I heard America shutting the hell up, for crying out loud. Most people did not know about the existence of the CD player, as that would necessitate actually coming into the building, and chose to base their perceptions on the flag itself, which the artist chose to reimagine in heavy plastic with green and clear stripes and a pink canton. This change in hue upset a good many local veterans, or at least a good many local veterans’ groups, which is not the same thing, who held that if red, white, and blue was good enough for them it ought to be good enough for everyone. So there was a fair amount of wrapping oneself in Old Glory this past week and some overheated rhetoric in the letters to the editor column of the local weekly, and as a result the flag now resides in a window down the street that does not depend on the taxpaying public for its bread and butter. I have no real opinion about this matter one way or the other, although this particular work hung in the reference room window for a couple of weeks. I did notice, however, that if you stared at the flag for a while, and then looked away quickly, you could see the Stars and Stripes in its original colors for a moment on your retina. As to the kerfuffle, well, a little patriotic outrage now and again isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and wrapping lame duck in a plastic flag will keep it fresher than wrapping it in tin foil will, so I guess we can all be thankful for the free cooking advice.

In other not so terribly important news, the director now has a pair of parakeets in her office. They are very nice looking birds, if you like parakeets, and they will form a very nice complement to the pigeons, sparrows, and finches that live in various parts of this place’s roof and façade. I don’t know if it is possible, but if our budget goes down next year as well, we could always investigate the possibility of reopening the library as a legally protected bird sanctuary. I suppose if we went whole hog on this thing, we could use some of our regular patrons as the wildlife and conduct photographic safaris for the tourists into the exotic and vibrant ecosystem we maintain here on Main Street, which would do wonders for our bottom line, I think. Nothing will come of this idea, of course; it would require the civil service to think outside the box, and if there’s anything that civil servants will not willingly do, not if their lives depended on it, is think outside the box. Ah well, it was a nice idea while it lasted.

*Since all attempts to actually make this link work have failed miserably, I am posting the piece about Gina and her most prominent features in the Blogger comments section. No one ever uses the thing and putting the piece there is more convenient for readers and for me as well.