AND NOW THE STAR OF OUR SHOW, NANOOK OF THE NORTH: Nanook of the North starved to death. He didn’t mean to, of course; no one except fakirs and anorexics are actually trying to starve themselves, but things just worked out that way. Nanook enjoyed his fifteen minutes of cinematic fame, but he wearied of waiting for the right part to come along—parts for nomadic hunter gatherers, whether they are from a polar region or from a somewhat more temperate clime, being few and far between both then and now, and tiring of development hell, he left Hollywood and went home to his spacious Spanish colonial igloo on the frozen tundra, a phrase I’ve never really understood since all tundra is frozen; otherwise tundra would just be cold wet dirt trying to make up its mind about whether it wants to be mud or listen to its parents and go to medical school instead. In any case, two years after he was the hit of the documentary film world, Nanook starved to death while waiting for his piece of the profits to come rolling in. I’m not sure why Nanook abandoned Hollywood for the Arctic. I understand that for many people a big tasty chunk of raw seal blubber beats a Chicago style deep pan pizza any day of the week, especially in those regions north of the Brooks Range, but the pizza is much easier to get a hold of, what with seals being fairly elusive critters not at all willing to be the main course at a Super Bowl party, and pizza has the added benefit of not annoying various and sundry environmentalist types who think that seals are cute as the dickens, which is another phrase I’ve never understood. Have you ever seen a photograph of Dickens? There’s a lot of things you could call Charlie, and a lot of people called him a lot of things, mostly unflattering, back in the day, but let’s face it, folks, cute ain’t one of them.

Now, you may not realize this; ordinarily I wouldn’t bring it up at all, but it seems germane at the moment; but I am writing this sentence about a week after I finished writing the last sentence in the previous paragraph. For most of the past week, I have been ill with a viral infection that manifested itself in a variety of ways too disgusting for me to mention here. Suffice it to say, however, that at this juncture I have absolutely no idea what this essay is supposed to be about now. Yes, whatever it was about poor old Nanook starving to death that I thought was funny enough to start one of these screeds is now one with Nineveh and Tyre. I’ve been trying to tell myself that the reason I can’t go on with this a lighthearted poke at a starving Eskimo is that, in my own small way, we are both brothers sharing the common bond of suffering. It took my family all of a minute to shoot this theory down—they would have shot it down sooner, but they were too busy laughing at me. The general consensus of opinion amongst those nearest and dearest to me is that I am a selfish, self-pitying bastard who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the sufferings of poor old Nanook. Clearly, I will have to do something about the family, but I need to make sure no suspects me afterwards. This, I think, might be a little hard to do.

Well then, having gotten this far without a subject and little or no idea what the point of it all is, I shall have to think of something and think of it in short order, won’t I? I hardly think you are going to sit there while I wrack my brain for available subject matter and I fear that the Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton trick of describing all the furniture in the room down to what kind of cheese is in the mousetrap while I try to think of something to say is not going to work in this case. I have a movable desk, a chair, a desk light, and a mesh can full of pencils. My electric pencil sharpener is on the windowsill and my dress shirts are hanging from a rod to my left. There’s not much of interest here, even if I did start describing it all.

I am, however, fond of my electric pencil sharpener. For most of my life, the lack of attention paid to the inventor of the electric pencil sharpener has struck me as inherently unfair. The electric pencil sharpener may not have pizzazz of Blackberries or cell phones or many modern communications devices, but the electric pencil sharpener has, in its own homely way, been one of the great steps forward in the history of communications. That the inventor of the electric pencil sharpener never received the adulation of Alexander Graham Bell or Samuel F. B. Morse only shows, I think, the depth to which the blind and unreasoning prejudice against pencils reaches here in this our Great Republic.

The American prejudice against pencils is never an easy subject to speak about, even today in our much more open and Oprahfied society. Like prostitutes, pencils exist to service a societal need, and when society deems that need met, society ignores or, worse, discards the used and damaged pencils entirely. The cost of this ongoing callousness is high; every year, work and school-related accidents damage, sometimes permanently, millions of fresh young pencils, and for these victims, there is little hope for a return to complete health. There is only the certainty that a hypocritical society will throw them away and replace them with a new, untouched pencil or, in extreme cases, with a ballpoint pen, perhaps even, and it pains me to say this in mixed company, a magic marker.

You may argue, and you may have a point here, that the social status of pencils is hardly a fitting subject for an essay like this, what with the children watching and all, but how would we serve the children any better by going on about poor old Nanook starving to death, that’s what I want to know. Obviously, this whole essay would have taken a much different turn if I hadn’t gotten sick in the middle of it and forgotten why I thought Nanook’s starving was so funny in the first place. It made perfect sense at the time, I remember, but then, so did phrenology, mesmerism, and Marxism-Leninism, so I guess that’s not much of an excuse.

AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR PROPRIETOR: First of all, I would like to thank the American pharmaceutical industry for their production runs of various and sundry antiviral medications. Antivirals are a wonderful thing, especially when you are breeding viruses like the damn things are going out of style and you really want them to go out into the great big world and get real jobs, especially jobs that do not require anyone to be flat on their back for most of the day wondering why God doesn’t like them anymore. So yes, I am feeling much better now, thank you all very much.

Secondly, I would like to thank the American media for turning President Obama’s historic inauguration into the aural version of root canal work, minus that nice pina colada tasting anesthetic the dentist gives you nowadays. Most of the commentators and bloviating pundits did their best to sound like lousy sportscasters, pounding the significance of the day into my poor ill skull over and over again until I wanted to scream with agony. In my desperate search for relief, I finally alighted on C-Span, where the proceedings came to the commentary addled viewer both live and in living color, a cultural reference only the people over forty here will actually understand, and sans the constant blather of people in love with the sound of their own voices.

As I sat watching the steady stream of people march past our new President, I wondered just why it is that we the people need to subject our new presidents to a seemingly endless parade of cacophonous kitsch, and I also wish to report that the growing Hispanization of this our Great Republic will yield one great positive result…well, two, after lots of great looking babes in tight dresses and high heels—the music in inaugural parades will improve exponentially with the large scale addition of mariachi bands to the mix, although, the truth be told, adding a squadron of drunken cross-dressing malarial chimpanzees with shotguns, kazoos, and broken beer bottles to the mix would improve the musical quality of your average high school marching band just as well. The shotguns would also do wonders for removing the musically untalented from the gene pool, but I suspect that counts as an unintended consequence.

My apologies for the lack of posting, folks; I have been sick for the past week and it looks like I will be sick into next week as well.

GAZA: I know next to nothing about the Middle East, but since no one else lets ignorance of the region get in the way of having a strong opinion about what goes on there, I think I will share my opinion as well. Vis-à-vis Israel’s current military operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, I think that when you are a 97 pound weakling and you make a point of going up to the strongest kid on the beach and kicking him in the shins over and over again, and you keep on kicking him in the shins over and over again even after he warns you multiple times to stop, then you shouldn’t be all that surprised when he starts kicking your dumb ass from one end of the beach to the other.

SMILE, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING: I should smile more. I hadn’t realized that smiling, or the lack thereof, was in any way a problem for me until a few days ago, when a small child came up to my desk and solemnly asked why I didn’t ever smile. My response to the little tatterdemalion, that I smiled all the time, brought forth a huge collective guffaw from my fellow inmates here at the egregious mold pit. When I asked what so funny, my co-workers, none of whom is ever going to get a Christmas card from me ever again, told me that the little urchin was right: I never smiled.

In fact, I am apparently famous from one end of this our happy little burg to the other, a span that admittedly does not cover much ground when looked at in the overall topographic scheme of things, for being the sort of grim, unsmiling, humorless ogre who could ruin a rich relative’s funeral just by showing up. This, I said, was nothing more or less than a low and contemptible slander—I am a cheerful sort of fellow, always happy and smiling and up for a good laugh. This statement brought forth a further burst of merriment from many of the co-workers and no few stares of wonder from others, especially those interested in seeing just how personally clueless one human being can be if given half a chance.

I must say that I found the discrepancy between the public’s apparent view of me and my own self-image more than a little disconcerting. I could not, I thought, be the dull, dour, humorless prig that my co-workers think me, and so I resolved to settle the matter by asking the people who know me best, my family, what they thought of the little munchkin’s libelous accusation.

Asking my family anything about anything is, I now find, a bad idea. Clearly, a virulent strain of idiocy runs through the family tree like Montezuma’s revenge. To a man, to a woman, to a child, the general consensus of amongst this vile assemblage of congenital dolts was that the runt was right: I am as grim, dour, and unsmiling a wretch as you would ever care to meet. Somehow or other, I have managed to go for fifty years without ever learning that I have all the personal charm of Ebenezer Scrooge before he met the spirits, with this small fillip of difference: everyone agrees that I would have told the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to go kiss my ass. I was stunned. I was shocked. I was mortified to the nth degree. Surely, I thought, there must be someone who sees the happy, smiling me. So I went then to the source of all wisdom and comfort in the Bashmachkin clan: my mom. Surely, my own dear, sweet, beloved mother would protect me from the scummy tide of calumny sweeping about me.

The interview did not go well, although I must admit that my threatening to have the immigration department deport her if she didn’t see things my way may have contributed to the generally negative tone of the meeting. Mom provoked me, though, what with her agreeing with the rest of the family on the smiling slander. She did do her best to put a positive spin on the bad news—moms are like that—telling me that while I was not the most cheerful person in the world, there were ten of thousands of people even worse than I am, no two ways about it, and there are my many positive qualities: I am kind to children and small animals when I am not actually kicking them, that I am good to the poor when I am not ignoring them, and that I respect the sanctity of other people’s families right up to the point where they want some of my money. Upon hearing my positive qualities stated in what I can only describe as a slightly equivocal manner, almost as if Mom had to rummage through her memory in order to find something nice to say about me, I then threatened the aforementioned deportation proceedings, whereupon my mother told me to go pound salt, an expression most New Yorkers use at least once a day and sometimes twice just for the fun of it.

So it must be true, after all: I don’t smile. I am a grim and glowering presence who thoroughly frightens small children and depresses anyone who comes in contact with me. I am that little guy in the L’il Abner cartoons, Joe Something or other, who stalked the earth with a perpetually raining storm cloud permanently ensconced over my head. It is official: I am not a happy camper. And then I saw it, I saw opportunity knocking like no one’s business. Yes, I frown more than I smile—from what the family tells me, I last smiled in 1966, but everyone thought I was trying to sneeze and so said, God bless you; I’d always wondered why they did that—but this is not altogether a bad thing, despite the best efforts of modern medical science to convince us otherwise. Modern medical science also tells us that it takes 76 muscles to frown and 14 to smile, and there’s gold in that there difference, folks, gold.

Yes, my friends, 76 muscles control the human frown, and to this day, no one has come up with a way to frown aerobically. Obviously, it is easier to smile aerobically than it is to frown, but if you spent your day smiling aerobically people would think that you were more than a little strange, and possibly on drugs, whereas aerobic frowning not only works more muscles than smiling, it convinces people that you are a deeply serious and thoughtful person whose opinion about the great issues of the world really matters. I haven’t worked out the details yet, but I’m pretty sure that this one is a moneymaker, even in tough economic times like these. The times may even help me strike it rich; if everyone’s going to be frowning anyway, and they will, they might as well frown and lose weight and feel better about themselves as they stand in the unemployment line. You know, I think I’ve got something there.

...AND A HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL IN 2009...

This is not actually going to happen, of course, not with The One about to bring back the New Deal in all its expensive and regulatory glory, but we can only hope for the best and pray that something pulls the economy out of the doldrums other than the rise of yet another looney dictator who want to rule the world, which is what got us all out of the last great depression we were in. And on that cheery thought, I am off to eat hot dogs (with ketchup). Enjoy the rest of your day, folks!