The fires this time

 You know, I remember back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina almost moved the city of New Orleans into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, a reporter asked General Honore, the head of the Federal task force coordinating the response  to the catastrophe, a question about the shortcomings of the earlier state and local responses the general had been brought in to correct. General  Honore cut the reporter off, telling him to not get stuck on stupid.  There would be a time for such questions once the disaster was over, but the current moment was neither the time or the place; people needed rescuing, the levees had to be shored up, the city had to be saved.  First things first.

Twenty years later, the city of Los Angeles, California (is the state even necessary in this sentence? There is only one LA, and everyone knows where it is located) is not only stuck on stupid, the city and the state's leadership class is firmly and proudly stuck on stupid, stranded in the muck of its own progressive delusions and doing its best to remain stuck there while simultaneously getting the rest of the country to pay for the cleanup (unlikely) and avoiding responsibility for the fires in the first place (even more unlikely). But hope springs eternal, so there will be no change in the city's forest management program and the reservoirs will remain unfilled and the snail darter will remain protected.  Los Angeles firefighters will have to check the right demographic boxes in order to get a job in the first place and will have to spout the progressive movement's DEI bromides with tremendous enthusiasm in order to keep the job they have.  Insurance companies will not be allowed to make money for their own good and poorly insulated electric wires will remain above ground for reasons that surpasseth understanding. So the more the fires destroy, the more things will stay the same. And Los Angeles, the city and the county, and state of California will not lower taxes on the population in their time of affliction, which makes the city and county of Los Angeles and the state of California look a lot less like modern governments and more like a poorly run protection racket operated by the Mafia's not so best and brightest.  All of them will probably be re-elected. 

The Academy Awards controversy

I feel that I should take this opportunity to protest the clear lack of diversity that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has demonstrated in its nominations in the acting categories this year.  I do not believe that I have to point out—indeed, tens of thousands of people have already pointed out—that of all the artists nominated in the acting categories only one is a French woman.  I find it hard to believe that the Academy could only find one French woman to nominate for anything when France invented cinema as an art form and has one of the oldest motion picture industries in the world, an industry that routinely produces hundreds of film annually. Such a brutal snub displays, I think, more than a little Francophobia and poses some very pointed questions about the Academy’s commitment to diversity.

As a corollary to the facts enumerated above, I should also point out that none of the nominees, even the French woman, is a member of a municipal fire department. In fact, I believe that I can say with a fair degree of certainty that none of the nominees is a member of a volunteer fire department, either. This, I think, is nothing short of despicable. I believe that all right-thinking people can agree that our nation’s fire departments, both career and volunteer, perform important, indeed vital, work in protecting the American movie-going public from danger every day and that the Academy’s refusal to nominate a fire fighter in any category is nothing short of churlish.

So, what are we to make of the Academy’s actions?  First, that the Academy is clearly biased against French women and fire departments is a fact so demonstrable in this year’s nominations as to be beyond the ability of any amount of face-saving p.r. to refute. Second, it is clear that the Academy will not reform its bigoted mindset unless compelled to do so. The many attempts by the French Embassy and the International Associations of Fire Chiefs to rectify the situation by behind the scenes persuasion have obviously been for naught. Therefore, I am calling on the Motion Picture Association of America, the body that rates the movies for language, violence, and sexual content, in begin issuing new ratings that will inform the public about the number of French women and fire fighters in any given motion picture and I am calling on the American public itself to boycott any motion picture in which an appropriate number of French women and fire fighters do not appear. In addition to these measures, the Academy should set aside a certain number of nominations every year for French women and fire fighters, in order to ensure fairness, and then set up a fund to encourage underprivileged French women and fire fighters to enter the motion picture field. In this way the American movie-going public can rest assured that a corrupt and venal Academy will not assault its sensibilities in such a brutal fashion and the sort of blatant bias we have all seen this year will not repeat itself.  Thank you and I will see you at the movies!

DR. STRANGETUBER, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE POTATO: I am not sure when the boys down the street at the Eldon T. Johnson Volunteer Hook & Ladder Volunteer Fire Company decided to join the military-industrial complex, but I suppose that anything that appeals to their innate patriotism, sense of civic duty, and gives them something to do with their time besides drinking beer and playing pinochle into the wee hours of the morning cannot be an entirely bad thing. I’m sure Eldon T. Johnson would have approved as well. Mr. Johnson owned a hat factory here in our happy little burg back in the late 1890’s and made a small fortune selling straw boaters for the summer trade, a respectable fortune selling uniform caps and hats to the United States Army, an organization that regarded then, and continues to regard to this day, the public hatlessness of its membership in much the same way as your average evangelical clergyman regards adultery, fornication, dancing, and other forms of mortal sin. He made an even greater fortune in marrying his wife, the very attractive daughter of a prominent local brewery owner, which is always nice work if you can get it, combining, as it does, both sex and money.

Mr. Johnson also made a grotesquely huge fortune selling campaign hats to the Army in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, and then, swept up in a fit of patriotic fervor, joined the Army himself. This was not the best business decision Mr. Johnson could have made under the circumstances, but his wife was proud of him anyway. He gained a captain’s commission in the Quartermaster Corps; his father-in-law’s influence with our local Congressman saw to that; and the Army sent him to Cuba after the fighting was over, where he saw no Spaniards to speak of, became one of the first Americans to taste a daiquiri, and died of yellow fever shortly afterwards. In his many long letters to his wife, he does not mention whether or not he saw any American soldiers wearing his company’s campaign hats; the subject never comes up. He did mention how beautiful Cuba was, however, and he complained a lot about the mosquitoes, which, given what eventually happened to him, was perfectly understandable. So, as I said, I am sure that he would approve of what the boys in his eponymous fire company are doing these days.

That they were going to have to tell someone what they were doing sooner or later was inevitable; that the someone they had to tell was me only became inevitable when they damn near took my head off with the stupid thing. I am, usually, a fairly calm and unruffled person who does not get too excited about the passing hubbub of day to day life, but it is difficult for anyone to maintain their composure when a projectile came flying out of a firehouse at hypersonic speeds and comes perilously close to taking one’s nose off. And so it was that my composure decided to take a vacation while the next three words out of my mouth, a blasphemy with an obscenity sandwiched in the middle to improve the phrase’s aerodynamic stability, was heard over much of our happy little burg, as was the rest of my protest, which combined blasphemy, profanity, obscenity, and scatology in no particular order. I also wish to take this opportunity to apologize yet again to the mothers, living and dead, of the current membership of the Eldon T. Johnson Volunteer Hook & Ladder Fire Company. What I said about all of you was unfair, unjust, and unkind, as well as ungentlemanly, however sufficient I believe the immediate cause of such sentiments to be. Over the years, I have grown used to my head being where it is and I see no reason why this state of affairs should change at this stage of my life. Call me selfish and unpatriotic if you must, but there it is.

The cat being out of the bag, the pig having escaped from the poke, and me screaming like a banshee—it is hard to keep any kind of secret hereabouts—the boys grabbed me and dragged me into the fire house, trying to get me to shut up and calm down, or the other way around, I’m not sure I remember the order at this point—I was pretty steamed at the time—but after several minutes of trying, during which time I uttered the slurs mentioned in the previous paragraph, and again, my apologies, ladies, I eventually calmed down a bit and even reacquired some small portion of my usual equilibrium, at which point I demanded to know what the hell was going on.

At first the boys tried to pull the national security routine with me, but was in no mood for that sort of nonsense, and, let’s face it, how many national security secrets does any local volunteer fire department have? Not a whole hell of a lot, I’d say, although I’m certain that the ex-sailors among them would probably not want their wives to find out about any number of loathsome diseases our erstwhile swabbies picked up while serving at Subic Bay during the 1970’s and 1980’s, but that seems more a personal security issue than one of national security. So, as I said, the guys, they hemmed and hawed for a minute, but I was not going to take no for an answer, and so finally they all looked to Joe Finnegan, the fire company’s long-time lieutenant and a great guy [full disclosure: we went to high school together], told the others to go get the thing. There was a brief protest from some of the younger members of the company, but Joe told them to be quiet, everything would be all right.

The thing, as Joe insisted on calling the thing, consisted of three lengths of black metal pipe about seven feet long all told that the firemen quickly screwed in each other. It was a cold, ugly looking thing, functional, utilitarian, relentless in its look, stripped of the martial fripperies that men use to hide the true purpose of many a weapon of war.
“You built your own bazooka,” I asked. “What the hell for?”
“The thing’s not a bazooka,” Joe said. “It’s a…thing, I guess you’d call it.”
“You guessed wrong, guy,” I said. “I call it a damn bazooka. What’s it shoot?”
Jim tried to mutter something quickly, but I didn’t catch what he said.
“Try again in English, Joe,” I said.
“Potatoes,” Joe Finnegan said.

I was stunned. I was stunned because I did not realize that potatoes had any sort of offensive capability at all, unless you mash them and put scallions in them, which offends me greatly; if I wanted scallions, I’d eat scallions, and I prefer to have my potatoes without, if it’s all the same to you; and I was stunned because this crew of idiots had damn near taken my head off with an Idaho baking potato. I understand that this life is not forever, that we all owe God a death, and that we must all at some point join the silent majority of the dead. I refuse, however, to go because someone else chose to be an idiot that day, and I refuse to die in a manner that will cause chuckles to reverberate from one end of this our Great Republic to the other, and having my head blown off by a spud definitely comes under the heading of chuckle-inducing. You can talk about how tragic any death is, how, as Donne put it, “…every man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind…”, but if that person died doing something incredibly stupid, then the idiotic manner of his passing is all you’ll ever remember about this poor schnook. Sometimes even that doesn’t work; there were no horses anywhere near Catherine the Great when she died and see what good that’s done her these past two hundred years or so.

To say I was furious underestimates the extent of my rage, but Jim, having thus exposed the Eldon T. Johnson Volunteer Hook & Ladder Fire Company’s greatest secret, now threw caution to the winds and began telling all about the thing, which apparently has an actual name: the Mark 10 [I kid you not; there are nine previous models of this gizmo] recoilless potato rifle. The Mark 10, which Jim now insisted on calling the thing when he wasn’t busy calling the thing a thing, could hurl your standard unpeeled potato some two hundred or so feet down range and still put a walloping big dent in the side of a metal garbage can, making the Mark 10 a very effective method of crowd control should metal garbage cans ever become a major threat to the peace, order, and domestic tranquility of the country. To fire the Mark 10, your standard Special Operations operator first sprays the barrel with a coating of cooking oil—WD-40 is good if there is no cooking oil in the battle space—and then inserts the spud into the breech, wrapped in a damp paper towel. The operator then sprays about fifteen seconds worth of hair spray into the firing chamber; Lysol works just as well if there are no teenaged girls going to their first prom in the neighborhood; the firing chamber is then quickly screwed on and locked shut. Having armed the weapon, our trusty operator then looks for a suitably offensive metal garbage can to put paid to. Finding one, which is easy to do today; the Sanitation Department comes around for the weekly pick-up tomorrow morning here in our happy little burg, aims his weapon and pulls the trigger. An electric spark from a standard AA battery shoots across the tiny space between two contacts in the firing chamber, ignites the hair spray, and the resulting explosion sends our spud hurling down the greased barrel and out into the open air to find some metal garbage can out to cause trouble, or my head, whichever comes first.

There are, as you might imagine, several significant problems with the Mark 10, the first of these being that potatoes are in no way aerodynamic in their natural state; they are a root plant, after all, and aerodynamic efficiency was never an evolutionary necessity for them on their long biological march from simple tuber to potatoes au gratin. Second, modifying the potato’s DNA to make them aerodynamic is not cost-effective. Third, potatoes do not explode and there is, as far as I know, no way to insert a suitable warhead inside even a very large potato, and fourth, no one would ever take the American military seriously ever again if they deployed a weapon that shot potatoes at the nation’s real or potential enemies, with the always important exception of metal garbage cans. In the tribal regions of Pakistan, Islamic extremists are not hard at work developing mortars that fire bunches of broccoli into American airports nor are the Chinese trying to build a new generation of cluster bombs that lay down a carpet of fried wontons all over the battlefield. They just aren’t; it would be silly. I didn’t want to tell the boys this, but someone had to—despite the best and the very sincere efforts of the firefighters of the Eldon T. Johnson Volunteer Hook & Ladder Fire Company, their first foray into the arcane world of secret weapons development was a complete and absolute bust. And then, in a flash, in a moment of utter capitalistic clarity, I saw the investment possibilities of the Mark 10 open before my eyes and visions of pelf, ever-glorious pelf, roll down before me like a river and into my bank account like mighty waters.

With only a few minor adjustments and some new attachments, the Mark 10 could make someone rich, and I intend for that someone to be me. Yes, I need to wrest the Mark 10 from these guys and make it mine. It can happen. David Sarnoff of RCA managed to keep Philo Farnsworth from earning any money from inventing television, even if Farnsworth had all the patents and managed to fight off the slavering wolf pack of Wall Street shysters Sarnoff turned loose on him. In the end, Sarnoff made the money and Farnsworth didn’t, and in a capitalist society, that’s what counts in the end. Yes, indeed, put a sharp grid at the end of that barrel and the Mark 10 and you can shoot French fries to a fan in any sports venue in the world, even a fan in the lousy seats so high up you wonder why they just didn’t stay home and watch the game on the television Philo Farnsworth never made any money on. I could even license the Mark 10 to McDonald’s; they’re always interested in new French fry delivery systems. With the right attachments, there’s no telling what an efficient Mark 10 operator can do; he could slice, dice, and julienne potatoes in their thousands, and why stop with French fries? Mashed potatoes might be beyond the realm of possibility, but perhaps potato salad is not, if there is some way of getting the proper mixture of vinegar, celery, and mayonnaise into the barrel.

And now that I’m thinking about it, why stop with potatoes? Is there any fruit or vegetable a smart entrepreneur couldn’t put in the Mark 10 and shoot over to a willing customer? I don’t know, but I’m sure an engineer could figure out a way, and I’m going to have a boatload of those guys working for me figuring this stuff out and working out the kinks in the thing. For example, the hair spray has to go. It has to. Nobody wants to eat a French fry that tastes like someone just shot the fry through the girls’ high school gym teacher’s beehive hairdo; they just don’t. People are like that, the ungrateful wretches. So the hair spray goes, but what to replace it with? Propane? More cooking oil? Gunpowder? Honestly, I’m not sure, but I am sure I’ll find out once I’ve finished infringing on the firemen’s patents, assuming they have patents. Like I said, that’s what engineers are for. And lawyers…especially lawyers.