Today I wrote nothing

Yes, today I wrote nothing. Well, no, that is not entirely true; I did write that I wrote nothing, but that still counts as nothing, even if it is something. In this the nothing I wrote is similar to the baloneyfish sandwich, which is not good for your teeth, what with all the carbolic acid in the bread. You should avoid the bread in a baloneyfish sandwich, if you can. Smerdyakov did not and he wound up dead, as did Wild Bill Hickock. Baloneyfish does not always agree with everyone who tries it, and why should it, really? This is a free country and if the baloneyfish does not want to agree with anyone there should be no great need to compel the baloneyfish to agree. This is the great difference between this our Great Republic and other countries. In those countries, the benighted aardvarks must wait for the Ferris wheel to arrive before they can eat their bananas. Smerdyakov did not wait for the Ferris wheel to arrive before he ate his banana and Wild Bill Hickock shot him, unless it wasn't Wild Bill Hicock; it could have been Jesse James. But Smerdyakov is still dead, no matter who shot him, No one knows what happened to his banana.

Storms

And so the monsoon came to town yesterday, complete with intense flashes of lightning and downpours so tremendous that one could forgive an impartial observer for wondering if Noah and the Ark would be floating down Main Street any time soon, and, if so, would they stop at Subway’s to pick up some sandwiches for the wife and the kids and the two of every sort of creature that walketh or creepeth upon the face of the Earth as they headed off towards the mountains of Ararat?  The wind howled in a suitably gruesome manner and the sky turned black in the middle of the day and all the denizens of our happy little burg trembled under the fury of the storm.  And then, of course, there were the people who braved the wrath of nature and went forth into the storm in order to get a gallon of milk or a pound of ground chuck at the supermarket, brave men and women who refused to bow down before dictates of nature but who wandered out, umbrellas in hand, leaving this observer to wonder just how much of a dumbass do you have to be to go outside in a thunderstorm holding a metal spike in the air?  First, when the winds are lashing around at about sixty miles an hour your umbrella is not going to help you; it will not even make an adequate sail, should you find yourself in a situation where you need an adequate sail.  I’m not saying that will ever happen in real life, you understand, but it might, and an umbrella that the wind has turned inside out is worse than useless.  It won’t keep the rain out of your face and it certainly won’t help shield you from the rest of the elements, which, I have noticed, tend to be fairly nasty during these meteorological temper tantrums.  Sec0nd, during the aforementioned meteorological temper tantrums the abundant lightning whips about striking both willy and nilly, deep frying them to a golden toasty brown. Given this, I repeat my previous question: why are these dolts going outside holding a metal spike in the air?  To me, this appears to be almost suicidal behavior, almost as if these poor saps were volunteering to have Nature in all her mystery and majesty remove their clearly bargain basement chromosomes from the gene pool in as expeditious a manner as possible.   While I am all for improving humanity and its morals, this appears to me to be a very short-sighted, if not more than vaguely painful way of accomplishing this altogether laudatory goal.  Wouldn’t all of these people be much better off if they simply stayed indoors until the storm blows by and then go out for a gallon of milk?

Just my opinion, you understand

This is about the time I usually start apologizing for not posting more often, and I would, except that this time it’s not really my fault. It’s my lumbar number five disc and its insistence on putting pressing on my sciatic nerve.  I don’t know why it’s putting pressure on the sciatic nerve; that nerve has no bad habits that I am aware of, so why anyone would want to pressure it is beyond me, but apparently lumbar number five has an entirely different view of the matter and so the pressure continues, with more than the usual number of sudden and very painful flares.  Annoying, but true, I fear.

In other news, I see that the Bloomberg Business News’ headline for the week is, Am I really such a jerk, or something to that effect.  That is an interesting question, I think, and one I’m sure that we’ve all asked ourselves at one time or another, but it does occur to me that if you have to ask yourself this question in a business setting, then yes, in all probability you really are such a jerk, and the people whom you are asking will probably be more than happy to tell you so to your face, unless this is the boss doing the asking, in which case you should lie until you are blue in the face. Getting another job in this economy is only slightly more difficult than pulling a woodpecker’s wisdom teeth, and while your unemployment benefits will continue for as long as China is willing to loan us the money, watching daytime television for any length of time will cause large portions of your prefrontal cortex to develop dry rot and lead you to drooling great buckets of spit on your nice clean shirt in a public place, which is cute when you’re six months old but not when you are in your forties.  Given the dreadful alternative, lying to protect your livelihood seems the lesser of the two evils. That’s what I think, anyway; your mileage may vary.

Pot shot

"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.." The former junior senator from Illinois, bloviating on January 21.

Why not, I wonder?  He does it all the time and he seems to be doing quite well with the strategy, unless, of course, this is not a strategy but rather an example of what the psychologists call projection, wherein one imputes one's own faults and shortcomings on to someone else. In either case, it hardly seems fair that He gets to project stuff and the GOP does not, and since fairness is the great mantra of the Illinois Messiah and His minions one would expect that conservatives would sue this maladministration for violating our equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment. I don't think it will happen, though; the trial lawyers are on His side. Such is life, I fear.

A Federal court has struck down a Texas voter identification law, to the cheers of Democrats everywhere. This is because all voter identification laws are evil and racist, discriminating as they do against the ignorant, the felonious, the dope-addled, and the dead, all of whom are reliable Democratic constituencies. Don’t believe me? Ask Al Franken.

Something to think about

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe I’m just not being cynical enough, which is always a possibility these days, but I assume everyone has noticed that while Mr. Akin has clearly shown that he is an idiot, he was, until recently, a relatively obscure Congressman running for the Senate in a state that most media types do not pay much attention to.  On the other hand, Mr. Biden has also clearly shown that he is an idiot, but the disapprobation does not seem nearly as severe or the media focus as intense, and yet he is only a heartbeat away from becoming the President of the United States.  Given the relative importance of the positions the two men are running for, one would think that the media would give more weight to Mr. Biden’s remarks than Mr. Akin’s.  After all, should the voters raise Mr. Akin to the office of United States Senator, he will merely be one idiot among many, whereas Mr. Biden will still be only a heartbeat away from the Presidency.  Something to think about, isn’t it?

WHAT TO DO TILL THE COWS COME HOME, OR OUR BOVINES HAVE TENDER GRAPES: I don’t know about you, but I wonder sometimes where the cows have gone to when someone tells me that I can wait till the cows come home. I never thought of cows as being a particularly adventuresome lot; they strike me as being a sort of homebodyish species, if homebodyish even counts as a word, and not at all given to the sorts of adventures your average American bison might think normal. And I know that cows used to have all sorts of adventures out West; like any American boy of my generation, I grew up watching my share of John Wayne movies and so I saw the Duke and his troop of cowboys move cows from one place to another more times than I can remember right off the top of my head.. But I didn’t really think about where the herd was going and neither, I suppose, did the herd. It’s bad enough to get a bit part in a Hollywood epic when you have bigger plans for yourself; finding out that you and your part, and your parts as well, get smaller and smaller in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle would really be upsetting, especially since the hero of the story isn’t you but some dumb Lithuanian who should have stayed away from Chicago if he didn’t want the forces of inhumane capitalism to oppress the hell out of him in the stockyards. Still, at the beginning and end of the process, you would still get some screen time—first, as one of Wayne’s stampeding herd; no cowboy epic is complete without the cows go wild like girls on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras and run off in all directions for no apparent reason; and second, as a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in a McDonald’s commercial; but in the long run it’s probably not much of a consolation one way or the other. Nobody really wants to grow up to be a comestible, no matter how much of an American staple you may be.

In the time between their birth and human digestion, however, the cows must go somewhere or otherwise you wouldn’t have to wait for them to come home. And given that there’s always a bit of a wait involved, those cows must be off doing something interesting while they wait for their number to come up in the abattoir. I haven’t seen any statistics on the rate of bovine tourism recently, but it seems to me that this must be a growth industry, especially for travel agents whose traditional business has suffered so much from the Internet. For travel agents cows are the perfect customers; they prefer to travel everywhere in groups, which means a big commission for the agent, and to date no computer company is offering a keyboard big enough to accommodate hooves, so unlike humans, cows have nowhere to go unless they book with an agent, creating a win-win situation for the agent looking to expand his customer base beyond the usual computer illiterates.

So where do cows go on vacation? As they are herbivores, I like to think that they are drawn to pastoral scenes, to places like Gettysburg, for example, where they can walk the paths of heroes and calmly graze on the vegetation in the Wheat Field and the Peach Orchard and contemplate the sacrifices made for liberty in those hallowed places. Or they might go on genealogical expeditions out to the West, seeking out the places where their ancestors made the long drive north along the Chisholm Trail from Texas to Abilene. The movie fans amongst the herd could even point out the points of cinematic interest, the places where John Wayne or Randolph Scott almost lost the herd in a great stampede, or where the Indians or cattle rustlers tried to use the herd as a shield to creep up on the heroes and do them in [this rarely worked, of course; the cows would get nervous and stampede and the only person the bad guys would actually kill would be the cook at the chuck wagon whose food nobody liked, but who would go down defending his lousy beans and grits in a blaze of gunfire and culinary glory like a true American hero]. The calves might even do a re-enactment of a great stampede if they’re in the mood for it, although I imagine that their parents would probably tell them to stop running around like crazy kids before they hurt themselves; parents are like that, you know.

How the cows get from the one place to the other, I couldn’t really tell you; it strikes me that cows are great hikers, so they might choose to walk the distances between the sites of particularly interest to them. Hiking is good exercise, no two ways about it, and cows can eat whatever is growing by the side of the road so they don’t have to factor in the cost of restaurants in their travel budgeting, and let’s face it, nobody likes having to factor in the cost of tips for bad service; it’s one of the really annoying things about any kind of travel planning. Hiking also lets your average herd of cows to get off the interstate highways and really see the country up close and personal, something too few people do nowadays, and lets the herd avoid the embarrassment of having the TSA feel them up at the airports. Cows are sensitive that way.

In the end, I have no objection to cows going off somewhere every now and again. Travel expands one’s horizons, leads to greater understanding of the world and one’s place in it, and for the cows, means putting off the day when they wind up on the ineluctable bun with the side order of French fries. What I do object to is my having to put my life on hold until they get back from their gallivanting about. I see no particular reason why I should have to wait for the cows to come home to do anything I think necessary, nor do I ever remember voting on a proposition that gave cattle the right to be the final arbiter of what I do with my time. I’m sorry, I realize that this is very small-minded of me, but sometimes a person has to be small-minded. If you don’t look after your own interests, no one else will look after them. That’s just the way things are here in this our Great Republic.

NO, I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS: There’s been a good deal of talk these past few years about the genetic modification of various foodstuffs, especially those foodstuffs derived from plants. I suppose I should be worried about this; millions of other people are worried about genetic modification and who am I not to be worried when so many others are; but frankly, I’m not. No matter how much you genetically modify a vegetable, said vegetable will rarely do anything interesting beyond lying on a plate next to the meat. Even if you put ketchup on a genetically modified vegetable, the end result will not taste differently than a non-genetically modified vegetable with ketchup on it. It will taste like ketchup with something else in there somewhere. That is the whole point of ketchup in the first place—to render palatable that which is inherently unpalatable, like eggs or liver (ketchup only works with liver if you put lots, and I do mean lots, of the stuff on the liver. Liver is so inherently disgusting that you need large amounts of ketchup to keep you from gagging on it. I hear the Heinz Corporation’s Keg O’Ketchup works wonderfully in these situations, so you might want to try it, and no, this is not a paid advertisement, but if you work for Heinz and you like this bit of product placement, please feel free to send me a check; I’m saving up for a wildly expensive camera, or a new roof, whichever comes, or in the case of my current roof, goes first).

But the most intensive DNA manipulation you can imagine will not permit your zucchini to enliven your boring dinner party with scintillating conversation—what the zucchini thinks of the veal is always interesting, I think, as are his stories about what a trollop the veal’s mother was—nor will it permit your ears of corn to dance the more difficult parts of Le sacre du printemps backwards while discussing Proust’s use of the double narrator, much as you may want to. You may be able grow the rutabaga that crushed Pittsburgh, especially if you can find enough fertilizer, but other than that, genetically modified plants don’t do much of anything except be vegetables, which is something most vegetables, all teenagers, and the vast majority of civil servants can do without any genetic modification whatsoever.

Of course, genetic modification has been going on for quite a while. For all it may gall the Gallic sensitivities of French wine connoisseurs, their ancestors the Gauls didn’t drink the wine the French drink today; in the 19th century, after blight devastated most of the French vineyards, the French imported blight-resistant vines from California and grafted them onto the remaining good vines. So whether the French want to admit it or not, they’ve been drinking California wine for more than a century, a fact that goes a long way towards explaining why no one knows where Antoine de Saint-Exupery is these days (no, I have absolutely no clue what that means). Throughout history, people have done strange things to plants and animals in order to give them the traits that people find desirable. Chihuahuas, for example, sit in their teacups all day long and remember when they were wolves and know how the mighty are fallen, all because people chose to make them fit into teacups. If you have a Chihuahua, this goes a long way towards explaining their resentful attitude towards people (look, if you started off as a wolf, the mighty hunter of the forest, and wound up in a damn teacup pissing on yourself, you’d be pretty damn annoyed too).

The orange, to take another example, began life in Los Angeles, California, the only child of hardworking emigrants from Iowa (in those days, all native Californians came from Iowa) who had lost everything at the Battle of the Little Big Horn and went to California without looking under the couch for their lost stuff (always a big mistake). The orange was a bright young lad; he did well in school and played well with others, and eventually went on to University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in international relations and Freudian metempsychosis. After the war—do you really care which one? I didn’t think so—the orange fell under the influence and woke up as a potted plant, the result of a CIA thought control/genetic modification experiment, and from that day to this he has been a pillar of California’s economy, although he would rather play center field for the Dodgers. Well, we can’t have everything, I guess. Florida oranges are an entirely different species, or so people tell me, and have nothing to do with genetic modification, thought control, or the CIA, but that’s what they want you to think, isn’t it?