Man Martin's Blog, page 166

Imagining

If you visited this blog hoping for my usual silliness, I'm sorry to disappoint.

This morning Nancy and I are driving to Macon to visit her parents: her mother who has Alzheimers, and her father who is living with someone who has Alzheimers.  Every so often, there's more news, and it's never good.

Nancy's mom is suffering from a delusion that dad is having an affair with a neighbor.  She spent all last week in a rage, never giving poor dad a break, and frightening him to the extent he called Nancy's brother and sister.  Dad is frail, and there's a very real chance Mom will do him physical harm.  The doctor upped Mom's dosage of Seroquil, and for the time being that seems to be working, bearing in mind, nothing in Alzheimers is permanent except the Alzheimers itself.
I believe the wellspring of Mom's delusional fury, and the fury of many of her fellow Alzheimers victims, is the inarticulate conviction she has been cheated out of something, which is perhaps not far wrong.  Old age, even without Alzheimers, is a terrible cheat and robs piecemeal.  Who can watch its ravages and not feel angry?

In an interview on NPR, Nora Ephron spoke of the experience growing old, "You think for quite a while you're going to be the only person who doesn't need reading glasses, or the only person who doesn't go through menopause... and in the end, the only person who isn't going to die.  And then you suddenly are faced with whichover of those things it is, and you can't believe how unimaginative you have been about what it actually consists of."

You can hope for the sudden death that takes you out of the world unaware - the  massive heart attack, the unexpected fatal stroke.  But the odds of that good fortune are small.  No matter how pleasant the broad middle plain of life is, the ending is usually nasty and harsh.  I can only imagine two ways not to feel bitter as it approaches, not to feel cheated: one is to believe firmly that there is something better waiting beyond death.  Frankly, I cannot see a justification for such a belief, but I may see things very differently when I face the black abyss myself.  The other is to live life so well, that there is nothing to regret, and you can hand over the joys of life with as little qualm as going to sleep after a full day.  This seems more doable, but is a high hurdle nevertheless.  How many people live such lives?  How many chase one phantom or another, trying to forget they will ever die?

The thing to do in the meantime, I believe, and to start doing now, whatever age you are, is to begin imagining the end.  Imagine that you will be old, that you will be faced with physical and mental debility.  Imagine that you will worsen and die.  Imagine it every day until you know it is true.

Interpol on Trail of Nutella Thieves

BERLIN - Police said Monday an unknown number of culprits made off with 5 metric tons (5.5 tons) of Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread from a parked trailer in the central German town of Bad Hersfeld over the weekend.  The loot is worth an estimated 16,000 euros ($20,710). Germans news agency dpa reported that thieves have previously stolen a load of energy drinks from the same location. - Associated Press

Naturally as soon as the crime was discovered, Interpol called me.  This was about 6:00 AM German time, or 12:00 noon our time, or about 12:15 by the clock in the living room.  The cell phone rang, and as soon as I could find it and answer it, they filled me in on the whole caper.
I knew it was bad.  Real bad.
Nutella is the key to the whole European economy; not being advanced like we are over here, they send their kids to school with Nutella sandwiches instead of peanut butter and jelly.  Nutella, in case you never heard of it, is basically peanut butter for people who don't know any better; it's made of hazelnuts which is kind of a snooty peanut substitute and chocolate because basically who's going to eat hazelnut butter?  In any case, without Nutella, the whole shabby edifice known as the so-called European civilization crumbles like a stack of saltines.
The more I heard about this heist the more I liked it less.  Turns out that earlier in the week the crooks swiped a whole truckload of Red Bull energy drinks from the same location.  This means whoever's behind this, they're caffeinated, and on top of that they drink Red Bull with Nutella, which also means they're crazy.  I didn't want to be too harsh, but I was bound to wonder why anyone would leave a trailer of valuable comestibles untended in a town called Bad Hersfeld in the first place.  I mean it wasn't Good Hersfeld or even In-Between Hersfeld, but Bad Hersfeld.  That's like handing your money over to Bernie Madoff or dating Taylor Swift.  You're pretty much asking for it.
I'm pretty sure the mastermind of the whole thing is Sheik Mocha Fashizzel, the ruthless Middle Eastern sandwich dealer.  Last year, you may recall, Fashizzel took responsibility for the theft of two tons of bacon, and the armed robbery of four hundred Better Boy tomatoes and two hundred heads of lettuce, along with an additional ton of white bread.  He was foiled when his operatives were taken captive in an unsuccessful raid of a mayonnaise warehouse.
When they bring in suspects for questioning, they should look for anyone unable to answer clearly until he's had a glass of milk.  That person will lead them straight to Fashizzel.

Another Reason I Never Made it as a Cartoonist

Hare Transplant

It Ain't the Things You Don't Know

"It ain't the things you don't know that get you in trouble," Mark Twain said.  "It's the things you do know that just ain't so."

Lord, at least I think Mark Twain said that.

My mother Mur had a ready answer for any question you could ask, and suffered no reluctance if she herself did not know the answer.  For instance, once we were driving through the rain down to Florida, and my sister asked if it would be raining when we got there.  Mother replied confidently it would not, because she had seen "the rainbirds flying south."  Chris was fascinated and spent the next ten or fifteen highway miles staring out the window asking where the rainbirds were, what they looked like, and other meteorological/ornithological matters.  Finally Mother admitted that she hadn't seen any rainbirds, that there were no rainbirds, that she'd made the whole thing up so we'd stop talking about the rain, and that she had no idea if it'd be raining when we got there, but it didn't do any good to fret about it.

Other times Mur would tell us little-known facts that turned out later no to be facts at all.  Every once in a while, I will trot one of these out in conversation - such as the startling news that LBJ was the first southern president since reconstruction or that the panda is not a true bear at all, but is more closely related to a raccoon - and it will explode in my face like a trick cigar.  Nor were her children the only ones to drink from her font of knowledge.  A friend once asked her the purpose of a mysterious-looking truck, and Mur informed her it was a truck specially designed for carrying commodes without chipping the porcelain.  The friend passed this tidbit to her husband who hotly told her they were not trucks for hauling toilets but pulpwood, that he had worked at a pulpwood plant for years and seen such trucks in this service.  Mur's friend, however, staunchly defended Mur's version of reality, and it was only by going back to the horse's mouth, as it were, and getting the horse to shame-facedly confess she really had no idea what the trucks were for, and that she had merely made an educated if somewhat far-fetched guess when she said they had to do with toilets.

This condition I believe is traceable at least as far back as my maternal grandfather, Boss.  Mur's brother Charley, working on a homework assignment, asked Boss whom Shakespeare had married.  Boss without hesitation replied he'd married a Swede, sending my innocent Uncle Charles off to school the next day armed with this piece of weird misinformation to share with his astonished teacher who was expecting the answer Ann Hathaway.

Now I find the misinformation gene has been passed to me.  One day my carpool buddy asked what it is called when the first part of one word is made from the overlapping letters from the previous word, as in a billboard advertising a hospital's emergency services, "Get Help SoonER."  (See, ER is made from the last part of "sooner."  There's better examples, but I can't think of any.)  I happily informed her this was known as "cannibalism," something I swear I learned from my buddies James Iredell and Mike Dockins.  (Back me up on this, guys.)  However, Ms Hruska checking her iPhone could discover no definition for cannibalism unrelated to eating human flesh, and when I got home, I confirmed the same thing.

Then, just another day, we were talking about language, and how odd the whole concept was that our minds convert dots of ink on a page or a computer screen into sounds and that these sounds have meanings.  Apropos of that, I told her that the Mandarin symbol for "trouble" was a man and a woman in a house.  She whipped out her iPhone and as perspiration beaded my brow, searched for the Chinese ideogram for "trouble."  She came up with nothing.  Finally, though, she discovered that the ideogram for "misery" is two women together, which as far as I'm concerned is close enough.  So I dodged a bullet that time.

Meanwhile, I'm stilling waiting for Jamie or Mike to confirm cannibalism means what I think it does.  And while I wait, here's a brand new ideogram signifying "humiliation."

It's me with my fat mouth open.

Entertainment Wrap-Up with Kim Jong-Un

Hot AMW (Actress, Model, Whatever) Lindsay Lohan is back on the market after breaking up with so-called rocker Avi Snow.  (What kind of rocker doesn't do drugs?  I've seen Weebles who were bigger rockers.)  Lindsay sure keeps us guessing; she tweeted she was pregnant on April 1.  Ver-ee funn-ee, Lindsay.  Just for that, I'm stationing 4,000 troops outside your Manhattan Apartment...Renaissance woman Kim Kardashian has finally given up Slut-Couture to wear some appropriate maternity clothes.  It's about time, bee-yotch, you're only six months pregnant.  As a reward, I'm taking my 250-man Kardashian Strike-Force Team off full alert... Painfully shy prepubescent pop-icon Justin Bieber strolled shirtless through a Lodz airport, his sagging pants displaying about three inches of whitey-tighty.  (Note to Justin: check calendar.  That look is over.)  That didn't stop Polish fans from turning out in the thousands to see him.  Justin, as a gift from yours truly, there'll be a Cougar waiting in your hotel room.  Not a sexually aggressive older woman, an actual Cougar.  And as far as Poland, two words: Ka-Boom... Now that hillbilly hottie and ironically-named Taylor Swift has broken up with most recent beau, ironically named Harry Styles, rumor has it she has her eye on a certain fella "with a body like the Pillsbury Doughboy" who "knows how to use his nuclear warhead."  Just be careful, Taylor, don't play with matches unless you want to get burned...  That's all for now.  Ta-ta from Pyongyang.

Consider the Gray Whale

Melville spends an entire chapter of Moby Dick on the
difficulty of drawing a whale.
It's really not that hard.The Gray Whale, as any child can tell you, is a baleen whale.  They were once known as "devil fish" because when humans hunted them, they would fight back, which is sort of a double standard.  It is unknown what the Gray Whales called the humans.

Somewhere about fifty million years ago, some Pakistani Pakecetids decided to spend more time in the water.  They'd been hunting around fresh steams and floodplains, nabbing other smaller animals when they came to get a drink, and they collectively decided, "Let's just go for it."  This meant getting rid of their hooves, which weren't much use for swimming, but they probably figured if the whole aquatic thing didn't work out, they could always turn back.  They were only fooling themselves.

It only took another few million years for the nasal hole to move to the tip of the snout where it would later become a blow hole.  But the big deal was something you couldn't see.  The semicircular canals inside the ear had shrunk to vestigal organs.  This meant these proto-whales, which by this point were calling themselves Remingtonocetids, had passed the point of no return.  If they'd gone up on land, they'd just keep falling over.  No one can survive that way unless you're at a cocktail party where everyone else is doing the same thing.

Around the Miocene, the baleen whales appeared, one of which is the Gray Whale.  Remember?

Anyway, right along with the whales some other animals were doing some evolving too, specifically barnacles.  We don't know as much as barnacle evolution because of natural selection; it's all determined by who gets the opportunity to reproduce.  If you're at a party and tell a pretty girl, "I study whales," you have a much better chance of scoring than if you say, "I study barnacles."  Over time whale scientists reproduce more effectively than barnacle scientists, ensuring their survival.

In any case, it turns out somewhere along the way specific barnacles have evolved to live on the skin of Gray Whales and other baleens.  As soon as a baby whale is calved, a few little barnacle emissaries float off Mamma - in the larval stage barnacles are highly mobile - and latch onto baby.  Once they find a good spot, the barnacles create tube-shaped cavities in their shells that dig into the growing whale skin.  This sounds pretty gruesome to us, but to a Mamma barnacle, it's adorable.  By the time the whale is full grown, it can have 1,000 pounds of barnacles on its back.

Whale tourists think certain whales are friendly, because they'll come up for a "back rub."  In reality they're trying to relieve an itch that they have no other way to reach.  Everyone makes a big deal about how far the whales migrate - between 16,000 and 22,000 kilometers each year - but that's not nearly as impressive as it sounds.  They're whales.  What have they go to do but swim.  What impresses me is the barnacles.  A whale can live up to seventy-five years.  Think of that.  Seventy five years enduring a constant, maddening, unreachable itch.

Some people like to go around saying how wonderful creation is, and the beauty and wisdom of divine providence, etcetera, and how God has his eye on the sparrow and so forth.  God may have had his eye on the sparrow, but evidently he was looking the other way when that first Pakecetids decided to start spending more time in the water.  Someone should have warned them what lay in store for their descendants.

That's the thing about choices.  You're dipping your toes in the water, thinking how pleasant it looks deeper out, and how much opportunity and krill there might be; you don't find out about the barnacles until you've given up your toes and your semicircular canals and it's too late.

Atlanta Memories

I can remember when there used to be a dairy farm right outside the 285 Loop; in fact, where Perimeter Mall is right now, there was a big old field with cattle grazing in it.  People thought you had to be crazy to put up a mall there, but it just goes to show.  Of course, in those days, 285 wasn't finished yet.  We just called it 28.

When we first moved here, my wife worked in a building called Tower Place.  It was the tallest building on that part of Peachtree because it was three stories.  Now, of course, it's dwarfed by buildings all around it, and they don't call it "Tower Place" anymore but "Waffle House."

When the Hotel Niko went up next door, people thought you had to be crazy to put a hotel there, what with the chickens and all.  (There used to be a poultry processing plant next door, and people said you had to be crazy to process chickens on Peachtree because it was so far away from everything, you had to drive all day just to get there.)  I ran across Mr. and Mrs. Niko themselves once.  I was running the Peachtree Roadrace - these days it's a big deal, but back then there was hardly anybody running it.  My number was "2."  They thought you had to be crazy to have a road race down Peachtree in those days, what with having to climb over the barbwire when you came to Johnson's farm and jump over the creek that used to run down West Paces Ferry.

I met Mr. and Mrs. Paces themselves once at a Braves game.  Hardly anybody showed up for the games in those days, and in fact, me and West had to take turns playing outfield because they didn't have enough players.  I told West to his face he had to be crazy putting up a ferry across the Chattahoochee, which in those days wasn't more than a trickle, especially since the steam engine hadn't been invented yet, but West just shrugged.  I guess it just goes to show.

After the game (I scored a double in the third inning.  In those days, people thought you have to be crazy to have three innings, it wasn't til later they added a fourth.) the Paces took us to the Sundial, the fancy rotating restaurant downtown that looks like a blue flying saucer landed on a grain elevator.  What most people don't know is it really was a grain elevator, and people said you had to be crazy to stick a grain elevator out in the middle of nowhere that way, and double crazy to stick a rotating restaurant on top of that, but I guess it just goes to show.  Now, of course, the Sundial doesn't seem as tall as it used to, and now it's not a restaurant anymore but a Jiffy Lube, but in those days you could see all the way from the Sundial to the Pacific Ocean, and everyone said you had to be crazy to put an ocean all the way over there where no one would be able to reach it, and you could also see Six Flags, which in those days of course, was just Flag, and people wondered what they had to be thinking to put a flag out there when no one was going to see it unless they were in the Sundial, which you'd have to be crazy to go to in the first place, except for the fact it got you so high above the street and all the noise from the goat farm.

I guess it goes to show.

Instructions for Filling Out Your 1040 WTF

Welcome to Typhon-Tax Software Program!  Simply answer a few questions and we'll prepare your State and Federal Income Tax Forms for you!  Let's get started, shall we?

1. Write your total income from 2012.

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2. Ouch. How many deductions are you claiming?

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3. Seriously, how many deductions are you claiming?

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4. You cannot claim a basset hound as a dependent.

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5. That's better.  Now how much money was withheld for federal and state taxes?

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6. As much as that?  Jeez, they really take a bite, don't we?  Are you a veteran, legally blind, or
did you operate a operate a soybean thresher in 2012?

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7.  No, huh?  That's too bad.  The government doles out mucho big tax breaks to soybean thresher operators.  Are you married or single?

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8. If you are married, are you married filing jointly, married filing separately, married filing for divorce but not telling anybody yet because you don't want people all up in your business?

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9. Are you gay?  I don't care personally, but the IRS is kind of iffy right now about same-sex couples filing jointly.

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10. Did you use a water filter this year?  If so, you may be eligible for a Pure-Water Tax Credit.  Add up your annual water bill, divide by the number of faucets, spigots, and toilets in your house.  Now multiply by the original cost of the water filter(s).

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11.  Ha ha.  Just kidding.  There's no such thing as a Pure-Water Tax Credit.

12. You really should consider getting a soybean thresher; it could save you a lot of money.  Did you receive any inheritances in 2012?

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13.  What about from Aunt Millie?  You were always talking about how much loot she had.

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14. No, that's a shame.  Your so-called relatives really screwed you on that one, didn't they?  Did you earn any money from your investments?

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15. Ha-ha-ha-ha.  Is that all?  Jesus, don't even bother reporting it.  Seriously, you'll just embarrass yourself.

16. Look, let's save everyone a whole bunch of trouble.  Just give the IRS access to your bank accounts and they'll take out as much as we need, and if there's extra, they'll send it right back.

17. Seriously, next year look into getting a soybean thresher.

God Explains Ban on Miracles

On Monday's episode of the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club," a viewer wrote in and asked why miracles -- "like people being raised from the dead, blind eyes opened, lame people walking" -- often happen overseas and not in the United States, RawStory notes. Robertson was quick to respond that the teaching of evolution in America might be partly to blame. "Those people overseas didn't go to Ivy League schools," he said. "We're so sophisticated. We think we've got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real. We know about all this stuff." -  Cavan Sieczkowski,  Huffington PostMy buddy Pat got it exactly right; the reason you Americans don't get more miracles is you've gotten too darn sophisticated for your own good.  An angel shows up in Peru, and everyone says "It's a miracle, a sign from God!"  Send that same angel to Massachusetts, and people say, "I bet that angel descended from an angel monkey billions of years ago."  Spoils the whole thing.And when I do a miracle, you guys just make fun of it.  Remember that tree back in New York that looked like the Virgin Mary?  Authentic miracle and you guys just made a joke of it.  Oh sure, lots of people showed up to take a look, but mostly everyone just laughed.  "I got a potato that looks like St Augustine!"  "I got a chicken that looks like St Claire!"  "I got a cucumber that looks like St Jerome!"  Well, real funny, yeah.  You try pulling a miracle and then have everyone make fun.  See how you like it.The truth is, I save the really good miracles for people who don't know any better.  Remember the Red Sea?  Pretty flashy, right?  Part of the secret was those Israelites were dee-you-em dumb.  I don't blame them, Egyptian public schools in those days were a joke, but they were stupid!  You'd have to be to get lost in the dessert for forty years.  I mean, I know there wasn't GPS, but forty years?!And as far as Jesus goes...  Well, I don't want to talk bad about the disciples, but you'll notice he didn't exactly put any brain surgeons or rocket scientists on his team.  Mostly fishermen, right?  You don't need a GED to catch fish, and they weren't even good at that.  Go back and read the Gospels, it's all in there.  And as far as all those people he cured, well, the Roman public schools weren't much better than the Egyptian ones, I can tell you.  They were using Roman Numerals for Pete's sake!  You ever try learning long division with Roman numerals?And between you and me, some of those miracles weren't miracle-miracles, if you catch my drift.  I mean, they were miracles, all right, but not quite as impressive as people let on.  For example, some of those blind people he cured weren't exactly blind, just extremely visually impaired.  I mean, legally they were blind, but they could see a little bit, so Jesus had a head start.  And that whole feeding the multitude business, what they don't tell you is Jesus told the disciples to slice the bread real thin and thrown in a whole bunch of Fish-Helper.But the main thing is He didn't waste his best miracles on the sharpest crayons in the box.  Take the lepers.  Ever wonder why he cured so many lepers?  Well, if you were really bright, you wouldn't be a leper in the first place.  You'd be asthmatic or something.Anyway, if you want to know why you haven't seen more miracles lately, that's the reason.  I'm not saying you have to be an idiot if you want a miracle.  But it helps.

When I Was a Bad Boy

I used to have crazy sex appeal.  No really.  I had to beat the women off with a stick.  A woman would say to her girlfriend, "Who's that cute guy over there with the stick?"  And her friend would say, "I don't know.  Let's check him out."

My secret?  I was a "bad boy," and we all know, the chicks are crazy about bad boys.

For example, one of my bad boy tricks was drinking coffee in the car, and you're probably thinking, "What's so bad about that?"  But wait - what I'd do is spill the coffee in the console, and I wouldn't wipe it up.  Or I would wipe it up, but not very effectively, like with some Taco Veloz napkins or something.  (Another thing the babes dig is a guy who eats a lot of fast food and leaves the trash in his car.)  So anyway, the spilled coffee would just congeal into a gummy mess, like a little La Brea Tar Pit.  That little stunt worked great for me, I can tell you.  Uma Thurman would accidentally get her fingers in it and go, "Yuck!  You are dis-gus-ting!"  And then she'd go all quivery.  Magic.

Another of my tricks had to do with Oreo cookies.  You can do it with almost anything good to eat, but Oreo cookies work best.  First you wait until the woman buys some Oreos - you can't buy them yourself or it doesn't count.  Then, you eat all the cookies except the last two.  It's like you're saving the last two for her or something, like you expect her to be grateful you're not such a pig you ate the entire bag.  Michelle Pfieffer hated it when I'd do that.  Hated it and loved it, if you know what I mean.  She'd be on the phone crying to her friend Susan Sarandon about how I'd eaten all but the last two cookies again, but next thing you know, she'd be all snuggled up to me.  The bad boy allure worked again.  And then the next time we were out to dinner with our friends, Susan'd be giving me the eye like, "What's he got that's so special," like she wanted to give the old Man-o-Lovin' a whirl herself.

I remember what used to drive Nicole Kidman wild was something I did after taking a shower.  I wouldn't dry off.  Simple, right?  Simple but effective.  I'd track water everywhere, especially on the hardwood.  I've got a fair amount of body hair - I'm no grizzly bear, but I'm moderately hairy - and it's surprising how much water will stay on me until I'm walking over an expensive hardwood floor.  Nicole hated it, I tell you, but it kept drawing her in against her will.  It was irresistible.  Finally she left me for Tom Cruise so she could "get some sanity" in her life.

Anyway, I know what all you ladies out there in blog-land are thinking, but it's too late.  I'm off the market.  I still get up to my bad boy tricks, just to keep the ol' magic alive.  And they still work, too.  They drive Nancy crazy.  Just ask her.