Man Martin's Blog, page 167

Great Ideas for April Fool's Pranks

I have some great ideas for April Fool's pranks, like ring Kim Jong-Un's doorbell and say, "We're the Navy Seals come to get you, sucker!"  April Fool!  The only problem is, I don't speak Korean, and I don't have a plane ticket.  And I don't think they'd let me into North Korea, and even if they did, I'd probably never get to rig Kim's doorbell.  I bet he's got like a zillion body guards.

Maybe you could go to the girl's dorm at Baylor and say, "We looked at the tape again - you won!"  April Fool!  Kind of mean, maybe, but it probably wouldn't work anyway.  I'd still need a plane ticket, and it'd be hard to shout loud enough to be heard by the whole team.  It wouldn't be funny if you told just one.  Telling say, Brittany Griner, just wouldn't be as funny.  You'd have to get the whole team.

Another one is to up to Antonin Scalia and say, "I think you have an incredibly sensuous mouth."  (This only works if you're a man.  If you're a woman say, "My brother thinks you have an incredibly sensuous mouth.")  April Fool!

How about this one, go up to Pope Francis and say, "Benedict wants his job back!"  April Fool!  Of course, you'd still need a plane ticket, and you'd have to speak Italian.  Oh, wait, Francis isn't Italian.  He's Latin American.  In that case, you'd have to speak Latin.

Another one is to go up to Oscar Pistorius and say, "Your shoelace is untied!"  April Fool!  That's kind of cruel, I guess, but he's probably been kidded about it his whole life, so he should be used to it by now.  Besides, he's been through a lot lately, and would probably appreciate a good joke to take his mind off things.

Coming Up on Mad Men Season 6

After a simmering confrontation with his wife, Megan (Jessica Pare) Don Draper (John Hamm) recommits himself to a monogamous family life.  Subsequently he has anonymous sex with a woman he picks up in a bar.  Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) approaches her cousin Jimmy, a cub reporter for the Daily Planet, about hiring his pal Superman to do a product endorsement for a new product, "Superglue."  Meanwhile Roger Sterling (John Slattery) smirkingly makes a biting but cynically true comment and pours a cocktail.

Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) while doing product-testing on a new product, "The Roach Motel," gets hopelessly trapped, and is unable to do more than wiggle his feet helplessly.  Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) turns a corner too rapidly and pokes out Bert Cooper's eye (Robert Morse).  Draper, the morning after a severe hangover, resolves once and for all "to give up the hootch."  Subsequently he pours a fifth of bourbon, a bottle of bitters, and fifteen marchino cherries into a flower pot, drinks the entire mess, and has sex with four anonymous women and one of their poodles whom he meets in a local bar.  Sterling cynically mixes himself a cocktail and makes a true but smirking comment as he bites something.

Salvatore "Sal" Romano (Bryan Batt), the art director who was written out of the script after the third season, reappears and brags loudly to anyone who will listen about his sexual conquests among Hollywood Starlets, stewardesses, and the sisters of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.  He then announces he's moving in with stand-up comedian Paul Lynde and a hot new entertainment sensation, Liberace.  Peter Campbell is charged with negligent homicide after hooking up his ailing mother-in-law's life-support machine to a brand-new new test-product, "the Clapper."  Draper's daughter, Sally Beth (Kiernan Shipka) tired of her weirdly dysfunctional mother and father, and hoping to get some normalcy in her life, changes her name to Wednesday and is adopted by Gomez and Morticia Addams.  Don swears that "so help me" he will never hurt another person so long as he lives, drinks a barrel of scotch, has sex with twenty anonymous women, and visits local schoolyards where he gives children free samples of a hot new product, "Crack Cocaine."  Meanwhile Roger Sterling, bites himself a cyniccal cocktail, smirks and says something true and pour.

Operating Manual for Your Body

Dear Mortal Being:
Congratulations on your acquisition of a human body!  The Powers That Be have spent billions of years crafting this out of the finest organic chemicals available, and with proper maintenance, this body may give you sensory experiences and "knowledge" for decades to come.

Warranties and Guarantees
You are guaranteed to live and die; other than that, there are no guarantees.

All human bodies arrive "as is" and are not warrantied against defective workmanship or accidental breakage.  This body is version 2.0, which Natural Selection has concluded is an improvement over homosapiens 1.0, or the neanderthal, which, while it had a bigger brain, reproduced more slowly and was incapable at laughing at fellow neanderthals for falling down or stepping in mastodon poop.  Nevertheless, many human bodies may contain genes giving a predisposition to Alzheimer disease, Hodgkins, Parkinsons, Lou Gehrig's Disease, Hungtingtons, osteoporosis, hydrocephaly, microcephaly, macrocephaly, spinal bifida, hypertension, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, dandruff, migraines, PMS, cancer, heart failure, diabetes, downs syndrome, male-pattern baldness, female-pattern baldness, hemophilia, sickle-cell anemia, lupus, brittle bones syndrome, agromegaly, buck teeth, crossbite, overbite, underbite, webbed toes, cystic fibrosis, muscular distrophy, fragile x syndrome, and Bloom Syndrome, among others.

Additionally, human bodies should avoid extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme wet, extreme dry, rain, snow, avalanches, meteors, volcanoes, earthquakes, fires, glaciers, white sharks, bears, microbes, fungi, pointed sticks, scissors, Bernie Madoff, alcohol, artificial sweeteners, petrochemicals, inert gasses, ert gasses, ticks, fleas, paper cuts, chainsaws, automatic weapons, refined sugar, tobacco, cocaine, methamphetamine, busy intersections, public toilets, dark alleys, oversleep, undersleep, malnutrition, contaminated water, mosquitoes, and warfare, among others.


Operating
Your human body is already loaded with a basic operating system that will take care of autonomic functions such as breathing and respiration for you, saving you trouble and worry.  (Unless you have infantile paralysis, polio, severe head trauma or other conditions which impede the operation of the autonomic nervous system, in which case, see "Warranties and Guarantees" above.)  Additionally, you have certain quasi-instinctual behaviors such as friendship and sexual attraction.  Some models may have conditions such as autism, aspergers syndrome, schizophrenia, among others which may make the formation of friendships particularly difficult, in which case, see note on Warranties and Guarantees.  Additionally, you may find yourself hopelessly attracted to sexual partners who are "out of your league," leading to rejection, loneliness, low self-esteem, and misery.  This is perfectly normal and is covered under Warranties and Guarantees.

Furthermore, your body will require regular feeding and watering.  There are a limited number of substances which can be used for this purpose.  Rocks, for example, should not be ingested.  Nor should hydrochloric acid, carbon monoxide, or carpet tacks.  There is no guarantee that your body will be placed in a habitat where food or clean water is available.  See Warranties and Guarantees.


Shutting Down
You need not worry about "turning off" your body.  When it is no longer functional, it will automatically shut down.  This is referred to as death.  Prior to death you may experience memory loss, loss of bowel and bladder control, loss of major muscle control, tremors, personality changes, physical pain, and depression.

These are normal occurrences and are covered under Warranties and Guarantees.


FAQS
Is anything certain besides death?
     See Warranties and Guarantees

Is there any purpose to life, am I here for a reason?
     No information available.

Is there is anything waiting for me after I die?
     No information available.

Does "no information available," mean there is information, but it's just not available to me because the Powers That Be are keeping it hidden for some reason, or does it mean the writers of this manual don't know the information, or that there is no information, that there are no answers, just a swirling chaos of particles that somehow have created life and consciousness? 
     No information available.

Good Friday

The Romans have no record of this crucifixion, but then they wouldn't have; there were lots of crucifixions, and you couldn't keep track of all of them.  There's no record in whatever Jewish documents remain either - no memo, say, from Caiphas to Herod: Get Jesus.  The only record comes from Jesus' followers and they didn't start talking publicly about it until Pentecost, fifty days after the event.  The first of the gospels, Mark, wasn't composed until about thirty years later.  Astonishingly, each successive gospel became more detailed: Matthew, written about fifteen years after Mark, goes into a lot of detail surrounding Jesus' birth that Mark seemed unaware of.  Luke recounts conversation on the cross.  And John, composed last of all, tells us Jesus existed since before the creation, a point you would think odd for the others to overlook.

And yet, this minor execution to which neither the Romans nor the Judeans paid much attention, and which is recorded with remarkable inconsistencies in the only records we have, mattered a great deal, and people who heard of it were profoundly affected.  In the end it didn't matter whether there were corroborating evidence or not, just as it doesn't even matter if Jesus were one man, or a composite figure made up of fifty would-be messiahs.  The simple story, a man executed for preaching the word of love, who with his dying words, asked mercy on his executioners: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."  Those words spoken from the cross compel all of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, to make a choice.  You will either believe that Jesus was another victim of this crappy world of bully versus bully and the biggest bully wins until lesser bullies gang up against him, or else you believe that Jesus won, that his love was the victory, even to love the bullies who killed him.  That you are presented with that choice, and that people of goodwill can choose to believe Jesus did not lose, but win, that the crucifixion was victory instead of defeat - is why the story matters, and why to this day the anniversary of the grisly and protracted death of a righteous man is still called Good Friday.

Rain

I used to think that the dullest thing in the world was the weather, and as far as discussing the weather, that was something for old fogies, and even the oldest and fogiest ones at that.

Now, however, as I approach middle age (and if I'm middle-aged now, I should expect to live to 106) I realize the weather is gosh-darn fascinating.  I live in Atlanta, where, thank goodness, the weather isn't quite so fascinating as it is elsewhere, what with their blizzards, floods, typhoons, and tsunamis - I don't think I could stand living anywhere quite that fascinating - but the weather right here at home is plenty interesting enough, I can tell you, especially in the glorious month of February.  Why, once every four years we add an extra day because we just can't get enough of it.

For example, we have rain.  Then we also have drizzle.  Sometimes it's merely cloudy and other times there's fog.  This may sound like a limited variety, but the combinations dear Mother Nature achieves with it are seemingly infinite.  It might rain in the morning and drizzle in the afternoon, but sometimes it's the other way around!  And then, it might be cloudy and you'll be on the edge of your seat wondering if it's going to drizzle or rain.  Or it might be foggy.  Once it was foggy and drizzling at the same time!  It's cuckoo-crazy, I tell you.

That's all Nancy and I talk about.  When we first met, we talked about going places and doing things, then we talked about how to pay off all the bills for those places and things we'd seen and done, then we talked about babies, the kids, then we talked about money some more, then we talked about teenagers, and we talked about money, then our teenagers talked about money, then we started talking about weddings, and we talked about money, then we talked about money some more, but now we mostly talk about weather, and we've never been happier.

When the evening news comes on, I'll watch with half an eye about NASCAR crashes and the Oscars and how America has gone straight off a Fiscal Cliff, hit bottom, and bounced, but when the weather comes on, I drop whatever I'm doing and stand in front of the TV like the dog in that old "His Master's Voice" Victrola ad.  And those weathermen tease you, too.  They know what they're up to.  They'll say, "Five day forecast coming right up after these twenty commercials and a boring old story about leukemia research."  And you'll be on tenterhooks wondering, "Will it be rain?  Will it be drizzle?"

When I die - if I ever do, I'm so busy I may never get around to it - at the approximate age of 107, I hope heaven will have a climate like here in Atlanta.  In pictures I've seen of the place, everyone's always standing around on clouds and it seems to be sunny all the time.  But I hope it rains at least once in a while.  Just to keep things interesting.

This originally appeared in The Brookhaven Neighbor

Spring Planting

Nancy and I started putting in our garden; this involved a considerable amount of effort.  This year, instead of renting a roto-tiller, we spade-turned the soil.  This means between our two beds, we turned over approximately 450 square feet of dirt.  Also, this year Nancy wanted to try making "mounds" because she'd seen this done at the Botanical Gardens.  So we also made mounds.  Lordy, my shovel muscles are tired.
I'm not complaining actually, I'm bragging.  The truth is, I love digging and hoeing.  I've been gardening, man and boy, since I was about twelve.  I'm fifty-three now.  You do the math.  I've never gotten appreciably better at it, but I do love it so.  I also love watching my beautiful wife, wielding a shovel.  All my atavistic farming instincts come rushing back, and I'll admit our mounds look pretty official.  I'm not sure they'll make any difference, but they look like we know what we're doing.

We let the chickens roam the furrows hunting worms, and they had a high old time of it.  It's sort of a last hurrah for them.  This is the last time we'll let them out of the coop for a while, until our plants get their growth.

I'm just a plain cornball sucker for the cycle of seasons.  I love the movement of winter into spring.  Dependably, it always makes me think of my own mortality.  When I was twenty, my mother taught me this poem by A E Housman:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with blosoms long the bough,
And all along the woodland ride
Is dressed in white for Eastertide.
Now of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again.
Take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom,
Fifty years is little room,
Through the woodland I will go,
To see the cherry hung with snow.

I haven't been twenty for a long time, and the number of my remaining springs has dwindled considerably.  Literature really teaches only one lesson, but it teaches it over and over again, "You will die, you will die, you will die."  In The Peloponesian Wars, Xerxes remarks that of all his soldiers, his whole vast army, not one of them will be alive in a hundred years.  I'll admit, that's about as far as I got in Thucydides' history, because I figured once I read that, I knew everything I needed to know.

Admittedly, knowing you will die isn't that big a secret, and it doesn't come in as handy as, say, the Pythagorean theorem, but at least it helps you avoid the more obvious life-wasting pitfalls so many fall into.  For instance, I know better than to let a spring pass without glorying in it, turning over the earth, watching my beautiful wife, and hearing the birds sing.

Here's my version of Housman:

Of my three score years and ten,
Fifty three will not come again.
Take from seventy springs fifty-three,
Seventeen springs are left to me.
And since to look at things in bloom,
Seventeen is little room,
To the garden I am bound,
To see the soil ranged in mounds.

Why should YOU replace Jay Leno

Another contender.

Leisure Time

This treadmill does not represent an actual treadmill.
It is a metaphor.Remember those words?

Does anyone use the word leisure any more?  Has the word left our vocabulary?

I woke up this morning asking myself if the weekend were well spent, and mentally I ticked off a list of things accomplished and errands run.  Did I spend any time just goofing off?  Even when I was watching tv, I had a computer in my lap checking emails.  I did take a nap, but that doesn't really count.  If you spend the afternoon turning the garden with a shovel, napping isn't goofing off, it's just inevitable.

What has happened to the fine old American pastime of doing nothing whatsoever?  On the Andy Griffith show they used to spend a lot of time sitting on the porch strumming guitars and saying hi to passing neighbors.  Now if they filmed that same scene, all the neighbors would be power-walking while they searched for sushi recipes on their smartphones or listened to How to Make Money on Foreclosures podcasts on their ipods.  I bet Barney would be one of those people who keeps a bluetooth in his ear.
I'm not complaining; I'm just pointing out that leisure, which used to be time off, has now turned into time on, just doing something else.  Even my recreation is targeted to keep me in shape.  It's just another task; the fact that I enjoy it isn't the point - if I didn't have that to do, I'd have to find something else to do instead.

We're in such horror of momentary boredom, we not only task, we multitask, even on - especially on - our time off.  Again, I'm not complaining.  No one made us live this way, we chose it.  We must like it.

But this morning it occurs to me, that just maybe, if we forced ourselves to stop once in a while - got off our treadmill lives of ant-like busyness interspersed with periods of unconciousness - if we, for example, sat on lawn chairs and greeted the neighbors, and if the neighbors were too busy for greeting, watched the birds - that if we did that, ie nothing, we might perceive a distant voice speaking to us, speaking silently but earnestly, the way if you hold a conch shell to your ear you hear the sea, but only if you take out your earphone first.  Sometimes I'm certain we'd hear the voice, and sometimes, I think the reason for our frantic activity is we don't want to hear the voice, and sometimes, sometimes on a quiet morning, in between keystrokes of my daily blog, I can almost hear the voice myself.

I wonder what it's saying.

Searching for Jay Leno's Replacement

Step aside Jimmy Fallon.  A contender.

Adventure By the Interstate

Here's an adventure I and a friend of mine, Chrishele Hruska, had last Thursday.  I didn't write about it earlier because I wasn't sure what to make of the experience.

It starts by Nancy informing me the fuel gauge on my Camry was broken.  She'd filled up the tank, but it was already registering "E."  So Thursday morning I drive to work with my carpool buddy Chrishele, explaining to her not to be concerned by the little fuel warning light, that it was a mere mechanical difficulty.  Then after a busy day of molding the little minds of today to be the moldy minds of tomorrow, we drove home.

Here began, as Shakespeare puts it, a tale, the lightest word of which would harrow up thy soul.

We were about halfway home when the car gave that tale-tell shudder that says it's down to its last fume.  I got off on the exit, and waiting for the light to change, we saw a bearded panhandler.  We debated whether or not this were a mere homeless man or Jesus Christ and decided it was probably Jesus, and in any case, we didn't want to chance it.  (Jesus, in case you didn't know, pulls this sort of stunt all the time - showing up on earth as a vagrant and seeing how you'll treat him.  I guess he has a lot of free time on his hands since the Resurrection and all.)  So we give him a couple of bucks, and when the light changed, I turned the key - the car had briefly conked out - convinced that after this good deed, karma would see to it the car would start.

But karma did no such thing.

Stupid karma.

So Chrishele, the man who might have been Jesus, and I pushed the car out of traffic, and Chrishele and I walked to a nearby gas station.  I will say this, and this will be a recurring theme in this story; I was embarrassed by the situation and anxious about having put my friend in a dangerous situation.  I don't want you to think people were shooting assault weapons at each other from the windows of primer-colored vans, but the fact remains, we'd abandoned my car on an off-ramp and were walking the weedy verge of a moderately busy road during rush hour.  Moreover, it was late, and Chrishele, quite reasonably, wanted to be home not out here amid exhaust fumes, weeds, and litter.  But here's the thing.  She was so completely game about it, laughing and joking, where someone else would have been pissed off and upset.  For all the world you would have thought that instead of a dratted inconvenience, we were sharing a jolly little adventure.  Which in a sense, I guess we were.

At the gas station we asked where the gas cans were, and being directed to them, found only an empty shelf.  Well, the shelf wasn't strictly empty: there were jugs of motor oil and antifreeze, but the spot where the gas cans should have been, was signified by an empty gas-can shaped space.  So we walked to the next gas station which did have gas cans.  While standing in line to pay for it, a kindly man let us cut in front of him.  He deduced two people do not visit a Citgo to pick up gas cans on a whim, especially during rush hour.  Gas cans are not impulse purchases like beef jerky but something you buy in a crisis.  We filled up the gas can and walked back to the car.

To this day, I am not certain if the gas can were defective, missing a part, or Chrishele and I, two college-educated professional pedagogues, were too bone-headed to figure how to work it.  Perhaps Chrishele knew full well how to work it, but stayed mum to spare my tender masculine pride.  In any case, we could not attach the nozzle to the can.  I know what you're thinking: you're envisioning the way your gas can works and thinking what a knucklehead I am not to figure it out, but I can only assure you this can did not work like yours.  Unwilling to walk back to the gas station and ask for a replacement, Chrishele and I ended by holding the nozzle in the gas tank and pouring gas from the can into it.  Having gotten about fifty percent of the gas into the tank, twenty-five percent on the ground, and the remaining twenty-five percent on our hands, giving us that je ne sais quois that only the aroma of petrol can give, we decided to fire up the engine again.
Here I will return again to my theme.  Throughout this ordeal, including the dousing of her hands with cold gasoline, Chrishele remained absolutely cheerful and encouraging.  The phrase "positive attitude" does not begin to cover it.  There was something inspiring about the way she encountered one damn setback after another with a smile and a laugh.

To make a long story no longer than strictly necessary, we drove to the gas station, added a few more gallons to the tank, and got safely home.  On the way, the needle edged back to "E" confirming there was a leak in the fuel line somewhere.  As I write this, the Camry is at our mechanic's awaiting repair.

So here's the thing.  I'm convinced this whole anecdote is meaningful, but not in any clear way I can put my finger on.  I'm absolutely certain the homeless guy was Jesus - he wasn't there when we returned with the can - but I don't quite get why he merely helped us push the car out of the way instead of just seeing to it the tank had enough fumes to get us to the gas station, something he could have easily done, just as he could have filled it with wine or fish or loaves of bread if he'd chosen.  Clearly the rascal had something else in mind, but what?  I think it had something to do with the man who let us cut in front of him at the Citgo - and in fact, I half suspect he and the homeless guy were the same person - and that it has something to do with Chrishele's wonderful and gracious reaction to every incident along the way.

Every once in a while, I get a glimmer of what the whole thing signifies, but I haven't quite got a handle on it.

I'm still working it out.