Man Martin's Blog, page 168

Can You Say No?

There are a number of illnesses that cause the victim to be incapable of saying, "No."  In a typical or mild case, someone is discussing movies, tv shows, bands, or books with his friends (I know no one ever discusses books these days, but bear with me) and someone will say, "Have you seen/heard/read Such and Such?"  A simple, straight-forward question, you would think, to which the answer happens to be "No," and yet, due to some neural kink brought about by the unfortunate's condition, he is unable to utter this syllable and instead says, "I've heard of it."  Not only has he not heard of it, he is puzzled why anyone would name a book, band, or tv show Such and Such.  The question would evoke the same response if the name were So and So.

In more extreme cases, the diseased person is unable to say "no" even in the most dire of circumstances.  Let us suppose he is a married man, and lives in - oh, we'll make up a mythical city - Brookhaven, Georgia, and his wife poses a perfectly frank query such as does he think it's a good idea to knock out the walls, install roof-beams, and turn the chimney forty-five degrees to the right so it will face the entertainment center.  Instantly images of fat fistfuls of cash flushing down the toilet appear in his mind, coupled with tableaux of fat contractors with greasy butt cracks applying jackhammers to brick and mortar, filling the house with migraine-inducing racket and clouds of dust.  Evolution has spent billions of years equipping us to say "no" in such situations.  Ask a typical marmoset or weasel this question, and he'll say "no" in a hot second, and yet this human, equipped with a so-called rational mind and a thorough command of the English language, will only be able to mutter, "Hmm, well, it's an interesting idea.  Let me think about it."

The victim of this debilitating condition is actually not in control of his own vocal cords.  He has the distinct intention of saying no, and instead comes out with, "I'll get back to you on that," or "Let me think about it," or even, "Maybe."  No medical treatments exist as yet, besides which, sufferers who seek medical help thwart effective diagnosis by the very nature of their condition.  A doctor will ask, "Have you been exercising - cutting back on your drinking - eating less red meat - like I told you?" and the patient will respond without hesitation.

"Yep."

Consider the Dodo

My version of the Dodo.
My guess is as good as anyone's.Ah, the Dodo.  The poster child for extinction.

A large flightless bird of the Mauritius island, the dodo lived happily without ever having encountered humans in any significant numbers.  That was its whole problem.  Sailors in the 1600's, the Golden Age of Exploration, were charmed by these large flightless friendly birds.  An early document records, "...their food was fruit, they were not well-feathered but abundantly covered with fat, a few were brought onboard to the delight of us all."  Evidently they tasted a lot like chicken.  (They were also called "Red Hens" and "Red Rails.")  The birds were so tame-acting Dutch sailors named them "doudos," which means "fool" or "simpleton." This is like naming an animal "Sucker!"  Humans have a natural and understandable contempt for any animal that would trust them.

The dodos began disappearing pretty darn rapidly and excitement grew that mankind was on the brink of causing its first major extinction in recorded history.  Concerned naturalists from as far away as China began sending requests, "Quick before the last dodo is gone, we must do something!  Kill us one and send it home so we can put it in a museum."  Ecologically-minded sailors thoughtfully began putting dodos aboard ship to take home to their native countries.  Some of these dodos may have been alive when they left Mauritius, but it's doubtful any of them were when they reached their destination.

Drawings were made, but not very good ones, so it's somewhat hard to tell, even today, exactly what dodos looked like. If you think you know what a dodo looks like it's probably because you saw John Tenniel's drawing of one in Alice in Wonderland, which seems to be a caricature of the author, Lewis Carroll, since the dodo in the book has a cane and white gloves, and real dodos are not believed to have worn these.  The only stuffed remains of a dodo remaining are a dried head and foot in the Oxford Museum: a head and one foot.  They are not in good shape.  Nothing else remains.

Say what you will about humans, when we set out to do something, we don't do it by half-measures.  We not only drove the dodo to extinction, we did it so thoroughly we don't even have a taxidermied specimen or a reliable drawing to look at.

Dodos.

The Department of Weights and Measures

I believe somewhere between the Fiscal Cliff and the Sequester, the Department of Weights and Measures has had its budget seriously cut.  I'm not strictly sure there is a Department of Weights and Measures, but whatever department is responsible for making sure no slick-talker tries to sell us a thirteen-inch ruler or a calendar without a February in it has not been doing its job lately.  Actually, now that I think of it, they haven't been doing their job for a long time.  Maybe they've never done their job.

It started, I believe, with a "Baker's Dozen."  Quick now, answer without thinking: How many are in a Baker's Dozen?

Thirteen, that's right.

A Baker's Dozen has been a standard unit of measure for as long as I can remember, and yet...  I have never once gotten a thirteen donuts when I asked for a dozen.  And donuts are baked!  Or at any rate, they're cooked.  In fact, I believe the whole concept of a Baker's Dozen was created to apply specifically to donuts.  Is there any other bread stuff you'd get a dozen of?  "I'd like a dozen loaves of rye bread, please."  I think not.  If it were merely a matter of Dunkin Donuts and Krispee Kreme needing to re-calibrate all their donut boxes, it would not be so big an issue.  I'm sure the Undersecretary in Charge of Muffins and Donuts could pay a single visit to corporate headquarters and straighten the whole thing out.

But it goes deeper than that.

Now I know nothing about dress sizes, but my wife assures me that a sinister shift has taken place there as well.  Let's say dress sizes are "petite," "standard," "standard-va-voom," "standard plus," "standard extra-plus," and "no more donuts for you, lady."  Nancy says that what used to be a "standard-va-voom" is now a "standard" or even a "petite," whereas a "standard" is now a "petite" or an "extra-petite" or even a "for God's sake, eat something, woman, you look like a pencil."  Put in terms of another unit of measure, dress sizes run from, say, "2" to "10."  I swear this is accurate although I can't make sense of it.  Doesn't this mean a woman who wears a "10" should be five times as big as a "2?"  And for a woman to go from a "2" to a "4," she'd have to double in body mass?  Anyway, the point is that as screwy as the system was in the first place, someone's been tampering with it.  Nancy is, let's say, a "3."  (I apologize, sweetheart, if I got the number wrong; this is just a for instance.)  But nowadays, if she puts on a "3" she looks like a basset hound, and she has to go down to a "2" or even a "1" to find something that fits.  She further reports that even this is not consistent, but varies from store to store and manufacturer to manufacturer.  My father-in-law blames this on outsourcing to the Koreans and such, but I don't see how this can be.  The Koreans have as many fingers and toes as the rest of us, surely, and ought to be as capable of measuring and counting, after all.  What makes this even more alarming is that Nancy says dress sizes now go down to "0."  Pause a moment to let that sink in.  If your dress size is "0," doesn't that mean you're naked?  And if sizes continue in the trend they're heading, won't women end up wearing negative numbers?  If a man who shops in the "Big and Tall" store meets a woman who's a negative 2, won't they cancel each other out and explode like a collision of matter and anti-matter?

The last example I'll give you is the most alarming.  Weather.  All my life we had hailstones as big as golf balls.  This was the standard measure of all hailstones and it worked perfectly fine for us.  But now I've been hearing about hailstones as big as baseballs.  What's wrong with us?  Why didn't we stick to golf balls?  Next we'll want them as big as softballs or soccer balls.

The time has come to take action.  We need to get a bunch of people together and go down to the Department of Weights and Measures and do a little incoherent shouting.  We need an Occupy-the-Department-of-Weights-and-Measures movement.  Someone needs to take the blame.

Signs of Spring

When I leave the house in the morning, it's still dark, but the early birds are already raising a racket in the trees.  I have switched from wearing long-sleeved shirts to short sleeves, and now...

I have my soil sample results from the County Extension Office!

It's just like Christmas.

This weekend, weather permitting, I'll add whatever quantities of nitrogen and potassium they recommend, rent a rototiller and till up the garden, then put in the plants.  "What will we plant,what will we plant?"  I tap my steepled fingers together like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons, "What will we plant?"  Tomatoes, of course, and okra, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, squash.  But maybe this year something different, corn?  I haven't planted corn in ages.

Each of these plants offers its own special joy, its own special torment.  Tomatoes, of course, are the Queen of the Garden, and for good reason.  No one ever eats our butternut squash and says, "Oh my Lord, this butternut squash is delish!  Did you grow it yourself?"  Our squash is delicious, but it doesn't taste markedly different from any other butternut squash on the planet.  The only problem is tomatoes are wickedly tempting to all sorts of critters who will wait exactly one day before a tomato is ready to pick and then take out a bite.  I have tried various remedies - motion-detector water sprinklers, pepper spray, netting: nothing is entirely effective.  Squirrels, chipmunks, and various birds - including our own chickens - find a way to sample the tomatoes, sometimes I even think the dog is getting at them.  Not to worry, though, the yearly battle against these pilferers is part of the pleasure.

Peppers meanwhile, aren't attractive to animals, but in our yard at least, take forever to ripen.  Cucumbers grow well, but so astonishingly quick.  Overlook one for a day and it goes from cocktail wienie to kielbasa.  One of my favorites is eggplant; I love watching those fat fruits inflate day by day from the ends of their stems like dark purple balloons.  And okra.  Okra is a blast.  You put it in and at first, nothing.  Then suddenly it decides to shoot up and towers over everything in the garden.  Yellow flowers with purple centers turn almost overnight into okra pods.  And corn.  Yes, this year I will definitely plant corn.  The problem with corn is, it takes mucho fertilizer, but it really is a glory.  You start from seed - keep the chickens penned until it gets some growth, or they'll eat every last damn one out of the ground - and then it pops up in April and then - I've already used the verb "shoot" to describe okra, but shoot is the only word for it - it shoots up like a rocket.  These absurd pollinating aerials form, and then the ears fill out.  What fun to pull back the husks from row upon row of yellow kernels.

And Nancy will make her gazpacho from fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and okra and tomatoes, and eggplant casserole, and tomato sandwiches.

I can't wait.  It's just like Christmas.  I'm about to unwrap Spring.

How to Write Jokes

When you're writing a joke you will need several things: 1) A topic, or something to write about, for example polar bears  2) A reason to think this is funny.  We call this the "twist" or "catch."  It's the ha-ha part of humor.  For example, a polar bear with a heat rash.  3)  The responses of several people to see if is funny.  4) Paper, pens, glue-sticks, scissors, post-it notes and high-lighters. A Polar Bear during a BlizzardNow, at the head of your paper, write "Polar Bears."  If you aren't sure if the spelling is Pollar, Poler, or Polar, you'll need to look it up on the internet.  (Oh, I forgot to mention, you'll also need 5) A computer with the internet.)  Spelling by the way, is rife with humorous possibilities.  Try typing Polar Bare into Google and see what you come up with.  Hmmm....  Mostly, Kate Upton photos and then some really weird stuff.  
Never mind.  (We in the humor biz call this a "dead end.")
Now, under Polar Bear jot down all the subtopics you can think of.  For example, Polar Bears are not actually white but black.  Their fur is white, but their skin is actually black, although you never know it because people don't go up to Polar Bears and shave them.  I'm pretty sure I heard that somewhere.  Look it up on the internet if you don't believe me.  Also a polar bear is not really a true bear at all; it's a marsupial. It's like a Koala bear.  Again, look this up to double-check.
What do Polar Bears eat?  Look this up, maybe it's something funny.  
It isn't.
Polar Bears in cartoons often appear alongside penguins, but this is an anachronism.  Or no, not an anachronism, the other thing.  The thing that starts with pal- and spells itself forward and backward.  Palimony.  
Look it up.
Anyway, I was wrong about Polar Bears being marsupials, but I wasn't wrong on the penguin.  Polar bears and penguins don't live anywhere near each other.  Polar Bears live on the top side of the earth, and penguins on the bottom.  (Possible joke?  "What's white on top and black-and-white on the bottom?"  No, that's not funny, besides the answer is "An old nun.")  So a polar bear isn't a marsupial, it's just a regular bear.  
Penguins are marsupials.
Speaking of penguins, maybe watch a little of March of the Penguins on Netflix.  You're never told anybody, but lord, that sounds dull.  Why watch a whole movie about penguins?  Maybe you could write a blog about that?  No, you came to write about polar bears, and by God, you're going to stick to it.
Maybe March of the Penguins is a pun.  The penguins move around in March.  No, March isn't Spring down there, it's Fall.  I'm pretty sure about that, and I refuse to look it up on the internet.  Why would penguins go anywhere if it's getting colder?  Let's see, thirty days hath September, spring forward and fall back, fingers and please excuse my dear Aunt Sally...  
Okay, I'll look it up.
That settles it, March is definitely Fall in the South Pole.  Stupid penguins anyway.  I could have sworn a polar bear was a marsupial.  Maybe I should write about penguins.  Penguins are funnier than polar bears.  You never saw a movie with Jim Carrey and Polar Bears.  You never saw the movie with him and the penguins either.  Monty Python had a great sketch about a Killer Penguin.  They also had a sketch about a Killer Rabbit.  Maybe just put "Killer" in front of something and see what you come up with.
Killer Polar Bear.
Not funny.
So you can see how simple the whole system is.  Just keep this up until you've written your joke, then show it to your wife and judge her response.  Tomorrow repeat the process.

St Patrick's Day

On St. Patrick’s Day everyone wears green. They go to the bars and drink gallons of green beer. Then the day after everyone is green.

St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, but someone must’ve driven out the Irish, too. In 2008 over thirty million Americans claimed Irish ancestry. That same year the population in Ireland was only four million. We have nearly ten times more Irish than Ireland itself, and surely there are at least few people in Ireland aren’t even Irish.

The Irish have made a proud contribution to our culture when you stop to consider all the great Irish Americans: John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Joe Kennedy, and of course also Ronald Reagan, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Barack O’Bama, just to name a few. On St. Patrick’s Day, of course, everyone’s Irish, but I really am. My ancestors, some of them, came over on the boat around 1850. They had no choice; they were too dumb to grow potatoes. Now that’s dumb. We grow potatoes in the backyard just by throwing out the rotten ones.

Anyway every St Patrick’s Day my wife and I have corned beef, which we make ourselves. What you do is take a brisket and soak it in salt water and pickling spice for three weeks. There’s a tiny risk of botulism, but I always feel the threat of food poisoning adds a certain je ne sais quoi to fine dining, don’t you? We got the recipe from that celebrated Irish Cookbook, The Joy O’Cooking.

After we eat, we sing that great traditional Irish ballad, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” A great traditional Irish song composed in 1912 in Buffalo, New York. Don’t be too upset, St. Patrick himself wasn’t Irish: his mother seems to have been Welsh and his father Italian. His name wasn’t even St. Patrick, it was Maewyn Succat. It’s hard to know any of this for certain – scholars think our modern St. Patrick might be a combination of at least two different people, one of them being a Gaulish missionary named Palladius. The only thing we know for sure is that whoever St. Patrick was, he drove the snakes out of Ireland.

Actually he didn’t; Ireland never had snakes.
.
But at least we know that the official color of Ireland is green.

Actually it’s blue.

But none of that matters. If we want St. Patrick to dress like a leprechaun with a shamrock in his hat and a red beard drinking green beer and singing “Irish Eyes,” that’s just what he’ll do, no matter what they say in Ireland.

I’ve seen the statistics. We’re ten times more Irish than they are

There We Go

 I was born almost dead center of the Baby Boom.  Between 1946 and 1964 there were over 17 million births in the US, and I have watched our generation move through the culture like a seismic ripple or the lump of an explorer passing through the digestive tract of an anaconda: the fads that have come and gone have risen and fallen on the shoulders of 17 million people.


In 1959, when I was born, the average baby boomer was five years old; that same year saw the introduction of the Barbie Doll and the Hula Hoop.  Mad Magazine had been introduced seven years before.  Three years before that a New Yorker mention launched Silly Putty into instant popularity.  I was five years old when the G.I. Joe doll was introduced.

In 1969, I was only ten, but the average baby boomer was already a teenager.  It was the Summer of Love.  There was the Woodstock Concert, and the Beatles gave their farewell performance.  A man walked on the moon.  A quarter of a million people marched on Washington protesting the war in Vietnam.

Are you seeing a trend yet?


In 1979, just when I was ready for full-fledged hippie-hood, the culture was shifting.  The median baby boomer was entering his mid-twenties and the sharp edge of protest and social conscience blunted and gave way to a desire for good times.  Whereas 1966 gave us "The Sound of Silence," 1976 gave us 'Disco Inferno."  And the waterbed.

In the '80's as baby boomers reached middle age, we entered the "decade of greed."  Rock'n'Roll was supplanted by Puts'n'Calls.

I won't detail any more decades, and before you fuss at me, yes, I know I'm over-simplifying here.  I wrote all that to write this: the other night I got a glimpse of the coming seismic shift in the culture as a generation 17 million strong enters its next phase: Nancy started reading me some trendy new obituaries.

There we go.

Kmart Apologizes

A 5-foot-long shark died after being put in an above-ground pool at a Los Angeles home where a Kmart commercial was being filmed, a newspaper reported Thursday. The white-tipped shark died March 6 after being shipped from New York to Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times said. The shark was injected with adrenaline and received oxygen after it showed signs of stress. It was later removed from the pool and died that afternoon. - Los Angeles Times

On behalf of Kmart, its employees, management, and investors, I wish to express my sincere grief over the passing of "Finn, the five-foot shark who died this week before filming his commercial.  Finn was very excited about the prospect of being on national tv, and we believe the stress coupled with a life-long smoking habit may have contributed to his death.  We did everything medically possible to save him, injecting him with adrenaline and removing him from the water.  In retrospect, removing him from the water may not have been the wisest possible course of action, considering Finn was a shark, but we will never know.

We also are deeply saddened by the loss of Oodles, the Kmart Koala bear who died before we had a chance to film his debut television commercial.  Oodles sank into a decline after eating some spoiled eucalyptus leaves.  We here at KMart immediately injected him with steroids and applied a defibrillator but to no avail.  We tried submerging him in a tank of water, but that seemed to do more harm than good.  Oodles will be sorely missed.

Zippy, the Kmart skink, we regret to say, has also passed away.  We envisioned a series of commercials similar to that of the Geico gecko, only with a skink.  Our advertising department was working out a pun involving "skink" and "Kmart," when one of our board members "felt something funny" under his butt and discovered he'd been sitting on Zippy.  We attempted reinflating him with a bicycle pump, administering adrenaline and ibuprofen, and rolling him in a tub of butterscotch pudding, but nothing worked.

We at Kmart, however, believe life is for the living, and while we mourn the deaths of Finn, Oodles, and Zippy, we continue to forge ahead.  We have bold plans for a commercial involving two hundred "sea monkeys" (yet to be named), Ruffles - an adorable Cocker Spaniel puppy, and Mugg a visually-impaired African Elephant rescued from a local animal shelter.

National Pi Day

I know what you're thinking - National Pi Day already?  I haven't even got a Pi wreath on the door or bought any Pi-Day cards!  Well, before you get sucked into the glitter and glamour of National Pi Day, all its commercialism and hype, think for a moment what Pi Day represents.  What Pi Day means.

Pi, or π of course is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.  Archimedes gets the credit for discovering it around 250 BC, which is why it has a Greek name, but in all truth pi was there all the time.  The Chinese geometer Liu Hui also approximated pi, and used similar methods to Archimedes, but you never hear of him, do you?  The Pyramids of Giza, built 2000 years before Archimedes, have a ratio between the perimeter and height which is approximately equal to pi (even Archimedes was only able to approximate it).  Somewhat later manuscripts from Egypt and Babylon calculate pi to 3.1 and change. The Hebrew Bible implies the value of pi in a description of King Solomon's pool which had a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty.

Pi has found applications in trigonometry and geometry, but also such high-falutin branches of learning as thermodynamics and fractals.  The chief charm of pi, however, is the fact it's so handy for calculating circumferences of circles if you know the diameter, and vice-versa, which is something most of us find ourselves doing on a regular basis.  Thank you Archimedes or Liu Hui or whoever you were for deriving the approximate value of pi!  I've got this radius here but I'd never be able to guess the circumference without it!

But pi is more that just a workhorse of computation for us to use in our daily lives like Euler's Number or the Fibinacci Sequence, for pi is a transcendental number, meaning it cannot be expressed accurately as a ratio between two digits in a fraction.  This is why representing pi in decimal form yields an infinite string of digits that never ends and never falls into a repeating pattern.  Who doesn't recall that classic Pi-Day Carol:

Three point one four one five nine two,
Six five three five eight nine!
Seven nine three two three eight four six,
Two six four three three eight three...!

How our parents loved to make us sing that and watch us go through verse after verse until we passed out from exhaustion and oxygen deprivation, knowing we could never reach the end.

This is what is so tantalizing about pi, that something so fundamental to the laws of geometry and mathematics should be ultimately inexpressible by numbers themselves, unobtainable by the human mind.  There is something, dare we say, Godlike in the number.  Pi is evidence of a higher mind at work in the universe, or not just at work, at play.  A cosmic humorist playing hide and seek with his creations, who has left a trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow, but which like the circle itself, like the Creator itself, is infinite.

How Does This Happen to Me?

I don't mind getting grief when I do something wrong.  I don't especially like it, but I expect it.  Lately though I get my chops busted even when it isn't my fault.

The other night Nancy told me and Spencer about nearly getting a speeding ticket.  She'd just gotten back from a business trip and was heading down to Macon to see her parents.  Her father had been hospitalized for a severe bronchial infection and an attack of angina.  We've both been worried about her parents as it is, because they're in their eighties, and Nancy's mother also has dementia, so she was understandably upset.

Anyway the blue light pulls her over and the officer informs Nancy she's going 70 in a 55 zone.  Nancy told the officer she was honestly unaware of her speed, and was appropriately apologetic.  He took her license back to the squad car to make sure she wasn't wanted for ax murder or something and when he returned just gave her a "warning citation."  Anyway, what with the emotions of anxiety over her parents, the stress of travel, the experience of nearly being ticketed, culminating in the policeman's generosity, she just broke down and cried.

I told you that to tell you this.

After hearing this, Spencer turns on me with an accusing glare, "See, she cried!  You always say whenever I get a speeding ticket, I cry."  (Spencer doesn't make a habit of getting speeding tickets, but the few times she has, she's called Nancy in tears.)  Now I'm defending myself for - I don't know what.  Telling Spencer she cried after getting a speeding ticket?  But Spencer knows she did.  Telling Nancy Spencer cried?  No, Nancy's the one who told me.  Before I can sort out a reasonable defense, Nancy also gives me a cold look, and suddenly says, "And where are the rest of the Girl Scout Cookies?"

See how it works?  I wasn't the one who got a speeding ticket, or even nearly got a speeding ticket, but all at once the conversation's about me.

As far as the missing Girl Scout Cookies, I plead the fifth.