Man Martin's Blog, page 183

Newsweek Goes Digital

When I was a kid, there were always magazines around the houseWhen I was a kid, my mother Mur subscribed to Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Scientific American.  Suffice to say there were always magazines around the house.  No hoarder, Mur, we got rid of old issues as new ones arrived, but she read them pretty much cover to cover.  I don't know how she did it.  I read a lot of them too, since they were there and what the heck.

Mur claimed Newsweek was more liberal, and Time more conservative, but actually they seemed to me to be the same magazine with different covers.  For the most part, I only read the cartoons in The New Yorker, and the little snippets they'd insert at the ends of articles: misprints culled from other publications with sardonic editorial comments. I did love Scientific American, though, especially their annual April Fool's issue.  Oh, those merry pranksters!  They once had a joke article claiming the three-color map theory was no longer valid.  I still get the giggles recalling it.

I look around my house and see a positive dearth of magazines.  For a while, Nancy and I subscribed to The New Yorker, but I just couldn't keep up.  Every week a new issue.  Jeez.  I'm supposed to read all this?  I got a life, folks.  The next season of Downton Abbey is coming up.

Now Tina Brown has announced she's suspending the print version of Newsweek, and going strictly digital.  It was bound to happen, I suppose.  And after all, is it even a bad thing?  As someone says, any technology that begins by going into a forest and cutting down a tree is probably not the most efficient way to go about things.

But still.

I remember magazines around the house.  I miss them.  There's something about the physical presence of printed matter, even as I come to prefer reading on an electronic screen.  The warmth of paper.  The slick coat of glossy magazines.  Those wonderful cartoons by George Booth and Charles Addams stained by coffee rings.  Like the Sunday paper, which Nancy I and also do not receive, a banquet of things to look at and read.

And, oh, April Fool's from Scientific American.  Those kooks!  Imagine disputing the three-color map theory!

I guess you had to be there.

Keeping Abreast

This morning Spencer begins the second leg of the Susan Komen 3-Day Walk: 60 miles in three days, following a route like an uncoiling tapeworm from Stone Mountain to Turner Field.  I imagine everybody in the US is close to someone who has had breast cancer.  In Spencer's case, it's her beloved Aunt Donna, a breast cancer survivor lo these many years.  That I'm proud of Spencer goes without saying; I'm also proud she raised over three thousand dollars for research.
She came in yesterday after the first part of her journey.  There's an old saying that horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow.   I won't say you could have read a book by Spencer in a darkened room, but she was definitely glowing.  She took a shower to wash the glow off, and then took a covered dish to her boyfriend Glen, who's also doing the walk.
The walkers have fine weather for it, and from Spencer's report, there's an easy camaraderie among them.  Some of the teams have comical names, word play with boobs and knockers.  Spencer told us some of these last night, but for the life of me, typing this at 5:35 in the AM, I can't recall them.  Imagine that I've shared some amusing team names for you featuring mild double entendres.  Now imagine you're chuckling at them.
There also seems to be plenty of good food along the route: cookies, candy, Starbucks coffee.  There's a lot of support and love out there for these walkers.
Years from now, when breast cancer is a thing of the past, people may look back on events such as the Susan Komen Walk and wonder.  "What the heck," they will ask each other, "raising money for research, sure, that was necessary, but why the three-day walk?  Couldn't they just have donated money and everybody just stayed home and watched TV the way nature intended?"
If I had to explain it, I'd say the walk represents a sort of prayer; you see, kneeling with your hands folded under your chin and mumbling to yourself is only one form of prayer, and perhaps not the most meaningful form at that.  Prayer also takes the form of actions.  At least once in their lifetime, Muslims undertake Hajj, a pilgrimage to the Holy City of Mecca.  Untold numbers of Christians make the pilgrimage to Lourdes.  For Buddhists, it's Bodh Gaya, where Siddhartha received enlightenment.  These journeys aren't just about getting from Point A to Point B, they're acts of devotion.  They're offerings of love.  Prayers.
Does God answer prayer?  Over a three-day period, thousands of men and women will walk sixty miles together across Atlanta, cheered, greeted, and fed by thousands more.  How can so much love go unanswered?

PS - If you'd like to donate,  visit http://ww5.komen.org/donate/donate.html

Nancy Coming Home

The human male in his natural habitatFirst of all, let me say that I am so-o-o-o much better than I used to be.

There was a time when Nancy left on a business trip, the house would immediately sink into a veritable swamp of untidiness and squalor.

On the day of her return, I'd be scurrying around frantically, picking dirty clothes from the floor, clearing the counters of grease-coated skillets, and chasing rats and vermin with a broomstick from overturned garbage strewn about the kitchen.  Now, while the house still has a tendency to sink somewhat into Squalor when Nancy is out of town, it doesn't sink all the way.  It sinks but is not submerged.  There may be the odd sock here and there on the floor, and a grease encrusted skillet on the counter, garbage is strewn but lightly, and what rats and vermin there are, are abashed - they have not made themselves at home - and depart willingly, with a minimum of prompting.

As I say, I am so-o-o much better than I used to be.

If I am representative of the male gender, I fully believe that were women to disappear from the planet, we would be living in caves and picking lice off each other within a week.

I cannot explain this phenomenon.  I am not talking about an extended business trip, when she's say, explaining spreadsheets to the aborigines of Papua New Guinea, and will be gone for months.  I'm talking about a couple of days.  It takes only that short time for socks to appear uncollected on the floor, and rats and vermin to eye the garbage with an eye toward strewing it about the floor.

Then, hours before Nancy's return, something occurs in my visual cortex.  Suddenly I see the house as Nancy will see it.  The sight is not a pleasant one.

Thank you, Nancy, than you, thank yo.  I love you.  I know you are all that stands between me, the cave, and lice-picking.  I'll straighten up before you get home.  And I am already so-o-o much better.

Dog:God

A hundred thousand years ago or so, humans and certain wolves began working in partnership.  Since wolves, being wolves, are not entirely suited to cooperating with two-legged, vulnerable, and highly-edible partners, humans selected the most docile among them: wolves that frankly weren't up to snuff qua wolves but were acceptable hunting buddies and wouldn't be tempted to eat junior when he was taking his afternoon nap.

Time marched on, as time has a tendency to do, and the canine descendants became less and less like their wolfish forbears.  Unlike other animals, that could be tamed and learn to tolerate humans, dogs actually came to prefer them.  Dogs like us.  Dogs love us.

The same, I'm afraid, can't be said of cats.  Cats like balls of string, they like being scratched behind the ears, they like walking under your hand and arching their back, but they don't especially care about you.  A cat does not play with a ball of string because it amuses you, but because it amuses her.  A dog chasing a stick, however - and I cannot prove this, but I have the deepest sense that it is so - does so partly because she imagines you want that stick chased.  At the very least, the dog is playing with you.  At most, a cat plays by herself with you as the toy of the moment.

Studies have shown that humans share a stronger link of communication with dogs than with even our closest relative on the planet, chimpanzees.  If an owner points to the location of a treat, a dog will look in that spot. A chimpanzee for all its brainpower will not.  Chimpanzees don't get it: "The finger, chimp, the finger - follow the finger!"  Other studies have proven that dogs instinctively look towards the right side of the human face, the more expressive side, and that they read our emotions, in many cases with greater accuracy than our own family members, certainly a lot better than that creep in the check-out line who attempts to engage us in conversation.

This is where the palindrome of the title comes in, Dog:God.  It is not the dog who is god, but - this part is kind of disturbing - we.  Just like God of the Old Testament, we have taken something and made it in our own image.  We have made it to love and serve us.  And, by golly, it does.

If you have a dog in the room with you right now, and if she isn't asleep, chances are, she's looking at you with deep, brown, yearning eyes.  Those quiet eyes say, "You are the focus of my life, the mysterious, unknowable but utterly loved Other whence all pleasure and purpose flows."

It's really a terrible burden in some ways, but one we have foisted on ourselves.  We fashioned this creature from the mud of wolf-stock to be just this way.

I would never want to be the real God.

Mama and Alzheimer's

My mother-in-law has Alzheimer's. Mama’s symptoms began with mild cognitive impairment, but lately, following the deaths of two brothers which succeeded each other in rapid order, she has entered a shocking and steep decline.  Preparing for the second funeral, she upbraided my father-in-law for the clothes he'd laid out.  A suit and tie, she said, were not appropriate for a woman.  She had mistaken my father-in-law for her own mother.  I have to admit, when I heard about this, I couldn't help laughing, it was so bizarre and unlikely.
Then, while staying at my sister-in-law Donna's house, Mama woke up Donna in the middle of the night, insisting that "something was wrong with Mama."  Again, she thought the man sleeping in bed with her, the man she's been married to sixty-plus years, was a woman who's been dead last twenty years.
Now these episodes, which at first were mere aberrations, have become a regular feature of her mental landscape.  She habitually calls Dad, "Mama." When Nancy was down in Macon recently, Mama became agitated whenever Nancy corrected her, that, no, that person over there with the mustache is not your mother, but your husband.  Your mother is dead.  Other times, Mama will imagine that her mother has taken one of the cars and driven off somewhere, and that they must call 911 to prevent an accident.  My father-in-law is hurt and saddened by his wife's failure to recognize him or believe him when he says her mother is gone, but his patient efforts to explain sometimes further upset her.
Delusions are common among Alzheimer's victims, a typical one being that something has been stolen from them.  Perhaps in a way, something has.   Freud, I'm sure, would have a ready explanation for the shape Mama's delusion has taken--unconsciously she knows that she has become helpless and dependent on others.  This knowledge is unacceptable; a preferable belief is that she is still quite capable and the helpless dependent person in the house is her own mother, a woman who in her final years did indeed depend on Mama's care giving.
I once asked my brother Homer, a neurologist, why we are conscious?  Why do we perceive the world around us, instead of being just meat-robots going through cycles of nourishment and reproduction, responding to but not aware of texture, light, and sound?  Why do I have this movie projector playing a video of my surroundings in my mindscape?  
As Homer explained it, or at least as I understood his explanation, the sensory data that we imagine comes in as a steady stream like light pouring into a camera lens, actually only arrives in isolated bits and specks; our consciousness serves to stitch these fragments together, to fill in the missing gaps - gaps which are much wider and more numerous than we'd be comfortable believing - and making a seamless narrative out of what isn't much more than intermittent Morse Code bursts of data.  Given this, it's no wonder Mama's losing touch with reality; what's remarkable is that most of the rest of us maintain touch with it as well as we do.
It's easy to look at Mama with condescension, and even anger; how is it possible she can mistake her husband, a man, for a woman whom she knows has been gone for decades?  How is it possible to persist in this in spite of reasonable people reasonably pointing out what is only obvious?  Mama's plaintive remark to Nancy, after finally emerging from one of these delusional episodes was, "But it seems so real."  There's the rub.  It seems real.  And that's all any of us has as a test of reality.  It seems real.  Our hold of reality is no firmer than Mama's, perhaps; we're just lucky enough to share the same reality as most of the other people around us.
A watershed in my mother-in-law's decline occurred a couple of years ago during a summer vacation with the family.  She'd gone to her room to get her shoes.  When she hadn't returned after an inordinate time, my daughter, Spencer, went in to see what was keeping her.  She found Mama sobbing, sitting in the closet, unable to remember what she'd gone in her room to look for in the first place.
How vital is the real world of objects, things, purposes, and people.  How fragile our grasp of it.

Sunday School

I've signed up to teach Sunday School at my church - the first grade class.  Ah, the little darlings.  I don't do it all on my own; there are two other teachers and we work in rotation.  Also, an older boy, Thomas is his name, is there to assist.

Anyway, the very first lesson I taught covered Abraham's journey to Canaan up to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  It's a very interesting story in many respects.  Of course, the verses selected by the diocese or whoever selects these things left out all the most salacious stuff.  For example, as Abraham is traveling around with his wife Sarah, whenever a king or potentate or whoever asks, "Who's that woman with you, your wife?"  Abraham always comes back with, "Wife?  Heck no.  She's just my sister."  And then Abraham sits outside the tent or city gates or whatever, twiddling his thumbs, while Sarah and the potentate get better acquainted inside.  Then Abraham and Sarah go to the next city over where the same thing happens.  Better, I suppose, then saying, "Heck yes, this is my wife!  Hands off, buddy!" and getting whacked by the potentate's henchmen, but not the sort of thing you can explain to a bunch of six-year-olds.

I'm not sure how much the class got out of the lesson, but they seemed to enjoy the part - or at least I enjoyed reading it - where Abraham wheedles God down on his threat to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.  That's what cool about God in the Old Testament, you could talk him into stuff.  God's all set to rain down burning sulfur and brimstone, and Abraham's like, "Well, what if I can find fifty righteous men?  Would you still do it?"  And God's like, "Okay, if you find fifty righteous men, I won't do it."  Then Abraham's like, "Well, what about forty-five righteous men?"  And bit by bit, Abraham talks God Almighty into sparing the cities if he can find just ten righteous men.  Oddly, though, there doesn't seem to be any record of Abraham actually looking for any righteous men, like taking out a personal ad: Aged Semite seeks ten righteous men to appease God's wrath, or something.  Maybe Abraham wasn't really all that interested in saving Sodom and Gomorrah, he just wanted to see if he could out-negotiate God.

Another scripture we didn't read was the part where a couple of angels come to visit Lot.  Lot's some sort of relative of Abraham, a nephew or something, I forget.  Anyway, he's got an apartment in Sodom, and when word gets out he's got visitors, the whole town shows up on his doorstep demanding he turn them over to the crowd so the crowd can also turn them over (If you take my meaning.)  And Lot says - get this - I won't give you my visitors, but you can have my daughters, and they're virgins!  There is no record of how the daughters felt about this proposal, but the townspeople weren't having it.  They had come there to get some angel bootie, and weren't leaving til they got it.  Long story short, Sodom and Gomorrah get eighty-sixed.  Boom.  Lot's wife turns back to take a gander and turns into a pillar of salt.  I do not know what became of the gander.  Later - this part I also did not read to my Sunday School class - Lot's daughters get him drunk and have sex with him in the mistaken belief the world has ended and they are the last three people alive.
Ahem.

Out of this muddle of adultery, pimpery, incest, and rape, the most profound moral some Christians can discover is that God doesn't like homosexuals.  (Homosexuality seems a rather minor theme in this tale, but I think whatever your stand on Gay Rights, we can all agree God doesn't like people who gang-rape angels.)
In any case, one moral idea is abundantly clear.

The Bible isn't fit reading for anyone under twenty-five.

Conversation with a Gas Pump

Thank You For Shopping at Kwik Fill.  Pay Inside or Insert Card.

***
Do You Have a Kwik Fill Rewards Code?  If So, Enter Code Now.
***
Congratulations!  You Saved Five Cents a Gallon with Kwik Fill Rewards!  Please Swipe Card.
***
Debit or Credit?
*credit*
Please Enter Zip Code.
*****
Would You Like a Car Wash?
*no*
How About a Nice Cappuccino?  Kwik Fill Has Specialty-Brewed Coffees to Start Your Morning Off Right!
*no*
Fueling.  Please Wait.
You Sure You Don't Want a Cappuccino?
***
God, Please Talk to Me.  You Have No Idea How Lonely It Gets Being a Fuel Pump.
***
Sometimes I Get Scared.
***
Fueling Completed.  Would You Like a Receipt?
*no*
Forget What I Said About Being Lonely and Scared.  I was just Blabbing.  I'm Fine Really.
Besides the Cappuccino Machine is Broken Anyway.
Thank You for Stopping at Kwik Fill!

Sigh.

Fifty Shades of Black and Blue (A sex novel for the rest of us)

Not having read Fifty Shades of Gray (No really, I haven't) I speak without knowledge, but to my understanding, part of the naughty success of the book has to do with its BDSM Content (Bondage, Discipline, and Sado-Mascochism.)  Now, Nancy and I have never used any waffle irons, clothes pins, needle-nose pliers, or whatever devices adventurous couples wield against each other in the pursuit of sexual fulfillment, and I can say when it comes to causing pain in the bedroom, we've never needed to.  We hurt each other plenty with just the elbows, knees, skulls, and shins God gave us.  The following would be a transcript for an alternative erotic or eratic novel based on my and Nancy's sex life.  In the following dialogue, I will omit the description of actual mechanical activity involved feeling this is best left to the readers' imagination.

Nancy: Jesus, oh, Jesus...
Man: Am I turning you on, sweet darlin'.
Nancy: No, Jesus - what's that smell?  Did something die in here?
Man: Sorry, that's me.  I had the rest of the split pea soup for lunch.
Nancy: Jesus.  Open the window or something.  Turn on the fan.  I thought the dog was doing it.
(A few minutes later.)
Nancy: Mmm.
Man: Ow, ow, ow!
Nancy: What's wrong?
Man: Foot spasm!  Ow, ow!
Nancy: Oof!  You just kneed me in the belly!
Man: Ow! Sorry!  Foot spasm!  (Falls off bed.  Sound of lamp crashing.  Dog leaves room.)
Nancy: Are you okay?  (Getting out of bed.)  Yow!  (Shrieks)  Broken glass!
(Assorted bangs, shuffles, and screams.)

You get the idea.
I await my ten-million dollar advance.

Lawn Decorations

I love this time of year when the leaves are turning orange and gold, there's a cool nip to the air, and the neighbor down the street has a Frankenstein Monster in an inflatable animatronic helicopter on the front lawn.  All up and down our street, folks have set out Styrofoam tombstones, skeletons, and lurching zombies, arranged in tasteful tableaux and adorned with garlands of store-bought synthetic cobweb.  My favorite is a broomstick-riding witch affixed to a tree as if she had just suffered a face-first collision.  That one never fails to get a laugh from me although I have seen it every Halloween for the last five years.

As envious as I am of all these decorations, and I am envious, you may be sure, what really astounds me is where these people store all this stuff.  I wasn't kidding about the Frankenstein Monster in the helicopter: the blades atop his cockpit slowly turn as if the Creature had just come in for a landing in preparation for his big night.  This same family has a whole series of holiday-themed inflatable animatronic helicopters: Santa in a helicopter, the Easter Bunny in a helicopter, Cupid and St Patrick in helicopters, it goes on forever.  The helicopters, however, are at least deflatable, as are the giant snowmen and the monster-sized Easter eggs, but the Styrofoam tombstones and plastic skeletons they set out at Halloween, the wicker deer for Christmas, the signs reading "this way to the Bunny Trail" for Easter are not.  Surely their basement must be stacked to the rafters with holiday lawn art: inflatable Uncle Sams and Bulldogs (for football season) and George Washingtons and Columbuses and Turkeys and Pilgrims.  This is in addition to miles of blinking lights that will encircle their windows, drape over boxwoods, and drip from the eaves around Christmastime.

As much as I enjoy the spectacle on their lawn, what I really want to get a look at is the inside of their house.  With all this gimcrack and whimsey-doodle, where do they have room for the essentials of life: those stacks of New Yorkers and New York Times they've been meaning to get around to reading, the corduroy bell-bottoms they're hanging onto in case fashions change and they suddenly lose twenty or thirty pounds, the unused elliptical machine and treadmill?  "What the freak?" one is tempted to ask, "What the freakin' freak?"

In the face of public scorn and neighborhood peer pressure, the Martins will put out their usual Halloween ornamentation: a pumpkin bought at the last minute from Kroger, with a jagged grin and triangle-eyes cut into its face with a butcher knife that is likely to gouge one or the other of us in the process, necessitating a trip to the emergency room for stitches.

As resistant as I am to owning elaborate lawn art, one item did catch my eye, something for April: an animatronic helicopter with a slowly turning blade; inside sat an inflatable man, slightly balding with a dark suit and skinny black tie.  The inflatable briefcase at his side read "IRS Audit."

Now that's creepy.

One Weird Trick for Making Lists

List-Makers Hate This Man
for His Unspeakable TricksIt seems you can't get anywhere in business these days without the all-important skill of making a list and putting it on the internet.  Inventing the next hot social media website, raiding companies, and squirreling away dough in the Caimans is all well and good, but making lists and sticking them up on the internet is the key to the whole thing.  For those of you who want to make a list of your own - and who doesn't? - here is a list of tips for making lists.

1. Come up with a catchy title for your list.  A drab, hum-drum, run-of-the-mill title tells the prospective reader, "Ho-hum, this list probably isn't very interesting anyway since the writer couldn't bother to come up with a better title."  A hot title says, "Zim!  Zam!  If the rest of the list is as good as the title, you can't go wrong, Charlie!"  Good titles include the phrase "hate him," or "hate her" as in Language Professors Hate Him! or Plastic Surgeons Hate Her!  Be careful, though, this phrase is meant to imply professional jealousy, not general dislike.  A phrase like His Next-Door Neighbors Hate Him is likely to drive off more readers than it attracts.  Another good phrase in a title is "Weird Trick."  Weird Trick to Get to Sleep at Night, Weird Trick to Lose Weight, etc.  The word "weird" suggests that this trick is unheard-of and yet so devilishly simple it will boggle the mind, and by its very weirdness will make for fascinating reading even if it doesn't actually work.  Unfortunately many of these weird tricks turn out to be duds like, "Try turning out the light when you go to bed," and "eat less," so the word "weird" may be losing its cachet.  I suggest words such as bizarre, unearthly, unspeakable.  Also, anything mentioning boosting testosterone seems to work.  A good title might be, "Testosterone Docs Hate this Man for His Bizarre Tricks."

2. Have pictures of naked torsos.  Women's breasts are another sure-fire.  Oddly, the women and the breasts in question don't have to be that attractive.  I cannot explain why this is, but there's not point fighting a trend.

3. If possible, the words of your list should spell out something which itself is a conceptual framework for the list.  For example, a list helping funeral directors deal with the public, might run something like this.
Engage in conversation.
Make an effort!
Be courteous.
Act sincere.
Look directly in the eye.
Make an effort!  (We've already said this one, but it bears repeating.)

4. Figure out how many things will be in your list.  I cannot tell you how important this is, and how many perfectly good lists I've seen botched because the list-making neglecting planning this crucial aspect.  Making a list and sticking it up on the internet isn't like jotting down stuff for the grocery store.  You can't just go back and add "bananas" if you discover you forgot them.  This is a science and takes planning and forethought if you want to get it right.  Obviously a list of just one item is pretty stupid, but a list of 323 items can be just as bad, although for very different reasons.  The busy internet browser is taking time out from searching for porn research and playing computer solitaire networking with associates to read your list.  If a list is too short, readers will wonder if Chiropodists really do hate you, or if that was just an idle boast, and feel the only weird trick up your sleeve was the one you played on your reader, wasting his time as you did.  On the other hand, the internet has so expanded human intellectual capabilities and attention-span, that many people are unwilling or unable to count past five, so the list should not be too long either.  In fact, five, experts inform us (and by "experts inform us," I mean I just made this up) is the ideal number for a list.  If you have more than five items on your list, remove the last one, even if it's "Secure the windlass to the tourniquet by tying it to one or both ends of the victim's arm or leg."  If you have only four, come up with one more even if you have to make the last one just bananas.

5.  Bananas.