Great Dying Words

Yesterday, I was reading the local newspaper and came across the obituaries. Yes, I know what you are thinking: once again it was a miracle, everyone died in alphabetical order.

Newspapers never print the last words of the deceased. And this is a shame, for some last words seem to encapsulate a person’s whole life in just a few words. Queen Elizabeth had some very sobering last words, “All my possessions for a moment of time." Probably the most truthful dying words of all time.

Shot as he drove home from visiting his mistress, Pancho Villa said, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something important.” Even after his incredible life, at the end, he had nothing really to say.

Of course, sometimes the irony simply drips. During the Civil War, at the battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, General John Sedgwick said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist…” Pity he wasn’t an elephant, for a Confederate sniper’s bullet killed him before he could finish the sentence.

Food seems to be on the mind of some people as they die. Lou Costello, the obese half of the comedy team Abbott and Costello, said, “That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.”

Or take the last words of Kit Carson, the famous explorer of the great southwest; “I wish I had time for one more bowl of chili.” I’m surprised this hasn’t been used in a TV commercial for Wolf Brand Chili.

Lots of dying words involve alcohol. Everyone knows of at least one teen-aged flower of American youth (blooming idiot) who, shortly before dying spectacularly, said to his friends, “Hold my beer and watch this.” This happens often enough in the South that it is a rite of passage.

But alcohol also figures prominently in the last moments of, for lack of a better word, normal people. Humphrey Bogart’s last words were, “I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.” Or take the example of Dylan Thomas: “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record . . .”

But these words only tell part of the story. What happened after these words were spoken? Why was the person dying? Imagine how much more interesting those obituaries would be if the newspaper would tell how the deceased died? Remember the golden rule of blogging: Bad Decisions Make Good Stories.

Let me tell you how Jack Daniels died. Yes, that Jack Daniels. I leave it to you to imagine why, but Jack couldn’t remember the combination to his safe. Eventually he was so frustrated that he fetched the safe a great rattling kick. This didn’t faze the safe much, but it injured Jack’s toe, and within a few days he died of blood poisoning.

And what were Jack’s dying words? “One last drink, please.”

Every now and then, someone’s dying words almost predict their own death. Take Isadora Duncan for example, who some have dubbed the ‘Mother of Modern Dance’.

This talented and beautiful woman died in a freak accident in Nice, France. She was known to wear long, flowing scarves that would often be seen flutter behind her in the wind. On her last day, her friend picked her up in his convertible, and she said to her friends, "Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!" (Goodbye, my friends, I am off to glory!). As the car raced off, her scarf became caught in the car’s wheel spokes. Isadora died instantly from a broken neck.

These stories are all famous, but there are thousands of great dying words that history doesn’t record simply because the dying person wasn’t famous. Here are a few of my favorite great dying words that aren’t famous:

• What is that?
• Did you put that back together right?
• Is it loaded?
• Oh, shit!
• I’ve always done it this way.
• Only one way to find out…
• No guts, no glory. 

Maybe history should record dying conversations. My favorite would be the last conversation a man had with his wife as he slowly passed away.

“Honey,” the dying man gasped. “I want to confess something to you. I slept with both your sister and your mother.”

“I know.” His wife answered. “Now lay still and let the poison work.”

One Picture and Less Than a Thousand Words

I recently attended a very nice wedding. It has been a while since I was at a wedding.  You can tell you’re getting older when you attend more funerals than weddings. I had a hard time finding my official wedding tie, I had to break down and wear my official funeral tie. Now that I think about it, I’m going to make the funeral tie my permanent wedding tie, because I have decided I’m not going to anyone’s funeral unless he comes to mine first.

It was a beautiful wedding, something everyone noticed as nearly everyone was taking pictures of it. Which got me thinking about digital cameras.

According to the briefest possible Google search, 100 million cameras are sold in the US each year. Since they have been selling for a while, this must mean there are more cameras in America than steak knives. More numerous than strange people at Wal-Mart. And never again is there a possibility of anything happening in the world without a half dozen cameras recording the event.

I suppose that as a historian, I should be thrilled. There are countless events throughout history that needed to have been recorded, yet for undeniably selfish reasons, not a single person was thoughtful enough drag out his cell phone and use the video camera. What were Caesar’s last words? What did Father Hidalgo really say in his El Grito speech? Was Cleopatra beautiful, or as ugly as a mud fence?

I won’t have to worry about that ever again. Now, I could go five miles out into the desert and whisper something to a jackrabbit and view the conversation on YouTube the next day. No society in history has been as self-obsessed with recording the day-to-day trivia of everyday life. Years ago, only important events were photographed. Are we recording every minute of our lives in an effort to make them more important? Validation through photography?

Back to the wedding. It was certainly a memorable affair. A beautiful bride and, surprisingly, a beautiful bride’s maid. Normally, the bride’s maid’s job is to wear the ugliest dress to be found on the bargain rack at the Salvation Army store. A hideous bride’s maid will make any bride look more attractive. At this wedding, the bride’s maid was almost as attractive as the bride. A wonderful wedding, and everyone took pictures.

Why? There was an official photographer with an extremely expensive camera taking pictures. I don’t know very much about photography, but he looked competent to me. Evidently, no one else had any faith in him for they were taking photos with cell phones and little digital cameras.

Even someone who doesn’t know much about photography knows:

• The tiny little flash on a pocket sized digital camera will only reach 10 feet.

• The maximum range of a cell phone camera is about 6 feet. If you take a picture of anything farther away than the other side of the table, you are creating abstract art.

• If you take a photo of yourself with the camera held at arm’s length, you get a picture of a large nose with giant nostrils. You should avoid this method unless you actually have a large nose with giant nostrils, then you could use this technique to explain your ugly photos.

• Handheld low resolution video cameras take shaky enough movies to make a test pilot puke. For God’s sake, didn’t you see The Blair Witch Project?

Those are the things I know about photography, but I have a few questions. Why do little digital cameras make such a racket? Why do they make a little whirring noise as if they were advancing film? Most of them have a digital shutter, shouldn’t they be completely quiet?

This fascination with shutter noises started with George Eastman, one of the pioneers in photography. In George’s opinion, the noise the camera produced when you released the shutter was a distinctive “Ko-Dak!” Engaging in a little onomatopoeia, a word that imitates the sound it represents, he named his company Eastman Kodak.

Why do people immediately take the same idiotic poses every time you point a camera at them? They put their heads together, use a smile completely unnatural, and stare wide-eyed at the camera. This pose never happens naturally. When you enter a room, do your friends bump heads together and grin like clowns?

Is it just me, or do photos distort your memory? When I go on vacation, if I take pictures, all I seem to remember are the places where I took a picture. Without photos, I seem to remember a lot more. Do cameras record events or distort them? Do real memories only live on glossy paper?

Nah, it’s probably just me. Why else would they have sold 100 million cameras last year?

Hell Holds Regular Faculty Meetings

I have previously written about faculty meetings, but the events of the last week have convinced me that I did not do the subject justice.  At one point in my life I was afraid that the structured university life might smother teachers.  Now, I am afraid it doesn't smother enough of them.

For the last several days, I worked on a lengthy blog wherein I compared the average faculty meeting to a screaming pack of howler monkeys. What I wrote was vicious, cruel, and utterly true. I have decided not to use it for fear of slighting the monkeys.

I have to admit, I do resemble this picture a little.  The beard is getting a little gray.

In some ways, faculty meetings remind me a little of flying; long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. Well, perhaps the better word is horror.  If our students ever found out what we do in these meetings, they would not take our courses unless they were paid.  Why are these meetings among supposedly educated people so acrimonious?  Imagine a convention of Tourette's sufferers.  

My colleagues are gifted, intelligent people.  These are, for the most part, kind and good-hearted people who evidently have forgotten the definiton of civility.  I'm not exactly sure what it means, either, but to paraphrase Mark Twain:  Civility means concealing how little we think of our colleagues while simultaneously conealing how much we think of ourselves.

Henry Kissinger once proposed a theory, "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." While Henry is undoubtedly correct, I think there is more to the problem; I think university professors suffer from positive feedback.

Most machinery operates with negative feedback. Imagine you are designing a robotic hand to pick up an egg. As the mechanical fingers grip the egg, sensors in the fingers would send a signal back to the motors to apply less force until at a critical point the motors would stop.  Your mechanical hand would delicately hold an unbroken egg.

Now imagine that we reverse the wiring so that the harder the fingers grip the egg, the more force would be applied. The egg would be almost immediately crushed in the tightly clenched fingers of the mechanical hand. Machinery controlled by positive feedback oscillates wildly out of control.

Now consider the students in a classroom. They trust the professor, they believe in him, and they have paid a lot of money to listen to a wise teacher. The paying part is very important, ask any carney; the marks won't believe unless you make them pay. Most of the time, the students should trust the professor, but sooner or later he is going to say something outrageous, something incredibly stupid... and the students will either believe him or in an incredible act of kindness, not point out how the professor has lost touch with reality.  

And not correcting the professor is the equivalent of positive feedback. The professor will feel free to be even more outrageous in a future class. Over time, his opinions and his beliefs will inevitably suffer some drift. You don't have to teach very long before you believe that you, and you alone, are brilliant. While I personally am immune from this disease, many of my colleagues are sick, sick puppies. I know.

A meeting room full of people each determined to prove his brillance is not exactly a happy place.

Still, outside of the occasionally interesting, if not very logical, arguments faculty meetings are boring. So, in self defense, I have found a way to pass the time. I have devised the Official Faculty Meeting Bingo Card. If, poor devil, you ever have to attend such a meeting, just print out this card and listen carefully for someone to say any of the following educational buzzwords.

If your meeting lasts more than about 30 minutes, perhaps you should refrain from yelling Bingo! until you black out the entire card.

Does Anyone Understand Women?

Francis Bacon wrote a beautiful line: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” 

Bacon obviously meant that it is the imperfection that makes beauty stand out, but the statement is probably just as true about all beautiful and wonderful things.  And it certainly applies to my wife, the Doc.

I married the Doc for a very simple reason; she was the smartest woman I ever met: A wonderful wife, great mother, talented woman, and about as strange as a purple puppy….With stripes.  I guess the strangeness was the bonus.

Shortly after marriage, I discovered that women and men shop differently.  Most men are hunters.  When we need something, we call the mall, find the store that sells it, go straight there, kill it with a credit card, tie it to our pickup truck, and drive home.  It’s a simple straight forward system that has worked since the mastodon.

This is not even close to the system that women use.  They are gatherers.  Take shopping for shoes, a pair of white high heel dress shoes for example.  I would rather try to kiss the front end of a speeding bus than go shopping for shoes with my wife.  Any man that finds himself in a similar situation should at a minimum take a book, possibly a hip flask.  

Step one in shoe shopping is to go the biggest shoe store in the mall and ask for a pair of white high heel dress shoes.  The clerk will bring a pair of exactly that, the husband will feel briefly hopeful, but the shoes will be rejected for some obscure reason discernable only by the wife.  The poor clerk will then bring almost every shoe, in every available color, that is anywhere close to the appropriate size. 

This act will be repeated at every shoe store in the mall.  If your town has more than one mall, it will be repeated at all of them.  If there is a nearby town within an hour’s driving time, you can take your show on the road.  At the end of the day, no shoes will have been purchased, but your wife will pick up a knitted blouse in blue.  She has two dozen identical blouses, but with clothes, wives try to collect the entire set.

The next day, without you, your wife will go back to the first store and buy the first pair of shoes she tried on.

And while I am on the subject, I do not think any man understands his wife’s shoes.  Why are there so many of them?  Why do they cost twice as much as a good pair of hunting boots when you put three pair of them inside one good hunting boot?  And why do women willingly wear a pair of shoes that would permanently render them lame if they were to walk across 100 feet of open ground?

Men, as a rule, don’t understand the whole used clothes thrift store thing, either.  I neither want to wear someone else’s used clothes or sell any of my old clothes as long as three threads hold together.  

Women seem to go through stages of life that can be defined by luggage.  When I met the Doc, most of her possessions could fit into a grocery bag.  I remember us suddenly driving from Houston to Florida on a whim.  I think she grabbed a poncho and her purse and we were off for a week.  No plans, no reservations, and neither of us had ever been there before.

Now, a weekend in the mountains requires the logistical support of the D-Day invasion.  She has enough luggage to fill an SUV.  If I were a polygamist, I would have to drive a bus.

Men will never understand women: all you can do is try to understand one.  Unfortunately, we rarely succeed.

A Good Cigar is a Smoke

I don’t smoke, and I’m not trying to make apologies for those who do. I don’t want my boys; What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One, to smoke. And there can be no doubt that smoking is bad for you.

Having said all that, I sure miss a good cigar.

To be fair, I never smoked cigars all that regularly, as a vice, it was more of a treat than a habit. But there were certain times that a good cigar was a deeply satisfying and intensely pleasurable experience. I guess that is what I miss.

I’m a terrible skier; I have broken way too many bones and joints. (When people tell you to evacuate because a hurricane is coming, listen. A hurricane is an IQ test: Don’t flunk like I did.) But skiing is fun, so I just do it badly and slowly work myself down the slope. I bought a bumper sticker at a truck stop and put it on the back of my ski jacket; “This Vehicle Makes Wide Slow Turns.” And I make frequent stops on the side of mountain as I have been known to sit in the middle of a slope, half way down the hill and just admire the view. At such times, a good cigar, and perhaps a little brandy from a pocket flask, is one of the great pleasures in life. Two miles above sea level, bright New Mexico sunlight, and a view that stretches for endless miles: glorious.

For me, cigars are always better when the weather is cold. Yet, I can remember a few exceptions. In Honduras, I watched them hand roll my pura, a cigar made entirely with local tobacco, before I smoked it. Does everything taste better when it is made fresh?

Certain activities, such as golf or playing poker are wonderful with cigars. And I can remember a particularly great cohiba I enjoyed while a friend and I flew a twin engine Navion to Pennsylvania.

Ayn Rand wrote a marvelous passage about smoking, albeit about cigarettes, in Atlas Shrugged, "I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

Ayn used a lot of symbolism in her books, it has been suggested that she used cigarettes as a symbol for, besides power and capitalism, sex. If Freud was correct about cigars being a phallic symbol, she obviously had a few disappointing relationships. Forget the cigarettes, let’s pretend she was talking about cigars. Now Ayn is a little closer to the truth. A cigar does seem to focus your attention a little better, aid your concentration, and perhaps let fly your imagination. The mind seems to find comfort in the familiar steps of trimming a cigar, lighting it, the measured flick to drop the ash off a cigar, and the slow exhale of aromatic smoke.

There is a great story about Winston Churchill and cigar ashes. While sitting in parliament, he wanted to distract everyone’s attention from a speech being delivered by a member of the loyal opposition. As the speech began, he elaborately lit a long cigar, and began to blow large clouds of smoke. As the ash began to grow, Churchill continued to blow billows of smoke, but did not flick off the large growing ash. More and more people began to watch the ash, it was growing impossibly long. Before long, the ash on the tip of the cigar was well over two inches and still growing. At this point, the poor chap making the speech could have juggled kittens and no one would have noticed.

Churchill never did flick the ashes off that cigar, he couldn’t have. Before attending that session of parliament, he had cut the head off a long hat pin and shoved it down the middle of the cigar. As the tobacco burned, the pin held the ashes in place.

It’s hard to imagine certain people without a cigar. Originally a light smoker, after General Grant was victorious at Fort Donelson, people all over the country sent him ten thousand cigars. Groucho Marx and Winston Churchill liked large cigars. Clint Eastwood liked those long thin cigars. Bill Clinton evidently likes a flavored cigar.

Even while I was smoking cigars, I knew that eventually I would have to stop. For as long as I could, I took comfort in the false hope that quitting was something I didn’t have to worry about while I was young, there was still time to quit, but not now, not this year. My first real clue that time was catching up with me occurred while slowly jogging up a small local hill. An elderly woman ran right by me like I wasn’t moving. I didn’t mind being way too out of breath to catch her, but the rock I threw missed her by ten feet.

The actual end to my enjoyment of cigars came pretty quickly. I was in a book store and walked by a magazine rack. There on the cover of Cigar Aficionado was a photo of Demi Moore smoking a nice cigar. That was it. I knew that if Demi and I had something in common outside of breathing; one of us had to change. Unfortunately, it was me. I never had another cigar.

I have to admit that occasionally, I still want a cigar. While playing poker, shooting pool, or hiking on a mountain I regularly experience an intense desire for a good cigar. For about a minute, I would kill a nun with a ball peen hammer for a cigar. Thankfully, the feeling passes after a while. Nuns everywhere are probably grateful.

About a hundred years ago, Vice President Marshall said what this country needed was a really good five cent cigar. Today, give me a cigar that cures cancer, strengthens my lungs, and will mow my grass.

I Know Nothing of Art

I confess:  All the knowledge I possess about art could easily be chiseled onto a granite slab small enough to fit in a gnat’s navel.  And it would rattle around in there, so small as to not discomfort the gnat.

I have no ill feelings towards art, but I do want to express some small pet peeves on the subject.  Not art itself, but a few topics on the periphery of art.

Let me start with Terry Gross of WHYY in Chicago. Her show, Fresh Air, can be heard daily on NPR.   This is a radio program I I dislike so thoroughly that I rarely miss an episode.   According to most of my email, most of the readers of my blog share this trait.

For those of you who don’t know, Ms. Gross is a talented and intelligent woman who can be heard 5 times a week interviewing among other people, artists, musicians, and actors.  And here is the rub; many of these people are the most whiny, self absorbed, unhappy people on earth.  The average interview seems to be with an angry woman furious that the government has cut off her funding, making it impossible for her to continue to pursue developing her medium:  political protest paintings made with elephant shit.

Why are all the artists so miserable?  So unhappy?  They all seem to come from such miserable homes that any given time one of their parents were being tried at the Hague for war crimes.  Are all artists addicted to snorting Sherwin Williams Permalast Oil Paint and have spent the majority of their lives in St. Dumbbell’s Rehab for the Clinically Idiotic?

Would it really be so bad if just once, Ms. Gross could interview someone happy?  Can you not find a single truck driver in Chicago who has been happily married for 25 years to the same woman, has three normal kids, and looks forward to his Wednesday night bowling league?  In short, a simple normal guy who thinks life is just grand? 

Secondly, I guess I don’t like Art Education.  I’m not talking about art education at my university; I have no idea what they do across the campus.  They are probably doing a great job.  Or not.  I would have no way of knowing.  I guess what I am peeved at is the industry of art education.  Anyone can be an Artist!  Send $39.95 and we guarantee to tell you so!

Even in a small sleepy New Mexico town, there are a plethora of stores selling art supplies, art galleries, and an entire army of people willing to take your money in exchange for lessons.

This reminds me of an afternoon many years ago when several of us were sitting around testing a case of beer to see if any of the bottles had spoiled.   Someone used a book of matches to relight his cigar, and there on the inside cover was that classic of advertising, the free art talent test.  Could you draw the pirate?  A small contest ensued; who could draw the worst picture.  The eventual winner was a result of several unorthodox techniques up to that date unknown in most art circles.  This included a contribution from the south end of a slumbering dog.  The masterpiece was mailed in, and in due course we were shocked to learn that dog’s ass had valuable latent talent.

Years ago, there was an annual art show in Texas called the Starving Artist Show.  Every painting had to sell for under $25.  The WalMart of art, enabling every single Texan to own his own original oil painting of a field full of bluebonnets dominated by a windmill.   There is a law requiring every home in Texas to own one of these. 

My mother and I had a small argument over the quality of the art sold in these shows.  My mother believed that true bargains could be obtained in these shows.  My opinion was that the mob that showed up would purchase road kill if you told them it was sculpture.  It turned out I was right because at the next show I spotted a table where a man was selling purses fashioned from armadillos. 

Since anyone could enter a painting, I decided to enter one of my own.  Despite the fact that I have absolutely no artistic ability, I had a plan.  I took a piece of plywood about two by three feet, sanded it smooth and painted it white.  This was my canvas.  Didn’t Leonardo da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa on wood?

My paints?  I had a cigar box full of assorted ballpoint pens of various colors.  I took these apart and cut the tips off the little tubes of ink.   I held each up to my mouth and blew the ink out onto the board.  I won’t say the result was pretty, but it was interesting.  A mass of wavy inky lines that looked like… exactly like something that looks like a mass of wavy inky lines.  After rotating my masterpiece for a solid ten minutes, I finally decided which way was up, signed the bottom with a ballpoint pen, naturally, and took it to the show.

It sold.  Somewhere, someone presumably has an original Milliorn.  But I’m not sure it will be the only one.  I’ve applied for a grant to paint more.  Terry, if they turn me down, I will be both terribly angry and available for your show.

If I Had Known Then...

A friend of mine was asked to write an essay for a radio station.  His topic was to be, If I had known then…  Obviously, this was to be an essay about regrets.  This got me to thinking about my own regrets.  How would I write such an essay?

Looking back across the last six decades, I do not regret too many things in my life. For years, I have gambled, occasionally drunk to excess, and systematically slaughtered many, if not most, of the Ten Commandments.  I am afraid I wasted the rest of the years.   Sure, I have made mistakes, but I’m not too sure I regret many of them.  Besides, I have come to realize that bad judgment makes for good stories.  As I am forced to realize that I have more of my years behind me than in front of me, I prize the stories more and more.

Okay, sticking around to see exactly how bad a category 4 hurricane could really be was probably a mistake.  Telling your wife that you could always remember her birthday because she was born on the anniversary of the Battle of Jutland was definitely a mistake.  If a highway patrolman asks you why you are driving a Porsche over 100 mph down the Gulf Freeway, the correct answer is probably not, “Well, I had to slow down on account of the rain.”  If you are interested in learning firsthand what that last experience was like, the next time you are pulled over for a minor traffic infringement, roll down the window, wait for the cop to walk up, and before he can say anything to you, scream, “Don’t look in the trunk!”  It was sort of like that.

On more than one occasion livestock have stepped on me, kicked me, bit me, and mistaken me for a public restroom.  I have been snake bit and knocked unconscious by an elephant.  (Never approach an immature elephant with a shirt pocket full of peanuts.) And the night three of us stole an alligator was definitely not a good night.  Yeah, all of these were mistakes, and I have the scars and the stitches to prove it.  Even if I could, I wouldn’t sell one of those scars for big money as each of them represents a story, and all of them are mine.

Mark Twain once said, “…a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”  I have carried my share of cats home by their tails, and I would not willingly part with my hard earned education.  And by this formula, that alligator must have earned me a doctorate.

I do have regrets, but most of my regrets have to do with the things I turned down.  I deeply regret the times I said no instead of leaping out and taking a great risk with a loud yes.  I regret not having said yes to a certain redhead with a 150 watt smile about 40 years ago.  I regret saying no to that Israeli Air Force recruiter.  And years ago, while driving from Vancouver to California, I saw a sign, “Alaska Ferry 10 Miles.”  Why in the world didn’t I turn the truck and get on that ferry?  I probably should regret using a Cessna to stampede cattle, but how was I to know there was a farmer standing in that field?  Even now, I would probably regret it, if only I could stop laughing.

I remember sitting on the side of a hill watching the bushes where I was damn near certain a buck was hiding, but before I could find out, a javelina started walking up the trail  towards me.  He looked right at me and there seemed to be a glint of intelligence in those cold beady black eyes.  I remember thinking, “He’s trying to tell me something.”  Now, a javelina is about as mean as my mother-in-law, and they can and will rip you to shreds, but I remember having a strong gut feeling that I could learn something from this one.  Perhaps I was on the brink of unlocking one of nature’s great mysteries.  In some small way, I regret having shot him.  I don’t regret having eaten him.   Slow cooked with onions, garlic, and red wine.  Maybe he was trying to tell me a better recipe.

I have a whole list of books that I haven’t read, and I deeply regret this.   I regret that too often in my life I did the things I was supposed to do and didn’t take more time off to read those books.  There is an infinite amount of work, but there is definitely a finite list of good books.  There’s a big list of bad books I regret not having read.

No, I look back and I regret having been too careful with my life.  I regret that I didn’t live a little wilder, jump a little higher, and run a lot faster.  I seemed to have been under the impression that somehow I was going to leave this life alive.  If I had known then what I know now, I would do everything the same, only more so, harder, and faster.

Frisbee Dates

The sad news today is the passing of a great inventor; Walter Frederick Morrison. This is the man who took a lid from a tin can full of popcorn, tossed it to his girlfriend and thus eventually earned a million dollars. Not bad.

Morrison sold his toy to Wham-O!, who sold his idea to Mattel, and all of them managed to sell us some 200 million flying discs, probably a third of which are on a roof somewhere right now. The patent has expired on the idea and no one knows how many companies around the world are making some sort of spinning toy, but only Mattel makes the Official Frisbee.

The history of the disc is truly remarkable; it has been estimated that 90% of all homes own one. If true, this would mean that the invention has saturated the market about as well as any device invented in the last 50 years. The US Navy spent $400,000 on an experiment to see if the toy could support naval flares. The Navy even designed and built a special machine to toss the discs off a mountain in Utah. I doubt if you will be surprised to learn the project was a failure. What happened to that machine? I hope the government has it preserved in the same warehouse they use to hide the Arc of the Covenant. This is the kind of technology that we should keep classified.

I can remember my first Frisbee: my father gave it to me right about the time that every American in the country was obsessed with the Hula-Hoop. The Hula-Hoop is one of those toys that will probably no longer work when most Americans no longer seem to have a waist or visible hips. When the average person looks like three grapefruit in a sock, at the very least we would need a hoop that is probably too large to bring home from the toy store. Back in 1959, my brother and I immediately invented a game that involved a hula-hoop, a Frisbee, and a barking cocker spaniel. I think the dog was the referee.

My favorite memories of playing with a Frisbee are from college at the University of Houston when I was dating my future wife. We were poor students, a concept that seems to have disappeared. I have students today who claim to be poor, but it is a little hard to accept that someone is poor when they are carrying a cell phone, a laptop, and an Ipod; the combined cost of which is more than I paid for my first two cars, my freshman tuition, and what I used to pay a month for rent on my apartment; combined.

No, my wife and I were the kind of poor where we had no phone, no TV, she had no car, and occasionally my truck stayed in the driveway for a week at a time since I could not afford to buy gas. And this at a time when gas cost about 35 cents a gallon. This kind of poor put quite a strain on dating. It is relatively hard to take a woman on a date when you have about a dollar and half. Hard, but not impossible.

Once a week, there was an inspection cruise up and down the ship channel and it was open to the public. The crew of the inspection ship thought it funny when my date and I brought a picnic lunch and ate it on the bow of the ship. Or you could, if you really studied the map and planned the transfers, ride the bus system all over the town for about half a dollar. A bus tour of the city.

There were lots of cheap dates; I gave blood for dinner theater tickets, there was an audience at the local TV station for a cooking show, there were art shows, museums, and I am afraid we crashed more than a few weddings. My favorite date was the picnic at the park with a Frisbee. Total cost: Zero. Those picnic lunches…well, I worked nights at a hotel that had several restaurants. No one has more friends than a restaurant chef.  I probably still owe that man a few favors.

With about three dollars, I could buy enough gas to get my aging Chrysler Barracuda to the beach in Galveston. After swimming in the gulf, we could play with the Frisbee until the sun went down, then watch the submarine races at night.

I remember a blanket in the park, cold chicken, and tossing a Frisbee until we were so tired we had to go back and lay on the blanket. I think I remember the blanket the best.

You don’t have to cure cancer or paint a ceiling in the Sistine Chapel to leave the world a better place than you found it, sometimes even the smallest actions can improve the world. Thank you Mr. Morrison. Well done.

Football Blogging Opportunity

While the entire country goes crazy over the Super Bowl, I have to admit that I am a little tired of football. This is probably after watching the local college team for the last few seasons. We call our team the New Mexico Possums since they play dead at home and get killed on the road.

I’ve taught many of the players, and they are good guys who try their best, but somehow the school joined a conference that apparently was created to train human forklifts for the Teamsters Union. After a long losing streak, the local paper has started reporting the games as “Shucks And Aw…”

Still, for a long time it was fun to watch them play and of course everyone enjoys watching the cheerleaders; the Goal Diggers. And the team certainly has the school’s best interest at heart, in these days of an ever-tightening budget, they promise to come down out of their Crystal Sports Palace and hold the school a bake sale. We hope to buy a book.

While I am no longer interested in the football this weekend, I am fascinated by the spectacle of the game. Millions of people will stop everything for this game. Golf courses will be deserted, movie theaters abandoned, and churches will have their lowest attendance of the year. Evidently, even God is a fan.

Stores are sold out of large screen, high definition TV sets, beer, and junk food. Enough Buffalo wings will be consumed on Sunday to ensure there is not an ambulatory chicken left in the country. The calories consumed this weekend are staggering. What’s the difference between a Super Bowl fan and an elephant? About 5 pounds. How do you make up the difference? Force feed the elephant.

More Americans will watch this game than the President’s State of the Union Address. Not that I blame them, as both the Colts and Saints have had a better year. And while the nearest computer can give you any music ever recorded, some 95 million Americans will be hoping to see some big-chested girlfriend of a quarterback performing an a capella version of “Pants On the Ground.” No one can say this country ain’t got culture.

The television commercials are the most amazing part of Super Bowl. Millions of people watch the game with absolutely no interest in football, they just want to watch the commercials. People who complain about commercials all during the year will willingly watch them this Sunday. These are supposedly good commercials. Somehow, on this one day a year, erectile dysfunction will be funny.

Advertisers are paying a staggering $90,000 a second, that’s $90,000 a second, to tell you about crap you would probably buy even if you didn’t watch the game. This means that for every 30 second spot, an advertiser has to pay about three cents per viewer.

This is a rip off. Madison Avenue, I have a much better deal for you. Advertise right here. Advertise on this excellent blog. According to Google, (the people who host this blog), the average reader spends about two minutes and twenty seconds on this site. And advertising here is about a tenth of the price per viewer compared to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl will only run once, this blog will be up for a year or more. And while the Super Bowl will be watched primarily only in the United States, according to my hate mail, this blog is read all over the world.

Hell, I’m getting email in languages I can’t even read. I’m ready and willing to negotiate. I’ll even write a second verse to “Pants on the Ground.”

Worthless Ideas for Higher Education

The future of education at universities is evidently linked to distance education. If you are unaware of this new development, distance education is where a student does not actually come to a classroom and engage in discussions, listen to lectures, and fall asleep in the back row while texting on his cell phone. Instead, the student has “content” delivered to his home computer. In this way, a student can be offered a rich choice of educational options: falling asleep at home, playing X-Box in another room, or forgetting to turn on the computer altogether.

The administration loves distance education. Not only can it avoid those pesky students actually coming to campus, but can expend its entire instructional construction budget on vital new education projects such as a new scoreboard for the football stadium.

Even more important, as university budgets decrease, distance education opens new opportunities to collect tuition from students who may not live within a thousand miles of the university. Distance education is so much cheaper for a university, that naturally there must be  extra charges. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some universities require a virtual distant parking permit.

It is only a matter of time before we read of a half million dollar contract for someone to coach a Big Ten fantasy football team.
Distance education does work, it is popular, and inevitably this will create its own problems. What will happen when all universities begin competing for the same students? Since the students do not actually come to a campus, there is no particular reason why a university could not allow an ever increasing number of students to enroll. A virtual campus could enroll an infinite number of virtual students. How will a small cash-strapped state university compete with a large cash strapped Ivy League college?

There is only one way: $$Price$$. To paraphrase Earl Scheib; “I’ll educate that student for $39.95.”

Imagine the quality education of the future. A neo-Neanderthal from Moose Crack, Wyoming can get a budget degree in Inter-Dimensional Multi-Media Mass Communication Management Disorders from OxBridge University, Inc., without having to violate his house arrest by removing his electronic ankle bracelet. For an extra $125, he can make the dean’s list.

It’s going to start getting ugly out there as universities begin to really compete for students. Eventually, I imagine universities will begin offshoring faculty jobs. I have a mental picture where the entire curriculum is taught by a single former call center employee in Pakistan. He could earn a little extra money by hiring himself out to students to take the course from himself.

The constant struggling with students to separate them from their money is getting out of hand. We need a more dignified method to separate the student from his tuition. I have a suggestion.

At the beginning of the school year, each student must purchase a new backpack, (naturally in the school colors.) Packed inside each bag could be several thousand dollars in cash. Whenever the built-in GPS unit registered that the student was on school property, a bell sounds every ten minutes and a fresh $5 bill would pop out of the top of the bag. The nearest university employee could just reach over and remove the bill.

Of course, in certain large and popular classes, the sound generated would be enormous, but many of these courses are just noise to begin with.

Or here is a simpler idea. Just auction off the degree to the highest bidder.

English Weather Explains England's Food

It has been raining, something not all that common here in New Mexico. Two of my classes are at opposite ends of the campus, so I decided to wear a raincoat. Wearing a raincoat in southern New Mexico is really rare. When I put it on, something rustled in the pocket and I found $7.00 and a receipt from a bookstore. The receipt was dated 5 years ago.

Raincoat, rain, I guess this is what got me thinking of England lately. Since I wrote something very nice about England a few weeks ago, I’m hoping I can get away with a little criticism this week. Besides, most of my hate mail lately has been coming from South Carolina or India; I’m ready for a change.

If New Mexico has the best weather, England is way at the other end of the spectrum, somewhere near Minnesota in winter, except you can freeze in England in July. At best they have 2 months of late spring followed by 10 months of dank, wet, gloomy hell. I remember listening to the BBC while cruising on a canal boat through Oxford one day in July. The announcer said, “We have music for your English summer. All thirty minutes of it.”

It mystifies me how a people that at one time or another conquered half the planet, including some very nice warm places, never moved. Look at Australia! If you have to live on an island, why not pick the warm one with great beaches? No! Only the English would ship their convicts to the warm island while staying in a place as cold as boarding house soup.

Personally, my idea of paradise involves a hot beach. And it doesn’t matter how you spell that word. Here in New Mexico, we have great beaches. The beaches just don’t have any water.

Having at one point been masters of North America, the British were only able to hang onto Canada. I guess it had exactly what England loves, lots of cold, wet land. All this is important, for only after you understand that the English are a beautiful people who prefer misery to comfort can you begin to understand English cooking.

I’m not sure, but I think the national dish of England is pork tartar. This is a country that specializes in gray, greasy, and boiled food. I think I remember the boiled part the most, vegetables boiled to a uniform gray. Nowhere else in the world do people brag about mushy peas. And if you see a sign saying a restaurant has a choice of three vegetables, this means you can choose between carrots, peas, and succotash.

There is an old joke in Europe about Heaven and Hell. Heaven is a German auto mechanic, a French cook, and an English policeman. Hell is a German policeman, a French auto mechanic, and an English cook. There is more than a germ of truth in this joke.

To be fair, maybe it is just because the food is different.  Sometimes different is good.  Pork and beans and baked tomatos for breakfast is different, but good?  They actually sell something called "Breakfast In A Can."  Sausage, bean, and tomatoes all in one can.  This is different, but argualbly not good.

Coming from the Southwest, I prefer my food to be on the spicy side; if food doesn’t bite back, it’s not hot enough. Despite what my wife claims, this does not mean I prefer my food to actually be on fire as I eat it, but clearly, if your eyes are not tearing uncontrollably you probably prefer food that comes out of a small jar with “Gerbers” printed on the label. So you can imagine my difficulties in England. I remember a restaurant in London where I sent a waiter on a quest to find me the hottest spice in the kitchen. After a long wait, he brought me a jar of yellow mustard. I ate it with a spoon.

I don’t know why I expected anything different; every restaurant has two strange condiment bottles on the table; white sauce and brown sauce. As far as I could tell, they were two different colors of library paste.

The good news is that there are a number of good restaurants in England; you just have to know the secret to finding them; only eat at restaurants that feature food from countries that England conquered. The Thai and Indian restaurants are spectacular.  And I really loved the jars of pickled cockels, each came with a little wooden spoon.  And I tried a jellied eel; and it tastes pretty much like what you think it does, only colder, greasier, and eelier.

I think I’ve figured it out; I now understand almost everything about the English. Except cricket.

Travel Tips Worth Their Weight In... Pesos

These days, everyone is making fun of airport security. It is easy to take cheap shots at the mentally handicapped. I know, because just last week, I made fun of them. See for yourself, just scroll down about a page and a half.

Cheap shots are easy, but I would like to do something constructive. No, not make more suggestions on how to improve airport security, that’s useless. I know, as a professional educator, I can tell you that while you can attempt to teach algebra to a pig, all that does is piss off the pig. Well, actually, I’ve never tried it with a pig, but I did try to teach history to a basketball player. Pretty much the same thing.

No, I have several useful and helpful ideas on how to improve your travel. In short, I have travel tips.

Let’s start with air travel. I don’t know about you, but one of the reasons I hate flying commercial, besides the airlines not letting me be the pilot, is that the planes are invariably filled with people. And way too often, they want to sit next to me. I really don’t understand this; after all there is plenty of space left out on the wings.

The worst flights, as in SouthWorst Airlines, are the airlines that will not allow you to reserve a seat. Somehow, they believe it is far more dignified to allow you to crowd, push, and grab the best seats you can, not unlike livestock filling a cattle car. The problem with this is that after you find a nice seat, you sit there watching the plane fill and inevitably a 400 lb born again Neanderthal on his way to a bad breath convention decides take not only the seat next to you, but half of your seat as well.

I have the solution. Take a pipe with you, and make damn sure that the only thing ever burned in the pipe was tobacco. You don’t actually smoke the pipe on the plane, but as soon as you sit down, take your pipe out of your pocket and stick it in your mouth. Within seconds, a nervous stewardess will remind you that smoking is forbidden. As a matter of fact, she will remind you every 30 seconds until the plane takes off. But, I can absolutely guarantee you that no one will willingly sit anywhere near the insane man with a pipe. Unless, the plane is full, no one will sit within rows of you.

The only flaw in this plan is that you have to be one of the first to board the plane. I have a suggestion for this, too. Pre-board. All you have to do is go to a drug store and buy a nice padded brace for you leg. When you check in at the ticket counter, tell them you have a broken leg and need to pre-board. If you are really brave, ask for a skycap with a wheel chair. And while you are sitting on the plane, pipe in mouth, waiting for everyone else to board… you can take the brace off.

Naturally, you will have to tip the skycap, but my last travel suggestion will handle this. Foreign money. Especially from Argentina, Mexico, or any other country where high inflation is common. Buy the smallest possible bill in large quantities.

Part of the fun of traveling used to be trying to figure out how much the local money was worth. Brightly colored pieces of strange paper with pictures of unknown people. I especially liked the money the Dutch used to have; they were more like works of art than cash. And it was kind of fun to pay a cab driver by holding up a fan of strange bills and say, “Don’t hurt me.”

While the introduction of the Euro has eliminated some of the fun of European travel, there are still several countries who can provide you with colorful, although worthless, printed money. About six years ago, a single dollar would buy you over a million Turkish Lira.

Several years ago, I took the Doc and both boys to Mexico. At the first bank, I exchanged enough money to provide my wife some pocket change. “Here you are, Honey.” I said as I dumped a pile of bills in her lap, “You’re a millionaire.”

And it was true. I paid a little over $300 for a million pesos. At that rate, you can stuff a handful of 10 peso notes into a bellboy’s or a skycap’s hand. Worth roughly about a quarter.  The recipient will have absolutely no idea how much, or how little, you have tipped them.

You can act like a high roller and throw the cash around. Unless you are stupid enough to try this in Mexico.

A Practical Proposal for Airport Security

Two months ago I wrote about problems with air travel and my views about what we call, in what can only be a cruel jest, airport security. (http://markmilliorn.blogspot.com/2009/11/travels-with-my-family.html) As we all know, since that time the underwear bomber has upped the stakes. And like every American, I have an opinion about how to improve airport (in)security. And these suggestions, like everyone else’s, will not be listened to and the airport security will continue to be a train wreck into mediocrity.

Still, I would like to offer a humble proposal for airport security. My proposal is a compromise between what I really want, and a security program too limp-wristed to bring order to a kindergarten playground.

What I actually want is…nothing. Just stop reacting to the actions of terrorists. What did the Brits do during the Battle of Britain? They continued to live their lives as normal as they could. I remember several years ago visiting an exclusive tailor’s shop in London. The front of the shop still clearly showed shrapnel damage from German bombs. The shop had no intention of repairing it, and was proud of having conducted business as close to normal as possible throughout the war.

I would like the opportunity to be as brave, but unfortunately my government has decided that I must cower as they protect me from the fingernail clippers and shampoo bottles of my fellow passengers.

I understand the government wants to appear it is proactive, doing something, anything. In today’s nanny state, a government must do something about every problem, but I do not understand why the government is against profiling. I do it all the time. As I have written, my hobby is rabbit hunting. What would happen if the next time I went out in the desert to thin the hare herd if I didn’t profile?

“Yes, your honor. I shot two dogs, a pickup, and a steer, but at least I wasn’t profiling.”

My actual proposal is small, I want to empower the most effective security force in aviation today; the passengers. The only hijacked plane that failed to reach its intended target on 9/11 was brought down by the passengers. Both the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were stopped by passengers. This despite the fact that all our security measures have done to date is disarm the passengers.

This is why I want to rearm the passengers. No, not with guns, I have no illusions that TSA will suddenly allow the stewardess to walk down the aisle saying, “Coffee, tea, thirty-eight?”

No, my proposal is a return to basics: Rocks. As the passengers board the plane, hand each of them a rock. One about the size of a baseball. Imagine the shoe bomber. Now imagine the shoe bomber being hit with 110 rocks. Crisis over. Ask yourself, if you are on a plane that someone is attempting to hijack, which would you prefer? A Sky Marshall somewhere on the plane who will probably try to reason with the hijacker while not injuring his self esteem? Or a plane load of people winding up to release a blizzard of 2 pound fast balls? There will be no need to subdue the would-be hijacker, he will be the lump under the pile of rocks.

No training is necessary, we all know how to use rocks, and as a society, we use them responsibly most of the time. I mean, you don’t have to build a fence around your rock garden to prevent a mass stoning. Even in Massachusetts you can carry a rock without a permit. Rocks are cheap, natural, renewable, and I guess they fit the definition of green.

America is at war with a fundamentalist Stone Age enemy with the brains of gravel. To fight them, America should return to the original missile defense system.  Clearly, rocks are the perfect weapon.  Let our motto be: Keep Calm and Carry On A Rock.

The Happy Valley

Many years ago, there was a beautiful and fertile valley. A hunter, intrigued by the abundant game, made his home in the valley and began to hunt rabbits. There was always meat on the table, life was easy and the hunter was happy.

Before long, a farmer moved to the valley and began to grow onions. He worked very hard and soon his efforts paid off with a bumper crop. Within a very short time he began to regularly trade onions with his neighbor for rabbit meat. Both men were very happy since rabbit stew tastes ever so much better with onions.

By the end of the first year, a shoemaker moved to the valley. Trading with the hunter for rabbit skins and meat, and with the farmer for onions he was soon making shoes for the families of both happy men.

The valley grew even happier with the arrival of a master brewer. Rabbit stew tastes great, but if you can wash it down with a cold beer it becomes a feast fit for a king. Shoes, meat, onions, and beer; the valley now had a thriving economy and a rosy future.

The next pilgrim was a preacher. The wives of the hunter, the farmer, the shoemaker, and the brewer insisted that their families must join the new church, if for no other reason than for the benefit of the children. The preacher explained that only through prayer and the devout religious observations would the harvest of onions and the availability of rabbits be assured. For his guidance, he accepted the gifts of shoes, meat, and onions. You can also be sure he accepted the beer, since he was the only preacher. Any preacher will drink beer as long as there isn’t another preacher to watch him do it.

By now, the little community was growing larger. Luckily a politician moved to the valley and explained the need for government and was quickly elected mayor. The new mayor quickly established an orderly society, with rules, laws, and taxes. Understanding the taxes was difficult, but the arrival of both a lawyer and an accountant helped solve the problem.

Before long, for the safety of the children, the community passed a law that every home had to have a fence built around it. This didn’t make the hunter very happy, as the fence was to be made from trees that primarily grew where the rabbits lived, but the hunter agreed to the project for the sake of the children. The work was very hard, but luckily the accountant counted the boards while the lawyer pointed out where the fences should be built. The hunter, the farmer, the shoemaker, and the brewer took time off from their jobs and with the spiritual guidance of the preacher, soon had the fences built.

The children were safe but uneducated, so the mayor wrote a letter and enticed a school teacher to move to the valley. It turned out the little community was ignorant, she explained that she was an educator and would instill a paradigm of advanced educational pedagogy based on excellence and self esteem. The ignorant people of the community were thrilled and hoped if this worked, maybe someday the educator could also teach the children. They understood this wouldn’t be anytime soon as the mayor was promising a football team just as soon as a coach could be found.

Schools are expensive, and there was a shortage of rabbit meat and onions, even though the mayor had passed a law against falling production. The mayor, the lawyer, and the accountant had worked out a five year economic plan that guaranteed success; the hunter was required by law to only shoot very large rabbits, the farmer was to double his yield per acre, and the brewer was required to put pints of beer in half pint bottles.

It was at this point that a man moved to the town. While he had a very large family, he didn’t have a profession. It seems that he did nothing at all. While it was the opinion of at least the farmer and the brewer that this man should starve to death, the preacher and the lawyer were good people and managed to explain that this man’s family had a right to eat, was entitled to eat, and the community owed it to them to feed them and provide shoes.

Since there was still a shortage, the mayor introduced a new sin tax on beer. Shortly after this new tax, the community discovered that the brewer had left town in the middle of the night with the preacher’s wife, neither was ever seen again. For some reason, right about the same time, the preacher convinced the mayor that alcohol was evil and new laws were passed making the drinking of beer against the law.

The farmer simply quit. He packed up his bags and moved out. He said several unkind things as he left, but there was no convincing him to stay. The mayor didn’t even try, saying he couldn’t be responsible for every undercapitalized business in town. Still the town must do something to preserve their way of life, so they passed a law forbidding the hunter from moving. Most of the pressure for this new law came from the shoemaker who was worried about the availability of rabbit skins.

The community’s fears proved to be well founded, for within a month they caught the hunter trying to sneak out of town. There was a trial, and eventually the lawyer convinced the community that a lesson had to be set for the education of everyone, especially the children. The hunter was hanged.

Years later when someone visited the valley, there were no people living there. The farmer’s fields were a dusty ruin and all the houses had blown down. Even the rabbits were gone, since without the hunter, they had quickly overpopulated, stripped the valley of plant life, and were already on the verge of starvation when an epidemic of Tularemia made them extinct.

The only thing left to show that people had ever lived in the valley was a faded sign where the mayor’s house had once been. As it swings in the wind, you can still dimly read the faded words; Welcome To New Mexico.

The Religious Upbringing of Children

The late Douglas Adams wrote a wonderful story in his incredibly misnamed five volume trilogy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, about a distant race of people who wanted to know the meaning of life, after thousands of years of work, and building multiple computers, they learned that the answer was 42. Unfortunately, after Adams gave us the answer, he never got around to explaining the question.

When What’s-His-Name was about 12, he began to leave childhood and become self-aware, he began questioning the world around him. So it was only natural that one day he asked me the same question.

“Dad?” he asked. “Why are we here? What is life all about?”

“42.” I promptly answered. I can’t say I was expecting the question, but I was ready. Thank you, Mr. Adams.

“Dad! Be serious, I want to know what life is all about.” What’s-His-Name was practically yelling.

“Son, if you don’t believe me, go ask your mother.” This was another great answer. My son and I both knew I had never missed an opportunity to play a practical joke on him, and he knew better than to completely believe me. His mother, The Doc, is absolutely trustworthy, having had her sense of humor surgically removed during the third year of med school.

So my son promptly ran to the other end of the house and asked his mother the same question and just as promptly got an answer, “42.” The Doc loves Douglas Adams as much as I do. She used to operate in scrubs with “Don’t Panic” stenciled on the back. Okay, some vestigial remains of her sense of humor are still attached.

You could hear What’s-His-Name wailing from the other end of the house. I’m still not sure if he was upset at an answer he couldn’t understand or the realization that all of his genetic material came from the two of us.

This incident happened years before I had worked out the tenets of my own church, St. Mark’s Buddhist Bar and Tabernacle, but even then I knew that every child needs some form of religious or ethical foundation. Eventually, we settled for something simple; Life Sucks and Then You Die.

Simple religions for simple people and this one fulfilled all the needs of a religion. It explains why bad things happen; Life Sucks. And it handles the question of an afterlife; You Die. It encourages a practical, though somewhat stoic, lifestyle. Okay, it probably fails one major test of a religion, it doesn’t coerce tithing, but my boys didn’t yet have the resources that would attract an established church.

Faithful readers by now realize that my philosophy of raising children is to take every possible opportunity to fill their heads with bullshit and lunacy. I believe in stretching their brains before life locks them into a role. Having been raised in Our Lady of Perpetual Motion, a church that was constantly terrified that someone somewhere was having a good time, I was determined to have my sons avoid this infection until they had developed sufficient antibodies. Besides, I was worried that if I was caught back on church grounds, they might burn me at the stake.

I wasn’t sure the boys completely understood this philosophy until I attended a parent/teachers conference when The-Other-One was in the third grade. The teacher was a little upset with my son’s history report about the hardships faced by the Pilgrims. She couldn’t understand why the son of a history professor would end his report with… and you guessed it… “Life Sucks and Then You Die.”

I could have told her there were 42 reasons, but she wasn’t ready for a religious breakthrough.

Thoughts On Being a Grandfather, Honorary Second Class

When your children are small, it is amazing how little you know about being a parent. Every situation is new, the children are fragile, and the job is impossible. I distinctly remember trying to dress What’s-His-Name in a snow suit. I think he was three, all elbows and knees and it seemed impossible to get both his arms in that blasted suit at the same time. I suddenly realized that I was exerting on this tiny little arm approximately the same force necessary to remove a frozen lug nut from a truck tire. It was just blind luck that I didn’t end up with that arm ripped loose in my hands.

Right about the time I began to understand small children, I blinked, and suddenly the boys were teenagers. For a while, I thought this was an improvement, after all, I remembered being a teenager myself, I was a treasure trove of relevant information. Unfortunately, my sons had discovered that both their parents were morons; neither of them would listen to such unreliable people. The best they could hope for was that we wouldn’t embarrass them in public while they tried to borrow my pickup.

Then suddenly, they were adults. Now, they are not only willing to listen to us, but are plainly astounded at the sudden knowledge my wife and I possess. Obviously, we morons have been studying nights. Unfortunately, we still don’t seem to be of much use as either our lives have sufficiently diverged from theirs or our memory has degraded. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t seem we have much relevant advice.

Another possibility is that their father just wants to see the boys crash and burn. Bad mistakes make good stories. Somebody has to write this blog, otherwise there are no ads for you to click.

For whatever reason, it seems that as a parent, you are never really as much help to your children as you would like. Raising kids is a cruel joke that you play on yourself.

Then, suddenly, it is Act II and you have grandchildren. At first, this seems like a great joke on the parents bordering on sublime revenge. For Christmas, I’m thinking of giving the Munchkin a set of drums. I hear ferrets make horrible pets; I’ll buy her two.

Some of the fun of being a grandfather disappears when you realize there is work involved. Undoubtedly, the worst chore is the Christmas pageant. How many millions of hours have been wasted by men sitting in a school cafeteria, their ass wedged into a tiny chair designed for someone about 4 foot tall, while they listen to a flock of pre-pubescent tricycle motors sing Christmas songs in an octave only dogs can hear?

The entire herd stands on the stage like deer caught in headlights as they sing the same words to every song:

La –la Santa la-de-la-de-la

O Bethlehem’s Reindeer

La Holy Night O’ Holy Nose

You Better Be Christmas Bells

All around you, soccer moms are videotaping every second. Who exactly will ever watch this? This is a new age, we have internet and YouTube. When you are probably just a Google search away from watching a video of the most wildly improbable event you can possibly imagine; say a chimpanzee attempting to mate with a football, why would you suddenly decide that tonight would be a perfect night to watch a badly filmed video of tiny children singing, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa’s Reindeer?”

Bored out of my mind, all I could do was sit there and ask myself questions. Why do schools have the acoustics of a snare drum? How do they expect a grown man to smile all the way through a Christmas pageant with nothing more fortifying than a plate full of vanilla wafers and a Dixie cup full of mystery punch? And most importnantly, exactly how much trouble can you get into if you spike the punchbowl in a pre-school?

Christmas in New Mexico

It is Christmas in southern New Mexico. You can tell by the weather, it is unseasonably cold; it only got up to 60 degrees today. Blue skies and warm sunshine, New Mexico has the perfect winter weather. If you don’t go outside in the middle of the night, our winter’s amount to only a few cold days scattered across a couple of months. We had one of those days last week; it snowed half an inch in one day, the schools closed, people panicked as if they had never heard of snow, and then we were back to normal.

For us, snow is mainly a spectator sport; we can see it on the mountains as we play golf. Snow belongs on Christmas cards and Yankees’ heads.

But you can tell it is Christmas because all the college students have left town. It is so quiet! God knows I love my students, but it is nice to drive to work without 5 cars driving so close behind me they seem to be auditioning to become my own personal proctologist. I know a librarian who once wished the students would never return; “It would be so much easier to keep the library neat if we didn’t have all those students.”

The southwest has its own form of Christmas decorations; luminarias. A tradition that dates back to when this part of the country was part of Mexico, luminarias are small paper sacks partially filled with sand that anchors the sack and provides a base for a burning candle. My family uses a modern version, a plastic waterproof sack containing a small electric light. The traditional name for these is fakolitos.

My wife, the Doc, is unhappy that Christmas seems to become more commercialized every year. Once again, I disagree. I don’t think the holidays are commercial enough.

Let’s cut the crap, by commercialization, we are talking about money. Can you have too much money in something? There have been periods in my life when I didn’t have any money; if it had cost a dollar to go around the world, I couldn’t have reached the next county. And there have been times in my life when I was relatively flush. Trust me, flush is better.

Exactly what is supposed to be wrong with money? Somehow money has become synonymous with evil. While I have no idea where this silly idea came from, I can tell you exactly what is wrong with it. Money is nothing more or less than the present incarnation of an ancient idea. Thousands of years ago man worked and fought for meat. If you had enough, you did not starve. Today, civilization notwithstanding, modernization has simply substituted money for meat. And if you have enough, you still won’t starve. Money is meat.

So bring it on, commercialize the holidays all you want. Let’s start the Christmas season even earlier, put the tree up Halloween night. Turn Thanksgiving into a Christmas brunch, and New Years can be the morning after party. While you are at it, you can merge a few other holidays into Christmas.

Hanukkah lasts 8 days, Kwanzaa 7, but Christmas is limited to one? Let’s combine them all and shoot for 100% participation. Happy Kwanistmaskuh!

Not only would this maximize shopping time, but it would eliminate all the false pretenses that have cropped up lately by the university and most stores about Christmas. Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays, Winter Break, my ass. Who the hell do we think we’re fooling? By combining the various holidays, all of them lose their religious significance, and we can concentrate of the business of Christmas. The expanded economic season will mean full employment, rising industrial profits, and increased tax revenue for the government.

As a first step, I believe the government should enact a Christmas stimulus package. Uncle Sam Claus can leave cash in my stocking.

Who Wants To Be A Grandfather?

Suddenly, and without much warning, I seem to be a grandfather. My son, The-Other-One, not What’s-His-Name, has managed to find a shortcut. Instead of adhering to the Brady Baby Bill with the mandatory nine month waiting period, he found a loophole and started dating a young woman with a three year old daughter. The child is tiny, like her mother, The Leprechaun.

I have to admit the child is adorable. Cute, smart, loving, and already house broken. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that I am ready to be a grandfather. There was a time when I wanted a lot of children, but 30 years later, I can no longer remember why. Unlike Angelina Jolie or Madonna, I have absolutely no desire to collect the entire set.

The Munchkin has provided me with several educational moments. Just last week, she informed me that as she was too young to be an adult, she was a “little-dult.”

And I have learned an awful lot about children’s clothes. Thank God I had boys. Boys will wear a paper sack if you cut holes in it for their legs, but little dresses for a three year old cost more than the clothes I wear to work. I remember an August a few years back when both boys and I needed back-to-school clothes. From the house to the mall and back home in under an hour, we had shirts, Levis, socks, and underwear for all of us and still had money for a pizza. We only had to go to one store; Sears. My motto: Buy your clothes where you buy your drill bits.

Evidently, clothing shopping for girls of any age requires the logistical support of a D-Day landing, a trip to every store in the county, and cost as much as my first car. I had no idea that a three year old girl needed jewelry. Mark my words; the first company that introduces a line of cosmetics for toddlers will reap a fortune.

I confess most of the problems are caused by me; it seems that you can’t raise little girls the same way you do boys. With little girls, you’re not supposed to cuss, threaten an ass-whipping, or teach them to shoot craps. The consensus around the house seems to be that if I had raised a daughter she would have turned out to be a sadomasochistic psychotic whore. Maybe so, but I bet she could make a decent martini.  (Both boys learned quite early to make a great martinin, but they never understood why I had them go outside to the far corner of the yard and whisper, "Vermouth."  I like a VERY dry martini.)

With the boys, I tried constantly to fill their heads with nonsense and bullshit. No question was ever answered truthfully, and story time was always a challenge to everyone’s imagination. When cooking, I used food coloring to dye every meal into outrageous colors. For a while, the favorite meal of both boys was a dish of my own invention; Monkey Blood Chicken. Rare was the breakfast without Green Eggs and Ham. Ours was the only house where Dr. Seuss was a cookbook.

Now, suddenly, this is frowned on. The Leprechaun doesn’t like it when I tell the story about Curious George and the Electric Fence. I’m not supposed to say that raspberries are actually blood clots. And personally, I thought it was hilarious when I had the Munchkin searching the house for our new pet, the Mexican Barking Spider.

I will admit the little-dult is adorable. She climbed into my lap and asked me if I would be her Grandpa Mark. I was so touched; I told her the story, Mr. Fork Marries Miss Electric Outlet.