Sciurus Non Carborundum

It is a hectic week here at Enema U.  Students are due back in just a few days, so in keeping with tradition, there are several sweeping changes and campus alterations being announced at the last possible moment.  It is a well-known concept in education that nothing can be truly improved until it is totally destroyed.

So it follows that quite a few streets, parking lots, bicycle lanes, and walkways have recently been closed for renovation and repair by the MOB (Maintenance Of Buildings) office.  As explained by Vinny Giaconno, the Associate Assistant Executive Vice President of Renovations, “These repairs will be completed by the end of June, long before the students come back to class.  Besides, we’ve been busy negotiating a new waste removal contract.”

The Personnel Department has been equally busy.  All married employees have been asked to produce copies of their marriage licenses to prove they are not defrauding the health insurance program.  Evidently employees are guilty, and single, until proven wedded.

I figure this is probably a mistake, at least in my case; they probably meant to ask for a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate.  I think I can save them the trouble: I will readily admit to being a bastard, but it had nothing to do with my parents’ marital status.  I am proud to admit that I am a self-made man.  Prior to coming to work for the university, I was only a self-made son-of-a-bitch, but I’ve been eddicated.

Perhaps the biggest change, at least for the faculty at Enema U, is the new digital measures program.  For years, the administration has striven to perfect a process whereby they could evaluate the performance of faculty.  Consider the problem: all the administration could rely on were arbitrary concepts like enrollment, class popularity, student evaluations, peer assessments, publications, or service work for the university and the community.  Wouldn’t it be much more efficient if the administration could figure out a simple digital, and statistically manageable, measurement system to tell them who were the truly productive faculty?

You can imagine the excitement here at Enema U when the new evaluation process, the Numerical Uniform Teaching Scoring System (NUTSS), was announced.  Developed by the Head Rodent in the Office of Moose and Squirrel, the faculty was sent a memo this week announcing that (at a full dress convocation in the coming week), she will proudly show off her NUTSS.  And while she acknowledges that her NUTSS are modestly small at present, before long her NUTSS will be found in every departmental office on campus. 

The pilot program has been extremely promising.  It was tested by the Department of Creative and Interactive Social Justice Education, and while the faculty was originally justifiably afraid of the administration’s NUTSS, before the trial period was over, many faculty members were publicly saying they were ready to give up the old system and kiss the administration’s NUTSS.

Said Professor Ken Holland, “I had never handled NUTSS before, but after a while I got used to it.”

Initially, there was some concern that a computer virus might contaminate NUTSS, but this problem was quickly licked.  The Administration urges that only routine protection should be used while using NUTSS.  Or as one member of the administration said, “No matter what you heard, our NUTSS are safe to use.”

Regular use of NUTSS, essentially a large database, will soon insure that everyone in Administration will be able to access complex reports relatively easily.  The goal is to have NUTSS exposed to every faculy member by the end of the semester.  Within a very short time, even department heads will be able to produce sophisticated reports by manipulating the Administration’s NUTSS.

Proudly, Enema U developed NUTSS and nothing like it can be found at other universities.  This situation may soon change, as several universities have expressed an interest in seeing our NUTSS.  One administration official is reportedly emailing photos of our NUTSS worldwide.  In the years to come, there is no telling where you could find Enema U’s NUTSS.

Yet Another Blog About Books

When I first met my wife, she said she wanted to go to medical school.  I nodded and smiled at this and just ignored what she had said.  I’d already met lots of people who said they were going to med school and if half of them had actually gone, the country would have had to import patients.  So, it was something of a shock when she actually got accepted to med school.

It was definitely a shock to the budget--her tuition and books were almost exactly what I grossed.  Obviously, I needed a new and better paying job.  My plan was simple: I applied for every job in the newspaper that paid enough money for us to survive, regardless of the qualifications needed.  I remember submitting resumes for jobs requiring degrees in fields I had never heard of.  Eventually, I actually got hired.  I worked for a very large publishing company in New York and my job was very simple.  I read books, drove around Texas in a company car and explained to bookstores what the company was publishing the next month.  It is hard to imagine how a job could be better than this (unless it involved free scotch and a lot of nudity).

Even the few problems with this job were minor and laughable.  I remember being asked by accounting why my expense account reports were so much less expensive than those of the sales reps from New York or Chicago.  It seems that they honestly expected me to spend $50 on lunch.  God knows, I tried.  This was in the 1970’s, and it was pretty hard to spend that much money for lunch.  In Beeville, I took the owner of the town’s only bookstore (and all the customers in or anywhere near the store) across the street to the diner for lunch, and still couldn’t get the tab over $40.

There are very few tourists in Corpus Christi during January.  The beach is as cold and wet as a well diggers’ feet.  At any hotel in town I could rent the honeymoon suite for $14 a night.  The home office in New York was expecting lodging bills of roughly $75 a night.  I’m pretty sure they thought I was sleeping in my car.  

New York never understood the Texas book market either.  I sold too many Louis L’Amour westerns and too few romance novels than their market plan allowed for.  And I distinctly remember being asked why I had only sold 4 copies of “A Shiksa’s Guide to Married Life” in the entire hill country of Texas.  I tried to explain that this was 134% of market penetration (some woman must have lost and replaced her copy) but they never really understood.

Nor did I ever understand what was happening in New York.  I would get pre-release copies of books for review.  If I thought they were horrible, each would invariably become best sellers.  Books I thought were wonderful usually disappeared from the market faster than donuts at a faculty meeting.   Let’s see--among the books  I told New York would never amount to anything were “Jaws”, “Amityville Horror”, “Saturday Night Fever”, and anything by Clive Cussler.  The only book that I raved about that ever actually amounted to anything was “Ecotopia”.  That book has become a staple on college campuses, and is still in print.

I spent a lot of time in campus bookstores: this was back when publishing companies kept extensive back stocks of books.  Our catalog of books was bigger than the phone books of many of the Texas towns I traveled through.  One of the campus bookstores on southern border had a new manager, and she had developed quite a problem.  When she was hired from a large eastern urban college, she expected that a college bookstore on the Mexican border would be fairly similar to what she had seen back east.

Wrong!  Sadly, in those days the literacy rate in the valley of Texas was horrible, and books just didn’t sell there, even on a college campus.  Most of my competition didn’t even bother trying to cover the area.  Not aware of this problem, the poor bookstore manager noticed the store lacked almost any reading material outside of class textbooks and decided to correct the situation.  She bought thousands of used books from a jobber back east.

And books sat in that store like lumps.  No sales!  The manager marked them down to half price.  No sales!  Her last desperate attempt was a grocery bag sale.  For $5, you could fill a paper grocery bag with books.  No sales!  No matter what she did, those books sat there like a basketball player in a math class.  By the time I arrived in her store, she was frantic to move the books; their very presence was starting to be a campus joke.  Did I know of anyone who would buy them in bulk?

I still have no idea why, but I heard my mouth offer her four cents a book for the entire collection.  As soon as I said it, I was horrified--this woman was going to be horribly insulted and call my boss and… She accepted my offer.  I had just bought a bookstore.

I knew a guy with a truck, (everyone in Texas either has a truck or knows a guy with a truck, but this guy had an 18-wheeler).  He picked up just over 12,000 books and brought them to my three-bedroom house.  The books, once we began sorting them into piles by category, filled the house.  Thankfully, the Doc and I did not yet have children, for there would not have been enough room left over for them.    These were mostly what are termed “Quality Paper-Backs”, with a few hundred coffee-table books thrown in.

Almost immediately, I began to sell books at a garage sale, at flea markets, and even a few to a book store in Beeville that remembered me kindly.  After about two months, I had broken even financially, but still had roughly 10,000 books left in my home (not counting the original 1000 or so the Doc and I owned before the deluge).  Even by our standards, we thought we had a few too many books in the house.  The problem was that the market was saturated.  I couldn’t imagine selling another used book to anyone, ever.

So that is how the Milliorn family came to donate 10,000 books to the Texas prison system.  The tax deduction for the donation wiped out both my father’s and my income taxes for three years.  We declined the offer by the prison to put up a plaque in our name, not from modesty--we just didn’t want to make any new friends in the prison system.

Enema U just opened a new bookstore.  If it doesn’t work out, they can call me.

For Medicinal Reasons

I was given a nice bottle of port this week.  St. Clair Winery here in New Mexico bottles an excellent port.  Normally a little out of my price range, but free is always affordable.  Port is one of those contemplative drinks.  You stare deep into a glass of the wine, the color of pigeon’s blood rubies, and remember who and what and when.  Tonight it reminds me of my first glass of port.

Many years ago, I was working my way through college on the night shift at a hotel in Houston.  It was a rather small and very expensive hotel in an exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by museums, art galleries, and upscale restaurants.  About half the hotel’s rooms were rented out permanently to elderly, and very rich, people who enjoyed the excellent service and security the hotel offered.

I had a unique job: I did a little of everything.  Part desk clerk, part security guard, full-time flunkey and all around gopher, I was the guy who did whatever was needed and not normally assigned to someone else.  Whatever was not someone else’s job was by definition my job.

This was a great gig for a student: I had lots of time to study, there were cute waitresses in the bar to flirt with, and friendly cooks worked in the restaurant who understood the needs of an always hungry teenager.  The hotel attracted an endless parade of interesting people. Louis L’Amour, the western writer, stayed in the hotel for several days so he could interview an aging and retired former chief of police who, in his earlier days, had been a deputy of Wyatt Earp.  Famous artists came frequently for shows at the museums.

The best part of the job, however, was the year round residents of the hotel.  Most of these self-made millionaires came from the early days of wildcatting oil or the last great days of ranching.  Perhaps my love of history started by talking to these guests. I can still remember vividly some of the stories they told me about Texas in the 1920’s and 1930’s.    These residents were generous to a fault; I quickly learned that small services were rewarded by lavish tips.  Especially Mrs. Hutchings from the sixth floor, (rumored to be the wealthiest resident in the hotel).  She would tip $5 if you brought her mail to her door.  I confess that on the infrequent days she had received two letters, I would hold one back to ensure she had mail the next day.  Since she had outlived most of her family, I considered, but eventually rejected, the idea of writing her a few letters myself.

About two thirds of these special residents of the hotel were widowed women.  They formed a rather exclusive and eccentric club.  They would travel as a group to art shows, new restaurant openings, and to church, but I think their favorite outing was going to the doctor.  Collectively, they were as healthy as draft horses, but individually, each would privately confide (to all who would listen) how they were suffering from a life threatening collection of ailments ranging from the galloping galontis to the creeping crud. 

Somehow, most of the doctors they visited could not confirm these ailments by modern medical testing, but this lapse in their medical training didn’t matter since the ladies would not visit the same doctor long enough for any medical treatment to be effective.  Within a month or two, one of the ever hopeful patients would discover a new doctor, usually young, and they would all troop off to seek the advice of the new physician.

Eventually, one of these doctors hit pay dirt by prescribing the previously proscribed: a glass of port wine every night before sleep, supposedly for the benefit of the heart.  I have always wondered if this doctor knew that telling a group of Baptist women to drink wine was giving them a perfect alibi to indulge in a little secret sin.  The only caution was that the doctor told each of the ladies not to drink alone.

This was a problem, for none of the women could possibly drink with any of the other ladies.  After several women went privately to discuss the problem with the hotel manager, a solution was found: every evening about sundown, I would discretely make the rounds of the ladies’ rooms carrying two small crystal glasses of port wine on a silver tray.  I was actually tipped for drinking to the ladies’ health.  By the time I got to Mrs. Hutchings on the top floor, my level of inebriation was somewhere between witty and invisible.  I would usually end the evening sleeping in my office behind the front desk.  Unfortunately, this medical experiment ended about a month after it started.  This was just as well--while the tips were excellent, my grades were suffering.

The St. Clair port is an excellent wine.  It is a shame I cannot be paid to drink it.  I asked, but my wife refused to tip me.

Facebook, I Unfriend Thee

I started working with microcomputers in 1976, long before most people even knew they existed.  So, in the last 35 years, I have been able to observe how they changed society, how we work and live with these new tools.

To be blunt, the computer age hit its peak period of productivity about 1985.  Since then, I think they have been more of a hindrance than a help.

Twenty-five years ago, if you showed a legal secretary how to use a good word processing computer, the improvement in productivity was dramatic.  You could store forms, totally eliminate typing errors, and eliminate redundant tasks. And make perfect copies without using carbon paper.  (Can you still buy carbon paper?  I wonder if my sons even know what it is?)

Shortly after that, the computer world invented something that totally destroyed productivity; the internet.  I am willing to bet that legal secretary in 1986 was a lot more productive than her counterpart in 2011.  Today, most office employees seem to spend at least half of every day on their email.

How and when did email become work?  Why do we believe that responding to email is productive?  Sure, simple communication is faster and simpler, but the volume of communication has increased exponentially.

During the American Civil War, generals in the field frequently chaffed under the constant barrage of telegrams they received from their headquarters.  This was the first war with modern communications.  “How much gunpowder did you use yesterday?  How many of your men need shoes?  Did you file a requisition in triplicate?”

Without a doubt, this improved communication caused an increase in the size of general staffs, not always with a corresponding increase in efficiency.  Probably the same phenomena occurred with the arrival of the telephone.  While overall workplace efficiency increased, individual efficiency suffered as more employees spent more time on the phone talking.  Unless you are a history professor, talking is not work.

Have you ever gone to a store and been forced to wait while a clerk answered a phone and talked to a customer?  You actually drove to the store, but for some reason you have to wait while the clerk helps some slob still at home in his pajamas.  The next time this happens, pull out you cell phone, call the store, and scream at the clerk, “DO YOU REMEMBER ME!”

Which brings us back to emails.  If I were the Head Moose or Squirrel at Enema U, I would turn off the email servers from 8:30 in the morning until 4:45 in the afternoon.  Productivity would soar.  Yes, I would miss out on emails reminding me of Daylight Savings Time, The United Way, and special faculty season pass offers to the football games we will lose (these special offers invariably are more expensive than what they offer the general public…), but I might actually have time to spend with students.

The university needs to make a start somewhere, as the Internet is a black hole slowly sucking up all productivity.  It is getting really hard to keep up with the demands that the internet places on our daily life.   Not that long ago, a high school reunion was something you did once every ten to twenty years just so you could see who got fat while you reminisced about a past that never was.  Now, we all seem to be locked in a reunion that we call Facebook.

Facebook was great when I had a dozen friends and communicated once a week.  Now, I have 250 friends and can’t remember who a third of them are.  Do I really need to know what everyone is having for lunch?  Do you have a friend that tells you endlessly about the health of their dog?  Do you have a friend who regularly tells you they are rereading Proust in the original French, but this time, just to make it intellectually challenging, they are going to read the book upside down?

I have a couple of student employees (the Munchkins).  When not busy, they seem to spend a lot of time with Farmville.  Why would people, who wouldn’t spend 5 minutes in a real garden if they were growing an honest-to-God Money Tree, volunteer to pretend to be a farmer?  Enema U is an ag school, if farming seems like fun, switch your major!  It’s not like your current major is ever going to lead to a real job--there aren’t any openings for Behavioral Social Justice Workers for the Chronic Musical Bedwetter.

America currently spends $100 million real dollars a year in Farmville.  This real money buys imaginary seeds and make-believe tractors.  We spend more on fake food than some incredibly-dirt-poor-hell-hole-country actually spends on real food.  I least I think so, because I’m not going to look it up.

Computers are slowly destroying all real work place productivity.  Our only hope is that the internet will eventually become completely full of cute pictures of cats.  God knows by wife is doing her part.

How to Commit Golf

This has been a busy month, so I am running way behind in almost everything.  Among the chores that desperately need doing is golf.  By this time of the month, I usually have given up golf at least once.

I am not a good golfer; it is probably questionable whether I am actually a golfer at all.  Looking at my scores, I golf a pretty good bowling score.  And the reverse is true as well.  I have great enthusiasm, and very little skill.  Unfortunately, the only time great enthusiasm can substitute for talent is during sex.  Still, I have a lot of fun on the links.  The foursomes behind me usually have a little less.

With my modest accomplishments at golf, I should probably refrain from writing about the sport, but it has been my observation that an expert is usually someone with average intelligence who happens to live in another state.  Since most of my readers do not live in New Mexico, I am eminently qualified to offer sage advice.

Always take pecans and peanuts to the golf course.  This idyllic park-like landscape is simply teeming with tame rabbits and bushy-tailed squirrels.  Unfortunately, without food to offer them, you will never get them close enough to hit with a club.  God knows, I’ve tried.  Most of the golfers I know are constantly buying new clubs; absolutely certain that some company must make a driver that even an orangutan can use to hit a ball 350 yards.  Personally, my dream club is a silenced .22 rifle that looks like a nine iron.  I could then, for the first time, honestly say I shot in the low eighties.

Years ago, a couple of new cardiologists came to town and the doc arranged for me to play a round of golf with them.  In hindsight, this was probably a mistake; these doctors had gone to a medical school back east where a low handicap was part of the school admission requirements.  I think my score was about equal with both of theirs added together.  Still, everything was fine until we were on the long par 5 course.  I was standing on the tee box trying my best to concentrate on a long drive that I would inevitably put into a tree when a dove flew right over my head.

I would like to remind the reader that I am from Texas.  Doves are food--we shoot them regularly.  Doves are targets that taste good and that is their only purpose on this planet.  Without even thinking about it, when that bird flew low over my head, I had an instinctive reaction:  I dropped my driver and grabbed for it.  You could try that for a thousand years and never, ever catch that bird.  That day, it whacked into my hand and instantly, I had a fist full of bird with wings, head, feet sticking out between my fingers.

I was shocked.  The two Yankee cardiologists looked frightened.  One of them looked a little shakily at me and asked, “Hungry?”

Select your golf balls with great care, inspect them carefully, and keep them clean.  Whoever finds them will appreciate this.  Personally, I do not put my name on my golf balls.  This practice is about as useless as Robinson Crusoe carving messages on coconuts and tossing them into the sea.  Besides, I am not sure I want to admit how far from the fairway my ball is likely to end up.  I do have two positive pieces of advice; first, water hazards should only be played with range balls.  Secondly, playing even on any hole means that you find as many balls as your lose.

Take great pride in your worst drives, if for no other reason than waiting to brag about a great drive may be about as pointless as France waiting for a military victory before they begin celebrating VE day.  I still remember a fantastic drive off the tee box of the Links Golf Course in Ruidoso.  This may be the longest drive I have ever accomplished; it certainly was the most spectacular slice anyone present had ever witnessed.  I remain dumbfounded at the stupidity of the management at the Lincoln County Savings and Loan.  I would never put a burglar alarm on a window facing a golf course.

Take great care in picking the players of your foursome.  The right group can enhance your golf game tremendously.  My best game ever was with a guy I will call Jay.  (Because that is his name.)  Before we teed off on the first hole, Jay violated club rules and drove his golf cart over to his pickup where he strapped an enormous ice chest to the back of the cart.  When he drove the cart back to the fairway, a young man came running out of the clubhouse.

“Sir!  Sir!” he yelled.  “You aren’t allowed to bring your own drinks onto the course.”

Jay turned and gave that poor kid a withering stare that you can only learn from being a Chief Master Petty Officer of the Coast Guard.  His voice was dripping with scorn as he said, “Son, I’m a diabetic.”

“Oh, sorry.” The young man was almost in tears as he ran back to the clubhouse.  Up to that moment, I hadn’t even known that Michelob made a sugar-free beer.

Obviously, you want to play golf with Jay.  On the other side of the equation, you do not want to play golf with Gimpy.  Gimpy is the brain dead one-legged ex-boyfriend of my sister-in-law, the lawyer.  (Now that is a sentence filled with such dangerous concepts that it deserves a warning label.  To craft a sentence with more potential hazard I would have to write about a toxic dumpsite protecting its daycare center with a mine field.)  I want to make it absolutely clear that it wasn’t his wooden leg that made Gimpy the worst golfer in history, it was his wooden head.  For some reason, the Doc, her sister, Gimpy, and I played a round of golf at the university course.  And for reasons that still escape me, Gimpy wanted to play the entire course with just a seven iron and a putter.

We teed off about nine in the morning.  Roughly an hour later, we were on the third fairway.  You could not have tracked our progress up to that point without GPS.  Think chaos.  Think Ping-Pong balls during an earthquake. 

Legions of groups played through us.  Some of them didn’t even know we were there, as our carts couldn’t be seen from any fairway on the course.  By the third hour, when we were still on the front nine, I had developed a facial tic and trembling hands.  I had spent most of the morning apologizing to foursomes that looked like they wanted to beat me to death with a sand wedge.  Finally, the course marshal drove up to me in his golf cart.

The marshal smiled politely and asked, “Is there a problem?”

“Yes, you idiot!” I roared.  “I’m playing with two women and a one-legged moron!”

Evidently, this happens more often that you would think, the marshal just nodded and drove away without a word.

I'll Drink to That!

Thirty-seven years and five months ago, a good friend gave the Doc and me a wedding present: a blender.  About ten minutes ago, the poor thing died with its boots on.  It finished making a strawberry-lime pina colada and promptly initiated—and failed—a smoke test.  This is the cocktail equivalent of throwing itself on a grenade.  If that blender had died before it finished making that drink, right now I would be in the kitchen beating strawberries with a roofing hammer.

I’m tempted to bury that avocado-colored appliance (it WAS the seventies) with a bottle of Bacardi in the back yard (next to all the pets that we told What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One we had sent to the pet retirement farm to run and play with the other pets).  It has been a good and faithful friend providing cool refreshment while living in a hot dry desert.  I should bury it, but New Mexico is also a poor state and I’ll probably just leave it on the sidewalk for ten minutes and let someone steal it.

I just remembered that I have already written about this blender before.  Strange, but then again, I do start writing this on Friday night after a liberal dose of educational brain juice.

All this is prelude to my main point: what has happened to the cocktail?  How did the art of making a good drink die?  Don’t tell me Americans drink less--they don’t.   There is more alcohol in a couple of bottles of beer than in a single good martini, but I don’t know of a bar in town that makes a good martini.

Probably every bar in town can figure out how to make a rum and coke, but call the drink a Cuba Libre and no one will know what you are talking about.  The recipe for a scotch and water is probably not too hard to remember, but it seems to be a growing trend that waitresses cannot tell the difference between “straight up” and “on the rocks.”  And every bartender should know how to make the simple martini.

When the Doc and I moved to this town, all the local physicians gave each other bottles of booze every Christmas.  Single malt scotch, infused vodkas, Irish whiskey… by New Years Eve I had enough bottles on hand to host a Tailhook Convention, or about half as much liquor you would need for a party for the local cops.   Then suddenly, everyone was giving each other bottles of wine.  A few more years passed and we received two dozen pies, some dried pasta and a quiche.  What the hell happened?  I know damn well, from personal observation, that the local physicians didn’t stop drinking.  I’m all for drinking responsibly, but why pretend we aren’t drinking at all?

Chuck, a close friend of mine, and I were on a bowling team for a while.  Well, actually, we were on a drinking team with a bowling problem.  One night, on a whim, we went into the bowling alley bar and ordered a couple of Gibsons.

“What’s that?” the bartender asked. 

“It’s a martini with onions instead of olives,” Chuck explained.

“How do you make a martini?” asked the bartender.  Now this was the regular bartender, and yes, a bowling alley rarely has a lending library attached, but we are talking about a damn martini.  It’s not like I asked for a triple rum punch served in the navel of a virgin concubine.

“Stir gin in a shaker with ice, strain into a cocktail glass and wave a bottle of Noilly Pratt over it while whispering ‘Vermouth.’  Add onions and you have a Gibson.” I explained.

The poor guy looked like I had asked him for the Holy Grail, but he did his best with gin, ice and two glasses.  I even managed to keep my mouth shut when he added lime juice for no apparent reason.  Then he disappeared into the kitchen behind the bar for about 5 minutes.  When he returned, he was holding a large plate in each hand.

“I didn’t know if you wanted chopped or sliced onions, so I brought you both,” he said.

The truly sad part of this story is that it isn’t the worst martini I have ever been served.  It would appear that very few bars even bother to keep a bartender’s book behind the bar.  Or maybe they hire bartenders who can’t read.

Chuck has decided to fix this problem.  He has found a very old bartender’s guide, which was originally published in 1903.  And he is working his way slowly through the book--one drink at a time, he is remaking the old recipes.  A beer flip, an Astoria, a Side Car, and, the other day, he made me a Moscow Mule.  Fantastic!  How in the world did this drink ever stop being popular?    Vodka, lime juice, and ginger beer served in an iced copper mug: the perfect hot weather drink.

Now that Chuck has agreed (not that I have actually asked him) to become my personal bartender, I have decided not to drink any more.  I have also decided not to drink any less.

Traffic Drives Me Sane

Recently, I made a trip from Southern New Mexico to Albuquerque.  The journey from my sleepy little town to the big city is a big trip in more than just miles, the difference in the way people drive is jarring.  City traffic is faster, ruder, and infinitely more dangerous.  I think half the city tried to be my personal vehicular proctologist.

Normally, I would wait until the car is very close, and then suddenly stand on my brake pedal with both feet.  I have an old truck, old enough to drink and I would love to introduce someone to my trailer hitch.  Unfortunately, we were in my wife’s car and she is rather fond of it.

Everyone claims either to be patient or love people who possess a great deal of patience.  Personally, I think this is a great lie; people may admire the patience of drivers behind them, but never the serenity of the drivers in front of them.

The problem with driving is that it’s too impersonal.  You can cut someone off and the party you have offended will never know who you are—and that’s a damn good thing.  Can you imagine what would happen if people standing in line at a movie theater acted the way most people do driving a car?  Would you run ahead of someone, jump in front of them, and then shoulder your way to the front of the line?  The resulting fist fights might be a lot more interesting than the movie.  Somehow, we must add an immediate penalty for rude behavior, even while driving.

Years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote a great science fiction short story titled, Along the Scenic Route.  George, the protagonist, is out for a Sunday drive in his Chevy Piranha when a young punk cuts him off with his Mercury.  Interestingly, the Mercury has twin-mounted Spandau machine guns.  Frustrated, George calls traffic control on his radio and gets permission to challenge the punk to a highway duel.  The story is a masterpiece, but I should warn you--once you read it, the memory will distract you forever while driving.

Dueling might be one possible answer to our problem.  A lot more traffic police is another solution.  Naturally, I have an alternative suggestion.

In his short story, Ellison gave his dueling vehicles machine guns and lasers.  On a much smaller scale, I want to give every car a simple air powered cannon that fires a giant purple toilet bowl plunger coated with super glue and purple paint.  I call it the dumb-fuck gun.

Here is the general idea.  As you drive around town on your daily routine, sooner or later you will witness Typical Automotive Ridiculous Driving (TARD—yes, I know, I used this term before, but there is more than one kind of TARD).  If you believe the driving offense to be serious enough, shoot the car with your dumb-fuck gun.   You won’t fire the gun without a lot of serious thought behind it, because you are only allowed to buy a new plunger-bullet once a year.  In short, the other driver has to be a real dumb-fuck for you to shoot at him.

All the police would have to do would be drive around and look for cars with a purple plunger stuck on them.  They would pull the dumb-fuck driver over and write him a stiff ticket.  If the car had several purple plungers stuck on it, the police could pull the car over and perform a curbside execution on the offending dumb-fuck.

I really like that last provision.  If your car has been dumb-fucked, you are either going to start driving very carefully, or get out of the car and walk until you can have your car repainted.  Either way, we have one less dumb-fuck on the road.

Fire trucks and ambulances should have dumb-fuck machine guns--they would never have to worry about a blocked intersection again.  School crossing guards get a tripod mounted gun.  And certain car models would come pre-dumb-fucked.  This would include turbo charged Audis and all Snaabs.  (Is there some kind of test to insure that only dumb-fucks drive these cars?)

In Albuquerque, the freeway would be mostly empty.  Abandoned on the side of the road would be a long line of purple porcupines.

Even If You Build It

Ahh.  It is that wonderful time of the year.  Southern New Mexico is hotter than a pawn shop pistol and the wind is both constant and strong enough to blow the nuts off a prairie dog.   This doesn’t bother me, if it wasn’t for a little heat and the occasional dust storm, New Mexico would be ass deep in New Yorkers.

Still, I completely understand why the deserts of southern New Mexico are not regularly featured on the Travel Channel.  We have a few museums, a huge beach (but no water), and a lot of rocks.  And for a few months of the year, buzzards have to pack a lunch to fly over the desert.  These are not the sort of attractions that draw large numbers of tourists.  Sad, but understandable.

The local city council, however, does not understand.  So they used our tax money to build a convention center.  To be fair, they put the idea up for a vote, giving the citizens the final say on the matter.  The citizens promptly voted the idea down, so the city fathers, all of whom suffer from an Edifice Complex, built the convention center, anyway. 

Now that the convention center is completed, something strange has happened—no one really wants to bring a convention here.  Evidently, our founding fathers believed that convention centers are kind of like a purple martin bird house.  “If you build it, they will come…”  Except they haven’t.  Maybe the town should put out some visitor-shaped decoys.  Cardboard people in shorts, white socks, and sandals taking photos of … rocks.  We could sell souvenir sand.

I’m trying to imagine a conversation at a distant corporation about a future convention.

“Did you get us a great location for our sales conference?” the boss asked.

“Absolutely,” the employee answers.  “We got booked into a small town in Southern New Mexico.  We’re practically guaranteed dry sunny weather.”

“New Mexico?” the boss answers. “What do the spouses do during our meetings?”

“They can shop at Wal-Mart.”

“Any resorts?  Casinos?  Strip clubs?“ asks the boss.

“No.”

“Lakes, boating, swimming?  Horseback riding?  Sightseeing tours?” the boss asks hopefully.

“No.  You can drive to Mexico, but I wouldn’t advise it.  The death rate in Juarez is slightly higher than in Baghdad or Kabul.”

“Tell me, I’m curious,” the boss says. “What was your second choice?”

Actually, there are a few conventions and meetings being held at the new center.  These are the local meetings the town normally hosted; the only difference seems to be that instead of these events being held at local restaurants and hotels, they are now held at a publicly owned facility.  In other words, using tax payer money, the city has decided to go into competition with the local businesses.  And the effect on local business is notable.  A few have said they are in financial trouble. 

This public/private competition reminds me of a man I met in Zacatecas years ago.  Juan had a job with the city government.  To be specific, he took care of an old brass smoothbore cannon on display in the city park.  The cannon was left over from Mexico’s war for independence, and the town was justifiably proud of its heirloom.

Every day, Juan would get up early, gather up a box of rags, take a new bottle of brass polish to the park, and spend the day polishing the cannon until he could see his own reflection in the gleaming brass.  Every day, summer or winter, rain or snow, Juan polished that cannon, maintaining a perfect shine on the old artillery piece.

After a few years, Juan began to have a few doubts about his job.  While he was paid a good wage, his job didn’t seem to have much advancement potential.  There had to be more to a career than polishing the city cannon.  So, Juan began to save his money.  After about a year, Juan convinced his parents and a few close friends to make him a small loan.  He cashed in his savings, and then quit his dead-end job.

Juan immediately took his money, purchased a new brass cannon, and went into business for himself.

Let me add a small postscript.  Obviously the city should not compete with private business, but occasionally, we as individuals have to help local government to do the right thing.  The renovation of Phillips Chapel is just such a case.

The competition to award funds for the restoration of Phillips Chapel from the National Trust for Historic Preservation ends June 30. Organizers say Phillips Chapel, located at 638 N. Tornillo St., is a symbol of community preservation in action, as private donations, volunteers and student labor are restoring it.

The National Trust has chosen Phillips Chapel as one of the top 100 places in This Place Matters competition. Only online votes can help win the award. There are three awards, first is $25,000, second is $10,000 and third is $5,000. Any of these would make a difference to the continuing efforts. More restorative and construction materials are needed as well as volunteer manpower. NMSU Archaeology professor Beth O'Leary is one of the leaders on the project.

For more information or to vote, visit http://www.preservationnation.org/take-action/this-place-matters/community-challenge/places/phillips-chapel-cme.html



LETCH – Loonies for the Ethical Treatment of Chickens

PETA, or the People Eating Tasty Animals, has been protesting in town this week.  They are a little upset with a local restaurant for selling chicken.  I’m not exactly sure just what the restaurant did that was wrong, but it apparently has something to do with killing the chicken before selling them as food.  Perhaps, PETA would prefer that your chicken sandwich scream as you bite into it.

PETA seems to be against pretty much everything involving animals except taking them to a happy farm in the country, where the animals can run and play.  The members of PETA are the only people over the age of 10 who still believe in that farm.  Simple beliefs are much easier than thinking; PETA doesn’t want to face a few simple unpleasant facts.

First, there are no happy stories involving chickens.  Trust me: I have a little experience here.  When chickens are the central character, the  stories never ends with the phrase, “And they lived happily ever after.”  No, stories with chickens end with a meal.  No poultry retirement homes, no white meat hospitals, no chicken cemeteries.  The last words said over a chicken are either a recipe or grace.

Secondly, PETA, do you really want to stop people from eating livestock?  Think about it, if no one eats livestock, no one will raise livestock.  Very few people will want to keep cows as pets.  Do you really want to protect whole species until they reach extinction?  This is also true for a lot of pets, even PETA can’t believe in large herds of free-range Chihuahuas.

Wait, come to think of it, PETA doesn’t believe in keeping pets either.  This week they are trying to push through an ordinance in San Francisco that will ban the sale of pets, even goldfish.  If you cannot sell pets, it is probably inhumane to own them.   We should all throw our pets out the front door, right now.  I’m going to start with my wife’s cat.  The useless cross-eyed feline lives under the sofa, so we call him Dust Bunny.  He could be gone for weeks before the Doc misses him, and even then I can blame his absence on PETA.

I have some prior experience with PETA--you might say they have even been to my home.  It started years ago when someone wrote to the local newspaper complaining about a local restaurant.  In particular, the restaurant had served pâté de foie gras, goose liver.  The writer claimed that pâté came from geese that had their feet nailed to the floor while grain was forced into their stomachs.

The restaurant in question was a favorite of mine, and here is part of a letter that I wrote in its defense:

I quite unashamedly like the liver pâté, and I don’t care about the geese who gave their all so I could spread their innards on a cracker.  Are the geese really nailed to floor and force fed?  I don’t know, but I remember a gander my family had when I was a child.  Its name was Knothead, and it used to chase me around the yard biting large red welts on my backside.  This memory leads me to hope that the preparation of pâté calls for the geese to be nailed to the ceiling while their livers are extracted with a power sander.

The paper published my letter.  The local chapter of PETA came to my house picketed briefly, and threw their literature all over the front lawn.

TARD Activity

I wonder if Jon Stewart is sending royalty checks to Congressman Weiner?  If not, he certainly should be: Stewart, like all the rest of comedians on TV, is having a field day writing jokes about the congressman.  I don’t intend to write another Weiner Roast, but I do have a couple of comments on a different subject that the Weiner affair has forced upon us.

First (and this is a small point), why are we referring to this as Weinergate?  Why is everything a “gate?”  Richard Nixon committed multiple felonies and tried to subvert the democratic process.  Anthony Weiner played with himself while sending juvenile messages to desperate women.  That’s not much of a comparison.  The Watergate Hotel is not that far away from The Dupont Circle Hotel.  If the offices that Nixon had burgled had been located there, today we might be calling the Weiner scandal a Circle Jerk.

It is time to retire the references to Watergate when politicians act illegally or immorally.  We need a new word, and I suggest we use TARD.  Typical Activity of Representative Delegates.  Repeat offenders can be Re-TARDS.  We might as well assign new meanings to these terms as the previous definitions are no longer politically correct.

My second complaint is a little more complicated.  Let me try and put Weiner into some historical context.   Political scandals are hardly new.  Former Vice President Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.   President Jackson fought over a dozen duels--mostly over the fact that he had inadvertently married a woman before her divorce was final.  Poor Jackson carried so many pistol balls in him that when he walked it was said he sounded like someone shaking a bag of marbles.

President Grover Cleveland possibly fathered of a child with a prostitute.  While several men might have been the true father, Cleveland did pay the woman child support and never denied his possible paternity.

Let’s skip over Presidents Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Eisenhower to move right up to Kennedy.  If we are to believe popular legend, Kennedy slept with Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, and according to one biographer, got a quickie from the wife of the French ambassador in the White House elevator.  As sex scandals go, this is the gold standard.

Nixon sanctioned illegal military activity in Cambodia and Laos and still had time to have the only true scandal worthy of calling a gate; Watergate.  Right about the same time, Congressman Wilbur Mills was caught driving while intoxicated.  When the police stopped his car, the local stripper he was having an affair with, Fanne Foxe, tried to escape the police by jumping into the Tidal Basin and swimming to safety.

This might have been the golden age of sex scandals.  From here, it seems to go downhill.  President Clinton showed his privates to a file clerk.  Senator Craig was arrested for soliciting sex in an airport bathroom.  Governor Spitzer hired a prostitute.  Schwarzenegger seduced the housekeeper.  And now, Weiner sends a picture of his underwear to women he has never actually met.

Is it just me, or are our sex scandals getting a little tame?  Not only are most of these peckerdillos tawdry and cheap, but they don’t even sound like much fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a prude.  I have always had a sneaky suspicion that rich and powerful men could get laid.  This might even be a good thing.  Do we really want a man who can start a nuclear war feeling a little…  I’m not exactly certain what word to use here, but I prefer this man to be relaxed.

And what are we, the public, getting so worked up over?  Our reactions to what seems to be fairly normal, if absolutely tawdry, behavior is a little over the top.  Jackson, Cleveland, and most of the rest of that list of men caught in sexual scandals ignored the press and went on to be either elected, reelected, or both. 

I don’t want to vote for a leader who has never done anything in his life.  Either we will elect a man who has so carefully covered up his past that we will have no idea who he really is, or we will have a leader who is hardly human.

Trotsky Came to Town

Once again, I think the statute of limitations will allow me to tell the truth about an event long past, but just in case, remember—this is just a blog and none of this really happened.

More than twenty years ago, I was in the computer retail business and one of my better customers was Enema U.  Naturally, the university bought a wide of variety of technical gear and through this business I met a wide variety of interesting people, but none was more interesting than Fred.  Fred worked for the university’s public radio station where he was the nighttime disk jockey.   A lifetime of reading through the night had made Fred an expert on everything.  I have never met a man with a more eclectic education.  Fred was unique in a number of ways, and this included his appearance.

Since he worked alone at night, over time his general appearance became strange.  By the time I met Fred, he had a long shaggy beard and hair that looked as if it had been combed with a lawnmower.  You can get a close approximation of his appearance if you imagine Santa Claus as a meth addict.  

Late one night several computer nerds were gathered at the business playing with our newest toy, a digital camera.  The camera was huge, the pictures were very low resolution, and the camera could only record images in black and white.  I think the resolution was about a tenth of a megapixel.  It was the first commercially available digital camera, and we loved it.

After a couple of hours playing with this camera, eventually we had to confess to ourselves that the photos were horrible.  No matter what the subject and regardless of the lighting, by the time you saw the image on the screen, it looked like a bad mug shot; if you printed it, the image was much worse.  If you had started by taking a photo of a beautiful dancing ballerina, the printed picture looked like a coffin photo of a dead nun.

Since the camera was, evidently, designed for taking the kind of photos found on wanted posters, we made a few.  You know what I mean: “Wanted: Dead or Alive.  Guilty of Highway Mopery and Dragging a Rope.”  We kept changing the wording and the photo until we ended up with a poster showing a close-up of Fred staring wide-eyed directly into the camera, hair and beard flying in every direction.

I’m not sure how it happened, as some single malt scotch was involved, but the final version of the poster read:

For One Night Only!

Leon Trotsky

Speaking on the Fallacy of a Contented Working Class

In a Post-Industrial America!

And in the middle of this poster was that crazy photo of Fred.  It was a stupid poster--partly because Fred looked a lot more like Engels than Trotsky, partly because Trotsky had been dead for over 40 years by the time we printed the poster, but mostly because of the bottom two lines of print:

Student Center Ballroom

Tuesday, October 3, 7:30 PM

A couple of dozen posters were printed and hung around the university on a lark.  Then, we forgot all about it.  It was a joke, and no one in their right mind would believe it.  Right???

Evidently wrong: the ballroom was filled to capacity, and the crowd waited for almost half an hour before they left, sad to have missed the great man.  At least, that is what I heard; I didn’t attend.

Several people said the entire Sociology Department was there.