A Short Suggestion On A Small Topic

Recently, the volume of hate mail that I receive has increased exponentially. I wish my family would stop that. A few of the rest of you were a little upset as well. This is nearly always the case if I say anything negative about the sports program at our university, Enema U.

My trifling comments that sports should be an afterthought to education were viciously attacked. Didn’t I understand that this program provided much needed scholarships to people who might not otherwise be able to afford a college education? It’s a scholarship program? By this reasoning, the university should offer degrees in beauty pageantry.

Don’t I understand the premise that athletics builds character? Actually, no, I don’t. Athletics, like any other challenge, reveals character; in this case the character of the players, their coaches, and the system. So far, the players are ahead on points.

Still, with my hate mail running strongly against me, I am willing to face the inevitable and concede that athletics is the tail that wags the educational dog. I surrender. Inter-collegiate sports programs are wonderful! The term “student athlete” is NOT an outrageous oxymoron! Football puts the university on the map! Losing games enhances student recruitment! And I would be willing to die happy if we could just get one lousy insignificant bowl game and until we can accomplish this minor miracle, I am more than happy to reorient the university budget to engineer a swap of our educational birthright for a bowl of athletic porridge. In short, I’m converted: I, too, am an ardent athletic supporter.

But, I have a few small questions. Forgive me-I just recently suffered my brain injury-so I am new to all this. Why do we only offer athletic scholarships to big people? If we are truly compassionate, why do we only offer scholarships to inner-city students who happen to be tall? Are they more worthy? Do short people, as the Randy Newman song says, “got nobody at all?”

Obviously, this is simply a slight oversight. A program that was specifically designed to build character could not be so cruel. No university, so single-mindedly focused at providing quality education, could be so blatantly engaged in size-ism. I am sure that our Athletic Infector (excuse me, I had a momentary relapse) Athletic Director will correct this situation now that it has been pointed out to him. I have no doubt that in the future, athletic scholarships will be given out to people regardless of speed, bulk, or height.

No, I am not suggesting that we change the existing sports to allow everyone to play, just design new sports so that everyone has an equal opportunity. Perhaps we could call it Title 0.9. Swimming could have a contest to see who sinks the fastest, or could hold their breath the longest, or whatever the hell it is that fat people do well. Maybe the NCAA needs to start a Buffalo wing eating contest.

Nor do we need to ruin basketball just to allow midgets to play. Though it would probably make a more interesting game. Just how do you steal the ball from someone who dribbles the ball only 10 inches off the floor? No, I am sure there are games that the short do better than the tall. Miniature golf comes to mind.

All this fuss would be unnecessary if you just changed one small rule in basketball. Instead of allowing 5 players, allow any number of team members on the court at the same time as long as the combined height of the players doesn’t exceed 35 feet. Instead of 5 giants around 7 feet tall, you could have 7 guys about 5 foot tall, or about 9 midgets. I’d pay to watch that game.

Actually, there is a brief historical precedent for this. In 1951, the coach of the St. Louis Browns hired a midget, Edward Gaedel, to play major league baseball. Confident that an 8” strike zone was too difficult for most pitchers, Eddie (to use his diminutive) was hired to be a relief hitter. At his first time at bat, the pitcher threw 4 balls and walked Edward. Unfortunately, his jersey, with the number 1/8, was retired immediately. The baseball commissioner ruled that midgets were unfair to pitchers. Obvious size-ism.

Finally, I have written an entry to this blog that will be pleasing to everyone-a blog that will generate nothing but sympathetic email. I am, at last, confident that no one could object to these kind, selfless, and humanitarian suggestions, now that I have joined the majority.

Except for all those angry midgets who want to be called little people.

I Hear the Bell and Obey

Raising children gives us so many gifts; for example, you never really learn to use profanity until you have raised children. You can’t really say you are an expert in profanity until you have taught one how to drive.

It was a few of the other gifts that children give you that I was thinking about. Just a few minutes ago, I was cooking some curried onions. I usually cook these spicy enough to cause pain in people who simply observe them: you don’t actually have to eat them to be in pain. Needless to say, my wife, the Doc, won’t touch them. So, I was spooning most of them into a jar so I could refrigerate them—when I suddenly noticed that my mouth was wide open. Have you ever spoon fed small children? You open your own mouth wide open in the foolish belief that they will imitate you long enough for you to shovel the baby food into their mouths.

I haven’t fed any infants in more than twenty years and I still hold my own mouth wide open whenever I move a spoon full of anything toward a round opening… This is a conditioned reflex of the highest order. Pavlov would write about me.

Nor is this strange behavior the only reflex my children have given me. When you brake your car suddenly, do you slap the passenger seat with your right hand? Even when there is no one in the car with you? Now, when children’s car seats are mandatory, and most people put them in the back seat, do parents still learn this reflex?

The Doc claims that I am still doing this because it gives me a great excuse to grab her breast while driving. She’s wrong, but it does give me a great excuse to brake suddenly. “Look! A Squirrel!” Three miles further down the road, “Clouds! Clouds!”

Neither of the boys still lives at home. Actually, neither lives within two hundred miles. So why do I wake up every night with the sudden desire to check their bedroom to see if they are all right? Why do I wonder if they are okay every night about 10? Because several thousand nights of doing the same thing will produce a conditioned response from a rock.

If I go to the mall and I hear a small child yell, “Dad!” I still turn to see what my son might want. Me, and every other father in the mall. None of us have any more choice than a trained circus animal. As soon as the calliope starts playing, we all strain to get into harness and start the show.

Years ago, I used to write my father a letter almost every week. Most of the letters were full of nonsense and whatever I happened to be thinking about when the urge to write him hit me. Long after he died, some trivial event during the day would suddenly trigger an urge to write him a letter. I would have over half the letter composed in my head before I would remember, with a start, that it was impossible to send him the letter.

Am I writing this blog to my father? Or am I writing it to my two sons, What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One? The phrases, “Dear Father” and “Dear Son” are powerful words. Powerful enough to create new conditioned responses.

Let’s Fix Education—Or Kill It Trying!

It is budget time here in New Mexico and once again the state is facing the problem of how to fund public education. Somehow, most of the discussion about the welfare of our students is lost somewhere in the muddle about teacher retirement. Education in New Mexico, where you can find it, is on life support.

For the last week, prospective new students of Enema U have been touring the campus, usually with their parents in tow. I think it is a bad sign when the parents look very interested, while the prospective students are clustered in the back of the group, looking about as interested as my sons did when I dragged them to every history museum in London.

So far, after talking to a few of these prospective students, I’m underwhelmed. These are not bad kids, but they don’t appear to be ready, academically or emotionally, to attend a good high school. And while I firmly believe that we could catch better students with a tiger pit, we will have to dig that hole some place other than New Mexico. I’m not exactly sure where, for I fear that many states’ education programs are in as bad a shape as ours is.

I have a cure for all this. I want to change public education for middle and high schools. I have no idea what to do at elementary schools, and since all I really think we need to do is keep the little rug rats out of the road until they learn to read, I will restrict my suggestions to the changes we need in secondary education:

1. Schools breed administrators like cockroaches, and in pretty much the same kinds of places. Here at Enema U, I have long thought that, if we could print up a guide to the Administration, (sort of like the program you buy at a baseball game) it might be easier to keep track of the game. High schools and school districts are no different. Line up all staff members who make over $50,000 a year, then fire everyone in that line who does not teach at least one class a semester.

2. School teachers learn how to become school teachers by getting a degree in education from other school teachers. In Biology, they call this inbreeding. If you did this with children, within a few generations, Little Johnny would sit in the corner licking his eyebrows. Come to think of it, this pretty well describes a lot of administrators. Eliminate the degree in education and require a content degree to teach every subject. In other words, if you are teaching history, get a degree in history. Qualifications for teaching at the elementary school level should be a one year certification after your BA. This kind of course could be taught in a community college.

3. Flying Flaming Bat Shit! Do we ever waste money on the wrong things in education! We need a new constitutional amendment: No school, college, or university can spend more on athletics than it spends on Math. If we want to compete in the world wide economy, it might be beneficial if our kids were better at math than at catching a ball.

4. No one who has ever committed ‘Coach’ should serve in any administrative job in education. Even if his parole is over. How many of you went to a high school where the principal or vice principal had once been a football coach? Why would you turn the school over to a person who, in all likelihood, is less well-educated than the school janitor? Athletic Directors should be treated exactly like pedophiles: Registered and required to stay 5 miles from any child.

5. No athletic facility should be built until the librarian at the school certifies that the library does not need any more space/books.

6. To graduate from high school, the student must show the ability to play a musical instrument. Suggesting that a student march with any musical instrument is a crime punishable by no fewer than 5 years serving on the PTA. Just what jackass decided that the highest form of music could be learned by marching? This must have been a coach… Quick, name three great marching symphonies.

7. Every high school student should be required to learn a new language. I don’t think it really matters which language, as long as it is something new to the student. Learning a new language stretches the brain, and our students need a challenge other than figuring out the latest TV remote.

8. Close the damn campus. The high school that my sons went to allowed students to leave the campus for lunch. This generally meant that from about 10:30 in the morning to about 2:00 in the afternoon, students could be found eating massive amounts of junk food while slowly wandering up and down the streets within a mile radius of the school. I would be willing to bet that a sizeable percentage of those students never returned to the school. What exactly is the purpose of this policy? Is the high school some form of economic subsidy for Taco Bell?

9. While we are at it, get rid of school crossing zones. Instead of lowering the speed limit, raise it. Let the students run for it: it will be educational and good exercise. Those who can’t figure out how to cross the road probably aren’t needed inside those classrooms, anyway. For the rest of them, it can help substitute for the smaller sports program.

I know these are modest changes to education, but I truly believe that if we don’t start with slow improvements like these, the public will probably never accept the big changes we will have to implement later.

Quello Che Vedi è Quello Che si Ottiene

This last week, a bright and attractive student made a request of the Language Department; could they furnish a contemporary translation into Italian of the phrase, “What’s done is done.” Luckily, one of the historians at Enema U is currently in Italy, researching obscene gestures of the late Rennaisance. She quickly supplied me with the phrase, “Quello che è fatto, è fatto.”

Once I emailed the student the translation, she was quite grateful. “Thank you so much. It is very important that I get this right, since I will have the tattoo a long time.”

A tattoo! If she had only told me this in advance, I would have sent her: “Quello che vedi è quello che si ottiene.” In English, this comes out: “What you see is what you get!” Now that I think of it, in the long run, both phrases mean pretty much the same thing.

I simply do not understand the attraction of tattoos. Why in the world would people want graffiti on their bodies that, if they found drawn on the walls of their homes, would send them into hysterics? Maybe we need a waiting period for tattoos. If you want one, first you hire a nearsighted nine year old to scratch the design on the fender of your car with a rusty nail. Thirty days later, if you still like the idea, some moron will stencil the same art on your body.

No, that’s not fair; your tattoo will be different, and it will be in beautiful colors. Bullshit. It may be in color when you get it, but a few years later, it will be green. I think the exact shade of green is somewhere between gangrene and baby shit. If you are lucky, eventually it will fade to the same weird dirty green you get when you find out your new ring isn’t really gold. Technically, I think this color is known as dumbass green.

Then again, maybe tattoos are not quite as permanent as you think. Due to a medical emergency, my wife, the Doc, has had to …to modify a few of them. She once did surgery on a guy who was so proud of his Harley that he had a tattoo of it on his belly. After the surgery to remove the real handlebars from his abdomen, I hope he was still proud of the tattoo, even though it now shows a mini-bike.

Tattoos as an art form are over 5,000 years old. Twenty years ago, a frozen mummy was found in a glacier in the Alps. Ötzi the Ice Man had 57 tattoos that date back to 3300 BC. Evidently, he died while trying to pledge a fraternity-probably “Atsa Cuppa Crappa.” As an art form, I think a run of 5300 years is long enough, it is time to move on to something else. Tattoos are so third millennia BC.

A couple of years ago, a student was just dying to show me her new tattoo-a large figure just below her neck that depicted several Chinese characters that, at least according to her, conveyed a deeply spiritual and mystic Oriental message. She was almost in tears when I convinced her that I was fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and her tattoo actually read, “Beef With Broccoli.”

Can we give the whole tattoo as spiritual message routine a permanent break?. Just because you have yelled, “Oh God!” a few times in your dorm room does not make you a spiritual person. And a message inked on your body, regardless of what it really says, is only going to put you in tune with your inner stupidity. If your self-esteem is so low that you think the only way to improve it is by scrawling on your body the kind of message normally reserved for the underside of a freeway overpass, perhaps your problems cannot be solved by ink, in any color.

Art may be a great investment, but not when the most expensive piece you own is something you bought from a guy named Pirate Bob who works at the International House of Hepatitis.  And something is very strange when many of the young women on campus are too young to legally buy a beer, yet already have too many tattoos to be accepted for enlistment in the United States Marine Corps.

Both of my sons, What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One, at one time or another, expressed an interest in tattoos. I told both of them they were free to get any tattoo they wanted, but I reserved the right to remove the tattoo with a pair of pliers. If either one of them was dumb enough to ever get any body art, they were smart enough to do it where I can’t see it.

I still have the pliers.

Repeal Prohibition, Again

For some strange reason (strange not because I do not know the reason, but strange because it involves an assistant rodent who works for the Office of Moose and Squirrel) the subject of marijuana has been on my mind a lot for the last two weeks.

Why is this country still having a senseless discussion about a harmless drug? I’m not going to go through all the phony arguments; we have all heard the crazy talk from the myth of gateway drugs to cannabis being a cause of violence. If reasoned arguments were going to work, the local convenience store would be selling packs of Maui Wowie. And have no doubt: both the feds and the state would profit more from the sale of a pack than the manufacturer, RJR Tobacco.

No, reasoned arguments will never work. And it is long past the time for change to come from an enlightened electorate. Let’s face the truth: repeal of marijuana laws is not likely to happen from simply waiting for politicians to change the laws.

Our last three presidents have admitted to using marijuana. I presume that these men are grateful they were not arrested for possession. I would even assume that a sizeable portion of the country is grateful they were not arrested. And it would not be an unreasonable assumption to believe that a large portion of the electorate believes that the country is better off without their having been arrested.

If these men had been arrested, their political careers would never have begun. Arrests could have meant long jail terms, would have barred entry into the Armed Services, possibly caused a loss of scholarships or entry into some schools, (and certainly would have destroyed political careers). And these men, who must be aware of all of this, have done absolutely nothing to change the drug laws. America arrested over a million people for marijuana last year. Without an arrest, perhaps one of that million might have risen to the presidency.

It would be somewhat pleasing to stop there, leaving the blame with the government, but the blame lies with all of us. There is just no denying that the sixties were roughly 50 years ago. That whole generation is about to be on Social Security, and perhaps it is about time to stop talking about the past and wake up to the here and now. My generation was going to change everything, make a new world. It is too late to apologize for disco, and I doubt we can still change those marijuana laws without leadership.

Laws criminalizing the possession and use of marijuana are all but repealed now. Already 15 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana. This means that cannabis is restricted to only those who can manage to say A-N-X-I-E-T-Y. A dozen more states have legislation pending, but this is not enough. This country should repeal all laws criminalizing marijuana now.

Every year on April 20, there is a call for all of America to light up a joint and defy the police to arrest all of us. This will never happen; most of us have far too much to lose to take this large a risk. But what would happen if all of us applied for a prescription for medical marijuana? Such a prescription can’t be that hard to acquire, since, in just the last two weeks, three different people have sent me the name of medical practitioners in the area who can "help" me. And I’m not even that anxious.

When alcohol prohibition, the Volkstead Act, passed in 1919, the law was widely violated. President Warren G. Harding simply ignored the law; he kept a well-stocked liquor cabinet in the White House. President Hoover thought about pushing for a repeal, but he was a little busy with other matters. Franklin D. Roosevelt tackled the job head on. Believing that Americans deserved a break, if not a drink, because of the depression, FDR asked Congress for a repeal on the ban on the sale of beer within days of his inauguration and Prohibition in general ended during his first year in office with the 21st Amendment.

Would it be too much to ask for a presidential candidate to embrace the issue of legalization of marijuana?

I Suppose They Would Be Easier To Dust

One of the great reasons to read, study, or go to school is that moment of epiphany. For those of you who were education majors, an epiphany is that moment when you suddenly understand something, when a difficult concept suddenly makes sense for the first time. When Archimedes stepped into a bathtub of water, he suddenly understood that the volume of water he displaced was equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged. Archimedes was so excited that he yelled “Eureka” (Ancient Greek for “I have found it.”) and ran through the streets of Syracuse in search of someone to share his discovery. Since he was naked at the time, I’m sure that a few of the citizens of Syracuse might have been confused as to what he had discovered.

Archimedes understood that an epiphany is the second biggest thrill in life. If you don’t what the first is, you probably shouldn’t read my blog.

Perhaps the pursuit of that epiphany is the reason I love teaching so much. I’m positive it is one of the reasons I love books. I can picture my students reading a book I assigned-when they suddenly understand the message the author was trying to pass on. I cannot imagine this scene if they are holding a Kindle instead of a real book.

If the electronic book reader catches on, it will probably change the way novels are written. Computers quickly become addictive due to their ability to instantly reward the user. You win a game, something works, or you search for something, and you are instantly rewarded. The user is constantly receiving positive feedback from the computer. Will readers who are used to such instant gratification read patiently through several chapters of plot development? I doubt it. It is probably not a coincidence that graphic novels, essentially nothing more than flat-chested comic books wearing a pushup bra, are suddenly popular. If, somehow, a book written exclusively for an Ereader was actually good, would you call it a real page clicker?

A co-worker here at Enema-U was bragging about her new E-Book reader. “It will hold 3,500 books,” she proudly said. Somehow, I sincerely doubt that she has read 35 books in her lifetime.

Does it matter how many books this device can hold? Theoretically, these things can hold a whole library of books the owner has read. And theoretically you could use my pocket knife to perform a heart transplant. What are the odds of either happening? Pricing this out online at Amazon, I can buy their Kindle for $139. For another $42,000 I can fill it to capacity. I probably have that many books in my home, and they are insured. I wonder what my insurance agent would say about insuring a virtual library.

I have accidentally hurt a few books. I have dropped a few in the bathtub, spilled coffee on a few, and occasionally torn a page. I lost a book once; this was in the third grade and it still bothers me. Several decades later, I was in Washington DC and visited the Library of Congress. I was delighted to find, and finish, “Binkie’s Billions” by Lee Wyndham. I felt better for having finally finished the book, but I am still a little upset for having lost it. What would I do if I dropped a whole library into a bathtub?

I love the feel of a well-made book. I like old leather-covered books-anything published by Folio Press-and I love the feel of good paper and a strong binding. Buying a book that contains a built in ribbon for the reader to use as a bookmark is almost thrilling. Just recently, I bought a first edition of the first Zorro story. The book, almost as old as my father, is printed on thick acid impregnated paper that is yellowing and smells of dusty bookstores. It is the perfect book to read about Don Diego and the plight of the Californian peasants. How in the world could a beeping (and bleeping) battery operated gizmo compete?

I have searched bookstores in a dozen countries. There was a marvelous half-timbered bookstore in Worcester that also sold 70 year old fountain pens. There is a great bookstore in Chicago near Wrigley Field that is home to a large cat who pushes books off the top shelves, so they will land on the customers. Evidently he disapproves of people taking away ‘his’ books.

I own autographed books, and books with comments written in the margins, and books with flowers pressed between the pages. I have a book by Lewis Carroll, that I bought the day I became an uncle, and I wrote a long passage on the flyleaf to my nephew, Matt. Have you ever bought a used book and found inside the cover a bookplate from the book’s first owner? Have you ever wondered, or perhaps even known, who that person was? What you might have in common?

Books are more than a collection of letters and words; they are an art form that cannot be replaced by a mere collection of electrons stored on a chip. I suppose that you could just as well store thousands of images of the collected paintings of the grand masters. Even if they call it the iGallery, it won’t be an art museum.

Please Send Bail Money

There is an oft repeated old story about President Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. It seems that Hoover liked to keep files of private and scintillating gossip about celebrities: which politician was sleeping with movie stars, who was gay, and which senators had drinking problems. These secret files were occasionally sent over to the White House for the amusement of the president-a little private bedside reading about private bedsides.

Suddenly, I discover that pretty much the same activity occurs here at Enema U. The campus chief of police evidently sends copies of police reports over to one of the administrators in the Office Of Moose and Squirrel. Unfortunately, the police reports are not written in simple words with a large red crayon, so they must be a little tough to read-pictures would probably help.

So, it was a little surprising Thursday, when I arrived at work, and was immediately questioned about my recent arrest for the possession of an illicit substance so rare that it can only be found on the grounds of every school yard in America (and damn near everywhere else). This was especially surprising since I hadn’t been arrested. At the time of my supposed arrest, I think I was actually in class.

Hell, it’s embarrassing to admit this, but I’m so square that my wife, the Doc, laughs at me. Other than an occasional dose of medicinal grain alcohol, I don’t even take things as mild as aspirin. The last time I tried a funny cigarette, I still carried a draft card and Nixon was president. As soon as I figured out that Scotch was both cheaper and legal, I never looked back.

How did a mild mannered history professor get mistaken for a convicted criminal drug user?

It seems that the Assistant Chief Rodent at the Office of Moose and Squirrel had trouble with the big words while reading her copy of the police report and missed several small details. She had the wrong name, the wrong department, the wrong building, and somehow inflated a citation for a petty misdemeanor into an arrest for possession. Maybe I should be grateful that the story didn’t circulate that I had resisted arrest with an Uzi. Someone should see what is the drug of choice inside the administration building.

Armed with this interesting (though completely inaccurate) information the Assistant Chief Rodent apparently made several phone calls. First, she called my dean, informing her of my supposed incarceration. Then, the High Holy Inquisitor in the Office of Inhuman Resources was notified and a highly confidential meeting was scheduled. Evidently, I was about to be put on double secret probation and have dog poop thrown on my shoes. Or something equivalent-I’m not sure, since I was not invited to the meeting and its very existence was kept so secret that, within an hour of its scheduling, only two people called and told me about it.  Within 24 hours, students were asking me about this secret and private affair.

Luckily, my dean is not one of the administration’s flying squirrels and simply didn’t believe any of this nonsense. Nor did she believe that the university should begin a trial only after the hangman’s rope was being taken down from the scaffold. And, most likely, she didn’t think that a meeting about me could last a whole hour unless I was invited to come and talk about myself. I am forced to admit that the dean is a class act.

It is an interesting dichotomy that this university is both a bastion of liberal thought, diversity and individual expression, and yet still capable of holding a kangaroo court over the possession of a trivial amount of marijuana.  Maybe I should check my wallet for my old draft card.  Is Nixon still president?

The rest of the week was fairly uneventful. People who had done nothing wrong came to my office and apologized profusely for the idiocies committed by the people who did commit them, but would not apologize. Another, and somewhat smaller group, stopped by and wanted to know if I would sell them a dime bag. I’m going to start selling small bags of oregano as soon as I can figure out the going rate.

Because I Say So

A thousand years ago, King Canute ruled England. A Dane, he was a pretty good king and must have been a great warrior, for when he attacked England with 10,000 troops, King Ethelred the Unready promptly had a heart attack and died. This was the original “shock and awe.”

Once the faint of heart were literally out of the way, the new Danish King set about transforming England into a modern state, and it turned out he was a pretty good administrator. He divided England up into territories under lords who reported to the king, and established a legal system that lasted until the reign of the Tudors. He eliminated the danegeld, an annual extortion paid to Danish lords, to prevent their invasion and wanton destruction. And best of all, he established a uniform system of coinage, with the weights of the various precious metals matching those of the Scandihoovian countries. This encouraged international trade.

This was all pretty good administration, especially when you consider that it was all done without congressional committees, focus groups, or an advertising budget. King Canute was hot stuff, or at least his ministers thought so, and who could blame them? Anyone who could pacify a wild kingdom by scaring his enemies to death deserves more than a little respect.

King Canute eventually found all this fawning attention a little tiring, so he decided to teach his ministers that even the power of a king is limited. He had his ministers carry his throne down to the edge of the sea just as the tide began to come in. King Canute sat in his throne, waved his scepter and commanded the waters to stay back-for the tide to recede. By the time King Canute was about ass deep in sea water, even his ministers understood that there are limits to all power.

An alternative historical interpretation is that King Canute was trying to save the beaches from early climate change. If true, Al Gore owes King Canute a Nobel Prize.

The lesson of King Canute has been on my mind this week as the administration of Enema U has issued several new rules, a few of which seem to fail the test of King Canute.

From now on, anyone who is planning anything new at the university must submit a “pre-planning” form, seeking permission for said planning. This new document, the Compulsory-Mother-May-I (COMMI) form, will be submitted prior to actually beginning to plan. So, if you are planning to start a new project that might require planning… no wait… you have to submit the planning form before you can plan on planning a new project… But, if you submit the form before you begin planning on a new project, how did you know you needed to submit the form? Perhaps the entire faculty needs to submit a form just in case we might decide to start a project that might require planning. I would say that would be a good plan, but I haven’t submitted a form yet.

No less confusing is a new requirement that all signatures on university documents must be legible. Sorry, my legal signature is not legible. But it is MY signature. If you want to redesign my signature, it will automatically turn into YOUR signature. And you will have misspelled your name. I’ve been married long enough to know there are very few things for which I am in charge. The main items on the list are bugs and busted plumbing, but somewhere on that incredibly short list, I am fairly sure I am still in charge of my own signature.

This vaguely reminds me of my running fight with the local city government. They insisted that I spray paint my street address on my driveway in large black numbers. So, I did, but I did it in Roman numerals; MMCXXXV to be exact. Someone from the city showed up, took pictures of this, then left. They did this serveral times a week for about a month.  Eventually, someone asked me if I didn’t think this might be dangerous as it might prevent emergency personnel from locating my house. It is my belief that anyone too stupid to read Roman numerals will probably not be of much use in an emergency. This issue is not yet settled as the city (while sure that I have done something wrong) cannot decide exactly what law I have broken.

The latest rule from the university is an extension of the rule on signatures. From now on, we must sign everything in blue ink. This rule will insure that everyone can ascertain whether they are dealing with original or duplicate copies. Thankfully, no one would ever think of using any of the half dozen color copiers located in just my building alone.

What are we signing that is so important? Most of my documents deal with make-up tests, recommendations for students, and pleas to textbook publishers for a review copy of a book I can’t afford. No one has asked me to initial our nation’s launch codes lately. Who exactly is going to check these documents for legibility and correct color? And before this policy was approved, was there an appropriate “Planning to Micro-Manage” form filed in triplicate?

President Canute (by a strange coincidence, that is the name of the President of Enema U), a few of your ministers did not understand your last demonstration. Perhaps this time you could put your throne at the fifty yard line of the stadium and command our team to win a game.

Woogie! Woogie!

All over the nation, it seems that we poor government employees are under attack. It seems that suddenly, almost everyone resents that teachers have recession-proof jobs that are fairly well paid and involve very little physical labor.

I don’t blame them-I love my job. Who wouldn’t? I am, basically, paid to read books and tell stories. All my work is indoors, with nothing heavier to lift than the occasional dictionary or atlas; and my office is located in what looks like a park. Hell, the library is only about 100 feet away. I’ve noticed that very few of my academic friends are especially religious.  For myself, I’m a practicing born-again pagan. Evidently, it is a little hard to sell the idea of an afterlife to those who already live in heaven.

I have no experience with other government jobs, but I suppose that most of them are pretty good, and all of us that are lucky enough to have one should be grateful. While the rest of the country has faced a recession, government employment has gone up; the federal government alone has hired over two hundred thousand new employees in the last two years. At this rate of increase, pretty soon, we will have to run a commuter train into Canada for the second shift.

One of the more common complaints about government employees is our pensions. In general, while they are much better than the private sector, we have been a little less lucky here in New Mexico. One of the state’s investment advisors spent some of our money on fancy homes, fast cars, and faster women. Bernie Madoff wasted the rest of the money. Still, our state pension plan is probably sound enough unless the popular protests of Wisconsin find their way south to New Mexico.

So, while I am not exactly worried, it seems only prudent to have an alternative plan. I toyed around with the idea of starting my own state, but it seems all the good places were taken. Since that first option is out, it would seem the only possibility left is losing your mind. Insanity as a retirement plan seems eminently sane

Mind you, I’m not going to use this plan myself, but I think it might work out fine for you. Should you need an Emergency Retirement, here’s what you do. Go to work, bright and early, and sit at your desk while you have a cup of coffee. When you are completely relaxed, take off all your clothes and leave them folded neatly on your desk. Carefully insert a pencil (eraser end first) up each nostril. Then run up and down the halls of your building yelling, “Woogie! Woogie!” Keep this up until you are physically restrained.

Once at the hospital, answer every question with either “It was in accordance with the prophesy” or “Would you like fries with that?” Refuse to answer to your own name, but insist that everyone call you King Shirley. While you will probably not be successful, it will undoubtedly enhance your performance if you occasionally attempt to lick your own eyebrows.

For your efforts, I figure you will get about a six week vacation at the local psychiatric ward. The food is not exactly great, but during group crafts you should be able to make key rings for all of your friends.

For some reason a disability retirement pays more than a regular retirement. This pay is not subject to income tax. And you immediately qualify for Social Security (which also pays more than a normal retirement). If word of this gets around, the halls at work might start to become rather interesting.

Now… That’s Entertainment!

Is it just me, or do you find a lot of today’s popular entertainment rather boring? Movies are lackluster lately. Hollywood is so mentally bankrupt they are reduced to remaking John Wayne movies and an endless stream of duds featuring comic book superheroes. Even at that, movies are better than television. I cannot even pretend to have an interest in shows such as Law And Order: The Jay Walkers.

This weekend the Oscars will be on TV, but I’m not going to watch, in part because I won’t recognize any of those people. The men will be as carefully slovenly as their expensive tuxedo will allow while the women will be emaciated stick figures. I guess it’s a sure sign of middle age when a man looks at blonde starlet and his first thought is to feed her a cheese burger before she dies of starvation.

The Oscars have been boring for years; the worst part is usually the endless speeches where people thank all the little people that no one, including the speaker, gives a hot damn about. I might watch if just once, someone would say, “I’m not going to thank you since I deserve this, I worked my skinny little ass off for it and it’s mine, all mine. If you idiots had the brains God gave bait, you would have given me this damn gilded door stop last year.”

Maybe they could change the awards categories. “Nominated for the Best Cleavage in a Role Requiring No Talent is …” No, that wouldn’t work, Scarlett Johanssen would win every year.

Barring improvements like these, the producers could still liven up the show easily enough. How about wiring the seats so that when they announce the winner, all the losers spontaneously combust? Or perhaps you could determine the winner with a caged mud wrestling match? Hell, I’d watch that. At least until a rerun of Top Gear came on.

I have a similar problem with most sports. It’s no fun to watch a game when you can no longer even remotely identify with any of the players. Take football, for example: I have very little in common, other than our species, with a 300 pound man so altered by steroids that he resembles my pickup. DuPont used to have an advertising slogan, “Better living through chemistry.” Somebody took this slogan a little too seriously.

Naturally, I have a few suggestions designed to improve the game. Now this is important, because I work for a football team with a small university attached. Our team has been losing money faster than Congress, and if this condition continues, the school might have to do away with the students in order to save money.

First, we need to speed up the game visually. I think the wide receivers should be on mini-bikes. This should get them down field a little faster. Next, I think both the offensive and defensive line should be in armor. Give them the type of armor worn during the days of King Arthur. Nothing drastic--no swords, no shields--just bright shiny armor with plumed helmets.

Obviously, this will put the quarterback at something of a disadvantage, since getting sacked by a human refrigerator wearing a galvanized trash can might sting a trifle. I admit this is a little unfair for the quarterback, so we will need to balance the odds out a little by giving him a Colt .45 automatic. We don’t want to overdo it, so we only give him a single clip per half. That’s only 14 shots per game, so he he’ll have to be a little conservative. I doubt most offensive linesmen these days can be dropped by a single shot of any caliber.

For a little fan participation, before the game starts, one lucky fan for each team will be randomly selected and be allowed to hide a single land mine somewhere on the playing field. I thought of adding a few sniper rifles, but we don’t want the game to get out of hand, after all; it will be televised.

Can you imagine the game? With both lines ready and glistening in highly polished armor, the ball is snapped to the quarterback, who fades back while the two lines slam into each other with a crash like two freight trains having sex. The receivers roar down the field on their dirt bikes, the tires throwing up a rooster tail of dirt. A single offensive linesman breaks through the defenders and clanks towards the quarterback, who, while he eyes the field for an open receiver, raises his .45 and drops the linesman just seconds before throwing the ball downfield. The receiver, looking back over his shoulder, is about to catch the ball when, BLAM! He disappears in a cloud of dirt and smoke as his bike hits a land mine. Pass incomplete!

Now, that’s a game. I might even buy season tickets.

Naturally, when the game is over, the losing coach is hanged from a goal post and the winning team has their way with the opposing team’s cheerleaders.

I haven’t yet finished my idea for the half-time show, but I’m working on an idea where both bands march at the same time, but we add flame throwers.

Religion As Microsoft Might Explain It

Several weeks ago, I wrote that I thought that I had figured out why we have so many problems with the Middle East-the men there obviously used violence as a coping mechanism to sublimate the stress of living in a desert, without beer, and with women who dressed like Batman. This kind of deep cultural awareness is a direct benefit of those years I spent getting an extra degree in Anthropology.

While this is obviously a brilliant insight into another culture (judging from the hate mail sent to this blog) it is obvious that I need to expand upon my explanation. Being a Texan by birth and training, I believe I can best accomplish this explanation with a metaphor.

Several thousand years ago, a nomadic people living in a desert became God’s chosen people. This wasn’t exactly an honor, however, since evidently God showers his favor on a people by periodically making their lives seriously miserable. This divine favoritism started with Job and his family, and then got worse over time. We will call this God 1.0®- the original release of a religious operating system. While there were a few earlier versions of God operating on some units, to keep our metaphor concise, we will just refer to these earlier religious operating systems as Beta Releases that did not survive field testing.

While God 1.0® was the dominant system for a thousand years, eventually there was a major upgrade with the release of God 2.0®. Predictably, due to the long period of time between releases, there was a large population who remained comfortable with God 1.0® and refused to upgrade their religious operating system. Most of this resistance to market saturation was regional in nature, so the manufacturing point of God 2.0® was moved to Rome, thus allowing the continued release of God 1.0®, (although in limited numbers) to remain in distribution in the Middle East.

For several hundred years, the market remained static-until the release of God 3.0® in the Middle East. This was a new improved God: cleaner, brighter, and all natural. Some enthusiasts contend that, actually, God 3.0® has existed for thousands of years, and point to its roots in the earlier Beta systems. We will ignore this claim, leaving it to the copyright lawyers. While this system became very popular in a relatively short period of time, it neither replaced God 1.0® nor God 2.0®; and all three systems remained in continual distribution.

Almost a thousand years later, there were major patches issued to God 2.0. Some members of the user group in Germany claimed the original release had become corrupt over time and could no longer be loaded. These user complaints brought about releases of God 2.1®, God 2.2®, God 2.2B3®, and so forth, for several hundred years. While the original God 2.0® is still available, there are almost as many versions of the patched God 2.0® systems as there are units to load them. This trend set off a veritable cottage industry in custom-designed religious operating systems for limited distribution. For example, some people, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are attempting to load a Linux-based operating system, with what can only be called mixed results.

And here is the problem: if you have gone to the trouble to purchase, install, and maintain God 3.0®, you would expect your life to be… well, good. Or at least, not suck. But, no matter how you want to measure it, it seems that the people living over the hill (those infidels still suffering along with an outdated God 1.0®) seem to have a better life. They are more prosperous, healthier, and (outside of the times when they are unsuccessfully attacked by people with God 3.0®) more peaceful. I won’t even bother to include a comparison of all those people with some version of God 2.whatever.

If I were a user of God 3.0®, I would be pissed. Instead of a smooth religious operating system, all the users seem to get are system crashes and unholy viruses. There are documented cases of some users of God 3.0® suffering such severe failures that the hardware literally explodes in public. Personally, I would want an upgrade, a patch, or an unlimited onsite service plan. Hell, God, how about a rebate? If I have to wait until you come up with some type of bug fix for this operating system, can I at least get an advance on the afterlife? But don’t send one of the 72 virgins; I’d rather have a single hot hooker who knows her business.

Note. These opinions are mine, and not actually those of Microsoft. Besides, any organization that could release both Works and Vistas must be more closely associated with the devil.

Making My Point the Hard Way

For a couple of weeks now it seems I have been going around three sides of the barn just to find the horse at the end of reins in my hand. No matter how hard I slug away at the paperwork and minutiae of my job, I never seem to catch up. This is probably pretty good evidence that I’m working stupid.

Years ago, my company kept me working incredible hours; I came in early, stayed late and could be found on the job seven days a week. “I am constantly putting out fires,” I told a friend.

My friend was the director of human resources at a local hospital and he promptly answered, “Show me a good firefighter and I’ll show you a good arsonist.”

I thought about this for a while and realized that my friend was probably right; I was undoubtedly putting out lots of small fires and solving a host of little problems and my style of management was definitely starting about twice that many fires. I changed my attitude, trusted my employees more, worked fewer hours, and somehow got a lot more done. In short, I worked smarter.

I suspect that somehow, at the university I have slipped back into stupid. My work habits have gotten sloppy. I’m reacting instead of preparing. I know better than this, I learned a long time ago from my mother that lazy people work the hardest, even if it is just mental work. Actually, I heard my mother say the words, but it took a while before I understood the concept.

Years ago, I got my private pilot’s license. While I was still learning, my instructor and I took a cross country flight to Fort Worth. On the way back, we landed for fuel, both for the plane and the two of us, at the Odessa Airport. Because we arrived late in the day, the setting sun was almost more than our sunglasses could handle. As we taxied up to the FBO (Fixed Based Operations-essentially a service station for airplanes) my instructor got out and suggested that I shoot a few solo takeoffs and landings while he ordered us some hamburgers.

I dutifully taxied out, took off, flew around the pattern and made my approach for a landing. I have to admit it wasn’t one of my better landings: not exactly bad-just wasn’t as good as my initial landing while the instructor had been in the plane.

“Don’t worry” I thought to myself. “Conditions have changed. The plane is lighter without your instructor, the sun has almost set, the wind has changed a little, and this airport is several thousand feet lower in altitude from the airport where you are used to landing. Here, the air is thick compared to the high deserts of New Mexico.”

So I took off, circled the field, and lined up for another approach. By now, the runway landing lights were on, so I turned on the plane’s landing light and carefully brought the little plane down. This landing was even more difficult than the previous attempt. Not bad, but difficult. I finally made contact with the runway, gave the plane full power and took off for my third and final solo landing.

“Snap out of it!” I thought. “You can do better than this. Conditions here are NOT that much different than home. You’re just tired; straighten up and fly right!”

Evidently, a motivational speaker I’m not. The last landing was tough, the dark runway was difficult to make out at night as I slowly descended, gingerly trying to make contact with the pavement. The people of Odessa really needed to buy some better landing lights for that was the darkest airport I had ever seen. It seemed like I descended forever, slowly lower and after what I thought was the longest approach of my life, I finally felt the wheels make contact with the runway.

I was mentally exhausted as I taxied the plane back to the FBO where I found my instructor smiling. He was leaning against the wall eating a hamburger as I got out of the plane.

“Mark, those were three pretty good landings.” He said. “They would have been even better if you had remembered to take off those sunglasses.”

I’ve just got to remember to work smarter.

The Blizzard of Oz

It is official: New Mexico is a third world country. Hard hit by about two inches of snow, we promptly shut down.

To be perfectly honest, it was not the snow. It was a lack of electrical power that did us in. Southern New Mexico buys its electrical power from El Paso, chiefly because such an enterprise is beyond our capability. The state once invested in the construction of a nuclear power plant, but managed to sell our share at a loss before it began production. Thankfully, we now own no share of what turned out to be a perfectly good power plant, so we can continue to give our business to our neighbor to the south, who overcharges us and subjects us to rolling blackouts.

It is those rolling blackouts that have forced most activity in the state to brake to a halt. The university has been closed for three days in order to conserve electricity. How exactly does that work? I visited my office during the shutdown and found the lights were still on all over the building, the heat was on, and the computers were still running in the empty labs. As I write this, the street lights and parking lot lights are on for the convenience of those not coming to school.

How much electricity is being conserved by this policy? Do the students in their dorms, houses, and apartments consume less electricity by staying home, microwaving pizza and watching TV rather than sleeping through class? If nothing else, wouldn’t all the snoring bodies help warm the classrooms?

Regardless of where those people are, they will continue to use electrical power. I am at a loss to see how asking everyone to stay home saves power. Our governor asked everyone to lower their thermostat by 10 degrees, but I doubt if anyone in the state followed this advice. I know the university didn’t. My office was warmer than my house.

Still, there was a little snow, so people promptly jumped into their cars and drove like idiots. I watched out my living room window (while I was watching TV and microwaving pizza) as cars went rapidly down the street. A few of them were sliding down the street backwards. I wonder what the hurry was since just about everything in town was closed.

All the schools, all the government offices, the university, and quite a few businesses shut down for the last three days. It has been as cold as bus station chili, but the snow was gone from the roads by noon the first day. Since then, the entire town has had a 5 day weekend while each of us waited for our turn at the rolling blackouts.

At least, we assume it is a 5 day weekend. What happens if they can’t get those generators online? What if this temporary power outage stretches out for weeks? Months? Does it matter? The university can stay closed and the professors can continue to get their paychecks. After all, the state doesn’t really care if we teach or not. It is equally obvious that the majority of the students don’t care if they learn.

Think about it. The state of New Mexico could just take a permanent vacation. The state produces very little since we have almost no factories. How many people can even name a single New Mexican product? As long as the federal checks keep rolling into the state, I’m not sure anyone would notice.

If you need us, don’t call. We are on early retirement. I wonder how big the spike in the birthrate will be nine months from now.

The Karmann GoNot

Looking around the student parking lot on campus, I have begun to wonder what happened to the concept of a starving student. Cars driven by the students appear to be worth much more than the cars driven by the faculty.

Many years ago, my wife and I were students, and I think we could genuinely be described as, if not starving, then at least somewhat underfed students. And this was reflected by our car: we didn’t have one. We either walked or rode the bus everywhere we went. As we were going to school in Houston, this was a real hardship. Houston is one of the great car cities; it is hard to live there without a car.

So, my wife and I started looking for something in our price range. Well, it wasn’t exactly a range, we had $75. We could have gone up to $85, but it would have meant skipping a few meals. Luckily, we found a car for sale for exactly $75. And, compounding our luck, the man selling it lived on a bus route. When you are car shopping by public transportation, your choices are limited.

The car was a 1959 Karmann Ghia Type 14 Coupe. This was a sports car where the engine and chassis were proven German engineering coupled with an Italian styled body. Damn, that sounds exotic. What we actually had was a twelve year old Volkswagen underneath an aging Italian body. Some things age like fine wine. Italian sports cars age like milk. Putting these two halves together may have been some form of revenge for us winning that war. This poor car had lived most of its life too close to salt water, and the only precision instrument the previous owner had used for maintenance must have been six feet of rusty chain.

The car, while running, was a wreck. We bought it immediately and drove it home. I think the top speed we achieved on that first trip was about 10 miles an hour, but I’m not sure as the speedometer wasn’t connected.

Almost nothing worked as it should. As we began the laborious task of repairing the car, we discovered it was a rolling disaster area. Someone had rewired the car using assorted appliance cord and stereo speaker wire. The brakes, windshield wipers, hand brake, and starter were sort of iffy. The heater could not be turned off. The battery could only reliably hold a charge until you needed to use it, and the transmission was not a team player. The car had an independent steering system, meaning it would independently decide to suddenly change lanes. With luck, we could usually get three of the four cylinders to fire. We loved that car.

I remember pushing that car a lot, usually to get it started. This took more than a few people to push it fast and long enough for the engine to fire. As Blanche Dubois said, we frequently depended on the kindness of strangers. I also remember more than a few flats. We could not afford new or even retreaded tires, so we kept patching the original tires; a set of Dunflopped Maypops.

Still, this was quite a learning experience for both of us. My wife learned I had a full set of wrenches and an fuller vocabulary of curse words. I learned she had double jointed hands. While trying to get enough gas to manually feed the carburetor, I dropped a turkey baster into the gas tank. She promptly reached down there and retrieved it. Looking at the tiny hole she had just put her hand through was the first time I believed she might actually accomplish her dream of going to medical school and becoming a surgeon.

While I never did get that car in really good shape, it did have something of a high point: our last real ride in the car was its crowning moment.

I had cleaned the spark plugs, replaced some more of the melting wiring, and generally hammered it back into a shape that looked like a car. It was late one night when I turned the key and it actually started right up. It even sounded pretty good, a nice deep roaring noise. Of course that was mainly due to the faulty muffler wrapped in duct tape, but it was the time for a test ride. My wife and I roared off, taking a trip down a long curving road. I had the pedal buried in the floor, wind was blowing wildly through the holes in the floorboards and we got up to an amazing 35 miles per hour!

And that’s when the engine died, the headlights went out and the hood flew up. It’s also when we decided to sell it.

In some ways, this really was the perfect car for us as we could not have afforded the gas and maintenance for a real car, that Karmann Ghia was more of a hobby than transportation. My wife and I had a lot of fun working on that car together and it was sort of sad when we finally realized that it was not worth the effort. Eventually we sold it to someone else for the same price we had paid, $75. I hope they had half the fun with that car we did.

I feel sort of sorry for students of today. Forty years from now, it will be a little boring for someone to write a blog where they say, “Yeah, I had a car in college. It always worked. Eventually, I sold it and bought another one that worked.”

Military Hate Speak

The other night, John King, a reporter on CNN publicly apologized after a guest on his show used the word ‘crosshairs’ while describing the Chicago mayoral race. After the tragedy that occurred in Tucson, many Americans feel that we have become inured to the use of violent terms in what would otherwise be innocent conversation.
I completely understand, and I agree. As Mr. King noted, America needs to move away from that kind of language.

For way too long our nation has been a victim of friendly fire from a veritable fifth column of creeping extreme violence speech, a form of viciousness that infiltrates our defensive perimeter, and targets our way of life under the camouflage of innocent speech.

We are better than this-we need to awake from our shell shocked state, counterattack this verbal Angel of Death before it contaminates us all, indoctrinating us to accept as common what should be rare. Let us make sure that this is not just a flash in the pan.  We should go loaded for bear, taking aim at all forms of hate speech, this new violence speak, until we have totally annihilated it. I am deeply afraid that it may be too late, that this politically incorrect way of speaking has already invaded our society and our D-Day arrived unnoticed.  It has already established a beachhead; even now we may be making our last stand-our Alamo-to fight for a peaceful society. Unless we, as a nation, accept that we are already in the trenches, we will lose this battle.

America has always been an arsenal of democracy for the entire world, but we could lose this status if we do not recoil from this violence. Hate speech is capable of destroying us simply because we refuse to take it seriously, and unless we accept that fact, deceptively simple words could be the ammunition that torpedoes civil discourse.

Violence speech, the new hate speech, is a minefield that we deliberately choose to walk through; we need not encourage our own demolition by continuing to innocently use such words in everyday conversation.

We need to guard our conversation and establish a citadel against verbal attack. Accepting violence speech is an atomic bomb that we self-detonate. And to protect ourselves against this assault, it is time to enact legislation prohibiting this form of hate speech. Such a law could target those who allow their conversation to trigger violence. This is especially true for those in the media.  We can no longer remain silent while those on radio and television shoot from the hip with such verbal grenades.

It is past time for such a law: we must strike now.  We need a preemptive strike before we have another incident. We need to declare war on military-derived hate speak and take no prisoner until we have an unconditional surrender.

The Great American Panty Raid

What a great title! I have your undivided attention, though I admit that this is not what I wanted to write about. After several recent airplane trips, I had thought to write about airport security and TSA (our motto: If we did our job any better, we’d have to buy you dinner first), but my wife, the Doc refused, saying she was tired of reading about TSA (our motto: It's not a grope, it's a freedom pat.) and would not proof read my post and then the whole world would know how poor my spelling and grammar really are.

So I won’t write about TSA (our motto: Don’t worry, my hands are still warm from the last guy.) but will, instead, write about my wife.

God knows, I love my wife: after 37 years, I probably don’t have a choice. I love her so much that just recently, I decided to prove my love, I’ve stopped introducing her as my first wife.  But with time, some things change in a marriage, and in my case, the things that have changed that I’m not exactly fond of are my wife’s nightgowns.

I can remember a time, a little over a quarter century ago, that the Doc wore the kind of nightgowns that could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. Lately, they have started to look like government issue in a federal women’s prison. Why the change? God knows, it can’t be me. When I ask my wife, the answer is always the same: “It’s comfortable.” I didn’t know comfort was the aim of a nightgown.

There was one nightgown in particular I found offensive. It was battleship gray, made of some material that probably was the prototype of Kevlar, and went down to her feet. If it had covered the head, it would have been uglier than a burka. (I just had a sudden insight. No wonder the men are always fighting in the Middle East: they live in a desert, they don’t drink beer, and their women look like Batman!)

I finally had enough of it and shoved that nightgown into a envelope and mailed it to the Russian Embassy in Moscow. I thoughtfully enclosed a note, “Here. This looks like something your women would wear.” While the bastards never acknowledged the gift, it is probably no coincidence that shortly after this the Berlin Wall came down. I am still waiting for my Nobel Peace Prize. After all, they have awarded them for less.

This brave and selfless act did not bring peace to my home, even after I purchased several replacements from Victoria's Secret.  The secrret seems to be that men will pay incredible prices for inexpensive clothes made in third world countries if the sales clerk is young and pretty.  Evidently, the best way to sell sex is with sex.

The Doc and I reached something of an armistice in this matter shortly after the event I call the Great American Panty Raid. It happened one Saturday afternoon when my wife, the Doc, came home after a long night at the operating room. Almost immediately, she was in the shower. And shortly after that, I found myself staring at the pair of panties she had laid out to wear after her shower. Why do they make that ugly shade of beige? Has anyone ever walked into a store and asked to see something in beige?

These things were ugly, way too ugly for the mother of my two children. These were the kind of ugly you should need a license to look at. I went to her dresser and examined the contents of the drawers. Do ugly clothes breed and multiply? I have no idea what military issue panties look like, but I bet they look better than what my wife owned.

So I gathered them all up-every single pair in the house-and took them outside and burned them. Yep, I dug a small hole next to the compost pile, added a little charcoal lighter fluid and produced a lot of black smoke. Technically, I think the correct term is melted; I melted them. In my opinion, they looked better after the fire.

I ignored all the yelling coming from the back door and drove directly to the mall and went panty shopping. Guys, have you ever gone shopping for panties? It’s a hell of a lot of fun. It is a little hard to get waited on: for some reason the clerk in Dillard’s didn’t just come running up to wait on the middle aged man fingering the panties, but when she saw how many I was buying, she got downright friendly. I think they work on commission.

I bought them in a rainbow of colors, styles, and materials. Did you know you can get panties for grown women with cartoon characters on them? I am not quite sure of the function of some of the snaps and bows, and more than a few resembled slingshots and eye patches, but they seemed interesting enough to try. At least I thought so.

Yes, my wife returned practically all of them, but that wasn’t the point. And while I can’t say that the replacements are as nice as the ones I purchased, I haven’t had to mail anything to the Russian embassy.

The misspelled words are my wife’s fault; she stopped proofreading after the third paragraph.

Pay No Attention to the Professor Behind the Curtain

I am in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. No, I have not been sentenced to a lengthy stay in a federal prison for some obscure violation of the postal laws. Since I doubt if anyone in the post office read last week’s semi-confession of low crimes and high misdemeanors, I am probably safe.

I am in Ft. Leavenworth to attend a course taught by the US Army to improve the skills of professors of military history. That makes it more like a plea bargain. It is somewhat comforting to learn that the Army believes I can improve. It is nice to have friends, especially ones with tanks.

So, I am truly grateful for the course, the Army’s confidence in my teaching abilities, and the two week vacation you taxpayers are giving me. And I am absolutely sure that Kansas is a beautiful place in the spring.

It is, however, winter. Kansas is as cold as boarding house soup.  The temperature is lower than the IQ of a Congressman.  The wind chill is in negative numbers and it just started to snow.  As far as I am concerned, snow belongs on Christmas Cards and penguins. 

That, in and by itself, would not be that bad. But Kansas has the kind of wind that back home we say could blow the nuts off a prairie dog. Arctic winds start in Canada, head south and accelerate through the Dakotas and Nebraska without finding so much as a good bush to slow them down, then hit the poor sap standing in Kansas with the velocity of a frozen missile.

I remember reading about the Titanic. Lieutenant Lightoller, not Jack Dawson, said the cold was like a thousand knives being driven into the body. Lightoller got it mostly right, but in Kansas those knives are red hot.

I am beginning to think I have completely misunderestimated the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy was not trying to return to Kansas, she was attempting to escape. Her famous quote, “We’re not in Kansas anymore” was not a cry of despair, but an exalted pronouncement of victory.

Only after visiting this flat frigid frontier state can one fully appreciate what would cause a young teenage girl to deliberately fling herself into a violent tornado just to escape… Well, let’s just say that we have obviously interpreted the entire book incorrectly. The whole trip down the yellow brick road (an obvious literary metaphor for sunlight) was a desperate attempt to flee from a witch who intended to return her back to a frozen Kansas.

I intend to examine closely the history books concerning the Indian Wars fought on the Great Plains. It could well be that the Native Americans were fighting due to the mistaken belief that the federal government was going to force them to stay here. If the Native Americans had understood that the intended reservation was going to be somewhere south of Kansas, say Southern Florida, they probably would have beaten the US Cavalry there. By the time the Army caught up with them, the casinos would be ready to open.

Why until now have I never noticed the deeply sinister meaning in the phrase “Dead of Winter?”

Tis the Season to Return That Gift

The Christmas season and its associated chores are almost over, all that remains is for us to return that gift we never wanted, can’t use, or already own. Frequently, there are returns for all three reasons. The British have created a special day for this: Boxing Day. While no one is exactly sure of the origin of Boxing Day, it probably had something to do with charity, goodwill, or gift giving. Recognizing the incredible foolishness of all that, today it is the British and Canadian equivalent of America’s Black Friday with a lot of gift exchanges and returns thrown in.

In keeping with the spirit of all this, I have my own merchandise return story. It is not exactly a story about a Christmas gift being returned, since I obviously love every present my wife has ever given me. (Including the pink dress shirt without pockets my wife once gave me. Really, honey, I loved that shirt-especially after I cut it into three inch squares to clean gun barrels.)

My story involves a restaurant supply store and a part for a missing blender. Since I am not entirely certain as to the statute of limitations involving crimes dealing with the postal service, I want to make it perfectly clear that this entire story is absolutely a work of fiction, is purely hypothetical, and probably the result of the brandy in the eggnog I’m drinking.

For a while, I lived on Galveston Island, and while there, I was conducting long term research on the perfect Daiquiri. During my investigations, I eventually destroyed the blades of my blender. Luckily, just a few weeks later, I was in Houston and happened by a very large commercial restaurant supply house. I explained my problem to the clerk, and almost immediately he was able to supply me with a replacement set of blender blades. Actually, he had two sets. It seemed that the manufacturer had made two slightly different versions of my blender with the same name and model number. The only way to be sure of purchasing the right blades was to bring the blender to the store and try them.

When I explained that my blender was over 50 miles away, the salesman had a great idea. “Why not go ahead and buy a set of blades? Take them home and try them,” he explained. “You have a 50% chance of buying the right blades, and if they don’t work you can bring them back and exchange them for the other set.”

Logically, this made perfect sense, so I agreed. I bought a pair, took them home, and immediately discovered that I had the wrong set of blades. I bet you already figured that out; otherwise, this would be a short and rather boring story.

About a week later, I was back in Houston and returned the blades for the correct set. I was waited on by the same clerk who promptly charged me $2.34 as a restocking fee. No matter how much I protested, he denied his previous offer and insisted that I owed a restocking fee. I was furious, but I had no recourse but to pay the restocking fee.

But then, as I left the store, I saw this shoe box on the counter with a little sign, “Take One! Customer Satisfaction Survey.” Inside the box were post cards with a set of questions on one side. On the other side, and this is the key point, was the store’s address and a preprinted “Postage will be paid by…” code.

Perfect! I took one. I would like to point out, remember hypothetically, that the sign was on the box, not on a single card. I took one box. (Hypothetically containing precisely 916 post cards. More or less.)

For the next couple of weeks, whenever I had a free moment, I filled out one of the cards. I put my name, address, and my somewhat clear and definite opinion about the store. I was very careful to politely request that they return to me the $2.34 that I believed they had charged me in error. Then, I would walk outside to the corner mailbox and deposit the card with the prepaid postage. As I understand it, this cost the store about $0.35 each to mail the card to them. Eventually, I may have done this with slightly more than three hundred cards. That is when I got the letter from their lawyer.

“Cease and desist!” the lawyer said. And a lot of other things, most of which were more or less threatening. The lawyer explained that those cards were for individual use, not to be monopolized by a single person. Continued misuse of these cards would constitute the felonious charge of Highway Mopery and Dragging a Rope. Or something like that-I’m not a lawyer.

Slightly after receiving this letter, I had a party that was attended by, among other people, a sizable portion of the Galveston Police Department. After demonstrating my recent progress on perfecting the ultimate Daiquiri, everyone read the lawyer’s letter. For some reason, everyone suddenly wanted to fill out their own customer survey card. Or perhaps cards: I don’t remember a lot about that evening, but I am sure that almost all of the cards included something about $2.34. I think about 35 people used more than 150 cards. Hypothetically.

There is almost certainly no truth to the story later circulated around Galveston that a couple of people emptied the cat’s litter box into a cardboard box, taped the box shut, and then glued one of those postage paid cards to the outside of the box. Besides, I’m pretty sure the post office wouldn’t actually deliver about ten pounds of cat shit and then charge the restaurant supply house first class postage for that. Right?

For the next few weeks about two hundred cards were mailed without a name or address, but including the cryptic message, “Somebody, Somewhere, needs a refund of $2.34.” They certainly were not mailed by me, even hypothetically. That was a very large restaurant supply house and had been in business for years. Those bastards probably owed lots of people $2.34.

Magically, at this point, the owners of that company suddenly had a religious revival. Their frozen conscience thawed, they realized their mistake, and they wanted to do the right thing. Either that, or someone figured out that in postage alone, they were out several hundred dollars not including whatever the lawyer’s letter had cost. However the change of heart occurred, I got a bank cashier’s check for $2.34. I received the check and a letter from the same lawyer ordering me to stop sending demanding postcards.

I never sent another postcard asking for $2.34. The rest of the 200 odd cards were mailed with “Thank You” neatly printed on them. I framed the check and hung it in my office.

At least, that is what I would have done if any of this had actually happened.

Who’s Been Naughty

It’s Christmas Eve and Santa is very busy, so I thought I would offer him some help by putting together my own ‘Who’s Been Naughty’ list. I will not be compiling a ‘Who’s Been Nice’ list as, obviously, it would appear the worldwide demand for nice has all but vanished.

Congress has been naughty. Naughty to the point where Santa should leave them nothing but coal. The soft smoky kind of coal, preferably on fire. This year Congress has shown the kind of budgetary restraint of a sixteen year old with a new credit card. After an election where the voters clearly screamed for an end to uncontrolled spending… Congress has spent billions more dollars. Personally, I think the only way we can stop this madness is to switch from borrowing money from China to borrowing from the mob. When a large guy named Vinnie shows up in Washington to collect, maybe Congress will wake up.

Airport Security and Homeland Security have been naughty. The kind of naughty that can only come from having the brains of a drunken terrier. I don’t want to spend any more time describing this stupidity except to say the obvious: America is at war with Muslim fundamentalist terrorists; America is not at war with every tenth person in line at the boarding gate.

North Korea is still naughty. I do not mean Kim Jong-il and the rest of the Ding-Dong-il family, but the citizenry of North Korea. Isn’t it about time for you people to gather up the torches and march up the hill to the castle and burn the monster out? There are a lot of governments that do not respond to the needs of their people, but very few with a leader who spends a fortune on Mickey Mouse memorabilia as his people starve to death while unsuccessfully attempting to survive by eating grass. When your leader takes advice from the governor of New Mexico, it is time to look for your pitchfork.

New Mexico has been naughty. As a state, we continue to hope that someone driving through the state will lose his wallet. This seems to be our only financial growth plan. The state’s major export remains college graduates looking for jobs. 20% of the people in this state work for the government-the third highest rate in the nation behind Alaska and Wyoming. I guess I shouldn’t complain too much, since one of those employees is me.

Hollywood has been sort of naughty. Worse, they have been boring. Other than making movies out of comic books and endless remakes, I can’t remember Hollywood producing a movie that got me excited in a long, long time. I liked Avatar, but let’s face it: it was a remake of Dances With Wolves with an all Smurf cast. When Hollywood starts remaking John Wayne movies without John Wayne, it’s time to try something different.

I thought about adding the usual celebrity crowd: people like Jesse James, Tiger Woods, and a myriad of aging actresses who keep getting facelifts until they sport goatees. These people aren’t really naughty-they’re stupid-and I doubt if this server has storage space enough for the list of the stupid.

One last note to my wife, the Doc. Honey, you could stand to be a little naughtier.