Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

§  I would value your input here — please help educate me.  In more films than I can count, there is a scene in which a character is wronged or finds him/herself in a no-win situation, and the character responds (after a moment of seething) by trashing the room they are in, throwing objects against mirrors, sweeping figurines and framed photos onto the floor, and otherwise violently unleashing their negative energy onto their surrounds.

Items resting quietly on pianos and fireplace mantles are particularly vulnerable.

My question is: does any real person ever come close to doing this, or are such histrionics just a tired Hollywood trope?  Sure there have been times I’ve been frustrated and angry, but never (ever!) on such a destructive binge.  It make me think such episodes are over-represented in film, just like pre-meditated murders are, but I don’t have any data.  Do you think everyday people really act out their frustrations so forcefully ?  (You don’t have to answer personally.)

§  I have a problem with human noses and toes.  There are lots of beautiful things about the human body, but noses and toes aren’t among them.  Plastered here, pointed there, growing more curved and contorted as we age.  Consider noses, whose primary purpose seems to be to interfere with kissing — did noses really need to evolve that way to keep the bugs and rain out?  Or do downward-pointing nostrils serve more to hide our nose hairs?  

And take toes — please!  If toes are so important, why didn’t they take on a more elegant design?  What tenet of natural selection could justify their stubby appearance and their constant need of grooming?  And why do we need five of them?  (I am talking about toes per foot, not noses per face.  Thank God for that scant bit of evolutionary economy.)

Sometime soon, I will post a gallery at ART@CHC of my feet-and-toes photos, both real and statuesque, and I must say in advance that sculptors of feet have great imagination.

§  Not that it’s your problem — it never is! — but I can’t count the times I’ve thought of a knock-em-dead idea for a Thoughts@Large item, then opened my laptop to record it for our joint pleasure, only to lose the thought along the way.  As Mitch Hedberg said about the jokes that came to him in the middle of the night, “If the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.”  Yep, same.  Except Mitch may have had higher standards.

§  On a more serious note, I would have liked to have been, at the very least, considered for the post of Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.  I would have been a natural for the position, given my political savvy and microwave skills.  So, when I heard that some Louisiana guy named Mike Johnson was elected, I was crushed.  Nearly cried (but didn’t — I’m a man).  I wasn’t even given the chance to drop out of the running first.

If this white guy from Louisiana had any cred at all, he should have been known as Wailin’ Mike Johnson or Jukin’ Mike Johnson and he should have his own line of hot sauce and a string of barbecue joints.  But just Mike Johnson?  C’mon dawg.

It was just last week that a Ohio man named James Daniel Jordan — after the 2oth book of the New Testament, and then after the lion’s den guy, and then after the river Jordan for good measure! — still wasn’t righteous enough for Republicans to elect him Speaker.  But then they turn around and pick James Michael Johnson, named after the very same book of the Bible, and then after the row-your-boat-ashore guy, and then after Walter Johnson, the iron-arm pitcher for the Washington Senators (1907-1927) who won the second-most games of anyone in baseball history.

It came as a surprise to me and many others, how the election of Speaker came down to how Congress felt about Johnsons.  But I guess it’s all about numbers: 189 of the 222 Republican House members have them.

§  We subscribe to both Netflix and Prime (and, this month, Apple as well), but it still takes forever for us to find a movie.  Apparently, Quentin Tarentino and the Coen Brothers can’t make films fast enough to keep up with the pace of our watching them.  C’mon guys.

§  Speaking of Films, Part I.  Wouldn’t you think that any gang of killers sent to murder the martial-arts hero would have watched enough movies to know YOU CAN’T ATTACK THE HERO ONE-PERSON-AT-A-TIME!  But as my sister-in-law says, if these guys were smart, they wouldn’t need to be criminals.  Same goes for script-writers.

§  Speaking of Films, Part II.  When the vengeful psychotic gunman corners his target and his gun is poised against the victim’s sweaty head, the gunman always begins a monologue that blames the victim and helps him “understand” why he deserves to be killed.  Then the gunman kills him (with exceptions, see below).  Which makes no sense.  Would it not be more cruel (if that were the gunman’s intent) to let the victim live an extended time with the guilt and shame of knowing how he turned the gunman into a psychopath?  I mean, the victim usually only gets a few seconds to appreciate the gunman’s inner turmoil, and then blam.  Well, like my sister-in-law said…

§  Speaking of Films, Part III.  The psychotic gunman, before he kills his victim, is either: (a) shot by the cop who also happens to be his childhood friend and who just now arrived on the scene, and is conflicted about saving or shooting him; (b) shot by the “sensitive” guy in the gang who has a wife and kids and decided this was the best way to save his family; (c) shot by his rival in the gang, who is also simultaneously shot, and both die; or (d) shot by his girlfriend who just can’t even; or (e) trampled by a herd of elephants.  OK, I sort of made that up.  I haven’t seen the bad guy trampled by elephants since, oh, Bomba and the Elephant Stampede (1951).  Tarentino never used elephants.

§  I don’t know what it’s like these days, but when I was in grade school, I remember how it was a big deal when one of our classmates was out sick, leaving an empty desk in the room. It just felt really odd and a little ominous.  “Where’s Janet today?”

§  If I were the 21st-century Marquis de Sade, I would want a job working for the airlines.  I would engineer a pressure-sensitive airplane seat that tallies the minutes your butt is in the seat and charges you extra for every seat-contact-minute.  Passengers who are able to crouch so that their tushie doesn’t touch the seat can save a buck!  If you have to sit, well, that privilege will cost you.  Tell me this isn’t in our future.

§  I find it uplifting if there is even one economic transaction a week in which I am treated like a human instead of a credit card swipe.  And it works the other way too: at the grocery, I generally try to read the cashier’s ID badge and either greet them by name or bid them well as I leave.  I get a smile in return about half the time and walk out happier in any case.

§  It’s not the same when I dare use the self-check line.  I’m still trying to figure out where on the scanning station I can strangle that dictatorial voice-bot, but it will be so satisfying the day I do.  “Please Place Your Item in the BA-A-GGH GAKH UKKH… “

§  When I was growing up, my mother always cut bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches on the diagonal.  No other item ever was, not that there were a lot of opportunities for creative slicing.  Today, eating any diagonally-cut sandwich still feels like a treat to me.

§  The past tense of bear is bore.  But how does it make sense to say, “A baby bore climbed our kousa dogwood tree looking for berries yesterday.”  It makes no sense at all, because plenty of berries had already fallen on the driveway.

§  My spouse often encourages me to look out our living room window as the evening light is fading and appreciate the beauty of the subtle blues and grays spreading across our sky.  I thought of this when I recently read the following passage from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 2009 autobiographical novel, My Struggle: Book 1:

I set off with a sigh.  Above me the entire sky had opened.  What a few hours earlier had been plain, dense cloud cover now took on landscapelike formations, a chasm with long flat stretches, steep walls, and sudden pinnacles, in some places white and substantial like snow, in others gray and as hard as rock, while the huge surfaces illuminated by the sunset did not shine or gleam or have a reddish glow, as they could, rather they seemed as if they had been dipped in some liquid. …

Sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought.

And with that we close for now.

§  This travel rule originated with my spouse, but I concur:  Any on-the-road restroom where you have to ask for the key will make you regret having asked for the key.

§  I was slicing radishes for our dinner salads when I made a tiny but generously-bleeding cut on the end of my thumb.  Acknowledging my inherent lack of skill with knives, I said to my spouse, “If I had lived in the 1850s, I’d be dead by now.”  (Hmm, ya think?)

§  How the shame of shame has changed.  On August 9, 1974, President Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment for conspiring to cover up a criminal act.  Not half a century later, President Trump led a conspiracy to overturn the result of a legitimate election and then has the temerity to insist that his First Amendment rights demanded this of him.  Yes, the First Amendment protects your right to be an asshole, Mr. Trump, so you be you.

Interestingly, temerity comes from the Latin tenebrio, “person who operates in darkness.”  This must also be the Latin root word for trump.

§  If I may share this once-upon-a-time excerpt from Bill Moyer’s May 1976 PBS interview with then-presidential-hopeful Jimmy Carter:

We have traveled light-years beyond Jimmy Carter’s spacetime.  Spin is now the currency of the realm.  Liars are embraced if they tell us what we want to hear.  Truth?  How quaint!

Use the dots or arrow keys to advance the frame.

§  There aren’t many six-letter English words with 3 syllables.  I was able to come up with these without external help:  ALBEIT, BONOBO, CALICO, DIADEM, ELATED, FINALE, GIGOLO, HERNIA, ICONIC, JICAMA, KAOLIN, LIABLE, MUSEUM, NOVENA, OCELOT, POTATO, QUALIA, RESUMÉ, SUGARY, TAMALE, UNABLE, VIABLE, WIRING, YTTRIA, ZINNIA.  I could not think of a six-letter X-word.  Your submissions welcome.

§  Shopping in Sam’s Club the other day, I was walking down an aisle near the tire center and thought to myself, I sort of like new-tire smell.  McGill University says I am not alone:  “[T]here are people who love the scent of new tires, some even describing an addiction to the fragrance.”  Reddit user gersty asked, “Do they make a new tire smell air freshener?”  Travis, on a Yamaha motorcycle forum, exclaimed, “DAMN I love the smell of a new tire!” and posted a photo of a tire he keeps next to his computer desk for its aroma.

Then there are people who like the smell of skunk.  (Not me, but certain people I know.)   Quora user David Lincoln Brooks rhapsodized thus about roadkill skunk:  “Yet on a cold November night, when the assailed skunk is a mile away, then the smell tints the cold still air with a curious mournful longing… the olfactory poignance of a distant train whistle at midnight.”  OK, Walt Whitman, but what about tires?

§  A while back, I read maybe half of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data (and so on) by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz; his topic was how our internet searches reveal ‘the real truth’ about ourselves.  The author’s examples and anecdotes might have made for a good essay in The Atlantic, but not a whole book.

I increasingly don’t care whether I finish non-fiction books — I find there is rarely much substance after the first 100 pages.  I know a book has been padded when I start skimming the first sentences of paragraphs and don’t feel like I’m missing anything.  Just because an author satisfies his publisher’s word count doesn’t mean I have to follow suit.

§  Why is it easier to give up on a bad movie than a bad book?  I venture it’s because we take (somewhat) more care selecting books and thus are more invested in our choices, which makes us less willing to abandon books.  Do Kindle users agree?

§  Old people are too old to be funny.  Consider: Jane Curtin is 75 (I think she has always been 75).  Goldie Hawn is 78.  Dave Letterman is 78, as is Steve Martin.  Michael Palin and Eric Idle are 80.  Lily Tomlin is 83.  Tom Smothers is 86.  Bob Newhart is 93.  I am 70, and this wasn’t funny at all, so that clinches it.  Old comics: they’re either weird, or dead.

§  I have three questions that need answers:

•  How do pacemakers know to speed up during exercise, when we need more oxygen?

•  Has any contestant on The Price is Right intentionally interfered with the wheel while it was spinning?  You know, to slow it down and try to make it land on $1.00.  After 50 years, wouldn’t you be surprised if it hasn’t been tried at least once?

•  What does eel taste like? (I bet it tastes like anything with two ee’s would taste like.)

§  Last but not least: Our pit of past despair (i.e., the water feature) is now a corner of zen.  All because I broke my toe and couldn’t reasonably work on it, and so we hired someone to finish it off.  It’s a big relief.  This lesson will last me a long time.