Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

•  Melania Trump slides into the rear seat of their limo, with her husband on her left and their Secret Service agent on her right.  Two blocks later, Melania turns to her right and complains, “I feel the baby moving.”

•  My intuition tells me the preceding item needed some kind of warm-up joke, but this blog can’t afford an opening act.  If I had my choice of warm-up acts, I would choose my friend Rob Simbeck, but he’s so quick, clever and talented I’d never be able to follow him.  For proof, listen to Rob perform his song It’s Raining, an old favorite of ours.  His website features dozens of his songs and other creative efforts, which I am happy to promote.

•  While doing a word puzzle today in which BELLMEN was an answer, I stopped to think: I can’t recall ever staying at a hotel where I was served by a woman “doorman” or bellhop, i.e., porter or luggage assistant.  Not once! — though we rarely stay in full-service hotels in any case.  What about you, have you ever encountered a BELLWOMAN?

• This (below) was featured in our local newspaper — owned by Gannett of course:

Question: Where did the “cunning thief” manage to find alligator-shaped trash bags? 

•  An item in the same newspaper:  “Asheville City Schools teachers are quitting at a rate (30.7%) higher than any other school system in North Carolina, according to a recently released state report.”  In North Carolina, whose statewide teacher attrition rate is 11.4%, teacher salaries are set by the state and there is no collective bargaining.  For comparison, teacher attrition rates are about 8% in Ohio and Pennsylvania (both collective bargaining states) and 13% in Arizona and Texas (both of which are not).

•  The New York Times review of the novel James, by Percival Everett, made me want to read it for myself, and I am mighty pleased that I did.  James is a re-imagined rendition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, except from the first-person view of Jim/James the slave/human.  While I knew the gist of Huckleberry Finn, I had never read Twain’s work — so it was a treat to read James and then follow it up with Twain’s original.  I agree with the reviewer that the two works should be read as a pair.

•  Mark Twain was a wonderful writer, not that he, having shaken Death’s hand more than a century ago, has need of my endorsement.  I loved this line from Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck describes Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly as “looking as sweet and contented as an angel half full of pie.”

•  While working on an update to Pet-Free Hotels, I came across a suburb of Ft. Worth, TX, called White Settlement.  The city’s website offers this white-oriented explanation of the origin of its name:  “During the 1800s, a time when much of the territory was unsettled, local Native Americans became aware of new people moving into the area.  As these families established homesteads, the Native Americans began to call the area ‘White Settlement.’  Later, many of the roaming Indians settled down in the area and the name continued as the two cultures lived peacefully along the Farmer’s Branch Creek.”

Aww.  It sorta reminds you of the First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Massachusetts, except for the fact that most Native Americans in the scrublands of North Texas and Oklahoma had been forcibly relocated there, only to see places like White Settlement settle-invaded by even more white people.  How do you like that, Mark Twain might have said.

In 2005, White Settlement held a referendum to change its name to something a bit more business-welcoming.  Some 2,500 of its 18,000 residents voted and the name change was defeated 9-1.  This vote took place a good decade before Trump, just saying.

The big tourist draw in White Settlement is, can you guess, the Texas Civil War Museum.  I don’t care how popular that museum is, I won’t be listing White Settlement area hotels on my Pet-Free Hotels site.  Y’all can hole up in Austin.

•  In 1962, the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary recorded the Will Holt song Lemon Tree, whose familiar refrain is, “Lemon tree very pretty / and the lemon flower is sweet / but the fruit of the poor lemon / is impossible to eat.”  I never quite got the message of this song:  “Sorry, but it sucks to be you!”  Oranges or nothing, apparently.

•  My college years were dotted by a number of then-revered counterculture novels, one of which was Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan (1967).  The protagonist of the work, if there was one, was called Trout Fishing in America Shorty.  I’d like to believe that Trout Fishing in America Shorty married Would You Get Me an Ice-Water Sweetie in late 1970 or early 1971.  And that they had two children named Sam and Convenience, whose last names were not officially recorded.   And that the couple separated in 1983.  And that, according to some accounts, Trout Fishing in America Shorty lived off the land until 2021, when he finally fell prey to data breaches and privacy assaults.  There are no public records of Would You Get Me an Ice-Water Sweetie after their 1983 separation — some believe that she changed her name back to Linda and bought an RV.

•  I find it sad that major-league baseball coverage (and baseball play itself) these days is mostly a stat-fest.  Exit velocities, spin rates, launch angles… stuff no one cared about in baseball’s mid-century heyday.  I used to be an avid baseball fan but I have pretty much checked out.  I am simply not interested in “the last player with a sinus infection to hit a two-out home run against a seventh-inning relief pitcher fighting off an intestinal virus” even if his name was Caleb “Potato Peel” Callahan of the 1902 St. Louis Mud Daubers.  Hey, as baseball teaches us, every devotion is made to be broken.

🥦  I was tasked the other day with putting away leftovers, one of which was a serving of Brussels sprouts.  Now, I’m not a big fan of Brussels sprouts, or even a medium-sized fan.  So when one of the sprouts escaped my spoon and fell into the sink and rolled around and went down the drain, I said to myself, “Oh well,” with little more remorse than when a piece of popcorn falls out of a bag at a baseball game.  “It made its choice.”

😟  Astute readers will note that I finally got emojis to work on this site.  We might 🫒 to regret it!

💕 Facebook and other social-media sites allow their users to deploy likes (expressed by those beloved emojis!) as fast-food substitutes for more fully-formed responses.  But likes are so vague that they may unintentionally convey any number of ideas:

•  I have read your post and I agree with it.
•  By clicking like, I join thousands of other social-media clickers who want to belong.
•  I read your post and you struck a sympathetic chord but not much more.  Good luck!
•  I have read your post and wanted to let you know I did, but I have no time or interest in formulating a response to what you just shared.
•  I saw your post and then I read the first few words.  I clicked the thumbs-up icon so that The Algorithm will direct people who read your posts to my own posts.
•  I read your post and I really don’t agree with any of it.  But luckily, I can click an icon that lets you know I read it, even if it only took a second, and now I can move on to my next friend without you or I feeling like I totally dismissed you.
•  I see you.  If this were the 1970s, my like would say, let’s meet up for a coffee.

Bottom line, I wouldn’t dwell too long on picking the perfect like emoji, as the recipient may have little idea what you really have in mind.

🦀 There must be an evolutionary reason why our third finger is our longest.  Maybe it’s as simple as “one finger has to be longest.”  Or perhaps there is a tree-grappling advantage to have a finger just a bit longer than the rest, so it can sense the branch just a fraction of an inch earlier and let us grapple it sooner, thereby escaping that panther.  Only our ancestors and predators knew for sure.

❣️ Who have you assigned to be your reality checker?  By this I mean, the person you are most comfortable sharing your first-draft thoughts with, the person from whom you want to hear, “Hmm, are you sure about that?”  We should all be so lucky to have one.

🔎  As one who appreciates a good science article, I wish to register a formal objection to almost every piece of science journalism I’ve ever read in the New York Times.  Not that this indictment spares other prestigious periodicals, but why not start at the top?

I am invariably frustrated by the dumbed-down, off-the-mark analogies that NY Times science writers routinely deploy, as if the paper’s readers cannot possibly be trusted to grasp physical facts on their own terms.  It is condescending for a publication of its stature to feed its readers scientific baby food, and mostly empty-calorie baby food at that.

An October 2023 article by freelancer Robin George Andrews about the planetary core of Mars is an excellent example of the crime in question.  His very first sentence tips us off that this will be one of those kind of science articles:  “In 2021, it seemed as if Mars had a surprisingly big heart.“

No, Robin.  Mars does not have a heart — it has a core.  Mars is a planet.  It is not a dog or a Salvation Army volunteer or a tin-man whose dream has been realized.

Nonetheless, Robin George Andrews, like a bulldog on a mailman’s leg, will not let go of the heart-core analogy in his article, even though planet cores neither beat nor fibrillate.  Instead he takes his strained analogy to the next level:  “[Teams have] concluded that Mars’s core is more like our own world’s heavy metal heart than previously suspected.” 

Would Earth’s heavy-metal heart belong to Ozzy Osbourne, Man-O-War, or Tony Stark?  (Dare I suggest Freddie Mercury?)  This is not scientific inquiry but science devaluation.

When a writer decides to sow cheap cultural references throughout a science article, it only serves to de-focus the reader’s attention and create a fuzzy mindless space, when focus is exactly what the reader needs to appreciate the science being presented.  But the editors of the NY Times don’t see it that way.  They would rather their readers consume, comment, and move on to the Style section, even if calls for the writer to sabotage the seriousness of his/her own work.

Lest you think the Heart-of-Mars article was just a one-off example, may I direct you to the January 2024 NY Times article, “The Early Universe Was Bananas.”  I would have posted a banana emoji here, but even that doesn’t convey enough satirical contempt.

♨️ After doing this blog for 13-plus years, I have often been tempted to recycle jokes and other bits that I feel were under-appreciated in their time. (Here’s a link to one of them.)  But that would be like The Archies re-issuing Sugar Sugar and hoping to revive that sweet bubblegum wonder of it all.  I… must not… gasp… stoop so low.  (Here’s that link again.)

💲 I have a love/hate relationship with capitalism.  Businesses rise and fall, and when they do fall, their workers usually fall before them.  The only reason I could retire at age 57 (which still seems unreal) is that I worked for a company which made tons of money selling photographic products and which had a good pension plan but a bad business plan, and so they offered employees like me a golden fire escape (golden parachutes being reserved for the bigwigs) before Kodak’s house-of-prints finally collapsed.

In my last few years at Kodak, I heard and observed attitudes and practices that seemed predatory and/or disingenuous rather than competitive, and I started to see the people at the top as testosterone-driven males who saw business as a “tough fight” rather than a race to deliver the best goods at the lowest cost.  I lost my innocence about what corporations (not just Kodak but Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sony, Big Pharma, all of them really) will do to make a buck.  It was discouraging to see my own naivety and look past my complicity.

In retrospect, I might have felt differently about myself if I had worked for a non-profit or a newspaper.  I would have earned less money and no doubt retired far later.  But I’ll never know!  And that will have to do.  I married capitalism right out of college; 36 years later, we had a friendly divorce with a fair settlement.  One can’t question things forever.