Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

• If I had raised my children without antibiotics, they would be safer to eat today.

• Edgar Allan Poe… who would have guessed he would one day write poetry?  We should be glad he wasn’t named Edgar Allan Bigot.

• A few days ago, while I was eating habanero ice cream with Satan, The Red One offered to whisk me off to Abbey Road Studios, circa 1967, and sit me down in the control room as Sir George Martin recorded The Beatles performing Strawberry Fields Forever, A Day in the Life, and I Am the Walrus.  This sounded wonderfully tempting to me —  but what did Satan want in return?  Nothing, really… or maybe everything.  “It’s up to you,” Satan said as he ate his last spoonful.  “Would you rather hang onto your fantasy or see the reality?”

• Popcorn is so sad.  It’s like you are eating the past tense.

• If I had My Way, I would be rich, or Paul Anka, or both.

• In my self-appointed role as Potentate of the Point-and-Shoot, I have declared that April is No-Cliché Photography Month.  In observance of same, I will be refraining from clicking LIKE on social-media pics of sunrises, sunsets, and rocky cascades of milky-looking water, and I urge you to do likewise.  If this goes well, then next year I will add restaurant food, foggy seascapes and scenes of architectural decay to the No-Cliché list.  That will be tough on me, especially when I am behind the lens.  I may have to start shooting cats.

• A Persian-American woman started a fashion veil business.  She designed a new line and traveled to Iran to unveil it.  This confused the authorities — she was lucky to escape.

• As most of you know, Asheville sits in the middle of America’s Bible Belt.  The Asheville-Greenville axis has been named the ninth-most “bible-minded” area of the country, based on how often people read it and how accurate they think it is.  So I should not have been surprised to see Spiritual Warfare Jesus’ Way in the book section of our local supermarket, on the bottom shelf, among the children’s selections.

I couldn’t imagine how Spiritual Warfare Jesus’ Way would appeal to children, until I saw the subtitle: How to Conquer Evil Spirits and Live Victoriously.  Now I get it — it’s sort of like Harry Potter, with sandals.

• One morning in America, Ronald Republican was walking his dog.  The dog pooped on the sidewalk and Mr. Republican unwittingly stepped in it, soiling his shoes and making them smell.  The now-outraged Mr. Republican stormed around, flailing his arms and kicking his feet.  But he didn’t yell at his dog for pooping.  And he didn’t yell at himself for stepping in it.  Instead, Mr. Republican stood there and yelled at the turd.  The turd is Donald Trump.

• I want to be in a rock band so that I can have a highly-public falling-out with its leader over creative differences — music shorthand for who took the wrong drugs when.

• NFL coach-speak is an odd but highly-evolved dialect whose purpose is to kill time in mandatory post-game interviews while avoiding saying anything of substance.  Mike Tomlin, head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, is a master of the form.  Tomlin’s recent commentary on his team’s up-and-down performances: “We know it’s something we’re very cognizant of.”

• Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh has announced its tuition and fee schedule for undergraduates entering in the fall of 2016.  Yearly tuition rises to $51,196 — standard room and board will cost $13,270.  This is in addition to the activity fee, technology fee,  transportation fee, media fee and orientation fee, which together total $1,114.  Without textbooks, this comes to $65,580.  When I entered college 45 years ago, the tuition was $2,500, including the $10 activity fee; room and board was $1,150.  So, the cost of going to CMU has gone up 18-fold in the last 45 years (an annualized rate of 6.6%) while per capita income in the U.S. has increased only 10-fold in the same period.  Small wonder that Bernie Sanders is popular among the young, educated and indebted.

• The reading list for my freshman “Literary Imagination” course was very formative and very 1960s: Slaughterhouse Five; Catch 22; Trout Fishing in America; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  None of those titles was written by a woman, nor did any of them involve strong female characters — Nurse Ratched excepted.  In retrospect, what passed for literary imagination in 1970 was still pretty limited.

• One recent clue on Jeopardy referred to the 56-bedroom, 61-bathroom Hearst Castle at San Simeon, California.  This led my wife to exclaim, “Who would want to clean all those bathrooms?”  Though phrased in the form of a question, this was not the right answer.

• Three Georges, three aphorisms:

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
— George Bernard Shaw

One cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.
— George Orwell

In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.
— George Carlin

• When I was growing up, I had the impression that poet was on equal footing with barber, policeman or scientist as something a person might do for a living.  That it was folly in me, thou mayst say! [Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 1610]

• As I write this, the U.S. stock market, as represented by its largest corporations, has fallen more than 10 percent below its long-term trend (see sidebar).  Declines of this magnitude are referred to — by the financial community — as volatility.  (Ordinary people call them losses.)  Sudden drops in the market always bring out the financial pundits, telling the public to stay calm.  As David Lebovitz of JPMorgan intones in Barrons, “To us, this recent sell-off looks more like a repricing, rather than the beginning of something more serious, and long-term investors should stay the course.”  [My emphasis added.]  Does no one else see the irony in Wall Street imploring the public not to sell, when the selling by Wall Street traders is the very reason prices are falling?  I know precisely why  the market is volatile: because these people are playing with other people’s money.

• Finally, a bit of nerd humor to zap your neurons. Last winter, a local personal weather station (PWS) reported an unusual reading (see image at right).  As you see, the “feels like” temperature differs from the 3.7 ° thermometer reading by seven units in the sixteenth decimal place, an astounding degree of precision.  How did they find someone with such sensitive skin?

• Religion is the cologne many killers wear to mask their hate.

• I would like to know what segment of the viewing public was able to watch David Caruso play tough-guy roles, while suspending disbelief.

• It would be nice to have richer interactions with others than this blog affords.  In spite of the occasional appreciative comments, I seldom know who is reading and whether their reaction is positive or otherwise.  Stage actors can bask in the visible warmth of their audiences, but writers must be blind and impassive, like fishermen.  When fishing, you cast your fly, and maybe there is a fish down there and maybe not, but if there is a fish there, it may be hungry or maybe not, but if it is hungry, maybe it is in the mood for a worm and not a fly, or maybe it is the time of year it eats gnats, or maybe your fly just smells funny or swims by too fast.  So you pull in the line and most often you find nothing.  And you think, maybe what you need is a different lure or a new line or a cooler day, but you really have no idea.

• Making and keeping friends is something I have never been good at.  As a result, I don’t have many.  I envy those who do — they will outlive me, in days and in minds.

• On a more melancholy note (!) I must also confess that the older I get, the more I tend to procrastinate.  I see this as perfectly rational — I would rather have my obituary read, “He died while working on his final composition” than “He died while cleaning the garage.”

• With respect to cleaning, I don’t see small specks of dirt and crumbs on the floor as well as I used to.  And the ones I do see, I’m less inclined to pick up right then and there… I will vac them up eventually.  A tentative co-existence with imperfection is settling in.

• From the American Irony Board:  When my son and his wife visited for Thanksgiving, they brought along a book to give to my daughter: “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.”  After the holiday, as my daughter was packing up to leave, I saw she had neglected to pack the book.  I asked her, didn’t she want to take the book with her, and she replied, no, she probably wouldn’t read it.  So now I get to figure out what to do with this book about clutter that is sitting on my desk.

• Donald Trump, with alphabetic economy, has made a not-so-surprising transition from “You’re Fired!” to “You’re Afraid!”

• I really don’t want my blog to be bleak.  I do love life.  It’s just that so much shit — man-made, man-preventable or man-remediable — makes life not so much fun for millions of others on this planet.  My cognitive dissonance stares me in the face every day that I watch The Price is Right — and I stare it right back down as I try to outguess the contestants on the prices of designer leather goods, wine coolers and karaoke systems.

I close with an observation by writer Anna Holmes, with a bracketed insertion of my own:  “I believe that self-loathing is a reasonable response to the unfairness and arbitrariness of the profession [humanity] with which we’ve chosen to align ourselves.”