So The Huntress915, who’s tough enough to take on the other 914, nominated me for a Sunshine Award, which is nice since I have a dark sense of humor, and The Huntress is a pretty amazing person. She’s smart and accomplished and from Texas, and you know what the say about how you shouldn’t mess with Texas. At least I hope someone knows it because I can’t remember it. I think it might be “Don’t aggravate the Lone Star State”, but that’s another story.
This is my first Sunshine Award, although I have been nominated for the Liebster Awardtwice, and I can never figure out how to add these to my blog, just like I haven’t figured out how to make it easy for people to leave comments without dealing with spam. And the other rule I always break is that I never nominate anyone else for the award. I appreciate the recognition and I want to pass it on and there are a lot of blogs I really like–more than the usual recommended five–but blogs are also a personal thing and I don’t want anyone to feel obligated to break out of whatever they’ve got planned. So if you’re a regular here or follow this blog or just dropped by consider this your Sunshine Award, and I’ll try and fix those grawlixing comments.
Oh yeah, and there’s one last thing: five random facts about myself. Here goes:
-I can guess anyone’s age within five years if they tell me their birthday.
-I was once arrested for impersonating a member of the Bulgarian royal family. I was in Liechtenstein at the time.
-I can eat an entire jar of peanut butter. It usually takes a couple of months.
-I have an extensive collection of walks into a bar jokes.
-I’ve been known to make up weird random facts about myself.
There is an app for your phone that alerts you when it’s the best time to take a break from a movie. It’s called, fittingly, RunPee, and it’s for when you’re watching an exceptionally long movie. There are two problems with this that I can think of. The first is when I go to see a movie in the theater I turn my phone completely off. I don’t want it to alert me to anything. The second is I don’t want people around me getting up and walking around me when I’m trying to watch a movie. And I say that as someone who enjoys going to a theater and sitting in the dark with a group of strangers. When I went to see Pulp Fiction a couple behind me got into an argument during the film’s opening.
“I seen this afore,” said the woman. “I know I seen this. It was on TV.”
Then the man started laughing. “You’re dumb!” he said, a little too loudly. “This ain’t never been on TV.”
“Are you sure this weren’t on TV?”
At that point I turned around and gave them a look and the man laughed again and said, “Now see what you done?”
I was glad they shut up after that but I also enjoyed the way their commentary seemed like a weird part of the movie itself.
Also I just thought of a third problem: if there’s a scene in a movie that’s long enough for people to take a break and so unnecessary that people can take a break maybe the damn movie shouldn’t be three hours in the first place.
Or we could bring back a venerable tradition that made many classic films more enjoyable, and this is not even close to a complete list:
Gone With The Wind
Run time: 3 hours, 58 minutes with an intermission
Ben-Hur
Run time: 3 hours, 44 minutes with an intermission
Lawrence of Arabia
Run time: 3 hours, 44 minutes with an intermission
2001: A Space Odyssey
Run time: 2 hours, 44 minutes with an intermission
I’ve heard some people used the break to drop windowpane for “the ultimate trip”.
The Sound Of Music
Run time: 2 hours, 54 minutes with an intermission
Fiddler On The Roof
Run time: 3 hours, 21 minutes with an intermission
It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World!
Run time: 3 hours, 30 minutes with an intermission
Fantasia
Run time: 2 hours, 6 minutes with an intermission
Funny Girl
Run time: 2 hours, 35 minutes with an intermission
Doctor Zhivago
Run time: 3 hours, 20 minutes with an intermission
Spartacus
Run time: 3 hours, 18 minutes with an intermission
Cleopatra
Run time: 5 hours, 20 minutes and I hope several intermissions
Because I love books and love to read I have this quote from Rabelais’s Gargantua & Pantagruel hanging over my desk:
The philosophers, preachers, and doctors of your world feed you with fine words through the ears. Here we literally take our teachings orally, through the mouth. Therefore I do not say to you: Read this chapter, understand this gloss. What I say is: Taste this chapter, swallow this gloss. Once upon a time an ancient prophet of the Jewish nation swallowed a book and became a learned man to the teeth. Now you must immediately drink this, and you’ll be learned to the liver. Here, open your jaws.
I love the idea that books are food for the mind–as opposed to fish, which I was told when I was a kid is good brain food, in spite of the mercury, but that’s another story. The idea of books as food for the mind seems to be the inspiration for the International Edible Book Festival, usually held on April 1st or 2nd. Here are some of the tasty selections from yesterday’s event at Vanderbilt University Library:
Some coffee was needed to wash all that down and the name on the box–Lara–made me wonder if Dr. Zhivago was in the house.
April 2018-The Freethinkers Anonymous fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 30th in spite of this blog not actually being a company or even making any money. It is, however, a great opportunity to remember a now-retired coworker who pronounced the word “fiscal” as “physical”, and would even write statements about “the physical year” in emails and had to be discouraged from sending emails to anyone outside of the office which was a lot easier to do in the day when communicating with anyone outside the office was done by phone, telegram, and snail mail, which often raised the question, would sending mail by snails actually work? Staff were then sent out to collect snails but it was determined to be early in the season. A lengthy series of communications within the office then took place around the watercooler.
May 2018-A decision to start paying staff in Paraguayan Guarani raised several questions. Primarily the symbol for the Guarani, ₲, prompted several staff members to remember that guy from high school who had a Commodore 64 and on the keyboard Shift-4 was actually a £ sign, not the number sign, and when and why did people start calling it a “hashtag”? The rest of the month was lost to playing with different fonts and trying to figure out who created the Wingdings font and why.
June 2018-An office poll was taken and staff were evenly divided on the question of whether it was possible to use the word “pneumatic” gratuitously.
July 2018-The annual attempt to find the best local milkshake raised several questions: how to define “local”, whether chain restaurants could be included if they’ve only expanded to a few states and haven’t gone national, whether the emphasis should be on places that mostly serve ice cream or burger joints, whether it was an appropriate subject since this really isn’t a food blog, what is this blog about and whether making it a food blog would be more physically rewarding, and why milkshakes?
August 2018-A sudden and serious dip in productivity resulted in a stern lecture from the office management. It was later determined that the lecture would have been more effective if it had been delivered during work hours. The mistake was attributed to confusion resulting from the change to Daylight Savings Time. No one could explain why office management decided to make the change to Daylight Savings Time five months late.
September 2018– Hugh: Welcome back to the World Croquet Finals here in Paramaribo. With several surprising eliminations this has been quite an exciting match, hasn’t it Jerry? Jerry: I wouldn’t know. I’ve been drunk since we arrived. Hugh: The rainy conditions have made this year’s match quite difficult with a soft pitch and of course the grounds crew has had to come out early each day and remove the snails. Jerry: The biggest challenge I’ve had has been staying upright. Have you seen how much they’re asking for rum in the duty free shop in the hotel lobby? Hell, it’s cheaper than bottled water. Hugh: The soggy conditions have really slowed down play. Jerry: Speaking of soggy conditions I thought the bathroom in my hotel room had a light that automatically came on when I opened the door. Turns out I’ve been peeing in the minibar. Hugh: You’ll notice that Dr. Brantley of the Canadian team managed to successfully croquet her opponent but she’s now facing a narrow hoop that will be difficult to get through. Do you know the common expression for that sort of hoop? Jerry: Whoa! Look at her hit those balls with that big hammer! Can I get her phone number? I’m asking for a friend of course. Hugh: I hate you so much.
October 2018-Plans for the office corn maze were abandoned when it was discovered squirrels and birds had eaten all the corn.
November 2018-Staff were occupied for most of the month discussing the question of whether November should be accompanied by a month called “Somember”, preferably in the summer which lacks any months ending in “ber” and also is never long enough. This may not seem like much of an issue but you’d be surprised how much time staff can spend on a question like that.
January 2019-Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, sit ne patrioque similique, eum in inimicus vulputate. Eu pri dicta detracto mnesarchum. Mea meliore noluisse dissentiet ne. Ei sea quaeque pneumatica lacquasso.
February 2019-An office poll was taken and staff were evenly united on the question of whether or not I should take a shower.
March 2019-An office poll was taken and staff celebrated the decision to conduct all internal office communications, including the release of the annual 2018/2019 annual report, by means of pneumatic tubes.
I mentioned in a previous post that I’m auditing a class on Jewish humor and with that comes some homework which I can then recycle into blog posts because, hey, why not? Because I’m only auditing the class and not an actual student the professor handed this paper back with a note that said, “If I were grading this I’d give it a 96.” And that seemed like a pretty good grade, even if she couldn’t dance to it, until I found out the grading scale is from one to a thousand. Well, I guess I should keep on trying.
The House Next Door: Performers & Their Identities
“Suppose nobody in the house took the painting?”
“Go to the house next door.”
“That’s great. Suppose there isn’t any house next door?”
“Well, then of course, we gotta build one.”
-Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx) and Ravelli (Chico Marx), Animal Crackers
From vaudeville up through film, radio, and television performers have adopted various identities. In vaudeville, as in earlier theater, there were stock characters who could be expected to behave certain ways. These characters could be played by a variety of actors. Some performers, however, began
developing distinctive characters. Some, such as George Burns and Gracie Allen and The Marx Brothers developed their identities on the stage and carried them over to other media. Others, such as Jack Benny and Fanny Brice, started in vaudeville but developed their characters after they moved to radio, while Gertrude Berg started performing at her father’s Catskills resort and created The Goldbergs for radio. In this paper I’ll examine some of the identities Jewish performers created and suggest both practical and personal reasons behind them.
To begin with, although Jack Benny started his career in vaudeville, he only really began developing the persona that he would become famous for on radio. Other vaudeville performers, as Epstein notes in The Haunted Smile, tried to make the transition from the stage to radio but found it difficult because of the regular need for new jokes:
In vaudeville, a comedian could survive on a single twenty-minute skit. The comedian would go from theater to theater around the country repeating the same routine…Radio was completely different. A skit done once could not be repeated the following week; new material was needed all the time. (Epstein, 56)
Benny adapted quickly, relying on and respecting writers who worked for him, and gradually created the persona of a miserly character who, when held up at gunpoint and told, “Your money or your life!” replies, “I’m thinking it over!” By playing a miserly character Benny, who was Jewish, risked reinforcing stereotypes about Jews, but, in the Depression, a wide audience probably found his concern with money relatable as well as funny. This was also only a character and not a reflection of the real Jack Benny, who was quite generous. When Eddie Cantor was raising money for Israel’s War of Independence Benny sent a blank check with the note, “Eddie, fill this in for whatever amount you need (Epstein, 63).”
Benny was also not locked into a single character. In To Be Or Not To Be he plays Joseph Tura, a vain and jealous actor who helps the Polish resistance by pretending to be a Nazi spy after members of the resistance murder the real spy, Professor Alexander Siletsky. Shut in a room with Siletsky’s corpse, which has been discovered by the Nazis, Tura almost escapes by shaving off the professor’s beard and replacing it with a false one, but his own false beard is then pulled off by a member of his acting troupe also pretending to be a Nazi. This is incredibly multi-layered with Jack Benny the actor abandoning his usual character to play an actor who, in turn, pretends to be a real person.
Benny would add another layer to his performance in the 1959 Merrie Melodies cartoon “The Mouse That Jack Built”, in which he voices a mouse named Jack Benny. The cartoon also includes the regular cast of “The Jack Benny Program”, Ed “Rochester” Anderson, Mary Livingstone, Don Wilson, as well as Mel Blanc, who voiced most of the Warner Brothers cartoons characters as well as playing several characters on “The Jack Benny Program” on both radio and television.
It’s not surprising that most performers weren’t like the people they portrayed, but it is surprising just how different they often were. Fanny Brice, born in 1891, became famous in vaudeville as a singer and comedian, but when she began performing on radio in the 1930s she presented herself as Baby Snooks, a four and a half year-old child character she’d used in sketches on Broadway. In some cases the identities developed by trial and error as performers responded to what audiences wanted. For instance early in their career as a double act George Burns had Gracie play it straight and feed him funny lines, but the audience laughed more at Gracie than him, so “Burns immediately rewrote the act, giving Gracie the funny lines and the daffy persona she became famous for displaying.” (Epstein, 24)
The Marx Brothers also developed their identities over time on stage; according to Groucho, “I believe all comedians arrive by trial and error.” (Marx, 73) Encouraged to perform by their mother Minnie the brothers went through a series of acts, including The Four Nightingales, a singing act comprised of Groucho, Gummo, and Chico, and Harpo. Harpo couldn’t sing, but Minnie told him, “Keep your mouth open and no one will know the difference!” (Marx, 68) While performing on the college circuit they began adding physical comedy to their musical act:
On the second chorus I would start to dance. In the middle of it Chico would jump up, grab me, and we would whirl around the stage together while Harpo would hop up on the piano stool and continue the playing. Near the finish of the song, I would give Chico a hefty shove. This would knock Harpo off the piano stool. Chico would then resume playing and I would finish the song, with Harpo stretched out on the floor simulating unconsciousness. (Marx, 121)
Groucho adds that they didn’t know how successful they would become but, with this beginning, “We were now a unit. We were The Marx Brothers.” They began developing characters in a skit called “Fun In Hi Skule”. Harpo in particular decided to stop speaking after a reviewer said, “He takes off on an Irish immigrant most amusingly in pantomime. Unfortunately, the effect is spoiled when he speaks.” (Epstein, 43) The characters were fully formed in their Broadway show I’ll Say She Is!—Groucho, the sharp-tongued wit and often the leader, Chico, the Italian immigrant, and Harpo, the mute cherubic clown. At the suggestion of Alexander Woollcott, who highly praised their performances they dropped their real names and began using the nicknames they’d been given in a poker game with a monologist named Art Fisher. (Epstein, 44) They would keep these characters throughout their film career and in television appearances.
While Gertrude Berg was a wife and mother her success and fame as actor, writer, and producer far exceeded the experiences of her fictional wife and mother of the Goldberg family, which formed the basis of The Goldbergs, “a show that was a cross between a situation comedy and a soap opera” (Epstein, 72). While the Goldbergs, first on radio from 1929-1946 and from 1949-1956 on television, dealt with various problems, including anti-Semitism, the show would be beset by very real problems, from difficulties with sponsorship and critics to the resignation of co-star Philip Loeb who was blacklisted as a suspected communist. Loeb left the show in 1952 and committed suicide in 1955. As Epstein says, though, what ultimately doomed the show was “its overt ethnicity” at a time of strong anti-Semitism and an entertainment industry that was moving “away from ethnicity and toward bland, nondescript situation comedies about middle-class WASP families.” (Epstein, 146)
Now I’d like to shift away from comedians and performers to writers and the identities they create, not only for characters in fiction but for themselves as well. While S.J. Perelman wrote works such as “Waiting For Sanity”, a parody of Waiting For Lefty by Clifford Odets and was a co-writer of the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business and Horse Feathers as well as other films, he also wrote a number of short seemingly autobiographical pieces he called “feuilletons”. Most were standalone, although his 1947 collection Acres And Pains follows his efforts to become a “gentleman farmer”, overseeing a property in rural Pennsylvania and becoming exasperated at the cost and difficulty of country life. It’s the opening feuilleton of his final book, The Last Laugh, though, that should make readers ask whether Perelman’s writings are as autobiographical as they seem. The title, “And Then the Whining Schoolboy with his Satchel”, is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It and focuses on a meeting between fifteen year-old Perelman and his teacher, Miss Cronjager. There is a great deal packed into this story. He describes Miss Cronjager as having “honey-colored hair and a figure evocative of the coryphées portrayed in cigarette pictures.” Perhaps wanting to impress his teacher his “autobiographical” essay draws on multiple literary works from Captains Courageous and Treasure Island to the works of H. Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer. This allows him to present himself to his teacher as a much more interesting and adventurous person while also signaling to us, the readers, how well-read he was. There is also a concern with money. He only has enough for the ride home but Miss Cronjager is late and it’s too cold for him to stay outside. Assuming she’ll pick up the tab since it was her invitation he goes into the café and orders food, starting with “a portion of jelly roll and a coffee float”. When Miss Cronjager still hasn’t arrived half an hour later he orders “a butterscotch ice cream soda and a slice of angel cake topped with hazelnuts and chocolate sauce.” When his teacher finally arrives she apologizes for being late and insists he order something.
I studied the menu carefully, torn between mocha layer cake and a walnut sundae with ladyfingers. Rather than be categorized as a glutton, however, I checked myself and settled for an eight-inch segment of poppy-seed strudel and a vanilla freeze.” (Perlman, 21-22)
He leaves before the bill arrives and attributes the low grade he ultimately receives on his essay to Miss Cronjager’s shock at how much he’s tallied up.
The short story “My Mother Was A Witch” by William Tenn, the pen name of Philip Klass, is also written as autobiography and is about the efforts of the author’s mother, who “had been born a Jewish cockney” who “bagged” his father in London’s East End, to adapt to life in Brooklyn. She is determined to “unlearn her useless English in place of what seemed to be the prevailing tongue of the New World”; that is, Yiddish, which her husband teaches her, but while he holds “science and sweet reason to be the hope of the world” she must deal with the women of the neighborhood who have “at their disposal whole libraries of cantrips.” (Klass, 289) Fortunately she learns quickly, creating a new self who not only teaches her son to deflect unfriendly spells but also sets back the most fearsome witch in the neighborhood, Mrs. Mokkeh, “an experienced heavy, a pro who had trained in the old country under famous champions.” (Klass, 292)
The mother in “My Mother Was A Witch” is different from the performers and writers I’ve discussed previously in that they, for the most part the children of immigrants, had familiar traditions they drew upon, but the mother is an outsider even among other immigrants. What all of them have in common, though, is that they are like the “house next door” discussed by Groucho and Chico in Animal Crackers. They are places conjured up by imagination and so elaborately realized that it doesn’t matter whether they’re real or fictional; they hold, or hide, very real aspects of the individuals who’ve created them. These “houses” are, I think, an expression of the feeling of goles, exile, as described by Michael Wex in Born To Kvetch:
As long as the Messiah is still missing and the Temple remains unbuilt, the whole world is in a sort of metaphysical goles from which it, too, needs to be redeemed. The world might not know it, the gentiles who are lording it over us and each other might never realize it, but anybody with real knowledge already knows that whatever is, is wrong. (Wex, 23)
Even as Jewish performers, both before and after World War II, felt pressured to tone down their Jewishness, the identities they presented the world were a way to be part of the world, to make their mark upon it. These identities may have been another form of exile, though, an exile from the self, since the faces they presented to the world were not really their own.
With that in mind I’d like to conclude by discussing the short story “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester as a story of the ironic dissolution of an identity. It follows the scientist Henry Hassel, a professor at “Unknown University”, who finds his wife with another man. Enraged he takes a gun but, rather than shooting his wife and her lover, he builds a time machine and goes back in time and murders her grandparents before they’d married. His intent is to erase his wife’s very existence, but when he returns to the present he finds her still with the same man. He then goes on a temporal killing spree, shooting George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon, Mohammed, and others. He gives Marie Curie the formula for nuclear fission, resulting in the destruction of Paris. With every atrocity he feels less and less substantial upon his return to the present, but his wife is always there with the same man. He calls the library and is told that, as far as the history books are concerned, nothing has changed. Finally he meets another scientist who also invented a time machine and rampaged through time, only to learn that,
When a man changes the past he only affects his own past—no one else’s. The past is like memory. When you erase a man’s memory, you wipe him out, but you don’t wipe out anybody else’s. You and I have erased our past. The individual worlds of the others go on, but we have ceased to exist. (Bester, 171)
This is a strange twist on John Donne’s “No man is an island”. Hassel’s attempts to destroy his wife’s existence backfire. It’s his own identity that’s erased. Is there a warning in this not to try and alter history, to not draw attention to oneself? Perhaps, although it could also be read as a comment on the elusive nature of identity and how too much scrutiny can undermine it.
Works Cited
Bester, Alfred, Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester, New York: Vintage Books, 1997
Epstein, Lawrence, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America, New York : Public Affairs, 2001
Marx, Groucho, Groucho And Me, New York : Da Capo Press, 1995
Perelman, S. J., The Last Laugh, New York : Simon & Schuster, 1981
Tenn, William, Immodest Proposals, Framingham, MA : NESFA Press, 2001
Wex, Michael, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods, New York : St. Martin’s Press
Rather than the cool personality that underpinned the Right Stuff in the Apollo era, future astronauts may need to prove they have something very different: the Silly Stuff. An onboard comedian is a proven way to unite teams in stressful situations, research shows.
Good evening everybody, or morning, or, uh, day. I’m not sure what time it is. Hey, who saw that full Earth earlier? Pretty spectacular, wasn’t it? Would you believe I could see my house from here? No? Anyway, who here is from out of town? Everybody? It’s nice to see we’ve got some Russians with us. You guys really know space exploration, don’t you? Would you believe I was at the observation window earlier and saw Sputnik go by? No? Anyway, how about that MIR space station, huh? That thing lasted longer than the Soviet Union! Hey, you guys aren’t with the KGB, are you? If you’re not then maybe you should be. If looks could kill, you know what I mean? No? Well. Looks like somebody set the phasers for stunned. They say in space no one can hear you scream. Or anything else apparently. You know, space is a lot like some restaurants I’ve been in. No atmosphere. Boy, the necks of these jumpsuits are really tight, aren’t they? Is it hot in here or is it just me? It’s just me, then. Yes, thanks, Fritz, for checking to make sure the environmental controls are fine. A big hand for systems engineer Fritz, the most ironically named engineer in the space program! Hey, if you’re not going to applaud for me at least applaud for Fritz. Please? Maybe as an engineer Fritz can explain why whenever I go to the store I always get that one grocery cart with the wobbly wheel. Has anyone else noticed that? No? Well. And like everybody else here Fritz has multiple jobs. For instance in the event of a forced evacuation I’m supposed to stay behind and make sure everyone else gets out safely, and if we find a dark mysterious cave I’m the one who’ll go in first, and if we meet aliens I’m the one they’ll use for rectal probing. What’s the deal with that, anyway? We’re out here to explore Mars and the aliens are out here to explore Uranus. And they call us “astronauts”. Anyway, Fritz, you know, is also in charge of nutrition and meals. When they told me Fritz was in charge of the food and the computers I asked if that meant everything would be sugar coded. Computer code. Okay, so, data doesn’t go over so well. Hey, Fritz, don’t take this personally, but the food really is terrible. And the portions are so small. I’m just kidding about the food being terrible, Fritz. A round of Tang on me for everybody! The food is great, really, once I learned that you have to add water, but now I understand why when I signed up for this they told me I’d probably lose about twelve percent of my body mass. I said, hey, my agent takes more than that. That reminds me, does the space suit make me look fat? And why are there twelve of us but only eleven suits? Has anyone else noticed that? No? Well. Moving right along, hey, I’m not the only entertainment on this ship, I also brought some movies. Let’s see, I brought The Martian, Gravity, Apollo 13, and Alien. Those should be fun. Also the director’s cut of Titanic. This is a three-year trip so that should be enough time to watch almost all of it.
All right, you guys have been great, really, and I’ll let you get back to work. I’ll be here all week and for the next three years. And don’t forget to tip your, uh, Fritz.
It’s Uranus Day! On March 13th, 1781 the astronomer William Herschel announced that he’d discovered the previously unknown planet that would be named Uranus. Uranus had been seen before, even by ancient astronomers, but everyone thought it was just a faint star until Herschel turned his telescope toward it and took a good, clear look at Uranus. The addition of Uranus helped expand the solar system and people have been intrigued and puzzled by Uranus ever since. It’s not the biggest planet in the solar system or even the farthest but, as the third largest of the gas giants, Uranus is still pretty big, full of hydrogen and helium. There are twenty-seven known moons orbiting it and there are even rings around Uranus, although they’re faint and set at an odd angle.
It takes Uranus eighty-four Earth years to orbit the sun, and yet a day on Uranus is just a little over seventeen hours. Uranus spins really fast!
Source: Imgur
That’s all about the planet Uranus. I’d now like to focus on the town of Uranus, located just below the center of Missouri, along the historic Route 66. More of a tourist attraction than a small town it’s really home to a lot of fun attractions, although I don’t have any details about how many people regularly pass through Uranus. The world’s biggest belt buckle is there–it’s more than ten feet tall and would probably fit a pair of pants just big enough to hold all of Uranus. There’s a fudge factory in Uranus, and a place called The Axehole where you can practice competitive axe-throwing and try to hit a target. There was even a short-lived newspaper, The Uranus Examiner, which unfortunately upset the mayor of a nearby town who thought it would encourage people to make jokes about Uranus. It just seems like a fun and interesting place, and what kind of people would make fun of Uranus?
March 8th of every year is International Women’s Day, an event that has a long history going back to 1909. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how far things have come in the past 110 years and how far things still have to go. This year Google celebrated the day with one of its doodles:
I didn’t realize that Google has a theme for its 2019 doodles, “When I grow up, I hope…” and that they’re accepting submissions for doodles until March 18, 2019. The fact that International Women’s Day isn’t more widely celebrated, or even recognized in some places, reminded me of some pictures I saw a few months ago, pictures with statements that seem obvious but that still need to be said:
These are very powerful images and, given the area, I suspect they’re mainly aimed at men going into or coming out of the bars and restaurants in the neighborhood, places where they might meet single women. The problem is the placement of these particular posters. This is where I found them:
They were in a back alley where it’s unlikely anyone would see them, where it was purely an accident that I’d see them. That the statements these posters make need to be said is a comment on how far we still have to go, and where these posters were placed is an even stronger comment on that.
So my wife competes in dog agility. It’s a fun sport that requires speed, concentration, and, er, agility. It’s not as easy as it looks, and it doesn’t look that easy. The dog and handler have to work together, watching each other as they run around the obstacles. One of the highest achievements in the sport is the Masters Agility Championship, or MACH, and it’s tough to earn. First a dog has to qualify in enough agility runs to reach the Excellent level and earn 720 Championship Points. Points are earned by coming in under course time, and course time is determined by the length of the course. Then they have to qualify in a Standard Agility run and a Jumpers With Weaves run on the same day twenty times. Dog and handler only get one chance per day and to qualify they have to finish both courses without any mistakes.
Anyway the latest member of the family to earn a MACH is Phoenix Montague No Illusions, although around the house we know him as Teller. He’s the son of Sagan, and he’s named for the magician Ray Teller, who works with Penn Gilette. In the picture he’s the one on the right. Here he is again:
I think my wife named him that because she hoped he’d be quiet, which he is, mostly, but there was a lot of cheering in the stands when he earned his MACH and he and my wife got to take a victory lap around the ring.
Way to go, Teller. Now he’s working on his second MACH.
Important Edit: My wife has pointed out that a MACH requires 750 points, not 720, which makes it 30 points more impressive. Teller is also a breed champion because he’s such a handsome dog. As my wife says, “Beauty and brains, ya know.” Or, as she’s also said, a well-balanced dog has titles at both ends.
So I’m a bit of a numismatist, or, as my wife likes to put it, I pay money for money. My focus is mostly foreign coins, mainly because they’re varied and interesting, and I feel they put me in touch with the wider world, with places I’d like to visit but will probably never see. One of my favorite pieces I’ve collected is a mint set of coins for the tiny island nation of Tuvalu. Only five thousand were minted but the population is so small there are more sets in the hands of collectors than there are coins in circulation. In spite of that it’s not a particularly expensive set, which is also part of the appeal of foreign coins—they’re cheap. At flea markets if you find a coin dealer they’ll usually have a box of loose foreign coins priced at four or five for a dollar. Sometimes I’ll pull out a British pound or even a Euro and, being honest, I’ll mention that the coin is worth more than what they’re charging.
“Take a few more,” they’ll say, pushing the box toward me.
Here’s the part that most people probably won’t think about but that really makes the numismatic me cringe: even if those coins are recovered their value has been significantly diminished. When it comes to coin collecting quality matters. Scratches, nicks, abrasions, and even simple wear affect the quality of coins. A friend’s aunt found some gold coins in her attic and took them to a coin dealer. For some reason she was holding them in her hand and rubbing them together when she asked the dealer, “How much are these worth?”
“About five hundred dollars less than they were worth before you did that,” he replied.
Something else I thought about, though, is that I understand the joy of collecting, and I feel bad for the guy who lost the coins—many coins are also historic artifacts, in addition to being tokens of exchange—but if I had the money to invest in a large and expensive collection of rare coins I’d probably spend it on something else instead. You can’t take it with you, as the 1938 Oscar-winning Frank Capra film taught us, although I do a pretty good Lionel Barrymore impression, especially after a few thousand-dollar beers, but that’s another story. If I had the money I’d probably spend it on travel, on creating memories that no one could ever take.