Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

June 28, 2013

An inventor has come up with a new way for women to dissuade creepy would-be suitors: hairy-legged pantyhose. I have about a dozen jokes about this, but they all have to take a back seat to the fact that two decades ago my wife and I were married by a judge who looked so much like John Cleese that, after he read the wedding vows I asked him, “What was the middle part?” I occasionally wonder why she’s stayed with me all these years, and she used to suggest that I only married her for her dogs, but then they became our dogs. I do, however, have a list of reasons I’ve been happily married to her for the past twenty years that is comprehensive, exhaustive, and woefully incomplete:

-Because she introduced me to sushi.

-Because she knitted me a hat that looks like a fish.

-Because sometimes she turns to me in the middle of a baseball game and says, “I think we both need another beer.”

-Because she has a recipe called “husband’s delight” that primarily consists of cheese, sour cream, ground meat, and noodles.

-Because when we’re watching a movie and I say, “Where have I seen that guy?” she always knows.

-Because with her, and the dogs, I’ve been to Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, California, North Carolina, Florida, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi. And eventually we’ll get to Oregon.

-Because her dogs loved me almost as much as she did.

-Because when we first met she was impressed that I could recite “Jabberwocky” from memory, and is still patient when I recite the entire “How do you know she’s a witch?” scene from Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

-Because after all these years she still occasionally says, “You’re so weird”, and still means it as a compliment.

-Because on one of our first dates we watched A Fish Called Wanda.

-Because we once brewed and then split an entire batch of excellent stout beer, then brewed and spit out an entire batch of ale that didn’t turn out so well.

-Because of that, you know, that thing. That one time. In that place.

-Because sometimes she’s willing to watch Doctor Who.

-Because I got a wonderful mother-in-law out of the deal, which was more than worth the cost of never being able to use half the Henny Youngman jokes I know.

-Because she was willing to wait.

-Because when I moved in the first thing she did was buy more bookshelves.

-Because we don’t cancel out each others’ votes.

-Because after some movie trailers she says, “You can see that one without me.”

-Because after some movie trailers she says, “We really need to see that one.”

-Because she builds fences and can repair small household appliances and I go to book clubs.

-Because in another year our marriage will legally be allowed to drink.

June 21, 2013

Often in movies and TV shows you’ll see drug lords, mafia dons, and other high level career criminals dining in restaurants. And this is never portrayed realistically. The truth is these guys can’t just go out for a nice meal at a fancy restaurant, even if they had reservations, without a lot of additional preparation. Well, most of the time they don’t bother with reservations, because if you’re a drug lord, mafia don, or other high level career criminal the last thing you want to do is advertise to the FBI, Interpol, or any of your numerous would-be assassins exactly where you’re going to be at seven p.m. next Thursday. What these gentlemen will usually do is send a group of their assistants ahead. There’s at least one documented case of this in which the assistants locked all the restaurant doors and windows, lowered the blinds, confiscated all cell phones, and informed everyone in the restaurant that no one would be allowed to leave until the boss had finished his meal. As an added bonus they also paid for everyone’s meal. Even though all cell phones had been confiscated one restaurant patron managed to record the assistant’s instructions. A transcript of those instructions follows.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Boss will be dining here tonight, and we thank you in advance for your cooperation. All doors and windows have been locked, and we will have to ask you to hand over your cell phones. The gentlemen walking among you now is my assistant Shkodran. Please give them to him, and take one of the tickets he is offering with his hook. These will allow you to reclaim your phones later. I must also ask you to please not make any sudden moves around him. When The Boss arrives we would also like to ask that you please refrain from looking at him or, unless you are his waiter, speaking to him. Do your best to carry on as though he is not here.

While the preparations may cause you some inconvenience, which we deeply regret, please understand that we are trying to minimize the possibility that some or all of you may be injured or killed this evening. We would like to avoid that if at all possible. Should any unforeseen circumstances arise we will try our best to avoid any crossfire that could endanger anyone not affiliated with The Boss, but, please understand, if an emergency arises you will be solely responsible for your own well-being.

Regarding The Boss’s personal habits, you may have heard a vicious and entirely unfounded rumor that he has had individuals with whom he’s had disagreements cooked and served to him as food. We would like to assure you that The Boss finds the very idea barbaric in the extreme, and that he has informed me personally that he finds human flesh too salty for his refined palate. We can also assure you that even if he were to indulge in such outré cuisine he would only do so in the privacy of his own home where he is served by his personal and trusted chef. This evening he will be dining strictly from the menu.

We would also like to remind you that The Boss has exemplary table manners He does not belch or pass gas through any bodily orifice. He also does not have any noticeable body odor, other than a light scent of vanilla and cherry bark. Any suggestion or indication by you to the contrary will greatly increase the possibility that you will be injured or killed this evening. Again, we would like to avoid that if at all possible.

Finally I am happy to inform you that, in gratitude for your cooperation this evening, The Boss will be paying for all your meals. We ask, though, that you simply dine as you normally would, and not attempt to take advantage of The Boss’s generosity. Those who would like to do so are encouraged to order dessert. The Boss highly recommends the chocolate mousse.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your cooperation.

June 14, 2013

So I was walking to the bus stop and I smelled skunk. Smelling a skunk isn’t unusual if you’re on a long road trip, especially if you’re driving through rural or wooded stretches. The smell hits you, and even if you don’t see the roadkill you know it’s somewhere nearby. Where I catch the bus, though, is within sight of downtown. It’s almost the heart of the city, and is all concrete, brick, and glass. At the corner a row of silos rises from an unmarked white building. There are bars on either side of an empty car warehouse whose huge windows reflect a spectral version of me layered over broken tile columns and drop cloths and a wine bottle as I walk by. On one window someone has scrawled, “can I live??”

Across the street from the bars is a place that sells plumbing fixtures, which makes me wonder if lots of people come out after last call and throw up on the window display of toilets, or if I’m the only one who did that. It might be a habitat for rats, but surely not skunks. The closest park is miles away. There are a few trees planted in the sidewalks, leftovers from a brief surge of eco-urbanism in the Seventies. I think they’re oaks and maples. Maybe someone planted them with a mischievous or even anarchic intent, hoping they’d thrive and break the sidewalk, sending roots through the sewer system, disrupting traffic, and ultimately allowing nature to reclaim what has been paved over. Instead they’ve been stunted. They’re not growing, and it would be wrong to say they’re even surviving. They’re just dying an extremely slow death.

The smell of skunk made me stop next to one of those trees. I’m not sure why everyone thinks of the smell of skunk as so awful. I don’t think it’s pleasant, necessarily—I wouldn’t want it bottled as a cologne, but I’ve smelled worse things. And it gives me a strange, almost synesthetic experience. It’s one of those rare smells that seems to me to have color and texture. It’s tawny, and has a texture like parchment, which is why, even though I don’t want to smell it for long, I don’t hold my nose at it either. Maybe everyone just pretends it’s fouler than it really is because we all understand it’s supposed to be a deterrent. Smell is supposed to be the sense most closely tied to memory, like the way Proust would always remember where he’d left his keys when he smelled turmeric. The smell of skunk vividly brings up for me one night of summer camp. We slept in canvas tents propped up on wooden frames with wooden floors. One night at supper one kid started telling everyone there was a white rat under his tent. What was a white rat doing in the woods? I wondered if it was an escaped pet, since you don’t usually find rats, let alone albino ones, in the wilderness. Anyway a group of us crowded into his tent. He led the way with the rest of us crowding close behind him, hoping for a look at this white rat. “I can see it,” he whispered, and we all got in closer. Then he yelled, “IT’S A SKUNK!” And within half a second we were all ten feet outside the tent, standing around the middle of the campsite looking at his tent. The skunk came out too, from under the wood floor. It gave us all a look that clearly said, “What’s wrong with you people?” We were all paralyzed, watching it like a bomb that could go off at any second. Except it didn’t. The skunk had decided that being mistaken for a white rat was insult enough, and it wasn’t going to be the butt of any more jokes.

I wish this were a better, funnier story. I wish we’d all been sprayed and that I could tell you we all had to go to the bathhouse and let sadistic camp counselors pour tomato juice over our bodies so we looked like Sissy Spacek at the climax of “Carrie”, and that our clothes had to be burned. If your only experience with skunks is Pepe le Pew you may be surprised to learn that skunks don’t stink all the time. They have to be provoked to give up the stench, and this one had probably become acclimatized to people by living under a tent. It would have been unnecessarily cruel to the skunk to poke it or threaten it or do something crazy to make it spray us, but a part of me wishes we had. It would have made a better story, and briefly set us apart from the civilized world. So the smell of skunk brings up a complex cocktail of regret and relief, and relief again that, as I was walking down the sidewalk, I only smelled a skunk and didn’t see one, that I wouldn’t be in any danger of carrying the smell home. And this is where I’ll leave you, on the sidewalk, next to one of those stunted trees. My bus is here.

June 7, 2013

As soon as I dropped the car off I was dreading the call. I’d left it at the auto repair place with explicit instructions that all it needed was an oil change, but I knew from previous experience that later in the day I’d be getting a call, that they would have found some urgent and costly and completely unrelated problem that would need to be fixed. The phone would ring and the guy from the auto place would say, “Mr. Waldrop? We found a loose thread in one of the seat cushions. Now it’ll cost $150 for us to cut it, but I’d suggest you let us go ahead and do it now or in a couple of months it’ll be $500 to get the entire seat replaced.” And because I have the word “sucker” printed across my forehead in special ink that only auto repair people can see I’d tell them to go ahead and do it.

I should clarify that I usually take the car to one of those fancy chain auto repair places, although I have on a couple of occasions taken it to an independent, locally owned auto shop. You know the sort I mean: it’s a dirty, ramshackle building, usually behind a lonely gas station on a country road. Outside there’s a stack of a half dozen tires from long extinct car models. The inside is all wood paneling with a calendar with a girl in a bikini hanging behind the desk. The guy who comes out to look at your car wears coveralls that look like they’ve been dipped in grease, and he’s got seven teeth pointing in eight different directions, and he leans over the engine with a lit cigar hanging from his lips and tells you something you can’t understand, but that’s okay. In spite of the fact that this sort of place always makes me uncomfortable I feel like these guys know what they’re doing. Those aren’t grease stains on their coveralls and caps and eyelids. Those are battle scars. They’ve learned the mysteries of the internal combustion engine, and can fix anything from a lawnmower to a Rolls Royce, sometimes just by hitting it hard enough in the right place with a wrench. And these are guys who’ll knock fifty bucks off replacing your car’s thermostat if you remembered to bring a box of doughnuts.

The place where I dropped the car off to get the oil change was the exact opposite of one of those places. As I said it’s one of those fancy chain places, where the interior is all gray and lavender, where brand new tires are arranged in geometric patterns and support promos for the latest animated film. If you want to wait while your car is fixed there’s a lounge where the big screen TV is always tuned to the home and garden network, and where you can enjoy a complimentary cup of free trade Sumatran medium roast. This is not an auto repair shop. It’s an automotive transformation boutique. Most of the employees appear to be between the ages of twenty and twenty five, wear spotless uniforms without a trace of grease, and look like cover models for CaZ, the magazine for the discriminating coveralls wearer. Even the one old guy, who’s a dead ringer for J.K. Simmons, is spotless, which makes me wonder if they wear hazmat suits just for oil changes. The whole place is permeated with the heady scent of tire rubber with just a hint of lilac. I can understand why they charge a little more – hey, those artisanal pastries aren’t cheap. But I also feel a little nervous. I wonder if they really know what they’re doing, especially when they tell me all these 2012 models have a special left-handed brake fluid catcher that needs to be replaced every six months, and I say, “But this is a ’98.”

This last time, though, when the call came all the young woman said was, “Mr. Waldrop, your oil change is done, and your car is ready any time you’d like to pick it up.” I nearly fell out of my chair. There was no hairline fracture in the carburetor, no southward drift in the rear axle, no coolant leak in the starboard nacelle’s plasma relay. So I went in to pick up the car and pay for the oil change, and the guy was ringing it up and said, “It’ll be $49.75. Would you like to make it an even $50 and donate the change to disaster relief?” This top-off program is something I’ve never heard of before. It sounded like a possible scam, even though I knew I was dealing with a legit business. And I was tempted to say, “Remember that time you charged me $600 and didn’t fix the problem I had but just made my car smell like maple syrup? Skim a quarter off of that.” Then I had this mental image of some poor child standing in the ruins of her house saying, “My family lost everything, including my pet goldfish, and now we can’t even get a lousy box of macaroni and cheese because you won’t part with two bits, you schmuck”. I felt so deeply conflicted that I finally said to the guy, “If you’re going to make me this uncomfortable you should at least have a calendar with a girl in a bikini hanging behind the desk.”

May 31, 2013

Summer is almost here, which means the major television networks are currently working on their fall schedules. What follows is a memo regarding new shows that one network is planning to air. How it fell into my hands is another story.

To: Scheduling Dept.
Re: Fall 2013 schedule

This network has consistently been fourth out of four among the networks in most markets, and fifth in a few, coming behind PBS. The programming heads have determined that major changes are needed for the Fall 2013 schedule. In developing new shows we’ve tried to aim for innovation, to create shows that are new, exciting, and different to appeal to the vital 18-35 demographic while also staying within established parameters so as not to alienate other demographic groups. The key is being innovative with what works. Please produce a schedule with slots for these shows we’ve developed for the coming season:

Eye See You (30mins, Reality): This is from the producers of Burn, Baby, Burn, our popular reality program in which families competed against each other in the Sierra Pelona Mountains while having to escape being burned by a giant magnifying glass. Eye See You is an exciting new reality program in which diverse contestants from all walks of life will have to perform emergency surgery. They will be provided some training prior to competing, but the real twist is they have to do it blindfolded!

Suck It (60mins, Drama): Aloysius Bernard isn’t just a vampire: he’s also a cop who’s been fighting crime as a member of the Atlantic City police force since the Civil War. Now he’s got a new partner, a tough girl rookie who grew up on the streets fighting the undead. Together they’ll have to work out their differences to solve crimes. Will she have to hide the crucifix her late grandmother gave her? Will he be able to restrain himself when she gets a paper cut? Things take an even stranger turn when these two very different cops find they may have feelings for each other.

For Richard Or Poorer (60mins, Drama): After trying and failing to save the life of a homeless man on his street recently-divorced doctor Richard Poor decides to fight hospital policy, and budget cuts, to provide medical care to the disadvantaged. It’s a heavy job, but he knows someone has to do it. With the help of his fellow doctors he just might find a way. Meanwhile he’s got to juggle a budding romance with a nurse and the faithful companionship of his pet iguana.

Too Old For This Bleep (30mins, Comedy): Five friends and veterans of the Tulsa, Oklahoma police force have been looking forward to retirement. But when a clerical error wipes out their pension funds they find themselves unable to leave the force, and training a group of unruly rookies to solve crimes. It’s a clash of generations as the old guys try to keep the kids in line while also finding out that you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Cut Ups (60mins, Dramedy): Life is tough for University of Ohio med school student Alannah Hayes. Her loans have been cut, and she’s struggling to make ends meet. On top of that an uncle she only just met has just passed away and left her his Toledo comedy club. She has to sell it as quickly as possible…or does she? With her fellow students she’ll be taking gross anatomy by day and telling gross-out jokes by night, and just trying to get by in Frogtown.

Finally, while the network executives are pleased that the exciting and innovative mid-season filler, Is That You Mo Dean? (60mins, Drama), about an HIV-positive man making peace with his past and looking for love in a small Iowa town, has already been nominated for six Emmys, three Critics’ Choice Awards, a Writers’ Guild Award, a Peabody Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and even a BAFTA. Having been featured in TV Guide as "the best show you’re not watching" it is being cancelled after its third episode due to lack of viewer interest. This will leave the Tuesday night, 9PM slot free. This decision is NOT final. Executives are considering re-working the series and making the main character a retired doctor who now spends his time helping the police solve crimes.

May 24, 2013

The other day I had to actually go into my local bank. I realize this is unusual at a time when almost all banking, like most other financial transactions, is done online. So it was a bit of a surprise to me that I had to go into a bank, and, judging by their expressions, it was a surprise to the people who worked there too. A couple of them looked around, as though wondering if Larry, over in the mortgage cubicle, had forgotten to lock the door again, just like he’d forgotten it was his week to buy doughnuts again. I was there to cash a savings bond my wife found in the closet. It had been given to me by my grandparents a few months after I was born, which was probably why I’d lost track of it because I had a few other things going on at that time in my life. Unlike me it had finally matured, and, like my grandparents, it would probably have disintegrated if it had been exposed to the open air all this time. One thing hasn’t changed about banking: they still have the velvet hopes in front of the tellers’ windows, so you can’t walk directly up to them. Even if you’re the only person in the bank you have to wind through the little maze they’ve built. I remember when ATMs first appeared, although in those days they weren’t called ATMs. They were called “timeless tellers”. I think they were mainly for deposits or checking your account, since, in those days, you could go to the grocery store and make out a check to cash, and Cash, who sat in the elevated office with plexiglass windows next to all the checkout lines adjusting his glasses or sleeping, would give you some money. This was a time when it was not only still legal to pay for things with cash but most people did. Credit cards were for rich people, and even then they were used sparingly for large purchases, like furniture or an emergency visit to the doctor, since there was nothing more embarrassing than being in the hospital checkout and having to say, “I’m sorry, I’m forty-four cents short. You’ll have to put my appendix back.” Although, to be fair, in those days you could pay for most emergency medical procedures with a live chicken, which the doctor would sometimes then use as an organ donor, but that’s another story.

For several years I wasn’t allowed in banks. This was the result of an incident when one of my friend’s mothers decided to take us out for ice cream, but she had to stop at the bank first, possibly because Cash wasn’t working at the grocery store that day. While she was making her way through the velvet rope maze my friend and I stood next to the table where the deposit and withdrawal slips are stacked. I suggested taking one of the withdrawal slips and writing “This is a bank robbery” on the back of it, then putting it back in the stack. Apparently several of the tellers overheard this idea and didn’t find it nearly as funny as my friend and I did, although the person who seemed most upset by it was the guy in line behind us who was wearing a Richard Nixon mask and carrying a violin case, and who’d left his car running out in the parking lot. I still think it’s funny, but one of the disadvantages of online banking is that joke doesn’t work so well anymore. Not that I’m completely down on online banking. When I went to college I opened an account in a bank near the school, then, after graduating, didn’t think about it. If online banking had been available at the time I probably wouldn’t still get occasional letters from that bank saying, “We’ve noticed that your account hasn’t had much activity for some time now.” And online banking has other advantages. You may have heard that some very savvy computer hackers recently pulled off a major bank heist, robbing multiple banks simultaneously for millions of dollars. It was very clever and didn’t even require the purchase of a Richard Nixon mask. I admire their moxie, their chutzpah, and the fact that they were caught quickly and ended up with bupkis. Although such cyber-robbery does take a little of the romance out of bank robbery. Not that I’m condoning it, but would we still be talking about Bonnie and Clyde if, instead of speeding down dusty roads in a Studebaker with loose bills blowing out the windows they’d been hunched over a computer, even if they were breaking through firewalls? And somehow I doubt John Dillinger would have been as legendary if he’d been caught coming out of a chat room and the FBI had pumped him full of pixels, even if he’d been wearing a Herbert Hoover mask at the time.

May 17, 2013

For reasons I still don’t fully understand I was invited to give the graduation commencement address this year at Catalpa University. I took it as a special challenge. I wanted to offer the graduates advice that was both tailored to their particular experience and that didn’t repeat the same advice, however good, that they’d heard most of their lives.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 2013: Sleep late. Wear bolo ties to expensive restaurants. Be careful when venturing out into the world. If something catches your eye you could spend the rest of your life half blind. Assume everything you put on the internet will stay there forever, but also assume that even a really good search engine won’t find most of it. Ask a physicist why nothing is faster than the speed of dark. Prance. Take test drives in expensive cars and don’t return them until the gas tank is almost empty. Always save bacon grease, because you never know when you might have to feed a bowling ball to a polar bear. Eskimos don’t really have seventy-two words for snow. They call it “snow”, and “Eskimo” is really just a blanket term for people who could always use more blankets. The Egyptians and Mayans built pyramids at roughly the same time, but on different continents. This is probably why their pyramids look so different. Aristotle wrote only one book of Poetics. The second one was done with mirrors. At some point in your life you will be asked to do something that violates your ethics, your morals, or your integrity. Possibly all three. When confronted with this situation, ask, “Can I get butter on that?” Do you ever wonder why vitamins F-J haven’t been discovered yet? Do you ever wonder why you never meet anyone named Aloysius anymore? Do you ever have trouble buying a pair of pants that fit? Don’t believe commercials that treat blood glucose monitors as fashion accessories. Was there really a time when men would leave bottles of milk on everyone’s front porch in the morning, and, if so, how early did people have to get up to prevent it from going bad in August? Why did everyone wear three-piece suits and long, heavy dresses, even in the summer in Florida? If people in other countries really believed the streets in America were paved with gold did they ever wonder how expensive it was to repair potholes? Obviously some mysteries are best left for trained philosophers in hazmat suits. Some of your elders will tell you everything was better in their day. Some of those same elders will also tell you they envy all the things you have that we never dreamed of. Except some of us did dream of those things, otherwise you wouldn’t have them. As the French say, “je suis perdu,” which is French for, “That’s really not my bag.” At least it is if you don’t speak French.

Inspirational advice is like the joker that comes with every deck of cards. No one’s quite sure what to do with it, but everyone keeps it, even though they put it back in the box while playing. Please don’t take my advice, and don’t take anyone else’s either, unless you have permission, and even then you should do your best to return it within a reasonable time and as close as possible to its original condition. Fortunately if it gets damaged while you’re using it it’s pretty easy to replace. Advice is cheap and plentiful. I feel confident saying this because I know you’re not listening to any of it, and you won’t remember any of it. I don’t remember who spoke at my graduation ceremony, or what they said, although I am pretty sure I stayed awake through all of it, which is more than I can say for row twelve out there and, for that matter, about half the professors sitting behind me. I realize that most of you just see me as a barrier between you and the sheet of paper that you hope will allow you to get an entry-level job in something close to what you’ve studied. I’d like to close by saying good luck, but that’s a terrible way to close, even though you’re going to need all the luck you can get. You are not the future. Neither am I. We’re just along for the ride. Thank you. You’ve been great. And please tip your waiter.

May 10, 2013

There are two distinct phases of technological and innovative development: there’s the "Wow, that is awesome, what a wonderful age we live in!" phase, and then there’s the "Yeah, I’ve seen that. What else have ya got?" phase. Of course there’s also the third phase, which depends on what kind of technology you’re dealing with. For most of human history the third phase has been "Oh, it’s broken, I’ll fix it myself." Advances in technology, however, required an alternative, which was, "Oh, it’s broken, I’ll have to find someone who knows how to fix it." And increasingly this has been superseded by a third alternative, "Oh, it’s broken. I’ll have to buy a new one because it would cost ten times as much to try and get it fixed, even if I could find someone who could, and there’s a better one out now anyway."

One area where seem to have been stuck in the second phase for a long time is flight. Well, comparatively speaking, the development of flight has advanced pretty quickly. It’s gone quickly enough that you’d think we’d still be amazed that we’ve gone from a world where most people didn’t travel more than twenty miles from their place of birth in their lifetime to one where most people still won’t travel more than twenty miles from their place of birth in their lifetime, but where those with the resources can travel to almost any part of the planet within less than twenty-four hours. After all it’s only been a hundred and ten years since the Wright Brothers, a couple of guys who owned a bicycle repair shop and who realized bicycles had long since reached phase two, and also to overcome the stigma of being saddled with the names Wilbur and Orville, made the first working airplane. Even though they were from Ohio they went to North Carolina to conduct their first flight, mainly because, if they’d done it in Ohio, they would have been routed through O’Hare, which is something everyone wants to avoid, but that’s another story. As I was saying there have been some pretty significant innovations in flight, although recently the best engineers seem to have been able to come up with seems to be making airplanes bigger and able to burst into flames in creative and surprising ways.

Actually the last time I flew I think I witnessed what was the first real innovation in flight in decades: instead of a couple of flight attendants doing the safety demonstration and showing us how to put on seatbelts and place the oxygen masks over our faces in the event that the plane suddenly lost pressure or burst into flames they lowered a video screen and we watched a short film in which someone who I’m pretty sure was an actress hired to play the role of a flight attendant gave the safety demonstration, thus automating one of the major responsibilities of flight attendants. If I were a flight attendant I’d be really worried about this trend, because you know it won’t be long before someone finds a way to automate the drinks cart and the process of handing out packets of salted peanuts, which is the only other job flight attendants have. The only other significant innovation that I know of is in-flight wi-fi for laptops and other mobile devices, which still baffles me. The flight attendants will say you can’t play games on your phone while the plane is on the runway–another job that could easily be automated, by the way–because it screws with the plane’s radar. Why do they need radar on the ground? If the pilot doesn’t know where the runway is or which way to go before the plane takes off we’re all in trouble, but then how does some kind of magical wi-fi service that the plane carries with it not affect the radar when we’re at twenty-thousand feet and need it the most? This is probably one of those things that someone could explain to me, but it would cost a lot.

Anyway, like anyone who saw the movie 2001 well before the year 2001 I’m a little disappointed that technological developments haven’t kept up with the vision of Kubrick and Clarke, and that we don’t have commercial space flights to the Moon yet. But we will soon have commercial space flight. Well, at least they’re calling it that. The so-called commercial space flights being offered by Virgin Galactic may represent the first time ever in human history that an innovation has skipped phase one and gone right to phase two. Now I’m a space and science fiction nut, so you’d think the idea of commercial space flight would really excite me, even though right now space, or at least the space that’s currently within human reach, doesn’t have much to offer. It’s cold, it’s dark, and there’s nothing to do up there. It’s just like Winnipeg. There’s not even a drugstore where you can buy postcards that’s say, "Greetings from SPACE". Still I think it would be pretty cool to even orbit the Earth, to look back on this small blue world, perhaps with the opening notes of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" ringing in my ears. The problem is Virgin Galactic, while claiming to offer commercial space flight, isn’t really. This is what they’re offering: for two-hundred thousand dollars you can spend three days in training to take a two hour flight that will take you to a suborbital position and then return you to Earth. I’m pretty sure that a two hour flight will mean that, even if you’re weightless at the flight’s peak, you’ll only be there for about ten minutes before you have to come back down again. And once you’re back you can reflect on the irony of having flown Virgin Galactic, since you’ve just been fucked out of two-hundred thousand dollars and didn’t even get dinner and a movie. Or maybe I’m just jaded by a lifetime of reading science fiction and expecting bigger things from spaceflight. Or maybe it’s because I did once take a flight that took me off the planet. It was a long trans-Atlantic flight. I’d been bumped so I was upgraded to first class, which meant I would get my drinks for free, but that didn’t stop me from having a couple of pints of Guinness–or maybe half a dozen, my memory is hazy–before boarding. Takeoff was delayed, so the flight attendant gave me a couple of those little bottles of Scotch to help pass the time, and I had a couple more once we were in the air. Then there was a bottle of beer with lunch followed by coffee with some kind of liqueur, followed by a few more little bottles of Scotch. After all that I was unquestionably not on this, or any other, planet for the rest of the flight. I offer this recipe for spaceflight completely free of charge, although, these days, on most flights that much alcohol probably will cost you about two-hundred thousand dollars.

May 3, 2013

April 23rd is generally assumed to be Shakespeare’s birthday. Since there’s no official birth record no one, other than, possibly, his mother Mrs. Shakespeare, really knows when he was born, and she might have been under the influence of an epidural and unaware even of what year it was. Anyway, he was baptized on April 26th, and in those days it took new mothers at least three days to recover from an epidural. Whether Shakespeare’s birthday is relevant, though, depends on whether Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, although whether the question of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays is something we should even be asking is probably the more important question.

For most of us asking who wrote Shakespeare’s plays is like asking who’s in Grant’s tomb. However among scholars it’s been a topic of hot debate for decades, proving the old adage that the fights in academia are so big because the turf is so small. Since some scholars consider it ridiculous that a working class guy from a hick town like Stratford-on-Avon could have written some of the greatest plays and poems in the English language, and they’ve found several potential contenders, although they have ruled out Marlon Brando, who merely could have been a contender. Among other things there’s no record of Shakespeare receiving any education, and he didn’t mention any plays or other works in his will. Adding to the suspicion than Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays is the fact that someone else published the plays, and someone else decided that the plays should all be divided into five acts, with most acts ending with everyone exeunting severally. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American lives, proving that Americans had short attention spans decades before the invention of MTV. Fitzgerald then proved his point by exeunting, or “dying” at the age of forty-eight, although he really was just trying to get out of paying an enormous bar tab. I’m not really sure if anyone’s life is really divided into acts, although you could say turning points in our lives mark the change in acts. Shakespeare had several significant turning points in his life, such as when he went to London, and, several years later, when his son Hamnet died, after which his plays stopped ending with everyone getting married and started ending with everyone dying. That’s assuming that Shakespeare wrote the plays, though.

Some scholars believe the real author of Shakespeare’s plays was Christopher Marlowe. The biggest problem with this theory is that Marlowe died at the age of 29, supposedly in a bar fight, although it’s believed by some that he went underground after he was marked for death for playing “got your nose” with the son of the Duke of Cambridge but forgetting to give the nose back. It’s also been suggested he went into hiding after getting bad reviews of Doctor Faustus, or just to get out of paying an enormous bar tab. Another possible author of Shakespeare’s plays is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, because in those days being a playwright was something a nobleman would be ashamed of. And de Vere knew about shame because, after accidentally farting in front of Queen Elizabeth, he fled the country and lived abroad for seven years, so, even if he were writing plays, it’s unlikely he was getting any of them produced in London because in those days email couldn’t handle really large attachments. Another possible author who’s been considered is Francis Bacon. Bacon froze solid in his backyard in 1626 and was thawed out almost three-hundred years later. He then became a famous painter but never tried to collect royalties for Shakespeare’s plays. I have my own suspicions about who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, which I’ll get to in a minute, but if I had to make a second choice it would be William Henry Ireland. Ireland was an expert forger who produced and sold “original” documents written by Shakespeare that were so convincing James Boswell got down on his knees and kissed them, although it was later found that Boswell was also recovering from an epidural at the time. Ireland’s forgeries were only exposed after he produced an “unknown” Shakespeare play, Vortigern and Rowena, that was so bad only Liam Neeson could be convinced to be in it. Still I think there’s a possibility he’s the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Even though Shakespeare died in 1616 and Ireland was born in 1775 he was an incredibly clever forger. Really, though, I think the most likely author of Shakespeare’s plays is a working class guy from that hick town Stratford-on-Avon.

April 5, 2013

April is National Poetry Month. A lot of people ask why poetry needs its own month for special recognition. Why isn’t there a National Painting Month, or a National Music Month? The answer is simple: painters and musicians can make a living painting or performing, but poetry barely pays enough for a cup of coffee at a dingy truck stop. Poets have to take a second job doing something like teaching, and usually a third job pouring coffee at dingy truck stops, just to make ends meet. The only exception to this rule is Russia, where being a poet is so highly revered a profession you can be sent to Siberia for confusing a metaphor and a simile. This wasn’t always the case, though. There was a time when poets could make a reasonably decent living, usually by selling their books, something unheard of today. A few lucky poets in Britain and the United States, though, manage to score the position of Poet Laureate. It’s a term that derives from ancient Greece when poets would sometimes be crowned with laurel wreaths, since the only art the Greeks revered more highly than poetry was topiary.

Although it wasn’t always formally recognized the position of Poet Laureate has a long history in Britain, where one the first poets to unofficially hold the post was Ben Johnson. He received a large barrel of Canary wine, and even though that’s only about a week’s supply of wine for most poets he got by for another month eating the canaries. Britain’s first official Poet Laureate, though, as established by Parliament, was John Dryden, whose responsibilities included writing verse for significant royal occasions. He was fired from the job for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to William III, and also for being unable to explain the difference between a synecdoche and metonymy. In addition to the barrel of wine Poets Laureate were also paid £200, which, adjusted for inflation, made Thomas Shadwell the 17th century equivalent of J.K. Rowling. Some also supplemented the income by dabbling in other things, like William Whitehead who discovered the difference between a cape and a cloak. And Britain still has the position of official Poet Laureate. It now pays a little more than £5,000, although due to austerity cuts the traditional barrel of wine has been replaced with a six-pack of Bass ale. The most notable thing about the position now is that the Poet Laureate is the only person in Britain who’s paid to not write about the royal family. The United States also has a Poet Laureate, appointed annually by the Librarian of the United States Congress, even though most librarians spend their time cataloging poetry rather than reading it. Originally the position was Poetry Consultant To The Library Of Congress, and mostly consisted of hanging around the library hoping no one would come in and ask what the difference is between a synecdoche and metonymy. The title was changed to Poet Laureate in 1986, and now pays a salary of $35,000, which, among poets, makes the U.S. Poet Laureate the financial equivalent of Bill Gates. While the position almost always goes to a poet who is highly regarded enough that most people will, when told the poet’s name, say, “Sounds familiar” there have been some very famous poets who never held the position. Here are some examples:

-Before there was a U.S. Poet Laureate Walt Whitman was considered for the position by Abraham Lincoln, until someone pointed out that it was “a British thing”, causing Lincoln to declare “this country needs a Poet Laureate like I need a hole in the head.”

-Emily Dickinson almost became the first U.S. Poet Laureate, but wouldn’t come down from her room for an interview.

-Robert Frost was almost offered the position of U.S. Poet Laureate, but the committee sent to tell him kept going down the wrong path.

-W.H. Auden was suggested as a British Poet Laureate but since he’d moved to Switzerland he remained neutral.

-Hart Crane had ambitions to be the first U.S.-born British Poet Laureate but failed in his attempt to swim from New York to Liverpool.

-T.S. Eliot was offered the opportunity to become both the U.S. and British Poet Laureate. The selection process ultimately got bogged down in questions of whether a recording of him reading “The Wasteland” could be used as an alternative soundtrack for “The Wizard of Oz”.

-The position in Britain was offered to Dylan Thomas then withdrawn it after it was determined that he’d in fact plagiarized “Through the teeth, over the gums,/Look out stomach, here it comes!” from Swinburne.

-John Ashbery was suggested as U.S. Poet Laureate, but the Librarian of the United States Congress refused, saying, “I don’t read The New Yorker.”

-W.B. Yeats was considered for Britain’s Poet Laureate until thorough genealogical research uncovered the shocking discovery that he was, in fact, Irish.