The Weekly Essay

March 2, 2012

When did consuming food become competitive? I know I’m more than a little behind on this, since there have been eating competitions for, well, possibly as long as there’s been food. Stories of someone who could eat an entire restaurant’s menu–okay, not the menu itself, but every item on it–date back to when Coney Island was full of rabbits instead of Nathan’s Hot Dogs, home of the annual hot dog eating contest. And Lewis and Clark stopped several times on their trip west at places where they could get a sixteen-hundred ounce steak for free if they could eat the whole thing in less than an hour, or a pizza the size of a dinner table, or a sub sandwich that was not only the size of a horse but was made from a horse, inspiring the saying "I’m so hungry I could get a free dinner at Big Lou’s".

And it seems like these contests are proliferating, which is a strange thing to have happen in a time when it seems like more and more people are going hungry. In fact it seems unnecessarily cruel to think that some people who aren’t able to afford food might be sitting at home watching a bunch of guys in Boise stuffing their faces in a competition to see who can eat the most potatoes. And maybe the reason people are going hungry has nothing to do with the economy or poverty or anything like that, but because those guys in Boise are eating up the food. Admittedly I can understand the impulse to take something that tastes good and eat a lot of it. At least I’m assuming people who enter eating contests actually like the food they’re eating.

Anyway, what I really can’t understand is the push to make spicy foods hotter and hotter, and to use those in competitions where the competition isn’t so much about whether you can pound down more pounds than somebody else but just whether you’ll even be physically able to take a second bite…or whether you’ll ever be able to eat again, since the first bite caused your head to explode. When you were a kid in school maybe you or one of your friends took an entire tray of cafeteria food–some "meat" loaf, some mashed potatoes, some stewed prunes, some chocolate pudding, and a banana–and smashed it all together and dared you or someone else to eat it. And no one would. Everyone said, "No, that’s disgusting." Sure, it wasn’t any less disgusting than it was before it was all mashed up, although the addition of the chocolate milk didn’t help. Now adults are taking everything from jalapenos and scotch bonnet peppers to exotic chilies that grow on a man-eating plant in the jungles of Thailand, piling them on something like a hot dog or a bowl of stewed prunes, and daring each other to eat it. And this isn’t something people do because they’re bored and sitting in a restaurant that just happens to have a lot of cayenne and a small shipment of death’s head peppers from Borneo that the cook thought he’d try. There are whole competitions, and even television shows devoted to making spicy foods that could actually be used as an alternative form of energy.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against spicy foods. I understand that the whole reason the British joined the Crusades was because spices came from the far east, and spices introduced to British food something that, to this day, it still lacks in many places: flavor. I like spicy food when the heat helps enhance the flavor of the food. What I have a problem with is something that sets your mouth on fire just for the sake of setting your mouth on fire. Okay, it does have the added advantage of proving how tough you are, which is why there are so many hot sauces out there with names like Flaming Hot River of Death Sauce or This Sauce Will Kick Your Ass Across The Room, or Keep Away From Children. I first realized that the real purpose of these sorts of hot sauces wasn’t to enhance or even improve the flavor of foods but to prove how tough you are when I was browsing in a store that exclusively sold hot foods. There was a little guy with a bad combover and horn-rimmed glasses gleefully telling the guy behind the register that he’d really been "cultivating an aptitude" for hotter and hotter foods. I guess it made him feel better about having always been picked last to be on somebody’s kickball team when he was a kid. Interestingly not too long after that the store burned down. I guess they couldn’t take the heat.

February 24, 2012

Last month scholars announced they’d translated a cuneiform tablet of riddles and jokes in Akkadian, an ancient Mesopotamian language. The Akkadians were also known as Assyrians, and one of their cities was Babylon. There’s your history lesson for the day. Not many tablets of jokes have been found even though thousands of cuneiform tablets have been translated, which you know is pretty impressive if you’ve ever seen one of these tablets. They don’t look like they’re written documents. They look like about fifty pigeons danced on them, so I’m always impressed that scholars even know which end is sideways, and this is even more impressive when you know that the cuneiform equivalent of the Rosetta stone is carved in a cliff more than three hundred feet up. The tablet of jokes dates back more than three thousand five hundred years. Because of the extreme age of the jokes most of them don’t make sense to us now, although they’re all still being told by Henny Youngman. The tablet is also extremely fragmentary, so in some cases we only have the start of a joke like "An Elamite walks into a bar", or the punchline, such as "And the leper says, ‘Keep the tip!’", although there are a couple of complete jokes, including, "Yo mama’s so fat she sat on a bushel of figs and made beer" and this one:

He: How many Hittites does it take to screw in a light bulb?

She: What’s a light bulb?

Unfortunately that one wouldn’t make sense for a few millennia, but it does demonstrate just how forward-thinking the Akkadians were. Well, technically it was the Sumerians who were forward-thinking. The Akkadians were to the Sumerians sort of like the Romans were to the Greeks: they thought highly of them and borrowed heavily from their religion, language, and culture while beating them down. My apologies to anyone who thought the history lesson was over two paragraphs ago. Anyway, the Sumerians, being even older than the Akkadians, invented all sorts of things. They invented libraries, schools, and, because they also had a sense of humor, the practical joke, which was a whoopee cushion carved out of stone. It wasn’t very practical, but then how many practical jokes really are? If they weren’t the first then they were among the first people to rely on agriculture rather than hunting and gathering, and they were the first people to brew beer. About the only thing they didn’t think of first was archaeology, which is unfortunate because they could have played some great jokes on modern archaeologists by making tools that had absolutely no use whatsoever, the same way our multi-device remotes will someday baffle future archaeologists who will be unable to understand why so much time and energy was put into building something that does absolutely nothing, but that’s another story. The Sumerians even had a surprisingly modern understanding of psychology, which was incorporated in the epic of Gilgamesh. The epic of Gilgamesh is a surprisingly modern story, even though it was written and then lost more than three thousand years ago, and only first recovered early in the 20th century. I’m bringing it up for a good reason.

The story of Gilgamesh is the story of things most of us will have to face, which may be why, at the time it was written, it was so widely known, and even now, having been restored to us by diligent scholars, it’s a kind of cultural touchstone with more than a dozen versions in English alone and references in everything from poetry and novels to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And it’s a story of emotional challenges most of us will eventually have to face. Well, strictly speaking the first half of the epic of Gilgamesh is more like a buddy cop film. The half-god Gilgamesh is a tyrannical ruler of the city of Uruk. The gods send a wild man named Enkidu who, ironically, tames Gilgamesh after a fight and they become friends. The two set out to make their names immortal by killing a demon who lives in the woods. This frightens the gods who send a monstrous bull to wreak havoc on Uruk. Why they went after everybody but Gilgamesh and Enkidu is beyond me, but then the Sumerian gods worked in mysterious ways. Or maybe it was because Gilgamesh and Enkidu didn’t have any trouble killing the bull, and even though the tablets are damaged, they probably then hosted the world’s first and biggest ever barbecue. And they invited the goddess Ishtar, who wanted to marry Gilgamesh, but he turned her down and mocked her, and Enkidu threw a piece of the bull at her, which was a serious mistake because even now, thousands of years later, we still haven’t found a way to get barbecue sauce out of a tunic. It was also a mistake because Enkidu then had a dream that the gods were in council, and he died soon after that.

This is where the story takes a turn into something much more than a myth. Modern psychologists say there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally acceptance. Gilgamesh and Enkidu talked about making their names immortal, but their understanding of death was very abstract. Gilgamesh has never really faced death before. He’s shocked by the loss of his friend. Going through the first two stages he’s stunned then outraged. Then he runs away from Uruk. The time varies depending on the version, but in the first translation of the Gilgamesh epic I read he ran for three days and looked and there was no light, and he ran for three more days and looked and there was no light, and he ran for three more days and in the distance there was light. Anyone who’s lost someone close to them, or who’s been through depression, knows what this means and how it feels. You know how it feels when nothing around you matters, when everything might as well be dark because of the darkness inside you, and there’s only a gradual reemergence into the world. Gilgamesh finds himself at the edge of the sea. In what sounds like the setup to a joke he goes into a bar. In fact the joke will be on him, but that comes later. The woman who owns the bar gives him a cup of beer, and tells him that across the sea lives an old man named Utnapishtim and his wife. They are believed to be immortal. Gilgamesh takes a ferry across the sea, hoping Utnapishtim will make him immortal as well. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how he survived a great flood which the gods sent to destroy the world. He then tells Gilgamesh that he will be granted immortality if he can stay awake for seven days and nights. This is where the bargaining phase of grief begins. Gilgamesh accepts the challenge, but falls asleep immediately and sleeps for seven days and nights. When he wakes up Utnapishtim tells him there is no immortality. All things must pass. Finally there is acceptance. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, and takes the ferryman with him. As they approach the city Gilgamesh points and says, "See the walls of my city, which I built."

It’s an enigmatic ending. Unlike The Odyssey or Beowulf there’s no final battle, no stirring conclusion. Nothing is really resolved at the end of the epic of Gilgamesh. For a long time I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Of course interpretation is always personal, but, to me, the walls are the walls we all build within ourselves, not to keep anything out, but to encircle and keep and connect the things that really matter to us, the things that we cling to even when we’re lost in the darkness, and that, when it breaks, are the light. And that is no joke.

February 17, 2012

There’s now a Charles Dickens theme park. It’s in Kent, England, even though it would be at least as appropriate to put it in London, Iowa. Obviously this is designed for those people for whom Stratford-on-Avon just wasn’t touristy enough, with its plaque marking Shakespeare’s favorite McDonalds and Bard bobble-heads being sold on every corner. Of course it’s hard to read anything by Dickens without seeing enormous commercial potential. Poverty, disease, misery, loneliness, greed, and death all naturally scream "giant water slide". And nothing brings the joy of scrofula and workhouses to life like a set of animatronic models. It’s like a child’s history of England. I’m sure the plan here is to make the works of Charles Dickens fun, and they can be if you’re into that sort of thing, but it’s hard to imagine that Charles Dickens World-and it really is called that, even though it should be called Fagin’s since its whole purpose is to fleece tourists-really going to make Dickens any more popular than he is now, although I guess it will make it possible for more people to talk about Dickens. The next time you bring up Sketches By Boz in conversation and someone asks you if you’ve read it you could say, "Well, no, but I’ve been to the theme park."

I remember the very first theme park I ever went to. It was Opryland, named after the Grand Ole Opry here in Tennessee, so it had a distinct country music theme, with rides called things like The Tennessee Waltz, and games where you would work in a coal mine or get hit by a train. And there were mascots like a giant talking guitar, who, when the park started losing money, was replaced by Franken Berry and a giant Cheerio, because nothing says country music like children’s breakfast cereals. I think the whole thing was supposed to be vaguely educational about the history of country music, and there were musical shows which I stopped going to as soon as I was old enough to get away from my parents and spend all my time on the rides. I suspect Dickens World will be just as educational, especially with the giant water slide. I understand a lot of effort has been put into making it as authentic as possible-among other things you’re bound to come out with a completely empty wallet-but it’ll probably be like most other theme parks. I can just imagine the rides. Why not take a spin in Miss Havisham’s Car? It takes you quietly and slowly through a decaying house for what seems like years before sending you through an enormous wall of flames at the end. Or you could go through Pip’s Graveyard, where you’ll be grabbed by a criminal who threatens to cut out your liver and eat it. Also don’t miss the Oliver Twist Tour in which a boat carries you past animatronic orphans from all singing the chorus of "Food Glorious Food" over and over and over again until you want to drown yourself in the gruel your boat is floating on.

Finally there’s The Guillotine. I won’t describe this one. Let’s just say it’s a far, far better ride than any you’ve ever ridden, and you’ll have a more exciting time on it than you’ve ever had. Or maybe it’ll just be a giant waterslide. It does sound like a fun outing, though. You’ll take our mutual friend, have some hard times when you see the admission price, get caught up in crowds enduring the battle of life, stop by to see a few pictures from Italy and the cricket on the hearth, and spend way too much money on a small greasy lunch at a place called It Wor Me Wot Ate Yor Pie that’ll taste terrible but still leave you asking, "Please sir, could I have some more?". Or maybe you’ll have a drink at Martin Guzzlewits before you spend the rest of your money in the old curiosity shop, and finally what you entered with great expectations will seem in retrospect like a bleak house.

February 10, 2012

On a very few occasions I’ve given flowers. And I’ve also been given flowers, and always thought it was a nice thing. During a period when we were still dating but thousands of miles apart my wife sent me a rose once a month to mark the day we’d met. When I was four years old I had to go into the hospital. My grandfather, who didn’t just have a green thumb but two green arms, gave me a bunch of snapdragons from his garden because I thought snapdragons were some of the coolest flowers ever. I still do. Even though they don’t belong to the ultra-deluxe family of carnivorous plants, and even though they don’t snap by themselves I still think they have a very hip, buck-toothed look. It’s the thought that counts with any gift, so it’s a good thing then that most people don’t think about what a gift of flowers really says, which is "Here are the severed reproductive organs of a plant that will now never have offspring. Enjoy them before they die." It’s not very romantic, is it? Maybe the idea is that flowers remind us that beauty and life are transient and that we should enjoy them as much as we can, which, yeah, is pretty romantic.

But love should be lasting, which makes the Bronx Zoo’s Name A Cockroach For Valentine’s Day program seem a lot more romantic. The gift of a cockroach, unlike the gift of a flower, says, "Here is something that has survived millions of years and will survive millions more unless it’s stepped on." You can’t get more hopeful than that. What really got me thinking about all this, though, was learning that the Victorians had a whole complex language of flowers. You had to be really careful when sending somebody a bouquet in Victorian times because you could just be saying, "I’m very forgetful. Do you like films about gladiators?" When I first heard about this, before I started doing some actual research into it, I thought that possibly the Victorians might even have used flowers as a sort of clever shorthand. You could send a messenger ahead of you with a bouquet of carnations, irises, and lilies that meant, "I’m running late. See if they’ll hold our table at the restaurant." As complex as Victorian flower language was it wasn’t that literal, which just proves that research takes the fun out of everything, but that’s another story. Flowers could be used to send messages, of course, and if my then-fiancée had known that she might have sent me freesias, which, according to some sources, means love in absence.

Actually I’m glad she sent roses, partly because roses are just nice, but also because I wouldn’t know a freesia from a fritillaria. And depending on your source different flowers could have different–even contradictory–meanings. An aster could mean reservations or an afterthought, flax might mean fate or simplicity, and anemones might mean either expectation or abandonment, which might cause you to ask, "With friends like these who needs anemones?" Chickweed flowers suggest a rendezvous, although unless they come with a note it might be hard to figure out where you’re supposed to be meeting, an iris meant "I have a message for you", which could be anything but was probably, "Here’s an iris", and sometimes flowers could even be insults. A yellow carnation was a sign of disdain, basil meant hatred, lavender meant mistrust, and a dandelion meant "you are losing time". It’s probably a good thing we’ve gotten over that and just give flowers as a sign of love or occasionally a sign of friendship, although I still think a live plant is more appropriate for someone you care about than cut flowers. Of course even a live plant can have different meanings. It could mean "I know you like plants" or it could mean "Here’s one more thing you’re going to feel obligated to take care of" or even "Sorry I forgot to feed your fish while you were gone. Hope this lives longer." In case you were wondering, by the way, snapdragons mean coarseness or incivility. Hey, I was four years old. Of course I was coarse.

February 3, 2012

It’s entirely possible that I’m the only person of my generation who went to public school in the United States and never bought the Cliff’s Notes version of any book I had to read for a class. To all foreigners, aliens, and people of a certain age: Cliff’s Notes were small yellow and black paperback condensed versions of classic works of literature. I understand they were called Coles Notes in Canada. They also contained brief explanatory essays on characters or theme which were perfect for memorizing and copying into the essay parts of tests. I know this probably sounds unbelievable, but I went through all of high school and college without ever reading the Cliff’s Notes of any book. For one thing I was suspicious of them. I had no idea who Cliff was. As far as I knew it was Cliff from Cheers who sat at the end of the bar next to Norm talking about how Florida oranges were so much better because they were fertilized with alligator guano. Or it could have been Cliff who sat next to me in English and always had Cliff’s Notes and was still flunking, probably because he didn’t read Cliff’s Notes.

The closest I ever came to reading a condensed version of any book in high school was when a friend of mine, as an extra-credit project, made a comic book version of Julius Caesar with his own version of the text, which actually did help me understand and appreciate that particular play a lot more. I like to think that if Shakespeare were alive today, if he ever stopped taking Kenneth Branagh to court for royalty payments, a comic book of Julius Caesar would be the sort of thing he’d write, although now it would be called a graphic novel and there would still be a Cliff’s Notes version of it. And unlike my friend’s version Caesar’s last words would probably not be, "Et tu Brute? You bunch of jerkwads."

I remember how much my teachers hated Cliff’s Notes because instead of reading four-hundred pages or so of Huckleberry Finn a kid could read the ten page condensed version and still ace the test. And in high school it didn’t matter if everyone’s answers to the essay questions sounded similar because mostly we weren’t being tested on our ability to think critically, just on our ability to regurgitate. And I doubted some of my teachers were looking that closely at our answers anyway. I’m pretty sure my high school English teacher my junior year had the memory of a goldfish. She also regularly told us that we weren’t yet knowledgeable enough to understand most of what we were reading, especially things like the poetry of William Carlos Williams, which she claimed was very complex and difficult. Occasionally I would wonder why she wasn’t teaching us what Williams’s poetry was about because that seemed like something a, well, teacher would do. I began to suspect that she’d forgotten everything she ever learned and would tell us how complicated and difficult Williams’s poetry was as her way of covering it up. This was pretty much confirmed when I went to college and learned, among other things, that Williams’s poem about a wheelbarrow and some white chickens is, on a deep metaphorical level, about a wheelbarrow and some white chickens, but that’s another story. And even though I don’t think this was her intention that particular teacher just made me want to read anything she claimed I wouldn’t be able to understand–which was pretty much everything. And for a similar reason I avoided Cliff’s Notes.

It’s true that I had this crazy dream of someday being a writer and I thought it would look better on my resume if I could honestly write down that I’d made an effort to read great works of literature and not just the condensed versions. But I also felt like Cliff’s Notes were insulting my intelligence. I never really thought they were speaking to me directly, but I felt like they were saying, "Hey kid, you’re too stupid to read The Scarlet Letter. Let me take care of it for you." And what got me thinking about this was hearing that there are now video versions of Cliff’s Notes. Because, you know, actually having to read the condensed version of a book is too hard. I remember some kids in my high school class thinking they could get by watching the movie adaptations of various books, but those of us who actually read the books and then watched the films noticed that there were often serious differences. The Grapes Of Wrath doesn’t end happily, Breakfast At Tiffany’s Ends very differently, in the book The Wizard of Oz the land of Oz is a real place, at the end of A Tale Of Two Cities Carton isn’t rescued from the guillotine by a helicopter, and don’t get me started on the number of things wrong with the Taming Of The Shrew episode of Moonlighting. So we learned to mistrust the movies. That makes me think that possibly the publishers and producers of both the Cliff’s Notes books and videos are actually engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to get kids to read great works of literature by using reverse psychology, telling kids they’re either not smart enough or to just not worry about what they’re missing. But I know it’s much more likely that the people behind Cliff’s Notes are probably really just a bunch of jerkwads.

January 27, 2012

Recently South Africa passed a law that local weathermen could go to jail if they get a forecast wrong. Okay, technically it is more complicated than that: anyone who reports severe weather or air pollution without getting written permission from the South African Weather Service first could face a fine of up to five million rand or up to five years in jail. I thought it sounded goofy even before I knew the details, but with the details it sounds even worse. In spite of all the advances in communications technology I don’t think in a crisis some weather reporter is going to have time to call the central weather service and say, "Hey, could you fax me something that says it’s okay to tell people in my community there’s a flash flood coming right now?" And in spite of all the advances in weather forecasting I think it’s going to be even less likely that some weather reporter is going to be able to call them up and say, "Hey, could you fax me something that says it’s okay to tell people in my community there will be a flash flood next Thursday at 10:15am?"

I would think predicting the weather in South Africa is hard enough already, especially since January down there falls right in the middle of summer. And the craziest thing is I know some people who think this law is a good idea. I know people who are positively ecstatic over it, saying, "It’s about time weather forecasters were held responsible. After all, what other job lets you get away with being wrong eighty percent of the time?" Hey, if you work in accounting, package delivery, a pharmacy, a restaurant, as a fireman, or most other professions and you’re wrong eighty percent of the time you should be fired, but even with satellites and radar and magic 8-balls predicting the weather is still tricky, and there’s a lot of room for error. When I was in college a local news station started giving a local grade school fifty dollars every time their weather guy’s prediction of the next day’s temperature was off by more than five degrees. I think they finally stopped it when the school built a whole new wing named after the weather guy.

The other night my wife and I and all four dogs were awakened at two a.m. by a tornado alert and went to the basement to sit on cold concrete for half an hour. And I’d already gone to bed late. Lucky for us we didn’t get hit by a tornado, but I’m not blaming the weather service for getting it wrong. Sure, if they’d been able to come up with an accurate forecast well in advance I would have thought to take some comfortable chairs, or at least some blankets, downstairs, but there are worse things than sitting on cold concrete in the middle of the night-like getting carried away by a tornado, for instance. I think people are impatient with weather forecasters because most of us have grown up with science fiction television shows and movies in which the weather isn’t just accurately predicted, it’s somehow controlled by a magical, futuristic system involving satellites and, I don’t know, mirrors or something. Predictions of controlled weather have been made in everything from Star Trek to Back To The Future, and every time it comes up I always wonder if it’s really a good idea. Haven’t we screwed up the environment enough already without trying to impose artificial controls on the weather? And while severe weather can be horrible and destructive from a human perspective it’s also part of the natural process. A tornado is nature’s way of taking out that old rug in the hallway and shaking all the dust out of it. A forest fire is nature’s way of getting rid of a lot of old furniture and replacing it with beanbag chairs. I’m not saying I want to get caught in a tornado or forest fire, and I don’t want it to happen to anyone else either, but even earthquakes can create oases in the desert.

On the other hand I do live in Tennessee, where forecasts of snow can cause panic, especially since most people around here think the way to drive with snow on the roads is to floor the accelerator and spin the steering wheel wildly. And everyone has to run to the store to stock up on eggs, bread, and milk. Why everyone goes for three of the most perishable things they can find is beyond me, but there’s apparently there’s something about snow that makes everyone crave what around here we call French toast, what the French call pan perdu, and what the English call poor knights of Windsor even though it’s neither French nor lost, and doesn’t taste anything like a knight, but that’s another story. It’s even been suggested that local weather forecasters are in cahoots with the grocery stores, and when the stores are overstocked on bread or have a bunch of milk that’s about to pass its expiration date suddenly the forecast calls for snow. I don’t buy this theory myself, although it would explain why we once had a forecast of snow in the middle of July. Even with that, though, the worst punishment I think the weather forecaster got was being made to get up in the middle of the night and sit in the basement.

January 20, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in passing that I thought Sherlock Holmes would be the world’s worst Jeopardy contestant. Strictly speaking this contradicts my earlier stated belief that I would be the world’s worst Jeopardy contestant because, in spite of my mind’s ability to retain the most obscure facts about squids, stellar fusion, and Edgar Allan Poe’s grooming habits while also forgetting that I need to stop at the grocery store to pick up milk, with my luck I’m certain that if I were to go on Jeopardy they’d have sixty-one questions about stopping at the store to pick up milk. Since Jeopardy is a game show that tests general knowledge–and which sometimes defines "general" as "painfully obscure"–it would seem obvious that Sherlock Holmes would make the Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings, who won more than two and a half million dollars during the longest winning streak in the show’s history, look like an amateur. Holmes, after all, had a quick wit, an eye for detail, and a breadth of knowledge that made rapid deductive reasoning easy even through the cloud of six pounds of tobacco he smoked each day. Regardless of whether Homes is a lanky armchair sleuth with an aquiline profile or a short, pug-nosed pugilist with a penchant for cross-dressing the power of his mind is one thing that never changes. And, to be honest, I’ve only read two Sherlock Holmes stories in my entire life–and both, I’m pretty sure, are the shortest of all the stories, so what I know about him may not be true, but it comes from a friend of mine who’d read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. And this friend of mine was a pretty smart guy. He was so smart, in fact, that when we’d debate something he often had a way of making me feel like the Watson to his Holmes. I didn’t even feel like the Doctor Watson to his Holmes, since he had a way of making me feel like I hadn’t made it out of third grade, much less gotten through medical school.

Anyway, this friend told me that Sherlock Holmes only remembered things he’d consider useful for solving a mystery. I guess Holmes thought of his brain as an attic where he was always afraid his poster of the periodic table would get buried under a box of coffee mugs with kitties on them. This friend went on to tell me that someone once told Sherlock Holmes the Earth was round, and Holmes replied, "Thank you. Now that you’ve told me that I’ll do my very best to forget it." He didn’t consider that useful information. I started trying to think of a mystery that might only be solved by knowing the Earth was round, but quickly gave up, simply because I have a hard time thinking up mysteries. The more I thought about it, though, the more I started to wonder how Holmes decided what information was worth remembering and what wasn’t. And suddenly Professor Moriarty always managing to escape Holmes’s clutches didn’t seem like such a big deal. All Moriarty would have to do would be to run toward the horizon, and Holmes would say, "We’ve got him now, Watson. At that rate he’s bound to fall over the edge." And Watson would reply, "Er, Holmes, you do realize that the Earth is…oh, never mind. No doubt Moriarty will come up with some other plan I can write another story about."

The thing is I’m not sure there’s such a thing as useless information. The quadratic formula, how to decline a Latin verb, and why the sky is blue are all things I learned in school, and while they haven’t come in handy yet they might be useful at some point. When I was a Boy Scout I had to learn to tie several different knots, most of which still seem pretty useless. Take the clove hitch, for instance. To this day I’ve never had a clove that needed hitching. And there was the bowline, which actually I never learned to tie because every time someone tried to teach it to me they’d tell some weird story about a rabbit coming out of a hole, looking around, circling a tree three or four times, checking his mail, and finally deciding to tie a bowline. Then there was the sheepshank, which is a useful nautical knot which got its name from the innumerable number of sheep’s legs that need to be shortened on ocean voyages. Since I wasn’t normally around either sheep or ships I wasn’t sure what good the sheepshank would do me, but there was a voice in the back of my mind that said, "You never know. This might come in handy someday." And it still might even though I’ve now forgotten how to tie all of those knots, but that’s another story. The more I think about it the more I realize I might actually be a decent Jeopardy contestant, but I wouldn’t be as entertaining as Sherlock Holmes, who’d occasionally buzz in to say, "I don’t know anything about French history, Mr. Trebek, but I do know you had eggs benedict for breakfast and that you slept on your couch last night." What I finally realized, of course, is that, in spite of my friend’s smarter-than-thou attitude and his aspirations of being as coolly knowledgeable as Sherlock Holmes, is that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character who could solve any mystery only because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle already knew the solution. That makes my friend’s knowledge of Holmes and his working methods pretty darn close to useless.

January 13, 2012

Recently I heard that the English language is approaching one million words. This was news to me because I thought the English language already had more than a million words, or maybe it just seemed that way when I was doing my sixth grade vocabulary homework. English is an absolutely amazing language. Not to put down other languages–especially since the only other languages I know are six words of Latin, four words of Russian, five words of French, two words of Norwegian, and the Turkish words bath, coffee, and delight, which leaves me unable to communicate with anyone–but English, unlike French, doesn’t have a fancy academy standing at the gate deciding what words can come in and what form they’ll take and whether, for instance, a DVD player will be considered masculine or feminine. And unlike German English doesn’t create new words solely by sticking old words together so that the word for something fairly new like, say, a hybrid car, consists of eighteen syllables.

English is a linguistic sponge, absorbing new words from all over the place, although that might explain why the language is also kind of a mess. Take, for instance, the simple word "to". It’s a preposition or part of an infinitive or a conjunction or an adverb-just under these uses it gets twenty-two different definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. Now add another "o" to it and you get "too", which sounds like "to" but is just an adverb, and has only six definitions in the OED. Now take the first "o" and replace it with a "w" and you get "two", which is a number. Move the "w" to the end and it’s "tow", which is either a noun or a verb and is pronounced like "no". If you take "no" and add a "w" to it you get "now", which is pronounced differently from "tow". To get "now" to sound like "tow" you have to put a "k" in front of it so you get "know", and to make "no" sound like "to" you have to replace the "o" with "ew" so you have "new", and if you stick a "k" in front of that you have "knew" which sounds like "new" but means something completely different. Now it gets really tricky because "no" sounds like "so". If you want "so" to sound like "to" you have to replace the "o" with "ue" so you have "sue". Or you can make "so" sound like "no" if you replace the "o" with "ew", so you have "sew", which doesn’t sound anything like "new". And if you take "so" and add a "w" to it so you have "sow" the pronunciation depends on whether it’s a noun or a verb.

With that much flexibility you’d think English would have a word for everything, or that at least people would stop using "impact" as a verb, and yet English is also a very environmentally conscious language because words get recycled all the time, especially in the field of technology. My computer is full of cookies, but I can’t eat any of them. In both the Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings films when trolls are mentioned I expected some big sweaty guy to come in contradicting everything everyone else said and occasionally screaming that the first thing the Nazis did was make everyone grow beards. Instead the cinematic trolls were these large, sweaty monsters swinging keyboards around and complaining about how hard it is to get Wi-Fi in a dungeon. And there are plenty of things I think should be words that I never hear used. For instance I’ve heard dictators being described as "ruthless", and yet I never hear, say, Gandhi described as "ruthful". Before you dismount a horse you have to mount it first, but before you dismantle something do you first have to mantle it? And people sometimes get discombobulated, which makes me wonder how they got combobulated in the first place.

And some words just confuse me, like "shampoo". The word "sham" means "fake", although I guess that’s a good thing because you wouldn’t want to wash your hair with real poo. There’s also the preponderance of synonyms in English, which I think contributes to his growth, even though I don’t think this is always necessary. A few years ago the word "bootylicious" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary even though the perfectly good word "callipygian" was already doing the job. And the word "flexitarian" describes someone who’s willing to adjust his or her diet to accommodate what everyone else is eating, even though I’d think "easygoing" or "omnivore" would be words that would work just as well. There’s also the small number of supposedly bad words. George Carlin famously listed seven words you couldn’t say on television, although, depending on the channel you’re watching, apparently you can say all of them now. Ironically the first time I heard Carlin list the seven words you couldn’t say on television I was watching television. The words Carlin listed were feces, urine, intercourse, vagina, fellatio, flexitarian, and mammaries. Yes, I know those aren’t really the words he listed. I’m not prudish, but for one thing I find the scientific words much funnier and for another the scientific words score even higher in Scrabble. Besides the list is constantly changing. The other night I was watching Blazing Saddles on a television station where you couldn’t say six of the seven words, so it was a censored version. But it wasn’t one of the unintentionally funny censored versions where they replace objectionable words with other words, like the time I watched Fargo on an equally prudish television station so Steve Buscemi was saying things like "I got frozen shot, you fruitful bowl of soup!" In Blazing Saddles they just muted the objectionable words so it was sort of like listening to a rap song and thinking your radio’s going out. Anyway, a woman said "ass" and then the next syllable was muted, and I thought, wow, I didn’t know "hole" was one of the words you couldn’t say on television.

Actually I looked it up and currently the seven words you can’t say on television are bunny, rainbow, hug, sunshine, volition, ampersand, and semprini. Recently the United States Supreme Court heard yet another case regarding what words could be said on television and when. The Supreme Court, by the way, has come to be referred to frequently as SCOTUS, and the President of the United States is often referred to as POTUS, and, even though I haven’t heard it yet, I assume that means Congress is also called COTUS, which sounds close to coitus, which is fitting considering how often Congress fucks the country, but that’s another story. To get back to Carlin, I think his point was that we consider certain words shocking when we shouldn’t. We should embrace language to its fullest. It really makes me a little sad when I look through a dictionary and find a word that’s obsolete, or even just rarely used. Take the word xenium, for instance, which comes to English directly from Greek, which has given us a lot of useful words like alphabet, blasphemy, gangrene, elastic, and asylum. The word xenium simply means a gift offered to a stranger, which I think is the sort of word that should get more use, especially since language itself is the ultimate xenium. We all enter the world as strangers, and yet we’re able to communicate and connect and share because of this wonderful gift called language.

January 6, 2012

Most New Year’s resolutions don’t make it past the first week of January, let alone to the end of the year. At least one study found that 88% of people who make New Year’s resolutions will break them, including the study’s authors, who’d made a resolution to not conduct any more ridiculous studies. The reasons are pretty simple: people often make resolutions on a whim, rather than planning well in advance, and often their resolutions are too abstract or unrealistic. I think there’s another problem: people forget their resolutions. If you’ve made a resolution for this year will you still be thinking about it in, say, June? Chances are you won’t, although there are now dozens of computer programs that can send you reminders so that in the middle of June you’ll get a pop-up message in the middle of your screen that says, "Have you lost twenty-five pounds and quit smoking yet?" just as you’re eating your third doughnut of the day and lighting up your ninth cigarette.

I’ve decided I want to try and make a more unique, more personal resolution, one that will be fulfilled at a specific time and in a very specific way. I want to challenge myself, step outside my comfort zone. I want to test boundaries, push the envelope, cross a line, do something edgy, be out there, take a risk, take a chance, take a powder, blaze a trail, dive into the deep end, and skip to my lou. That may seem like an overly abstract resolution, but I already have an idea of how I’m going to keep it. I’m going to take a class on stand-up comedy. If that doesn’t seem particularly risky then it has the advantage of setting the bar low, but it is actually kind of scary. I have no idea what this class will involve. I’m not even sure if I’ll pass. In most classes if you fail you just get a bad grade, but what do they do if you fail a stand-up class? Maybe they’ll make me get on stage and pour a bucket of water over me to give me the experience of flop sweat. I’m looking forward to this class and yet at the same time I’m absolutely terrified I’ll be a complete failure. I’ve taken a couple of classes in improv comedy, and learned, among other things, that I’m not fast enough on my feet for improv. I knew I was in over my head within the first five minutes of one of the classes when we were just going around doing introductions. The guy next to me said, "My name’s Rick, I’m a waiter, and I also sell drugs." Everyone laughed and that gave me an idea, so I said, "My name’s Chris, I’m an undercover cop and I’ve been trailing Rick." A few people chuckled and Rick had this panicked look in his eyes, so, almost immediately, I added, "but seriously…" I love to tell jokes, but because of my poor delivery and timing people often take me seriously. I once said to a friend, "I put a skylight in my apartment. The people upstairs are furious." She frowned and said, "I didn’t know you lived in an apartment."

There’s a story about a time when Mark Twain was playing pool, missed an easy shot, and swore profusely. His wife heard him from the other room, walked in, and calmly repeated back every swear word he’d just used. He looked at her and said, "You have excellent vocabulary, but your delivery needs work." Sometimes when I tell a joke I feel exactly like Twain’s wife. And then there’s the fact that everyone else in this class will be a stranger to me. There’s an old joke that more people say public speaking is their number one fear than say their number one fear is death. The joke is that this means more people are afraid of speaking in public than they are of dying, although I don’t think this necessarily follows. If you tell someone "You can give a public speech or you can be put up against a wall and shot" I seriously doubt the first thing most people would ask is, "What kind of bullets would you use?" It might be easier to do stand-up in front of friends, preferably with a big sign behind me that said, "LAUGH" that would come on whenever I finished a joke, although usually when I’m hanging out with friends there aren’t very many opportunities to get up on a stage and, say, do a ten minute bit about why Sherlock Holmes would be the world’s worst Jeopardy contestant.

And stand-up is something I’d like to try, so, in spite of all my anxieties, I’m going to take the plunge, or, to be more accurate, take the class. And I can hope that the experience will be like a dream I had some time ago, a dream which put the idea in my head of trying stand-up. I dreamed I was doing stand-up comedy at a science fiction convention. Offhand I don’t know if there’s much call for stand-up comedy at science fiction conventions. It’s been twenty years since I last went to one, and I don’t recall anybody getting up on a stage and saying, "A tribble, R2-D2, and a Dalek roll into a bar…" Still, this was a dream, so anything’s possible, and to make it even more bizarre I was talking about furries, who are people who like to dress up as animals. Anyway, I said I understood that they creep some people out, but that science fiction from Star Trek to Firefly teaches us we should embrace and try to understand differences rather than fearing them. Okay, War Of The Worlds teaches something completely different, but that’s another story. I asked if there were any furries in the audience, and one guy stood up. I asked him what his animal was, and he said, "A gecko." I replied, "Wow, I didn’t realize furries could be reptiles.* Wouldn’t that technically make you a ‘scalie’? I’m just kidding, I appreciate you being brave enough to stand up. By the way, after the show I’d like to talk to you about my car insurance." That last line killed. Yes, this was a dream, so technically I was completely in control, but still it’s kind of reassuring that my subconscious not only recognized that I was telling a joke but knew when to laugh, although, in the dream, there might have been a big sign behind me.

*Actually I don’t know if this really is true or not, since my research in this area has been mostly limited to an episode of CSI in which a furry was a suspect.**

**One of my other resolutions for this year was to use a footnote. Also I’ve always wanted to footnote a footnote, something which I don’t think has ever been done before, although my research in the area of footnotes has also been extremely limited.

December 9, 2011

The tradition of kissing under mistletoe is one I’ve always wondered about. Specifically, how much of an obligation is there? If you’re standing under mistletoe and you don’t realize it do you still have to be kissed? Or do you have to kiss a complete stranger if you see them standing under mistletoe? What are the repercussions if you don’t kiss them? Would a handshake do? With all the colds and flu going around at this time of year maybe it would be better to leave it at a friendly nod. That’s what I’d prefer, especially when I think back to family gatherings where, even without any mistletoe around, I always had to kiss my great aunt Gerda, which was like making out with an oversized kiwi.

Anyway, I decided to do some research into the history of the tradition of kissing under mistletoe and found, well, not much. It seems pretty obvious that the tradition is pagan in origin, and there are very old accounts of mistletoe being used to promote fertility. Mistletoe stays green throughout the winter, so it really stands out on the trees it grows on. Just around town I know at least half a dozen places to find real live mistletoe, not the cheap plastic crap they have in the stores, although that does raise an interesting question: if it’s not real mistletoe do you have to do something different if you see someone standing under it, like punch them in the face? What I found in my research, though, is that the first mention of the tradition of kissing under mistletoe in print only dates from 1813. The tradition itself must be much older than that, but no one really knows how much older, or how it got started in the first place.

There are some interesting variants to the tradition, though. In some places it was believed that if the mistletoe wasn’t burned on Christmas Day or by Twelfth Night then all the couples who’d kissed under it would be enemies by the end of the year, which would be a really good way to break up people you really don’t think belong together, especially if you want to date one of them yourself. And in other places anyone who didn’t get or give a kiss under mistletoe at a Christmas party would be beaten with a broom, which brings back memories of my senior prom, but that’s another story.

There’s also a lot of non-kissing lore associated with mistletoe. Back in AD 77 Pliny wrote that the Druids revered mistletoe and would cut it from the tree with a scythe made of gold. It’s an interesting story, but there are two problems with it. For one thing Pliny was writing about people in France, not Druids, and he also says his source is something he read on the internet. People believed mistletoe grew on trees that had been struck by lightning, so putting mistletoe on a house protected it from ever being hit, since everyone knows that lightning never strikes the same place twice, and is also extremely gullible. Mistletoe was also a medieval form of aloe, since people believed it could cure anything, and was even sometimes called allheal. It was sometimes applied to wounds, or occasionally eaten by people who died before they could tell anyone what it tastes like, since mistletoe is poisonous.

In some parts of Britain it was considered very important to feed mistletoe to the first cow to give birth in the new year. This was supposed to guarantee a healthy herd, which would be useful since the cow that ate the mistletoe would probably be giving poisoned milk for a while. And, strangely enough, even though mistletoe is poisonous some people believed it was an antidote to any poison. Maybe people thought that if you’d been poisoned if you swallowed some mistletoe the two poisons would fight it out and leave you alone. Or maybe they were operating on the principle that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I really don’t know. All I do know is that, if given the choice, I think I would rather eat mistletoe than have to kiss my aunt Gerda again.