The Weekly Essay

April 8, 2011

It’s an odd coincidence that, on the same day I heard the cobra that escaped from the Bronx Zoo had been recaptured alive and well I found a dead garter snake in my yard. The garter snake was clearly a young one, only about eight inches long, with a pistachio-green stripe running down his back. He was curled up. The days are warm now , but the nights are cold and I’m afraid that’s what got him. I have vague memories of visiting the Bronx Zoo as a child. I don’t remember the reptile house, but I do remember in one of the open areas finding a dollar, holding it up, and yelling, "Did someone lose this?" But that’s another story. I must have been born with a love of snakes. When I first saw the animated version of Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi I cried over the deaths of Nag and Nagaina. Maybe it’s genetic. My grandfather loved snakes, although, to be more precise, he loved putting them in the middle of the sidewalk where my grandmother would see them and run screaming. Finding a dead snake always makes me sad. It takes me back to when I was only five or six and used to play in a vacant lot behind my house. One day I found a dead boa constrictor in the drainage ditch. Even at that point I’d read everything about snakes I could get my hands on so I recognized this magnificent creature and thought it must have escaped and died of exposure. Now I wonder if it hadn’t been "released" by some bonehead who didn’t know what he was getting into when he impulsively bought a young, beautiful snake. A few years later I’d have a happier encounter with a boa constrictor. The local children’s museum had a small menagerie of animals. Most of them were local wildlife that had been injured and rescued-a possum that had been brought in with a broken leg, a hawk or owl that had a damaged wing. There was also a massive snapping turtle in an aquarium, and a collection of snakes, including a boa named Lydia. I was part of a lucky group that got to have our pictures taken with the animal of our choice. The snapping turtle wasn’t available so I went with Lydia, who I draped over my shoulders as though we were in a music video. The woman taking the pictures was using an old fashioned Instamatic camera, and when she went to develop the film she turned out the lights leaving me in the dark with a great big snake draped over my shoulders. Most people would find being in the dark with a snake pretty terrifying, but Lydia just put her head down and, I think, went to sleep.

A few years after that I got a pet snake of my own-a garter snake I named Slither.Slither liked to strike at my hand every time I opened the cage, although I was usually holding his food, so I don’t think it was anything personal. After a while Slither outgrew his cage so I released him in a wooded area where, I hope, his descendants still live. Being a native I think Slither would fare better than a non-native boa would. Slither and Lydia were, of course, non-poisonous, but I had my encounters with poisonous snakes as well-three in one week, even. Every summer I spent a week at a place called Camp Ozone, in East Tennessee, which is home to three types of poisonous snakes. I’m pleased to say that I’ve met them all. The first night of one of my weeks at Camp Ozone I was walking back to my cabin when my flashlight caught something slithering along the ground. "Snake!" I yelled, wanting to share the experience with my fellow campers. I would have kept my mouth shut if I’d known a couple of counselors with sticks would come running and kill it. I don’t think they even knew until it was dead that it was a copperhead. Okay, copperheads are poisonous, but it was just crossing the path, and if I’d been a little bit later or a little bit earlier leaving the dining hall we probably wouldn’t have met. A few days later down by the lake someone spotted a cottonmouth, also known as a water moccasin, although I wouldn’t want to put my foot near one. My mother used to be afraid of me catching snakes because she was concerned I’d catch a poisonous one. I assured her I could tell poisonous snakes by their vertical pupils, and she’d always say, "If you’re close enough to see their eyes it’s too late!" I never got a good look at the cottonmouth’s eyes, but there was no need-there was no mistaking the thick, black body and arrow- shaped head. There’s more than one way to tell a poisonous snake. The night of the big campfire I was sent to collect firewood, and, in a clearing off the path, I found a large pile of timber with a curled up rattlesnake on top of it. He was big enough that, even outside of striking distance, I could see his vertical pupils. He glared at me balefully and seemed to be saying, "Keep your mouth shut, kid." I did. I went looking elsewhere for firewood. My most memorable snake encounter, though, was in Florida. Down there you find a lot of exotic species that boneheaded people buy and then release and which then, thanks to the climate, breed and threaten the locals, but I was lucky enough to meet a local, specifically a hognose snake. It was trapped in a rain gutter next to the road, so I got off my bike and helped it out. Hognose snakes are non-poisonous but they like to put on a show of impersonating their poisonous cousins. This one thanked me for helping it out by hissing and puffing up and even pretending to strike, falling just short of where I was standing. It was quite an entertaining show, but since it failed to satisfy me the snake resorted to its next trick of playing dead. And when that didn’t work it held up a dollar and said, "Did you lose this?"

April 1, 2011

Oh have you heard it’s time for vaccinations?
I think someone put salt into your tea.
They’re giving us eleven-month vacations.
And Florida has sunk into the sea.
Oh have you heard the President has measles?
The principal has just burned down the school.
Your hair is full of ants and purple weasels-
APRIL FOOL!

-Shel Silverstein

Last year April Fools’ Day fell on a Thursday, the day that I normally mail out these Freethinkers Anonymous missives. And since it had been fifteen years (give or take a month or two) since I’d started writing them I decided to celebrate, knowing it would be at least a year before another April Fools’ Day came around. Since it falls on a Friday this year I tried to think up a prank. I’ve never been very good at pulling pranks, though. Looking for an idea I did some reading up on April Fools’ Day and read about a traditional prank in Scotland. A guy would be given a letter to deliver to the next house over, presumably by his mother or someone he trusted. The letter would say, "It’s April Fools’ Day. Tell him to deliver the letter to the next house over." Eventually the guy would end up back where he’d started and everyone would have a hearty laugh. That’s the best they could do? Admittedly I did once have a friend who fell for the "Did you know they took the word ‘gullible’ out of the dictionary?" joke at least three times, but you’d think the guy carrying the letter would catch on eventually, even if it took him a year. On my first Boy Scout camping trip the leader sent me around to different campsite looking for a left-handed smoke shifter. After the twelfth guy I talked to giggled and suggested I talk to someone in campsite next to his I started to suspect there really wasn’t such a thing as a left-handed smoke shifter, especially since he was directing me to my own campsite. I didn’t return empty-handed, though-I built up an impressive collection of tent locks and skyhooks, but that’s another story.

And pranks can sometimes have serious consequences. According to the April 9, 1906 Atlanta Journal a man named W.O. Roberts attempted to cut his own throat because of an April Fools’ joke his wife played on him. She told him there was a cow in the yard. I’m not sure what the joke was, or why this would cause enough consternation to drive a man to suicide. That does remind me of the old joke about a man trying to explain to his son that leather is made of cowhide. The son says, "It’s made of what?" The man says, "Hide! Hide! The cow’s outside!" And the son says, "So what if it is? I’m not afraid of a cow." I’ve never quite gotten that joke, mainly because I’m a little bit scared of cows myself. Whenever I’ve been around cows I’ve always been afraid of being chased and trampled, even though the cows have never actually expressed any interest in doing this. But while most people see cows as hamburger on the hoof I see them as unpredictable grass-eating steamrollers. To get back to April Fools’ Day, though, I thought a good prank might be announcing my retirement, but then I thought about the potential reactions to this news. I doubt anyone would cut their throat over it, but I thought there’d be reactions ranging from mild disappointment to "Who are you?" So instead I tried to find out the origins of April Fools’ Day, but the details are sketchy. The best explanation I’ve ever heard is that March is so named because it’s when armies marched off to war, and April was when they realized what fools they were being and all went home, except that, if you look at history, it’s usually taken armies a lot longer than a month to figure out they were being fools. At least one of my sources suggests it had something to do with the Gregorian calendar which moved the beginning of the year from April to January. People who were slow on the uptake and celebrated New Years’ Day in April were considered fools. Well, in those days people were obviously hard-pressed for entertainment. Nowadays we’re much more sophisticated with our humor and don’t bother with such ridiculous pranks. By the way, would you deliver a letter for me?

March 25, 2011

I’m shorter than average. Well, shorter than the average person in the United States, anyway, and even shorter than the average person in Sweden, although in Indonesia I’d just about fit right in. And it doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was at least average, or at least closer to it than I am now. Of course just a few centuries ago I would have been on the tall side. I believe it was Emperor Leopold II who put together an army of men who were at least six feet tall. That would be like finding a bunch of guys who were eight feet tall today. I’m taller than Napoleon, who everyone thinks was short, but who, for his time, was really about average. I can always tell when I’m in an old house because I can reach up and touch the top of the door frame as I walk through it. And I can tell when I’m in a really old house because I can reach up and touch the ceiling. At times this can be frustrating. Everyone I meet seems to look down on me. In the grocery store I sometimes have to get someone to reach something on a high shelf for me, because apparently only really tall people eat oatmeal.

On the other hand being shorter than average can have its advantages. Once where I work there was a security alert that advised people to be on the lookout for-I’m not making this up-a man between the ages of eighteen and forty-five who was of average height, had an average build, and brown hair. During this Everyman’s reign of terror being less than average height probably saved me from being stopped by the cops every twenty minutes or causing panic just by crossing the street. The annoying thing, though, is that, while I’m not tall enough to be average, I’m not really short enough to qualify as short. If there were a story of Goldilocks And The Four Bears I’d be the slightly lukewarm porridge between the one that was too cold and the one that was too hot. I’m too tall to shop in the children’s section-although being able to match my clothes by the cartoon animals printed on the labels would save me a lot of time on the morning. But I’m also too short to shop in the adult section. The other day I was trying to buy some new jeans but I couldn’t find any that were short enough. I had no trouble finding any that were just the right waist size-they were just all designed for guys who could have been in Leopold II’s army. And I did find a few pairs of jeans that were just the right length but, for some reason, the waists were always too big. I found one pair-I’m not making this up-that had a 28-inch inseam and a 54-inch waist. I don’t know where clothing makers got the idea that all of us short guys are built like Danny DeVito, who, I’m pretty sure, is still taller than Napoleon.

March 18, 2011

The college I went to had a large theater, to go with its large theater department. The seating area was divided by broad steps that led to the exits. All the theater people called each section with the steps a "vom", which was short for "vomitorium". I was told they got this name back in the late sixties when the theater department put on a production of Peter Weiss’s The Persecution And Assassination Of Jean Paul Marat As Performed By The Inmates Of Charenton Under The Direction Of The Marquis de Sade. You can tell it’s a German play because pretty much everything you need to know is crammed into the title, and in the original that title is all one word. "If it wasn’t for us Americans all these people would be speaking German." And I said, "Yes, I’m sure these Austrians appreciate that." Anyway, in putting on the play the head of the theater department decided to do something radical and turned the entire theater into an asylum and had most of the students live in it as inmates. Okay, technically this wasn’t that radical, since most theater departments are already like asylums that are run by the inmates, but that’s another story.

At the end of the play the "inmates" – who had very limited access to sanitation – crawled through the audience. This caused some audience members to vomit into the voms. At least that’s how the story went, but even from the beginning I had a gut feeling it wasn’t completely true. And I got even more suspicious when I learned that in every theater the section that contains the steps leading to the seats is called a vomitorium. There’s something to think about the next time you’re in a theater and making your way to your seat, although if you’ve heard that a "vomitorium" is a room the Romans went to when they wanted to throw up so they could keep eating huge feasts you’ve heard wrong. Yes, the Romans did eat a lot of things you’d think would make anyone throw up, but taste is in the tongue of the beholder, and larks’ tongues, otters’ noses and ocelot spleens were just the Roman equivalent of popcorn and junior mints. In ancient Rome a vomitorium was the same thing it is now: the section of a theater or amphitheater with steps. I’m not sure how the term got shortened into vomit, or how vomit came to mean, well, vomit. Maybe someone thought of their stomach as a big theater and there was a sudden mass exodus when, after eating some popcorn and ocelot spleens someone in the "audience" yelled "Fire!" There’s something to think about the next time you’re enjoying an elegant evening at the theater.

Fortunately the vomitorium can be rescued from its unsavory association by the numerous synonyms we have for vomit. There’s barf, puke, purge, throw up, upchuck, hurl, spew, retch, regurgitate, blow chow, blow chowder, blow chunks, toss your cookies, toss your lunch, do the technicolor yawn, drive the porcelain bus, ralph, call Ralph on the porcelain phone, experience reverse peristalsis, and shout at your shoes. The Australians call it chunder, the French call it vomir, the Russians call it rvota, and the Germans have a word that’s forty-eight letters long and has pretty much everything you need to know crammed into it. I once knew a guy who told me he found throwing up to be a pleasant experience. I don’t know anything pleasant about it. It’s not like pulling off a scab where you have a few seconds of excruciating pain followed by a massive endorphin wave. The only pleasant thing about throwing up is when it’s over, although even then you still usually have to get past the dry heaves. And I realize that, if you’re still reading, this has been pretty unpleasant. I’m sorry. I just had to get it out of my system.

March 11, 2011

Some stories are more interesting, or at least funnier, when you don’t have all the facts. When I heard that Australia’s drug council (known locally as the GAFA Wombat Yobbos) was asking schools not to sell their own brands of alcohol I was pretty surprised to hear that not only were Australian schools selling alcohol but schools even had their own brands of alcohol. When I looked into it, though, what I found was that, while a few schools do have a particular brand of alcohol, the real issue is schools selling alcohol to adults at fundraisers, and even having wine tastings as school fundraisers. School administrators are emphatic that alcohol is never given to kids, and that the presence of alcohol at school events is treated with a combination of caution and common sense. And having alcohol at fundraisers seems like a pretty good idea. My school had flea markets and bake sales. If we’d had wine tastings we might have been able to afford textbooks that didn’t have chapter headings like "Will We Reach The Moon?" And kids aren’t getting alcohol at these events anymore than they’d get alcohol in a restaurant where adults were knocking back a glass of cabernet or a martini or two. And I do kind of like the idea of a school brand of alcohol, since alcohol tends to put me in a reminiscing mood, and having a bottle of whiskey with my alma mater’s name on it could help stir up some memories. On the other hand mixing up alcohol and memories of high school might not always be such a good idea. But consider the potential for an organization like, say, the Girl Scouts. They do pretty well selling cookies-I especially like the chocolate-mint ones–so imagine the fundraising potential if they added, say, a chocolate-mint liqueur to their menu.

Speaking of chocolate, mint and alcohol reminds me of a joke. A grasshopper walks into a bar. The bartender says, "We have a drink named after you." The grasshopper says, "You have a drink named Murray?" Okay, I admit it, everything reminds me of that joke. Anyway, I can just imagine kids-with adult supervision, of course-with a card table out in front of a grocery store stopping people and saying, "Would you like to buy some beer to help our school?" It beats kids hanging out in front of liquor stores asking adults to buy them a bottle of Old Harper, which does nothing for their education, and what would they reminisce about, anyway? Kindergarten? Except that Australian kids wouldn’t say, "Would you like to buy some beer?" They’d say, "G’day, mate, how’s about a few tubes of the amber fluid?" And that gets me to what I really want to talk about: the myth that Australians speak English. Winston Churchill said that the the people of the United States and Britain are divided by a common language. Australians, on the other hand, gobsmack us in the Northern Hemisphere with their language. It’s a lot of things but I’m not sure it’s English. Australians take a perfectly good word like "pond" and replace it with "billabong", which, admittedly, must make them demons at Scrabble. We say food", they say "tucker", we say "underwear", they say "grundies", we say "original", they say "ridgie-didge". It’s like Australia is a whole other country. I once met an Aussie folk singer. I bought his CD-which I think they call a "silver spinny"-which was a collection of all twelve of Australia’s national anthems. One thing that always makes Australians winning a gold medal at the Olympics exciting is you never know whether they’re going to mount the podium to Slim Dusty’s "G’Day G’Day" or Men At Work’s "Land Down Under", but that’s another story. When I bought the CD the smallest bill I had was a twenty-which I think Australians call a "doovalacky". The singer wasn’t sure he could make change for that, but instead of saying, "I don’t think I can make change" he said, "Crikey, mate, I think all my bikkies have gone walkabout." I would have asked if he knew any English, but I was too distracted by the corks hanging from his hat. Finally he found some change under his hat, which I think Australians call a "hat". That’s the thing about Aussie lingo: it’s still interesting even if you understand it.

March 4, 2011

Right now, on any clear night, I can step out of my back door and see Orion rising from the south. Why Ptolemy, who cataloged most of the constellations we know, chose to name this particular one after a hunter who, even in Greek mythology, ain’t that prominent, and not after Hercules or Perseus or a half-dozen better known sword-weilding guys is beyond me. Yes, they have their own constellations, but they’re not nearly as noticeable. Maybe Ptolemy got halfway through his list when he said, "Oops, I forgot that big collection of stars in the south. Well, all the good names are taken, so I’ll just name it after…um…Orion." And then there’s the fact that the constellations are now all defined and standardized by the International Astronomical Union. These are the same people who demoted Pluto, so I think somebody better step in and take the constellations away from them before they decide to rename Cygnus after Gene Shalit. I have a special affection for the constellation Orion, though, because it’s the second constellation I learned to recognize. The first was the Big Dipper-also known as Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, although the fact that it has such an incredibly long tail makes me think Ptolemy hadn’t seen that many bears. We’re probably lucky that Ptolemy was completely unfamiliar with the fauna of North America because he might have been tempted to call the Big Dipper Mephitis Major and, let’s face it, "the Great Skunk" doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard about the Big Dipper. It was in the middle of summer, no sign of clouds, and one of the kids across the street said, "Tonight will be a good night to see the Big Dipper." I didn’t want to appear ignorant, especially since he wasn’t talking to me, so I just nodded knowingly and went back to collecting roly-polys. Later I asked my mother what the Big Dipper was. I think I was five or six at the time and had no clue what even a dipper was. My mother told me that, that night, she’d point it out to me. I think I imagined something like the moon, something big and easy to spot, which made me wonder why I’d never noticed it before. That night we went outside and she bent down next to me and started pointing at the stars saying, "There’s the spoon, and there’s its handle. Do you see it?" I didn’t want to appear ignorant, so I said, "Oh, yeah, okay," while I was thinking, "What the heck is she talking about? All I see is a bunch of stars." I’m pretty sure my mother, a former teacher, started by explaining that the Big Dipper is a constellation and that those are designs made by collections of stars, but I think I may have missed that, being concerned about the fact that the denizens of my roly-poly zoo were escaping by simply walking through the moat I’d carefully built. It wasn’t really until I’d seen connect-the-dots pictures of the Big Dipper, and a show about constellations at the planetarium, that I figured out what it was. And I got a huge thrill, almost like learning a magic trick, out of being able to actually spot it for myself in the night sky. In spite of the thrill I avoided learning any other constellations, just because I thought they were too hard to piece together. Orion, though, is kind of hard to miss, even in a fairly light-polluted neighborhood. I think I recognized Orion even before I knew which constellation it was, and once I looked it up that kind of opened the floodgates. Now I can spot Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Draco, maybe his father Lucius, or even, on a good night, Gene Shalit. What never ceases to amaze me, though, is that I’m never actually seeing the stars as they are, but as they once were. Even when I look at the sun–which I know you’re never supposed to do but as a kid I would do anyway, if only just for a second–I know it’s the sun as it was eight minutes ago. With stars, and this is the part that always gets me, it’s as they were hundreds, thousands, even millions of years ago. When we look at stars we are literally looking at a ray of light projected to us from distant space. I know this is Astronomy 101 but it still gets me that, when I look at the sky, I’m seeing stars that could have burned out when my ancestors didn’t even know how to make fire. At one point in Alice In Wonderland Alice, fearing she’s going to shrink out of existence, tries to imagine what a flame looks like after it’s gone out. Stars are candles that burn so bright their light is stretched across time. The only thing, to me, more amazing than that is that, when stars burn out, some of them will, in dying, build the elements that life itself is built from. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and every other element is nothing more than a cluster of hydrogen atoms smashed together in the heart of a dying star. Walt Whitman has a famous poem about astronomy:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Actually I don’t think it’s about the science of astronomy itself. I think Whitman was busting the chops of a really bad lecturer, the sort of guy who’d describe a car accident by telling you the temperature and relative humidity at the time it happened. Whitman, after all, also coined the phrase "the body electric", so I think he understood how much poetry there is in science. I wonder what Whitman would have thought if he’d heard, and fully understood, what Carl Sagan said more than a century later–"The Earth, and every living thing, are made of star stuff." Astronomy is the essence of poetry–and everything else.

February 25, 2011

Some psychologists have discovered what they say is a new syndrome–or rather it’s a previously unidentified syndrome, but one that’s probably been around for some time, sort of like when scientists discover a "new" planet, and you know there have got to be at least a couple of aliens sitting on it monitoring our newscasts and saying, "Shucks, we’ve known about this place for ages. Now tourists are gonna ruin it." The new syndrome is called "sidewalk rage", an intense feeling of aggression some people walking on sidewalks feel when they get stuck behind someone who’s walking more slowly than they are. Some people who’ve experienced sidewalk rage have reported actually wanting to punch the person in front of them in the back of the neck. Psychologists, of course, don’t call it "sidewalk rage", they call it "Pedestrian Aggression Syndrome", or, to be more scientifically accurate, "being an asshole." On the one hand I find it really hard to believe there’s such a syndrome. I’m pretty sure I’ve never experienced sidewalk rage myself because I’ve never been in a sidewalk situation where I couldn’t move around someone in front of me who was walking slowly. Even on a really crowded sidewalk I’ve been able to step into the grass or just move into a line of people that’s moving slightly faster, sort of like changing lanes in a car when you’re stuck in a really slow lane.

Of course the major difference is that when people are walking slowly it’s probably because they’re just slow walkers, whereas when you’re in the car and the cars in the lane on the left is creeping along while the cars in the lane on the right are zooming by it’s probably because a mile up the road the right lane is closed and all the idiots who went zooming by are now holding everybody up while they pull over. And in the car it’s hard to just step off into the grass, which is why road rage is an understandable phenomenon. People who experience sidewalk rage are just causing themselves unnecessary grief. On the other hand, though, I think I have experienced something like sidewalk rage in the grocery store when I’ve come down one aisle and found two old women with their grocery carts blocking the entire aisle while they stand and talk right in front of the falafel mix which is the last thing on my list. But even in those situations I don’t really get angry. I just move one aisle over and start lobbing satsumas over the wall so they think it’s raining fruit and decide to move along before cantaloupes start falling. And then there are the times when I’ve been out walking on a sidewalk and I stop at a crosswalk because I need to cross the street, and some guy in a Hummer stops and gives me the little three-fingered motion to go on ahead and cross. That little finger motion always annoys me, but I also understand that these guys do it because, even when stopped, they need to keep one hand on steering wheel and the other hand on their beer. And while I’m about halfway across he’ll blow his horn or start to move forward and laugh. That always enrages me, but, now that I think about it, maybe that guy has a problem. Maybe he’s suffering from some as-yet undiscovered syndrome. I think I even know a scientifically accurate term for it.

February 18, 2011

Where I went to college there was a Subway ™ sandwich shop right across the street from the campus. To this day I’m not sure how they stayed open because, no matter when you went in, whoever was behind the counter would look up and yell, "We’re closing in five minutes!" You could go in at noon on a Wednesday and they were closing in five minutes. And they were always out of almost everything, with the result that you could only get your sandwich on white bread, and even then you could only get an Italian cold cut combo which was made with salami, bologna, ham, and at least three other meats which no Italian ever heard of, but that’s okay because they were all exactly like the salami, bologna, and ham, and the whole thing was buried under approximately three pounds of lettuce, which was the one thing they never seemed to run out of. I was reminded of this recently when I heard that the Subway chain is trying to trademark the term "footlong" to describe their sandwiches that are, well, a foot long. Actually they’ve been working on this for at least a year, but I only heard about it recently, proving that boneheadedness is perennial and, like perennial plants, can pop up at any time. I’m not sure what the implications of this would be, other than the fact that no one could use the term "footlong" to describe anything other than a Subway sandwich. Hopefully they’ll be content with the term as a single word and not try to trademark "foot long" as well, otherwise we’ll all be stuck describing everything that happens to be a foot long as either twelve inches or perhaps approximately one-third of a meter. Aside from the legal questions I really have to wonder what the Subway chain would have done back when they first opened if the term "subway" had already been trademarked by another sandwich shop or, for that matter, the subway systems of New York or Boston. This reminds me of the time the Marx Brothers made a movie called A Night In Casablanca, and were threatened with a lawsuit by Warner Brothers, which had made the movie Casablanca just a few years ago. Groucho responded to the threat with a letter of his own stating that he didn’t realize anyone owned the actual name Casablanca, but he also questioned whether the Warners had the right to the term "Brothers". Having done a little research into this I’m pretty sure the Marx Brothers were brothers back when the Warner Brothers were still the Wonskolaser Brothers, but that’s another story. I understand the validity of most trademark and copyright claims, if only because I think people who create things–especially artists, but I think it extends to art’s evil twin, advertising–deserve to be paid for and to have some control over their work. For artists especially copyright can be beneficial.

Consider the writer Anthony Burgess who, when he was forty-one, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and given just a year to live. So he went into a writing frenzy, churning out a bunch of novels that would provide his wife a steady income from royalties after he died. He ended up living to be seventy-six and wrote a lot more, but even if he hadn’t at least he’d guaranteed himself a steady income for thirty-six years. But applying copyright is like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Sometimes it’s necessary and sometimes it’s just boneheaded and deserves to be punished. If Walt Disney hadn’t gotten away with blatantly parodying a Buster Keaton film the world might never have been introduced to Mickey Mouse, which makes it ironic that I’m probably going to be sued for a copyright violation for using the name "Mickey Mouse", and if that doesn’t happen then Abbie Hoffman’s estate might come after me for ripping off the name of his book. All this reminds me of a cartoon I once saw of Shakespeare rising from the grave. He was saying, "I want….royalties!" Imagine the devastation just to the British entertainment industry. Now imagine that, instead of Shakespeare, it was the Earl of Sandwich. Every Subway shop in the world would be shut down in five minutes.

February 11, 2011

Milton Levine, inventor of the ant farm, passed away last month. I didn’t realize the ant farm had actually been invented by someone, but it seems obvious that somebody had invented it, just like Anna Thynne invented the aquarium, which is basically an ant farm with water and fish in it. Hearing about Mr. Levine’s passing reminded me of the summer I tried to make a homemade ant farm by putting some honey in the bottom of a mayonnaise jar and setting it out next to an anthill, but, for reasons I still can’t figure out, the ants were never interested enough to actually go in it. Maybe it was the combination of the lingering smell of mayonnaise and honey that turned them off, although we’re talking about creatures that will eat dead rats. So I asked for, and received, an ant farm, a large plastic rectangle filled with white, fine sand, like snow, either for my birthday or for Christmas. Either way it arrived in the middle of winter and came with a postcard that you mailed to the company that made it so they could ship the ants separately. I’ll never forget that the ants’ container came in a plain brown envelope, and when I opened it there was another envelope, and inside that one a note that said, "Live animals. Cannot be shipped to California, Florida, Hawaii, or Tennessee." Why Tennessee was included in this list is another mystery, especially since it’s surrounded by seven other states and I’m pretty sure you’d find carpenter ants in at least one of them.

As I was putting the ants in their farm one escaped. It looked so proud of itself, marching across the table with its head held high. Fortunately for the state of Tennessee I scooped it up with a piece of paper and it joined the others. The instructions that came with the ant farm were simple: feed the ants bread dipped in sugar. To ensure the survival of the colony I was also supposed to dig up an ants’ nest and steal its queen. Apparently ants will revere and care for a queen who is from an entirely different place, which is one way ants are like Canadians or Australians, or other members of the Commonwealth. In fact New Zealand briefly replaced Queen Elizabeth with Ru Paul, but that’s another story. Since it was the middle of winter, though, I couldn’t go out and dig up an ants’ nest. But the ants worked and went about their lives even without a queen, which is one way ants are like the Irish. They built tunnels and egg-shaped chambers with no eggs to fill them. And one by one they died. The dead ants were dismembered by the remaining ones and deposited in an upper corner of the ant farm. After about six weeks there was only one ant left. I like to think it was the one that almost escaped. I don’t know whether it was optimism or determination or simple biology or a low cholesterol diet that kept that ant going longer than the rest. Maybe it knew that spring was coming, that ant nests out in the real world would soon reopen and a queen would come.

Meanwhile it went on with its tasks of repairing tunnels and cleaning rooms. By the time I was ten I’d heard the fable of the grasshopper and the ants at least a hundred times. The lazy grasshopper plays all summer while the ants work, and then, in winter, the grasshopper dies of exposure and starvation. I think even the first time I heard that story I knew how it was going to end, but no matter how many times I heard it I still sided with the grasshopper. His life may have been cut short, but at least he had something to live for other than endless drudgery. There’s more to life than mere survival. All work and no play makes Jack go crazy and take an axe and chase his family through the Overlook Hotel, you know. That’s why I like to think that, while that ant was working away, it was holding out hope for a better future, one in which it would once again be surrounded by other ants. Then, still in winter, the last ant died. The tunnels and rooms collapsed. Spring came and I found ants everywhere. I never did dig up a queen. I’d learned everything I needed from the ant farm.

February 4, 2011

In prehistoric times groups of hunters would go out in search of food, usually in the form of a large and dangerous wild animal. They’d pursue it, and, if they were skillful and lucky enough, they’d bring it down and each hunter would carve out a large hunk of meat the size of his head. Fortunately we don’t have to do that anymore. If we did there’d probably be a lot more vegetarians, but that’s another story. The hunting tradition, though, is preserved in the form of sporting events, although those, fortunately, don’t typically involve large wild animals anymore. That’s probably just as well because for the most part animals aren’t that interested in sports, but there are exceptions. For instance one of our dogs has been known to sit on the couch with me and watch a soccer or even baseball game with great interest, and that’s without the benefit of alcohol, which makes me think he appreciates baseball more than most of its fans.

That also reminds me of a joke: a guy takes his dog to a talent agent and says, "I’ve got a talking dog here." He then asks the dog, "What’s on top of a house?" The dog says, "Roof!" He asks, "What’s on the side of a tree?" The dog says, "Bark!" He asks, "Who was the greatest baseball player of all time?" The dog says, "Ruth!" The talent agent throws them out, and the dog says, "Must be a Cubs fan." Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered why most sports teams are named after dangerous animals-the Lions, the Tigers, da Bears, the Pangolins, or anything native to Australia-it’s because sports reflect the hunting experience. And even though most of us aren’t fit enough or are just too lazy to go running up and down a field, especially in the middle of winter, we can still vicariously take part in the hunting experience as spectators. It may be cheating, but even in the comfort of our homes we can sit around with bowls of chips the size of our heads and lots of guacamole, salsa, cheese dip, onion dip, clam dip, spinach dip, ranch dip, and the traditional bean dip molded into the shape of a football. Sure, there are those who prefer to see sporting events live, but then you just end up surrounded by a bunch of dips you can’t stick chips in. Anyway, this is why, even though it may seem counterintuitive or even heretical, I don’t think most sports fans are really fans of a particular sport. I think they’re fans of getting together in large groups to relish, or even mustard, the hunting experience. I think most sports fans are more interested in hanging out with others than they are in what’s happening on the screen. Of course there are exceptions. There are people who are genuinely interested in a sport, or lots of different sports. One year in college there was a true sports fan in the dorm room next to mine. I went to college in Indiana, where the most common religion is basketball, but everyone is required, by law, to take a serious interest in some sport, and also to learn to play euchre. The people of Indiana are traditionally called "Hoosiers". I quickly learned this is because everywhere I went I was asked, "Hoosier favorite team?" I also quickly learned that saying, "The Wolverhampton Wanderers" made people regard me suspiciously and suspect that I was from another planet or, worse, from Illinois.

I never actually met the guy in the dorm room next to mine. In fact I don’t think anyone met him, including his roommate. He was a music major and all he seemed to ever do was play the bassoon and watch sports. When I wasn’t hearing the opening bars of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring coming from his room I was hearing the sound of cheering crowds and announcers. And occasionally when the crowds would really roar I’d hear the guy speak. "Yes! Yes!" That was all he ever said, and I assume it meant his team was winning. If I’d been a Hoosier I’d probably know what the sport was and which team was his. Heck, I’d probably be watching with him, although I think he preferred to be left alone. Later I’d see him in the dining hall, sitting by himself, eating a slab of meatloaf the size of his head.