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February 8, 2008

So I heard on the news the other day that Swedish scientists have created a cell phone the size of two business cards. This raises an important question: since when did Swedes become scientists? I’m not saying that people from Sweden aren’t smart, but for a long time they seem to have been happy to give out awards to other smart people. Basically Sweden is famous for three things: Stockholm Syndrome, some kind of meatball, and ABBA. Maybe they’ve started becoming scientists because they were feeling a little insecure. Everybody comes to their country to pick up their Nobel Prizes and then they leave and Sweden gets stuck with the check. Heck, even the Danish have the Vikings, those pastries, and museums where you can smoke a bong, pick up a prostitute, and see some of Van Gogh’s best work.

But I digress. Remember the old days when technology was about making things really, really big instead of really small? I was born in the Cretaceous period so I remember when it was a status symbol to have a stereo system that took up your entire living room wall and several of my friends were crushed to death trying to carry really huge boom boxes. If you were really cool you had speakers the size of small apartment buildings. Now if you’re really cool you have speakers that are the size of a small coffee mug but can produce a shockwave of sound that will knock out all the windows of small apartment buildings. I almost said the speakers were smaller than a breadbox, but then I realized that I have no clue how big a breadbox is. When I was a kid people were always describing things as being either bigger or smaller than a breadbox, but I can’t remember ever actually seeing a breadbox. If they’d said a matchbox I might have gotten it, but then I’d have to wonder if it was one of the small matchboxes or one of the big ones. If they’d said a Matchbox car then I would have understood because I had a ton of those things. I’m not sure they are even still around, but that’s okay because most new hybrid cars are about the size of a Matchbox car.

But I digress. Now there’s even a laptop that’s so thin it will fit into an inter-office envelope, which raises the question, what bonehead would put a computer inside an inter-office envelope? If I spend a couple of thousand dollars on a computer the last thing I want to do is put it in something that will guarantee it will get tossed, dropped, folded, bent, spindled, mutilated, and trampled on by a rhinoceros. Send your new laptop via inter-office envelope to the guy in the cubicle next to you and you’ll discover a whole new meaning to the expression "some assembly required". Besides, why would I want a computer that small when I can already get a cell phone the size of two business cards? And I could probably watch movies on it, because there’s no better way to watch a movie than on a screen smaller than my hand. In a few years phones that can play movies will probably be so small that I could walk around with one hand over my eye. People will ask me, "Is there something wrong with your eye?" And I’ll say, "No, I’m just watching Forbidden Planet." Actually they won’t ask because they’ll be walking around with one hand over their eye too.

It’s amazing how quickly we get used to changes like that. It was only a few years ago that I first saw someone using a hands-free cell phone. She was a few feet away from me in an airport and for several minutes I thought she was crazy. You know the saying: talking to yourself is healthy; answering back is insane. Then she turned her head and I could see a little cord dangling from her ear, so I realized it was some newfangled kind of phone. Of course she was talking so much the person on the other end couldn’t possibly have a chance to answer back; they probably had the phone off the hook and were out mowing their yard while she talked. That’s when I realized that your actual importance and your need for that kind of technology are inversely proportional.

February 1, 2008

It seems like there’s a pill for everything now. If you’re too depressed, too happy, if you’re unsure about life’s purpose, if your plants start talking to you, there’s a pill you can take that will even everything out so you can stop being concerned. There’s a pill to help people overcome shyness. How do the people who really need this pill get it in the first place, since they’re probably to shy to tell their doctor they have a problem? Someone who’s really shy isn’t going to say, in a regular checkup, "By the way, Doc, I’m really shy and it’s affecting my work. The other day my boss asked me to give a presentation and I was so upset I threw up all over him." The worst part is the doctor would see this as an excuse to whip out his prescription pad and say, "I’m going to give you a pill for that, and also you need to lose some weight, so I’ll give you a pill for that too. And just in case you get a toenail fungus, here’s a prescription made by a company that just bought me a new car." How did they find out that the pill that helps you overcome shyness worked, anyway? I know they do experiments on laboratory mice. Did they notice that one of the mice which spent most of its time in the corner had, after being injected with a new chemical, suddenly move up to the position of vice president of water bottle control and get a huge bonus in food pellets?

But I digress. The worst part is the advertising, because commercials make people start thinking that maybe they need medications they really don’t. I haven’t thrown up over anyone lately, but I was a little nervous the other day when I had to get up and speak during a meeting, so maybe I need that pill to overcome shyness. And every night while watching television I see a commercial for eye drops. It’s always the same thing: a soothing voice says, "Are your eyes tired, itchy, or red?" And immediately my eyes start itching and, when I think about it, yeah, they do feel kind of tired. Maybe I shouldn’t be watching so much television. Or maybe I need some of those eye drops even though for all I know they’re made from a leftover liquid that was used to process salmon eyeballs for export to third world countries. And the eyedrops are over-the-counter medications, or "OTC" as they’re cleverly called now because "Doctors weren’t handing out enough prescriptions for this crap so we decided to put it on the shelves" doesn’t fit well on a box, even if you reduce it to an acronym. Some pills even add "OTC" to their names even though eventually every pill will be available over the counter. That’s going to cause some confusion, though, so maybe they’ll start coming up with acronyms to describe the conditions the pills treat. For instance, pills made to treat psychosis could have names like Loonien NAF (Nutty As Fruitcake) or OOYT (Out Of Your Tree). I know none of this is new, but somehow I always manage to be behind the times, under the curve, between a rock and a hard place, neither here nor there, a day late and a dollar short. It’s a serious problem for me. I wonder if there’s a pill for it.

January 25, 2008

So the other day I saw in one of those free weekly living-decorating-entertainment-ditch digging newspapers that tequila is the liquor of the moment. Really? When did this happen? I don’t hang out with a lot of either heavy drinkers or fashion-conscious people, although if I hung out with fashion-conscious people I’m pretty sure I’d become a heavy drinker.

But I digress. It seems like tequila has been the "liquor of the moment" for at least the last six years. Yes, every once in a while single-malt whiskey (or whisky) will pop up and a few guys in turtleneck sweaters will stand at the bar talking about essence of peat and bitumen, and I can’t turn on the television any more without seeing an artsy commercial for some kind of vodka called Antimony that’s made from gooseberries that only grow in a single square mile of Siberian tundra and are harvested under a full moon, or an even more annoying commercial for some corporate brand of rum that apparently makes the entire planet jump into a conga line whenever a bartender throws it and a couple of limes into a glass. All these commercials tell me, actually, is that men shouldn’t wear miniskirts.

But I digress. Why is tequila suddenly the fashionable thing to drink and, more importantly, shouldn’t we be worried about this? If you want to drink a Margarita with your chips and salsa and a big bowl of menudos that’s one thing, but, just between us, I’ve never known anyone who didn’t turn into a mean drunk under the effects of straight tequila. It’s true that some people are mean drunks no matter what they drink, even non-alcoholic beer. These people should stay away from alcohol entirely, especially since they’re the idiots who insist that they’re okay to drive even after downing two six-packs and a fifth of gin. But there’s something about pure tequila, with or without the added annoyance of having to lick salt from your wrist and squirt a lemon in your mouth because the taste is so bloody awful, that it turns even the sweetest, gentlest souls into raging lunatics. I’m pretty sure if Gandhi ever tried tequila he would have been getting up in the grills of British officers, or maybe random British people, or possibly even just anyone who happened to be around and screaming, "You wanna piece of me? Huh? Do ya?" And he’d be making phone calls at three am and saying, "You know what, Nehru? You better watch your back." And when the person on the other end of line tried to explain that he’d misdialed and called Brussels by mistake, he’d get even angrier and start screaming, "You sayin’ I don’t know how to use a phone? Huh? I don’t know who you are, buddy, but you’re on my list!" In fact I’m pretty sure cultures that have a prohibition against alcohol have that solely because of tequila and that, deep down, they’d probably be okay with beer or wine or whisky or cleaning fluid as long as these things were consumed in moderation. I once tried to decide whether other varieties of alcohol actually had such specific effects–if, for instance, vodka made drinkers depressed existential philosophers, or if whiskey made people great storytellers who were completely unable to dance, or if rum drinkers became convinced they looked good in a thong, but so far evidence is slim. I only know with complete certainty that tequila is bad so I’ll stay away from it. You got a problem with that? Huh? Do ya?

January 18, 2008

Welcome to another exciting installment of Fun With Science! This week we’ll be looking at static electricity. Specifically we’ll be looking at it by putting on wool sweaters, dragging our feet across the carpet, and then touching someone else’s elbow or the back of their neck or their eyeball. And we’ll be exploring why this is funnier if you do it to someone who’s not expecting it and is instead watching television or performing cardio-thoracic surgery. The term “static” means “still”, and “still” means “a thing people used to use to make whiskey in the old days”. (To learn more about stills and how to build one, check out our previous installment, Brewing Up Trouble).

Sometimes static electricity makes things stick to each other. For instance when you’ve got an important business meeting you can bet that there will be a sock stuck to the back of your shirt that you won’t find out about until after the meeting is over. Later on we’ll be exploring uses for static electricity by rubbing balloons on the backs of cats and then seeing if the cats will stick to the wall. Sometimes you can see static electricity as a bright spark that you mostly see during the winter. We’re not sure why you mostly see static electricity during the winter, but it may be because there aren’t as many thunderstorms in the winter as there are during the summer. Maybe static electricity is related to lightning. (For more about lightning, take an old TV antenna out in the back yard during a thunderstorm. For best results climb up on an aluminum ladder and wave the antenna above your head.) You may have read in a science book that you can generate static electricity by rubbing a plastic bar with a piece of fur. This raises some very interesting questions. If you get a big enough plastic bar and enough fur could you generate enough static electricity to power your house? And what sort of person owns plastic bars and fur? That guy you see hanging out down by the bus stop—the one who’s always wearing a trench coat even in August and who has a really greasy-looking combover—looks like he’d be the sort who’d have a plastic bar and some fur and probably a lot of other weird things too. And is static electricity good for anything other than making your friends jump, or hurting your ears when it comes through your headphones while you’re trying to listen to the radio at work? These are all very good questions, and science is all about answering questions. Fun With Science, on the other hand, is only about answering really interesting questions. Next time we’ll be looking at earthworms and electrical outlets, and asking, Can they be friends?

January 11, 2008

It doesn’t snow any more like it did when I was a kid. In fact lately it hasn’t been snowing at all, mainly because, even though it’s January, it’s been about eighty degrees. We should be getting snow but instead we’ve been getting rain. There’s something distinctly wrong with this. The only place it should be eighty degrees in January is at the equator, or maybe some place like Australia where they don’t have the good sense to get their seasons in the right order. I don’t need a blizzard, or even enough snow to completely shut down the city for three weeks, although in the Southern United States where I live it that only takes about half an inch of snow, and even if it melts by noon the city is still shut down because everybody’s so busy walking around saying, “Wow, that was some snow. But you know, it doesn’t snow like it did when I was a kid.”

I’d like enough snow to at least turn the ground white, or at least enough snow that, once I get home and turn on the news, I’ll hear that schools are closed. Even though it’s been years since I had to go to school it still makes me happy to hear that schools are closed. I think this is because it was hardwired into my system when I was very young because it was the greatest thing to be able to wake up in the morning to eight feet of snow outside my window—which was amazing because my room was on the second storey—and know that there would be no school but my mother would still turn on the news to make absolutely certain that school buses weren’t equipped with plows, salt dispensers, and flame-throwers. The best thing was waking up to snow. If it started snowing during the day and I was at home my mother wouldn’t let me go out until it stopped snowing. I never could figure out why this was. Did she think I was going to be attacked by giant catfish that only came out when snow was falling?

But I digress. The second best thing, of course, was when it started snowing at school because then the teachers would just scrap whatever lesson plan they had because we were all going to be staring out the window anyway. Sometimes we’d have a cool teacher who would let us go in the snow we were waiting for the buses to warm up their flame-throwers so we could start going home. I’ll never forget one year when we waited several hours for the buses to show up and start taking us home. The snow started falling pretty early in the day, but the weather reporters, who were broadcasting from Australia , kept insisting that everything was warm and sunny. Our teacher, who wasn’t cool enough to let us go out in the snow, instead pulled out this newfangled thing called a “television” and we sat around and watched about seven and a half hours of educational programming. Every half hour or so one lucky kid would get to go out and measure the snow. I didn’t get to, but I remember when one of my friends went out with a rule and yelled back to us that it was up to half an inch. And then he was attacked by a giant catfish. Finally some dogsleds arrived to take us to the buses. Our regular bus route took us around Deadman’s Curve, over Kill Hill, and down Exploding Carburetor Alley, but a little snow made it just too dangerous, so our bus driver took us in the opposite direction, apparently deciding that the fastest way to get us home was to go as far away from our houses as possible. With the snow coming down it wasn’t long before she was able to put the pedal to the metal and push the bus up to about half an inch an hour. Einstein’s Law of Relativity says that the faster you’re traveling the slower time goes, and, also, that time goes really slow when your relatives are staying with you, especially if one of them is Uncle Harry who spends at least an hour and a half in the bathroom every morning.

But I digress. I’m convinced Einstein never had to spend six hours on a school bus with a bunch of fifth graders. If he had he would have realized that there are worse things than having Uncle Harry come and stay for a week, or a month, or maybe three years. Now of course all the kids would have cell phones and video games so they’d be able to call their parents and keep themselves entertained on the bus, but we had to sit around and actually talk to each other to amuse ourselves. And we were the lucky ones. Some kids had to spend the night at school. It was bad enough having to stay at school during the day and watch the snow coming down. I had to walk up the steep hill to my house, but the bus driver took down my phone number and the phone numbers of every kid on the bus and, when she finally got home, she called every parent to make sure we all got home safe. If there were a Nobel Prize for bus driving she would have won it. I guess it’s fortunate that we haven’t had a situation like that again, and I wouldn’t wish having to spend six hours on a school bus on anyone, but I still can’t figure out why we don’t get snow anymore. I blame the Australians.

December 7, 2007

Do you remember telegrams? When I was young we used to get telegrams all the time, especially at this time of year. We’d be sitting around the Victrola drinking sarsaparilla and a telegram would arrive with a message like, FELICITATIONS AND SALULTATIONS STOP WE HOPE YOU ARE ENJOYING THE HOLIDAY SEASON STOP SINCERELY STOP. And then we’d have to send a return telegram to every single person we knew because they never included who it was from. This was back in the day when you paid for every word, unlike modern texting, in which you only pay for every correctly spelled word, and whoever sent us telegrams couldn’t afford to sign them because that last STOP was all they could afford. Okay, I’m kidding, I’ve never gotten a telegram in my entire life. It really is true that, when people used to send telegrams, they were charged by the word, not by the letter, so it’s probably a good thing I wasn’t around because I’d be tempted to send telegrams to my friends thanking them for their Verbesserungsvorschlagsversammlung, or asking them if they know how to define floccinaucinihilipilification. And I’m pretty sure what finished off the telegram wasn’t new technology but people sending telegrams from Wales, telling their friends, "Well, here we are in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch!"

But I digress. I’m pretty sure singing telegrams are still around. People in the movies and on television used to get singing telegrams all the time, but even then I had no clue where I’d go to send a singing telegram. And are you supposed to come up with the rhymes yourself or do they write those for you? I’d better not find a place that does singing telegrams because I’d be too tempted to send one to a honorificabilitudinitatibus friend with a message about how I was in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and hoping they didn’t suffer from hippopotomonstrosequippedaliophobia. There are all kinds of other grams you can send to people. There are cookiegrams, pizzagrams, lobstergrams, sushigrams, beargrams (the toy kind, although you probably know at least one person you’d like to send a real live bear), zombiegrams, Draculagrams, Frankensteingrams, werewolfgrams, fruitgrams, saladgrams, tomatograms, potatograms, burgergrams, pajamagrams, and even-I’m not making this up-Jewish grandmother-grams.There are puzzlegrams, which must be the perfect way of telling someone, "I was thinking of you and wanted to make you feel like an idiot." If it can be bottled, boxed, basketed, borrowed, or bashed in the head and stuffed in a trunk it can be sent as a gram. There are beergrams, whiskeygrams, vodkagrams, gingrams, rumgrams, tequilagrams, and even, I’m pretty sure, fancy mixed flaming cocktailgrams. Most importantly there’s the candygram, because Mongo like candy, although with that one you have to watch out for those pesky land sharks.

But I digress. The crazy thing is there are all these grams out there and I’ve never received or sent one and I don’t know anybody who’s ever sent or gotten one, not even while they were cranking the Victrola. I hope somebody somewhere gets some kind of funky gram this holiday season, but, even if you don’t, I’d like to share at least a couple of kilograms of holiday spirit with you. And I’ll be back gramming it up next year.

November 30, 2007

When I was a kid the Guinness Book of World Records was our ultimate reference book. Forget the Encyclopedia Americana, or the Encyclopaedia Britannica with its silly extra ‘a’, forget the Enciklopedia Magyar or even the dictionary. If we wanted to know what was the biggest, the longest, the most lethal, or the most idiotic thing we could possibly come up with to try on the playground, the Guinness Book of World Records was where we went. This was back in the day before kids doing incredibly stupid things was a television staple, and this was back when people thought of computers as tools that would allow them to fill out their tax forms more easily, rather than tools that would allow them to send videos of themselves setting leaves on fire and then accidentally burning their lawnmower all over the world. This was back when we-the kids-were confused about why it was called a book of "records" even though there wasn’t a single Juice Newton album listed anywhere in it that we could find.

But I digress. I’ve thought about trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, but I have no idea for what. There are records for the world’s fastest furniture, the longest hair extension, the most simultaneously spinning yo-yos, the fastest clapping, the longest time spent hopping on one leg, the fastest prune eating, and even, I’m pretty sure, the most world records held by a single person. When I was a kid I thought it would be really cool to have the world’s longest fingernails, although I never thought about the logistics of having twelve-foot long fingernails. At least I’d never have to bend over to scratch my feet. And there are so many other records that, no matter how cool they are, are just completely off-limits. No matter how hard I try or how much financing I get I’ll never be the world’s longest millipede (which is currently held by an African millipede that’s a measly fifteen inches, which I’m pretty sure I could beat) or achieve the highest jump by a pig (just twenty-seven and a half inches! I can jump higher than that!). The problem with records, though, is that sooner or later physics is going to set limits on them. Even though a guy in Australia can lift a hundred and thirty-six pounds with his ear, and even though sooner or later someone’s going to try for a hundred and thirty-seven, there is a limit to how much the ear of anyone, even Prince Charles, can lift. And no human being will ever run a mile in thirty seconds without some kind of artificial help, although a lot of college graduates will attempt it when they see a loan officer coming. Sooner or later there will be a limit on the tallest person, the biggest nose, the largest snail, the heaviest car someone balances on their head, or the most prunes consumed in three minutes. There are always firsts, but those are even harder than the other records. It’s really hard to say, for instance, who was the first human being to set foot on the North American Continent because, unfortunately, the Guinness judges were, at that time, occupied with measuring the tusks of a woolly mammoth in Siberia. We all know Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon, but at least twenty-seven different people claim to have come up with that "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!" joke. I may be the first person to point out that sooner or later physics is going to put limits on most records, but since I’m at least six years behind on every trend I doubt it. There are limits to everything, which is part of the reason people come up with loony records involving twenty-pound chocolate chips and the world’s biggest chess game. As the French say, "Glisser doucement la soie ordinaire entre les dents et sous la ligne de gencives." Or something like that. I’m pretty sure there’s a "sacre bleu!", meaning literally, "holy blue!" in there.

But I digress. And let’s face it: there’s more to life than trying to get a little bit of fame by setting some completely idiotic record. I used to have a friend who I’m pretty sure was trying to get into the Guinness Book Of World Records by consuming more Guinness than anyone else. All he’d drink was Guinness. He drank Guinness constantly. No matter how much I tried I never could convince him that there’s a great big world out there with so much more to offer than just Guinness. For instance, there’s Bass Ale.

November 16, 2007

The holidays are coming and a lot of kids are probably going to be clamoring for video games. And they don’t want last year’s video games-they want this year’s video game, the one that’s shaped like a cylinder with some pointy things sticking out and controllers that have to be held with both hands. When I was a kid we had the same video game system for four years which, today, would be unheard of. We had an Intellivision, the game system that had George Plimpton in all its commercials because the makers had the brilliant idea that they wanted to market to that prized five-to-thirteen-year-old Paris Review-readers demographic. That was before computer programmers took over the world and decided that every device has to be completely changed every six months. I dread the day when computer programmers finally start designing cars. Right now with cars the difference between this year’s model and last year’s model is a slightly different shape to the bumper and this year’s model doesn’t have a passenger’s side armrest. When computer programmers take over they’ll decide that this year’s model will have the brake and accelerators reversed and not only that the brake will now be the small pedal, and the accelerator will be four-feet long and in the backseat.

But I digress. I grew up in Eighties, the age of video game junkies. We didn’t have drugs because everybody in the Seventies had already done all the drugs, but we didn’t care because video games were better than drugs. For one thing video games only cost a quarter. Video games were cheap compared to drugs, and you knew what you were getting up front. If you were trying to buy drugs you were usually disappointed to find that even a nickel bag cost at least ten bucks. With video games you could escape into a bizarro-fantasy world for at least a few minutes, and even longer if you were really good at them. There was a reason people stood in line to play games like Pac Man and and Donkey Kong and Space Invader. And thanks to the limits on computer power these games looked absolutely nothing like reality. Not even the games that were sort of based on real things looked like those things. Centipede didn’t have anything that looked even remotely like a centipede, although the little thing you moved around to shoot looked sort of like the spigot on a garden hose. My favorite game was Q*Bert, partly because no one would figure out how to pronounce it so there was never a line, partly because I was good at it, but mainly because it fulfilled my dream of being able to be Marty Feldman.

Looking at those games now I have to wonder what drugs the designers were taking, and wishing that game designers of today would take some drugs too. Now realism is the big thing in video games. The last time I checked reality was scary enough. Video games should be an escape, albeit a temporary one, a place where we go to get away from the mundane worries of everyday life, the stresses and strains and pains and annoying people who use words like "albeit". People have developed whole second lives in video games. Video games should be fantasies, but they took that away from us when they came up with a video game called Final Fantasy. That’s it: final, the end, finis, kaput. That title was almost as misleading as nickel bag, though, because at one point there was a new version of the Final Fantasy game coming out every twenty minutes. Realism in today’s video games goes so far that people have whole lives in their video games. They have virtual homes with virtual white picket fences. They have virtual spouses, virtual children, virtual pets, and even virtual furniture that, believe it or not, other players can virtually steal and be arrested by real police. In other words in video games people can now have all the things they would have if they weren’t spending all their time playing video games. And if that weren’t bad enough every lousy film that comes out has to have its own video game. Thank goodness we didn’t have that in the Eighties. Imagine the horror of The Breakfast Club video game. That would be almost as bad as that Less Than Zero Saturday morning cartoon.

But I digress. I’m not saying video games are bad. I’m just saying that, this year, you should give kids what they really want: a subscription to the Paris Review.

November 9, 2007

I’ve been thinking about hibernating this winter. I like cold weather-not too cold, of course. I don’t think I could ever live in a place where I’d have to buy a refrigerator to keep my food from freezing, but I like living in a place that has four distinct seasons, especially when those seasons are hot, really hot, insanely hot, and cold. At least sleeping through the winter would let me skip getting a cold this winter. I’m just not sure whether I should talk to my doctor about this first. Whenever I hear about some new great exercise device that’s guaranteed to make you lose seventy pounds in three weeks by working out for just fifteen seconds a day they always say, "Give us your credit card number and let us send you this device that looks like a cross between a can opener and a coat hanger for just eighteen easy payments of $2999.95 each!," but there’s also a little asterisk with the message, "Be sure to consult your doctor before starting any exercise program."

Should I consult my doctor before starting a non-exercise program, though? Imagine going in and saying, "Hey, doc, I’m planning on not doing anything for the next three months. Do you think my heart can take it?" And then there’s the diet. Like bears, squirrels, gophers, badgers, members of Congress, and other animals that spend several months in a comatose state I’ll have to bulk up, so I’ll also have to tell my doctor I’m doing to spend the next month or so eating eight to ten pounds of fried mushrooms and a block of Parmesan cheese every day. I’m just kidding. I’ll be varying my diet more than that. I’m sure even bears, who eat nothing but salmon in the Fall, would put more variety in their diets if they could. Most bears at some point probably even think, "Boy, I’d love a big, fat, slow-moving cheeseburger to swim upstream sometime".

But I digress. Aside from not getting a cold and being able to take all that vacation time I’ve saved up the other advantage of hibernating would be I’d be able to skip my birthday this year. I’m not exactly old, but I have reached an age people refer to as "getting on up there". I’ve reached an age where the songs I rocked out to as a teenager are now on the Golden Oldies station. There are now whole television shows devoted to the songs of my youth, and most of them have the phrase "Remember when?" somewhere in them. I haven’t reached the big milestone just yet, the one where people will send me approximately eight-thousand cards and greetings that all begin with "Lordy, Lordy", but I’m getting close, and I definitely want to skip that one. I don’t remember my father’s fortieth birthday party because I was too young to attend it, but I do remember that one of the gifts he got-I’m not making this up-was a device that would capture intestinal gas and transfer it through a long rubber tube so the gas could be used as fuel for a cigar lighter. My mother’s fortieth birthday party was a little better: she got a cake with black frosting. And it turned everyone’s teeth black, which meant a trip to the dentist. So you can understand why I might want to sleep through that birthday. On the other hand if I sleep through the whole winter I’ll miss a lot of other peoples’ birthdays, and I don’t want to do that. I have so many great gift ideas for people I know who have winter birthdays. For instance, I have this great cigar lighter my father gave me.

November 2, 2007

Since I live in a city with a population greater than five people there’s a local lottery. It’s a really cool thing. Every once in a while the jackpot will go up to some ridiculous number like three-hundred and fifty-eight bazillion dollars, and I’ll think, "Hey, imagine what I could do if I won that!" And then I remember that I didn’t buy a ticket. That’s the trouble with these games: there’s always some technicality. Someone also always reminds me that, after taxes, I won’t really have won three-hundred and fifty-eight bazillion dollars, but I don’t mind. I could still do a lot with a hundred bucks.

But I digress. Up until recently the lottery system was pretty low-tech: there were a bunch of ping-pong balls in plastic containers and air was pumped into the containers that made the balls jump around like a bunch of nine-year olds on Halloween. It was kind of fun to watch. An announcer in a tuxedo would stand next to them and say things like, "Okay, here’s the next number, is that a nine or a six? Let me put my glasses on. Oh, it’s twenty-seven." Then they got rid of the ping-pong balls and the containers and the announcer and replaced the whole thing with a computer program. According to the lottery people this changed saved them over five million dollars, which tells me they were paying the announcer way too much. Did he get a new tuxedo every night? And where were they buying their ping-pong balls? The funny thing is they were saving even more than that when they discovered there was a glitch in the computer system that prevented certain number combinations from coming up. I’m pretty sure they spent the five-million dollars they were saving on a thorough check of the program because there was one character missing in one line that fouled up the whole thing. But, hey, them’s the breaks.

It’s gambling, which means there are risks involved. If I’m playing blackjack and discover that the dealer’s shoe is missing the deuce of spades, that’ll teach me not to mortgage my house just to keep playing. The really funny thing is the lottery administrators are now talking about trying to restore peoples’ faith in the lottery. Did anyone have faith in the lottery to begin with? Maybe I’m hanging out with the wrong people, but most people I know have faith in religion or justice or ping-pong balls, things that are abstract and intangible, things we generally can’t be certain about but which we hope will work in our favor. If they want to restore faith in the lottery system maybe they could go back to the low-tech system and give that poor announcer guy his job back. He’s probably out wandering the streets right now in a frayed tuxedo carrying a sign that says, "Will narrate for food." If they insist on continuing to use a computer they should hook all the tickets up to the computer system so if you choose a number combination the system won’t generate a little window will pop up that says, "Your ticket has encountered an error and needs to close. Do you want to send a report?" I get those windows on my computer all the time, and I used to say "Yes" but then I realized that my chances of ever getting the problem fixed were about the same as my chances of winning the lottery.