Eric The Blue

Act now to be an American hero before the bar is raised

 

Hearing people talk about Mike Pence being an American hero put me in mind of Sam Morril's bit in the above clip. It's a great time to be a guy—the bar is so low—and an even better time to be a Republican. He went on a date and did not commit any felonies: an American hero! He was recruited to play a part in the overthrow of the government but instead he did what the Constitution required, thereby daring to disappoint the guy who tried to get him killed: another American hero! Now if only the first guy could kick his porn habit and the second would testify about what he knows. 

Mark Shields, 1937-2022

Mark Shields, who died this morning, was for years a Friday night political commentator on PBS NewsHour, formerly known as the McNeill Lehrer Report. He'd discuss the week's political news with a conservative sparring partner—earliest one I can remember was Paul Gigot, then David Gergen, and most recently David Brooks. I must have seen a thousand of these segments in the 90s and early aughts, often the midnight rerun while the effects of happy hour were starting to wear off. Today, everyone is saying what a mensch he was, and I'm sure it's true, but if you only knew him because you consumed political journalism on TV what stood out (besides the fact that I almost always agreed with him) was his wit. He once said, on live television, something like, "Regarding Chris Christie, I'm probably about the last person who should tell him to join a gym. But let me tell ya something: watching that guy get out of an SUV, it was like watching the Russians get out of Afghanistan. Took that long." 

He was an Irish Catholic, a Marine, a Notre Dame grad (major: philosophy), a sports fan (Red Sox and Georgetown basketball), smart and funny and, according to the testimony of many, kind—one thing about the Christie quip, he wasn't punching down. 

Update: I keep forgetting it's 2022. Here's the clip. It's hilarious that Rush Limbaugh fans faulted him for "mocking Christie's weight."

 

 

Rockin' the short-sleeved button-down with cargo shorts

Liberals talk of “codifying Roe” but we should aim higher: mandatory abortion unless the expectant mother can prove her clump of cells lacks the potential to become a teenager with opinions about dad’s “style sense.” Why is this so bad? Probably wouldn't even be impressed by the sight of Fred Couples sauntering down the fairway in a bright and busy sweater vest.

 

Socratic method

Just bought a cup of coffee for $2.97. Paid with a five. The young employee entered $10 on the cash register. Realizing her mistake, she summoned a colleague for help. I thought maybe for some inscrutable reason the transaction had to be voided but, no, it was just that she was now confused about how much change I deserved: garbage in, garbage out.

They discussed the problem in my presence. It was fun to mark the Eureka expressions when I suggested they subtract five dollars from whatever the register indicated. Seven-oh-three? Ok, then, two-oh-three, right? (Didn't want them to think I was pulling a fast one.) "You're so smart!" one of them commented. I put a dollar in the tip jar and swaggered off.

You know you're old when you think the young are not going to be able to keep the world going. Somehow, they will. Maybe one of those kids puzzling at the register will be president! The little episode reminds me of the following clip from The Howard Stern Show.

 

 

 

 

 

Current events

Apparently Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. I'll never understand why there should be a conspiracy of silence surrounding such events. Just for the Internet record, however, I'm on Chris Rock's side. The job description of "Oscar host" includes directing jokes at individual members of the assembled elite. You shouldn't be subjected to physical danger just because you've punched in, unless the job is low-paying.

Plus, I don't subscribe to this whole man-must-protect-the-honor-of-his-lady code. We're all packing now, boys and girls. If a 21st-century chick is that sensitive about her alopecia, she can resort to violence on her own behalf. Should be obvious to feminists.

Lol, I wanted to check the spelling of "alopecia." After one stroke, Google guesses "Amazon," but at "al" it knows where I'm headed. 

Domestic issues

 

Making my valentines a roast with onion, potatoes, and carrots for supper—originally planned for the Super Bowl but the day got away from us, I mean from me. The house is full of the good smell and news of troop movements on the Ukrainian frontier. Then 11-year-old arrives home from school.

Her: What's that smell?

Me: The roast we didn't have last night. It's in the oven.

[Silence]

Me: Smells good, huh?

Her: It smells like something, I'll give you that.

She gets her protein from peanut butter. Also on the domestic front, I googled today, for the obvious reason, "Minneapolis recycling peanut butter containers," and was soon reading, here:

Food containers, like those for yogurt, peanut butter or spaghetti sauce should be pretty well cleaned out, but it doesn't have to be perfect (95 percent is good, Kish said). (This is mostly because humans have to do some of the sorting and that food gets gross.)

I'm afraid this is like an Escher sentence in the respect that it has the form of a precise and meaningful speech act without being particularly helpful. Does "95 percent" refer to the part of interior surface area that is clear of food residue? It's weird, in that case, that peanut butter containers are grouped with those for yogurt and spaghetti sauce, which with a rinse and a swish easily meet the standard. A peanut butter jar is in a different category. You can devote to them a lot of time and material without getting to 95 percent, a circumstance that must detract from the marginal utility of recycling them. Is it ecologically sound to use a quart of water and your least serviceable sponge to get the Jif jar in the neighborhood of 95 percent?

If I knew this Kish guy, I think I'd give him an ultimatum: just 50 percent for peanut butter, or it's going in the trash. 

Sports desk

We Packer-haters are all headline writers for a tabloid paper today.

"Niners jab Pack, Rodgers!"

"Rodgers Never Had A Shot!"

You hate to see it. 

Memento mori

Toured a Memory Care Unit this morning, I wish just for the hell of it, and the experience may have operated on me like a subliminal memento mori as I just realized that, upon returning home, I served my kids the traditional Lutheran funeral lunch: ham sandwiches on little buttered buns (the kind that taste slightly sweet with a dusting of flour on top), in this case an unrealistically constrained selection of pickles and olives and other relishes, jello "salad," and a cookie—they're not old enough yet for coffee, no matter how weak it is. 

Sorry girls, no marshmallow topping on the "salad," this was merely a simulation inspired, additionally or alternately, by the news that Louie Anderson died today. I'll be in need of the Memory Care Unit myself when I forget his TV debut with Johnny Carson. He walks out on the stage, allows everyone to take in the sight of him, begins, "Sorry I can't stay long, I'm between meals." 

"I went to McDonald's so all the statistics have changed." 

Friendly family competition

 

In Scattegories, the letter was "f" and for "reasons to be late" younger daughter writes, "Fat, so couldn't run fast." Another category in the same round was "ways to say yes." Older daughter writes, "F yeah!" I check to make sure she didn't spell it out, then deny her a point on the ground that "F" is spelled "eff." Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat.

She hits back when the category is "TV shows from before you were born," chortling that "Dad has no options!" They laugh uproariously. The two of them collude to vote down some of my sketchier answers and the older daughter wins the game. F.

Good riddance to 2021

This is pretty funny, but I think the apostrophe is misplaced. The inability to turn off one's inner copy editor must be a source of the psychological condition called anhedonia. 

It's funny because of two different senses of the word "sentence." Get it? Can't turn off my inner pedant, either.

Since it's the last day of the year, traditionally a time for a reflective backwards gaze, I should say that this was the year I learned it's not a penalty to tackle a guy by jerking him to the ground by the wad of hair hanging out the back of his helmet.

I have to thank my first dog for everything else I learned this year. When it's below about 15 degrees F., everyone else outside is also accompanied by a dog. Relatedly, I've lived in south Minneapolis for 40 years and it was in Year No. 40 that I fixed in my mind the fact that Pillsbury Avenue is parallel with and one block east of Pleasant Avenue, not the other way around. 

Why are the Rutgers Scarlet Knights playing in a bowl game on the day before New Year's? Since they were 5-7, 2-7 in the Big Ten, it must be on account of their unblemished record in nonconference games. Yes, I see now that they beat perennial powers Temple and Delaware as well as Syracuse, another 5-7 team, which apparently gave them the tie breaker for a Gator Bowl invitation over the Orangemen. 

I'm walking the dog while it's still above zero and the first national semifinal hasn't started. Happy New Year!

I hear America singing

Gomer Pyle goes to Washington, signs up for Twitter

When politicians are unintentionally funny, it's often not benign, which is why the Twitter feed of Sen. Chuck Grassley, the 88-year-old Iowa Republican, deserves recognition. Yesterday, he tweeted:

Just spent 45 mins finding out why I don’t hv history channel Negotiations btwn 4 channels incl history & Direct tv Results: if I want history channel my bill go fr $65 to $99 I’m not paying $34 for history ch when not much history /or should I change from Direct to DISH??

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) December 11, 2021

This caught my attention and has spurred me to collect a small miscellany of the senator's social media work. His dissatisfaction with the History Channel is a theme but let's try to keep this positive by paying particular attention to objects of his affection, like Dairy Queen:

 

Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is good place for u kno what

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) November 3, 2014

I don't want to reveal too much about myself, but, reading this, it seems to me sufficiently cryptic as to suggest an inside joke among boys at school on the Monday morning after the Saturday night that something went down in the DQ parking lot. That must be part of why it's funny.  On the day he tweeted this the senator was 81 and I'm fairly confident the "u kno what" refers to soft serve ice cream. About a year later he tweeted, self-referentially:

 

I'm at the Jefferson Iowa DairyQueen doing "you know what" !!!

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) October 16, 2015o

One of his constituents replied: "Whoa! Whoa! What happened to Windsor Heights?" I've researched it, and Windsor Heights is in the exurbs of northwestern Des Moines, whereas Jefferson is around 45 miles west of Ames. The senator gets around Iowa, but he's also a man of the world, and an ambassador for Twitter:

 

Welcome to Twitter Pope Benedict. U will find it useful and interesting

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) December 3, 2012

Couple of hip eldsters working their thumbs. But you can't take the boy out of Iowa farm country for long:

Fred and I hit a deer on hiway 136 south of Dyersville. After I pulled fender rubbing on tire we continued to farm. Assume deer dead

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) October 26, 2012

 

If you want to keep up with the Iowa geography lesson, Dyersville is in the east central part of the state, about 30 miles west of the Mississippi River town of Dubuque. The senator soon appended:

@ChuckGrassley Followers legitimately asked about condition of dear that attacked our Prius I didn't hv a flashlight to check on critter

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) October 27, 2012

 

Which inspired another of his constituents to create a Twitter account, "Deer in Iowa," just so s/he could reply, "I'm alive and well but a little sore, because that was most definitely not a Prius." Here is probably my favorite specimen of the senator's constituent service via Twitter:

 

If u lost ur pet pidgin /it’s dead in front yard my Iowa farm JUST DISCOVERED here r identifiers Right leg Blue 2020/3089/AU2020/SHE ///LEFT LEG GREEN BAND NO PRINTED INFO. Sorry for bad news

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) September 19, 2020

What some people call "haiku." The senator's style is inimitable. If he ever tweeted something impolitic, it would be impossible to blame a staffer. Like the Bible, the story of Senator Grassley's Twitter feed commences sublimely:

 

I now h v an iphone

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) February 13, 2012

It has a flashlight, senator. For next time you might want to check on a wounded critter in the night. 

Sportz talk

Heard by chance on the car radio this morning some Wisconsin sports talk. Two guys competing with each other to be more scornfully dismissive than the other of the local team's effort. In their eagerness the Badgers are guilty of every sin, including mutually exclusive ones. It's sort of like Fox News. The new variant is a fake! But if Trump were president he'd have a vaccine for it! The vaccines don't work!

#schadenfreude

Wisconsin lost four football games (so far) this season—to Penn State, Michigan, Notre Dame, and Minnesota. They've got a nice club, but, assuming they want to take a step up and join the elite, they're going to have to find a way occasionally to beat a perennial power. 

#skiumah    

 

Report card

My fifth grader came home with her report card for the first quarter today. I scanned it up and down but no grade for Critical Race Theory. I don't think Drag Queen Story Hour is a thing either because I just asked her and she doesn't even know what a drag queen is. Fifth grade! The home environment here is fairly sterile. I was counting on the schools but apparently it's all math, science, language arts, blah, blah, blah. 

Mathing

At supper, I asked the kids if they had any jokes and was rewarded with:

Why are math books depressed?

They have so many problems.

Volunteered by fifth grader. Fortunately, eighth grader later in the evening reported being over challenged by one such problem, which spared me the agony of watching either election returns or a dull World Series game, the outcome of which (I'm talking about the ballgame only) did not interest me in the least. She was supposed to calculate the area of a regular hexagon that's 20 centimeters on a side.

I hemmed and hawed embarrassingly for a couple of minutes. In my defense, she had the advantage of stewing about it for 15 minutes, or more likely 15 seconds, before submitting the problem to dad and expecting instant insight. My first idea was to think of the hexagon as being inscribed within a rectangle, then subtracting the areas of four identical right triangles at the corners of that rectangle. But what is known about the triangles? Only that their hypotenuse is 20 cm and their angles 30º--60º--90º. That's enough, but it's a trigonometry problem, and her class is geometry. I asked whether the phrase "cosine of thirty degrees" meant anything to her and got the gaze I associate with a prizefighter regarding his opponent while the referee gives instructions before the fight. 

I could see from the other problems that the lesson seemed to be "applications of the Pythagorean Theorem," and what ended up working was to carve up the hexagon into triangles. She knew that the interior angles were all 120º—goes up by 180º for every side added, so 540º for a pentagon (108 per angle), 720º for a hexagon (120 per angle), &c. The "spokes" bisect these angles, so the resulting triangles have to be equilateral:

We don't have right triangles yet, but each equilateral triangle can be divided into two identical right triangles that look like this: 

The area of these right triangles, each one-twelfth of the hexagon, is given by the product of half the base and the height. Half the base is 5. She knew how to use the Pythagorean Theorem to find h:

10² + h² = 20²------->h = √300 = 10√3.

So the area of each right triangle is 50√3 and the area of the whole hexagon is (12)(50)(√3), or 600√3 sq cm. She endured me pointing out that the same strategy can be used to derive a general formula for the area of a regular hexagon with the length of a side equal to s, for the triangles then look like:

And, by the Pythagorean Theorem:

(s/2)² + h² = s²------>h² = s² - (s/2)² = s² - s²/4 = 3s²/4----->h = s√3/2.

The area of each right triangle is then half the base (s/4) times the height (s√3/2), which equals s²√3/8. Since the regular hexagon is made of 12 of these right triangles, the general formula for its area is:

12 s² √3/8 = (3/2) (s²) (√3). 

As to the so-called election "results," I now sleep in camo and have loaded my weapons into the minivan. I assume we'll be marching on Richmond but am awaiting specific instructions from Soros and Hillary. 

Happy Halloween

My youngest with her trick-or-treat running mate from next door. The older one spurned Halloween in order to lie on the couch, clicking between the World Series and the Vikings. Loving her is like loving myself.

St. Augustine's views on the depravity of children have been frequently denounced but then comes Halloween and one of his critics who can't be home in the evening leaves a pail of candy on the front step along with written instructions to "take just one." I watched and listened as a little boy, escorted by his dad, walked  up to the pail, peered in, with disappointment declared it to be empty. His dad suggested it would be "really cool" if he dropped in a few of his candies, so that it wouldn't be empty for the next trick-or-treater.

"No," said the little boy, "I don't want to do that."

Table talk

[13-year-old, at the end of a rant, adduces the final proof of the “immaturity” of her tablemates in a certain class]: Today, they spent 10 minutes fighting over a pencil.

10-year-old sister: Was it long with a sharp point and big eraser?

Signs

I took this pic while walking to a coffeeshop this morning. Not sure, but I think the incongruous details may be attributed to the wit of a homeless person? It looks like someone has "decorated" their parlor along the 35W sound wall with stolen or discarded signs advertising for the Remodelers Showcase of Homes. This way to Elegantly Upgraded House Number 26!

Still hittin it hard

Last night around 9 o’clock I made myself a cup of instant coffee and while stirring in a splash of milk thought to myself, “It’s 8 in the morning somewhere, damnit.” If you’ve ever wondered whether I’m the same hard-charging bad boy you may have known 30 or more years ago, I think you have your answer.

Life in these United States

Anticipating a message from my rural relatives to the effect that their livestock is infested with worms and the only thing available to treat it is the COVID-19 vaccine.

Sammy says

Friends, relatives, anyone within range:

Do not listen to Tucker Carlson. Listen to Sammy. Vaccines work. If you haven't, get vaccinated. 

Can't help but notice that the visible replies seem more interested in ancillary matters:

1) How the f do people get invited to orgies?

2) LinkedIn usually.

Sammy, the voice of reason on vaccine efficacy; his repliers, voices of perplexity and experience in regard to orgy attendance. Don't try and tell me Twitter is a wasteland.

Reminiscing on the Fourth of July

While trying to verify that our favorite bakery is open on the Fourth, I saw the above graphic on their Facebook page, and it reminded me of conversations overheard at the kitchen table more than 50 years ago. My dad would be explaining to my mom how to get somewhere she wanted to go.

MY  MOM: Which side of the street is it on?

MY DAD: That would depend, Yvonne, on which direction you're travelling.

MY MOM: Why must you be so difficult and haughty? I only want to know which side of the street it's on.

MY DAD: Well, if the store across the street is on "the right-hand side," then it's on "the left-hand side." [He achieves the quotation marks with the inflection of his voice.]

MY MOM: Was that so hard? Thank you!

MY DAD: [Reads newspaper.]

MY MOM: [Drinks coffee.]

 

It would be great if weekends were made for Michelob

Over the weekend—Saturday—I proposed to out-of-town guests that I drive them around, showing them the sites. Was there any place they were particularly interested in seeing? Yes, the Mall of America! I talked them out of that and instead we went to Minnehaha Falls and the Sculpture Garden, both of which were also on their list. After they'd left, I did something by myself for the first time ever: held an umbrella over a dog while he took a crap in the rain. I would have memorialized the event with an Instagram photo, but I had the leash in one hand and the umbrella in the other. 

Then, yesterday, I helped my sister empty out our dad's old house in preparation for an estate sale—he's moved to an assisted living facility. It's sort of sad to come upon mementos of me that my parents thought to preserve, like report cards now close to 50 years old. They weren't even that great but I guess mom and dad were proud? An upside to what the whitecoats call "mild to moderate cognitive decline" might be that you are not up to the task of noticing that high hopes for your offspring appear to have been affected by gravity. What's the last line of that Melville story?—

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

This is a test

In addition, I don't know what to make of a person who says:

Everything I say is a lie.

If it's true, it's false; and an answer, by virtue of being right, is wrong. 

Perhaps for no good reason, the made-up gameshow conundrum reminds me of an actual test question I had in junior high Health:

Marijuana comes from:

A. Indian hemp plant

B. Flowering top of Indian hemp plant

C. Both A and B

D. Only A

E. Only B

The author of this question was also my Sex Education teacher. Don't know if that explains anything. As I remember it, the question was toward the end of the test, so kids came to it at different times depending on how fast they were working, and the silent test-taking vibe in the room was intermittently interrupted by laughter as first this kid and then that one realized that the teacher was, you know, daft. In laughing about it with my sister, I said I'd answered C—"clearly the best option." She said the teacher should have included a sixth choice:

F. Only C

62, woke and with-it

To prove that White men in their 60s can be woke and with-it, I've started fasting each day from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. This is not just a Lenten thing. No nothing during those hours, a full quarter of my life. Nutella, Oreos, vegetables, animal products (including ice cream and beef tongue tacos from Taco Taxi), nonalcoholic beverages—all strictly forbidden, I need to "cleanse." 

Also, thinking of becoming a Buddhist even though I have ugly feet and don't like sandals.

Gericatric

Here's our good boy enjoying his sunny spot on Easter. You can't tell, but he's 18, give or take, and blind, which has affected his mobility. He doesn't do stairs, and there have been accidents. The front porch now has everything he needs and he's consigned to it at night. I'm a stomach sleeper and miss his weighty presence on the back of my legs at night, but he seems content with his shrinking world. He eats, but I can tell when petting him that he's lost weight, and I'm afraid a bad day is coming. If it happens at the vet's, I'm imagining the ride home, one girl sobbing inconsolably and the other asking, "Now can we finally get a dog?"

Kid talk

Shooting baskets in the driveway with my older daughter when we are joined by the neighbor boy down the street. He's in third grade and plainly views himself as an interloper—just stands off to the side and only shoots when one of us passes him the ball. But it would be wrong to say he stands to the side shyly as he keeps up a steady stream of rather learned commentary, such as:

"I assume you realize that basketball would not be possible if it weren't for gravity, because you'd shoot and the ball would just float off into space."

This is not the kind of conversation we're used to and I try to rise to the occasion by pointing out that, while true, it's complicated by the fact that everything else, like the hoop and we ourselves, would also be floating off into space. It'd be a crazy game! After a brief but perceptible pause, he replies: "I know that." But I think he hadn't thought of it. Thus the pause, as he considered it for the first time, and I attribute "I know that" to his wounded intellectual pride. According to my own theory, I bested a third grader!

Inside, I cut cake and my girls argue loudly over which piece is bigger. I have to cut a third piece, a sliver, to add to one of the plates. Thankfully, I do not overcompensate and this settles it—evidently doesn't occur to them that by keeping up the argument they could get more and more cake, theoretically. I know, I know, I should let the younger one choose but only after the older one cuts. While eating, they discuss whether "hell" is a swear word. This is more like it! Younger girl argues that it can't be since it's contained within "hello" and: "They wouldn't make it so that you have to swear to say a regular word." Older girl rolls eyes. Immature, smart ass dad tries to think of a regular word with consecutive letters s-h-i-t and briefly wonders whether "base hit" qualifies since the "e" is silent. However,

• it's two words, not one; and
• to count against younger girl's theory, it would have to be pronounced "bās-shit."

So maybe she's onto something!

Brits watching Oprah

I'm among those who tend to regard with scorn all the interest bestowed upon Britain's Royal Family. Why they don't just do away with it is beyond me. Seems like it'd be better for everyone, including the Royals. I've sometimes imagined one of them as a young person, just old enough to have thoughts that keep them awake nights, so one is lying there in his perfect little palace bed thinking, "One life to live, and I have to be the freakin' Prince of Wales!"  No one else his age has to wear a necktie. I guess my scorn is polluted by a measure of sympathy. Not too much. We all have burdens to bear but usually Oprah isn't interested. 

There is, however, one aspect of the Blockbuster Interview that has captured my attention. That would be the reaction of Brits who tuned in to find out about the royal soap opera and were then swept away, not by the revelation that Meghan had contemplated suicide, but by the "adverts" on American TV. They have the NHS (National Health Service), what some of us call "socialized medicine," and as a result are not accustomed to meds being hawked during the commercial interludes. Their shocked social media commentary places us suddenly in the position of seeing ourselves as others see us: what we don't think twice about strikes them as sketch comedy of a particularly dark variety, the effect of course heightened by the fact that the human intelligence behind the ad is oblivious to its own joke. Here is a fairly representative specimen of British perplexity on this point; you can go here for more:

i’m watching the meghan interview recording and yet again i can’t understand why american tv ads are like “ask your doctor for…” or “tell your doctor…” why the fuck would you be the one to tell a DOCTOR what medicine to give you????? maybe i’m too european to get it but wtf

— agvta♑️ (@siIverskyy) March 8, 2021

Not sure I'd want to live without March Madness and Opening Day, but, on the other hand, during soccer matches she does not find herself fielding questions on ED from the young sports fans of the household.

Public Service Announcement

I have insurance, so this seemed like a lot for a colonoscopy and an office visit. When I called, word salad but no satisfactory resolution. I asked whether it was common to pay about $300 out of pocket for a common, recommended cancer screening. He did not have an opinion about that. Next, I proceeded to appropriate a Jim Gaffigan joke, word-smithed to fit the situation: "I would never have consented to be violated in that fashion if I knew it was also going to cost me $300.” Total effing silence. Evidently not a Gaffigan fan. Maybe it was my delivery. 

We'd had enough of each other, so I called the insurance company for another twenty minutes of elevator music before a really helpful person came on the line. "It's common to receive two claims, one for a 'facilities charge' and the other for the practitioner's service," she explained. "In the case of your colonoscopy, we received a claim for the facilities charge, which we paid, but we never received a claim for the actual doctor bill. If we received such a claim, of course we'd cover it. Similarly with the office visit. No claim received for the doctor bill." Armed with this information, I placed another call to 1-888-313-1492. Just my luck to talk to the same guy again! He still had dementia and ended up advising me to "contact the individual provider to straighten this out." I thought that's the activity I was currently engaged in! I guess it's my job to get different parts of their organization to communicate with each other so that I don't take it in the ass again? 

I reverted to a tactic that has sometimes worked for me in the past. I ignored the problem and hoped it would disappear. After a couple of weeks, I got an email from them. The new strategy had failed. I still owed the above impossible amount. In the interim, I had heard a story on NPR in which it was reported that, in America, it's rare to receive a medical bill that is both comprehensible and accurate. The former deficiency makes it hard to detect the latter deficiency. If consumers suspect something is wrong, they're almost certainly right. Yes, I had thought, but you need a sequel concerning the challenges consumers face when trying to explain to the submitter of the bill the errors in said bill. Anyway, yesterday I placed another call to 1-888-313-1492. It seems only this one guy works there! The sound of his voice reminded me of what a judge said about pornography*: beforehand, I would not have been able to describe it, but soon as I heard it I knew it was him. We started over. He talks with more people than I do and most likely only I realized we'd had the pleasure of being previously acquainted. I explained again my theory of the case, the "facilities charge" but not the "practitioner's charge," blah, blah, and this time, like a gift from above, he replied, "Ah, yes, I see what you mean, I will put those claims through and get this taken care of for you."

Possibly our first and second conversations occurred on his first day of flying solo on his new job? I feel like I made about $450 on one phone call and am wondering what to blow it on. I've heard of the sunk-cost fallacy, and that doesn't seem to apply, so maybe I do deserve about 30 boxes of cheap wine. Here's the thing about the cheap stuff: its alcohol content is the same. The end of this Public Service Announcement but here's Gaffigan:

* “I can’t define ‘pornography,’ but I know it when I see it.”

 

 

Notice

Wish I could remember what I had googled that caused me to stumble upon this. Not for nothing that some blogs get more traffic than mine.

Merry Christmas!

Highlights of a wasted day

 

 

    I enjoyed this interview, between New York Times staffer Sopan Deb and Zach Zarba, a veteran NBA referee. Here's a teaser, the most interesting exchange of the interview to me (aside from an amusing story about the young Kobe Bryant):

Deb: Do superstars get more leeway?

Zarba: I would disagree and go the other way and I would say that the majority of superstar players in our league don't get all the calls and don't get as many whistles as they deserve.

I guess I would have expected an official either to acknowledge that conventional wisdom about a star system is true, thereby winning points for "candor," or else to defend the honor of his profession by insisting that refs treat star players the same as everyone else. The view that star players get the shaft from officials therefore struck me as actually candid. From my long-ago experience umpiring ball games, I have an idea how this could be true without impugning anyone's good faith. I felt like my judgment could be affected by what I expected to happen, and that it was practically impossible not to have these expectations. For example, a batter hits a sinking line drive into the outfield. I think it's a hit for one second, two seconds—I can't suppress the thought—then the racing outfielder dives and gloves the ball at turf level: Was it a trap or a good catch? Well, from the instant the ball was hit, I'd been thinking: "can't be caught." It seems to me entirely possible that your perception of what actually happened can be colored by what you thought was going to happen—or, to put it another way, by what you thought was possible. It's not hard to see how such a psychological process operating in a good-faith referee might work against an athlete capable of defying expectations.

On the other hand, in the NBA the same officials are working games with the same players over and over again. Zach Zarba knows who is a star, right? Maybe if I had known that the diving player was the Kobe Bryant of outfielders, my expectation about what was going to happen would have shifted and the result of the headlong dive would look more like a good catch. Only thing I'm sure of is that referees are human, a point that comes to the fore when you talk to them, if Deb's conversation with Zarba is representative. 

****

Ten seconds of every hour devoted to social media is worth the callous on the tip of my scrolling finger. I know I won't get 59 minutes and 50 seconds back but here's the harvest from the other ten ticks, my candidate for Tweet of the Day:

 

don’t even bother clicking - I checked, they don’t show you the sandwich. https://t.co/X0fxToheAg

— hend amry (@LibyaLiberty) September 23, 2020

Jim Gaffigan

Embarrassing confession: until he went on his anti-Trump Twitter tirade, I wasn't a fan of comedian Jim Gaffigan. 

When I say "fan," I mean fan of his comedy. I think I either confused him with that Smarter-Than-a-Fifth-Grader guy or else placed him in the same "school" and therefore decided I wasn't interested. But then he let Trump have it and I became Gaffigan-curious. Having now spent a fair part of the afternoon on his You Tube channel, I conclude that he's funny, funny, funny. Clean, too: not much bad language, unlike in his tirade against Trump.

Speaking of bad language, I'm watching the Twins game as I type this, and either they have to pump up the volume on the piped-in crowd sound or else turn off the mics that hang down near the playing field. Dick Bremer felt obliged to apologize once and took a pass on several other opportunities. Oh my god! Two out, nobody on, Cruz up, and they walk him intentionally. Worked, too, as Rosario strikes out on two pitches. 

Anyway, Gaffigan. I am not a comedy theorist or anything, but my impression is that stand-up, being a public act, can achieve a sort of easy effect just by violating ordinary boundaries: saying stuff that usually can't be said in a crowd. Back in the day before it was okay to say "fuck" in public, comedians would walk out on stage and say "fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking fuck" and the crowd would howl with laughter. But it's only funny, if it's funny, because "you can't say that"—nevertheless, he did. Even funnier if she said it because then it's more of a violation. Or was more of a violation. Now you have to ratchet it up a bit, talk about masturbation or your romantic partner's pubic hair or something as not even Dick Bremer is much affected by "fuck." 

That obviously is not Gaffigan's thing. I wonder if he owes something to it, though. He wouldn't seem so funny if in the background there weren't a million practitioners of this other "brand." And then you come to find out it can be his brand too, when the topic is Trump. Here is my favorite installment to his rant:

Fuck Lou Holtz. Biden is Catholic in name only? Compared to who? How many abortions did trump pay for? How many women has he raped? How many times did pull the shit he did in Ukraine. Wake up. He's a crook and a con man.

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

First runner-up:

I know you hate snobs and elites I get it but look at Ivana and that douche bag Jerod. Think they are on your side? Do you think they've ever done a real days work in their lives. Wake up

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

His refrain is "wake up." Not knowing how to spell the names of the douche bags is unconscious perfection. 

The clip above is a compilation of his religion jokes—Catholicism, his own faith, providing the biggest target. Below, on eating at McDonald's. 

 

 

 

 

John Boorman's adventures

John Boorman is the English movie director best known, at least to me, for Deliverance. Reading up on him, I see that one of his other movies, Point Blank (1967), has like Deliverance been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry on account of being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." I know nothing about Point Blank beyond what I just read in Wikipedia: a crime thriller starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Carroll O'Connor (who would soon become famous as Archie Bunker), it was ignored on its release but later gained a cultish following.

Boorman also is the author of a memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy. If the following passage concerning one of his misadventures with Lee Marvin is representative, it must be a rollicking good read:

We had arrived together in Lee's Chrysler station wagon. He was staggering, drunk. I begged him to let me drive. "Fuck you." He drew back a fist. He had a whole repertoire of violent gestures, many of them cribbed from his hero, Toshiro Mifune. I tried to grab the keys, but he slashed me with his imaginary samurai sword. These were movie blows an inch short of your neck or chin. 

I snatched the keys and got into the driver's seat, the women in back. "Get in Lee." Another battle of wills. How could he meekly submit, this warrior, this conqueror? We pleaded with him. He stalked and staggered around the car, raining blows on it. Finally he found a way of saving face. He climbed up and crouched on the roof rack. Despite our entreaties, he would not come down. I decided to drive slowly down the length of the pier, hoping that the cool ocean air might sober him up. I stopped as we got to the public road. I got out. He snarled at me, would not get down. I was at my wits' end. The streets were deserted. I drove slowly down the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. Flashing lights in my rearview mirror—sirens. I pulled over. The patrolman approached the car, warily loosening his revolver holster. He looked up, then at me. "Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?"

The punchline is so good I almost forgot my amazement upon learning that Lee Marvin drove a Chrysler grocery–getter with a roof rack.

H/t Scott Shapiro, who retweeted John Frankensteiner's tweeted excerpt.

Hell's leading citizen

After seeing this picture somewhere, I took a few minutes to work up a composite of Hell's leading citizen: an outspoken bisexual Catholic lady who's devoted to her vibrator and drinks Chablis directly from the box.

His t-shirt says that coronavirus is God's judgment so maybe he should have added "old people with co-morbidities" to his list of degenerates.

Free advertising

Got out of my car and took a picture of this sign just so I could snottily observe that 35W and 1st Avenue are a block apart and parallel with each other. But now you know they're open (and their longitude). I also love how  the phone number was a faint after thought.

Since I'm having fun with their advertising campaign, here's some free publicity connecting with jillions of devoted readers: Hibachi Buffet is on Lake Street a block west of 35W. The sign was at 42nd Street & Bloomington Avenue, which is about three miles from there. I wonder how many of these signs they've stuck in the ground? 

I've never eaten at Hibachi Buffet but can vouch for the rice noodle soup at Pho Tau Bay, just on the other side of the KMart site. Once, as my daughter Claire prepared to salt her rice, the server grabbed the shaker right out of her hand and told her in Vietnamese to use soy sauce. So shocked that she reverted to her native tongue. Then, laughing at herself, but still somewhat agitated by what she'd almost witnessed, she set the soy sauce bottle in front of Claire and repeated herself, this time in English. Claire by now was sitting far back in the booth, bug-eyed. It was the first time anyone had objected to her ruining her rice.

She also puts chocolate syrup on orange sherbet. 

Laurie Kilmartin live tweets her mom's "facetime hospice"

 

Laurie Kilmartin is a comedian. The above is a specimen of her standup. She is also a writer for Conan and the author of two books, Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us and Dead People Suck. Regarding Sh*tty Mom, I assume it's autobiographical and that the title describes the contents. A year or two ago I happened to be in Magers and Quinn bookstore one afternoon when she was there to read from Dead People Suck. It's about her dad's final illness and the hospice experience she went through with him and the rest of her family as he was dying. I don't know how funny it is, but, judging from the selections she read that day, it's for sure funnier than it sounds, in a dark sort of way that appeals anyway to me. 

As her Twitter followers know, Kilmartin has for the last couple of weeks been conducting an encore performance as her mother lies dying of Covid-19 in a hospital. The efforts of her and her sister to persuade the hospital to let them visit their mom at the ICU have been the subject of news reports in the LA area. For the most part, however, she monitors her mom over Facetime while live tweeting her last days. Does that sound inhuman? It's the opposite. Too tedious to paste in  tweets so I'll just type a few of them:

Busy watching the Season 82 finale of "Mom"

Glad I only had two parents, I can't do this again

so. mom's heart rate is 30. that seems low!

My sister and I are both heartbroken that mom's last words to us were complaints about the nursing home and not about our appearance.

She is barely breathing but it would be great if she could awaken from all this and tell me to wash my robe.

GAH I tried to put my head on mom's heart and hit all the keys on the keyboard

Getting in our last 300 "I love yous"

When her mom died this morning, Kilmartin tweeted—

She died not at home, surrounded by people she'd never met #COVID

—and followed it up, a few minutes later, with:

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you throw hot coffee in the face of anyone not wearing a mask. 

Type "Laurie Kilmartin twitter" into Google if you want at least a hundred more "chapters" in this 21st-century art form.

Minnesota Lutheran lady speaks out from beyond

My mom has checked out of the hereafter in order to join the protests here on Earth.

Reading recommendations

People who know I like to read sometimes ask whether I have any book recommendations. Just two:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I read them aloud to my kids on the night before the big standardized tests, which I'm pretty sure is why they're both among the top 93%. 

Philippa Foot; George Clooney

This is too obscure to help in the event you one day go on Jeopardy, but I put it forward as an example of the (arguably) fun facts you can learn whiling away your life on social media.  Today someone posed on Twitter a question about a philosopher who deserves more renown. I suppose they know that a lot of their followers are philosophy professors or something. I'd at least heard of all the candidates mentioned in the replies, except for one: Philippa Foot. Now I've looked her up and it turns out she's the English philosopher who invented the Trolley Problem. You may have heard about it recently, in the context of discussions about the ethical distribution of scarce medical resources. In the Trolley Problem, Foot described a trolley heading down a track to which five people are tied. By throwing a switch, you can send the trolley down a different track where it will kill only one person. Foot was interested in why it seems you ought to throw the switch, thereby saving four lives, though at the same time almost all of us (I think) agree that you cannot kill someone in order to harvest organs that would save the lives of four desperately ill people. 

But that's not the fun fact. Philippa Foot was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. Her mother, Esther, was Cleveland's daughter, and was actually born in the White House on September 9, 1893, early in her dad's second term. Esther married some British military hotshot and their philosopher daughter was born in 1920. 

But maybe you are more interested in George Clooney. This is highly entertaining.

 

 

 

 

"A Jew Walks Into a Bar"

I think this short film—less than a half hour—is funny and oddly affecting. Watch it if you have 25 minutes of shelter-in-place time to spare.

The main character's opening joke, about maybe being in the wrong place, reminds me of a small incident from my life as an occasional fan of standup comedy. The VFW in Minneapolis's LynLake neighborhood used to have one standup night per month before all the craziness started. Once, arriving alone and early for the show, I took a seat at the back of the room—in case audience participation was a part of someone's act. After the room had begun to fill, this strikingly obese fellow took a seat by himself at the table adjoining mine. Our chairs were next to each other, and I was about to make small talk with him when he pulled out a notebook and began studying it: one of the performers? Sure enough, the show starts, and he's about the third comedian to take the stage. There's no "green room"; the comedians just walk up the aisle and mount the stage after being introduced. Most of them charge right up there, jump onto the stage, and shout something like "Good evening Minneapolis!" All energetic and fun. This guy is way too big for that. He lumbers down the aisle from his seat in the back, next to me. It seems to take him forever. Of course every eye is on him and it's easy to imagine what everyone is thinking: "My God! This guy is huge!" He finally gets to the stage and ascends with difficulty. Now he's finally at the microphone. The room has gone silent. Everyone is waiting for him to speak. He pauses, maybe for effect, like David Finklestein in "A Jew Walks Into a Bar," but it's also possible he's winded and has to catch his breath. And then he speaks.

He says, "No one ever asks me if they need a jacket."

How I pass the time in quarantine

You tell me now?

Culinary

 

This is funny—Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat from Virginia, posted to Instagram a tutorial on how to make a tuna melt. Although people who know me probably think I'm in no position to laugh. Jan Witkowski, for example, who commented recently on my post about the somewhat amusing activities of my neighbors. Jan was a Hennepin County colleague of mine for many years. Like my other mom, Jan thought I was "too thin" and would frequently slip me easy recipes for hearty meals she thought even I could make. I remember one of them was for "tuna casserole." You prepare a box of macaroni and cheese according to the directions on the back panel. We're not talking soul food mac and cheese: Kraft, with the orange dust. Then you add to it a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of tuna (Sen. Warner would not drain the tuna but I knew to do that). When it's all mixed together, you bake it in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes. Pretty easy, so one night I made it, but it wasn't very good. I remember hoping she'd never ask whether I'd tried it. She did, however, so I told her it was "okay" but "seemed a little dry." Jan thought for around a half a second and then, squinting at me, said: "Did you remember the soup?"

Three ingredients and I used only two of them! But I've never microwaved mayonnaise. Jan is to Eric as Sen. Harris is to Sen. Warner.

 

Mark—we need to talk. Call. Please. Your friend KDH.pic.twitter.com/IPGsT6cnjE

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) April 22, 2020

Normies

Since I've recently regaled my legions of readers with miniature disquisitions on Montaigne and Milton, here are some more ordinary pastimes, opinions, and observations.

A good dinner may be secured at McDonald's, brought home, and washed down with two cans of Miller Lite.

Around 11 on Sunday morning is a good time to have two fried eggs, toast with butter and jelly, two strips of bacon, lots of greasy hashbrowns, and several cups of black coffee, though with sugar and cream in the last one, for dessert.

If you go to a "nice" place for brunch, and order a Bloody Mary, it is apt to come with way more than you need or even want. I just want the vodka, the tomato juice, ice, spices, and something to stir it with, like a pickle. Everything else is unnecessary and distracting.

I think I maybe developed my opinions about Bloody Marys at the Poodle Club, a bar on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis. It has since burned down, but in the early-80s, when I first moved into the neighborhood, it had a weekend breakfast special: two eggs any style, two toast, and your choice of a Bloody Mary or a screwdriver—$1.99. This was almost forty years ago, but still, as you'd predict, the Bloody was not accessorized. The first fifty I ever had were at the Poodle. I had them at the bar with the eggs and  toast. On Saturday morning, the cigarette haze from Friday night had not lifted and was augmented by the smell of spilled beer on the floor. I'm not sure all the customers had been home. I remember once hearing the guy on the next stool tell the bartender he wanted "the special, with a screwdriver, hold the eggs, hold the toast, and keep them coming." The Poodle Club ambience got imprinted on my brain and associated with the idea of a Bloody Mary. When I finally had one somewhere else, and it came in a curvy glass with pepperoni and a radish. . . seemed sort of ridiculous.

It's odd that I have such strong opinions about food and drink but am not at all particular. Truest sentence my mom ever spoke was, "He's easy to cook for." 

Pretty good chance that history will adjudge Trump to have been a subpar president.

The best game is baseball.

A lot of people who vote reliably for the Democrats have an unduly dismissive attitude toward country music. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings: every one of them, beyond merely terrific. Probably others too, more current, but I don't know about them. I do like Nikki Lane.

When I talk to young people who like me prefer the Democrats, and there are a million of them around where I live, I find that their reasons aren't my reasons. With me, it's got nothing to do with yoga or the horrors of genetically modified plants in agriculture. Have they noticed, though, that the other side is depraved and completely whacko?  Nixon was a crook, Reagan an avuncular dunce, and George Shrub . . . wasn't avuncular. But look at their team now! Holy shit!

I think I've been channeling (subliminally till just this instant) a Twitter thread I saw in which people were challenged to confess their most "normie" opinion. So someone said they thought the Beatles were a good band. Someone else said with almost any band their best songs are the ones they did after their real fans accused  them of having sold out. Someone said they liked the Eagles, to which someone replied: "That's a bridge too far." Or maybe Cold Play was a bridge too far, I can't remember for sure. Some of the responses were pleasingly layered, such as (paraphrasing on all these that are inside quotes): "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a great work of classical music, although people who don't appreciate classical music agree." Naturally, I remember the food ones, like: "The parking lot at Olive Garden is usually packed as the unlimited garden salad is quite good." Another contribution: "Melted cheese elevates many dishes." I got into the thread because someone I follow, Jennifer Frey, offered, "Potato salad, lots of it." My opinion about potato salad is that, as with the Bloody Mary, it's too often too busy. You have to let the potatoes speak for themselves, like the vodka. Within reason though. At Stand Up Frank's, a bar in north Minneapolis, if you ordered a Bloody for yourself and a screwdriver for your friend, the bartender would put a straw in one drink and two straws in the other, so that you'd know which was which, not that it mattered. My normie about that was, if you must have two, have three, so that you won't even be able to find your car in the lot and therefore won't try to drive it. 

Home school schedule

I've gotten together with some of the other neighborhood parents and worked up an academic schedule for our kids while school is out. None of us is a professional educator, but we are doing our best in these strange times. Feel free to use it yourself, if you have kids who need to keep learning!

It's ambitious, but so far I've found that, once past Tuesday, I'm able to execute the plan. 

#LaughterTheBestMedicine

The caption for this pic, posted on social media, was something like, "While working from home it's important to preserve as much of the daily routine as possible."

In the same spirit, someone said he had built a gym in his basement, then joined, then never went.