Category Archives: humor

DAILY PHOTO: Headstone Sales in a Tallinn Market

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Taken in the summer of 2011

Taken in the summer of 2011

I can’t recall anywhere besides Estonia that I’ve seen headstones for sale in a run-of-the-mill market. It was a market with green grocers, florists, hardware vendors, sellers of trinkets, and headstone engravers. This raised many questions for me. Who buys the headstone? Does one buy one’s own? If so, isn’t there a risk of narcissism in the engraved epitaph? If someone else buys it, is it something one would buy for a loved one or a mortal enemy? I can see it going either way. If it’s for a loved one, one probably has it made after that person’s death, but if it’s for an enemy, one gets it made and delivered beforehand–perhaps directly onto the unassuming melon of said enemy.

Anyone who understands the Tallinn headstone market, feel free to enlighten me.

The IT Revolution & Crises of Self-Importance

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Source: Ed Poor at Wikipedia.en

Source: Ed Poor at Wikipedia.en

If you’re as old as I (no, I’m not Wilford Brimley old by any stretch), you remember the days when you couldn’t count on getting a hold of another person instantaneously. Incidentally, the phrase “get a hold of” is apropos. Think of other times one might use those words. If one were a practitioner of judō (i.e. a judōka), one might use that phrase when talking about seizing an opponent in anticipation of throwing them.

Herein lies an intriguing irony. The person calling is dominating the called. That is, they are writing a check on one’s time that they believe to be cashable whenever the hell they please. Therefore, one might expect the person receiving random calls at random times to suffer a diminution of self-esteem. They are, after all, at the beck-and-call of some localized bit of humanity. However, on the contrary, the perfection of the electronic-leash has spawned a growing field of narcissists.

The reasoning that drives this plague of narcissism is as follows, “I am so important that some–albeit tiny–part of the universe is at risk of collapse if I’m not ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. In other words, I am a localized superman[/superwoman.]”

The thing is, you’re really not. The deflating truth is that none of us is so important that any portion of the universe will collapse if we are unplugged from the hive for a few hours– try it.

Now, you may be saying, “Look, I have my phone on all the time, and I talk on it much of the day, but I’m not one of those loud people whose conversation lays waste  to the solitude of people around me everywhere I go.”

The thing is, you really are. Those annoying bastards that you “hurrumph” at when you’re not on the phone–that’s you when you are on it. You make a connection at a distance and, like all others, become oblivious to your immediate environment. At best you are a destroyer of solitude; at worst you are a danger to yourself and others.

There’s No Such Thing as a Silly Question? LIAR!

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I’m shocked by how easily a piece of “common wisdom” can become accepted despite being patently and demonstrably wrong. The best example may be, “There’s no such thing as a silly question.”

Oh, yeah:

“Do you wear spurs when you ride ostrich in the avian rodeo?”

“If you had to wear shoes made of cheese, of which cheese would you want them made?”

“Do you have purple-glazed doughnuts in honor of the St. Crispin’s Day unicycle rally?”

“May I twirl my way into an eternity of dandelion lunacy?”

I can do this all day.

Are you seriously going to tell me that none of the above questions is at least a little bit silly. As a person of silliness, it enrages me… well maybe not so much “enrages” as has no discernible effect… when people deny the potential for silliness. Folks, it’s all around us. So, the next time you say that there is no such thing as a silly question, my response is, “Do you really think you can make that stick like the Archbishop’s bugger to the side of an albino wino?”

FLASH FICTION: Bob Newhart with a Gun

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Attribution: Jim Wallace (Smithsonian Institution) Bob, Bob! Why do you want to kill me? Bob.

Attribution: Jim Wallace (Smithsonian Institution)
Bob, Bob! Why do you want to kill me? Bob.

In my dream I remember running, running away from Bob Newhart, a revolver gripped tightly in the comedic actor’s hand. I don’t know whether it was supposed to be Bob Newhart the person, or if my subconscious thought that Bob Newhart was the best actor to convey life’s dark comedy. I knew why Newhart was chasing me.  I worked in a machine shop and had a less than reliable partner who had apparently made a wild promise that our little shop could never deliver upon. It must have been important to Newhart. So I understood why Bob Newhart was mad and I accepted it. If it was me, I might be homicidal too—because I just rage that way sometimes. Still, I didn’t want to die because I was associated with a dodgy rogue. I guess that’s what the dream was about.

There was a kid with me–not my kid–at least I don’t think the dream ran that far afield. I’m willing to accept that my subconscious would see me as a machinist—a career unlike any in my bookish résumé. Furthermore, I can fathom that my subconscious imagining Bob Newhart wanting to kill me with a snub-nosed revolver—even if for something that was not my fault. However, I can’t imagine my subconscious thinking I would have a kid.

Anyway, Newhart saw us as he was maniacally driving a car toward the machine shop. We, the kid and I, were walking down the sidewalk away from the shop, having just closed up for a glorious summer afternoon in the way of slackers everywhere. I don’t know where my shady partner was, the unreliable always escape unscathed—maybe that’s what the dream was about.

I saw the murderous gleam in Newhart’s eye, and turned to run back to the shop. I grabbed the kid by the arm and tugged him in that direction—maybe I do have some paternal instinct. My plan was to get into the shop, lock the door, and call the unreliable person to come and get shot by an enraged Bob Newhart. However, in the panic of thinking that Newhart, who had done a bootlegger-180 with his car and was now driving straight for us, was going to crush us under the car, I forgot to lock the door behind us. (Or maybe there are no working locks in dreamland.) Locking the door was, after all, the one good part of the plan. (I don’t know what I had been thinking about calling the unreliable person, unreliable people never show up when you call them–they show up at 2:30am on a Sunday morning wanting to borrow $20 and a condom.)

Anyway, Newhart parked legally, but when he got out I saw the snub-nosed revolver in his hand, framed perfectly in the window in a way that can only happen in dreams. I ushered the kid around a partition wall that separated the small storefront from the shop beyond.

Newhart was walking like one of those geriatric mall-walkers, or like a man who’d drunk a 32 oz. cola and driven six hours only to get to a rest-stop restroom that was probably locked. When Newhart threw open the door, the little bell tinkled cheerfully—the bell clearly didn’t know what was about to go down. As I rounded the partition wall, pushing the kid into the darkened shop, I picked up a steel pipe. Despite the perennial advice that one should never bring a steel pipe to a gunfight, I felt a cool calm wash over me. (Maybe it was that I knew gun-toting men Newhart’s age usually shot blanks in their dreams.) Anyway, I hid in wait.

Then I woke up. I’ll never know whether Newhart shot me or whether I bludgeoned one of America’s beloved comedic elder statesmen to death with a steel pipe. Maybe both would have happened. Maybe neither. I know if I go back to sleep, the dream won’t resume. They never do. I’ll never know. Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe that’s the point of the dream.

DAILY PHOTO: Trabant 601-E with Optional Roof Keg

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Taken in the Summer of 2011

Taken in the Summer of 2011.

It’s a monumental challenge for a police officer to spot an open container unless the offender happens to be driving the wrong way down the sidewalk backwards while asleep, or one’s car is wrapped around a telephone pole upside-down. However, if you get the Keg-o-matic 2000 dispensing system installed on your car, are you really guilty of having an open container? The hose that attaches the device to one’s lips is the only part actually inside the car.

NOTE: This blog neither condones nor celebrates driving while intoxicated. I just thought this car, which I saw in rural Hungary near the border with Slovakia, was amusing.

The Continuing Saga of This Old House

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I have an old house. Those of you forty-five and over will find this disconcerting as your age is equal to or greater than that of my old house. It’s disconcerting for me because the house was still in its infancy when I was born. As I’m currently trying to whip it into shape to sell or rent it out, I’m discovering the downside. We didn’t buy a newer house because I was told they were popping them up so fast in the area and taking short-cuts that sometimes ended in tragedy–like burying construction debris in the backyard so that it formed a ticking time-bomb for a sinkhole to swallow up unsuspecting children at inopportune moments–as opposed to when you want them to be swallowed whole by the Earth.

Given that the life expectancy of a house–theoretically–is as long or longer than a person, what makes my house old? It’s the fact that half the time I have to get custom replacement parts because “they just don’t do it like that anymore.”

Our built-in wall oven is tiny by today’s standards. People buying houses in the late 60’s were often children of the Great Depression. They, therefore, didn’t know that a respectable house had to have an oven big enough to prepare Thanksgiving turkey and all the accouterments for the Second Infantry Division. This creates an intriguing problem. If I want an oven that will fit our cut-out, we have to pay $2,500 because they are only made by German companies with names like “Gruber & Kafarfignugen” for tiny apartments in Amsterdam or Munich–and thus have to be sailed over special order.  Or I can buy a new style wall oven for $800, but then I have to pay the other $1,700 to a carpenter to modify our cabinets.

They just brought two brand-spanking new exterior doors to my house yesterday that I had bought the day before. Then they took them away because: a.) they were the wrong size (somewhere along the line someone decided that  four of the inches of width were extraneous, but we needed one extra inch of height.) I understand the height thing, Americans have been getting taller in the post-War period. However, Americans have also been getting fatter; so why are the doors getting narrower?) b.) they have no idea how to install the door frames because the construction methods were different 45 years ago, and they only know how to replace doors on new homes. QUESTION: “Why are people replacing doors on new houses so much more than on old houses that the company doesn’t even think to consider one might have an older house?”

It’s true, in some cases the old ways were crazy. We have two fluorescent light fixtures in the kitchen, one was original and one is newer. The old one was designed to never be taken down by an amateur–I think the electrician’s union was in cahoots with the lighting manufacturer’s union, because the design was truly crazy and not the least bit customer friendly. The new one could safely be put up and taken down by a bright five-year old. However, the downside of this all this user-friendliness is that the “professionals” often don’t seem to know more than we do about any situation that is the least bit out of the ordinary because they are used to using the same customer-friendly products.

One thing has gone smoothly so far, and that’s the electrical bit. At least my house was born of the circuit-breaker era. I’ll try to end on that up-beat note. I could use it.

Google Thinks They Know Me, We’ll See!

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I sent an email to my wife asking if she wanted to have pizza tonight. Lo and behold, there was a Gmail ad for Dominos by the time I hit send. From here on out, I’m using the code “murder the butler” in place of “buy pizza.” I don’t want Google knowing that I’m carbo-loading.  I have shame. Find me an ad for that, bitches.

In related news:

“watch TV” now equals “watch gay porn”

“have a beer” now equals “fire up the crack pipe”

“masturbate” now equals “file a fraudulent insurance claim”

 

You think you know me, Google? We’ll see.

 

 

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING: Presidents of Wild Facial Hair Coin Set

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As I’m eating breakfast this morning, I noticed this ad among the newspaper flyers.

Notice Grover Cleveland's two different styles of facial hair (for authenticity, as he served two non-consecutive terms.)

Notice Grover Cleveland’s two different styles of facial hair (for authenticity, as he served two non-consecutive terms.)

This spurred two thoughts. First, is there really a pent-up demand for coins with these three Presidents on them. I realize that, besides Abraham Lincoln, we don’t have any “money Presidents” who’ve made bold choices in facial hair (only with wigs), but is that really enough. I remembered the boondoggle in which Congress required the Treasury to mint coins faced with all the deceased Presidents on them (FYI- that’s the only way Jimmy Carter will ever be on a coin unless he kills an alien invader with his Habitat-4-Humanity claw hammer.) Anyway, they minted all these coins, but there was no demand for them–precisely because banks were afraid that tellers would get shot for trying to pass on a coin with Benjamin Harrison’s face on it. People won’t accept a Grover Cleveland coin as money (regardless of whether he sports the Hulk Hogan fu manchu) any more than they would a coin with Justin Bieber on the front and a poodle on the back.

Then, of course, I realized that these seem to be the very same coins put out by the U.S. Treasury. Which brings me to my second point, you can buy 8 of these $1 coins for 8 dollars. Normally, that isn’t called “buying” but, rather, “making change.” So it looks like the Treasury held a fire sale to get rid of all these coins. Congratulations, our Congress may be the first to have mastered reverse-seigniorage. For those of you who weren’t economics majors, seigniorage is revenue that is normally earned by the government as a maker of money. For example, if it costs $0.16 to make a quarter, the government makes $0.09 in seigniorage. Of course, if you sell the coin for enough less than face value… well, you can do the math. (FYI -This is why there is a movement afoot to eliminate pennies, because it costs $0.0124 to mint these $0.01 coins.)

You’ll note that the government has been trying for years to replace the iconic paper dollar with a coin. However, they always seem to blow it by either a.) making the coin the exact same dimensions as a quarter, b.) being super PC and putting someone on the coin that [fairly or unfairly] no one recognizes as money-worthy (e.g. Sacajawea, Susan B. Anthony, William Howard Taft, or Chester Arthur), c.) doing both of the above.

Granted, there are economic reasons for wanting to replace the paper dollar with a coin. The dollar is such a rapidly circulating denomination that it wears out quickly. Travelers will note that most countries have coins for the denomination that represents a roughly similar level of purchasing power to the dollar. However, I think there’s a more insidious reason for the drive to dollar coinage, and it may–in fact– be the reason that all attempts to date have thus failed. There are always movements to try to put strip clubs out of business. The coin dollar is just one more attempt. Frequenters of strip clubs cannot tuck a coin into a g-string, and if they start tucking $5 bills the average customer won’t be  able to stay for long. Thus, it’s those who enjoy strip clubs that keep the demand for the paper dollar high, and they are winning in their fight against the Moral Majority–or whatever we are calling the group that tries to dictate morality to the rest of the world while knoodling their secretaries behind their wife’s back as god apparently intended.

A Postal Solution & A Related Rant

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I heard on the news yesterday that the US Postal Service was backtracking on its plan to stop Saturday mail service. It turns out that they need approval from Congress to make such a change. Of course, it’s hard to get Congress to agree on anything, but–adding to the challenge–Congress is not really familiar with the concept that one must have money in order to spend money. When the Postmaster General testified before the House that the Post Office could not keep operating as is because they weren’t taking in as much money as they were spending, the entire chamber was seen to simultaneously tilt their heads like the RCA dog. The House’s best and brightest was heard to inquire, “Why don’t you just use other people’s money?”

At any rate, I have a solution for the Postal Service. Instead of offering junk mailers a bulk rate discount, don’t. Here me out. I know what you’re thinking, if it wasn’t for junk mail there’d be no mail. Instead of charging Ida Mae Bludgeonsworth–an octogenarian from Beaver Springs, Montana who is the last remaining sender of private letters–half a dollar and charging Citibank ten cents, you flip it.  Yes,  it’s true that if one increases the cost to the credit card companies to spam us to, say, $3 then revenues won’t increase (remember discussion of Laffer Curves from Macroeconomics? I didn’t think so. The idea is that as you raise tax rates eventually you will reach a point where revenues decline because people will not feel an incentive to work anymore. There is great controversy about where we are on the Laffer curve at any moment, but that such a tipping point exists is undeniable–i.e. how many hours a week would you work if you paid zero income taxes? How many, if you paid 100% of income to taxes?) So revenues would likely decline (or your interest rate would shoot up), but if one cut out junk mail, the Post Office would only have to deliver to my house once a week–a substantial savings.

I know it’s always hard to see a career field go the way of the dodo. We have great sympathy for the typewriter repairmen and personal travel agents of this world, but it may be better to rip the bandage off swiftly.

You may wonder why I harbor ill-will towards the makers of junk mail? The person I particularly hate is the evil genius who decided to start putting plastic mock credit cards in each piece of credit card junk mail. Up until then, I didn’t even need to bother with opening envelopes, I could simply drop the junk mail into the shredder whole. Now I have to be bothered with either a.) opening the letter and extracting the shredder-killing  blockage, b.) purchasing an industrial strength chipper-shredder. I think I should be able to charge junk mailers for my time for making it such a pain to discard their “pre-approved” offer–which has to be shredded because it is half filled out with information they shouldn’t even have and is thus a case of fraud waiting to happen.

TODAY’S RANT: DIY Home Improvement Videos, or Vishnu Wallpapering

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So, I’ve been doing a lot of home improvement lately. My life, largely divided between having my nose to either a laptop or a book, has prepared me to  find out how to do any task in record time–in theory. Give me a few minutes and I can find out how to–in theory–install a cardiac shunt. That’s from a starting point of not knowing what a “cardiac shunt” is or even if it’s a real thing. The problem is that this background has in no way prepared me to interact with the physical universe. (So while I can find out everything one needs to know about cardiac shunts in a short period of time, and even probably understand [or look up] all of the arcane language in the scientific journals, I wouldn’t offer me $100 to install your cardiac shunt if I were you.)

I ramble. So I know how to optimize my search terms to find out how to do exactly what I need to do. Then I watch the video and I’m filled with great confidence, having seen exactly how easy it is. And then I wallpaper myself to the wall. The whole time the experts in the video are doing the task, they are filling my head with false confidence. “See how easy that was?… People think this requires an expert, but…”

It occurs to me that this might just be a strategy by such experts. My training as an economist invariably leads me to ask one question–from an economist’s perspective it’s the root question about any human behavior.  That question is, “What’s the incentive?” What is the incentive for a professional wallpaper hanger to make a do-it-yourself video? We don’t see travel agents (if such mythical creatures still exist) doing videos on how to use Orbitz, Kayak, or Travelocity. My training as a human has led me to be skeptical of munificence in all its forms. I think the strategy is to build false expectations. If one went into a home improvement chore knowing that it was going to be a hellish nightmare, one would have the right state of mind to get through it. However, if one thinks it’s going to be easy-peasy, then one ends up ripping one’s hair out and creating holes in the wall for an expert to–lucratively–repair.

That’s just one theory.  I have others. Now, I know that you are familiar with the common adage, “It’s a poor workman who blames aliens or Hindu deities.” Still, I can’t help but feeling that the wallpaper hanging experts in the YouTube videos had extra appendages that I couldn’t see due to some sort of psychic block or CGI erasure (i.e. like when they take the wires out of kung fu movies.) It’s my contention that one would have to have extra arms, like Vishnu, to keep the paper that straight and perfect as it’s applied. At one point I thought I’d made a breakthrough in string theory when I saw my wallpaper curl into more than three dimensions simultaneously, but it may have just been rage-induced brain hypoxia.

So why would multi-armed aliens, or Vishnu, make home improvement videos? How should I know. I can speculate that Vishnu might enjoy practicing Shakti, which–as I understand it–is the ability to make the impossible possible, the impossible in this scenario being effortless wallpaper hanging. The aliens might just be testing whether our species has the fine motor skills to challenge them in their impending takeover.