Tag Archives: humor

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.

BOOK REVIEW: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Hitchhiker's Guide, #4)So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

My reviews of the previous books in the series are linked below:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Life, the Universe, and Everything

This, the fourth book in the H2G2 trilogy, feels different from the others. First, it’s not so much about the ensemble cast featured in the other books. This is a book about Arthur, plain and simple. Arthur is reunited with Ford Prefect only in chapter 36 of 40, though there are Ford chapters interspersed preceding that reunion. Marvin the depressive robot makes it into the final chapter, but his appearance seems random and purposeless (except that it interjects a Marvin’s typical humor to nice effect.) Zaphod and Trillian are only mentioned in passing.

Second, romance plays a significant part in the story line, answering the previously perennial question, “Will Arthur ever get laid?”

It will be no surprise to readers of the earlier books that the title, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, was the final message of the dolphins before they jetted from the Earth–they being the only ones on the planet who knew the Vogons were about to destroy Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

The story begins with Arthur being dropped on a planet that looks suspiciously like the Earth that he knows was destroyed. He hitches a ride with a young man and his delirious sister, Fenchurch. He develops an inexplicable connection with Fenchurch, and their burgeoning romance makes up a considerable part of the story. Fenchurch had had an epiphany right before what she can’t help feeling was the destruction of the world, and she is traumatized by her inability to remember.

The only difference between this planet and the one Arthur knows is that–he later finds out–this one is entirely devoid of dolphins. His house is even where he left it with a couple of months of dust and dirt accumulated. The only thing out-of-place is a new fishbowl engraved with “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

The couple, once united, go to meet an eccentric scientist who claims to know what happened to the dolphins. The eccentric, who goes by the name Wonko the Sane, has a house built inside-out to symbolize that he is outside the asylum–the asylum being the rest of the world. Wonko shows the couple his engraved fishbowl, and they then realize that all three of them (including Fenchurch) received such bowls. Wonko tells them that they should have put their ear to the bowl’s mouth. They do so, and hear a message from the “Save the Humans” organization, which is a dolphin charity group whose name says it all.

Fenchurch wants to see the universe, and so when Ford lands back on Earth–having come to investigate why the Hitchhiker’s Guide entry for Earth has been expanded from “mostly harmless”–they go off together. Their first stop is to read God’s final message to His created. I’ll not tell you the message. So ends the book–well there’s a little epilogue which is nearly meaningless in isolation.

While it’s off-kilter from the other books, this one shares Adams’ usual absurdist humor. However, in keeping with the different feel, one of the best laughs I had in this book was not absurdist humor at all. That laugh resulted from a story told by Arthur to Fenchurch as an icebreaker. He had once bought a packet of crisps and a beverage and sat down at a table to work the crossword at a train station. The station cafe was crowded and so a stranger ended up sitting across the table from him. The man opened the package of crisps and ate one. Taken aback, Arthur didn’t know what to do. Being non-confrontational in a reserved British fashion, all he could manage to do was to ignore the man’s encroachment and take his own crisp to eat. The man, not to be out done, took another. They proceeded like this until the entire pack had been consumed. To Arthur’s mortification, when he got up to go to his train, he found that his packet of crisps was under his newspaper, untouched. Something about that struck me as hilarious.

View all my reviews

Here is the song from the movie of the same name.

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.

It’s All Fish Balls and Kipper Snacks From Here on Out

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FishballsOwing to a freakish and inexplicable popularity of this blog with Norwegians, I recently received a quasi-lucrative endorsement offer from the King Oscar Canned Fish Corporation. In exchange for tweaking this blog’s content, I will receive all the canned fish products that I can eat– for life. Yeah, that’s right, I get all the minced mackerel, pickled herring, and fish balls that I can stomach. (FYI- Fish balls aren’t aquatic rocky mountain oysters, if you were wondering.)  This is almost as good an offer as was received by Flipper, and he had immense star power. The first truckload arrived this morning as promised, putting me on retainer. Therefore, from this moment onward, the content of this blog will be devoted to the delectable joys of such foods as herring fillets in monkfish sauce or Kipper snacks in oil.

Rest assured, I’ll continue to present the same type material I have in the past, but it will now all have a canned seafood theme running through it. For example, for those who have enjoyed my poetry, I have a doozy coming up entitled “Ode to the Happy Anchovie.”  I will continue to produce humorous postings. There is only one subject off the table… no, not pedophilia… I will never make fun of the delicious Norwegian canned fish snacks of the King Oscar Corporation. However, I have a scathing rant against people who don’t want anchovies on their half of the pizza that I think you’ll find particularly rib-tickling.

In conclusion, I’d like to wish you all a happy April Fool’s Day.

POEM: They Spiked My Punch

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IMG_5559They spiked my punch.
I had no lunch.
I got so drunk, so very drunk.
Drunker than I thunk
that a man could ever be,
and I don’t know if I can trust what my eyes did see:

I saw: two elephants riding pogo sticks,
the Taj Mahal made  of Lego bricks,
Ned Flanders as a creepy voyeur,
A lady talking to an honest lawyer,
goats doing kung fu in the park,
a talking dog and a man who barked,
a traffic cop with a great big smile,
the line for kicks formed in single file,
two geese played a wicked ping-pong match,
I got hit by a bus–look not a scratch.

TODAY’S RANT: Crossing False Alarm

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Source: roadtrafficsigns.com

Source: roadtrafficsigns.com

If you’re like me, when you see the above sign, you say to yourself, “That is all well and good, but what if I get a non-conformist deer, or one of those illegals who can’t read English?”  Now, I know what you’re thinking, usually they put a little leaping deer silhouette on the sign so the deer knows the sign is addressed to it, even if reading is not its strong suit. (Let’s face it, if reading were essential to life on this planet, most of humanity would die out.) At any rate, for any number of reasons I might collide with a deer in a completely inappropriate zone.

Now imagine my confusion, and then excitement, when I came across this sign on a recent walk.

IMG_5309This was a flat piece of land, and rocks are generally believed to be inanimate.  So–at first blush–this doesn’t seem to make a lick of sense. However, then I began to think, “What if they mean ‘Rock’ as in ‘rock-n-roll’?”  So I staked it out for an entire day, hoping to get an autograph–maybe Clapton or REO Speedwagon. Who did I get? No one. Not even Donnie Osmond, because–you know–he’s a little bit rock and roll (a very little bit, an infinitesimally small part nano-rock-n-roll.) There weren’t even local bands.

What’s more, no actual rocks tried to cross all day. No igneous, no sedimentary, no basalt, no granite, no shale, no pyrite, no agate, no jasper, no oolite, no amber, no opalite, no Icelandite, no norite, no obsidian, no quartz, no chert, no flint, no gneiss, no marble, no schist, no slate… are you getting my point here? There wasn’t a single rock crossing event all day. Furthermore, how would a rock even know where to cross the trail? They aren’t as smart as deer.

A St. Paddy’s Day Note

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My website will be sporting green through St. Patrick’s Day.

That is all.

The Irish have invaded every country in the world, this one being Thailand.

The Irish have invaded every country in the world, this one being Thailand.

TODAY’S RANT: How’d I Get So Much Stuff?

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IMG_5194I don’t  like to use words like “stuff”, “things”, or the vague but picturesque “crap.”  Such words have low information content and are thus semantic lightweights. However, there are few words for the random compilation of tchotchkes, trinkets, baubles, gewgaws, kit, tools, devices, objects, gadgets, contraptions, contrivances, gizmos, widgets, thingamajigs, and doohickeys that line the drawers, shelves, and closets of my house.

You may think I’m some sort of packrat, but the sad fact is– I’m not. I’d say our household buys  less than average for homeowners. For one thing, we have no children. For another thing, both my wife and I might be classified as, for lack of a more eloquent term, cheapskates. (She’s an accountant and I’m trained as an economist, what do you expect?)  Of course, many people, perhaps most people, organize their junk better than I.

I do have one consumption fetish, and that is books. If you live in a very small town (or a large city with many small, local libraries) I may have more volumes in my house than does your local library. However, two things have slowed me down in collecting [physical] books. First, I buy most of my books on my Kindle these days. Second, I’ve come to realize that the reason I’ve bought so many books is the hope that one of them would provide some impetus for me to say something interesting, insightful, and valuable, and the entire English language canon has failed me utterly in this regard.

Still, I have a lot of miscellaneous detritus floating around in my home. You’ve heard of the 500-year flood? I have 500-year tools; that is, tools that are specifically for some task that only comes up once every few lifetimes or so. In a reasonable world, one would rent such tools. However, most tool rental places are also tool sellers. Such businesses have learned that if the tool sells new for $60, they can rent it for $50. Most people will buy it on the principle of the matter, and if they don’t… CHA-Ching. Who would rent a tool that costs almost as much to rent as it does to buy? I’ll tell you who (you thought that was rhetorical, didn’t you?), people who have the good sense to think of every object that comes into their home as an item being warehoused at their expense. People who have garage sales are brilliant. They are getting paid to store their junk in your home.

When I’m doing spring cleaning, as I am now, I frequently find containers that contain nothing. I guess I’ve just kept them around in case some pressing containment needs pop up. I keep all sorts of things because I think one day I’ll need them. However,  I never do need such items again, except the day after I throw them out.  To avoid such a situation, I don’t pitch them. However, if I keep them I won’t need them. If Joseph Heller was still alive, he could write a novel about my life.

Of course, sometimes I do need such items, but–owing to my poor organizational paradigm–I can’t find them. I then face the ultimate dilemma. Do I put the new one that I just bought with the old one that I found after I made the purchase, or do I put it in an entirely different location in the hope that when I need it again I’ll have a better chance of finding it.

No place have I felt the weight of how much “junk”  is swirling through our planet as when I was in Bangkok’s Chinatown last fall. There are miles of cramped alleyways and corridors packed to the gills with little plastic-wrapped junk, much of which seems to serve no purpose other than to satisfy the aesthetic needs of people with really poor taste or as gifts for people to whom you really want to send a statement of loathing. I had to get out of there, owing to a fear that shelving would collapse and I would be buried alive under a pile of knock-off Hello-Kitty coin purses.  I can think of no death that is more embarrassing and yet apropos of life in the modern world than that.

Of course, one of the many downsides of an economics education is the knowledge that our high standard of living is dependent upon people making and buying ever more stuff. If you are saying “what high standard of living?” and you haven’t hand-churned your own butter, darned some socks, and killed a mastodon today, I would encourage you to look into how people lived in the past. People unburdened of an economics education can make statements like, “People shouldn’t be materialistic and everybody should have a job and all jobs should pay a living wage.” However, that is like saying, “I should be able to keep my cake and I should be able to eat it as well and somebody should pay me $100 for it.”

We are still hunter-gatherers. We just hunt for bargains, and gather up geegaws.

IMG_3804

The Case of the Biggest Ego

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Dear Leader, Version 3.0, and Dennis Rodman

Dear Leader, Version 3.0, and Dennis Rodman

I was reading an article in The Economist over the weekend about the sanctions against North Korea, and Kim Jong Un’s “don’t mess with me, I’m CRAZY!” response.

The article featured the photo above. I was immediately struck by the fact that Kim Jong Un’s head is higher, despite the fact that Dennis Rodman is about six-and-a-half foot tall and Kim Jong Un is… well, let’s just say a dwarf.  I don’t know exactly how tall Kim is, and I’m sure nobody truly does. I tried to look up Kim’s height, but the figures ranged from 5’3″ to 5’9″. This isn’t surprising. The Kim family motto is, don’t let blatant facts to the contrary get in the way of a good lie; stick to your guns, execute people as necessary, and show your skeptics the crazy eyes. Kim Jong Il was believed to have worn six-inch lifts and a nine-inch pompadour to impress his underlings with his grand total 5’2″ physique. Of course, each successive generation of the Kim Dynasty has an easier time because the country’s citizenry is shrinking due to undernourishment, a fate that isn’t shared by the Kims. (Sadly, this isn’t a joke. North Korea is one of the few nations whose average height has been in decline over recent decades.)

It’s not really surprising that Kim insists on his head being higher than his guests. (I know what you’re asking. Whose set of phonebooks is he sitting on, because there sure as hell aren’t enough phones in North Korea for him to be sitting on the DPRK listings–which is more of a pamphlet?) Anyway, kings, emperors, and dictators have always required others to scrunch down so that the royal status will remain unquestioned.

However, if there is anyone who can match a dictator’s monumental ego ton for ton, it’s a professional athlete. Consider Lance Armstrong, he sued reporters for telling the truth about him. What kind of rarefied atmosphere does one have to live in to do that?  Then there are the many athlete-rapists whose defense was “Your Honor, I didn’t know I needed permission to have sex with that person. I think my lawyer may have failed to make you aware that I’m this year’s MVP… Even an MVP needs permission? That’s some crazy shit.”

As a society, we nurture the notion that the dictates of polite society don’t apply to those who are skilled at winning games. Coaches have been known to be fired mid-season for losing, but Bobby Knight beat the hell out of kids for decades before he got fired. We deify athletes just like the people of North Korea, who can’t afford leisure activities of any kind, deify their dictator.

So this photo answers for me an intriguing question, who’s more narcissistic: a professional athlete or a professional dictator. Seeing Dennis Rodman peering at the game over the twin humps of his knees answers the question nicely.

To be fair, Rodman did get a subtle dig in with his Team USA cap;  subdued as it may have been, that must have gotten Kim’s goat. Rodman also got in a nice Coca-Cola product placement. Fun fact: I was once told by a Coke employee that there were only two countries in which Coke was not sold. Everybody guessed that North Korea was one of them, but that’s not correct. It was Burma and Cuba (don’t ask me how the latter has been making Cuba Libres all this time.) Given Burma’s reforms, I wouldn’t be surprised if today it was down to one (or none.)  [World dominance… check.]

Evangelists Meet Max Their Match

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BING-BONG.

Without even looking up from his computer, Max knew it was church people. They came around trying to sell him a religion now and again. No one sold aluminum siding, encyclopedias, or ice cream door-to-door anymore. Evangelic proselytizers were the last bastion of door-to-door salesmanship. The sect varied; the approach did not. They were the only ones who ever disturbed his peace.  Well, the only ones who didn’t use the phone.

He went to the door. It was a zaftig woman and a clean-cut young man–both dressed in funeral-like attire.

“Hello!” the pair said with practiced exuberance.

“Hello,” Max parroted with a decided lack of exuberance. Then he added, “May I help you?”

Max didn’t feel like being helpful, but there was the off-chance that it was  a couple of his neighbors who were just looking to borrow a cup of sugar so they could bake cookies for whatever wake they were attending. If so, he’d help them out, but as far as he knew such a request hadn’t happened since 1955. Then he saw their name tags, and not the paper kind. These were black plastic bordered in gold with white letters.

“We’d like to talk to ya ‘bout the Bible,” the woman said.

“Unless it’s the racy bits, I don’t think you’ll hold my interest,” Max said.

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind.”

“Have you ‘cepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?” the woman asked. The young man was silent, apparently just there in case the woman knocked on the door of a Jeffery Dahmer-type.

Max was distracted by the words “personal lord”, and how odd the phrase seemed. Can I get my Messiah in Mocha with a burgundy robe?

After an awkward pause, he said,  “No, I’m an atheologist.”

They gave a coordinated grimace as if he’d dropped a deuce at their feet. “You’re an atheist?”

“No. I said atheologist. An atheist is one who does not believe in God. I believe in God. I just don’t believe in religion.”

“You cain’t have Gawd without religion.” The woman said.

“I beg to differ.”

“How’d ya know Gawd, elsewise?” The woman continued.

Max swept his hand outward in a gesture meant to draw the pair’s attention to the flowering dogwood in his front yard and the sky beyond. Their forehead creases indicated that they were both perplexed. The meaning of his gesture was lost on them.

“You cain’t know Gawd without religion,” the woman repeated, as if Max just hadn’t heard her the first time and if she said it more emphatically he would get it.

“You can repeat a gratuitous assertion ad infinitum, and it will remain an assertion,” Max said.

Neither evangelist gave any indication that they understood what Max was saying.

He sighed, stepped out onto the porch with them, and said, “Look. First, let’s ask what God gives us.” He leaned out under the eaves to look at an azure sky feathered by white wisps of cirrus clouds. This time they followed his gesturing arm and looked out with him at the bounty of nature. “Now, let’s consider what religion offers us. May I?”  He said as he reached for the thin little magazine that they had prepared to leave with him.

Max was taking a risk. He couldn’t know exactly what it the magazine would contain, but he’d seen enough of them to make an educated guess. There it was, right on the cover. He didn’t even have to flip through in search of it. The cover artwork was a dark sketch of a treeless city with brooding clouds drifting at the tops of buildings. The buildings were in ruins, and there were human-shaped lumps on the ground –meant to be either corpses or homeless people. It was a story about the fall of man or the coming apocalypse or some doom upon whose cusp humanity sits.

“Here we have it. Religion doesn’t show us beauty. It wants me to be afraid. It wants to scare me. It wants carnage and chaos to be my lodestar. It shows me horrors so that it can be my life-preserver. It wants to be my life-preserver so that I’ll substitute its will and wisdom for my own. It wants me to believe its leaders are infallible so that I’ll feel good about giving up control. It wants me to behave as its people behave. Most insidiously, it wants me to hate the people who it hates… This is why I don’t believe in religion. Thank you for your time,” Max said as he handed the Doomsday Gazette back to the woman and walked back into his house, leaving the two slack-jawed proselytizers in his wake.