This is an old favorite. I think he sings it differently every time; I don’t remember the part about his brother and the baby oil. Also, the annotator here misspelled “Cheryl Tiegs.”
But who cares?
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
On the morning after the Fourth of July, Partner told me something he’d just seen on TV: some huge fiasco at the San Diego fireworks display the night before.
Later in the day, idly, I looked up the video of the event. And I nearly died laughing.
Every single thing went off at once. There were four barges full of fireworks, and something sparked them all simultaneously. It’s like watching the sun explode. It lasts approximately fifteen seconds, and then it dies down, and you hear the crowd applauding tentatively, waiting for more.
And there ain’t no more.
No one was hurt. Many, however, were disappointed. Some were “angry.”
Angry at what? I ask. That was just about the funniest and best fireworks display I’ve ever seen. It was mercifully brief, and bizarrely intense. If I were a kid watching that, I would know in my heart that I had just seen the best fireworks display ever.
But then, I love a good calamity.
This little gem from the Library of America came along in my email yesterday morning, just in time for the Presidents’ Day holiday. I have to admit that Mark Twain is not my favorite writer, but this piece is pretty funny; it is brief, and savage, and it has not aged a bit since it was written in 1879.
I have pretty much made up my mind to run for President. What the country wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history, so that the enemies of the party will be unable to rake up anything against him that nobody ever heard of before. If you know the worst about a candidate, to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be checkmated. Now I am going to enter the field with an open record. I am going to own up in advance to all the wickedness I have done, and if any Congressional committee is disposed to prowl around my biography in the hope of discovering any dark and deadly deed that I have secreted, why—let it prowl.
In the first place, I admit that I treed a rheumatic grandfather of mine in the winter of 1850. He was old and inexpert in climbing trees, but with the heartless brutality that is characteristic of me I ran him out of the front door in his night-shirt at the point of a shotgun, and caused him to bowl up a maple tree, where he remained all night, while I emptied shot into his legs. I did this because he snored. I will do it again if I ever have another grandfather. I am as inhuman now as I was in 1850. I candidly acknowledge that I ran away at the battle of Gettysburg. My friends have tried to smooth over this fact by asserting that I did so for the purpose of imitating Washington, who went into the woods at Valley Forge for the purpose of saying his prayers. It was a miserable subterfuge. I struck out in a straight line for the Tropic of Cancer because I was scared. I wanted my country saved, but I preferred to have somebody else save it. I entertain that preference yet. If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon’s mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me to be Napoleonic in its grandeur.
My financial views are of the most decided character, but they are not likely, perhaps, to increase my popularity with the advocates of inflation. I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get.
The rumor that I buried a dead aunt under my grapevine was correct. The vine needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this high purpose. Does that unfit me for the Presidency? The Constitution of our country does not say so. No other citizen was ever considered unworthy of this office because he enriched his grapevines with his dead relatives. Why should I be selected as the first victim of an absurd prejudice?
I admit also that I am not a friend of the poor man. I regard the poor man, in his present condition, as so much wasted raw material. Cut up and properly canned, he might be made useful to fatten the natives of the cannibal islands and to improve our export trade with that region. I shall recommend legislation upon the subject in my first message. My campaign cry will be: “Desiccate the poor workingman; stuff him into sausages.”
These are about the worst parts of my record. On them I come before the country. If my country don’t want me, I will go back again. But I recommend myself as a safe man—a man who starts from the basis of total depravity and proposes to be fiendish to the last.
What to give you for Groundhog Day? I wanted very much to share a clip of Rudy Vallee and Robert Morse singing the “Groundhog Song” from the movie version of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” but all I could find on YouTube were audio recordings of Rudy and Robert, and tons of really awful college / neighborhood productions of the same.
So nerts to that.
Then, by chance, up floated another idea.
I met Richard Eberhart at a poetry reading in the 1980s, and shook his hand, and told him how much I loved this poem, and he smiled and thanked me.
I still love it.
Below is a link to a video of a group of (I assume) college kids, somewhere, reading the poem (badly) and acting it out and generally murdering it. Imagine! The best poem ever written about a dead groundhog!
I like to think that Eberhart (who died in 2005) would have enjoyed it.
Happy Groundhog Day.
(Postscript: if you want to read the poem as it was actually written, try this link.)
For a long time I was terrible at making (and keeping) resolutions. Then, at last, I realized that I needed to make reasonable resolutions, rather than pie-in-the-sky type things.
Here are my resolutions for 2012:
- I will renew my passport, so that I can get the hell out of the country if the shit hits the fan.
- I will consolidate my two big sloppy retirement accounts into one slightly neater retirement account, so that I can begin to think (reluctantly) about the Wonderful World of Retirement that awaits me, sometime around the year 2040.
- I will try not to let the election year irk me too much, especially the Republican candidates, who have demonstrated that they will do anything – gay-bashing, maligning the Palestinian state, abusing the poor – if they think it will help them with the far-right base. (And if you think you have it bad where you are, you should see the attack ads that are already airing here for the Massachusetts senatorial campaign. Brutal and idiotic.)
- Whoever wins the November presidential election, I will not commit suicide.
- I will speak to the doctor again about my left kidney, which pains me frequently.
- I will maintain my weight.
- I will continue to go to the health club.
- I will endeavor to keep my nose clean and my hands to myself.
- I will try very hard not to get sick, partly because I do not enjoy being sick, and partly because I sincerely do not want to infect others (most especially Partner) with my nasty viral complaints.
- I will try to live within my means. (Ha!)
- I will keep writing a blog a day, if it kills me. (Actually I enjoy it. It won’t kill me. More likely it will help to keep me alive.)
- On the same topic: I will try very hard to stay alive. I enjoy being alive. I like waking up and seeing Partner next to me in bed; I like seeing the sunlight on the rooftops when I walk to work in the morning; I like listening to Apollonia’s stories; I like eating pasta and tacos and burgers and ice cream. I like baking. I like reading the Financial Times, and doing the FT crossword puzzle, and winning the competition from time to time. I like all kinds of things. I would hate to give any of these things up. I am going to try very hard to live long enough to see New Year’s Day 2013, though even writing that date makes me feel as if I’m in a science-fiction story set in the future.
But if the worst happens, and I don’t make it, I think of this scene from “The Simpsons:”
Grandpa Simpson is determined to prove that he’s still young and vital. He’s riding a bicycle. He hits a bump, and catapults off his bike through the air, over a hedge, and into an open grave in a cemetery. He disappears for a moment. Then we hear his voice from inside the grave: “You know,” he says, “this isn’t so bad. This is kind of peaceful.”
Peaceful sounds pretty good.
Happy new year, kids.
Neither Partner nor I practices any particular religion. I spent a couple of years in the mid-2000s trying to recapture my Catholicism, but found it ultimately futile. Partner and I talk about Buddhism a lot, but I am uneasily aware that Buddhism is easier to talk about than practice. (For those of you who use “Zen” as an adjective, I recommend a wonderful and very acerbic book called “What Makes You Not A Buddhist,” by a wonderful Bhutanese lama / film director / author (!) named Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse.)
So how did Partner and I, both filthy heathens, spend this Christmas season?
Let’s see:
- We saw “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” on Christmas Eve.
- We exchanged gifts. Partner gave me a lovely sweater and two lovely shirts. I like pretty colors, but am often confused by the bright lights in the department stores; Partner corrects my fashion sense, and I invariably get compliments when I wear the things he’s bought for me (so long as I wear them in the combinations he very carefully specifies). I gave him, among other things, a mounted 1957 one-dollar Silver Certificate. (I was born in 1957, before the Space Age, so it was a little symbolic.)
- Next morning, we sleepily wished each other a Merry Christmas.
- After some discussion, we went to the closest casino, Twin River, in Lincoln, Rhode Island.
- We left at 1:00 pm with considerably more money than we arrived with. Merry Christmas!
- We went to a Chinese restaurant and ordered everything on the menu.
- We ate until we were sick.
- We took our leftovers and went home and napped a bit.
- In the evening, I baked cookies.
This is the perfect secular Xmas, as far as I’m concerned. And here’s why:
- We both spent it with someone we loved.
And that’s all it takes.
Happy holidays, kids.
It is the Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa season, which means giving stuff to people. I like this, actually. I like getting stuff (although it makes me feel all blushy and humble), and (when I’m flush) I like giving things away.
When money’s tight, however – as in the present economy – I try to be frugal.
I am cheap in any case. Apollonia asked how much I give my newspaper guy for Xmas, and guffawed in amusement when I told her. “That’s not enough,” she said. “Think of what a miserable job it is. He’s up hours before you are. He deserves a little more than that.”
“He’s a newspaper-delivery guy,” I said. “He’s back in bed by ten a.m. I only wish I were.”
Naturally there are people who deserve nice gifts. Candy is a nice gift, as is liquor. Besides, when it’s someone you know well, you pretty much know what they’d like: you know what they wear and where they shop. It’s easy.
Now, for those of you who work in offices: how about the people you don’t like?
You know who I mean.
You can’t afford to piss them off – not too much, anyway. You’d like to give them nothing at all, but you’ve got to give them something.
Regifting is always an interesting option. I often end up with several bottles of wine at Christmastime, and I don’t drink wine, so it gets passed along. But I generally give this to people I like, whom I know to be drinkers of wine.
So what else is there?
How about a nice box of candy from Ocean State Job Lot, the local odds-and-ends discount store? It’s imported (possibly from the Ukraine!). It’s nicely wrapped. It’s – well, who knows? - a little old. You pick it up for two bucks, and give it to the person in the office you don’t like.
Outwardly it’s nice. In reality, it’s a snub. You know it, and the other person knows it.
Point taken.
From Gertrude Stein’s “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”:
Hélène [the Stein/Toklas cook] had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these things but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.
Get it, Monsieur Matisse?
Looking for holiday gift ideas?
So am I. It’s only December seventh, and I’m already worn out.
For Partner, and for friends like Patricia and Apollonia and George and Joanne, it’s easy. I know them all well enough to know what they’d like and what they’d appreciate.
For the bottom-of-the-list people – the ones you have to buy something for – there’s always candy and liquor.
But what do you do about the middle of the list? You know who I mean.
Well, take a look at the list compiled by Nicholas Kristof.
I’m often mistrustful of charities. I’m never sure how much money actually gets to the people whose sad pictures appear on the websites and in the literature. But Nick Kristof vouches for these particular charities, and he’s a good liberal Oregon boy, and that’s good enough for me.
I like the idea of giving a duck, or a pair of glasses, to someone whose life will be changed by the gift. I like againstmalaria.com especially; every five dollars buys a mosquito net, and malaria is a horribly serious problem – far more serious than most Americans realize. Also, it’s a highly-rated charity, which uses an amazing 100% of its gift receipts to buy nets.
See? You don’t have to give them a Sonicare toothbrush or a Target gift card after all.
You can give them a whole flock of chickens.
I used to do traditional American for Halloween: pumpkins, scarecrows, etc.
Then, some years ago, a very sophisticated friend gave me a set of Dia de los Muertos figurines: skeleton nuns playing musical instruments. I didn’t take good care of them, and they lost limbs along the way; I don’t think any of them are whole anymore.
And then I found out that, if they were perfect, they would be very valuable.
Yeep!
Anyway, broken limbs and all, I started using them in a Day of the Dead display (see above photo). I supplement it with all kinds of things: photos of my dead relatives and friends, a business card from one of my dead bosses, the funeral notice from a friend who died last year, lots of little things that belonged to my parents while they were alive . . .
I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. Every year there are more people to commemorate.
Every night, through most of October and right up to November 2, I try to light my candle every night, and actually muster up a thought or two for the people who have gone ahead of me on the road.
It makes the prospect seem less lonely, somehow.
Happy Day of the Dead.
Charlie Brown's sister Sally thought Columbus Day was a person's name. “'I can give you three ships, Mr. Day,' said the Queen.” Et cetera.
I have always felt tenderly toward Mr. Day.
For one thing, Chris (aka Cristoforo Colombo) was a paesano from Genoa. My maternal grandfather was (probably) from somewhere in northern Italy, so Mr. Day and I are probably seventeenth cousins, or something.
Also, I have fond memories of my two first-grade teachers of sainted memory, Miss Plowman and Miss Marvin, giving us fat first-grader crayons to color pictures of the Nina and the Pinta and the Santa Maria, which were displayed (very judgment-free!) on the wall.
And there was really no need for judgment, because they were all beautiful.
Since then, however, the world has become stormy and sad.
My employer, Brown University, has renamed Columbus Day the “Fall Weekend.” Mr. Day, you see, was the harbinger of all bad things: disease, and slavery, and dispossession. They think it best not to mention him.
Indeed all those things followed on his “discovery.” I cannot deny it.
And yet: here we all are, in the New World that Mr. Day scouted out, with his three ships.
I am torn. I understand the revisionists' point: much of what happened over the next few hundred years was a sin and a shame, and the native inhabitants (I am very fond of the Canadian term “First Nations”) were ravaged and decimated – more than decimated – by the European immigration.
And yet: here I sit, a descendant of those immigrants and their relatives.
Frankly, speaking as a radical socialist / anarchist, I'd gladly give the First Nations back their land. I would, like William Blackstone and Roger Williams (the kooky founders of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations), be glad to live side by side with them, on their terms, with the explicit understanding that it was their land long before my folks arrived.
Mr. Day was a venal businessman, and did in fact send back some poor West Indies tribesmen to Spain for display. He bragged about being a warrior “who never once put down the sword.”
But he did not (I think) intend genocide.
And he reached out to the New World.
And then a bunch of stuff happened. And now: here we all are.
We are all very sorry for what our very stupid ancestors did.
Let's not let it get us down. We are all at least as stupid as they were.
Let us celebrate Columbus Day, and resolve to do better.
