Happy Halloween, You Bunch Of Freaks

Hallowe’en’s a mess. Everybody tells me so.

Read the newspapers. Hallowe’en is a combination salacious bachanaal, devil worship love-in, and workplace sexual harrassment playground– with the added attractions of being fired, run down by cars, dressing your daughters as Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, and perhaps getting razor blades or anthrax in your kid’s candy. Other than that: Have Fun!

Pope Gregory III moved Festum omnium sanctorum –-All Saints Day — to November first to put a Christian gloss on the thing, but I bet appeasing dead spirits that walk the earth with treats goes back to the times of the caves of Altamira. The actual caves, not the Steely Dan song.

Co-opting an existing tradition for a current generation’s amusement. Hmm. Sounds exactly like what every crank, weirdo, jerk, and dogooder busybody is trying to do right now with Hallowe’en. At least the Pope just monkeyed about with the day after Hallowe’en, so his flock could enjoy a pagan festivity without worrying about it much. It’s like a Fortune 500 company hiring P Diddy as a spokesman. It’s more about image than any change in substance. My apologies for referring to him as “P Diddy.” I think he’s just “Diddy” now. Or perhaps he’s changed it again; it’s almost 10:00 am and I haven’t checked today.

I don’t have much of an opinion about Hallowe’en. Everyone seems to have lost their minds about it. There, that’s an opinion.

I see problems:

1. People use the day as an excuse to do vicious things to one another. I don’t care for that. And I really don’t think you want to be placed in any jail population wearing a costume.

2. Adults participate in it more than children now. That’s silly. Adults are supposed to walk behind their children with a flashlight and carry their charges and their loot for the last 7/8 of the trip.

3. People’s insane ideas about what other people should eat are intruding on the fun. Hint to homeowners: Children like candy. Children don’t like candy designed for diabetics. Trust me on this one.

4. Paganism is the root of Hallowe’en. If you’re an actual Pagan, or Druid, or Wiccan, or think you’re a witch or warlock, I’ve got news for you. Hallowe’en ain’t your night. It’s NOT the one night when everybody sees the essential coolness of your Wal*Mart Vampirella thang; it’s the one night of the year that normal people pay enough attention to the imaginary trappings of your foolish worldview to make fun of you. That’s it. Just like everybody else on Hallowe’en, you should behave and look differently for a short period. In your case, you should dress normally and act in a dignified and intelligent manner for a little while . You can spend the other 364 days acting like a loon.

5. Hallowe’en considered changing its name to “The College Kids Don’t Wear Much, Drink Still Liquor- Keystone- Cough Medicine-Rohypnol Smashes While Re-enacting the Sack of Troy, Amateur Arson/ Rapist/ NASCAR driver/Insane Jehovah’s Witness/ Melee Night.” It wouldn’t fit on the t-shirt, so they left it alone. College kids don’t need Hallowe’en. College kids only need the calendar to read “Thursday; PM,” for all that. No use eggin’ them on.

I’m here to help. Let’s solve all our problems with Hallowe’en:

At around dusk, small children dressed in cute and fantastic costumes will visit the doors of their nearby neighbors, who will give them a little Snickers bar for their trouble. Any child old enough to be unaccompanied by an adult is too old to trick-or-treat. The children’s parents will stand slightly behind their children and wave to the neighbors and they will exchange pleasantries. The home will have a pumpkin or two on the step, and perhaps the silhouette of a witch on a broom and a black cat, cut from construction paper by a gradeschooler, in the window. These small children will not be frightened by this activity, and startling people for your amusement will get you only a rap on the head from a Maglite flashlight that you will commemorate for several weeks by rubbing the lump it leaves on your addled head. The small children will be home and asleep at the regular hour, more or less.

While they sleep the deep, comforting sleep of the weary and contented child, I will steal their candy.

Words To Live By For Monday

I decided to write an aphorism from scratch today. It’s harder than I thought. Here goes:

If one man is playing checkers, the other chess, the man playing checkers will win.

Whew. That was a lot of work. Just like playing chess. I’m going to play checkers for the rest of the essay and just steal other people’s stuff. All unattributed, because I’m lazy and who knows who said what first anyway?

• Technology is dominated by two types of people — those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
• Brains x Beauty x Availability = Constant.
  This constant is always zero.
• Any change looks terrible at first.
• Sow your wild oats on Saturday night. On Sunday pray for crop failure.
• Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
• Air goes in and out, blood goes round and round; any variation on this is bad.
• If it’s stupid but it works, it wasn’t stupid.
• An expert is someone brought in at the last minute to share blame.
• Every thorough investigation leads to confusion.
• Simple things are hard.
• The chance of a computer crash is directly proportional to the importance of the document.
• Any subject interesting to teachers is boring or counterfactual; usually both.
• We could do worse; we always have.

SpongeBob Rocks

I have two children. One is a diplomat, one is feral. Assembled, that makes me.

Anyway, they browse amongst the luxuriant undergrowth of amusements like everybody else. We don’t have TV, so more or less we choose what we’re going to look at. We often choose SpongeBob.

There’s something profoundly wrong with you if you don’t like SpongeBob Squarepants. You should have someone unscrew the top of your head and mess around with the wires if you dislike it. It’s Shakespeare and the Three Stooges with all the interim stops thrown in. It’s sublime.

There’s all sorts of diversions offered to my tots — and their parents as collateral damage. My older son is a gaping maw for content of all kinds now. Even the little one doesn’t watch the same VCR tape over and over any more without protesting. I’ve seen all the usual suspects, and I have no problem with Sheen and Karl Weezer and Billy and Mandy and a bunch of other harmless tripe. But in general, each micro-generation attracts all the best –or at least the most appropriate and timely– ideas and people and distills it into something that defines that infantile generation. Bugs Bunny. Fred Flintstone. SpongeBob. Like that.

I think the coalescence of talent and the spot to put it in is not predictable with adults, never mind children whose minds we once had but are completely opaque to all of us now. It’s like a mature economy is; no one knows exactly what’s going on with everybody, and we all throw all sorts of stuff at the wall and gauge people’s reactions to determine if we need a new wall or new stuff to throw or a new thrower. Anyone that tells you that they can predict the next big thing is a liar; or more likely is telling the truth as they understand it, which is not very well. You can only be correct in that big way by happenstance and probabilities. And almost without exception it’s a trick any person can only pull off once, anyway; so your track record in the last smash hit makes you as qualified as a homeless man on the corner yelling at the traffic in predicting the next one. Yeah, you knew in advance the obscure dork bit player that held a clipboard on Coach would be a worldwide sensation as an animated talking doofus starfish. I bet the guy that hired him didn’t. He was just flinging the best thing he could find and afford at the likeliest wall he could imagine, and hoping.

It’s a great wall. It all stuck.

Sippican’s Got His Wealth Of Nations Freak On

Look, I’m doing it wrong.

It’s not that I don’t understand how the Intertunnel works. I do. But I can’t bring myself to do what you’re supposed to do and grub around on the ones-and-zeros ground for attention. I’m too busy making things anyway.

But no one writes things and hopes no one reads them — unless they’re crazy. I’m a lunatic, of course, but a much different kind than that. I appreciate it when people come and read what’s offered here. It is a constant source of fun and interest to read what visitors here offer as comments, and to see how many other people point to what is here and talk about it.

Part of me “doing it wrong” is how badly I keep up with all that. Based on manners alone, I wish I could correspond properly with everyone that says: Hey, look at that Sippican drivel today; it’s the Shiznit! And I’d like to acknowledge a lot of such people right now, but I am loathe to do it because I will undoubtedly leave out a bunch of people, because I forgot, or I didn’t even know about it in the first place. I do find my name in the damndest places these days.

I must mention one thing, because it is so piquant. I am terribly fond of everybody’s crazy intellectual uncle, that wild wigged wag from Edinburgh, Adam Smith. I sheepishly admit I keep a hardbound copy of The Wealth of Nations at my bedside and reread it all the time. It is like a secular bible to me. Of course I’m so poor that reading it is more akin to looking at pornography than scripture, but still. As someone who is fed into the maw of the woodchipper of primitive barebones commerce daily, but has likewise run things large enough to come under the rubric of “Macro” economics, I can tell you that if you’re looking for a pinmaker, well, Adam, I’m your huckleberry.

Oh yes, that one thing? I am a devotee of a website across the roiling Atlantic called The Adam Smith Institute blog. I’ve been reading it for years, and stealing jokes from it, too. Of course any institute devoted to the memory and teaching of Adam Smith is my kinda place, and their blog is very interesting, in an I’m-interested-in-things-other-people-avoid-like-homework and-would-rather-watch-CSIMiami kinda way. And I was reading it the other day, and flummoxed to see them telling everybody to read Sippican Cottage. It seemed like such an out of the way/wonderful place to find myself.

Again, thanks to the legions of people who read and comment and link and riff and so forth. But you gents and dames over there on that foggy lump of rocks and coal out in the Atlantic? You made my day.