If life seems jolly rotten
There’s something you’ve forgotten
And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing
When you’re feeling in the dumps
Don’t be silly, chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle – that’s the thing
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Or, you know, The IT Crowd.
Many, that is pure cornball stuff. It’s the kind of show you avoid like the plague if you read a description of it, because you’re too cool for school, yo. But if you’re dragged to it, you end up laughing like a hyena. One wonders just how much dragging it takes to get a president back into Ford’s Theater.
It’s vaudeville and the circus, but edgy. It’s staggering to think of how much practice it took to make the juggling look like an offhand detail in the act.
If you’ve never tried it, juggling is really quite interesting. There was a bit of a fad for it back in the 80s. Davis makes a joke out of the primary practice for juggling at the beginning of the act. He throws one ball back and forth. That’s the muscle memory portion of the necessary practice. You have to be able to toss the balls in the same parabolic arc, over and over, without thinking about it. Then you perform 2/3 of a full cycle by starting with a ball in each hand, throwing one ball in the air, and “exchanging” the balls when the first ball is about halfway to the opposite hand. Then you graduate to a full exchange starting with two balls in one hand and one in the other. That’s where it gets interesting, and counter-intuitive. You can’t look at the balls. If you look at any one of the balls, you’ll miss the other two. You have to look out into the middle distance, and let the balls pass in front of you, and learn to simply let your hands find the balls without concentrating on any individual ball.
That’s how you juggle. Learn it, and maybe you can perform for a president or speaker of the house or a senator or two. You’ll need some jokes, though. Sorry, I can’t help you there. I don’t know how to tell jokes.
I was never in the Boy Scouts. Our family wasn’t the joining type. We mostly steered clear of organizations of all kinds. If we wanted to go bowling, we went to the bowling alley and did bowling things. Matching shirts were not required. Enough of my friends were Boy Scouts, however, for me to know what’s involved. I got to wondering how the Boy Scout ethos is holding up after all these years.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure the Boy Scouts even exists anymore. I seem to recall rather a lot of lawsuits. I better check.
Well, I’m back. Sure enough, if you squint hard enough, the Boys Scouts still exists. Except it’s just not for boys anymore, which in most ways defeats its stated purpose. But it’ll still do for the purposes of our discussion. The Scouts take an oath. Oaths used to be pretty serious public declarations of intent. Way back when, oaths were understood to be the Terms of Service consent form for standing outside the Pearly Gates with some ‘splainin’ to do if you broke them. The only thing people adhere to as rigidly as an oath nowadays is a grudge over someone who took your parking space. Every other promise seems pretty conditional at this point.
Anyway, the Scout Oath says you’ll obey the Scout Law, which reads as follows:
A Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent.
I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot here, but a Scout should also put a comma after Clean, as God and Strunk and White intended. But let’s not quibble. That’s a pretty good rundown of how a good male citizen should behave. I have no idea how a good female citizen should behave. I’ve only met one in the last thirty years, and I married her, so the sample size is too small to make any sweeping judgments.
Since the scouts of all flavors include girls now, you could assume that they intend for girls to act like boys, but I am beset by doubts on that score. Making all the boys into little girls is probably more like it. I’ve noticed that the gender uniformity river only flows one way. But a good citizen is a good citizen, wherever you find one. Let’s see how well the average citizen is adhering to the precepts of Scout Law, with or without the BSA’s ministrations in their yute. Let’s go to Walmart!
If there’s anyplace better than Wallie World to put your finger on the pulse of society, I’m glad I haven’t experienced it. I’m not sure if the county lockup or a methadone clinic would be a sideways move, or a downward hop from our tiny town Wallie World. Since it’s basically the only game in town, you get a good blast of what most people are like, because most people are required to go there if they want stuff like groceries or clothes named George.
I essentially never leave my house, so I’m going to rely on my wife’s rundown of the goings on at the Walton’s Rodeo Drive for Rodeo clowns. She always returns from grocery shopping there somewhat haggard. I ask her about her trips the way Henry Hill queries Karen after her trip to see Jimmy the Gent. She likes to pause to compose herself first, and of course wash herself thoroughly with bleach, including her eyes. Then we get down to it. I’ll see if I can compare tales from her most recent trip to the entries in the Scout Law, and see how Ammurhiga is shaping up recently.
So it appears that adding girls to the Boy Scouts didn’t do the trick of making good citizens. I think we need to add all the adults, too, and even geriatrics to the membership. We’ll need about five hundred Cardinal Richelieu types in charge of it to start over properly. And we should get that guy from Ben Hur that hits the post with big mallets in the trireme to indicate ramming speed to supervise the meetings.
[Update: Many thanks to Bob for his generous contribution to the tip jar. Contributions like his keep this blog, and blogger, going.]
Alrighty then. We need something to argue about. Politics is out, of course. All smart people always have the same brand of politics. Which one? Smart people never tell.
No, we need to argue about something more substantial than the fenceposts currently serving in government at all levels. I can’t stand the thought of hashing out the usual Star Wars or Star Trek conundrum, or Ginger or Mary Ann sorts of things. I don’t care what color that dress was, either. Let’s squabble about something more substantial. Eyepatches! Which musician wore them best? It’s a meaty topic, fer sure. If you like, you can base your assessments on style alone, or give extra credit for glaucoma or car wrecks or whatever.
We’ll wade right in with Davey “Ziggy” Jones, who may not win in the eyepatch competition, but certainly is rocking the finest mullet. That’s worthy of the NHL in the 90s right there:
Pretty strong entry. I like that the guitar isn’t plugged in. Fake eyepatch, fake strumming, it’s all good. I hope those aren’t his real teeth, though.
Next up, Dead or Alive, doing their (as far as I know) only hit. I don’t know much about this band, but I’ll bet the lead singer has heard of David Bowie:
I’m not sure the addition of a textual quality to the eyepatch added much to the whole enchilada.
Let’s move on. We’re fiddling our fingers in the busted chips at the bottom of the Glam Rock bowl with that last one. We need to take it up a couple hundred notches. Bryan Ferry nearly invented Glam Rock. Let’s see how he does:
Now we’re talking. I have no idea what kind of degenerate activity Bryan got up to, probably with those two singers he kidnapped from the airport stewardess lounge, but for once, a mother was right, and he really did put his eye out doing it. The uniform’s nice too. Boy Scout in perdition, with an absinthe merit badge. Gonna be hard to beat.
Back in the USA, we have Kansas, and I mean that both ways:
Poor guy can’t see he has two guitars on. Let’s not mock him. Especially when we can just make fun of the lead singer.
That last one looked too, well, medicinal to be an true image enhancer. But we’ve saved what I think is the best for last. This guy has it all. He’s obviously as dissipated as Ferry could ever hope to be. He’s up for any sort of shenanigans, you can just tell. After all, he used to sing a song titled, When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard.
The dude is friends with Shel Silverstein, for criminey’s sake. That means he’s capable of anything. I’m trying to picture the moonshine still explosion or knife fight or gator-wrasslin’ gig that harvested an ojo from the dude. He’s ahead by five lengths in our sweepstakes coming into the home stretch, if you ask me.
Feel free to vote for your favorite in the comments. I’ll keep an eye out for you.
I was getting a little down in the mouth. Low. Put-upon. Weary. But then the Maslach Burnout Inventory hove into view, and made my day a little brighter. It’s based on information from the World Health Organization, so you just know it’s rock solid stuff. They’re batting something like a thousand lately, if my memory doesn’t fail me. Or if my memory doesn’t fail me. I imagine since they’ve cured all the other diseases, they have time to worry if you have too many Post-it notes spangling the frame on your computer monitor.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The test didn’t improve my life one whit. If you’re younger, you may not know that a whit is 3/117ths of a cubit. Never mind that. If you’re feeling Eeoyore-ish, and work has got you down, you’ve just got to put down your iPhone and pick up your pencil and take the test. I did it online, and I feel ever so much better.
I dutifully started filling out the forms. It interrupted me halfway through, and informed me that based on my answers so far, I was an angry mob, and each of us should put down the pitchforks and take the test separately. I assured the imaginary docent that it was just me and the cat in the room, and the cat was pretty mellow except at 7:08 every morning when the bowls are still empty.
I toted up my score, and the little “Scoring Results — Interpretation” section at the end cheered me right up. According to the test, I was legally entitled to commit a three-state killing spree to relax and unwind at the end of a long day. I was “past tense,” if you know what I mean. Your mileage may vary. Your job description might be different than mine. You might only be entitled to mutter imprecations under your breath when the HR lady waddles by.
To give you some idea of the questions, here’s the first of three sections:
If you’re having trouble, I’ll coach you through it. See? Many hands make light work. Your day is brightening already. You’re welcome in advance.
There’s a couple more sections for you to fill out. I’d help you through them, but working with people all day long requires a great deal of effort. Damn. Anybody got an eraser? I gotta fix the second answer.
Look, Loki, we’re going to be talking science here. Not “The Science,” like people who are gulled by articles in regular newspapers. I mean honest to goodness science. Hard evidence. Statistics. Here it comes, so to speak: Heavy Metal is for wankers.
Let’s plow right into the data. Wander on over to Psypost.org, and peruse Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success. It’s just a summary of a hardcore paper over at the American Psychological Association, but it’ll save you from having to read one of those pdfs with scatter plots and bar charts and control group flim flam and other assorted massage techniques for statistics. The “Impact Statement” over at the source material is a hoot, though, and drives right to the basket, as it were:
This study explores the idea that heterosexual male metal guitarists are motivated to invest heavily in getting good at guitar to primarily impress other men. The study’s results provide some support for this idea. Additionally, metal guitarists also seem to be somewhat motivated by a desire for casual sex. (link)
Please note that they’re motivated by a desire for casual sex. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna get any. As my friend Shaky Bill might say, it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance, due to a performance that features shredding. Heavy metal guitarists are mostly in store for the most casual kind of sex, the kind with no one else present. It’s science!
This is very old news to anyone who’s actually worked in the regular cover band music business. Once, on a lark, I tried to explain to people why playing guitar hero songs like Sultans of Swing was a bad idea if you wanted a female human still present when you finished up. I had a hard time making myself understood. That isn’t even in the neighborhood of Heavy Metal, but the phenomenon is exactly the same. I’ve gone over this ground before:
“Making myself understood” with people reading on the internet, I mean. We had plenty of luck making ouselves understood back in the day. We played in bands that performed covers of stuff like the following instead of Sultans of Swing. Believe you me, girls understood exactly what we were after:
Now, I’m not claiming you could get Helen Reddy to panty drop just by playing Funky Music. You’d probably have to play Funky Music and get two or three Sloe Gin Fizzes in her, too. But covering a Black Sabbath number is definitely not going to get you home without duct tape, rope, and rohypnol. God, we all knew that back in the day. Did you really think we played disco because we liked it?
There’s no joke so wild that you can make these days that events won’t overtake it. For example, Spinal Tap was a great parody of the genre. Here’s the script:
MARTY: Let’s talk about your music today…uh…one thing that puzzles me …um…is the make up of your audience
seems to be …uh… predominately young boys.
D AVID: Well it’s a sexual thing, really isn’t it? Aside from the identifying the boys do with us there’s also a re-reaction
to the female…..of the female to our music. How did you put it?
NIGEL: Really they’re quite fearful—that’s my theory. They see us on stage with tight trousers. We’ve got, you know,
armadillos in our trousers. I mean it’s really quite frightening…
DAVID: Yeah.
NIGEL: …the size…and and they, they run screaming
And here we are, back to THE SCIENCE:
Although there is evidence that playing music increases male attractiveness, the sexual selection explanation may not be mutually exclusive to all types of music. Extreme metal is a genre that is heavily male-biased, not only among the individuals that play this style of music, but also among the fans of the genre.
Do tell. Of course being scienticians or psychomechanics or whatever the capital letters after their names mean, they get the right data and then bollix up the conclusions:
Therefore, it is unlikely that extreme metal musicians are primarily trying to increase their mating success through their music.
There’s wrong, and then there’s the wrong like that sentence. You need a map to travel far enough out into the wrongness to deal with that begged question. The stats and your humble narrator says playing metal guitar doesn’t help you one whit with the ladies, and may actually hurt your chances. Good so far. But they extrapolate that the men who endlessly practice two finger barre chords with the fuzz box on eleven must be doing it for some other reason than getting chicks, because they can’t get any. Says who? Assuming that rational people would discover that metal music checks exactly zero female boxes, which would lead to self-awareness and a change to performing Marvin Gaye covers, has nothing to do with metal players. They’re simply failing, over and over, and never figuring out why.
I’ll give you a much more trenchant example of the phenomenon. I double dog dare you to find any metal band, anywhere, at any time, getting over better with a room full of hot babes than this dude:
You just know what that guy is swimming in, and it ain’t due to Blue Oyster Cult covers.
But there’s one more data point I can let you all in on. In a way, it’s borderline anecdotal, but I gotsa lotta anecdotes at my disposal. Here goes: It doesn’t matter what kind of guitar genre you learn. She always goes home with the bass player anyway. Deal wif it.
It’s a shame this fellow doesn’t speak English. A song like this could have been big here in the States.
Some changes would have been in order. It’s harder to work LL Bean gumboots into a lyric, but he could have had a go at it. He’d be hard pressed to find an audience of Presbyterians here in the US to sit still like that, and smile quietly to themselves throughout his performance. And he’d have to kill a Bee Gee to get ahold of that shirt if he forgot to bring one with him. But a fine effort, overall, don’t you think?
Before I begin with the advices, I’m required to pull rank somehow. Lay out my bona fidos. In order to tempt you to take writing advice from me, I have to lure you into thinking that I’ve managed to produce some form of folding money by writing. That’s the Holy Grail, and I have to convince you I’ve had a swig from it before you’ll listen to me. Here goes: I’m such a good writer that I have intermittently been able to cover the monthly fee for keeping a bank account open to accept the money I’ve earned by writing. I know, huh? How awesome is that?
I don’t mean to brag, but I have adjectives I haven’t even used yet. I can swear more convincingly than Edna St. Vincent Millay and write dialog better than any you’ll find in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I can make grown men weep and women violent. I have the touch, and I’m here to give you the benefit of my touching.
I started out fairly wretched, so it was easier for me to become an inkstained wretch than most people. I wrote a book that had pages with printing on both sides and two covers that were too far apart. I sold several copies of that book to drunk persons who found themselves on Amazon at 4 AM (it’s my target demographic). That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have that kind of luck. Those people might have sobered up by now. I advise you to start off slowly and confine yourself to writing for the Internets. But whatever you decide, make sure you confine yourself, or someone else will.
Here’s my Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers:
Well, there you have it. You’re now ready to enter the lucrative world of Intertunnel writing. If you’re wondering if my advice is any better than the other 40,995,651 websites offering writing advice, I urge you to search on Google for “Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers.” I assure you I’ll be the very first entry on the search results. That’s how the quality of everything on the Intertunnel is determined.
Excuse me, did you say “42”? Because 42 is so last week. I have discovered the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and it’s a lot more useful and comprehensible than 42.
My wife was accosted in the supermarket parking lot by some ill-mannered brigands, otherwise known as female high school students. Don’t get me wrong; people are more mannerly and friendly in Maine than in other places I have known. But there are many interactions between persons that have been bent by circumstance. One thing used to mean one thing, and now means another. The form of the thing remains, but it’s reflected in a dirty funhouse mirror.
That is to say: a dirty mirror in a funhouse, not a mirror in a dirty funhouse. A dirty funhouse sounds like fun to my ear. Upon reflection, I’ve been in a dirty funhouse before. It was fun. Walmart is not fun, but it is dirty. It’s installed dirty, I think. All the surfaces look drear on day one. The sky was lowering and the occasional urban jellyfish was buoyed on the breeze pregnant with rain, and …
Sorry, I turned into David Foster Wallace there for a minute. Anyway, the old trouble and strife needed provisions, and she had to pass the portals of Dante’s Always Low Prices and Common Denominator Warehouse to get them. That was the precise moment that she was waylaid, when she was girding her loins and shrugging from a low-rent blow from an existential god unseen — the exact moment we discovered the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. The students sauntered up to my wife, and importunately asked if she would like to buy a candy bar to send a kid to camp.
My wife is very quiet and reserved. She smiles a lot, but she doesn’t talk very much. I have always depended on her steadiness, because I am mercurial. I wonder if there is anyone in this world who has anything bad to say about her, other than she chooses husbands in lighting not suitable for buying off-brand bales of hay. Anyway, she was caught somewhat unawares, and didn’t have a moment to parse what she said carefully for its effect. She just asked, more or less politely, “Why would I want to do that?”
They backed up like people who had opened a mummy’s tomb and heard Egyptian being spoken. It was as unanswerable as a tax bill.
Don’t you see? Can’t you see it? It’s the answer to everything. It’s the Swiss army knife of life, with the little can-opener dongle on it, except instead of opening cans it opens universes. If everyone would answer 99 percent of the questions put to them every day with, “Why would I want to do that?”, the world would be a better place. Not just for the questioner. All manner of mischief would fold up and die and I wouldn’t get messages from Nigerian princelings anymore because every offer to send a million dollars tax-free would be met with, “Why would I want to do that?”
I recognized it like a lost friend. It’s the phrase I’ve been thinking but not saying, morning, noon and night, for years on end, whenever anyone asks me anything about anything. It is my default position for everything, I’ve just never uttered it.
Look at it. It’s a daisy. It’s magnificent. No, really try it out. Try it right now. It works on everything.
“For only five dollars more a month, you can add over 250 channels of television programming to your monthly Internet bill.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“If you act now, you’ll receive a free coupon that will allow you to take the whole family to Disneyland!”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“This new button on YouTube lets you autoplay all the videos in the right-hand column!”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Sign up for Facebook and find your friends. Create an account to start sharing photos and updates with people you know!”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“You can read the New York Times on your smartphone for free!”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“For only $200, you can have an Amazon Echo device that will let you use voice activation to stream music from a smartphone app wirelessly!”
“Why would I want to do that?”
” You can donate $3 of your federal tax to go to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund”
“Why…”
“Why…”
It was there that my slogan failed the ultimate test of life, the universe, and everything. Because it had to be modified in this one instance, it was not universal, and with the modification, the phrase reads and sounds less lyrical to the ear:
“Why in the name of Honore de Balzac would I want to do that you buttmunch dillhole *deep breath* me cago en la leche *deep breath* yela’an sabe’a jad lak *deep breath* nide muchin shr ega da wukwei *deep breath* krisnera zhazh tan vred *deep breath*. Now go piss into a transformer.”
It just doesn’t roll off the tongue. Back to the drawing board.
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