Finley Peter Dunne: The Names of a Week

Today I’d like to return to Finley Peter Dunne and his Mister Dooley here, in a piece from Observations By Mister Dooley going over the news of the week. This should all sound extremely vivid if you’re well-versed in the daily news of 1902 (in July of 1902 when the campanille in Venice’s Piazza San Marco collapsed, an incident which brought a lot of attention to that rather famous one in Pisa, which hasn’t yet fallen down or over), but I don’t imagine that annotating every bit of this is necessary. It’s to me a marvelous way to see figures of the era, such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryant, and Whitelaw Reid as more vivid figures than just what history books give you; and if you don’t know the era.

“What’s goin’ on this week in th’ papers?” asked Mr. Hennessy.

“Ivrything,” said Mr. Dooley. “It’s been a turbylint week. I can hardly sleep iv nights thinkin’ iv th’ doin’s iv people. Th’ campinily at Venice has fallen down. ‘Twas built in 1604 be th’ Beezantiums an’ raystored in 1402 be th’ Dogs. It fell down because th’ foundations was weak, because th’ wind blew, because th’ beautiful figure iv th’ goolden angel on top iv it was fifteen feet high. It will be rebuilt or maybe not. Th’ king iv Italy has given thirty-three billion liars to put it up again, an’ siv’ral ladin’ American archytects have offered to do th’ job, makin’ an office buildin’ iv it. Th’ campinily was wan iv th’ proudest monymints iv Italy an’ was used as a bell-tower at times, an’ at other times as a gazabo where anny American cud take a peek at th’ gran’ canal an’ compare it with th’ Erie, th’ Pannyma an’ th’ dhrainage iv the same name.

“Th’ king iv England is betther. He’s off in his yacht. So ar-re Laking, Treves, Smith, Barlow, Jones, Casey, Lister, thank Hiven! A hard life is science. Th’ Hon’rable Joseph Choate is raycoverin’ more slowly. He still sobs occas’nally in his sleep an’ has ordhered all th’ undher sicreties to have their vermyform appindixes raymoved as a token iv rayspict f’r th’ sthricken nation. Th’ Hon’rable Whitelaw Reid is havin’ a cast iv his knee breeches made, which will be exhibited in New York durin’ th’ comin’ winter.

“Me frind, J. Pierpont Morgan, has been takin’ dinner with th’ Impror Willum. It is undherstud he will presint him to th’ Methropolytan Museem iv Art. There are said to be worse things there.

“Lord Salisberry has thrun up his job. Lord Salisberry was wan iv th’ grandest an’ mos’ succissful statesmen iv modhren times. He niver did annything. He is succeeded be his nevvew, Misther Balfour, if I get th’ name right, who has done less. It is expicted that Misther Balfour will have a good time. On rayceivin’ th’ congrathylations iv his colleague, Misther Chamberlain, he bought himsilf a rayvolver an’ took out a policy on his life.

“A lady down east woke her husband up to tell him there was a burglar in th’ house. Th’ foolish woman. They’se always burglars in th’ house. That’s what burglars are f’r, an’ houses. Instead iv argyin’ th’ pint in a loud voice, coughin’ an’ givin’ th’ burglar a chance to lave with dignity, this man got up an’ was kilt. Now th’ pa-apers with th’ assistance iv th’ officers iv th’ law has discovered that th’ lady took a boat ride with a gintleman frind in th’ summer iv sixty-two, that she wanst quarreled with her husband about th’ price iv a hat, that wan iv her lower teeth is plugged, that she wears a switch an’ that she weeps whin she sees her childher. They’se a moral in this. It’s ayether don’t wake a man up out iv a sound sleep, or don’t get out iv bed till ye have to, or don’t bother a burglar whin ye see he’s busy, or kill th’ iditor. I don’t know which it is.

“Willum Jennings Bryan is readin’ me frind Grover Cleveland out iv th’ party. He’s usin’ the Commoner to read him out. That’s a sure way.

“Mary MeLane has been in town. I didn’t see her, me place not bein’ a raysort f’r th’ young an’ yearnin’, an’ especially me duckin’ all lithry ladies iv whativer sex. Mary McLane is th’ author iv a book called: ‘Whin I am older I’ll know betther.’ Ye ought to read it, Hinnissy.

“Th’ Newport season is opened with gr-reat gayety an’ th’ aim iv rayturnin’ husbands is much more sure.

“Gin’ral Bragg fr’m up in Wisconsin has been gettin’ into throuble with our haughty allies, th’ Cubians, he writin’ home to his wife that ye might as well thry to make a whistle out iv a pig’s tail as a dacint man out iv a Cubian. Gin’ral Bragg will be bounced an’ he ought to be. He don’t belong in pollytics. His place is iditor iv a losin’ newspaper.

“Gov’nor Taft has been in Rome showin’ th’ wurruld how succissful, sthraightforward, downright, outspoken, manly, frank, fourteen ounces to th’ pound American business dalings can be again’ th’ worn-out di-plomacy iv th’ papal coort. Whin last heerd fr’m this astoot an’ able man, backed up be th’ advice iv Elihoo Root iv York state, was makin’ his way tow’rd Manila on foot, an’ siv’ral mimbers iv th’ colledge iv cardinals was heerd to regret that American statesmen were so thin they cudden’t find anything to fit thim in his thrunk.

“Cholera is ragin’ in th’ Ph’lippeens vice Gin’ral Jake Smith, raymoved.

“Th’ stock market is boomin’ an’ business has become so dull elsewhere that some iv th’ best known outside operators ar-re obliged to increase th’ depth iv th’ goold coatin’ on th’ brick to nearly an inch.

“Th’ capital iv th’ nation has raymoved to Eyesther Bay, a city on th’ north shore iv Long Island, with a popylation iv three millyion clams, an’ a number iv mosquitos with pianola attachments an’ steel rams. There day be day th’ head iv th’ nation thransacts th’ nation’s business as follows: four A.M., a plunge into th’ salt, salt sea an’ a swim iv twenty miles; five A.M., horse-back ride, th’ prisidint insthructin’ his two sons, aged two and four rayspictively, to jump th’ first Methodist church without knockin’ off th’ shingles; six A.M., wrestles with a thrained grizzly bear; sivin A.M., breakfast; eight A.M., Indyan clubs; nine A.M., boxes with Sharkey; tin A.M., bates th’ tinnis champeen; iliven A.M., rayceives a band iv rough riders an’ person’lly supervises th’ sindin’ iv th’ ambylance to look afther th’ injured in th’ village; noon, dinner with Sharkey, Oscar Featherstone, th’ champeen roller-skater iv Harvard, ’98, Pro-fissor McGlue, th’ archyologist, Lord Dum de Dum, Mike Kehoe, Immanuel Kant Gumbo, th’ naygro pote, Horrible Hank, t’ bad lands scout, Sinitor Lodge, Lucy Emerson Tick, th’ writer on female sufferage, Mud-in-the-Eye, th’ chief iv th’ Ogallas, Gin’ral Powell Clayton, th’ Mexican mine expert, four rough riders with their spurs on, th’ Ambassadure iv France an’ th’ Cinquovasti fam’ly, jugglers. Th’ conversation, we larn fr’m wan iv th’ guests who’s our spoortin’ iditor, was jined in be th’ prisidint an’ dealt with art, boxin’, lithrachoor, horse-breakin’, science, shootin’, pollytics, how to kill a mountain line, di-plomacy, lobbing, pothry, th’ pivot blow, rayform, an’ th’ campaign in Cubia. Whin our rayporther was dhriven off th’ premises be wan iv th’ rough riders, th’ head iv th’ nation was tachin’ Lord Dum de Dum an’ Sicrety Hay how to do a hand-spring, an’ th’ other guests was scattered about th’ lawn, boxin’, rasslin’, swingin’ on th’ thrapeze, ridin’ th’ buckin’ bronco an’ shootin’ at th’ naygro pote f’r th’ dhrinks–in short enjyin’ an ideel day in th’ counthry.

“An’ that’s all th’ news,” said Mr. Dooley. “There ye ar-re jus’ as if ye cud read. That’s all that’s happened. Ain’t I a good newspaper? Not a dull line in me. Sind in ye’er small ads.”

“Sure, all that’s no news,” said Mr. Hennessy, discontentedly. “Hasn’t there annything happened? Hasn’t anny wan been–been kilt?”

“There ye ar-re,” said Mr. Dooley. “Be news ye mane misfortune. I suppose near ivry wan does. What’s wan man’s news is another man’s throubles. In these hot days, I’d like to see a pa-aper with nawthin’ in it but affectionate wives an’ loyal husbands an’ prosp’rous, smilin’ people an’ money in th’ bank an’ three a day. That’s what I’m lookin’ f’r in th’ hot weather.”

“Th’ newspapers have got to print what happens,” said Mr. Hennessy.

“No,” said Mr. Dooley, “they’ve got to print what’s diff’rent. Whiniver they begin to put headlines on happiness, contint, varchoo, an’ charity, I’ll know things is goin’ as wrong with this counthry as I think they ar-re ivry naytional campaign.”

Bunny Snacking

The purchase of some “Green Goddess” salad dressing lead me inevitably to looking up Annie’s Homegrown — they make those organic Macaroni and Cheese packages with the cute pictures of bunnies all over them — on Wikipedia. Their symbol on the stock exchange is BNNY, and isn’t that adorable? So anyway besides learning about their various corporate takeovers and food recalls was this recent bit of corporate news:

On April 3, 2014 Annie’s opened their doors to their first bakery manufacturing plant purchased from Safeway Inc. located in Joplin, Missouri, that currently has an estimated 100 employees. [53079]

So I took that sentence to my seventh-grade English teacher, the one who made me, as best I can determine, the latest-born person to ever learn how to diagram sentences. She examined this soggy pile of words and explained that the “53079” is the ASCAP registration number, used to sort out royalties for when the sentence is played over the radio, so I’m glad to have that straightened out.

Comic Strips You Might Read

Over on my mathematics blog I have a fresh round of mathematics-themed comics, so if you’ve not read that, I’d be grateful if you did. I admit I’m not deliberately trying to be funny with what I say over there, but, plenty of things I say meaning to be funny don’t pan out that way, so, maybe I can amuse people by trying the other way around.

In non-mathematics comic strip news, Bud Sagendorf’s Popeye has somehow got eight more weeks to run of the question of what Popeye’s last name is, and I’m strangely fascinated by the development that now Popeye knows what his last name is. It can’t have been revealed to the audience when the series first ran in 1980, because Wikipedia hasn’t got Popeye’s last name and I’d imagine Popeye’s last name to be almost as fascinating to Wikipedia as Lieutenant Columbo’s first name. (It’s “Lieutenant”.) So somehow this has to get through eight more weeks of story without anyone saying a name that left him weeping, and, without getting back to the question of what Olive Oyl’s middle name is.

And past that, over in Greg Evans and Karen Evans’s Luann, four teenagers have managed to get themselves battered, torn, and injured after the ordeal of walking across an empty field, because they are apparently very old people made of a brittle, defective plaster.

Statistics Saturday: The Forgotten Days

The most popular forgotten days of the week:

1. Bragiday (traditional day for the complaining about the poetry of others)
2. Hellinsday (traditional day for doctor’s appointments and hacky jokes about hospital gift shops)
3. Tuesday (except in its two-fer form)
4. Meimeirsday (good for running about like one’s head had been cut off; removed by the Council of Nicaea and put aside “for Miss Manners”)
5. Sagasday (nobody knows when this was)
6. Ransday (day of the sea and/or misunderstood Paul McCartney albums)
7. Wednesday (the remake; lost in the 1922 calendar reboot)
8. Gefjunday (position in the week given away to Bragiday, then left in the back of the closet until it was forgotten)
9. Hoenirsday (no records of it, sorry)
10. Voersday (traditional day for realizing what you should have said instead; in French, le jour d’escalier, the day for remembering one should have pushed someone down the escalator)

Koko the Clown: Koko’s Earth Control

For today I’d like to bring attention to the Fleischer brother’s Koko the Clown cartoon Koko’s Earth Control, which is a pretty good candidate for the title of Most Fleischer-iest Fleischer cartoon. The premise is there in the title: Koko and his dog find the Earth Control, with the dials and levers and all that to control whether it’s day or night, whether it’s raining, whether the world is to come to an end …

Yeah, about that. If I were in charge of the Earth Control, I’d have some kind of lock in place on the lever to end the world, but then, sensible workplace safety regulations would make a lot of cartoons less interesting. So the cartoon turns to a series of spot gags about everything going horribly, crazily wrong, in surreal and sometimes disturbing ways. It’s well-paced, it includes the live action in a pretty good fashion, and if it hasn’t quite got an ending, well, how would you end the world?

Report on the Failure of the Turpid Moraine Moraine Project

It is difficult to identify the proximate and ultimate causes of the failed Turpid Moraine Moraine Project, as this complex and sinister web of factors can pretty much be blamed on the people getting this report, but the effort is worthwhile as it keeps the report-writer from having to unload the boxes of returned things or suffer physical retribution from the Moraine Moraine clients.

We must characterize communications as a primary failure cause and/or mode. For example, the client could directly ask the programmers to ask whether the demands on their servers would be lessened if the software development kits used a smaller typeface and maybe something in a Futura. Meanwhile the programmers were inadequately shy about writing back to ask whether the project had been approved for development as much as 34 months after the contract was signed.

A considerable volume of chat transcripts indicate that communications — internal, external, and whatever that grey area is in-between — were altogether too good and allowed everyone to know what kinds of people they were dealing with. In any modern organization traces of humanity must be suppressed, because humans are just terrible, and the more you hear from them the worse they are. Fortunately the failure of the Moraine Moraine Project bodes well for future work with them as there’s no one left on their staff or ours willing to speak to the other.

To underscore the excessiveness of our communication note that the client’s staffers who sent the typeface memo asserted they were merely being facetious, to bring all together in a sense of common cause against the general stupidity of the modern world. Our programmers responded that there is no reason to treat an ironical shopworn joke as superior to a sincerely shopworn joke. The ensuing debate on the signifiers and purposes of humor, and what did our programmers think that approved-for-development base-touching was exactly, enabled over seven persons in both organizations to earn their Masters of Literature. While we had no explicit responsibility many felt we ought to keep people safe from that sort of thing.

Despite too-good communications, the specifications for the project were still inadequately defined. Enclosed please find the final draft of the project requirements: the twelve Primary Objectives include (as item seven) an inventory of the broken vending machine, (item twelve) a ruling on whether to write “10” or “ten”, and (item nine) a call for international diplomacy by way of open covenants of peace, openly arrived at. Among the twenty Desirable Objectives are “fireproof kettles”, whatever those are, and a settlement on the way to spell “moustache”. The Marketing division was able to identify fourteen products which already meet all these specifications, none of which satisfied the clients, and two of which required the attention of three municipalities’ emergency medical technicians. Marketing asserts Moraine Moraine was being “fickle”.

The Training Department’s admirable refusal to communicate with Programming, Marketing, or the client, despite its de facto status as project coordinators, nevertheless failed us in some ways. Lacking other information, for example, both Marketing and Programming trusted that the West Silage physical plant was still owned by our company, or indeed any company. This was the direct cause of the humiliating site visit in which the attempt to the prototypes of our data-sampling and analysis tools resulted in being chased by binturongs wielding sticks. The Training Department wants it noted that the sticks were sharpened in line with the ISO-9000/OUCH procedure they developed for the Total Quality Management program which began in 1994, and that they will be ready for the 1998 Final Audit whenever we can provide them with six to eight years notice. They would.

While it is always dangerous to identify senior management as participants in the failure I must note that the boss’s decision to unnecessarily offend the foul witch Sycorax and thus get grown into some kind of hoop or something in a pine tree (her e-mails on this point were blissfully uncommunicative) until freed by a shipwrecked sailor, coming as the incident did in the middle of budgeting, left our staffing decisions badly affected for the following fiscal year.

Given the multifaceted nature of the Moraine Moraine failure it is difficult to recommend a single most important corrective action, so I recommend we just have everybody in charge of something read a bunch of Tom Peters books until they feel good about themselves again.

Notes From The Dream World: Al Roker Subway Nudity Something Or Other

So, if we can trust what I’m getting out of my dreams, apparently New York City has some portion of the subway system where there’s nice wide cement platforms elevated high enough that the entire train runs underneath the platform level. Probably there’s a way of getting into the trains underneath the concrete and you just use the very high platforms for getting around. It all seems kind of risky but you can hop from one platform side to the other when the train’s in the station, which is nice. Also, apparently, Al Roker’s going to spend a lot of time wandering around and waving merrily to people on top of the platform.

But there’ll be hazards yet, such as the several honor guard hollering at people to clear a swath about twenty feet wide to make way for the baggage being carried for His Majesty, the King of the Nuditarians. This is peculiar, since certainly I’d imagined the King of the Nuditarians didn’t need all that much luggage. I’d have guessed it at maybe a duffel bag for his gym shorts and a toothbrush. Maybe carry along a bowling ball-style bag for his crown. But the ways of royalty are strange, on the New York City subway or not.

You know, if it weren’t for the honor guard, I’d have suspected him of being an impostor.

What Unseen Voices Laugh At In The Commercial Break

It was a commercial break on The Price Is Right. They were advertising that show CBS has that’s The View, only on CBS, so given some other name I can’t remember. Their guest star was to be Christopher Meloni. A woman, I trust one of the hosts, says, “Meloni? Me likey!” and is met with raucous laughter from an audience that I have no doubt exists, and that listens to this sort of word play or single-party flirtation or whatever it is exactly, and approves. I stared back at the television, wondering, what has brought things to this?

I’m left to suspect this is how the guy who draws Zippy the Pinhead feels all the time.

Math Comics with a Side of Mathematics comics

Over on my mathematics blog there’s another article talking about the subjects that the last couple weeks of comic syndicated, newspaper-grade comic strips mentioned. There’s also, courtesy of Bill Amend of FoxTrot, a link to a big bundle of FoxTrot comic strips that have some mathematical content and are suitable for inclusion on the doors to mathematics classrooms or maybe PowerPoint slides explaining what the tangent of 45 degrees is.

Quarks of nature

And for this morning I’d like to offer a pointer/reblogging of “Quarks of Nature”, on a Labor Of Like’s WordPress blog. Labor of Like writes a good number of pieces using a comic mode that I’ve somehow avoided in these parts, that of the mock news article. Labor of Like also works heavily in the science-news stream, which is a tough kind of humor to write: there’s a terrific drive to write informationally if you start talking about subsurface oceans of gas-giant moons or superlatively weird constructions of quarks, if nothing else to make sure the average reader has a hope of knowing what’s being talked about.

This bit, about the discovery of a bizarre kind of quark construct dubbed Z(4430), gives I think a fairly good sense of what the blog’s humor style is like and so, if you like science-news-based-humor (and done in the style of stuffing each sentence full of jokes, a style that I can find exhausting to write, but which if it works evokes the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films with jokes piled on top of jokes) then this could be something fresh that you’ll enjoy.

A Labor of Like

In matter-that-doesn’t news, the recent discovery of a four-quark something or other has triggered a new round of physics gang warfare.

The new particles go by the name Z(4430).  Physicists give these particles names starting with the letter Z because all the good letters, like M and G, are already taken.  The number is derived from the fact that the particle showed up sometime between 4:00 and 4:30, while scientists were out having afternoon tea.  “I just came back, and there were these 4 quarks laying on the floor of the collider.  They weren’t there when we left, but we’re not sure exactly when they showed up.”

In 2008, the Belle Collaboration*, a street gang of Hot and/or BrightDisney heroines, announced it saw the world’s first evidence of Z(4430) in Japan.  Then another group, led by the elephant king BaBar, ran its own experiments in California. BaBar said their…

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Statistics Saturday: Most Popular Unwritten Articles

Here are the most popular things which I did not write in the past month:

1. French Words I Do Not Know, a quick guide to things you can’t talk about with me in French.
2. Bacon Moustaches In Mason Jars, frankly, clickbait for the hipster audience that saw through me so clearly that they were over me before everyone else was.
3. The Studio Audience, and other things not found around my apartment (I haven’t had a studio apartment since 1998).
4. Episodes of Automan I Still Have In My Head, a cautionary tale. Warning: they’re all stupid.
5. Robert Benchley: My First Radio Set, an essay about trying out life as a ham radio operator which the great humorist never wrote.

Felix the Cat: Felix the Ghost-Breaker

This morning I’d like to offer the 1923 Felix the Cat short, Felix the Ghost-Breaker. I admit part of what interests me about this is that it’s not hard to see the premise — Felix the Cat runs across some ghosts, and takes on the job of ridding a farmer’s house of them — and imagine the Fleischer Brothers cartoon that’d be made from it. But Pat Sullivan Cartoon studios made more measured, more orderly cartoons than the Fleischers did, and the plot takes priority over ghost-and-haunting jokes, down to an ending that’s funny for its lack of connection to the plot and for the somewhat-modern pop-culture joke it makes me think of.

Nevertheless, I’m amused by the whole short, partly because I like the rhythms of silent-era cartoons, and the impressive look they have from being done in literally black and white, no greys. The short also features one of the conventions of silent cartoons, that of word balloons popping out of the characters’ mouths, a gimmick that really connects you to the comic strip forebears and that reminds you that comic strips didn’t really get word balloons so they looked right until about the 1940s.

There are also several nicely creepy moments; for my money the best of them is a scene with a skeleton seen in the darkness. Curiously, Felix is almost a passive observer for about two-thirds of the cartoon’s runtime.

How To Write Out Numbers

Here are some rules for writing numbers.

For whole numbers under ten, write them out as words. For ten, 11, and twelve, discuss the matter with your copy editor, engaging in a long-running and frank exchange of typographical views that will, as always, end with at least one of the parties arrested for stuffing a body part into a toaster on the “bagel” setting that is itself stuffed into a composting pit, and might bring in some other parties who will discover they can not believe these other people are allowed to vote or hold sharp objects such as hula hoops. If the argument is not productive enough bring up the matter of zero and what results will surely end with arson. For numbers larger than twelve use digits, as they’re too tedious if given the chance to be words. Exceptions: googol googolplex either neither fimble flumble seizure leisure sixty-four caffeine.

When writing a string of numbers it’s important to alternate between digits and words for clarity, as for example in the famous aircraft being the Boeing “seven40seven” or the less famous aircraft the Boeing “7.thirty.7”. In addition to reading clarity the graphic design potential is powerful, and if you can’t imagine a trendy club writing its address this way you’ve failed graphic design class and probably can’t even recognize Futura when you see it, which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad person but does mean we’ll have to have someone watching whenever you walk into the campus’s Fine Arts Library.

Percentages should never be referred to in print, as they make the reader suspect this is a word problem and the reader will go off to the bridge column. They may be used in PowerPoint slides only if the percent symbol is animated, rotating around one or two axes but not the third.

Negative numbers require special protection so as not to startle skittish readers. Besides being denoted with a minus sign they should be preceded by a man on foot waving a large red flag, and followed by another man ringing a bell. It is good practice to surround the number in parentheses, in case of spilling, and to be printed in red ink, lest the supply of red ink get noticeably too large. At that, you’ll want to have your copy reviewed by trained professional mathematicians. Do not rely on the untrained kind, as they will try to clean up spilled negative numbers by having them (the numbers) eaten by a goat. Trained professional mathematicians will call in something from accredited accounting ungulates.

Imaginary numbers may be written any old way you like, as the non-mathematical reader thinks you’re just making them up anyway, while the mathematically inclined roll their eyes and sigh knowingly whenever the subject comes up. Really, you probably don’t even have to do that much. Rewrite the sentence to avoid the whole subject, even if you have to change the essay’s subject from the history of polynomials into, oh, lumps of putty.

If you need to pluralize a number go wild and add an apostrophe before the s or es, as in: 7.thirty.7’es. In fact, nobody’s ever lived to regret adding apostrophes where they’re not needed, so, what the heck, toss in something so, like, this year is known as 201’4, or the population of the United States as 317′,84’2,’000. Apostrophes are also cool if you need to omit the part of the number that’s boring. Why not try writing the volume of your refrigerator in cubic inches as 14’82 and leave the reader to work out the omitted numbers for their fun and mental exercise, other than that if the reader finds out where you live they might jab you with an apostrophe in front of the toaster?

Know the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers! If mixed they will fight until one is stuffed into a toaster and the other sneaks off to make long-distance calls on your land line. In cases of ambiguity remember that cardinal numbers are nearly invariably Rh-positive while ordinal numbers are afraid of bats, owing to the longstanding resentment of ordinal numbers for vampire novels after their manuscripts were rejected.

If you don’t like those rules, try some other ones. That’ll go well.

Expedition Log, Day 1, Day 3: Nothing

11:58 am. Coming to question entire point of expedition. What is the point of discovery? What is the value of exploration? How can traveller’s tales of Upper Fiddled Mewes or the eastern shore of the Pompous Lakes District be relevant to the modern age? Is there a point to continuing, and at that, is there a point to pointedness when life is occupied by a string of suffering that stretches to the indefinite past and to the pointlessness of the future? The Price Is Right ended in a Double Overbid. After enough time spent staring into the void will come the balm of punching a book of Nietzsche.

Total Mileage: 0 (me), 0.001136 miles (book of Nietzsche, would have been farther but it hit the wall; may try again in a larger room).

Georges Melies: Le Diable Noir

For today I’d like to offer another Georges Méliès film, 1905’s Le Diable Noir. Le Diable was probably Méliès’s favorite character, since, toss in the sort of impish devil that his films featured and you have a perfectly sound reason to spend the whole film making stop-motion tricks follow one another. Here, a tenant — I believe it’s Georges Méliès himself — attempts to get to bed and it goes about as well as you might expect. I enjoy this sort of playful demon who’ll do less about inflicting eternal torment and more who’ll make excessively many chairs appear in the room.

The Beatles’ Revolver Hits

The days of the year you’re most likely to hear the various songs from The Beatles’ Revolver on NewsRadio 88 or your equivalent news station:

Song	Most Popular Day
Taxman	November 15 (Tax Day for procrastinators)
Eleanor Rigby	September 24 (Eleanor Day)
I’m Only Sleeping	August 8 (Snoopy’s Birthday)
Love You To	First Monday after First Tuesday of February (Why Not?)
Here, There and Everywhere	October 8 (Dave Barry’s Son’s Birthday)
Yellow Submarine	Second Weekend of August (Manasquan, NJ, Big Sea Day)
She Said She Said	July 16 (Echo Eve)
Good Day Sunshine	Penultimate Tuesday in March (first sunny day of year)
And Your Bird Can Sing	May 5 (Bird Morning)
For No One	December 2 (Nothing going on)
Doctor Robert	October 28 (Robert defends his thesis)
I Want To Tell You	Last Sunday before Last Monday in June (Honesty Day)
Got To Get You Into My Life	January 14 (National Absorption Of Other Amoebas Day, Amoeba Orthodox calendar)
Tomorrow Never Knows	April 16 (better get ready!)

S J Perelman: The Body Beautiful

[ Among The Best Of S J Perelman is this article about the funny things one can find by scrounging around magazines meant for readerships which don’t include you. That’s always been a method of finding comedy, and Perelman even includes a casual mention here about how much work you might have to do in searching for stuff in order to find something that can be used.
]

Sometimes when I have worked for hours in vain over a difficult problem in Baker Street and my keen hawklike profile is drawn with fatigue, I like to take down my Stradivarius, pile it on the fire and curl up with a cop of Hygeia, the monthly magazine published by the American Medical Association. I don’t necessarily have to read it; all I have to do is curl up with it. In a few minutes my pulse becomes normal, my eyes glaze over, and I am ready to do business with the Sandman. I don’t know much about medicine but I know what I like, If the American Medical Association would only put up this magazine in tablet or powder form nobody would ever pass a white night again. Unlike other soporifics, Hygeia does not affect the heart; I have even read a copy without any ill effects other than a feeling of drowsiness the next day. It fulfills every requirement of the United States Pharmacopeia; it is clean, it is fresh every month, and it is standard strength. From the opening essay on flat feet down to the very last article on diabetic muffins, it is a guaranteed yawn from cover to cover.

The one oasis in this Sahara, however, is a sort of outpatient clinic where the layman is allowed to make a fool of himself in full view of the medical profession. I quote at random (random hell, I had to look through nineteen
copies to find it) a letter headed “Synthetic Saliva” appearing in the Q. and A. department of Hygeia:

“To the Editor:— How could saliva be duplicated? Where could the proper materials be secured to duplicate it or nearly so?— H.C.D., Illinois.

Here is a cry from the heart. Obviously some young Frankenstein has built himself a monster or Golem in his spare time out in the woodshed. With infinite labor and utmost secrecy, using bits of wire, tin, old bones and meat, he has created the perfect robot. Suddenly, on the verge of completion, he stops in sudden panic. He has left out saliva. The monster is beginning to growl ominously; he wants what all the other boys on the street have. But do you think the editors of Hygeia care? They fob off H.C.D. (possibly one of the most brilliant inventors of our time) with a few heavy-duty medical words and sink into a complacent snooze, unmindful that a raging monster with a dry mouth may be loose in the Middle West at this very moment. I don’t like to be an alarmist, fellows, but this is a very short-sighted attitude.

No matter how blase they imagine themselves, hypochondriacs from six to sixty will get a deep and ghoulish satisfaction studying the correspondence which appears each month. Those private maladies you have been pruning and transplanting couldn’t possibly compare with the things that bother Hygeia. readers. The pathetic query of J.I.B., Pennsylvania, will illustrate:

“To the Editor:— Is there any danger of contracting radium poisoning from the use of clocks painted with a radium compound; for instance, in case the clock crystal should be broken and the radium compound chipped
off?”

The editors, who pretend to know everything, reply that there is no danger whatsoever. This is pretty cold comfort to a man who probably glows like a Big Ben every time he enters a dark room. However, he might as well stop barking up the wrong tree; he wouldn’t get a civil answer from Hygeia even if he grew a minute hand and sounded the hour and half-hour with a musical chime.

I would like to think that the case of G.S., Ohio, is also one of hypochondria but it has a more ominous ring:

‘To the Editor:— Can the statements contained in a recent daily newspaper that bobbing the hair will cause girls to grow beards be verified? Or is it just a bit of propaganda?”

If that isn’t a tacit admission that Miss G.S. is sporting a grogan or an imperial around Ohio, I knock under. Even if she only thinks she has a beard, I wouldn’t give her house-room; but that is beside the point, as she has not asked me for house-room. She probably has the whole house to herself anyway. Much more understandable is the plight of the frightened Kansan who writes as follows:

“To the Editor:— My students tell me that surgeons have been able to transplant the stomach from an animal, as a calf or a goat, into man. Is this possible?— N.B.Z., Kansas”

I can sympathize with the poor fellow for I, too, get the same sensation when I drink black velvet. Actually, it only feels as if you had changed stomachs with a goat. One morning I even woke up convinced that I had swallowed a marble the night before. To make it worse, a man named Mr. Coffee-Nerves was standing over my bed in a white Prince Albert, helping me to hate myself. I got up and went right through him to the bathroom where I had a long look at my chest. At first I couldn’t tell whether it was a steelie or a bull’s-eye, but it turned out to be a clear glass agate with a little lamb inside. I managed to dissolve my marble with two aspirins in a glass of hot water. But thank God I’m no hypochondriac; you don’t catch me writing letters to the American Medical Association.

For a refreshing contrast to Hygeia, one turns to a live- wire little monthly called Estes Back to Nature Magazine, published at 1 1 3 North LaBrea Avenue, Hollywood, California. Its editor is Dr. St. Louis Estes, who modestly styles himself “Discoverer of Brain Breathing and Dynamic Breath Controls for Disease Prevention and Life Extension, Father and Founder of the Raw Food Movement, and International Authority on Old Age and Raw Foods.” (There is something to write on a library card when they ask you for your occupation.) Cooked vegetables, spices, and hair tonic are poison, says Dr. Estes, and although I have never tried the combination, I can readily believe it. But the Doctor is constructive, and I know no better answer to the cynicism and bigotry of Hygeia than a menu I found in his magazine. It was labelled “A Dinner Fit for a King” and it still haunts me:

“EGG AND FRUIT SOUP: To one quart of milk and one pint of cream, beat in thoroughly four eggs. Use as a filler cubed pineapple, sweeten to taste with honey. Serve in cups like broth.

“MOCK TURKEY-WHITE MEAT: Into one pound of cottage cheese mix and roll equal amount of raw flaked pecans, peanuts and Jordan almonds until it becomes a thick, solid mass. Season to taste with chopped onions, pimientos, green peppers, adding a dash of powdered celery, sage and horseradish. Serve in slices like white meat.

“MAPLE ICE CREAM: To one pint of whipped cream add one pint of pure maple syrup. Whip until thick. Then add the beaten whites of two eggs and one cupful of chopped nuts. Freeze.”

I froze.

Statistics Saturday: Country Populations Versus What I Thought

I confess I’ve gotten a little away from the important business of these statistical reports, that of listing countries of the world. Let me return to that, then, with a brief chart describing the countries of the world and how their population compares to what I thought.

Country	Population	How That Compares To What I’d Have Guessed
China	1,363,800,000	About Right
India	1,242,620,000	About Right
United States	317,842,000	About Right
Indonesia	247,424,598	About Right
Brazil	201,032,714	Higher
Pakistan	186,134,000	Higher
Nigeria	173,615,000	Higher
Bangladesh	152,518,015	Higher
Russia	146,019,512	Higher
Japan	127,120,000	Lower
Mexico	119,713,203	Higher
Philippines	99,392,700	Higher
Vietnam	89,708,900	Higher
Ethiopia	86,613,986	Higher
Egypt	86,261,500	Higher
Germany	80,716,000	Higher
Iran	77,347,000	Higher
Turkey	76,667,864	Higher
Democratic Republic of the Congo	67,514,000	Higher
Thailand	65,926,261	Higher
France	65,864,000	Lower
United Kingdom	63,705,000	Lower
Italy	60,021,955	Lower
Burma	53,259,000	About Right
South Africa	52,981,991	Higher
South Korea	50,219,669	About Right
Colombia	47,540,000	Higher
Spain	46,609,700	Lower
Ukraine	45,410,071	Higher
Tanzania	44,928,923	Higher
Kenya	44,354,000	Higher
Argentina	40,117,096	Higher
Algeria	38,700,000	Higher
Poland	38,502,396	Higher
Sudan	37,964,000	Higher
Uganda	35,357,000	Higher
Canada	35,344,962	About Right
Iraq	34,035,000	About Right
Morocco	33,225,600	Higher
Peru	30,475,144	Higher
Uzbekistan	30,183,400	Higher
Malaysia	30,071,000	About Right
Saudi Arabia	29,994,272	Higher
Venezuela	28,946,101	About Right
Nepal	26,494,504	Higher
Afghanistan	25,500,100	About Right
Yemen	25,235,000	Higher
North Korea	24,895,000	About Right
Ghana	24,658,823	Higher
Mozambique	23,700,715	Higher
Australia	23,446,084	About Right
Taiwan	23,379,129	Higher
Ivory Coast	23,202,000	Higher
Syria	21,898,000	Higher
Madagascar	21,263,403	Higher
Angola	20,609,294	Higher
Cameroon	20,386,799	Higher
Sri Lanka	20,277,597	About Right
Romania	20,121,641	About Right
Burkina Faso	17,322,796	Higher
Kazakhstan	17,207,000	Higher
Niger	17,129,076	About Right
Netherlands	16,845,600	Lower
Malawi	16,363,000	About Right
Chile	16,341,929	Lower
Guatemala	15,806,675	About Right
Ecuador	15,715,900	Lower
Mali	15,302,000	About Right
Cambodia	15,135,000	Lower
Zambia	14,580,290	Lower
Zimbabwe	12,973,808	Lower
Senegal	12,873,601	About Right
Chad	12,825,000	Lower
South Sudan	11,296,000	About Right
Belgium	11,188,935	Lower
Cuba	11,167,325	Lower
Tunisia	10,886,500	About Right
Guinea	10,824,200	About Right
Greece	10,815,197	Lower
Rwanda	10,537,222	Lower
Czech Republic	10,512,400	Lower
Somalia	10,496,000	About Right
Portugal	10,477,800	Lower
Haiti	10,413,211	About Right
Benin	10,323,000	Higher
Bolivia	10,027,254	Lower
Hungary	9,879,000	Lower
Sweden	9,658,301	Lower
Azerbaijan	9,477,100	About Right
Belarus	9,468,100	Higher
Dominican Republic	9,445,281	Lower
Burundi	9,420,248	About Right
Honduras	8,555,072	Lower
Austria	8,504,850	Lower
United Arab Emirates	8,264,070	Lower
Tajikistan	8,160,000	Higher
Israel	8,157,300	About Right
Switzerland	8,112,200	Lower
Papua New Guinea	7,398,500	About Right
Bulgaria	7,282,041	Lower
Hong Kong (China)	7,219,700	Higher
Serbia	7,181,505	About Right
Paraguay	6,783,374	Lower
Laos	6,580,800	About Right
Jordan	6,568,100	Lower
El Salvador	6,340,000	Lower
Eritrea	6,333,000	Lower
Libya	6,202,000	Lower
Togo	6,191,155	About Right
Sierra Leone	6,190,280	About Right
Nicaragua	6,071,045	Lower
Kyrgyzstan	5,663,133	About Right
Denmark	5,627,235	Lower
Finland	5,453,784	Lower
Slovakia	5,415,949	Lower
Singapore	5,399,200	About Right
Turkmenistan	5,240,000	Lower
Norway	5,109,056	Lower
Lebanon	4,822,000	Lower
Costa Rica	4,667,096	Lower
Central African Republic	4,616,000	Lower
Ireland	4,593,100	Lower
New Zealand	4,522,810	About Right
Georgia	4,483,800	Lower
Republic of the Congo	4,448,000	Lower
Palestine	4,420,549	About Right
Liberia	4,294,000	About Right
Croatia	4,290,612	Lower
Oman	3,992,000	About Right
Bosnia and Herzegovina	3,791,622	About Right
Puerto Rico (USA)	3,615,086	About Right
Moldova	4,062,800	Lower
Mauritania	3,461,041	About Right
Panama	3,405,813	Lower
Uruguay	3,286,314	Lower
Kuwait	3,065,850	Lower
Armenia	3,017,400	Lower
Lithuania	2,941,953	About Right
Mongolia	2,931,300	Lower
Albania	2,821,977	About Right
Jamaica	2,711,476	Higher
Qatar	2,116,400	About Right
Namibia	2,113,077	Lower
Lesotho	2,074,000	About Right
Macedonia	2,062,294	About Right
Slovenia	2,062,227	About Right
Botswana	2,024,904	Lower
Latvia	2,003,900	About Right
Gambia	1,882,450	Lower
Kosovo	1,815,606	Lower
Guinea-Bissau	1,704,000	Lower
Gabon	1,672,000	Lower
Equatorial Guinea	1,622,000	About Right
Trinidad and Tobago	1,328,019	About Right
Estonia	1,311,870	Lower
Mauritius	1,257,900	About Right
Swaziland	1,250,000	About Right
Bahrain	1,234,571	About Right
Timor-Leste	1,066,409	Higher
Djibouti	873,000	About Right
Cyprus	865,878	About Right
Fiji	858,038	Higher
Réunion (France)	840,974	Higher
Guyana	784,894	Higher
Bhutan	746,060	Higher
Comoros	743,798	Higher
Montenegro	620,029	Higher
Macau (China)	607,500	Lower
Solomon Islands	581,344	Lower
Western Sahara	567,000	Lower
Luxembourg	537,000	Lower
Suriname	534,189	About Right
Cape Verde	491,875	About Right
Malta	416,055	About Right
Guadeloupe (France)	405,739	Lower
Brunei	393,162	Lower
Martinique (France)	392,291	About Right
Bahamas	351,461	About Right
Belize	349,728	Lower
Iceland	325,671	Lower
Maldives	317,280	About Right
Barbados	285,000	Lower
French Polynesia (France)	268,270	About Right
Vanuatu	264,652	About Right
New Caledonia (France)	258,958	Higher
French Guiana (France)	237,549	Higher
Mayotte (France)	212,645	About Right
Samoa	187,820	Lower
São Tomé and Príncipe	187,356	Lower
Saint Lucia	180,000	Lower
Guam (USA)	159,358	Lower
Curaçao (Netherlands)	150,563	Lower
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	109,000	Lower
Kiribati	106,461	About Right
United States Virgin Islands (USA)	106,405	Lower
Grenada	103,328	Lower
Tonga	103,036	About Right
Aruba (Netherlands)	101,484	About Right
Federated States of Micronesia	101,351	About Right
Jersey (UK)	99,000	Lower
Seychelles	90,945	Lower
Antigua and Barbuda	86,295	Lower
Isle of Man (UK)	84,497	Lower
Andorra	76,098	Lower
Dominica	71,293	Lower
Bermuda (UK)	64,237	Lower
Guernsey (UK)	63,085	Lower
Greenland (Denmark)	56,483	Lower
Marshall Islands	56,086	About Right
American Samoa (USA)	55,519	About Right
Cayman Islands (UK)	55,456	About Right
Saint Kitts and Nevis	54,000	About Right
Northern Mariana Islands (USA)	53,883	About Right
Faroe Islands (Denmark)	48,308	About Right
Sint Maarten (Netherlands)	37,429	About Right
Liechtenstein	37,132	Lower
Saint Martin (France)	36,979	Lower
Monaco	36,136	About Right
San Marino	33,549	About Right
Turks and Caicos Islands (UK)	31,458	Lower
Gibraltar (UK)	30,001	Lower
British Virgin Islands (UK)	29,537	Lower
Åland Islands (Finland)	28,502	Lower
Caribbean Netherlands (Netherlands)	23,296	Lower
Palau	20,901	Lower
Cook Islands (NZ)	14,974	Lower
Anguilla (UK)	13,452	Lower
Wallis and Futuna (France)	13,135	Lower
Tuvalu	11,323	Lower
Nauru	9,945	Lower
Saint Barthélemy (France)	8,938	Lower
Saint Pierre and Miquelon (France)	6,081	Lower
Montserrat (UK)	4,922	Lower
Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha (UK)	4,000	About Right
Svalbard and Jan Mayen (Norway)	2,655	Lower
Falkland Islands (UK)	2,563	About Right
Norfolk Island (Australia)	2,302	Lower
Christmas Island (Australia)	2,072	Lower
Niue (NZ)	1,613	Lower
Tokelau (NZ)	1,411	Lower
Vatican City	839	Higher
Cocos (Keeling) Islands (Australia)	596	Lower
Pitcairn Islands (UK)	56	About Right

In conclusion: there are a lot of countries in the world and I somehow had preconceptions about the size of the populations of New Caledonia, Gambia, and Benin, which I only hope hasn’t caused me to make improper policy decisions.

Betty Boop: Crazy Town

For today’s cartoon I’d like to offer something that’s just absurd: the Fleischer studios’ 1932 Betty Boop short Crazy Town. After the handsome opening credits — which include James Culhane, who’s famous in animation circles for doing the “Heigh-Ho” sequence in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and writing (as Shamus Culhane) the classic textbook Animation From Script To Screen; and David Tendlar, who never achieved fame, but who animated for Fleischer Studios/Paramount Studios for decades and then went to Hanna-Barbera, so you’ve seen his work — Betty Boop and Bimbo take the trolley to Crazy Town, a place where pretty much any sight gag the animators could think of gets done. Many of them are simple reversals of expectation, birds that fly under water and fish that swim above, or barbers that make hair grow by cutting it, but that doesn’t infringe on the childish glee that comes from seeing the reversals. And then, of course, things keep getting stranger.

The Record Offensive

I’ve been reading Kenneth Bilby’s biography of David Sarnoff, the pioneer in organizing multinational corporations to enthusiastically crush inventors who foolishly develop critical radio and television technologies, and came across one of those passages in Chapter 7 (“Chapter Seven”) that just captivates a mind like mine:

The tools that [ Sarnoff ] proposed for winning [ the Cold War ] were electronic, to be made available at cost by American manufacturing concerns, led by RCA. Tiny record players, costing less than $1 to manufacture, would be parachuted in clusters inside Russia along with small vinyl records. The recorded messages in Russian would tell the populace that America was their friend and call upon them to overthrow their Marxist masters. [ … ] The idea of parachuted phonographs was dropped as too hazardous, and thus possibly counterproductive.

Imagine the world if come the late 50s RCA had cranked out millions of cheap record players that were parachute-dropped into the Soviet Union, carrying messages of friendship and goodwill and apologies for any record players that hit someone on the head as they landed, which would probably be the counterproductive part. “We love you,” I can picture the recording of President Eisenhower saying, “Sorry about the bumps on the head! Overthrow your masters!” Well, maybe that doesn’t exactly capture Eisenhower’s voice, since he was born in Kansas or something in the late 19th century, where they only used exclamation points for weirdly passionate arguments about silver coinage. So imagine something with those sentiments, then, but expressed using his own punctuation.

Of course, on top of the counterproductivity of bonking Russians on the head with record players of love and rebellion there’s also the potential for retaliation. Surely something fewer than two billion record players could be dropped onto Moscow before the Soviets would decide it’s time to retaliate, and they’d start whipping up their own record players for dropping into Western Europe, increasing the rate of head injury from the Oder to the English Channel, and maybe a bit farther, if the winds are up to it. By 1962 West and East Germany could be covered hip-deep in one-dollar record players, and traffic in anything smaller than a bulldozer would be impossible.

Since by this point it’d be clear the record-player-drop wasn’t working the only thing to do would be to step it up, with even more record players and far more discs plummeting onto the East European Plain when the Central Siberian Plateau turend out to be too hard to find. The President couldn’t possibly have time to record all the messages, and probably wouldn’t even review them after a couple dozen times. The record-makers would start slipping in popular music, comedians, maybe read some stuff from the newspaper they thought was neat and the only people to suspect would be the actual Russians, who, if they understand English, would naturally wonder why the United States was going to all this effort to read them Charles Henry Goren’s columns about playing bridge, or why anyone plays bridge.

To achieve better market saturation bombers would give way to rockets, and by the mid-1960s the Soviets and the Americans would have hundreds of Intercontinental Ballistic Muzak weapons, ready on a moment’s notice to shower the population with enough Ferrante and Teicher to background the world with music twelve times over. The contest would leap inevitably to space, where the first long-playing rockets threaten to light up the entire ionosphere with an inescapable mass of Mexicali Singers, at what risk to the ozone layer we can only imagine. (And none of this even considers how the Non-Aligned Movement might react to a blanketing of Vaughn Meader.) The first men on the Moon could well look back to Earth and remark how from that distance there are no 45’s, no 33 1/3’s, no 78’s, just a universal matrix message of brotherhood.

So aren’t you captivated by this? And yet the real world decided this was maybe one Cold War scheme too many. But that’s probably just as well. If we were making record players for a dollar to parachute onto unsuspecting people, how much would we be spending on the parachutes? I grant a cheap parachute isn’t necessarily a bad one, but, would you want to take that risk?

The Mildness of the Weather and the Walnut Trees of Oregon

So, a close examination of the sidewalks in my neighborhood for reasons that are perfectly legitimate and not at all odd, thank you very much, led me to a January 1912 edition of The M.A.C. Record, the student newspaper for what would become Michigan State University. Amongst the items listed in “About The Campus” was this intelligence:

O. I. Gregg writes that he has placed an order for a large number of fruit and walnut trees, to be planted on the Fairview fruit and poultry ranch at Grant’s Pass, Oregon. Mr. Gregg enjoys the West, and states that the weather is very mild at this time of year.

I realize that this is not in substance any different from the things people post on their Facebooks or Twitter feeds today, but I can’t help imagining Mister O. I. Gregg, then now of Grant’s Pass, Oregon, stopping in the telegraph office and declaring, “Gadzooks! It’s the New Year! I must send a message to the Michigan Agricultural College and notify them of my purchase of fruit and walnut trees, as well as to attest to the mildness of the weather at this time of year!” Probably there was a crowd, too, of all the college men in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, gathered around and figuring out how many trees they were going to tell their alma maters they had purchased.

I wonder if the weather really was mild in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, in the winter of 1911-12. Maybe the college graduates just reported it was, so everyone would figure they were doing comfortably well, what with their fruit and their walnut trees, and wouldn’t worry about them and wouldn’t lose heart in their academic studies or dreams of someday moving to Oregon.

Expedition Log, Day 1, Redux: Not Arguing That Again

9:45 am. Not making the same mistake as last time. Headed out east to find the Cumbrey Road onramp desperately backed up due to emergency construction. Turned around; went west, discovered the Pridmore’s Swamp Turnpike closed due to non-emergency non-construction. At the Five Points Turnabout walls of orange barrels reach high enough to blot out the sun. Trying south instead discovered potholes for sale by the square yard and extending as far as forty feet off the highway and into people’s homes. Northwest reveals a patch where it’s still winter, and northeast finds routine construction implying detours sending me right back home. Clearly there are deeper forces at work here than we suspect.

Total Mileage: 0.

From The Days of Sensurround

You maybe remember a while back I got to wondering about the 1977 disaster film Rollercoaster. There’s a scene near the end where they needed a rock band, and apparently the producers’ first hope was that they’d get Kiss to play the scenes. Somehow that didn’t happen, and they got Sparks instead, because Kiss and Sparks are very similar bands what with having two S’s and on K in both their names.

It turns out that according to somebody or other on the Internet Movie Database, which is the soundest citation possible not involving “forwarded in e-mail from your grandmom”, the producers also considered at some point having the Bay City Rollers perform. This is obviously a huge departure what with that band having only one S and no K’s to speak of, and makes me wonder if the producers even knew what they were looking for. It’s almost like they figured once they had roller coasters everything else would just fit, whatever letters they had. I don’t know.

Robert Benchley: Do Insects Think?

[ I feel like some Benchley today; do you? From Love Conquers All, Mister Benchley offers his experiences with the problem of understanding the mind of a very non-human animal. ]

In a recent book entitled, The Psychic Life of Insects, Professor Bouvier says that we must be careful not to credit the little winged fellows with intelligence when they behave in what seems like an intelligent manner. They may be only reacting. I would like to confront the Professor with an instance of reasoning power on the part of an insect which can not be explained away in any such manner.

During the summer of 1899, while I was at work on my treatise Do Larvae Laugh, we kept a female wasp at our cottage in the Adirondacks. It really was more like a child of our own than a wasp, except that it looked more like a wasp than a child of our own. That was one of the ways we told the difference.

It was still a young wasp when we got it (thirteen or fourteen years old) and for some time we could not get it to eat or drink, it was so shy. Since it was a, female, we decided to call it Miriam, but soon the children’s nickname for it—“Pudge”—became a fixture, and “Pudge” it was from that time on.

One evening I had been working late in my laboratory fooling round with some gin and other chemicals, and in leaving the room I tripped over a nine of diamonds which someone had left lying on the floor and knocked over my card catalogue containing the names and addresses of all the larvae worth knowing in North America. The cards went everywhere.

I was too tired to stop to pick them up that night, and went sobbing to bed, just as mad as I could be. As I went, however, I noticed the wasp flying about in circles over the scattered cards. “Maybe Pudge will pick them up,” I said half-laughingly to myself, never thinking for one moment that such would be the case.

When I came down the next morning Pudge was still asleep over in her box, evidently tired out. And well she might have been. For there on the floor lay the cards scattered all about just as I had left them the night before. The faithful little insect had buzzed about all night trying to come to some decision about picking them up and arranging them in the catalogue-box, and then, figuring out for herself that, as she knew practically nothing about larvae of any sort except wasp-larvae, she ould probably make more of a mess of rearranging them than as if she left them on the floor for me to fix. It was just too much for her to tackle, and, discouraged, she went over and lay down in her box, where she cried herself to sleep.

If this is not an answer to Professor Bouvier’s statement that insects have no reasoning power, I do not know what is.

Statistics Saturday: Mean Time Between Paul McCartney

Here is a quick reference guide to how long you can expect to go between references to something written by or featuring Sir Paul McCartney:

Location	Time
The 60s ratio station	18 minutes
The 70s radio station	17 minutes
The 80s radio station	34 minutes, but it’s going to be “Spies Like Us” distressingly often
NewsRadio 88	46 hours
Any given episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000	54 minutes
The 50s radio station	There are no 50s radio stations anymore
Foreign currency exchange markets	12 minutes (!)
Dave Davies’s house	Once per year, as in late March he figures to write an April Fool’s e-mail to Ray Davies saying Paul invited him on tour because nobody else can sing “Death Of A Clown” right, only he has to delete the unsent e-mail because once again this year he hasn’t got Ray Davies’s e-mail
As Wake-Up Music On The International Space Station	4 days
Commercials Supporting The Existence Of Banks	Surprisingly short
Those tiny toy music boxes at the museum gift shop	Continuous until the cashiers go mad

Felix the Cat: Felix in Fairyland

For this Saturday morning I’d like to offer Pat Sullivan’s Felix in Fairyland. Felix the Cat is one of those cartoon stars who managed to become so famous in his prime that he’s been kind of remembered ever since even though there hasn’t really been a lot to remember him for in a lifetime. There’ve been revitals in the 1950s and 1990s, and a direct-to-video movie in 1991 that featured some staggeringly ugly computer animation, but I can’t say any of it since the 1930s has been all that interesting. Nevertheless, he’s still somewhat recognizable, and gets rated as among the top cartoon characters of all time, so, why not look to one of the originals?

This nine-minute short, as promised, sends Felix to a fairy-tale land after an act of kindness, and once there he stands up for Little Miss Muffet and then comes to the aid of the Little Old Woman Who Lives In A Shoe. Cartoons would do a lot of fairy-tale fracturing and recombining in decades to come, and I’d be surprised if this were the first cartoon to do that, but it must be among the earlier ones since cartoons were only something like two decades old at this point.

The cartoon shows its age, in ways besides being silent. The worst of these ways is the pacing, as it takes its time establishing stuff and making sure everyone knows the setup. Felix doesn’t even get to Fairyland until two and a half minutes in. But the best of these ways is in the loose way that anything can be anything else, given a moment to change. Reality could be a very fluid thing before animation got very good at telling stories, and before sound and color added a kind of heavy reality to objects. When it was all black ink and white background, a spider could be a witch and Felix could climb a ladder of his own question marks with dreamy ease.

In Which I Do Not, Repeat Do Not, Poison Our Pet Rabbit

“This is poison, isn’t it?” said our pet rabbit, as he chewed on the leafy part.

I’d had the accusation before. “It’s Swiss chard again. There wasn’t anything poisonous about it last time either.”

He hopped up and shook out a little, which is the sort of happy thing rabbits do and didn’t match his tone at all. “Why are you trying to poison me?” He sniffed and then chewed some more at the leaf.

“Why on Earth would I even want to poison you? You’re too darling to poison.”

He pulled his head up, which is some new behavior he’s picked up and exposes this adorable dark-colored patch in the middle of the white-colored patches of his chin, and it’s only his quick reflexes that keep it from being tickled. “I can’t know your motivations. If I make the a priori assumption you’re a rational agent I could expect you to inevitably come to a sufficient moral awareness to keep you from choosing to poison me, but for all I know you’ve had a partial or a defective moral upbringing. And I know you’re not fully rational because I heard that awful movie you watched Saturday.”

So this explained why the bookmarks in my Beloved’s books of Kant keep getting moved around, and maybe why there was a nibbled corner of the Critique of the Power of Judgement. I should probably mention here that not all pets kept by philosophers end up acting like. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, famously kept a pet squirrel who did little but kick the him in the shins, less because of the squirrel’s treatise on the origins of ethics and more because Wittgenstein was the sort of person who inspired people to kick him. Also in my defense I was watching Foodfight extremely ironically and felt a little bad for even doing that.

“I can’t prove to you that I’ve got a functioning moral compass” — and he interrupted with a sharp HA! — “but if you really suspect the chard is poison you don’t have to eat it.”

He stopped chewing and looked up indignantly. “You yelled and laughed when I ate that dog food!”

“We didn’t think you’d really eat it! We thought you’d sniff at it and refuse. That stuff contains meat, you know.”

“Then why’d you put a kibble out for me?”

“Well, it’s cute seeing you sniff at things you rear back from.”

“Because you figure I won’t eat poison!”

“Again, though, you haven’t suggested a reason for me to poison you. And just saying I’m irrational doesn’t excuse the need for a reason. You need an irrational reason.”

He huffed a bit, the way he does when he realizes he’s being pulled into the pet carrier. “You envy my superior lifestyle. I can just hop around the house and eat and nap all day.”

“That argument won’t obtain,” which sounds like a smart thing to say, because it’s a weird use of the word “obtain”, one I’m not sure is defensible. “I’m a telecommuter. Functionally we’re equivalent.”

“If you’re not envious then why don’t you ever name me when you write about me on the Internet?”

Ah, that. Probably best to go with the honest answer. “I don’t want people getting your name and ringing up fraudulent credit card charges. It protects you.”

“Oh.” And he started chewing on the stalk of the chard. “You could give me a stage name.”

“I can’t think of any that could capture your personality.”

And he did that little shaking hop.

“You know, when I bought that chard, the cashier asked if red or white tasted better.”

He let the stalk of the chard drop. “What did you tell him?”

“I told her I didn’t know. We just buy it for you.”

“And she asked why you’re poisoning me?” He picked the stalk back up and started inhaling it, like a log disappearing into a buzz saw.

“She asked whether you liked it.”

“And you said?”

“I said you were still working out your policy regarding Swiss chard” — he snorted again — “but you look so adorable chewing the stalk that we couldn’t resist.” And he finished the last of it.

“I name you when I write about you on the Internet.”

“I’m flattered.”

“If this isn’t poison why don’t you eat some?”

“The last time we ate any vegetables we bought for you you called it the end of the world.”

“Well, that’s honest at least,” and he flopped out on his side.

Expedition Log, Day 1. Mileage: lower than expected

9:30 am. Readied to set out. With the car loaded up, popped back inside to announce to presumed interested public about the start of the journey. Drawn into conflict about whether this should be “Day 1” or “Day 0” away from home on the grounds that a nontrivial part of the day was spent at home. Argument proved surprisingly violent; cats hid under bed, producing discovery that there were cats around.

Total Mileage: 0.

Math, Comics, and Popeye

I wanted to give people around here a warning that over on my mathematics blog there’s a fresh collection of comics that mention mathematics subjects, and what those math subjects imply.

And to keep things interesting around here this April 2, when all the stores mark their pranks down to half-price, let me point out the current storyline that’s in the daily Popeye comics by Bud Sagendorf. It’s a rerun, originally running from the 7th of January through the 9th of April, 1980, and in it Olive Oyl is working as a census taker, and having trouble with Popeye because, as the sampled strips note, he just hasn’t got a last name. Nor has he got a middle name, which I’m aware causes all sorts of problems with forms that were designed on the assumption that people have middle names even though that’s so very wrong.

Anyway, the story has been staggering on a couple weeks in the quest to get Popeye’s full name, and not making much progress there, and I’m reading partly because I do like Popeye that much, and partly because I really want to know if, for all this talk about Popeye the Sailor needing a middle name, they’re ever going to figure out a middle name for Olive Oyl.

Unfortunately the Sagendorf Popeye was not notable for its satisfying resolutions to its storylines, and there isn’t much evidence a couple weeks in that the quest for Popeye’s name is looping back around to the obvious question.

What Nebus Humor Found In March 2014

To keep up the listing of things and numbers and especially countries that’s oddly popular around here let me review what WordPress says the humor blog did here the past month. The big news is I had my most popular month, by page views, on record, 468 things looked at, which is thrilling because I’d hoped that sometime I’d write stuff that was viewed by not more than ten percent less than 500 times in a single month. There were 199 unique visitors, too, which ties for second for my all-time records without being a suspiciously neat 200. I bet WordPress deducted one just so it wouldn’t look like too round a number was being reported. Anyway, all that’s up fro February 2014’s 337 views and 170 visitors, and even the views per visitor went up from 1.98 to 2.35.

The top five articles this month produced a four-way crash for fifth place, which isn’t that always the way? But here’s the list of them:

1. The Chuckletrousers Decade, a lightly biographical bit about something funny that happened on Usenet back when Usenet happened.
2. I’m No Good At Music, the really not at all exaggerated story of how bad I am with doing music.
3. Next, The Comics, pointing over to my mathematics blog and showing off a Beetle Bailey cartoon printed literally days after the Soviet Union had the world’s first successful intercontinental ballistic missile launch.
4. Dream World Investment Tips: My Little Pony Edition, as apparently there’s a very peculiar fortune to be made out of this show.
5. Warnings From The Dream World: Trans-Dimensional Travel Edition, as there are hazards in going through dystopian alternate universes and hassling with their movie cashiers.
6. Five Astounding Facts About Turbo, That Movie About A Snail In The Indianapolis 500, because really isn’t every fact about this movie astounding?
7. Escaping To Lansing, and the various disasters you won’t see there.
8. Better Eating For 2015, and how Olive Garden figures it will provide this.

The countries sending me many readers this month were the United States (342), the United Kingdom (22), and the Canada (11). Just a single reader each came from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Pakistan, Russia, and Switzerland. None of those were on the list for February, so again, the whole world is very gradually kind of tolerating my stuff.

Among the search terms that brought people here:

• “robert benchley’s “opera”” (I put it into three parts, Die Meister-Genossenschaft, then Il Minnestrone, and then Lucy de Lima, though the original article had them all run together)
• “any course is there to run departmental store” (there probably are but I’ve never taken one)
• “odysseus’s letter to penelope for school” (the good Robert Benchley once again turns out to be my biggest draw here)
• “dreams transdimensional” (no idea how this could have brought anyone to me; it must have been somebody’s prank)
• “the indianapolis 500 snail”, as well as “movie turbo facts”, “turbo movie fun facts”, “what is interesting in the movie turbo”, and “can a snail race in indianpolis 500”
• “charley chase” (I’ve linked to Love, Loot and Crash and to A Versatile Villain before).
• “ben turpin side of house scene” (I’m not sure it’s what they were looking for, but, Ben Turpin is credited with the first pie-in-the-face movie scene)