Monthly Archives: May 2014

Poems, Science

A Polluter’s Lament

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Featured Image taken by Dori (dori@merr.info)

Last week’s White House National Climate Assessment was remarkably blunt about the reality of our situation – that we are already experiencing the effects of an environmental shift.

For some of us in the baby boom generation who have been following this issue for a long time, this comes as a surprising development. Yes, we had heard that our habits of consumption were contributing to a potential catastrophe, but it always felt our role was simple – to create the problem and then to start a conversation about how later generations would face it and solve it.

Sorry about the mess, guys. Good luck!

Now this latest report seems to suggest the we are not going to be able to skip out on the check after all. Any chance I can go back and un-drive all those miles and un-click all those switches that let the power flow?

I didn’t think so. Would a poem of atonement help? I asked Trail Baboon sing-song poet laureate Tyler Schuyler Wyler to write one up, and he agreed because every stanza could include a reference to death – his favorite subject.

The warming fields and rising seas
The melting ice and dying trees
The drying lakes that will not freeze
This all has come up by degrees.

We’d heard it was a thing to dread.
And by our habits it was sped.
But also was it often said,
It won’t get bad ’til we are dead.

But now they say it has arrived!
Not something still to be derived
for our descendants to survive.
It came while we are still alive!

Our sadness, is, of course, profound.
For glacial ice now in the sound
and forest creatures elsewhere bound,
and us, that we remain around.

What have you witnessed that you thought you would never get to see?

The Baboon Congress

Southern Discomfort

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Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

Twice in one day I received eye pings, that is discordant visual images it took my brain several seconds to recognize and decode.

The first happened while driving in Mankato; the vanity license plate in front of me read “M MORT.” What? Then I realized it was on a hearse, a Mankato Mortuary hearse no doubt. But isn’t “M MORT” just sort of a small “ewee”? Do they have another one called “M MINKY”?

The second happened about an hour later in Barnes & Noble. I was staring off into empty space; not into space actually but into the magazine rack a few feet away, which is by-and-large the mental equivalent of empty space. I read as the title of a magazine Garden & Gun.

What? Was this real? Had I misread? Nope. I looked closer and saw a subtitle “Soul of the South.” Hmm. The entire complicated cultures of the ten or so states of The South find their soul in gardens and guns? I do not like sweeping generalizations about nations, cultures, peoples, regions, but gardens and guns are a big miss for my experience of The South. But see it’s for real.

Then I looked lower on the cover and it read “The Hollywood Issue.” Now that’s more than a bit discordant. Has Hollywood ever represented The South as anything but tired old cliches? Or The Midwest, or New England? To Hollywood has The South ever been much beyond hillbillies, plantations, bigotry, and threatening ignorance?

What was on the cover? But of course, a woman showing cleavage.

Cover Garden & Gun

Anna Camp, whoever she is. Another actress of whom I have never heard, but I am ignorant in this regard. In a wedding dress–is that what that is–and cowboy boots. How did cowboy boots become Southern, anyway?

I scanned through the magazine. It is actually very slick, high-concept, visually very well done. It had few pictures of either guns or gardens. It did, however, have an extensive article with high-quality photos on how to make moonshine.

It was all too big a brain cramp for me. I went and scanned through Mad Magazine–much more in my frame of reference.

What would be your “_____________ & ____________” title of a magazine on The Midwest?

Uncategorized

Ask Dr. Babooner

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Dear Dr. Babooner,

Almost 20 years ago I had a prolonged fling with a powerful married man. I was silly and he was foolish and it got into the press (because he was kind of important) and it almost cost him his job. But he survived the scandal and is still taken seriously today.

I, however, was mocked and scorned and I lost all the jobs that I might have had – ever. The only real employment I could get from that moment on was in the global punchline industry. As the unpaid butt of a billion jokes, I heard my name mentioned everywhere as I saw my once-promising future become bimbo-ized. So rather than hide and weep I went on TV to talk about it with Barbara Walters and sat for interviews so someone could write a book on the whole incident from my point of view.

Then I tried to make handbags for a living and when that didn’t work out, I hosted a reality show but people were only interested in the much more dramatic reality show I had lived through. So I didn’t say much for a long time, hoping it would all blow over. But now I’m back and guess what? Nothing has changed! People are acting like I’ve never talked about it at all and that I’ve been in hiding all this time, even though I’ve been desperately trying to get attention for something (anything!) else.

In spite of it all, I’m still ‘that girl’ even though I’m 40 years old!

I can see clearly now how things will go unless I’m somehow able to re-write the end of my story. But how can I do that? Should I change my name? Should I do a total makeover and move to Madagascar? But disappearing won’t do anything to salvage my name, and of course politics is completely out of the question.

Please, Dr. Babooner, point me in a direction that will head me out of this eternal dead-end!

Sincerely,
Saucy Beret

I told Saucy Beret she is completely out of luck if she hopes to write this “shameful episode” out of her someday obituary, because as a somewhat famous person her obituary is already partly written and it’s in there for keeps! Her only hope is to minimize the dalliance with an outsized, separate accomplishment of some significant sort. I recommend finding a cure for cancer, which would not only give her something to talk about besides her youthful indiscretions, it would also tangentially benefit a few other people she’s never even met!

Short of that, her only option is to grin and bear it.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

Science

Amateur Jugglers Rejoice!

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I’m sure I learned something in college, though I’m not certain I can put it into words. My major was Radio-Television, and I’ve worked in radio all my adult life. But the skills I use every day are not things I learned in class. I picked them up while working at the campus radio station.

When it comes to classwork, the greatest course of my entire post-secondary career wasn’t even in the Radio-TV Department, it was taught out of the campus auditorium and it was called “Vaudeville”.

Yes, I took the most academically rigorous route available.

When questioned about this choice by my cash-strapped parents I explained that my mission was to succeed in the media, and since radio and television are entertainment mediums, it was necessary for me to be conversant in other, historic forms of mass amusement.

They acknowledged my logic but still did not pay for the pricier tap shoes.

In spite of my being personally underfunded for this particular class, as part of “Vaudeville” the instructor, Jo Mack Witwer, did managed to teach me to tap dance and to juggle.

Like virtually everything else I learned in class during those years, I didn’t keep up the daily practice and eventually forgot my hoofing and juggling skills though I do like thinking of myself as someone who can, in a pinch, do both.

This all comes rushing back because scientists have successfully duplicated an earlier attempt to create a super-heavy element, a metal known currently as ununseptium, soon to throw its atomic weight around the periodic table under a different, freshly-minted name.

Ununseptium doesn’t exist in nature – it has to be created in the laboratory by bombarding radioactive berkelium-249 with calcium-ion beams. And then as soon as it exists, this inherently unstable element starts to decay , breaking down into other unstable elements before it finally devolves into parts that are capable of existing for a span of time that actually registers with our conscious minds.

But existing for a few milliseconds in repeated experiments is enough to qualify ununseptium for a new name and permanent inclusion in the table of elements. I admire the scientists who managed this and am in awe of their achievement, though with entirely selfish motives.

Here’s why – if ununseptium is an element, then I am still a juggler.

I discovered through experimentation that if I practice for two days straight, I can juggle three balls for five seconds before my eye-hand coordination goes kerflooey and everything hits the floor. But those five seconds are golden, and they make up a span of time that’s much longer than any atom of ununseptium has ever existed.

Mission accomplished!

What are you good at for only a very short time?

Uncategorized

A Brief Pressing

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Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden.

Hey Mr. C.,

I thought it was pretty cool the other day when that kid from New York who got accepted into all eight Ivy League colleges held a press conference at his school to announce that he had chosen Yale.

That’s a pretty awesome decision.

I don’t mean the decision about going to Yale. Ho hum to that. I mean deciding to have a PRESS CONFERENCE at your SCHOOL!  And one that real reporters would actually come to!

Amazing!

It got us talking in 5th hour Life Skills about what it takes to get attention from journalists and how each of us would handle the pressure if we knew we had to face the press.

Mr. Boozenporn said the key is to know your message and state it clearly. And take only a few questions – the minimum needed to give the impression that you care about what the press wants to know, which of course you DON’T.

You want to make them think you’re being open, you hope they swallow your bull, and then you go home.

Then he assigned us to write a two sentence opening statement for a press conference that could be about anything we want – world issues, personal statements, the weather, etc. And to make it as much like the real thing as possible, we had to get up and read our statement while a guy from the A/V department set off strobe lights and then our classmates got to shout angry questions at us for one minute.  

It was pretty cool.

Here are some of the statements kids came up with.

“I called you all here to confess that the rumors are true. I have been rejected by all eight Ivy League schools and have decided to attend Hamburger U. in the fall.”

“After an in-depth review of electronic records, I have decided I am going to un-friend Derek for the fifth, and final, time. If he tells you we are still ‘friends’, you will know he is a liar, which is something I have known all along but I have only recently decided to believe 24/7, rather than only every once in a while.”

“I have called the world’s press together to announce that I, too, have decided to put a ring in my nose, because piercing is our generation’s way of expression our unique individuality. And besides, everyone’s doing it.”

I’m surprised at how nervous I got when it came time for me to make my statement. But I swallowed hard, got up there, looked into the lights and said this:

“I called this press conference today to publicly challenge Alicia Erickson to a date, at a time and place yet to be determined, and under the rules of the Geneva Convention. I will name a delegation to negotiate the details with her representatives during tomorrow’s second hour study hall, where I have spent the last eight months staring at the back of her head, wishing she would turn around and speak to me.”

Well you can imagine that I got a lot of questions after that about what makes me think somebody as cool as Alicia would go out with me (nothing) and what do the Geneva Conventions have to do with dating (lots), but I said as little as possible and then sat down.

When Alicia got up and gave her press statement ten minutes later it was about pesticides, so I was happy she didn’t include anything about my date challenge in that. But she did look at me a couple of times and she might have smiled once, so I’m feeling pretty hopeful about it.

Your Pal,
Bubby

What is your two-line opening statement?

The Baboon Congress, Travel

A Slow Slog In Oslo

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Today’s guest post comes from Jacque.

​Hallo Baboons, from Norway.

This  blog comes to you from our apartment in Oslo after a somewhat miserable stay in this city.  

We have experienced an Oslo tour of various kinds of construction:  buildings from the ground up;  road construction and reconstruction, and some big mess of construction near the beautiful Oslo Opera House.  This construction tour in combination with the Norwegian Easter Holiday (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday and the following Monday) disrupted our time here–Museums are closed for re-modeling, transportation lines in vital areas are closed and sidewalks are gone which is rendering our beloved Rick Steve’s books useless.  
 
​We arrived Monday on a bumpy flight from Amsterdam which left me dizzy and nauseous.  Then we found a broken elevator in the building in which we rented a fifth floor apartment.  Climbing the five flights of stairs with luggage also left us dizzy and nauseous.  This will result in my request for a partial refund from the apartment owner.  Lou contracted a cold on Tuesday.  By Thursday, I had it as well.  

Oslo Opera House
Viking Ship Museum
Folk Museum
Construction!
Folk Museum

We had a somewhat frightening encounter with a mentally ill man on a tram.  He chose to rant in clear, understandable English about the Norwegian government, about refugees, about his music which he was blasting on a small, entirely too portable speaker system capable of maximum volume!  This Tram Driver stopped to reason with the guy, prompting most of the passengers to flee.  I swear the passenger was channelling the Norse Rush Limbaugh.

This experience was the ugly underbelly of travel!
 
​We did, however, have several wonderful days sightseeing: On Friday we took the train over the “top of Norway” from Oslo to Bergen.  This 300 mile trip was scenic and thrilling.  We travelled above the tree line through a glacier into ski-resort country. The Norwegian Folk Museum was interesting and detailed about the regions of Norway.  They also had a beautiful display of Norwegian Folk Art that seemed so….familiar.  And we met a Tram Driver who really should have been a tour guide somewhere.  He gave us an informative and knowledgable recap of Oslo on his break, which he chose to spend talking with us.    
 
 
​How would you create a great tourist experience for visitors to your town?