Songs

Birthday People

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Astrology is a bunch of hooey. There’s no way the position of the stars in relation to the Earth on a particular day has any influence at all over the sort of person you become. All you have to do is look at any one day’s host of birthday people – artists who launched themselves into a certain form of expression and ultimately wound up in very different places.

Like today’s birthday people in music. February 9th boasts:

Carmen Miranda in 1909
Ernest Tubb in 1914
Carole King in 1942.

If astrology had any truth to it, these three different performers would fit this description from astrology.com.au

You are a zesty individual, having tremendous amounts of energy. You are determined and forceful in how you deal with people. You want to express your ground-breaking spirit in everything you do but unfortunately you won’t always able to break free of the limits that are imposed upon you. Some Aquarians learn through their family life that before you can be the master of your own destiny, you have to serve. In some extreme cases Aquarians are controlled and dominated by others throughout the formative period of their lives which is why it’s so difficult for them to submit to others.

Most of that could apply to anyone. But in the case of these three, it’s not true at all. Well, OK. Maybe the “zesty” part. And all three had great chart-topping success for a time in the music business. Each eventually found some disappointment in the limitations of the entertainment industry and the fickle nature of stardom.

Two of them are always seen wearing hats. Two were listed among the most creatively and financially successful women of their time.

But only one of them attempted to shoot a music producer in a hotel lobby. And only one had a heart attack on the Jimmy Durante show and died the next day.

See? Very different.

Astrology: Is it charlatanism, quackery or just pure hooey?

Poems

Meet the Relative

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A new data-crunching effort has examined thousands of mammal measurements (including ours) to conclude that everything from elephants to Lindsay Lohan sprang from a common Hypothetical Placental Mammal Ancestor. The numbers suggest this happened sometime after the demise of the non-flying dinosaurs, when the coast was clear at last for our stompable forebears to gain a foothold rather than being flattened in a footprint.

Placental Ancestor

There seems to be a lot of excitement and chatter about this latest bit of evolutionary news, as if it is some kind of a surprise. I, for one, have always known that at least one of my relatives was a furry, bug eating, shrew – not quite a rat but definitely more kick-ass than a mouse.

Several fit that description, actually. No need to name names.

But of course all this is still controversial, and will remain so for thousands, maybe millions of years. Or until the next major asteroid provides a clean slate for another robust species to start its journey from dining on available insects to computer-assisted speculation about the family tree.

But just in case this turns out to be true, we should take advantage of our position in time to be the first to write a greeting to our freshly imagined progenitor – the Hypothetical Placental Mammal Ancestor.

Here are three, in haiku form:

Oh shrew-like fur ball
Good thing you ditched the long tail
Before there were doors.

Hypothetical
Is a bad first name for one
lacking confidence.

Mother of us all
Eating a bug for the team
It tastes like chicken.

Send a greeting to our H.P.M.A.

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Ask Dr. Babooner

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We are ALL Dr. Babooner
We are ALL Dr. Babooner

Dear Dr. Babooner,

I can’t seem to get my pacifist niece to like me, even though I’m really a gregarious, lovable guy.

OK, it’s true that I have lined the perimeter of my property with barbed wire, own more guns than some third world countries, and will expound at length about why jack-booted government thugs are planning to surround the house to take away my freedoms.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not a nice person. I laugh. I’m kind to children. And I like puppies and Disneyland, just like every other proper American. So why doesn’t she warm up to me?

I will admit that some people who feel the same way I do about certain things have committed terrible acts, and they can be kind of scary, especially when you get them going on the Second Amendment. But if you could see me the way I see me, I’d seem perfectly reasonable to you.

Noble, even.

I tried to convince my niece that I’m not insane, but she says if the government really wants to come after me, my arsenal will be useless. But in my mind I am George Washington – the leader of a popular uprising that will prevail against overwhelming odds and become a beacon for the world before it morphs into a merciless tyrant that will try to crush another brave someone exactly like me more than 230 years from now!

That would make me incredibly famous forever – and she’d be famous too because she’s my niece! But she just doesn’t get excited about it in the same way I do.

It’s not that different from those who imagine being the winning quarterback in the Super Bowl or a global singing star by impressing the judges on The Voice. These are harmless fantasies that people need to help them face another day.

I sometimes hear my niece say things like “follow your bliss’ and “be the most authentic version of you you can be”, which I think she picked up from Oprah. Not my thing, but I’ll defend to the death her right to watch it.

So why does she scoff at my dream?

Intensely,
Gregarious Uncle Needs Niece’s Understanding To Survive

I told G.U.N.N.U.T.S. his dream is unsettling for his pacifist niece because its realization relies so heavily on firearms, which are the opposite of harmless and much more frightening than football or singing. Everybody wants to be celebrated, but perhaps if he wants to win over his niece, he needs to construct a more benign hero fantasy for himself.

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

The Baboon Congress

A Crowded Language

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Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

We speak, by far, the language with the most words in it. The Germans manage to converse precisely, thank you, with something like a fourth or a fifth of our lexicon.

We have lots of words we do not use, and a few I could do without. Ampallung has now become an English word, but we could do without that word in all languages. (I was going to provide a link to an explanation of this, but everyone I found is too graphic.) It is a piercing through the penis. Everyone say “Ewwww.”

Some words we do not give their full and proper due. Coprolite, meaning a fossilized turd, is a word of which we could make much greater use. Start naming, to yourself only please, all the people you have known who are living coprolites.

But I still think some words are missing. We need a word for:

  1. That stuff, ragged, messing stuff, that is left when you tear a page out a spiral notebook. It is the bane of teachers. I required kids to cut off the ragged edge of such pages before they turned them in and to be careful not to drop that stuff, ragged, messing stuff around the room. I always wanted a word for it. I called it froo-froo, but that’s a stolen word. I used to hold contests to name that stuff, ragged, messing stuff. It never worked. My turkey-drawing contests worked but not that one.
  2. That stuff, stupid, cliched, never-dying stuff that gets sent to you over and over again in emails. Or at least between women. I have only rarely received such stuff, stupid, cliched, never-dying stuff from a male friend. My wife gets 4-5 a week, and everyone sending to her knows she does not like them and that I throw them all out before she opens her mail every 4-6 weeks.
  3. A tree standing alone isolated from other trees. Why, you are asking, do we need that word? I am not sure. I have just always wanted it. Any tree standing alone draws my eye, evokes some response from me.

Here are some solitary trees, uncharacteristically clumped together:

The Witch’s Tree
This one was near our house
The Honking Tree
A grand-daughter’s depiction

It is trees all alone in a field which have a power over me. I used to watch for the half dozen of them in the too-often-repeated drive from the Cities to Two Harbors. The only famous one of those is now gone, cut down by vandals, the Two Harbors Honking Tree, which was actually in Larsmont. This picture is by one of my very favorite students.

(We could use a word to describe the soul of the person who cut it down.)

Apparently in the right circumstance, I am not alone in being drawn to solitary trees. I have drawn many such trees. And my grand-daughter has my obsession. She draws this picture over and over again.

Share your ideas for words that should be added to or removed from the English language.

Songs

Final Resting Place

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Far better than anything coming out of the Super Bowl was Sunday’s news that the Brits have discovered the bones of Richard III under a parking lot.

Lovely.

There were no parking lots when the hunchbacked king died on the battlefield in 1485. He was buried in a church but the church was later razed and the parking lot put over him. So it goes. But having an intact skeleton may help to rehabilitate Richard’s image, tarnished by Tudors, Time and the Theater, most notably that reputation-killer, Shakespeare.

But it does put an exclamation point on the notion that once dead, you are no longer in the driver’s seat. You could be under it. And it’s up to those who follow you to honor your memory – or not.

Ultimately, does it matter where the remains land? Here are three songs making last requests about final arrangements. Short of drawing up legal papers that say essentially the same thing as your lyrics, I don’t think putting your internment instructions in a song brings any hope of success, and certainly no guarantee.

You just don’t get to call the shots after you’re gone.

You can ask for one place NOT to be buried. Maybe we will listen.

Poems, Songs

Super Rhyme XLVII

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Here’s a Super Bowl poem from Trail Baboon’s rhyming poet laureate, Schulyer Tyler Wyler.  A common question on the Monday after the world’s largest remaining Roman Numeraled Event is “Did you watch the Super Bowl?”  I suggested that phrase as a title for the poem, and told STW he could come up with the rest as long as it doesn’t go on for too many verses.

STW said he was willing to take on this project under three conditions:

  1. He could base the poem on the rhythm and rhyme scheme of the song “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Miserables. “I just saw the new film version and that stupid song is stuck in my head,” he said. “‘Do You Hear The People Sing’ and ‘Did You Watch The Super Bowl’ have the same number of syllables, so I should be able to do it in ten minutes flat, and maybe this will help me banish the thing from my brain at long last.”
  2. I would not require him to actually watch the game or know anything about it.
  3. I would pay him in advance.

Since I AM interested in watching the game and did not want to have to come up with a blog post for today, and since STW and I always deal in make-believe money,  I agreed to pay him $1,000 pretend dollars and he got to work immediately.

For reference, here’s the original song, from the 1998 film version.

Did you watch the Super Bowl?
There was a lot of stuff to see.
There was a ton of advertising
pushing stuff that’s not for me.

There were men who came to play
fighting about an oblong ball
but what they did I cannot say
for I don’t recall.

I saw puppies and a baby.
Sloppy kissing and a car.
Some beer was drunk by people
but don’t ask me who they are.
It all was a blur, and so noisy.
I watched in a bar!

Did you see the Super Bowl?
Yes but it all went by so quick.
There was a time when I blacked out.
I’m sure the nachos made me sick.

There were fortunes that were lost.
There was a bunch of money won.
But it did not appear to me
anyone had fun.

There were folks with painted faces
wearing beads for Mardi Gras.
There were men so overweight
they needed girdles and a bra.
And that was my family, I hope that
nobody else saw!

Did you see the Super Bowl?
Well yes I knew that it was on.
And I suppose I watched a little
bit while stifling a yawn.

I am sure they’ll play again.
Two super teams will get their shot.
And which teams played the game this year
I will have forgot.

I’m pretty sure I did not get my make-believe money’s worth from rhyming poet laureate Schuyler Tyler Wyler, but that’s what the morning after the Super Bowl is for – waking up with the feeling that you’ve just thrown away a bunch of time and money on something meaningless.

And I think he was lying about not watching the game. That line about blacking out is a clear reference to the 3rd quarter power failure at the Super Dome.

What do you do when the electricity goes out?

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Still On Foot

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I’m fascinated by the first entries in Paul Salopek’s Walk Out of Eden, his seven year project to travel by foot from Africa’s rift valley to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. In one of his recent posts we discovered that African nomads, who live lives very different from our own, are increasingly reliant on their cell phones.  One catch is the absence of an electric grid for re-charging, so services are springing up to provide desert plug-ins.

Shida_monument

Let that be a lesson for the American luddite who has every new tool at his disposal but refuses to use them. You may see computers and smart phones as meaningless and inauthentic, but nomadic Ethiopian shepherds are using digital technology to stay current on the price of goats. They’re also walking great distances in light, inexpensive plastic sandals – to such an extent that the footwear has been memorialized by a public sculpture in Eritrea.

While the nomads are leaping forward technologically, Salopek is turning back time when it comes to modes of travel, abandoning modern conveyances for the most basic transport of all. It’s an attention-getting move to decide to take a long walk in the modern western world.  

It got my attention, anyway.

Taking a Big Walk is still an eye-opener here in the “developed” west – as surprising in our culture as it would be to the nomads if one of their own loaded his goats into the back of a Hummer and drove off into the sunset.  A remarkably long list of people have trekked across the USA to lose weight, change their attitude, honor a friend or relative, or raise money for a cause.

If you are thinking of doing the same thing, there is plenty of advice available. But it appears the stakes are rising.

When I was still a teenager, Dan Walker walked almost 1,200 miles across Illinois and wound up winning the state’s top political office. I think people were impressed that he managed to actually set a goal and accomplish  it – a rare feat in some political circles.   Walker later became one of Illinois’ imprisoned Governors – not a great distinction but I suppose he can take some pride in the knowledge that his jail-able offenses were committed AFTER he was in office.  Apparently on his long walk one thing he did NOT think about was whether or not there’s a significant difference between a federal law and a banking regulation.

Regardless, you have to respect the magnitude of the walk.

It would be hard to match the outsized significance of Salopek’s pilgrimage, but if you had the time, the stamina and the shoes for it, where would you take your 1,500 go 3,000 mile walk?

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Destination Hospital!

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Today’s post comes from idea generator Spin Williams.

Hello future patients!

Here at The Meeting That Never Ends, we’re all abuzz about the just-announced, urgently hoped-for expansion by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The grand vision is that with a 6 billion dollar investment, including over a half billion from the state, the famous medical complex will grow to employ another 25 to 30 thousand people and be even bigger in size and more influential, clout-wise.

Already in those two key categories, the Mayo is massive and irresistible.

But we love big, powerful things, and we’re most excited by the announced intention of all this money-funnelling – to create a “Global Destination Medical Center.”

Around the table at T.M.T.N.E., we were unanimous in our reactions – “Yes! Yes! Yes!” What the planet needs is a Global Destination Hospital – a medical Disneyland! This is a place you come to celebrate the joy of feeling better even when you’re not sick to begin with. Because nothing feels as good as feeling good, unless it’s feeling good in the company of people who are feeling a whole lot worse!

As freelance commercial opportunists, we at The Meeting That Never Ends would like to build a ring of hotels around the outskirts of the Global Destination Medical Center – lodging (and more) for patients and partygoers. The rides would be awesome – a Whirling Gurney Glider, the Bedpan Panic Plummet, The Co-Pay Coaster, the Tilt-a-Hurl, It’s a Small Intestine, and of course an M.R.Imax Theater.

And who knows? While on vacation at Mayo World, you might feel like you’re coming down with something! No worries – you’re already in the happiest place (for doctors) on Earth.

In fact, you could make a strong argument that we’re ALL headed for one Destination Hospital or another eventually. Why not make your ultimate destination the best one in the world? In fact, mixed in with the on-site hotels we can have hundreds of retirement community buildings so people over 65 can just go LIVE at the hospital. And another housing development would cater to families with young children – they’re always going to the emergency room anyway.

Why not?

Mayo World is a brilliant idea, and we’d like to get in on the ground floor. Or even a second floor walk-up would be acceptable. How about you?

As is his habit, Spin is already ahead of the crowd on this one. Of course the world is ready for a medical care theme park / resort / gated community. But why stop there? Cemeteries are also looking for new marketing angles – mostly to compensate for the increasing numbers of people who are choosing cremation and having their ashes spread, rather than buried. Why not establish a Global Destination Eternal Resting Place, where people can go to enjoy some recreation and relaxation before they eventually go back for disintegration?

What kind of fun attraction would you like to see at Mayo World?

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Happy Thoughts

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Today’s post comes from Trail Baboon’s Living and Loving correspondent B. Marty Barry.

I just want to take a moment here to congratulate everyone who hates hates hates hates winter. You know who you are – you’re the person who sees the months of November through March as a miserable ordeal that must be endured.

I’ve been having some extra sessions lately with my clients who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, so I’m more-than-usually attuned to the plight of the light-starved and warmth-hungry among us. The cold, the ice, the darkness, the Super Bowl – all of it is an affront to your senses.

Here’s the good news. You’ve almost cleared January!

January is the worst month of the year by far. All of January’s excitement happens at the beginning and then it’s dreary and painful and endless. January is ten times longer and fifty times nastier than any other month.

If the months of the year were all assigned a planet, January would be Jupiter. Big and cold, heavy with gravity and gas, marred by an unsightly blot that turns out to be a permanent storm. Blah! No wonder people find it oppressive.

Well all that awfulness is about to come to an end – tomorrow is the first of February! February is a giddy sprint by comparison – it’s groundhogs, hearts, presidents and kaput. Blink and it’s over. Then we’re into March, the leprechauns come out, and suddenly the end is in sight.

So smile because it’s January 31st! The end is nigh. It’s true we still have to endure the Super Bowl, but by Monday afternoon that will be forgotten and then it’s clear sailing! Before you know it we’ll have April flowers, May showers, June blooms, July fireworks, August fairs, September leaves …

But I’m getting too far ahead of myself. My message today is to enjoy this moment and smile, even if it happens to be horribly, perversely cold! And if you can’t smile, that’s OK too. Maybe your face is frozen. Maybe you’ve discovered that buying more assault weapons doesn’t perk you up the way you hoped it would. I’m not here to judge or to impose anything on you – I just want to cheer you to the furthest extent that you can be cheered, and not a single smile more.

But if you’re having trouble coping, think about Jim Nabors. He just got married to the love of his life and he’s 82! Doesn’t that warm your heart? His too-long wait for a change in status has finally come to an end. He also lives in Hawaii, but try not to think about that part of it. But if you do anyway and you’re still sad, remember that you’re not a failure. Your seasonal malaise may be justified but it doesn’t define you.

Not in my eyes, anyway. Because although I’ve never met you, I care about you very, very, very much.

Your friend and (I hope) confidant,
B. Marty Barry

What makes you happy when you know it’s finally over?

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Wide Shot

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NASA released this nice infra-red photo yesterday, showing us all of the Andromeda Galaxy with colors assigned to indicate relative temperature. For some reason, blue represents the warmer parts and red, the cooler ones.

andromeda

Trying to challenge our expectations, NASA? That’s quite a risk to take when you consider we are situated at a moment in time just before the dawn of commercial spaceflight for the well-heeled tourist. Revelers who save up an entire lifetime for one amazing interstellar trip will not take kindly to their disappointing arrival at the exotic destination. Remember when planning your Andromeda getaway that the most comfortable beaches will be found at the center.

Not that we have to go out of our way to get there, since Andromeda is scheduled to merge with our Milky Way Galaxy in about 4 billion years.

But never you mind, I like Andromeda just fine. It’s pretty to look at.

In fact, the jaunty angle at which the NASA stylists framed this makes me think of the Fascinators that were so predominant during the most recent British Royal Wedding.

Kate_Hat_Galaxy2

The right hat can put an exclamation point on a crisply stylish look. But does wearing an entire galaxy on your head qualify as overstatement? We’ve all known people with their heads in the clouds and others with stars in their eyes, but what does it mean when you have clouds of stars in your hair?

Describe your favorite headgear.