The Baboon Congress

Confessions of a Birthday Scrooge

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Today’s guest post comes from Tiny Clyde.

I have a birthday this month, never mind which day. And don’t go wishing me happy birthday anyway.

“Every idiot who goes about with [Happy Birthday] on his lips, should be boiled with his own [birthday cake], and buried with a [birthday candle] through his heart. He should!”

If I could have my way, which I cannot, of course, my birthday would be ignored. It’s not anything about growing old. I do not grasp how one day of aging is more significant than any other. As a matter of fact, I go through each year saying I am older than I am. If you ask me how old I am on January 10, 2012, I will not remember and have to subtract years. So I will subtract 1944 from 2012 and say I am 68. Each December I am surprised to realize that I am not as old as I always say.

My birthday problem starts as a child. It was a ritual to put up our Christmas tree on my birthday, which I was expected to consider a gift. From about age ten the gift included the task of going into the woods, selecting the tree, cutting it down, and putting it in its stand. I am not claiming I had a bad childhood. I had a very good childhood, except every year on my birthday. The standard joke was to say that I was being allowed to open one Christmas present early. My mother loved standard jokes. She wore many a standard joke down to the nub, ground it to powder, and still repeated it. I am still not sure that it was always a joke. In any case, the wrapping on my present or presents was Christmas wrapping, a simple economic measure. My mother loved simple economic measures even more than she loved wearing out the same jokes each year.

A few days before Christmas (some unspecified number) is about as bad a time as there is to have a birthday. My granddaughter’s birthday is December 25. So far she has not felt slighted, but when she becomes a sulky teenager, that may change. But I think my date is worse because people, me especially, make a point of overdoing her birthday–in proper birthday wrapping.

My sister’s birthday is March 27, which happens also to be my wife’s birthday. Now think about it. Is there any better time for a girl to have a birthday, even though it may fall on or very near Easter? Think of all the spring clothes she can be given, or, as in my sister’s case, have made for her. So my sister’s birthday was a feast of presents. You know how those girls are—they consider clothing actual presents. Then on my nineteenth birthday, my sister further buried my birthday under familial distractions by getting married that day.

My childhood birthdays happened at a time when I had already received everything needed for the winter. It was also a time of the year of limited money in our family, as opposed to the spring when more money was at hand. We also had a seldom-seen and difficult grandmother who doted on my sister because my sister had been given her name. She would write on the letter with my sister’s presents how in the rush of Christmas she had simply forgotten my birthday.

Dickens, Of Course

Now, (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) I’m not carrying a grudge, especially against my sister, with whom I was as a child and teen extremely close and with whom I still have a close bond. It’s simply that I joined the parade years ago and decided to ignore my birthday too.

(Before I ask the question of the day, I do want to clarify that I would not swear to any of the above under oath. Not one word of it.)

What’s your favorite quote or scene from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”?

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Inexplicable Particle Party

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There will be an announcement from the scientists at the CERN super collider this morning having to do with particle physics and the search for the mysterious Higgs boson, which supposedly plays an important role in some theoretical explanation of the universe and why things have mass.

I made a token effort to read up on it and quickly came to the conclusion that this is something I will only understand if it is explained in terms so simple that the description completely undermines the complicated science that supports it. Please, put it in some nice words that interest me. If the universe is a hot fudge sundae, is the Higgs boson a piece of walnut, the cherry on top, or the bowl?

Maybe it will all make sense tomorrow, once the world’s best journalists have had a shot at interpreting this scientific press carnival. Or perhaps we should just prepare ourselves to be smothered by a tsunami of profound confusion.

One thing is for sure – there will be a lot of loose talk over the next 24 hours about the Higgs boson as a “God” particle, because God is something we already know how to argue about and misinterpret.

And if that’s not bad enough, some idiot will try to put the thing into a dopey poem.

They’ll bravely attempt it, in newspaper articles
Journalists writing about physics particles.
Laying it out with such logical text
that a monkey could read it and not be perplexed.

And on radio, too, they’ll attempt to explain it
so beautifully, singers will try to refrain it.
On TV they’ll make Mr. Higgs and his boson
As sexy as starlets without any clothes on.

But after the press conference, headlines and fizz
There will still be uncertainty as to what is
the meaning of whatever news comes to pass,
using words that take space and have weight, but no mass,

So beware the quick and the glib and the simple.
It’s more than a dot or a speck or a pimple.
There’s no single term for it that isn’t flawed
which is why it’s elusively named after God.

Name something that defies understanding.

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The Great Oxidation

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Having spent the weekend discussing places we’ve lived, let’s turn our attention now to places we may live some day in the distant future. Or, dear baboons, places where other restless creatures already live. Places they may be longing to leave.

Which brings us to Kepler 22b, the most recently discovered “Goldilocks” planet – a place orbiting a different star where the temperature is ‘not too cold’ and ‘not too hot’. Initial observations indicate conditions could be favorable for human-like life.
That is, if the planet has a surface.

Dang! When it comes to the nuts and bolts of existence, there’s always that complicated bit about needing a surface to sit on. Not to mention some of the other necessary valuables, like having to have water to drink, food to eat and air to breathe. Air is especially important.

In writing about the notion of a “Goldilocks” planet, Dennis Overbye of the NY Times identifies an event that had to happen before life as we know it on Earth could get its start – The Great Oxidation.

“The seeds for animal life were sown sometime in the dim past when some bacterium learned to use sunlight to split water molecules and produce oxygen and sugar — photosynthesis, in short. The results began to kick in 2.4 billion years ago when the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere began to rise dramatically.

The Great Oxidation Event, as it is called in geology, “was clearly the biggest event in the history of the biosphere,” said Dr. Ward from Washington. It culminated in what is known as the Cambrian explosion, about 550 million years ago, when multicellular creatures, that is to say, animals, appeared in sudden splendiferous profusion in the fossil record. We were off to the Darwinian races. Whatever happened to cause this flowering of species helped elevate Earth someplace special, say the Rare Earthers. Paleontologists argue about whether it could have been a spell of bad climate known as Snowball Earth, the breakup of a previous supercontinent, or something else.

Eventually though, Earth’s luck will run out. As the Sun ages it will get brighter, astronomers say, increasing the weathering and washing away of carbon dioxide. At the same time, as the interior of the Earth cools, volcanic activity will gradually subside, cutting off the replenishing of the greenhouse gas.

A billion years from now, Dr. Brownlee said, there will not be enough carbon dioxide left to support photosynthesis, that is to say, the oxygen we breathe.

And so much for us.

“Even Earth, wonderful and special as it is, will only have animal life for one billion years,” Dr. Brownlee said.”

Which all seems rather wonderful and dismal at the same time. Clearly the clock is running and as many science fiction writers have already suggested, it is high time we start looking for another place to be before Earth becomes uninhabitable. Is Kepler 22b it? And in this time of ritual celebration, why is it that the major religions have traditional festivals that inspire and create a sense of wonder, while science offers us nothing except another episode of “MythBusters“?

Perhaps scientists should develop something celebretory that can spark the imagination of the unfaithful.

What would be one of the features of a festival built around “The Great Oxidation Event”? “Oxi-Claus?”

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So Far Away

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I stumbled across this article a few days ago and immediately recognized the idea as one that makes so much sense, I assumed it had already been done – a Carole King jukebox musical on Broadway. Apparently one is in the works, though the NY Post write up breathlessly describes a reading of the script that happened last May as it it were the most remarkable and recent development. Do things really happen that slowly in the world of musical theater? Well, a lot of Ms. King’s songs are thoughtful and unhurried. And it was a long summer.

If the show ever gets launched, let’s hope it includes this song.

Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore? Let’s look at it on the residence level. Where have you lived the longest?

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Everything Old Is New Again

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If you’re entranced by the latest cultural throwback, a completely silent black and white film called “The Artist,” then perhaps you are charmed enough to try out another very old thing that was recently discovered – the world’s most ancient mattress.

Mom-With-Too-Much-Time-On-Her-Hands Concept of a Prehistoric Bed

National Geographic says the find in South Africa is a squishy pad made out of compacted grasses and leafy plants, and is 77 thousand years old. That’s about how long it has been since I turned the mattress at home. In prehistoric times and today, bed maintenance isn’t one of those ‘top of mind’ tasks.

So how good a night’s sleep could you get on a bed of Jurassic Leaves? Personally, I wouldn’t expect much. For me, it’s all in the pillow, and National Geographic doesn’t mention that kind of accessory in this bedroom set. This is the bed you set on fire every so often just to get rid of the garbage and discourage pests. So not only did they not have ‘sleep numbers,’ they just plain didn’t have numbers. And it shows in their behavior. If you can’t count, there’s no such concept as ‘too much.’ And these ancient beds are large enough to accommodate the whole family – which is the sleeping preference of people for whom the concept of one or two to a bed “is unknown.”

I take news of a prehistoric, smelly, insect-ridden family bed as just one more piece of evidence that proves we modern people are hopelessly spoiled. Our obsession with creature comforts has made us weak and whiney, and if magically transported back 77 thousand years, we would probably die in less than 10 minutes. And why not? Anything would be better than eating a still-throbbing heart from the bloody remains of some recent kill and then trying to sleep in a leafy, buggy bed. Survival of the fittest, indeed! If THEY were so fit, why are we so Unfit? And how awful will our current beds seem to people 77 thousand years from now?

What do you need to have in order to fall asleep?

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An Ode is Owed

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No doubt the former Governor of the State of Illinois, sentenced to 14 years in jail yesterday, will soon be immortalized by the jailhouse poets. Oh, yes, there are many denizens of the gentler arts behind bars! Among them is the great P. Oswald Effinger the Third, a convicted and unrepentant repeat pedant, who has already offered a modest effort. P.O.E. III, as he is called, holds the title of Poet Incarcerate at Paul Powell Penitentiary in Pawnee, IL, which is one of only a handful of fully alliterative detention centers in the U.S.

A note from the poet: “The newly minted inmate will find a warm welcome in jail. I predict people will want to call out his name from their cells because it is such a treat to say, and so it will echo up and down the halls of the penitentiary. I believe his name is a marvel. With four full syllables, it permits full expression and can be spoken in such a way to match any human emotion. On paper, the name looks like a mess. It is a pure deception. The name wants to be rhymed, needs to be rhymed, begs and pleads to be rhymed. What I have given you, then, is a poem that some may call an abomination, but I assure you, all the couplets are completely consensual.

    Now it is Christmas, so be of good cheer!
    All the townsfolk will gather their families near.
    With their hearts full of kindness and mercy and joy, of which
    not very much will be shared with Blagojevich.

    He had been rather great for a very short while
    Like his hair he impressed us with volume and style.
    He was boastful and brusque. You could not call him coy. And which
    laws he’d obey was known just to Blagojevich.

    He was caught on tape saying “I’ve got it … this thing.”
    “And it’s golden,” he said, clearly thinking, ka-ching!
    Illinois is a state that grows corn stalks and soy. A switch
    isn’t too likely. Just ask Rod Blagojevich.

    In the prison they’ll cut off his iconic locks.
    there’s enough there to weave into ten pairs of socks.
    Though to wear them is something you wouldn’t enjoy. An itch
    needs to be scratched if that itch is Blagojevich!

How important is it to have an impressive head of hair?

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Scary Things That Fly

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There is no such thing as a common news item that our breathless reporter Bud Buck can’t inflate into a major crisis. Witness the latest technological leap forward in the construction industry …

This is Bud Buck with Bud’s Newsbucket of News!

Your intrepid reporter has learned that the 21st Century Robot Wars have moved one step closer to reality with the development of sinister whirlygigs that have been built expressly for the purpose of stealing the millions of stable, high-paying jobs that we have long relied upon in the dynamic foam block construction industry.

Woe to you if you are an ultra-light materials builder. View the video below, and see the coming apocalypse!

Yes! Mechanical airborne demons have now mastered the skill of constructing vast, wavy-sided foam block corrals where we will all soon be quarantined, watching in helpless wonder as waves of infernal heli-stackers quickly surround us with Frank Gehry-inspired barriers of doom! Be afraid!

How serious is this? I see it as another giant step forward in our increasingly brisk walk towards total destruction. We have known for generations that this day would come, ever since today’s elders foresaw the assault as part of a widely shared generational nightmare.

Just like the wall-building robots, notice how much programming those monkeys need before they’re set loose! Blah, blah blah blah blah! But then they spring into terrifying action! If your children are still wondering what line of work they should enter – carpentry or code writing – wonder no more. The handwriting is on the undulating wall!

This is Bud Buck!

Ever been replaced (or merely threatened) by a machine?

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Dave Brubeck’s Birthday

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Today is Dave Brubeck’s birthday – he’s 91 years old.

The jazz man was born in California and raised by a cattle rancher and a music teacher. I think if him as a thoroughly American musician – dedicated to freedom of expression, but willing and able to please the audience. Just the right combination of inventiveness and show business.

Here he is in a perfectly ’60’s-type setting (the year was 1961) performing with the quartet on Paul Desmond’s “Take Five”.

There was a moment in 1951 when we could have lost Dave Brubeck and all he brought to our culture. This is from a PBS website devoted to Brubeck and his music:

While working a gig in Hawaii, Dave had a swimming accident and nearly broke his neck. “I was swimming with my kids on Waikiki Beach and my last famous words were, ‘watch daddy,'” Brubeck recalled. “And I dove into a wave and there was a sandbar right in front of me. And rather than hit it with my face, I turned my head and it almost broke my neck, and I thought I was gonna be paralyzed. I had to go to the Army hospital and stayed there for twenty-one days in traction and they were able to pull my neck back.” While lying in traction at a local hospital, he lost his job and his trio.

I’m both amused and horrified at this: “… my famous last words were ‘watch daddy.'” Ooof. How many pour unfortunates have gone to the great beyond with that exact set up? And what sort of person would you become if you had actually watched your daddy dive into the afterlife while showing off for you at the beach. I’m so grateful Dave Brubeck survived, but it does make me wonder.

What tricks can you do to impress the kids? And would you want to leave the world doing that particular thing?

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Branded!

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Herman Cain’s decision over the weekend to suspend his presidential campaign has been described as a savvy move for a number of reasons – primarily that suspending but not ending the effort means he can continue to raise money. But another line of reasoning says Cain has already had received the second biggest payoff possible in a presidential bid – he has solidified his “brand“.

So what if Cain quits now? He has succeeded in stepping on to the larger public stage, and people are not going to forget him. We can’t. We know too much about him now, thanks to the media’s relentless fascination with his peccadilloes. I asked marketing guru Spin Williams for his take on all this Cain Scrutiny. Here’s his response.

Here at The Meeting That Never Ends we’re in total agreement with Herman Cain’s handlers – now is the time to get out! Mr. Cain has received as much attention as a person is likely to get out of a presidential run short of actually BEING the NOMINEE. And if you’ve ever been an actual nominee, you know that you’ll get lots more press but it feels like less fun.

A number of my clients have asked for help “solidifying” their personal brand and a few have even wondered if they should try this “running for president” idea as a technique to nail down who they think they are.

I tell them that engaging in some Electoral Marketing certainly does force you to focus on your own agenda, especially when you have 20 debates in 10 weeks and dozens of TV cameras following you around to just to see where you go, who you meet and what you say. If you’re an attention hog, it’s great. But if you don’t take criticism well, there will be trouble. And if there’s anything you’re keeping from your family, things can get a bit awkward.

Still, if your “brand” includes specific negative qualities like “adulterer”, “bad memorizer” or “raw nonsense spouter”, a well-financed bid for the Oval Office will do more to publicize your glaring weaknesses than you could manage if you spent the same amount of money advertising them.

But there’s no need to worry. Within a few years of your startling public collapse people will tend to forget all the things you did wrong and they will only remember that they remember you somehow.

And that’s all you really need. Don’t forget – these days you don’t have to be good as long as you can stay known.

I told Spin that from now on I will see all presidential candidates as personal brand managers who are simply looking to hike their market share. I know if I ever attempted such a run, I would surely boost my main intellectual brands – Someone Who Takes A Long Time To Answer and That Guy Who Is Always Changing His Mind.

What’s your personal brand?

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Inspector Goatlock’s Casebook

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I had a nice chat with Inspector Goatlock the other day. We were at the Farmer’s Market looking at produce and he appeared to be quite hungry. Still, I engaged him in conversation about his work and he told me a few things about a recent case he’d had. When I pressed for more details, he pulled a journal from his pocket and tore out a page, saying “Here … read all about it. I’ve got to find a stand selling rutabagas.”
The page read as follows:

One brisk December morning I was on a casual search for some loose hay with hints of red clover and weedy mix in a warehouse area on the outskirts of an eastern city when I noticed a crowd milling around the entrance to Michael’s Wholesale Furniture Distributors. An odd gathering, I thought, given that this was the week AFTER Black Friday’s “Door Buster” deal making. I ambled over and several members of the group turned at the sound of my hooves on the damp asphalt of the parking lot.

“Hey!” one of the millers-around exclaimed. “We found something you’ll really get into. Can you climb up on the roof to look for a hole?”

“During the night something crashed through the roof of our warehouse,” voiced another. “We think a passing aircraft has lost an important part! Maybe a piece of an axle of some sort. Airplanes have axles, right?”

“No,” offered a third. “It’s clearly from the gun turret of an alien spacecraft. We are under attack!”

“Nonsense,” blustered a fourth. “This projectile was launched by extreme weight pressures building inside the broken suspension of a passing boxcar.”

Intrigued, I quickly scrambled up on to the roof, but in spite of the initial claim made by the first person I spoke to, there was no hay. However I did find a small hole, and through a jagged opening I could see shattered ceiling tiles scattered across the floor of a warehouse chock-full of ugly plastic-covered sofas and ghastly settees.

Just then, a man appeared at roof’s edge. He had climbed up a hastily procured ladder that had been steadied against the base of a nearby industrial-sized wood chipper. He held in his hand a cylindrical five-pound chunk of metal. It matched the hole perfectly.

When I asked to investigate the artifact, he recoiled.

“What you hear about goats eating anything is absolutely false,” I said. “We’re actually rather picky.”

The strange object carried no telltale signs that would reveal its origin. Its roughly shaped ends suggested it had been violently sheared from a larger piece of equipment.

“Why would something so strange and inexplicable happen here? Camelot Industrial Park has got to be the quietest, least interesting section of Plymouth, Massachusetts!”

“Not so strange,” I said to the strange man. “It all makes perfect sense …”

The bottom of the page was missing. The moistened edge suggested that Inspector Goatlock had, in desperation, taken a bite from his own notes. And by the time I looked up, he had disappeared into the crowd.

What could explain the mysterious chunk of roof-crashing metal?