Pish-Posh Pastiche Post
If you read the title, you have already been treated to my only significant original contribution to this post. The remainder is an indulgence in the notion that an accumulation of worthless items somehow has a value the individual items lack. This is, as anyone who has attended an arts & crafts fair or graded high school research papers knows, a fallacy.
Nonetheless, I ran across this stuff while looking for something else in the 2001-2002 stratum of my email archives. I sent each of these items to people I like so I must have thought it was clever then, and who am I to doubt my judgment?
1. I’m Not Prepared.
This piece from the late, great, lamented SatireWire may be more pertinent these days than it was when it was published 4 or 5 years ago. It captures dead-on the sensationalistic tone that has marked 80% of the stories on “60 minutes,” “20/20,” and their ilk for the past decade and, especially, since 9/11. Try entering “US unprepared for” at your favorite search site. Google returns 24,000 hits, including, on the first page alone, warnings that the US is unprepared for
- net meltdown
- bird flu
- bioterrorism
- the impact of aging population on health workforce
- the health impact of climate change
- oil cutoff
- baby boomers’ retirement
- humanitarian obligations of Iraq occupation
My favorite impending dangers for which we are not ready, however, are those that cover the field, “US Unprepared For Catastrophes” and “US Unprepared For Disaster;”1 i.e., our nation is the anti-Boy Scout; we are not prepared - for anything.
The SatireWire article is U.S. “Grossly Unprepared” For Unlikely Threats (with the subtitle No Plans in Place to Deal with Drying Up of Oceans, Giant Moon Explosion, Or Potential for Everyone to Be Pecked to Death Like in “The Birds”)
I also recommend a more recent take on this same concept from The Onion, which is, thankfully, still operational: Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared For Full-Scale Zombie Attack
[Update: More Unpreparedness]
2. Scamalot
These days, email scams that make their way to my inbox seem to fall primarily into the categories of eBay, PayPal, or bank phishing, variants of the Nigerian Advance Fee ploy (AKA 419 Scam), the Netherlands Lottery, Survey Rewards, and, occasionally, a reincarnation of the Microsoft/AOL Giveaway (emailers are to be paid for forwarding messages to check out an email tracking system), but the following parody should ring true for those of us who were emailing back in the good old days. Prepare to wax nostalgic.
Hello –
My name is Billy Evans. I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing
this for me, because I can’t. She is crying. The reason she is so sad is
because I’m so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn’t hurt, except
when I try to breathe.
The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with
leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us
having no money or insurance. I would like to have a body transplant, but we
need more money.
Mommy doesn’t work because she said nobody hires crying people. I said,
“Don’t cry, Mommy,” and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me
hugs, even though she’s allergic to burlap and it makes her sneeze and
chafes her real bad.
I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to
everyone you know. Forward it to people you don’t know, too. Dr. Johansen
said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team
up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect
prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take
them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will
come back to earth and go to the Pope, and he will take up a collection in
church and send all the money to the
doctors. The doctors could help me get better then.
Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball. Right now I can only be third
base.
Every time you forward this letter, the astronauts can take more prayers to
the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true. Please help me. Mommy
is so sad, and I want a body. I don’t want my leaves to rot before I turn
10.
If you don’t forward this email, that’s okay. Mommy
says you’re a mean and heartless bastard who doesn’t care about a poor
little boy with only a head. She says that if you don’t stew in the raw pit
of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow, horrible
death and then burn forever in hell. What kind of cruel person are you that
you can’t take five g-damn’ minutes to forward this to all your friends so
that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless
nine-year-old boy?
Please help me. I try to be happy, but it’s hard. I wish I had a kitty. I
wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn’t chew on
me and try to bury its turds in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that
very much.
Thank You, Billy “Smiles” Evans
P.S. You can send money to the person who sent you this because that person
is very trustworthy.
3. HOORAY, HURRAH, MIZZOU, MIZZOU!2
In my copy of Mizzou (the University of Missouri Alumni newsletter), I found this item, buried among several pages of a section entitled, “Class Notes:”
Sheryl Crow, BS Ed ‘84, of Los Angeles received a Grammy in 2001 for best
female rock album, “There Goes the Neighborhood.”
The preceding item was Patti Hamilton, BHS ‘83 and husband Brian of Dallas
announce the birth of Brenna Kaye in October.
The next item was Michael Coit, BJ ‘85, is a general assignment reporter for ‘The Press Democrat’ in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Chronological order is a bitch.
4. Fourscore & Seven Slides Ago
If you haven’t seen the PowerPoint version of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address yet (there must be someone who hasn’t), it is certainly worth checking out. Developed by Peter Norvig, engineering director at Google Inc., in 1999, this spoof is credited with being the first parody embodying, in devastating fashion, the weaknesses and limitations of the PowerPoint lecture format. It has been viewed, by Norvig’s estimate, by at least 500,000 people and includes bullet points such as “unfinished work (great tasks),” “new birth of freedom” and “government not perish.” You can view it as well, at
The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
There are many, many PowerPoint parodies now, none of which, in my estimation, matches the quality of the original. Still, they do have their charms. I suggest another effort from The Onion, Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation which includes not only the slides but a critique of the technique and style of the show with comments such as “The colors in Apologies & Farewells were perfectly calibrated for digital-projector display,” I.T. director Bill Schapp said and “I felt some of the later transitions were weak,” Pruriyaran said. “The point of a transition is to maintain audience interest and lighten the mood. To me, the door-closing sound effects in Will & Funeral were repetitive and heavy-handed. But Ron’s choice to end with that Hamlet quote and then fade to black was really powerful.” Or Try out PowerPoint Shakespeare
That’s all for now. More junk tomorrow …
Footnotes
- There is also a recurrent, more specific headline, “US Unprepared For Major Disaster,” which may be only a more polite version of “US Unprepared For Disaster,” or which may an implication that, perhaps, we are prepared for minor disasters. ~back~
- The entire Mizzou cheer follows:
HIT IT!
HOORAY, HURRAH, MIZZOU, MIZZOU!
HOORAY, HURRAH, MIZZOU, MIZZOU!
HOORAY, HURRAH, AND A BULLY FOR OLD MIZZOU,
RAH! RAH! RAH! RAH!
MIZZOU-RAH! MIZZOU-RAH! MIZZOU-RAH, TIGERS! ~back~
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Meeting Fictional Characters
As I mentioned in an earlier post,1 I have had only two or three minor interactions with celebrities and have laid eyes on perhaps another half-dozen in settings other than performances (e.g., I watched Valerie Harper cross Michigan Avenue). That I recall these instances at all indicates that I am susceptible to the fascination with famous folks that seems part of contemporary culture although it seems to me that my case is of the mild, benign variety.
To calibrate the degree of my affliction, consider first my reaction to a “pure celebrity,” the sort of individual Daniel Boorstin described as “a person who is well-known for his well-knownness,”2 or, in the misquoted but improved version, someone “famous for being famous,” I’m interested enough that if someone shouted, “Look, it’s Paris Hilton and Regis Philbin wrestling in the street,” I’d turn around to look. Heck, I’d be willing to walk as far as ten feet to see that. But that’s about it.
Even if the celebrity is deservedly famous, my emotional investment is limited. I think, for example, Tom Hanks is an outstanding actor. I recently saw him make thoughtful and insightful remarks when interviewed on Inside The Actors Studio, and, as far as I know, he’s a fine fellow and decent human being, but given the choice between a ninety minute one on one conversation with Tom or watching him in Forrest Gump or Saving Private Ryan, I’m going to be munching popcorn while Tom-Forrest explains about life being like a box of chocolates or Tom-Captain Miller ducks bullets. (If the movie choice were The Da Vinci Code, I might opt for the Paris Hilton-Regis Philbin wrestling match.)
I can imagine special circumstances that could increase my involvement. If, say, Michael Jordan needed my input regarding making another comeback or Warren Buffet wanted investment tips, I’d feel compelled to help (Don’t do it, Mike; Warren, it’s buy low, sell high). These would seem, however, to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
Art Intersects Life
Given all that, I can’t account for the enormous sense of gratification I experience when my life hypothetically intersects with a fictional character.
The sequence of events leading to the most recent example of this phenomenon began when I read Adam Langer’s Crossing California, which recounts the interactions of an assortment of teenagers from three middle class families living in a near-northern Chicago suburb (”California” references a thoroughfare that marks a socioeconomic and cultural division of Rogers Park) from 1979-1981. This is a B or B+ book that was just good enough to persuade me to pick up the sequel, The Washington Story.
The Washington Story features the same characters as its predecessor, picking up their stories around 1981 and extending into the next few years. This book, alas, proved a disappointment – except for one scene.
Before we get to that scene, let’s review:
The scene in question takes place in a less successful sequel of a B level novel about adolescents growing up in Rogers Park, Illinois in the 1980s.
Got that? OK.
The Scene
The scene consists of two of the main characters, a boy and girl who have long been best friends, 
traveling to Chicago proper to watch This Is Spinal Tap on its opening night at the Fine Arts Theatre.
And that’s all that happens. This is not a climactic point in the arc of the story. No revelations are revealed, no simmering erotic tension is consummated, no life-changing epiphany is visited upon the participants. It doesn’t even advance the plot. It’s pretty much a throwaway scene contributing a bit of local color and reaffirming the already established personalities of the two characters.
So, why do I have this one paragraph permanently enshrined in what passes for my mind?
Because Julie and I were also at the opening night of This Is Spinal Tap at the Fine Arts. And, nothing special happened to us. It was not a climactic point in the arc of our story, either. It was a funny movie and a pleasant evening.
Even if those two characters from The Washington Story had been real people and even if they had been sitting next to us, I probably wouldn’t recall them today. Even if they had introduced themselves in some weird update of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author as a couple of characters from a novel to be written 20 years later, I probably — well, I guess I’d remember that, but you know what I mean.
Yet, almost a year after reading this paragraph, I’m still far more taken with this coincidence of my social calendar in 1984 and a novelist’s choices of setting for an incidental scene than I am with sighting Valerie Harper (which was, at least, a coincidental intersection of two real people) or any of the other handful of such encounters I’ve had.
I don’t detect any profound implications in this beyond “the mind is a funny thing.” It’s just one of those How about that? items.
Footnotes
- See It’s Pandoracious! ~back~
- The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream by Daniel Boorstin ~back~
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Books About Houses: A Handful Of Madeleines
Five books recommended for anyone who is buying a house, who already owns a house, who lives, has lived or might someday live in a house, who has ever played house, …
Why Read About Building Houses?
First, none of these books falls in the Do-It-Yourself Project genre. Nor are they polemical tracts about ecologically sustainable homes, instruction manuals for negotiating the purchase or sale of real estate, or catalogs of architectural design.
They do offer utilitarian value by providing the reader with a database and vocabulary sufficient for discussions with professionals engaged in building, designing, remodeling, repairing, buying, or selling ones home. And it does assuage ones anxiety to know that, for example, querying the grizzled old coot at the local Ace Hardware about their stud finders won’t occasion snorts of derisive laughter.
They also contain a batch of tips that will astound ones friends and prevent any number of unnecessary hassles.1
In the long run, however, the most significant contribution of these volumes is enlightening the reader about how an important aspect of our contemporary world functions.
And, by my lights, these books are better written, more entertaining, and supply more drama and humor than the majority of books on the New York Times bestseller list.
Why These Five Books?
I was originally motivated to begin reading books about building homes by the realization that, as was true of so many other areas of knowledge, I knew too little to even ask a cogent question. After several years and many titles, I’ve found these five to be the best of breed. There are areas of overlap, but each of these volumes provides something unique.
Home: A Short History of an Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
In an extended essay, Rybczynski describes the evolution of the concept of a home from filthy, uncomfortable medieval dwellings inhabited by several families to the contemporary notion of a private retreat with its emphasis on comfort.
While Home: A Short History of an Idea offers only the occasional detail about construction, it provides a surprisingly useful conceptual framework for understanding everything from traffic flow through the rooms to the positioning of the most comfortable chair in front of the fireplace.
House 
by Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder, in the style he debuted in The Soul Of A New Machine, uses the story of a couple building a suburban home as an Everyman’s epic journey, the final destination of which is a completed home.
The conflicts between the owners, the builders, & the architect are intriguing, entertaining, and instructive. While it would be easy to attribute the problems to the fact that, as more than one reviewer has pointed out, the owners are — to revert to the vernacular of the 1980s — Yuppie scum, the frictions are inherent in the situation, regardless of the specific players. It will prove no surprise to anyone who has purchased a house that the owners want perfection at a low cost, the builder wants to do decent work and be well compensated, and the architect wants everyone to cooperate to build the house as he designed it.
But the owners really are Yuppie scum.
The Well-Built House 
by James Locke
It’s a convenient segue from Kidder’s book to this one since the author of The WellBuilt House, James Locke, was also the head builder in House. Locke provides a been there/done that guided tour of building a house. The content is clear, useful, and clever and his writing style as spare and craftsmanlike as his building technique. I especially admire his capacity to provide an opinion (his preference, say, for a masonry chimney rather than a metal lined firebox) without booby-trapping it with condescension.
The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works 
by David Owen
Owen’s writing is also accomplished, as one might expect given that he routinely writes for, among other publications, The New Yorker. This book is the story of the transition of Owen, his two children, and his wife from residing in a Manhattan apartment to surviving in a 200 year old Connecticut farmhouse. While Owen does, on occasion, succumb to the temptation to go for the easy laugh (and who can blame him?) by recalling one or another remodeling catastrophe cum epiphany, he does so in an manner that is sympathetic rather than pitiable or slapstick. It’s also instructive. The key is that Owen, who at the outset, is, thank goodness, as ignorant as I was when I picked up his book, is also a skilled researcher who can assimilate information, evaluate its validity, and present it in a clear, succinct manner.
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built 
by Stewart Brand
Yep, it’s that Stewart Brand, the guy behind The Whole Earth Catalog and founder of CoEvolution Quarterly (now Whole Earth Review ). And, this book does have more than a trace of populist, anti-establishment sentiment, but this doesn’t get in the way of a bevy of useful ideas about building. Brand marshals a lucid text joined to illustrative photos and drawings to support his contention that houses (as well as commercial buildings) change over time in adaptation to the inhabitants’ style and habits, the particular uses to which they are put, and the aging of their own materials and designs. He goes on to argue that owners can benefit by treating the house as a “Darwinian mechanism” and taking charge of their own surroundings. I can’t resist quoting from a booksellers description that summarizes the book perfectly: His crunchy-granola insights bristle with an undeniable pragmatism.
Footnote
- Such hassles typically fall into the Everyone knows …, You did … , didn’t you?, or Why did you have [a former workman] do it that way categories. E.g., The current workman (AKA the expert post facto) sneers something on the lines of
Everyone knows you have to frame the gable vents with 1/8-inch clearance.
You did use a semitransparent penetrating oil-based stain on those shakes, didn’t you?
Why did you have your plumber install a 1.5 inch kitchen drain instead of a 2 inch? ~back~
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Contracting With Patients To Follow Prescribed Treatment
Contracting For Compliance , the post this Friday past at AlignMap, my professional blog and web site, deals with a West Virginia program that would provide certain healthcare benefits, in addition to those covered in a basic healthcare plan, to individuals covered by Medicaid if and only if they formally agreed (i.e., signed a contract) to follow prescribed treatment, including taking medications as directed, showing up for appointments, adhering to diets or exercise programs, etc. If those individuals were unwilling to enter into that agreement or if they proved unable to comply with treatment, that enhanced set of benefits would be eliminated.
While the focus is on the West Virginia program, two other states are considering a similar plan, and it’s said that the federal healthcare agencies are vigorously promoting the idea as well.
Also discussed is a Perspective published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which points out some fundamental ethical and clinical flaws in this measure.
I take the position that the arguments currently advanced by West Virginia, the Feds, and the NEJM are clinically oversimplified and politically polarized, tainting and, deliberately or unintentionally, subverting a potentially beneficial concept.
From some of the email responses I’ve received to this post, it seems that it might be of interest to those outside the healthcare industry, including those who read the Heck Of A Guy blog. This is, after all, a matter of public policy determining how tax monies are used to provide healthcare to a portion of the population most in need. Even more significantly, if this project is viewed as a success, there is reason to think that other government-funded health plans and commercial health insurers would institute similar policies.
See what you think at
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I Was Sinking Deep In Sin … WEEEEEEEEEE
Hear The Invitation; Come Whosoever Will
For your Sunday morning salvation, The [Occasionally] Right Rev. DrHGuy invites you to Objective: Christian Ministries (AKA Objective: Ministries)
It may be that only a hard-core lapsed fundamentalist such as DrHGuy can fully appreciate Objective: Christian Ministries. As the opening line of Saved! puts it, I’ve been born again my whole life. My attempt to insert a humorous, over-the-top graphic floundered when I realized I couldn’t conceive of any statement so outrageous that one or another of the churches in my home town would not only acknowledge but would joyously seize upon to incite a schism in order to cull the heretics from the congregation. The best I could come up with was
That’s pitiful. Heck, there are Vacation Bible Schools back home that would use that as a slogan for the third graders to mount in alphabet macaroni on popsicle stick plaques.
Objective: Christian Ministries
It may, indeed, be the best disguised parody online. It links to some genuine church-sponsored sites and Christian oriented news and entertainment as well as several other churches and organizations with suitably churchy names that do not exist. It professes to support a Christian youth rock ministry, denounces the teaching of evolution, suggests that readers “Make “CUT UP THE CONCUBINE!” (Judges 19) your battle cry during the War on Christians,” and, in what I consider a master stroke, promotes a campaign to shut down Landover Baptist, which is also a parody (and a pretty funny one that is itself worth a visit) but is much more recognizable as such. There are many, many atheists and anti-fundamentalist critics who have denounced Objective: Christian Ministries in the belief it was legit.1
Not To Be Missed
The Online Shop which offers all manner of Godly stuff, including the “Jesus Is The Light Switch” and the “As A Former Sperm, I Oppose Condoms” bumper sticker.
The anti-triclavianism campaign , based on the following theological premise:
Triclavianists hold that three, and only three, nails were used to affix our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. While it might be true that three nails were used — and, in fact, archaeological evidences uncovered by Biblical researchers positively point to this conclusion — it is erroneous, and theologically dangerous, to make this a doctrinal position.
The anti-evolutionist, therefore anti-Apple campaign. Apple is accused of promoting “evolutionism propaganda” by” bas[ing] their newest operating system on Darwinism,” because OS X was based on the Darwin operating system. Many news sites, including Slashdot, referenced the story without realizing it was a hoax.
Footnote
- For example, Stupid Evil Bastard - Just when I think the Christian Fundies can’t get any sillier and Atheist Coalition of San Diego - A Christian Nation of Hate and Ignorance ~back~
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Saturday Is Not Just The Day After Friday
The word “weekend,” which started life as the grammatically correct “week-end,” lost its hyphen somewhere along the way, ceasing to be merely the end of the week and acquiring, instead, an autonomous and sovereign existence.
From Waiting For The Weekend by Witold Rybeczynski
In a series of tenuously joined digressions masquerading as a book-length essay on the origins and cultural meanings of the weekend, Rybeczynski presents the reader with a casually arranged bouquet of his idiosyncratic thoughts on the subject. If it’s not a floral arrangement one would enter in a contest or choose for a wedding ceremony, it is certainly one that is enjoyable and entertaining to brighten ones home. (I.e., it’s a solid B+ sort of book.)
And, Waiting For The Weekend does provide a significant insight.
The idea of a workweek and a weekend is so embedded in contemporary culture that it seems a reflection of the natural order of things. As Loverboy, in Working For The Weekend, eloquently phrased it,
Everybody’s working for the weekend
Everybody wants a little romance
Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end
Everybody needs a second chance, oh
You want a piece of my heart
You better start from start
You wanna be in the show
Come on baby lets go
Rybeczynski, I believe, provides a valuable, if gentle, jolt to our unthinking acceptance of life as we know it by pointing out that the seven-day week, the five-day workweek, and the two-day weekend, unlike, say, the four seasons, was not predetermined by some celestial phenomena or a consensus of civilizations.
Instead, the weekend as an entity unto itself is the arbitrary and artifactual result of the coincidence of events as disparate as the Babylonian calendar, the influence of Christianity on the reign of Constantine, the lunar calendar developed by Muhammad, the 19th-century practice in some portions of Europe of “keeping Saint Monday,” and the 1911 Revolution in China.
The weekend was, in fact, finally given its current two-day format when the American labor movement, during a period of consolidation, needed to accommodate and garner the loyalty of their Jewish members and consequently campaigned to eliminate Saturday as a workday to allow them to observe the Sabbath. This effort became widely successful after Henry Ford championed the idea, believing that his employees would function more efficiently with two days off work and, more importantly, that a general increase in leisure time would benefit the auto industry.
Yep, the unions’ lust for power combined with the traditions of Jewish worship led to a movement, the most prominent supporter of which was a rabidly anti-union, anti-Semitic industrialist, that eventuated in the institution of The Weekend.
Enjoy yours
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Awesome-o Sends Greetings
One of the gifts Julie brought to our marriage was a dandy extended family. Especially notable are two nieces, whom our own children, AKA Da Boyz, have always assumed had no other purpose in life other than serving as their own playmates/baby-sitters/enablers.
Although the younger of these nieces (whose childhood ambition was, like every other girl in grade school, to become a stand-up comic) is, I am certain, no more than 14 years old by now, she obstinately insists that she is somewhat more mature and that she is, in fact, an expectant mother.
At five months post gestation, my soon-to-be great-nephew/niece is waving in the latest sonogram, pictured above.
The “nephew/niece” notation, by the way, is necessary since the parents have remained intentionally uninformed of gender (well, they apparently know about gender in general, they just don’t know the kid’s gender). They have, consequently, endowed the sum and substance of their love and passion with the transitional (one trusts) unisex designation Awesome-o, a choice with which I heartily concur because
- I’m touched that they would choose a moniker that so blatantly references me
- I appreciate the parents’ thoughtfulness in providing their impending offspring with a suitable, blogworthy pseudonym1
According to those parents,
Awesome-o weighs 9 ounces and is 10 inches long. We saw two kidneys, a wonderful heart, and a very smart brain
This is gonna be one heck of a kid.
Updates
Awesome-o Returns
Updated:
Ruby Wren: Still Awesome-O
Awesome-O Returns
Footnote
- I would, in fact, favor legislation requiring each individual to have, in addition to his or her surname and given names, a blog-alias ~back~