Fifth-Grade Math

I was struck by a comment by Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, who was upset by a judge's recent ruling overturning a federal law banning gay marriage. She said: "We can't allow the lowest common denominator states, like Massachusetts, to set standards for the country." Well, how very hypotenuse of her.

I have no idea what she was getting at by that, but I don't think she was calling Massachusetts the smallest polynomial that is exactly divisible by each denominator of a set of fractions. I imagine she was just intellectually overcome because she personally is easily creeped out by, for instance, the thought of two people of the same or similar sex being able to cosine for a loan, which is important if you don't live in a commutative property state. Worse yet she suspects that such people, if encouraged, might be inclined to multiply. I've tried and tried to understand this point of view, and respond politely, but I can usually sum up my position with one digit.

Ms. Lafferty is indeed interested in education, as evidenced by this quote on the Traditional Values Coalition website: President Barack Obama [is] quietly rushing through legislation that would actually bring cross-dressing teachers into your child's classroom...your children will be trapped in classes taught by drag queens. God, I hope they're math teachers.

It's a little galling to take values lessons from someone who isn't as smart as a fifth-grader. People who can't count shouldn't be in charge of deciding which people don't count. So I'd like to offer a little arithmetic primer. Visualize a fraction as one number divided by another; we can use the Mason-Dixon line as a visual aid. The denominator is a big blobby state below the line, and the numerator is a little state more on top of things. So, say, if we are trying to determine the fraction of states that uphold liberty for all, we could say that it is one Vermont-Texasth of them. See, that's not workable. How can we have a situation we can't even pronounce?

When it comes to civil rights, if we're going to have one nation indivisible with freedom and justice for all, it's going to have to be 50/50. That's my angle, anyway, and I think it's the right angle.

Vampires Among Us

The first mosquito was annoying. It wasn't until I slapped the second, a minute or two later, that I was flooded with panic. It hit me like that white flash of shock you get when you've only popped into the store for some cigarettes and maybe one game of video poker and suddenly a few hours later you remember you've left the kids in the car with the windows rolled up and a case of Ho-Hos and a little bottle of something to help you get some sleep. Pure dread.

I ran around the place looking for my strong, lean, brave man but when I found him it was too late. He was already slumped over, whimpering, drained, anemic, and a little pudgy. The pudge was due to a uniform layer of fused welts swelling his body a half inch in every direction. "I'm gonna die," he said.

He doesn't scare easily. This is the guy who maintained for years that "anybody can quit smoking. It takes a man to face lung cancer."

Mosquitoes adore Dave. They plan their holidays around him. When they're done with him they all go off and lie down, patting their bellies and burping and maybe watching a little football. For years we have employed him at barbecues to stand a little off to the side and draw mosquitoes. They'd be ecstatic. We'd hear them yelling "wheeeeeeee-oooooo" with the Doppler effect kicking in as they zoomed overhead. If we brought him enough hot dogs he'd stand over there all afternoon and smack himself like a masochist with Tourette's.

One time, in Maine, my sister and Dave and I walked through a mosquito-drenched forest to get to the beach (this is him on said beach with his socks stylishly pulled up as far as they will go to cut down on exposed skin). We expected the beach to be windy enough to repel mosquitoes and it was, except not these mosquitoes. Dave bailed out in fear when he got to the water and discovered they were still there. He ran a mile back to the car, shut himself and a few hundred mosquitoes inside and maniacally slapped the living crap out of every surface in it. Anyone happening upon the scene would have been concerned enough to call the authorities, after first pulling back a few miles.

We're not supposed to have mosquitoes in Portland. Screen porches are unknown. We only keep screens on a couple of windows to keep the cat in. Even Dave gets no more than a bite a night at worst, from the single mosquito in a mile radius. But suddenly this year we have mosquitoes, and their arrival coincided with the temperatures rising to near a thousand degrees, and at night we left a couple windows open a crack, leaving all the lights off. Dave woke up with a mosquito biting his lip, which swelled enormously. He looked like Angelina Jolie with a beard, which is surprisingly attractive. "What more can I do?" he wailed, and other than trying it again the next night with his pants off, I couldn't think of a thing.

The reason we have mosquitoes this year is the record-breaking rains we had in May and June, brought to us by the same folks that brought unseasonal snow, monster hurricanes and successive hundred-year floods. Mainly people like James "Global Warming Is A Hoax" Inhofe, who also doesn't think much of universal health care. If Dave ever gets out of the ICU, that's who I'm sending the bill to.

The Whiz Kid

Citizens of Toronto are on the alert for a band of pickpockets who distract their victims by strafing them with fecal matter. The perpetrators work in concert, one flinging poo, one pointing out the flung poo, and one executing the robbery, and presumably all share the profits, although I should think that the one in charge of collecting ammunition might rate a bonus. Underpaid employees of Forensics have confirmed the fecal matter to be human. Which brings two observations to mind. One: Evolution is not all it's cracked up to be. Two: at least they're not using the fake stuff.

There is a disturbing trend towards the use of phony bodily humors and something really should be done before it gets out of hand. Faux poo, vomit and blood are still mainly used in the novelty industry, and the mock mucus market is still in its infancy, being mostly confined to a single storefront in Pittsburgh. (Its product, "I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Booger," has remained stuck on the shelves, and the proprietor blames slow sales on the economy. He rigorously denies that his product is illegal. "That blows," he told reporters recently. "It's not," he is believed to have added.)

The most egregious use of fake humors is the trade in false bile, truckloads of which are off-loaded to the Republican National Committee daily, which resolutely defends its use. "We have way too much legislation to thwart to be limited to authentic indignation," a spokesman said.

But the fake fluid most alarming in its implications, for my money, is the thriving market in false urine. Perhaps I take this a bit too personally, but Dave's and my entire lifestyle is built on a foundation of genuine American pee.

Dave recently retired from a career as a refractory hod carrier, a position that frequently required him to work long shifts in boilers so hot that the wheelbarrow tire would explode and the plank it was running on would catch fire. Workers were sealed up in these areas and given a gallon of water an hour and let out only after their juices ran clear when they were poked with a fork. It's not a job for everybody, but union wages did attract a small number of men to sign up. Then, in the eighties, drug screening tests became routine. Of the tiny subset of humans willing to do Dave's kind of work, an astonishing number at any given time were lacking their driver's licenses or their freedom, and although many could still pass urine, far fewer could pass a urine test. Dave might have been among these except for his foresight in developing a broad and diversified portfolio of vices, so it was a simple matter of re-balancing these and presto--full employment for Dave. "Crap," the foreman would say, "we'll be needing a dozen drug-free guys for the Hoffman job," and our phone would ring, and Dave would join a small group of other men who were probably sleeping it off when they got the call.

Ultimately, it was not his stellar work ethic, his stamina, his strength, or his willingness to endure pain that got him these jobs, although all of those became important in his marriage. It was his pee. Dave's pee was golden.

But now, it turns out, workers have been cheating the tests with false urine for years. Some have employed the urine of other animals, resulting in a workforce that tests negative for marijuana but positive for hoof-and-mouth. But most have purchased, legally, vials of synthetic urine. Sometimes these can be detected by underpaid lab employees by smell alone, but not always. It's scandalous. It's changed the whole game.

But for thirty years, Bromley Masonry, C.H. Murphy Refractory and I all had something in common. Dave was our number-one guy.

Caution: Curmudgeon Crossing

"Sorry I'm late," my friend hollered out, trotting up to me on the street corner.

"NO," I said, leaving my mouth hanging open. My mouth was waiting for the rest of the phrase to emerge. My friend looked startled. She wasn't that late.

The problem was I was caught midway between trends and had stopped my phrase before saying "no problem" but hadn't quite accessed the new wording, "no worries." If you were able to peer into my brain at that moment, you would have seen it all pixelated and momentarily frozen, waiting to resolve. My VCR brain was still piddling around looking for a tape at the video store when the world had gone completely DVD. Or whatever it is they're using now. It's hard to keep up.

When I was in my teens, one way you could tell if someone was an old fart was if they used the word "groovy." No one I knew ever once said "groovy"--that was an urban myth. I do distinctly remember hearing the word "hang-up" for the first time, and my whole generation was flinging that little locution around with confidence inside of a week. So I consulted a young person a while back about "word up." What did it mean? He explained. "Okay," I said, feeling it out, "so if you said 'it sure is hot today,' I could say 'word up?'"

"Or just 'word,'" he offered. I tried it out.

"But really, no one says either of those anymore," he finished. Well crap. I was trying to hop a train that had already left the station.

We all learn our language in a big mass, all at once. When you meet someone new, and she has a cute way of saying something, your brain takes note of it and shoots it out of your own mouth soon after, without your even telling it to. Stuff gets into the community system. Back when Watergate was the only Gate around, the lawyer John Dean was on TV frequently, explaining what had happened "at this point in time." It sounded ever so exact. Before Mr. Dean, things happened "at this point" or "at this time" but no one ever had that stop-action precision that he was able to bring to the picture. Mr. Dean said it, and infected other people, who began to say it on TV, and now we can't get rid of it. It's not a deliberate choice. You'll just say "at this point" and the "in time" hitches right onto it. Unless you're curmudgeonly, like me, and make a point of not saying it.

Some of these phrases can be traced back to a particular day, or point in time, if you will. During the Clinton impeachment embarrathon, someone wrapped up his testimony by saying "at the end of the day," meaning "ultimately" or "when all is said and done." It sounded very poetic, and I took note. The very next day, an entirely different senator concluded his statement by saying "at the end of the day," and I thought: uh oh. Sure enough, the phrase went viral ("went viral:" c. 1994). Every time I hear it now it's like catching the edge of a buried splinter. My reaction is so profound that I recoiled when I read about the sun dipping below the horizon at the end of the day, and had to remind myself that that is, in fact, what it does at the end of the day. Oh. Well then. Okay.

It's not just phrases. Even voice patterns sweep across the population in an epidemic fashion. Like most old farts, I got irritable about the questioning intonation that young people, almost without exception, began to employ a few decades ago. I just found it so annoying? I never thought I'd miss it until it got replaced by the current mode wherein all speech peters out into a little gravel bar at the back of the throat, as though the speaker has suddenly become way too tired to prop up her own larynx. Everybody of a certain age speaks that way now, even professional radio announcers.

Some stuff just gets mentally embedded and lurches out willy-nilly. A friend told me proudly that her young son had gone out Christmas-shopping "on his own recognizance." I don't think she meant anything by that, but she'd already said "on his own" and the "recognizance" didn't come unhooked. It just trailed along like verbal toilet paper on the conversational shoe. In the same manner, people are always sweating "like a banshee" or driving "like a banshee" when all banshees ever did was wail.

People used to wait for other people and have conversations about things. Now they wait on people and have conversations around things. And then there was the first time I saw a poster that said "What part of NO don't you understand?" I thought it was very clever. So did everybody else. Now we keep running into stuff like "What part of you can have my gun when you pry it out of my cold dead hands don't you understand?" Not so clever. Kinda dumb, really.

Since I've set myself up as the expert in trend-spotting, I'll let you in on the latest one. You will now hear it twenty times a day on NPR interviews. Here it is: "That's a really great question."

It replaces "Um."

It's Like Walking On Air

They found a 5,500-year-old shoe the other day in a cave in Armenia. Just the one--it was like the sale rack at Nordstrom's. The archaeologist who found it was very excited at first, because she had always dreamed of finding a shoe. Except she was hoping for something in a pump. This one was more of a Buster Brown--a sturdy leather number, musk ox maybe, in size 7 with eyelets and laces with the little mastodon-ivory jobbers at the ends to make the lacing easier. A fine shoe in every way, and just the sort of thing I might have picked out. It was perfectly preserved in mounds of sheep dung. This is a sensible place to look for a shoe. Even back then, if a guy loses his shoe in a deep enough pile of sheep poo, he's going to look at it and think, shoot. I can always get another musk ox.

I don't have a lot of shoes. Usually there's a cute-shoe gene strapped right on to the X chromosome, but in my case it's missing. I not only rarely refer to shoes as "cute," but I'm drawn to shoes that look more like men's, and buy women's styles only under duress. This is true even though I am aware that Dave is an aficionado of women's shoes. I wore a uniform at work and have never had to maintain a proper wardrobe. It was a chore to come up with a decent outfit on special occasions, because I didn't even have the basics, so every time I would have to buy hosiery and accessories and a suitable coat as well to pull it all together. Plus the shoes. At that point I'd usually give up and suggest we stay home instead.

When our friend Peg got married, a group of us decided to doll up big-time, so we trolled the thrift stores together until we got a theme (it was "pink"). I even found some pink three-dollar heels to match. Dave warned me, soberly, that I'd need to practice wearing the heels, and that he'd need to be nearby to spot me. "Walk towards me," he said, so I did, then "okay, turn and walk away from me--slowly, slowly," so I did, and this went on for a very long time. I was pretty sure I had it down, but Dave insisted, in a dreamy, far-away voice, that I couldn't be too careful.

I did buy a few pairs of shoes through the years that I really liked, and even when they went out of fashion, I couldn't give them up. This worked out a few years ago when my nearly-new Uggs from the eighties came roaring back, but it was a whole different story with the Cherokees. The Cherokees were ribbon sandals with a saucy ankle strap and a towering, narrow rubbery platform heel that nearly doubled my height. Sexy as hell, I thought, and because the heel was rubbery, they were easy to wear, even for someone like me who's been known to tip over just from changing my mind too fast. I bought them in the early seventies but they fell out of favor when a different kind of heel gained ascendance, and I stashed them in the closet. For 25 years.

Then we got invited to a fancy dinner and I bought a slinky dress and realized my beloved Cherokees would totally work again. Off we went. As I sashayed into the venue, I stumbled a bit on what looked like gravel. Inside, I stumbled a little more. Finally, I discovered to my horror that my rubbery heels were disintegrating into crumbs with every step. Just before the other guests were able to cop to the fact that I was shrinking visibly before their eyes, I sat at the table and refused to get up. "Jeez, look at that," the person next to me said, "someone dumped their rolls onto the carpet and the crumbs are getting all over. What a putz." At the end of the evening I strolled out of the restaurant barefoot, affecting a bohemian air.

Next time, I'm totally storing them in sheep dung.

The Flatulympics

I have no memory of anyone in my family farting, ever. It just wasn't done.

I do realize that it probably happened. Otherwise our whole family would have been bobbing about on the ceiling like balloons in the Macy's parade, and I'm sure I'd remember that. And looking back, I now see that my brother was probably world-class. All I knew was you did not want to go in the bathroom after he'd been in it. He always planted a major fug in there, part aftershave, part cigarettes and part Fumes of Mystery. My eyebrows still haven't grown back all the way.

I also remember it happening to me at least once. I've only got about ten memories from first grade, but tops among them was the time I farted and Chris Ripper smelled it and he got all the kids to stand up in a line so he could sniff their butts. Chris probably had a lot of self-confidence to pull that off, and I don't remember anyone flinging that "he who smelt it, dealt it" line at him. Anyway he passed right by my butt without fingering me, as it were, and that's probably why it's so vivid. You always remember your biggest humiliations and triumphs, and while that one could have gone either way, I put it in the "triumph" column.

(The next memory I have of Chris Ripper was in tenth-grade biology, when we were doing a study of blood types and had to prick our own fingers with a lancet, and he volunteered--with glee, mind you--to stab all the leery ones. I wonder what Chris is up to now. I really do.)

So if I don't remember any farting in my family, it must be because I learned early on that such a thing was never to be remarked upon, or noticed in any way, and I took that to heart so much that my memory slate was wiped clean. As it were.

But although I signed on for much of our family ethic, in this respect at least, the apple fell from the tree and hasn't stopped rolling away. I now live in a household in which flatulence is a competitive sport. No matter what sort of noise I might make, Dave can imitate it. We go back and forth. It's a form of conversation, I maintain, and while not elevated, it serves a lot of the same function of ordinary discourse ("hello, I'm here, I care, I'm listening"). We're not just talking about the weather; we're doing something about it.

I remain fascinated that so many different sounds can be made with just the one instrument. It's a matter of embouchure, just like in woodwinds, I assume; everything from the little squeal to the pop-pop-pop-pop to something worthy of a ship in fog. And we both try to hold back enough ammunition to get in the last word. (Also, we do our own laundry.)

One of the beautiful things about modern technology is you can write an essay about farting and blast it all over the planet (as it were), and somebody out there will care. The blogosphere is a cozy place, and there are all sorts of interest groups and communities in it. There's something for everyone. There are mommy blogs and birding blogs and art blogs and knitting blogs and wingnut blogs, left and right. And sometimes when you're bobbing about on the ceiling of the blogosphere, you can recognize a kindred spirit, someone who holds your core values. A case in point would be Don Joe, the proprietor of the very funny blog Workforced. Ostensibly, it's about life in the modern office; but after reading this post and that post and OMG this one, I realized that Don was essentially putting out the same inspirational message I am.

Pull my finger.

Legendary Hotness

Climate science is very complicated. There are reams of data to collect and analyze about a multiplicity of systems interconnected in an infinite number of ways. Throw in feedback loops and the whole enterprise seems almost impossibly complex. It's serious business. How is the average person expected to make sense of it all? It's simple, with the Peter-Meter. Earlier last year, when a couple of British scientists were discovered talking smack in their emails, the very foundation of climate science took a big hit. But neither scientist was caught diddling the pool boy, so we were unable to come to any conclusions.

Fortunately, now we've got much more information to go on. Al "Call me Al" Gore has been rumored to have engaged the services of a massage therapist here in Portland who had more legitimacy than he was counting on, and before you could say "lock box," a convenient hand of truth was shoved down the groin of mendacity. Mr. Gore reportedly thought the Northwest Passage was open and had his mighty vessel all ready to break through, but it was not to be.

At first, many of us were inclined to discount this story, putting it down to the legendary hotness of Portland women, but as the tale unfolded, it became clear we have all been taken for a ride. Mr. Gore allegedly attempted to remove the straps of her camisole, revealing the underpinnings of the global warming hoax. Then he flang the woman onto a bed and launched himself on top of her with a thwomp and a wobble, and that, ladies and gentlemen--that is the sound of glaciers growing, of seas retreating, of hurricanes relaxing to swizzle-stick velocities. It's over, folks. There's no need to panic anymore, no need to soldier through the mountains of research, and best of all, no need to change a thing.

Senator James Inhofe has said that all along, of course. Senator Inhofe, who has irrelevantly siphoned off tankers of oil industry cash, nailed global warming as a hoax a long time ago. So we will have to take him at his word, at least until he bangs the maid.

Oh, if only Copernicus had been revealed to have a wide stance in the bathroom, we'd already have that sun back revolving around us, just the way God set it up.