Lettuce Entertain You

I am eating a salad right now. I’m really enjoying my salad. I made it myself, at the salad bar at the grocery store, so it has only things that I like in it.

Okay, the above paragraph is almost a complete lie. First, I am not really enjoying my salad that much because I would much rather have something dipped in batter and deep-fried. Second, when I say that the salad has only things I like in it, what I mean is it has raw vegetables that I can tolerate in it. If it truly had only things I like in it, it would have ice cream in it as well as chocolate in some form. But I suppose that all of that can be taken as read, since that’s the way we all feel about salad. I mean, maybe you would rather have a slice of pie than ice cream, but the fact is, we only eat salads because we are supposed to.  Salad is not part of the natural order but came about through an excess of civilization. 

We have all heard the term “politically correct” ad nauseam. In fact, we now use it when we actually mean socioeconomically correct or culturally correct, but "PC" has just become the shorthand for all things that we say and do to keep from looking like cavemen. Well, I will add a new kind of correctness to our vocabulary: healthfully correct. There are a lot of things that we do nowadays that we would never have dreamed of back when we thought that food was supposed to just taste good and when we got exercise by going outside, playing, and having fun. But now we engage in all of these healthfully correct behaviors to please our doctors, our spouses, and, most importantly, our insurance providers. In the HC world, just as in the PC world, it does not matter what your actual opinion of something is. You must subsume your actual likes and dislikes to the Greater Good. In the PC world, this means that you must not act like a caveman toward people who are of a different gender, race, ethinicity, religion, or lifestyle than you are. In the HC world (note that HC can also stand for "high cholesterol" and "heart condition," both of which you will end up dying from if you do not become healthfully correct), you must no longer eat like a caveman–meaning that meat and potatoes are off the menu–and you must not say demeaning things about people who eat differently from you, meaning, they claim to actually like salad, tofu, and whatever that horrible stuff is that Vegans substitute for chocolate.

Well, just as with political correctness, that’s not entirely true. In all types of correctness it is okay to say demeaning things toward people who are in the mainstream group. It’s just not okay to say discouraging words to the people who are in the “alternate” groups. So, we omnivores must not even look askance at vegetarians, fruitarians, and vegans or at people who eat a “raw” diet (are they "rawans?). However, members of any of those groups are allowed to give long lectures to omnivores about the errors of their diets and how their diets are going to, in fact, be the death of the entire planet, except for that, blessedly, the omnivores will all die of heart disease, pesticide poisoning, and steroid overdoses before they can do too much more damage. It is okay for them to tell omnivores about how chickens are treated on factory farms (which is beyond abominable, by the way) while we are eating our KFC and to tell us how much grease is in those delicious Mickey D's fries that we are scarfing down. But omnivores are not ever supposed to mention to the non-meat eaters that tofu tastes just like cheese that has had all of the flavor and texture left out or that the stuff that they are calling chocolate tastes a lot like dirt.

But I digress. I was talking about eating salad and enjoying it. I remember something called iceberg lettuce. It was served as a vegetable from about the 1950s through the 1980s. It was crisp, crunchy, cool, watery, and, best of all, it had no discernible flavor that anyone could object to. It was the perfect vegetable. Except for, apparently, it also had no nutritional value. So, in the 1990s, we began to disapprove of iceberg lettuce, with feelings that became stronger and stronger, until finally, iceberg lettuce was outlawed in California in 2003. More and more western and northeastern states have outlawed it since 2003, and it will finally be outlawed in Tennessee in 2210 and in Mississippi in 2212. (Except that those two states, plus West Virginia, will still allow iceberg lettuce to be served deep-fried at county fairs.)

Now we who are HC make our salads with something called “mixed greens.” Mixed greens are a variety of lettuces, leaves, and grasses that add texture and a variety of nutrients to our diets. In addition, mixed greens also have taste–a novel concept in a salad–meaning that many children and most adults who were raised on iceberg lettuce will not like them.

For the most part, I can tolerate these mixed greens pretty well. I’m generally well-disposed toward most grasses, leaves, and lettuces, so I happily munch away while hoping that my dinner is going to be followed by ice cream with chocolate sauce. Except for one thing. There is this one kind of...lettuce (?) that is unacceptable to me. It always occurs in big clumps, for one thing, that are very much like a plant version of a hairball. (Do not think cat hairball in this example. Think the huge wad of hair that you pull out of your teenage daughter's hairbrush.)  It consists of long, spidery limbs on light-green stems with sort of spindly, sickly-looking leaves hanging off of them. It looks like a vegetable invented by Dr. Seuss. And there is always such a big clump of it together that it cannot be cut up, corralled, or contained, no matter how you try to attack it with your fork. There is nothing for it but to stuff this huge amoebic lettuce creature into your mouth all in one piece, which leaves parts of it sticking out of your mouth as you try to choke it down (which is hard to do because it reminds you so much of eating hair) and thus pull the errant limbs into your mouth as you swallow the initial tumbleweed.

I do not know the name of this plant. I am sure that it is from another planet, probably one invented by Dr. Seuss. It does not occur on earth. It can’t. It looks like a plant that does not get enough exposure to sunlight, as if it can be found growing in the dim sunlight of one of the moons of Saturn. The only possible earthly origins for this plant would be caves or underground hydroponics labs. I also do not know who thought of putting this plant into the bag o’ salad called “mixed greens,” but I do know that I wish they would stop.

I do not mind eating in an HC fashion, to a certain extent, as long as I do not have to eat lettuce that is like a big wad of hair.

Thank you.

Leo Tolstoy, Pt. II: East Tennessee Mountain Man?

After I inserted the photo of Leo Tolstoy in my last post, I kept being struck by how familiar he looks to me. I finally realized that it wasn't that I was so familiar with Tolstoy himself, it was that I see his face around Knoxville and every time I travel up into the nearby mountains of East Tennessee. He could easily have passed for one of our mountain denizens, until he opened his mouth, at which point he would have been met by suspicious looks and the inevitable question, "You ain't from around here, is you, boy?"

If he had felt too alienated by always being asked that question, he could have left the hills of East Tennessee for a lucrative career playing bass for ZZ Top.

The Leo Tolstoy of Bloggers

That's me.

I have made every effort to write shorter blog posts in the hopes of giving my readers a quick laugh, a brief respite, and then allow them to go. But I'm giving up on that.

You know how in some card games—like Bridge, Spades, Hearts—one must, at the outset of each hand, bid either high or low, depending on how many tricks they think they'll take? Well, some bloggers can bid low in the word-count game. I'm going to have to bid high.

I worked up some statistics this morning.

What novel do Americans most often use as the measuring stick for length? Yes, that's right: Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. It's the bellwether of word count, as far as we are concerned. However, weighing in at just 560,000 words, it comes in at a distant 15th compared to other novels. (This is purely word count, not page count. It's possible, if you use really long words—as Tolstoy usually does—to have a higher page count than an author who trumps you on word count.)

I apparently should've been born French. French novels come in as the top three word-count books, with Artamene (a whopping 2,100,000 words), Les Hommes de Bonne Volonte (a close also-ran at 2,070,000. Goof grief, Jules Romains! Another 35,000 words and you'd have had the record!). But after the top three spots, the English definitely have it, claiming seven of the top 10 slots. So I guess I'm onto something. By the way, for those of you who have slogged through Hugo's Les Miserables, it comes in at a very lightweight 513,000 words. So if you want to read a really long novel in English, go find Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (number four, with 969,000 words in the first edition, but upgraded to over one million words in its third edition). But if you really want to be considered a heavyweight reader, learn French.

Compared to the above stats, I'm definitely a lightweight writer. But compared to most bloggers, I definitely measure up at least to Tolstoy. As I said before, I've really tried to shorten my posts. I've also read other people's blogs and admired their concise, pithy posts that fit easily on one page on my tiny 13-inch laptop screen, without scrolling. I've tried, but I just can't do it. I'm many things, but concise isn't one of them. And for those who might say that I am pithy, I'd argue that though I sometimes might act “pithed off,” I'm hardly terse and to-the-point.

At any rate, I think that at this point, I'm just going to give in to my wordiness, bid high, and hang the consequences (the consequences being that no one but the stalwart will want to read my posts). I've tried to bid low, but even my “short” posts are long by others' standards.

My longest post, I think, was the “two kinds of people” one, which I split into two posts, to try to trick people into thinking it was shorter. Total word count: 1,729.

So, then, I decided to try some shorter posts. One of these was my post about Larry Niven's extremely short story, called “Unfinished Story.” Niven's short story was a total of 10 words long. It took me 288 words to tell you about it.

Next, I thought that I could quickly write about my favorite quotation in “The Human Condition.” It was a short little quotation that required some set-up. Word count: 658.

Then, yesterday, while eating lunch, I was thinking about this problem of my posts being so long. I looked at the salad I was eating and thought, “I should write about lettuce; that couldn't possibly be very long.” I was thinking that I would just literally write about my lunch and keep it really short. I haven't posted that story yet, but it came in at 1,105 words!

So there you have it. I may not be in the same category as the old French novelists, but I do seem to weigh in around the Tolstoy level. For blogs, that is. (Word count of this post: about 699.)

The Human Condition

I’m a great reader of quotations by people from all walks: the famous, the infamous, and the unknown. Winston Churchill said, “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” I am not exactly uneducated, but I am a slow reader, so, rather than spending my time reading whole biographies to learn about great people (which I’d like to do), I often instead read collections of quotations.

There is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from famous quotations, and they give you the measure of the person without having to muck about in their everyday lives. Of course, there’s much to be learned about people’s true character by mucking about in their everyday lives, so I don’t at all discount that aspect of reading biographies.

My favorite quotes, as well as aphorisms, axioms and adages, are those that pretty much sum up the human condition. There are lots of great sayings out there, of course, including many that can improve our health, our parenting, our perspective, our character, and every other aspect of our lives. But the ones I like best are the ones that sum up human nature or the human condition in a nutshell.

I think that my all-time favorite quote, though, about the human condition, came from someone who is not famous, and I won’t make him famous because, to be quite frank, I’ve long since forgotten his name.

He was an old farmer living somewhere in the hinterlands of Houston, Texas. Houston and the flatlands around it are prone to flooding every time there comes a big gullywasher (as we call them here in the hills of east Tennessee). Being from the hills–where water drains very rapidly during storms, what with its always wanting to go downhill–I never imagined what water could do in flat country. It just piles up and sits there. Which I learned about during my brief stint in Houston.

So, we’d had days or perhaps weeks of rain and flooding, and the water was encroaching slowly from the lowest spots toward the higher spots. Folks in surrounding low-lying counties were sandbagging like mad, trying to stay ahead of the water and keep home and hearth dry.

On the local news one evening, they showed an aerial view of a farm that was completely surrounded by water. Only the house and the barn were still on dry land, and that was thanks to a very good job of sandbagging done by the farmer and his family. However, the water continued to rise, and the news reporter asked the farmer whether he was going to hold out and do more sandbagging or whether he was going to evacuate, along with his neighbors, when the local constabulary came calling.

He said, “I just don’t know. If I knew what was going to happen, I’d know what to do. But I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I don’t know what to do.”

Well, there you have it. About as succinct a summation of the human condition as I can imagine. He was quite serious, of course. This was no time for fooling around or being cute. He was looking at possibly losing everything that he and his family had worked for, probably for generations. So, he was not just idly philosophizing. This was human-condition examination of the most important kind. This was where the rubber meets the road.

I think of that old farmer all the time. Every time I come to a crossroads in my life, where I have to make a pretty important decision that, it seems, will shape the rest of my life, my mind brings back the words of the old farmer. If only I knew what was going to happen, I’d know what to do. But I must muddle through, just like everyone else, not knowing what the outcome will be till it’s too late to change my decision.

A very short story

Since yesterday's post was sort of longish, today's will be short. In fact, my intro will be much longer than the featured story. (Which is par for the course with me.)

Larry Niven is a science fiction author, probably best known for his Ringworld series. But he's been a quite prolific author, and one of my favorites of his is The Magic Goes Away series. I could be wrong, but I believe that the story I'm going to repeat here is part of that series. I went and lent ALL of my Larry Niven books to RJM (who'd better be taking good care of them!), so I can't look this story up. I am therefore working entirely from memory, as I also couldn't find the specific story in a very quick Google search.

Anyway, it was called something like Unfinished Story. It may have had a number after it because, again--if I am recalling correctly--he may have published three or so of these unfinished stories, which then became numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.

But then, I could be completely wrong on any or all of this. I'm sure that, if and when they read this, REB and RJM can correct my mistakes. So, I really hope that I can get Mr. Niven's story right, because I'm working entirely from a memory based on reading the story probably 25-plus years ago. It was one of my favorite short stories that I ever read, so I tried to commit it to memory. I believe that it may be the shortest story ever published, at least by a major publishing house.

So hear goes:

Unfinished story

There are some things man was not meant to know.

***
The End

Children's Fiction, snippet #1

Following is a little piece of a story that I've been working on here and there. I've just got little snippets of it. In short, it's about two or three of the Brooks family kids (I think there are six children in all) who meet a mysterious gentleman who takes them on a series of adventures through magical doors that appear out of nowhere. Between adventures, they sometimes have strange, interesting, enlightening, and/or acerbic conversations with the mystery man.

You can ignore this, if children's fiction is not your thing, or you can read it and tell me what you think. Does it seem worth pursuing? Does it make you want to know more? Does it make you want to go back to the riveting article you were reading in the Washington Post, or go back to your experimental work with hybridizing the world's hottest peppers? Feel free to let me know what you think. I can take it. I think. Well, maybe not. We'll see.

...
“Slug mugs and mudbugs and flub dugs
Slog togs and dog slobs and frog mogs
Blurb glurbs and slurp tubs and slub dubs.
If it's dirty or geary, greasy or smeary,
oily or noisy, if girls don't like it, or
if it can be made into a sword,
boys like it.”

“That doesn't paint too nice a picture of boys, does it?” Caitlin asked

“I think it's pretty accurate,”said Keaton. “I like it. I'm not sure what a flub dug is, but I have a feeling I'd like to poke it with a stick if I did.”

“Well, if that's what boys like, I don't think I want to even hear your opinion of girls. But go ahead. What do girls like?”

“Girls like to twirl.”

“That's it? That's all you can say about girls? We like to twirl?” Caitlin was indignant.

“If pressed, I could say more. But mostly—and I have to admit that this is purely from observation, as I've never been a girl—I would say that girls like to twirl. But, if I absolutely had to say more, I'd say that girls like jumping rope in the sun, spinning in the rain, singing, humming, and dancing on daddy's feet. If it's furry or lacy or princy or prancy, if it's shiny or glittery, glimmery or gleamy, girls want it. If it can swirl or unfurl, twist or twirl, twitter or flitter, skip or slip, splish or splash, or if it's a bath towel that can be made into 27 dress styles, girls like it.”

In spite of herself, Caitlin had to agree with this. Perhaps not every point of it was true for her, but a lot of it was, and the parts that weren't, she could think of at least several of her friends for whom it was true. And, truth to tell, she did enjoy twirling.

“So,” she said in her best ingratiating manner, “what do adults like?”

“Sleeping,” he said with finality.

She scrunched up her nose. “Really? That's all? No funny rhymes, no activity, no...nothing? Just sleeping?”

“Well, if you push me, I'll also say resting. And relaxing. Dozing. Snoozing. Snoring, even. Hammocks, sofas, lazy summer days and sandy beaches, long winter nights with a fire. Sunday afternoons that stretch into infinity. Doldrums and boredoms, dreary and dreamy. It takes the rest of your life to get over all of the activity of your childhood,” he said very seriously.

“But they work all the time. They pay bills. When they're not paying bills, they're talking about paying bills, or when they can buy a new dishwasher, or a better car. They talk about that stuff all the time. They must enjoy working and paying bills.”

He eyed her with one eyebrow cocked. “Just like you must love school and homework because you talk about them so much,” he said drily. With this, he turned and said, “Next!” and they knew that a door was about to open and they must follow him or be left behind.

Stupid Questions #1

This is my first Stupid Questions post (thus the clever title), in what I hope will become a series.

I am the Queen of Stupid Questions myself, as almost nothing is self-evident to me. I am not talking about obvious, run-of-the-mill stupid questions. A really good Stupid Question sometimes takes a moment to recognize. It makes the askee squint his eyes and cock his head the way a Labrador Retriever does when you are holding food in your hand and talking in a high-pitched, squeaky voice.

Following are a couple of my all-time favorite Stupid Questions (that were actually asked of me). I will not even attempt to give any of the answers that have occurred to me over the years. I'll let you entertain yourself by coming up with your own answers.

From a restaurant hostess: "Are you waiting for someone who's already here?"

From a co-worker: "Do you live at home?"

And one that a friend, who owns an antique and art shop, told me over the weekend.

A customer came to the cash register, holding aloft an old-fashioned biscuit cutter (which, for those who don't know, is a lot like a very simple cookie cutter), and asked, "Does this work?"

If you have a great Stupid Question story, feel free to post it in the comments section or e-mail it to me and I'll post it for you.