FAIRLY SOON

I'll be posting again. The snide part of my brain seems to have blown a fuse, and without that I can't post very well--like Jane Austen if she stopped being impressed by real estate.

Meanwhile, thank you all for your kind comments and emails.

THE SAFE AND GENERAL ANTIDOTE TO SORROW

Soldiers don't mourn, my father always said; they're too busy concentrating on getting their own asses out alive. A heavily decorated war hero, he knew. Civilians mourn.

Eventually, after a death in the family--my father, in this case, who was not only a war hero but a great and significant professional success who I loved and admired--you gotta start getting back to things, as in "gotta." That is because grief is one emotion that can never be satisfied. You got desire, go after her. You got ambition, go for it. You want money, go for that. But you got grief? You can't bring back the dead. If you're a soldier, the appropriate phrase of mourning is "that is some tough shit." If you're a civilian, mourn and then start, bit by bit, getting back to your life.

I am a civilian.

NO BOSS DON'T PULL THAT SWITCH BOSS NO NO NOOOOOOO

Remember the Large Hardon I mean Hadron Collider, and how if they started it it would maybe make a black hole that would slurp up the earth like a three-year-old slurping a piece of spaghetti, and how it sort of broke down last time they tried to start it? Well, in a few weeks they are going to fire that sucker up again. Only they might not, and for Cosmic reasons. From today's New York Times:

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one.

See, going back to 1912 and killing your grandfather is a problem, because you already exist. But going back and killing your grandfather is not a problem if you don't exist but then have the bad manners to start existing; in that case by going back and killing your grandfather you're just preserving the status quo. In fact, it will always have been that way.

If that is what really is going on with the Large Hadron Collider, we should be able to predict things that we wouldn't otherwise have foreseen--for instance, that the newly refurbished LHC will cave in, short out, blow up, shut down, or otherwise become unusable before it is able to create a Higgs boson. This has already been happening. Every time they try to start this fucker, it shorts out, etc. If this continues to happen, the hypothesis will be upgraded, and eventually will be called a theory.

Of course it's not a good thing to go public with all this, since now anybody can dress up like Jake Busey in "Contact" and blow up the thing and say he's from the future. The Times article is here.

IT'S EASY TO CRITICIZE

Very easy, sometimes. Stupendously easy. This morning, for instance, I had to sit in a courtroom and wait for the judge to sign a paper. Well, he was busy; there was a trial going on. I took a professional interest in it, for about five seconds. Here is what I heard:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Your Honor, staff, bailiffs, opposition counsel, esteemed Urdu translators, maintenance crew, members of the public. What you have to understand about this case is that it is about what we call SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE injuries. Let me give you an example of SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE injuries. An objective injury is for example if you break your arm and you see the bone sticking out of the arm.

I am absolutely not making very much of this up. So I begin thinking how I'd say it:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm sure you're wondering why you've been pulled out of your lives to come down here. You've been pulled out of your lives to come down here because, as I will prove to you, that man over there is faking. He says he's hurt, and he tells all the doctors he's hurt, looks pained about being hurt, and pretty soon he is going to get up on that stand and swear to you about how hurt he is. Well, he's not hurt. We'll show you all the X-rays and the MRI films and EMG scans and every other test by which doctors can see, hear, touch, taste or smell any kind of hurt, and there isn't anything in those tests--nothing at all--zip. Which is what I will ask you to give him. Nothing at all. Zip. Because while there are many hurt people out there who deserve your sympathy and your help, this guy over here is not one of them.

It needs cleaning up, of course; its overdone. (Not to mention I would be damned to hell and back twice before I ever went to bat for an insurance company.) But my version does have a perfectly good explanation of the difference between "subjective" and "objective." The best thing is, it doesn't use the words "subjective" and "objective," because those words are are cumbersome, stupid, offputting, confusing words that have no place in the mouth of anyone who actually has anything to say to anybody.

If I ran legal academia, I would require a two credit course in "how to fucking talk." Or how not to, at least. How to talk is (I suppose) a gift; how not to talk is a skill available to any man, woman, or vegetable.

A CHILD'S GARDEN OF MEAT

I don't know what to make of Jonathan Safran Foer's article on meat. Here's a summary: Blah blah my Jewish grandmother's chicken college I got married I don't eat meat, statistics, the end. Well, I got news for him. Meat is good. A child's garden of meat:

When I was six years old, we had a deep freezer in the basement. One day, by way of putting the freezer to use, my father purchased half a cow. The half a cow came disassembled and wrapped. The wrappers were labeled "brisket," "top round" and other things. My mother was horrified. "Let's go down to the freezer and get some of that half a cow," we'd say, and she would look unhappy. When I found a package that said "rump," my parents did not hear the end of it for a year.

Our meat grinders were hand-cranked. I liked the big one--it looked like a hair dryer made out of plumbing. You clamped it to the counter top, inserted a gigantic spiral-shaped grinding screw that weighed about three pounds, slipped the cutting blade over the screw head and the extruder (a steel disc with holes punched in it) over that, and then you screwed the retaining ring over the entire assembly to hold it together. Finally you attached the crank. Diabolus ex machina.

We were fussy about the steak. It had to be uniform in color and not too deep a red. You rinsed the steak (top round, preferably) and dried it and cut it into strips, and you turned the crank and fed the steak into the grinder, strip by strip. We always had capers on hand so we could sneak some steak tartare on crackers.

To prepare the grinder for cleaning, you fed a piece of bread through it. This removed all the stringy parts of the meat and gathered them at the front, where they formed a sort of bread-and sinew doughnut. We didn't eat that.

As to the poor helpless animals, fuck them. They're animals! Treat them kindly, slaughter them quickly and neatly and your moral obligation is discharged. If you get crazy about that, what's more sadistic than fishing? Or crabbing? Life in Washington, D.C. without blue crabs? Are you serious? In those days, a bushel of blue crabs was a dollar. The bushel basket emitted bubbling sounds. I would open the lid and stare into the basket. The crabs would stare back. Once I poked my finger in and a big sook pinched me. A great white pot was on the stove to cook the crabs. The water was boiling. I pointed to the crab that had bitten me.

"Him first," I said.

He tasted good, too, the little bastard. Crabs have had a lot of revenge for this over the ages. One way to look for a dead body in the Chesapeake is to look for a big bunch of crabs. It is all part of the circle of life, son. And your Jewish grandmother's too.

NEW JERSEY GOVERNORS' RACE UPDATE!

As you may or may not know or care, the New Jersey gubernatorial (whoever the fuck invented that word should be forced to go around saying it to people in the subway) contest is now a neck-and-neck race between two candidates:

1. The incumbent, Democrat Jon Corzine, a skinny geeky dude with a beard and glasses who has so much fucking money that he could probably end the recession all by himself just by paying everybody in America $100,000.00 in cash every month for the next ten years and

2. The challenger, Republican Chris Christie, a fat, thuggish bully apparently modeled on Moe from "Calvin & Hobbes" who says he will make "drastic" spending cuts but refuses to say what he'll cut, because in New Jersey there is nothing left to cut without closing the schools, shutting off all the traffic lights, sending all the cops and firemen home, firing all the garbage men, and figuring out what to do with the mounting pile of dead bodies.

Who will win? To approach the problem you have to understand Archer's Rule, which is that the winner is the one who would be the coolest if this were high school. Using this model I successfully predicted that Bill Clinton would survive impeachment, because Clinton was a cool guy who got girls and Ken Starr was a geek (not to mention Linda Tripp was a total bitch and everyone hated her).

Even with this sophisticated analytical technique, however, the Jersey race is impossible to call. Corzine is a loser who if you hit him with a spitball in home room he'd try to ignore it and everybody would laugh because he's such a pussy. Christie is the guy who would blow the spitball, but if you high-five him he'll walk over to you with his buddies and have a little fun with you just for kicks, and you won't have your front teeth.

Obama, who is still very cool in Jersey, actually came here and said Corzine was his man, and Corzine's numbers went up. Of course whether that was because of Obama is anybody's guess, since that was the same day Christie was caught torturing a worm with a cigarette lighter. This made a bunch of girls go "eeeeew," and now whole thing depends on whether Corzine wins a prize at the science fair. If he does, Christie will pull ahead, and Obama will have to come here again, and let Corzine sit with him in the cafeteria.

RESPONSES TO OBAMA NOBEL PRIZE CALLED INTEMPERATE

WASHINGTON (Oct. 9)-- Republicans today said that President Barack Obama's Nobel Prize "was purchased with the innocence of child prostitutes forced by their Democrat pimps to submit to the unspeakable animal desires of the Nobel Committee, all of whom are well-known Swedish sex perverts."

Democrats responded that Republicans "hate America" and "are plotting with the Taliban to establish a misogynistic theocracy that will turn American women into sex slaves and baby-making machines for blow-dried Evangelical media whores."

"It's a joke," replied Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele. "A horrible joke. The average Republican does more for world peace by wiping his ass than that slick smooth-talking Kenyan Socialist Communist Nazi bastard ever did in his entire worthless pro-terrorist America-hating cock sucking mother fucking shit eating god damned life. Oh, is this mike on?"

WHY DO MEN HAVE SEX?

The brilliantly insightful book Why Women Have Sex has topped the Google News "Spotlight" Parade for days. It seems that women have sex (just as men always suspected) as a way to get a house with a refrigerator in it to hold the children's drawings, which they intend to attach to the refrigerator with flower magnets. (In fact, this is the most frequently reported female sexual fantasy.) There are other reasons women have sex, too, such as getting ahead at work, making other women feel bad about their clothes, makeup, shoes, etc.

But why do men have sex? I have completed my own exhaustive and painstaking research into the matter by asking some men to fill out an exhaustive and painstaking survey form. They refused to do this, however. They did give the following reasons for having sex.

1. She says something sexy, such as "We're out of paper clips."

2. She's quiet and doesn't say anything.

3. She wears those kinda shoes with the open toes you can see her nail polish.

4. She wears shoes you can't see her feet.

5. She bends over to get something.

6. She doesn't actually bend over to get something but you imagine she does.

7. She's one of those abstinence babes.

8. She's a great big slut.

9. She's really, without any doubt the person you want to raise a family with. (Just kidding. None of the men said this. Well, okay, one of them did but then he started to cry, so he doesn't count.)

CAT FIGHT! CAT FIGHT!

Mrs. Merdle, the richest woman in London, comfortably middle-aged, bares fangs at the young and gorgeous Fanny Dorrit, who is flirting with Mrs. Merdle's son. Fanny is equal to the fight. Is Mrs. Merdle's husband, someone asks, in Rome?


'Why, indeed,' said Mrs Merdle, 'he is so much engaged and in such
request, that I fear not. He has not been able to get abroad for
years. You, Miss Dorrit, I believe have been almost continually
abroad for a long time.'

'Oh dear yes,' drawled Fanny, with the greatest hardihood. 'An
immense number of years.'