Screwball Tragedy

Blog

  • Tat’s Incredible!

    Men are unwilling to commit. It’s a common enough complaint that Google can barely find time to search for any other topics. The reasons, experts say, range from fear, selfishness, indecision, to emasculation.

    Yet men as young as eighteen are committing to a lifetime with an arm covered by a tattooed dragon swallowing a skull, or the logo of a hometown sports franchise which might gladly pack up the uniforms and depart in the middle of the night. The average lifespan of an American male is nearing 76, meaning Junior’s cool Metallica ink, though destined to fade, might outlast all but the longest marriages.

    Jeffery Chapman mugshot

    A Kansan, Jeffery Wade Chapman, committed to the word “murder,” badly tattooed on his neck in giant block letters. He seems to have done it himself in the mirror, perhaps as a sort of to-do list.

    When he was charged with fatally shooting Damon Galyardt in 2011, the presiding judge denied a defense request for tat removal but allowed him to wear a turtleneck to court. Chapman was convicted anyway and sentenced to a Hard 25.

    The sweater couldn’t save his neck, but his neck will at least save Chapman from constantly answering the question, “So, what are you in for?” There’s no word on whether he has added an -ER at the end.

    Commitment, as the divorce rate proves, can often be painful and misguided. Reformed skinhead Bryon Widner endured 25 surgeries to decouple from his white power beliefs. A sympathetic, anonymous donor picked up the tab.

    Reformed racist Bryon Widner

    Johnny Depp famously had his Winona Forever tat altered to Wino Forever, embracing the inevitable. His later spat with Amber Heard spawned a slew of tattoo removal ads offering to disappear the names of long-gone loves. Decommitment, you might call it.

    At least in instances of ink, it might be best to heed the words of the fictional surgeon Hawkeye Pierce. When Radar O’Reilly was considering a tattoo, Hawkeye advised, “Don’t hang any picture on your body that you wouldn’t hang on your wall.”

  • Ich Bin Ein Mexican

    We all are. If Mexico was going to pay for the wall, and American taxpayers ended up paying for the wall, what else would that make us?

    border wall under construction in Texas

    “I will build a great great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall,” Donald Trump said while campaigning in 2015, repeatedly drawing cheers.

    When his first term ground to its riotous end, less than 100 miles of new wall had been built, with $15 billion vaporized, much of it spent on the existing, pre-Don wall. That money came mostly from the Department of Defense, torpedoing projects like a middle school at Ft. Campbell and new daycare at Joint Base Andrews, not to mention counternarcotics plans.

    More to the point, it came from the MAGA crowds hooting each time Trump made his promise.

    It’s easy to forget that they — we — are still building it. This time around, the Clinically Obese Bill earmarked $46.5 billion for the wall, which would pay for 1,754 median-priced middle schools, with change left over for unbanned books.

    Action expresses priorities, as Gandhi said. But then, he never visited America, convinced his message would be ignored here.

  • Brief Encounter

    water droplet
    photo by Pradeep Raj via Unsplash

    I have filled in all the required fields for a life insurance claim and clicked submit when the website informs me that my claim cannot be processed online and I will have to phone the Prudential call center.

    After several minutes on hold, lulled by scratchy, distorted New Age music, an operator comes on the line.

    “Good morning,” says a female voice with a pleasant Eastern European accent. “This is Destiny. How may I help you?”

  • On the Four

    sign for Rhythm Management Clinic

    The Clinic boasts an 84 percent success rate, though patients in the nearby MRI have been known to complain about the constant thump of “One Nation Under a Groove.”

  • Semi-protein

    I never had the patience for upscale backpacking food. In my younger days I ate an embarrassing amount of Dinty Moore stew, mainly because it could be heated right in the can. No need to dirty a pan and waste precious water cleaning it.

    Add some smashed bread, bruised fruit, and a warm can of beer: dinner was served. I also routinely took a half-pound bag of bag of Peanut M&M’s; protein and chocolate in a convenient, tidy pellet.

    Once I spent a few hours in the sun on a small cliff in Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest, legs kicked over the edge, reading Thomas Pynchon. Occasionally I would tip some M&M’s from the bag into my mouth and wash them down with a swill of water.

    At some point I may have noticed a bitter taste. Maybe I chalked it up to the novel.

    When I stood up to leave, I realized that a steady stream of ants had invaded the candy bag and I had been eating them for some time.

    ant

    And what a pointless death. They couldn’t possibly have breached the hard coating. Or could they?

  • BOGO

    BOGO sunblock offers

    The BOGO, I now believe, rather than being cold-blooded manipulation by heartless retailers — a Pavlovian, chiming trigger of capitalism — is a ray of optimism on the part of the consumer, a vote of confidence that, despite all evidence, civilization will survive long enough for her to open that second bottle of sunscreen.

  • See It to Be It

    bust of Aristotle

    I’ve read Aristotle. I’ve read Proverbs. I’ve read some Voltaire. I’ve nodded over Descartes, and stifled laughter at the alleged prose of Ayn Rand. I’ve sampled Emerson, seen Ben Kingsley play Gandhi, watched at least one episode of Oprah.

    I’ve read Malcom Gladwell. I’ve pondered the inspirational slogans of Nike. I’ve picked up a Tony Robbins book, skimmed the blurbs, put it down. I’ve been in the same room with a Hang in there baby! poster. I read bumperstickers.

    Yet the words I live by, the words that seem more relevant each day, were in the first two lines of the B-side opener of the first Elvis Costello record, the only words I ever considered getting tattooed:

    Elvis Costello

    I used to be disgusted.

    Now I try to be amused.

  • Unhinged at Any Speed

    photo of Ford Nucleon prototype

    Scientific American: “In 1959 Ford Motor Company built a model chassis for the Nucleon, which would be powered by steam from a microreactor. Needless to say it was never completed, but the model can be seen at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.”

    Wikipedia: “Ford envisioned… that the vehicle would get 5,000 miles before the reactor would have to be exchanged for a new one.”

    The average American now drives about 14,000 miles a year. So, roughly three times a year the fissioning, uranium-filled power source would need to be replaced.

    Certainly nothing inconvenient about that. Would the Jiffy Reactor Swap have free popcorn served in lead bags?

    It’s a shame Ford didn’t incorporate this bold technology a decade later, when it introduced the Pinto. The fiery glow from a rear-ended atomic car would have eliminated the need for traffic cones and made it easy for a towtruck to locate the wreckage.

  • New Tricks

    There was a time when ships would keep live fish on board, in barrels, for easy protein. Hence the expression.

    For me the conceptual difficulty has always been the shooting. Wouldn’t it blast holes in the barrel, thereby killing all the other fish? Just how hard was it for a seafaring cook to simply reach in and seize?

    Donald Trump lacks most of skills we associate with his various predecessors: tact, wit, discretion, subtlety, coherence, deliberation, grammar. And experts often describe the difficulty older people face when learning new skills. But I think we can all agree he has recently excelled at one timeless presidential skill: killing.

    With American bombs raining across the globe it’s easy to overlook, but the death toll in his war against alleged drug runners has now topped 200.

    That number is only a fraction of the Iranian civilians, approaching 2,000, who have been killed. But significant, at least to their families.

    How hard would it have been for U.S. warships to simply seize these small boats? The Coast Guard does it all the time, yielding perp walks and captured evidence. By contrast, the proof from Operation Southern Spear is literally irrefutable, because no one has seen it, at least in public.

    Like Trump, I’m no good at geography, but some of the boats appear to have been travelling away from the United States, a fact which might prove underwhelming in a court of law. And so far, literally none of the boats have fought back, rendering the war a touch one-sided, despite the crowing of Pete Hegseth, the beefcake Aryan. As Trump himself once asked, in a different context, “Can’t you shoot them in the legs or something?”

    Our president is so anti-drug he’s blasting people out of the water, yet he’s neck deep in crypto, which has been a godsend for cartels. Almost seems, well, inconsistent.

    Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, Syria.

    The list gives new meaning to the term government efficiency. Andrew Jackson, Trump’s murderous role model, could only dream of bombing seven countries in a single year.

    Still, the idea of a guy who so desperately wants a peace prize bombing the planet would be bitterly laughable if not for the body parts washing ashore in the Caribbean, and now the Pacific.

    Is there a Nobel Pieces Prize?

  • Veritas

    Wine Enthusiast catalogue

    If it loves wine as much as I do, there should be a cabinet for airplane-sized bottles.