Tag Archives: Ring Lardner

A number of dastardly schemes on sale….

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Ffolkes,
Brave stories of epic battles and perilous quests are written every day, by authors all over the world. Visions drawn, songs sung, tales told, authors fill the Net with letters, words, phrases, and paragraphs, some noble, some rotten. Fantasy and real life, romance and mystery, light and dark, serious and fun, people give their self to their work, seeking to find that part within themselves that makes them what they are, that makes them feel not just the desire to write, but the need.

Each of those authors has their own routines, that they have worked out over time, that help them to write. These routines are sometimes rigid, written in stone; if the routine is disrupted, no writing gets done. Others’ patterns are more flexible, allowing the author some leeway before crashing the boat into the rocks of no inspiration. Each author’s routine is based, in part, on their own physical and mental characteristics, and is unique in that respect, just as we are…..

“Writing comes easy.  It’s just a matter of staring at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.” — Ring Lardner

None of those other authors, though, have an ass that hurts before it even gets sat upon. None of them are limited to only 10 minutes in the chair, before needing to get up to move and stretch….. Well, that isn’t true, I guess…. I know of at least one fellow author who also suffers from lower back pain, and she also has troubles with this…. But, it only verifies what I’m saying, and that is that it is getting hard to get these Pearls done, from a physical standpoint, and my routine will have to be adjusted to accommodate those physical limitations.

I’m going to have to alter my writing habits, to include longer, more frequent breaks, as my back is complaining more and more as time passes, and I’m starting to get pressure sores on my buttocks from sitting so long. This may have an effect on my writing; I can’t tell yet whether that effect will be positive or negative. I’m hoping against the latter of course, but expect it will, if nothing else, slow down the process quite a bit, in order to maintain the quality of what goes in here…..

All that being said, again to little purpose, we should no doubt get on with the scheduled activities, before we have to start all over…. Shall we Pearl?….
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“Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure which is useful to them, to praise which deceives them.” — La Rochefoucauld

Certain members of the French aristocracy occasionally had some pretty accurate insights into human nature, and this is certainly in that category. La Rochefoucauld gives us a very rational explanation for why our beloved ruling class finds it so easy to lie to the public, not only in this country, but in every country. One of a politician’s most basic skills is this ability to praise with deceit; since so many of those who end up in politics begin their journey toward Hell in law school, I suspect that there is a class that is given to law students that covers this principle, which would obviously also be a good skill for use on juries…..

People are lazy, and don’t want to have to think, if they can help it. If they hear something that tells them they are good people, or somehow they have been made special, just by being born white, or Christian, or ignorant, and are willing to buy into whatever they’re told by a person wearing a tie, why, they will follow that person straight to Hell itself, smiling all the way….

So, politicians learn at their mother’s knees to feed into this aspect of human nature, and pick up the skill of lying with a perfectly straight face at an early age. That skill has often been perfected by the time they reach mid-puberty…. which accounts for their tendency to marry and breed at a young age, thus making sure that there will always be more willing dunderheads available for brainwashing…. And people are much easier to fool when they’ve been programmed from an early age…. I think this is, to me, the most reprehensible part of the whole idea of controlling others, i.e., the abuse of children that is essential to the continuation of the process…..

Yes, abuse of children, that is what I said. To me, to deny knowledge is abuse, and to force ignorance upon a child is a most heinous crime. Denying a child the opportunity to learn and grow is even worse than merely lying to the public, to my mind, for it takes away that child’s entire life of possibilities, turning them into a robot, easily manipulated by more false information.

“I’ve been thinking, but it’s an accident I swear!” — Rush Limbaugh’s ex-script writer, now working for Mitt Romney as a speech writer….

One of the primary characteristics of anyone who desires to control other people is a total indifference to any suffering they may cause others. It doesn’t enter into their consciousness, or into their calculations, to worry about what might happen to anyone else; only what happens to them matters….. This isn’t news, just look at any of them on TV, and you can see it in their eyes…. no soul in there….

The Devil hath not, in all his quiver’s choice,
An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice.
— Lord Byron (1788-1824) — Don Juan, Canto xv, Stanza 13

In fact, there are some of them who can’t keep from showing their disdain, especially in their eyes…. Note how Mr. Romney’s eyes  glitter and sparkle when he talks about denying rights to minority groups, or when he talks about war. You can see him doing an inner happy dance at the misfortune of those who would suffer from his policies, such as when he speaks of breaking up immigrant families. I think I would tend to worry about a President of this country who became sexually aroused at the thought of bombing little brown people; but look deep into Mitt’s eyes when he talks about that subject, and you’ll be convinced…. the man is certifiably insane, and he has millions of people backing him….

“Never before have I encountered such corrupt and foul-minded perversity! Have you ever considered a career in the Church?” —  Black Adder II (or in Politics?)

It’s time to make sure my ammunition is dry….. and my escape route is thoroughly planned and secured…. both may be needed sooner than I had hoped….
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Old school pearl here…. and the conclusion IS left as an exercise for the Gentle Reader……

Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. — Smart Bee

“Somehow, in the midst of their horrid history, the best among the _gaijin_ learned a wonderful lesson.  They learned to distrust themselves, to doubt even what they were taught to believe or what their egos make them yearn to see.  To know that even truth must be scrutinized, it was a great discovery, almost as great as the treasure we of the East have to offer them in return, the gift of harmony.” — David Brin – Dr. Pak’s Preschool

“It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean….For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.” — Luther Burbank (1849-1926)

“You can teach an elephant to dance, but the likelihood of its stepping on your toes is very high.” — Gary Moss

He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe  Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one. — Terry Pratchett, “Mort”

Okay, that should be enough to get the idea across. Or through. Or around. Or whatever….. if not, well, no worries. It will be on the quiz, but the quiz doesn’t count toward the final grade…. mainly because this is Life, and you don’t get graded using that system; Life’s more of a “pass/fail” class….

These five pearls do have a point they ‘sort of’ lead up to, and the line of near-logic to follow there isn’t completely hidden. But, I’d take an aspirin first, if you plan to spend any significant time trying to fuddle it out. Like most things I put together, there is a humorous intent, but don’t get burned trying to find it…. not worth it, from the risk/gain aspect. And it might be a good idea to wash up after…..
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Where the map differs from the terrain, believe the terrain. — Swedish Army Manual

Wow! This is deep! The Swiss Army dude or dudette who wrote this little gem must have been an Uncarved Block, to have written such a universal rule, disguised as a simple reminder to a simple soldier….. This rule is applicable to everything. Everything. Next time you are listening to some pundit expounding their political theories, use this as a tool to analyze their remarks. Simply view what they say as a map, a map they are using to describe their version of reality, which is the terrain.

The map they describe always differs from the terrain that exists in reality, and using this analogy simplifies finding the differences, as one merely need to look at reality to see the truth. It is by far one of the handiest little tools I’ve ever seen for determining the distance the speaker is from actual truth….. The officers in the Swedish Army must have to be careful giving orders, as their soldiers are armed with more weapons than the ones they carry in their hands…..
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Well, this has certainly been an experience. The relative value of that experience is something I don’t believe I want to get into just now…. “Meandering” is a good word, I think, to describe the way my head worked this morning, but, at least I’ve meandered to an ending point…. I could just as easily fallen into a rant…. Plus, I just noticed that there is no poetry, to speak of, today, except for one little couplet from a longer poem. Ah well, so be it…. Y’all take care out there, and May the Metaphorse be with you…..

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Dozer

Kowabunga!

Forget the biscuits, into the water taxi….

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Ffolkes,
“What a charming delusion!”, I thought to myself. “He thinks he is a pothole.” Since he’d asked so nicely, I gave him the bit of ground up coal shards he wanted to fill himself in, and shut the door. Turning back to the stove, I noted that the bacon grease had caught fire, and the whole wall was burning. Sighing in resignation, I turned on the automatic fire suppression system, shut off the lights, and left to go get some breakfast at the corner deli….. Sometimes, it isn’t worth getting up at all….

The deli was crowded with the usual midnight crowd (hey, we all like breakfast at different times!…. and the corner is a LONG walk away….), just out of the theater down the street, which is playing a classic version of “Phantom of the Opera”, complete with appalling  organ music, shabby, out-dated costumes, and glaringly ugly stage sets. I could tell the theater-goers by the vacuous, glazed expressions of their companions, and the baldness of their heads under the top hats.

Hungry now, I pushed through them, and hollered over their heads to Kim, the Korean imam behind the counter, “My usual,  Kim!” He replied, as always, “Fuck you, white boy, you wait like the rest!”  Confident that would produce my plate of bacon and grits with raisins in no time, I meandered to the single booth, kicked the homeless sleeper’s feet off the bench, and sat down to wait….

Whoa! I’m glad that one let go when it did; I’m not sure I WANT to know where it was headed…. Loaded with strange, this morning I seem to be. Oh uh, Yoda-speak I have caught. Woe me is! Do, this never will; write I must, but like this, I cannot. Too weird it is, and scares me it does….. If stop it I cannot, do, can I what? Help!….

If I start to annoy you, just let me know…. my sense of strange often exceeds even my own tolerance, so I know it can bother other ffolkes as well. Maybe we should just get on with the normal (question-begging term, I know) program, and let the chips fall where they may…. It’s better than trying to translate English to Yoda…. shall we Pearl?…..
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“Writing comes easy.  It’s just a matter of staring at a blank  piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.” — Ring Lardner

If one may accept the above as true, then my opening line from yesterday makes a lot more sense. (I had blood running down my face at the time, if you recall…) It also fits right in with the experience yesterday gave me in being unable to write as I would like; it was a four-hour descent into Hell, punctuated with numerous slaps to the forehead and uncountable curses. Even the fictional outbreaks were written with great effort, as the words just fought harder to stay off the screen the more I pushed at them to go.

Such days are hard on me, as writing is, for me, therapy. If I don’t write enough, I have this feeling all day that something isn’t quite right. Kind of like leaving the house, getting all the way across town, and remembering you left the stove burning under a pot of rice. Then you race home, to find you cooked the rice the day before…. It lends new meaning to the term, PITA….

I need my writing. In reading the news, and watching the parade of ignorance that plays out daily on the public stage, I build up a lot of angst, ( a side effect of caring, oddly enough…), and writing is what keeps that angst from building up to the point where an explosion is the only way to get it out. Those explosions can be dangerous, in my experience, so I write to try to at least put them off for a time.

Fortunately for us all, this morning seems to be going much better than yesterday, at least from the standpoint of finding pearls. All those fine little snippets of virtual wisdom were hiding out for most of the day, and yesterday came very close to the flash point by the time the Pearl was finished. But they’ve all come back out to play again today, and we can rest assured that, for at least one more day, I won’t get to the point where the following would be a possible scenario…..

“If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.” — Paul Fussell
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A limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical. — Smart Bee

So true! If one loves poetry, one must have a small soft spot for limericks. Personally, I love them, even the filthy ones. I don’t know why the form lends itself so well to such degradation by people’s imagination; I suspect it has more to do with human nature than with the form itself. People can turn almost any form of words into pornography of some sort, so well, it seems one of our most advanced modes of thought is innuendo of a sexual nature.

I would guess this is an evolutionary left-over from our past, adapting itself to a more civilized mode of communication than grunts and facial expressions. Humans are, after all, the only creatures on Earth who experience constant sexual readiness; all the other species have only certain times of the year when they are sexually able to reproduce. This constant state of randiness is probably where the urge to limerick was born….. Ah, who cares? They’re still cool, no matter why we make them, and this is a classic of the genre….even though it is clean…..
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“Age ain’t nothin’ but a number. But age is other things too. It is wisdom, if one has lived one’s life properly. It is experience and knowledge. And it is getting to know all the ways the world turns, so that if you cannot turn the world the way you want, you can at least get out of the way so you won’t get run over.” — Miriam Makeba

It is always a surprise when an artist, known for their talent in a field of entertainment, says something that shows the kind of insight that this statement exhibits. Perhaps the fault for that lies within us, for there is really no reason to expect that a good artist is NOT insightful. In fact, one could make an argument that such insight would lead to a lot of this sort of wisdom in our most talented entertainers, just as it improves their art.

Of course, this isn’t true in all cases. There are far too many artists whose lives are obviously not under the control of a wise person, as they carry on their personal drama on public stages; dramas full of glaring stupidity, rather than wisdom.

But, in this case, and in many others I can point out (though I won’t just now….), the artist’s personal level of experience and knowledge has brought them to a place where they can see life quite clearly, and allows this kind of shared wisdom. It is a very nice bonus to see and hear such good advice as an addendum to Miriam’s body of work…. and, wow! Can she sing, or what?…. Amazing pipes!…..
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A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new game.  Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water’s edge.  Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match.  Then, the paper reports, “The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin colony and overfly it.  Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently onto their backs.  — Audobon Society Magazine

Whether this is true or not, the visual image it gives is priceless. If true, I find it to be possibly the best-spent millions of dollars of public money in all of history, without exception. I can think of no better way for these million-pound/dollar aircraft, capable of destroying entire cities, to justify their existence, than to act as entertainment for a colony of penguins! Nothing you could say could change my take on this, either; sorry, but this is just too, too cool for fools, and it just tickles me pink (boy, talk about dating oneself by slang!) to picture this in my mind….. brilliant!    🙂
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A man fell off a mountain and, as he fell, saw a branch and grabbed for it. By superhuman effort he was able to get a precarious grip on it.  As he was hanging there for dear life, he looked up and cried out,  “Is anybody there?”
A deep majestic voice answered,   “Yes my son, I am here. What do you need?”
“Help me!!” cried the man.
“I will help you”, said the voice, “just let go of the branch and you’ll be safe.  All you have to do is trust.”
The man thought for a moment and cried out:  “Anybody ELSE up there?”

Okay, I’m sorry…. I couldn’t resist. I know that taking potshots at religion is like shooting at empty beer cans; they have no real defenses. But this made me laugh out loud, and that in itself makes it worthy of inclusion in a Pearl. Besides, Smart Bee is once again trying to hide pearls from me, so I’ll take what I can get…. It’s worth a chuckle, then we can get on with the day….

As I edited this, I was reminded of one of my all-time favorite jokes, so, here it is…

Joe was a deliberate man, and waited a long time before falling in love, but when he did, he fell hard, and married at age 30. He took his beloved new wife to Mexico for their honeymoon, and they went to watch the cliff divers perform. A freak gust of wind blew his wife off the cliff, into the waves and rocks below; her body was never found.

Destroyed, Joe went home to LA and buried himself in work. After eight more years, he came out of his shell, fell in love, and married again. But, as they were boarding a cruise ship for a lovely honeymoon cruise, an earthquake struck, and his new wife was thrown overboard, and drowned before anyone could recover.

Naturally, Joe was again devastated, and hid himself again in his job. It took ten years, but he finally met a good woman, and decided to marry again. While flying to Las Vegas, the plane they were in was struck by a freak bolt of lightening, and crashed a few miles short of the lights of Las Vegas…

The pilot and Joe’s wife were killed instantly in the crash, but Joe was thrown clear, into a soft sand dune, only breaking his leg, and a few other insignificant bones. As he crawled, in agony, toward the lights in the distance, he despaired, and cried out in his anguish, “Why me, God, why me?”

A huge voice came out of the sky, and said, “I don’t know, Joe, there’s just something about you that has always pissed me off!”

Hah!….
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As is often the case after I finish a Pearl, a sense of confusion has stolen over me, and I am left with a feeling that something isn’t quite right. But, as in all of those cases, I don’t give a rat’s ass, because, hey, I’m done, and there is no power on Earth that can make me go back and do it over….. not with current technology, anyway.

Of course, I’ve never been tempted with unlimited sexual favors to do so, but, as that remains pretty unlikely, I’m sticking with my policy. If such were ever put in front of me, and offered to me if I didn’t write, perhaps I’d consider it…. Hell, I’d go for it in a New York second; it’s been close to two years now I’ve been celibate, and there is little a male in that state can do to resist such a temptation, other than running away, and who’s stupid enough to do that?

Well, I suppose a touch of innuendo is an appropriate ending for such a strange interlude, so I’m going to let this fly…. Y’all take care out there, and May the Metaphorse be with you…..

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Kowabunga!