The Grouch Speaks: Overwhelmed by Ennui

This morning, when I left the gym, I felt overwhelmed by ennui.  I don’t know why I was down, but I knew what would fix the problem, a cup of coffee.  As some ad or other says, “Caffeine—makes you do stupid things faster and with more energy.”

I went across the street to La Bou, got my coffee and a staple in my Kamikaze diabetic diet—a chocolate croissant—and sat where I could watch all three big-screen television monitors.  I wanted to see how bad things were in Houston, which was largely underwater because of hurricane Harvey.  A base just outside of Houston was one of my first assignments in the air force.  After more than three years there, I left with fond memories.  Now I'd like to know what was happening.

On one TV a woman wearing an Egyptian fright mask was talking about something or other, what I don’t know.  The sound was off as was the captioning.  Then the captioning came on and gave her name:  Kim.  Ah, yes, one of the famed Kardashians, the twenty-first century’s replacements for the Gabor sisters (Google them) of years gone by.

The station broke, and a more-or-less news program came on.  Three people were talking about a pay-per-view fight, the conduct of which soaked people for millions of dollars to watch late at night.  One of the panelists asked this question: “What late-night activity would keep you up?”

Be serious.  I was talking, silently, to the TV, asking, Do you guys think about the words you use before you throw them out over the air?  I know what late-night activity would keep me up, and it’s none of your business.

I pivoted to look at the monitor in the middle of the room.  A courtroom drama was on, but no, it wasn’t, a commercial came on for a local law firm.

At one time it was illegal for lawyers to advertise; now it’s not.  I don’t have a problem with that, but I think that when the law was changed it should have included a requirement that professional actors be used and lawyers not be allowed to pretend to act.  The lawyers representing themselves on the screen before were as wooden as Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd—dummies used by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.

The TV monitor at the back of the room caught my eye.  People were doing something with a watermelon.  It was a food channel, or a cooking channel, something like that.  A man put a chunk of watermelon in a glass and then poured gin over it. Or vodka.  Or some phony booze.  It’s the concept that counts.  That appealed to me.

It was time for me to go.  I could check out Houston on the Google news feed at home, and what daytime television I'd seen still left me overwhelmed with ennui.

***

What Would (Did) Mencken Say?

"The White House will be adorned by a downright moron”—H. L. Mencken.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English.   He preferred a shortened form of his name, H. L. Mencken, and was nicknamed the "Sage of Baltimore."

Snopes.com checked the authenticity of the quote used at the start of this post and verified that, yes, Mencken did in fact write those words.

Snopes went further and put the remark in the paragraph in which it was originally composed, thereby showing the context, which was not at all flattering to Americans: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Mencken was a skeptic.  He was acerbic. His barbs lived long lives and are scattered around the internet.

He distrusted humanity: “Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.”

He had a low opinion of his fellow Americans: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

He disliked the American form of government: “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

He thought little of the GOP: “In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

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As a Good Ole Boy Might Say . . .

I enjoyed my air force days stationed with young men from the rural south, people today called Good Ole Boys.  They could do entertaining things with the English language, such as creating a simile like this:

 "His brain is so small that if you wadded it into a ball and shoved it up a gnat’s ass it would rattle like a walnut in a boxcar."

That remark can be applied to whomever you might think of.

***

Power Outage

Our electricity was off because of a scheduled power outage.  I used the time to run errands.  I needed essentials—beer, wine, and insulin syringes.  I like to be mellow when I shoot up.

Necessary stuff taken care of, it was time to do something pointless, time to go to the mall.  The mall in this case is Sacramento’s Arden Fair Mall, two levels containing 165 retail tenants.  The mall’s website says it’s more than 1,100,000 square feet big.  A million square feet! 

But a million square feet is small footage compared to malls in Asia that are three to four times that size.  Somebody has probably written a book about super-sized malls, but I wondered if anyone has compared any of the malls to classic structures such as India's Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid of Giza, or the Roman Colosseum. If anyone has tried to elevate the shopping mall to timeless architectural status, I didn’t find a reference to it.  Moreover, some sort of record should survive so that people of the future will know that we are the era responsible for shopping malls, large dams, small electronics, and nuclear weapons.

Going to a mall is pointless for me because I don’t have the shopping gene.  Maybe I was born without it, or maybe it spun out of my system somewhere along the way.  I suppose a proper shopping gene could have been injected at some point, but it wasn’t, and I remain genetically unmodified, a non-GMO generic old man.

But I had time to kill until the power at home came back on, and my hunger gene pleaded for something to eat.  We, the hunger gene and I, went to the mall and into the food court.  Here is proof that there are no shortages of fat and sugar.  Rationalizing my choice on the knowledge that my blood sugar sags late in the morning and needs a pick-me-up, the kamikaze diabetic in me ordered a hot dog on a stick and a lemonade.  More than just a hot dog and a splinter, the whole creation is dipped in batter and deep-fat-fried so that it looks like what it is, a cocoon filled with carbs.

Then, something miraculous happened:  My phone rang!  In two years of owning a cell phone, this was only the second or third time I’d received a call on it.  That’s the result of deliberate use.  My wife and I got cell phones as backups for our intermittent land line, and we gave our cell numbers to very few people.

Actually, my phone didn’t ring but vibrated, which it was set to do.  I could feel it through the fabric of the pocket.  The vibration was quiet; no bystander would be distracted.  (All things that vibrate are not the same.  Just think of what kind of story you could write if you were in a crowded mall and saw a geezer with a vibrator.)  

Answering it would have to wait.  The food court was packed with noisy people, and I was enjoying a delicious repast of a hot dog on a stick and lemonade.

And, another miracle happened:  My phone vibrated—again!  A different caller this time. 

That was enough.  A trip to the mall and two phone calls was a good morning’s work.  I went home and lay down to experience my own personal power outage.

***

They Say “Senior Citizen”—I Say “Old Man”

A young man was walking out of the library as I was walking in.  He grinned and said, “Hey, old man.  Good morning!”

I liked that.  I liked it then, and I like it now.  He made an honest call.  If it walks like an old man and looks like an old man and acts like an old man, call it what it is.

And he needed more than a little nerve to use the term old man on someone he didn’t know in a society that shuns talk of growing old by hiding behind the euphemism senior citizen. 

Not only is senior citizen a euphemism, it lacks punch.  Ernest Hemingway would have fallen by the wayside if he’d called his masterpiece The Senior Citizen and the Sea.  And my mother’s favorite insult— “the old fool”—becomes worthless as the “senior citizen fool.”

The term came to life in 1938 when a Time magazine writer said a California politician “had an inspiration to do something on behalf of what he calls, for campaign purposes, 'our senior citizens.'”  For campaign purposes there was a lot of pandering for the old folks’ votes in those days since Social Security benefits, implemented in 1935, proved to be so popular.  (For comments on senior citizen and a lot of other topics see Barry Popik’s The Big Apple, at http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/senior_citizen )

It’s possible that euphemisms breed more euphemisms.  A restaurant I eat at doesn’t use the words “senior citizen discount” on its menu but does offer special deals on a page titled, “For Our Honored Guests over 55.”

What garbage.  I’m not a guest of a restaurant but a customer, and I haven’t done anything to warrant being honored.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I like plain, honest language.  Forget about me being a senior citizen.  Just call me old man.

***

I’m from Chicago—Wanna See My Bullet Hole?

Our oldest daughter and a friend recently went to Chicago.  They saw a White Sox Game, took in a Jimmy Buffet concert, ambled in and out of attractions on the lake front, rode a tour boat and a water taxi, and used the El.  They were there for a weekend and came home without any bullet holes in them.

I mention that because Forbes magazine recently ran an article that began, “Chicago has a reputation as one of America's most violent cities. 2016 was the worst year for homicides in nearly two decades in the Windy City with 762 murders, 3,550 shooting incidents and 4,331 shooting victims. On average, 12 people are shot in Chicago every single day and it experienced more murders than New York and Los Angeles combined last year.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/06/21/is-chicago-really-americas-most-dangerous-city-infographic/#7e7831e650da.)

But, according to that same article, in terms of shooting victims per 100,000 residents, more than a dozen U.S. cities are more lethal than Chicago.

So, what about that “reputation as one of America's most violent cities”?

I wondered about that myself, as a kid growing up in Chicago.  From books and movies and radio programs I had learned that Al Capone and bunches of gangsters roamed the city with machine guns, slaughtering at will.  But that ended before I was born, and at its worst it affected very few people.  I never heard any adults tell of the horrible old days that they lived through, but the reputation was there.

It was a reputation that I had fun with when I enlisted in the air force.   The military was going through a big buildup in the early months of the Korean War.  Because of that buildup, I was transferred from base to base three times in my first year, and when I wasn’t being moved around, new guys were coming into whatever outfit I was in at the time.

When you met someone, a ritual took place:  You would introduce yourself and say where you were from.  Very early I began saying, after I gave my name, “I’m from Chicago—wanna see my bullet hole?”  That remark always got a smile, such was Chicago’s reputation.

And it drew a smile from a man I met just last week; such is Chicago’s reputation today.

But—let’s have the disclaimer first:  People are being gunned down in Chicago.  That is truly unfortunate, but no matter where you go or what you do, much of life is a crapshoot.  And this post is not travel advice but merely a little help with sorting out what you get from the media about violence in Chicago.

Chicago is a city of sides, and most shootings occur on the South Side.  The media mention that, usually without making a big deal about it, so the impression that’s given is that Chicago as a whole is a generic term for death by gunshot.

The South Side is the city’s largest side.  In the screwy way that the city grew, the South Side expanded and expanded and expanded, curving east around Lake Michigan, bumping into the Indiana state line, and adding on to the south.  If someone hadn’t put the brakes on, St. Louis and Memphis would have become suburbs.

It’s a shame that the South Side gets such a bad rap.  There are wealthy neighborhoods down there, nice places to live, along with major universities, important hospitals, beautiful parks, and the longest stretch of lake front in the city.  But there are also pockets of people who are trigger happy.

Violence has spilled over these days to the West Side.  I honestly don’t remember there being a West Side when I was growing up.  There had to be, but maybe it was under the radar back then.

I grew up on the Northwest Side, the peaceful Northwest Side.  My parents allowed me a staggering amount of freedom (maybe they were hoping that when I went out one night I might not come back).  I could, and did, go anywhere in the city with only one restriction:  Don’t go to the South Side.

That was in the 1930s and ‘40s, and I suspect that a lot of people follow that stricture these days:  Stay away from the South Side.

That’s not always easy to do.  If you want to go to the University of Chicago, you have to go to the South Side.  If you want to see the White Sox play, that’s on the South Side.  One of the city’s famous St. Patrick’s Day parades is held deep in the South Side.

But when someone is shot in Chicago it happens at one spot, and the pavement isn’t slathered  with blood wherever you look.

I didn’t caution my daughter and her friend about safety.  They’ve traveled a lot and have surely picked up some street smarts.  And I didn’t want to get one of those looks from my daughter that said, Dad, really!

They went, and they had a good time.

And they brought back chocolates!

***

From the Files: Peregrine Falcon

Every now and then I get the urge to delete files.  I don’t differentiate between necessary and unnecessary files; as far as I’m concerned all files are necessary, not to be deleted.  Some I’m using or have planned uses for, while others fall into that mysterious category of well-you-can-never-tell-when-I-might-need-that.

Nevertheless, I did click some bytes into the trash this time, while saving one set of files that I particularly liked.  They’re photos of a peregrine falcon at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. 

The wildlife refuge is in the Sacramento Valley, which sits under the Pacific Flyway.  The flyway is used by some 2 million migrating waterfowl that are fleeing winter’s frozen north for warmer climes.  Many of them glide down from the flyway to spend winter in the valley, on farmland or in wildlife refuges.  The refuges are collections of ponds and waterways designed for waterfowl--ducks, geese, and swans.

So I had this picture of a bird about which I was curious.  I went into the refuge’s headquarters and asked for the help of a uniformed young woman.  I pointed to a bird in a display case as if to say, that’s it.

“No,” she said.  “That bird has got webbed feet.  The bird out there perches in that same spot every day.  It doesn’t have webbed feet.  It’s a peregrine falcon.”

She was nice about it.  She could have said, You dummy!  Didn’t you look at the feet?  This place is for waterfowl.  Birds with webbed feet.  I had photographed an interloper.

She let me go after telling me the one fact about peregrine falcons that seemingly everyone latches onto:  They can dive at speeds of 200 miles per hour.  Actually, they can go quite a bit faster, as I learned later.

My education in this instance began with
http://www.10000birds.com/what-is-a-falcon.  On this site are essays, photos, and videos “for people who love birds, pictures of birds, and people who write about birds, birding, conservation, and much more.”  

About falcons: “For starters, they have the little notch in their bill that delivers the killing blow to spinal cords.  They have small bony protuberances in their nostrils that baffle air flow and allow them to breathe while flying at high speeds.  And there are those remarkable pointed wings, and their reputation for intelligence not shared with the rest of their former family.  These are special birds.”

But we could have lost them, writes Larry Jordan, in one of the site’s essays, “Peregrine Falcon–The Fastest Animal on The Planet”: 

“This beautiful raptor was almost driven to extinction from the use of DDT, a popular pesticide used in the early 20th century….  Beginning in the 1930’s Peregrine Falcon numbers were reduced until in 1970 there were a mere 39 breeding pairs left in the United States….

“The Peregrine Falcon is a success story brought about by the restrictions placed on the use of DDT, the protection afforded by the Endangered Species Act, and the reintroduction of captive-bred chicks.  A cleaner environment and the success of cooperative recovery efforts provide great promise of a bright future for the Peregrine Falcon in North America.”

Jordan’s article also offers a link to High-Velocity Falcon, a National Geographic video.  This short video about a skydiving peregrine named Frightful is enlarged on in a Smithsonian Air & Space magazine article, "Falling with the Falcon." These two pieces describe Frightful's high-speed dives.  In telling about the dives here, I relied on the Air & Space article.

Frightful was airlifted up to 17,000 feet; she had never been that high before.   Not to worry, for she was with her owner and skydiving partner, master falconer and pilot Ken Franklin; also part of the team was Norman Kent, a world-renowned skydiving videographer.

She was released from the plane; Franklin and Kent followed her out.  She dove after a lure, streamlining herself by tucking in wings and feet.  An altimeter-computer combination measured how far she fell over a certain time. On that dive she was clocked at 183 miles per hour.  On another dive a week later, she achieved a velocity of 242 miles per hour.

Now, about that hooked beak.  The top part--it's called a tomial tooth--and the bottom part fit together. The combination enables falcons to bite through cervical vertebrae and sever the spinal cord of their prey.  

Peregrine falcons primarily eat birds.  That dietary preference tends to upset people who don't like to think about one bird feasting on another.  Well, you can't mess with Mother Nature--whatever works, works.

***