The Sporadic Curmudgeon

I don’t believe I have ever voluntarily purchased a couch in my entire life. I am about to turn 49. I have no idea if that’s normal or not. It’s not really the kind of thing that routinely comes up in conversation.

Oh, I’ve bought all kinds of other furniture for myself over the years: reading chairs, drafting chairs, coffee tables, beds; just no sofas. Most of the time I just use what’s already there. Usually there’s a sofa on the premises when I move in (mainly because they’re so difficult to transport that they just get left for the next tenant), and if not, I have resorted to big pillows or a futon. (Yes, I even bought one of those. Shut up. Like there’s nothing in your past to cringe about.)

But every single time I’ve purchased a sofa, there has been a woman begging me to do it. It wasn’t my idea, and honestly I didn’t want to. Whatever was already at hand worked fine, and I saw no need to toss several hundred dollars into the living room just so we could plant our butts on it. But thankfully women’s butts are much different from mine, and so I have agreed to the purchase, whilst stifling my own opinion as far as I am able. Sometimes better than others. That’s love, kids.

But am I alone in this?

I’ve certainly had male friends who bought couches or even entire living room sets, but thinking back on it, it’s not really a statistically significant number. And none of them, to my recollection, did it because they suddenly decided they wanted a nice comfy sofa RIGHT THIS DAMNED MINUTE. All were under some overriding femalish compulsion, be it girlfriend, wife, or that whole really creepy pink-skinned-effeminately-tidy-it’s-always-the-quiet-ones thing. Leaving them out of the equation because they were coerced by women or freakish hormones, and also leaving out those who purchase furniture for hotels, apartments and office buildings as part of their jobs, I have to wonder if my near couch-virginity is pretty much the norm.

Hold on.

Oh.

I’m completely wrong. I honestly wanted the couches my wife and I picked up just after we were married. They had a great Moroccan feel to them. It was the tables that gave me trouble, what with me being a clumsy oaf and the tables having a great excess of wrought-iron protrusions.

Another possible theory is that I’m an insensitive poorly-socialized semi-psychotic aberration and that natural selection will eventually prune me and my sorry ilk’s nasty diseased little branch off the evolutionary tree and not a moment too soon.

The 200-foot-long curving wall in the Google Maps image to the right is a huge sound mirror on the island of Malta.

If you’ve never heard of sound mirrors, aka acoustic locators, don’t feel bad. I first found out about them this weekend, and am now passing that knowledge on to you, gentle reader.

Sound mirrors are one of the devices used before the invention of radar to locate incoming enemy aircraft. Essentially a big curved concrete wall, they focused sound waves so that they were easier to detect, and also provided directional information as to the source. Another common configuration was a large cement dish, which had the dual advantages of smaller size and of providing positional information in two planes, the horizontal and the vertical. By triangulating the data from several sound mirrors at once, it was possible to calculate the direction, range and altitude of approaching bombers. They were capable of detecting aircraft 20-30 miles away.

That may not sound like much, but keep in mind that with even the best hearing unaided ears can only detect an airplane from about six-and-a-half miles off. Before radar, that was a significant amount of time bought to prepare for an attack.

So when and where were these things used? The big static mirrors were mostly installed on the coastline of England, with the one on Malta being the only exception I’m aware of. They date from just after WWI through the first part of the Second World War. Many of the British mirrors still exist, at least for now.

Portable acoustic locators were used by almost everyone, though: Japan, Germany, England and the US all had different versions. Some of these could get impressively goofy-looking: witness the majestic glory of the mighty Japanese War Tubas. I swear, they look like the kind of thing John Philip Sousa would dream up if you fed him LSD for a week.

Lord knows I’m not a happy man, or possess much wealth or strength, but tonight I am indeed a fortunate man.

This afternoon my Mother, who came perilously close to dying just two months ago and is still hospitalized, spoke on the phone with her Granddaughter, something that until quite recently seemed a sad impossibility.

And then this evening, as my six-year-old daughter lay in bed, I sat down and began reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to her for the very first time. We got through the first chapter, and she insisted on hearing the second. Tomorrow night we start Chapter III: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale, and she has absolutely no idea what is going to happen.

Can you imagine that? Do you remember not knowing what happens next? Can you imagine how privileged I feel to be the one who introduces her to Wonderland?

As I said, I’m a fortunate man. It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I Get It. Have a good night, everyone, and bless you. I mean that with all my heart.

And thank you for the books, Reverend Dodgson.

A Sudanese man who was caught in flagrante disgusto with a goat has been forced to marry it by the goat’s owner, Mr. Alifi.

A quick consultation with the local elders led to a radical judgement, Alifi said: “They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife.”

Man, oh, man. Can you imagine the toasts at the reception? I wonder if they wrote their own vows?

“I, Sudanese Goatfucker, take you, Resentful Domesticated Quadruped , to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until I get really hungry and decide to slow grill you on a spit over a bed of charcoal and serve you slathered with barbecue sauce, sliced thin, with a nice side of rice pilaf and a few bottles of Mexican beer. And probably there should be some buddies over, and maybe there’ll be something good on TV. So help me God.”

Last night I was watching a Simpsons episode from the ninth season entitled “Dumbbell Indemnity.” (Episode number 194 Production Code 5F12, for those of you who will never have sex.)

The plot involves Homer helping Moe the bartender commit insurance fraud by stealing his car and parking it on the railroad tracks so it will be destroyed. On the way, Homer sees that one of his favorite films, Hail to the Chimp, is playing at the drive-in theater and decides he has time to watch it before the train arrives. Of course, he falls asleep, and wakes up just as the train passes.

At this point, I alarmed my wife by sitting straight up, sputtering and pointing at the TV. Not because I’d finally had that brain aneurism the hordes of my enemies have been praying for, but because I recognized the image on the screen. A very obscure image. Specifically, the artists on The Simpsons had quoted a photograph from 1956 named Hotshot Eastbound.

The only reason I even spotted the visual reference in the first place was because the story behind the picture was in the December 2005 issue of The Smithsonian Magazine. The photographer’s name was O. Winston Link, and he chronicled the end of the steam locomotive era.

I wasn’t absolutely sure I was right, though, so I hunted around for some screen grabs of the sequence. Not only was I correct, but there is a detail I hadn’t spotted last night: there’s a jet in the same orientation on the drive-in screen in both versions. The Simpsons shot is about a quarter-second behind the photograph, but as you can plainly see they’re essentially identical.

I haven’t found a discussion of this visual joke anywhere on the web, so I may have actually been the first person to spot it. Makes you wonder what else they’ve buried in the margins of the show.

This morning, as I was wading through the usual thicket of spam asking if I am willing to help out an exiled member of Nigerian royalty in spite of my having a penis so apallingly flaccid that it vanishes when I turn sideways, one message caught my eye. Entitled Earth first, we’ll strip-mine the other planets later!, the email posed five questions. The first one was this stumper:

Would you like to have an unbelievable sex during all the night?

This is, quite frankly, puzzling. Until that moment I wasn’t aware that there were any other options than the standard set of males, females and an occasional hermaphrodite or red-state “farm wife.” True, there are various permutations possible, but they can all be accounted for with simple combinatorials. Is there literally an unbelievable sex lurking out there on the fringes of society? If so, where is it? What does it look like? Is there an instruction manual? More importantly, is an adaptor required?

The more I think about it, the less I think I’d like it. Unless it was really, really cute. And discrete.

high-pressure project
near breakdown but met deadline
was not sent memo

Once upon a time, a frog came upon a scorpion sitting on the bank of a river.

“Could you please carry me across?” asked the scorpion.

“I don’t know,” said the frog cautiously. “How do I know you won’t sting me?”

“I can’t swim, so if I stung you I would drown.”

This made sense, and so the frog agreed. The scorpion climbed onto the frog’s back and hung on tight. “Thank you,” said the scorpion. They entered the river.

Halfway across, just where the water was deepest, the scorpion suddenly stung the frog as hard as it could. Paralysis quickly spread through the frog’s body, and they began to sink.

Astonished, the frog cried, “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both die!”

The scorpion shrugged. “It’s my nature.”

The Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 2006: FBI Checking Reporters’ Phone Records

ABC News reports that the FBI has acknowledged that it was seeking reporters’ phone records to investigate leaks about secret prisons in Europe and warrantless wiretapping.

“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” a senior federal official told ABC News “The Blotter” news blog.

…

On Monday, ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, who write “The Blotter,” reported that a senior federal law enforcement official told ABC News that the FBI is tracking the phone numbers the two reporters call to reach confidential sources. The source told them in person that it was “time for you to get some new cell phones, quick.”

Ribbet.

There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film North by Northwest where Cary Grant is putting the moves on Eva Marie Saint, and we cut to a shot of a train going into a tunnel. (If you don’t get it, you shouldn’t be on this site, kid. Come back when your voice changes.) The organizers of the Club X Sexpo in Perth, Australia have gone Hitchcock one better: they’ve created a sex train ride, where adults can view robotic recreations of incidents such as Lorena Bobbit’s infamous root-pruning.

I’m betting this would not be good first-date fodder.

Another thing to see at Sexpo will be, um… well, I’ll just let you read it for yourself:

Penile artist Tim Patch will be another star attraction when he unveils portraits he’s painted – with his penis – of Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley.

More details on Tim Patch’s methodology would be enlightening, if not exactly welcome. Is his wang prehensile? Or, assuming he uses his dick as a brush, that still begs the question: traditional or airbrush? I suppose we should all be grateful Mr. Patch hasn’t taken up sculpture.

I don’t know if it’ll still be there when you visit the page, but I swear there was an ad following the story that read “BROUGHT TO YOU BY KELLOGG’S CRUNCHY NUT.” It just don’t get any better than that, folks.

Thanks and a big tip o’ the tentpole to John Hawkins for this story.

Especially revolting update: Someone who used to be my friend before he sent me this link, Sam Hennessy, has managed to dig up some pictures of the “penile artist” Tim Patch and the portaits he painted with his penis. Wait a moment. Don’t click on that link yet. I want you to stop and think carefully about whether or not you really want your brain contaminated. Frankly, if I could scratch out the offending neurons that Sam just ruined with a rusty nail I would.

I’m not sure what’s more terrifying: the white top hat, the red bow tie, the disgusted look on John Howard’s face or the profoundly disturbing shade of red on Kim Beazley’s lips.

a practical joke
the old exploding cigar
plastic surgery