The Sporadic Curmudgeon

I just found out that Molly Ivins has passed away. She died of breast cancer.

Molly was an amazingly courageous and funny writer, had a world-class smile, and was one of the last great unashamed liberals. She’s been one of my role models for many years.

The De Lorean DMC-12 was without question the coolest car of the 1980s. Nice lines, gull-wing doors, and a gorgeous brushed stainless steel body that inspired more wet dreams than that poster of Nastassja Kinski with a snake. Plus, there’s that whole doubles-as-a-time-machine thing.

You will be pleased to learn that the coolitude continues.

As reported on Digg, if you go to the auto parts search page for the DeLorean Motor Company and do a search on the word “flux”, you find this:

Yes, you can get your very own Flux Capacitor for only $5,995!

I especially like the part number: 18851985. Those are two of the four years depicted in the Back to the Future trilogy. (The other two are 1955 and 2015. Doc Brown apparently had a thing for fives.)

Hats off to whoever at DMC stuck this little joke in.

On a side note, in the late 80s Crispin Glover (George McFly in the first film) lived just a few doors down from me in Hollywood. Supposedly his apartment was painted entirely black and the only furniture in the living room was a nineteenth-century gynecologist’s chair. I believe it; he really is that odd. We met when I repaired his airbrush the day of his first big gallery show in downtown LA.

The producers of Back to the Future shafted him. He should have been allowed to do the sequels.

I just don’t understand it. Every day I get about a dozen emails telling me that my penis is so woefully inadequate as to have become the target of public ridicule.

Here’s a typical example:

Subject: re: could you reply why your schlong is so short?

Salute Man

I don’t care why your one-eyed monster is so small, but 77% of women do.
They are pretty sure that bigger ramrod will make their desire
stronger. You have the chance to change your life.

Here you can get the thing.

It will help you for sure.
The remedy can be sent worldwide.
If you wont be satisfied - we will return all you money.
No bullshit.

Somehow that final “no bullshit” fails to have the reassuring effect that was its undoubted intent. Unless it was meant as a signature.

A few things strike me as odd about these emails.

• How exactly did this vicious rumor about my being hung like a dwarf hamster start? Did I really tick off an ex?

• Where do they get their statistics? Has Gallup recently begun asking women about one-eyed monster preference?

• Why do they think that pointing and laughing at a potential customer’s genitalia is a good sales technique? Except for some recent Hummer ads, it flies in the face of the entire history of American advertising. In fact, it’d be more likely to make someone go on a four-day shooting spree than clinch a sale.

All in all, it’s very puzzling.

Oh, for the record, I do not have a tiny penis. I’m a liberal.

People, as a species, just aren’t very observant. It probably has to do with tuning out the goofball clowning around at the cave entrance so you can concentrate on the sabertooth that’s thinking of having a little Ogg-tartar.

In the modern world this survival mechanism, while admirably suited for avoiding things like process servers and fiery death on the freeway, can cause us to miss things that have been staring us in the face for years. We just don’t see them.

Sometimes, though, the true nature of something manages to break through a blind spot. One minute you’re walking along, oblivious, and the next you’re utterly flabbergasted by the variety and number of water towers in your city. It’s like you’re seeing water towers for the very first time, and in a sense that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s a strange and disorienting experience.

One night about ten years ago I was driving back from the grocery store when The Beachboys’ “Good Vibrations” came on the radio. I’d heard the song dozens of times, and liked it, but had never given it much thought. I lumped it in with all the other surf music I enjoyed, such as Jan & Dean or The Ventures.

But that night, for some reason, I really listened to it.

And I could not believe what I was hearing.

I realized, to my complete surprise, that it’s a masterpiece. There are intricacies in “Good Vibrations” that would make Bach jealous. I later found out that I’m far from alone in my opinion. Among students of the form there’s a near consensus that Brian Wilson probably came as close to recording a perfect pop song as anyone’s ever going to get. It took seventeen recording sessions and over 90 hours of tape to assemble and mix this one three-and-a-half-minute song.

But in my car that night, with the radio cranked up and a rapt expression on my face, I didn’t know any of that. All I knew was that a song I had heard and enjoyed for thirty years was one of the best pieces of music ever composed, and I had had absolutely no idea.

I like to think about “Good Vibrations” every once in a while. It helps keep me on the lookout for other things I’ve missed.

A Romanian man has been awarded £120,000 after his doctor lost his temper during surgery, lopped off the man’s penis, placed it on the operating table, and chopped it up into small pieces. Unbelievably, the Romanian doctors’ unions are criticizing the decision to make the Benihana wannabe pay the £100,000 damages part of the award.

They say the move sets a dangerous precedent and that Professor Ciomu, a urologist and lecturer in anatomy, has already been punished enough after having his medical licence suspended.

They said he had been under stress and had lost his temper after he accidentally cut the man’s urinary channel and ‘overreacted’ to the situation. He told the court it was a temporary loss of judgement due to personal problems.

Vice-president of the Romanian Doctors Union, Vasile Astarastoae, said: ‘Ciomu’s case is a dangerous precedent for all Romanian doctors. In future doctors may have to think very carefully about what work they undertake.’

That’s some overreaction. Seems like a simple “damn it” would have been sufficient.

I feel for Professor Ciomu, though. It’s a lot of money. I’d give him a choice: either pony up the £100,000, or let the aggrieved (and truncated) patient slice and dice the good doc’s crotch cobra. The lack of surgical skills could be ameliorated by the use of power tools.

Model railroading is a strange hobby that breeds strange people. They gather in clubs to run their trains and discuss things profoundly uninteresting to anyone but themselves. But mostly, they build layouts.

In basements, rec rooms and attics all over the globe these men (and a handful of women) build their miniature worlds. Some of them spend decades and fortunes doing it. And I have to admit that even I am a sucker for a good model train layout. (There was one at the Los Angeles County Fair in the mid-eighties that was pretty sweet.)

But the king of all HO scale layouts is the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany. So far it covers about 900 square meters, with 9,000 meters of track. There are 2,800 structures and bridges, and 90,000 tiny human figures.

A funny thing about those tiny human figures, though. As I mentioned, model railroaders can be strange people, and one of the strangest things they like to do is hide little jokes in the layouts. In Miniatur Wunderland there are some real doozies:

• What appears to be the US Border Patrol rounding up illegal aliens

• A couple of sailors on leave checking out some prostitutes

and my personal favorite,

• A charming crime scene depicting a nude dead body at the bottom of a stream surrounded by police divers

Recently CSI had an episode about a serial-killer/model railroader that featured a hilariously morbid layout, but I don’t know if it was built specially for the show or was pre-existing. If anyone’s got information about it, or any other twisted train layouts please send it my way and I’ll put it all together on a special page.

on way to bathroom
pass your boss in the hallway
a wet toilet seat

Special full-disclosure note: The last line of this bad haiku is by James Cole. It is so much better/worse than what I originally wrote that I stand in awe/revulsion.

Tonight I was doing research for a post on the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613 (no, really) when I happened to glance over at the TV. My daughter was watching Pokémon, which, believe it or not, is a show I don’t have a problem with. (The writing’s not bad, the “Team Rocket” bad guys are a hoot, and the episodes usually teach a lesson. Besides, from a pure marketing standpoint I sure as hell wish I’d thought of it.)

However, this particular episode featured a Pokémon that had me doing a spit-take. I swear it looks like a skinny dick and balls wearing a French tickler for a hat. This isn’t just bad character design, this is Hindenburg-style catastrophic failure.

I can just imagine Pat Robertson having nightmares where these things dance around on his pillow singing “Anything Goes.”

I am about to confess to a Federal crime, just so I can link to an article on a goofy research project. Yep, we lay it on the line here at Atomic Deathray, folks.

But first, some long-winded background.

When I was a teenager I made the happy discovery that George Washington bears an uncanny likeness to Groucho Marx, and I chose to use Washington’s portrait on the one-dollar bill as the medium through which I would alert the public to this fact. Every once in a while I would add eyebrows, glasses, a mustache and a cigar to The Father Of Our Country and send the bill on its merry way. Over the years I figure I did about a hundred “Groucho Dollars.”

On occasion someone would tell me that it was illegal to deface United States currency. This is not entirely true, though. It is illegal to deface United States currency, but only with intent to remove it from circulation. (Drawing on money is a fine American tradition, by the way.) Yes, I was defacing the bills, but I wanted them circulated as widely as possible. I hoped my “Groucho Dollars” were circling the globe, making people smile wherever they crossed a palm.

I continued doing this for several decades, until my gradual maturation into The Fine Civic-Minded Fellow Standing Before You put an end to the practice. (Translation: I became a cantankerous old bastard.) But that’s not the crime.

In 1982 or so, one of my bills caught the attention of a woman who was a major player in the Los Angeles mailart scene. Mailart was an art movement that used the US Postal Service as its canvas. People sent decorated envelopes and hand-drawn or rubber-stamped postcards and such through the mail, sometimes to each other, and sometimes to mailart shows held in various galleries around the world. Anyone could be a mailartist, and she suggested that I give it a try.

Other than the continual annoyance of having to explain to people what the hell mailart is, being a mailartist was a lot of fun. I specialized in strange little humorous postcard collages. (To this day my nickname is “Doctor X-Acto” because of the craft knife I favored.)

One show in Germany had an assigned theme of “Inspiration and Temptation in Modern Life.” I found an old engraving of a Russian eighteenth-century outdoor public bath which depicted dozens of carefully posed naked men and women lounging around on a bunch of rocks. I put a little thought bubble containing an exclamation mark above every head. I heard it got a lot of laughs at the show.

Up to this point, all of my forays into mailart had been ordinary rectangular postcards, with the artistic element being the artwork it contained. But one day I had an idea: what if the actual item being mailed was the point of the piece? I decided to mail a postcard that was completely non-rectangular, just to see if it would be delivered. I glued a photograph of a tropical fish onto card stock, and carefully cut it out, preserving every intricate little anatomical detail. I addressed it to another mailartist in San Diego and dropped it into a mailbox.

It arrived in two days. Success!

But where to go from there? I wanted to really test the limits of what could be sent through the mail. At first I thought of slapping some stamps and an address on a hard-boiled egg, but then I had a better idea. Something superbly transgressive.

Keep in mind that during this period of my life I considered myself first and foremost an artist-with-a-capital-A. To me, art was something almost sacred that could change society for the better. Snicker all you like; it was my governing philosophy. Now, of course, I know that art is really just a branch of show biz, sort of like writing but more corrupt.

So when I was told, mistakenly as it turned out, that artwork was exempt from the normal laws relating to defacement of currency, I believed it.

Okay, now we’re finally to the crime part.

I took a dollar bill, cut out the oval where Washington’s head is, replaced it with a computer-generated picture of a robotic ant clipped out of a magazine, wrote “In Bug We Trust” over and over in tiny letters all around the border, glued it to some cardboard, addressed the other side and then laminated the whole thing in plastic.

Which is pretty much the very definition of “mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued.”

I didn’t know it, but I was now afoul of the Secret Service, who do the Treasury Department’s dirty work. I could have been fined up to $100 and/or been sent to jail for up to six months! Not only that, but I’d sent the evidence through the US Mail, which is obviously a government agency, without an envelope!

Luckily for me, nobody came knocking at my door in the middle of the night, but still it took five weeks for the flagrant felony to go from Los Angeles to San Diego. It had obviously attracted some official attention en route. I figure I dodged a bullet.

So you can imagine my surprise this evening when I read that a group of researchers have been doing the same sort of mail experiments I did all those years ago, including laminated money:

$1 bill. Sealed in clear plastic, with label attached with address and postage. Days to delivery, 6.

$20 bill. Days to delivery, 4.

Football. Days to delivery, 6. Male postal carrier was talkative and asked recipient about the scores of various current games. Carrier noted that mail must be wrapped.

Pair of new, expensive tennis shoes. Strapped together with duct tape. Days to delivery, 7. When shoes were picked up at station, laces were tied tightly together with difficult-to-remove knot. Clerk noted that mail must be wrapped.

Man, that takes me back. I wonder where I put my old X-Acto knife?

Although he was one of the best blues guitarists in history, very little is actually known about Blind Blake.

He was probably born around 1893 in Jacksonville, Florida, and most likely died at age 40 in 1933. His real name may have been Arthur Blake or Arthur Phelps.

No one is even sure how or where he died. Some say he drank himself to death in Atlanta, but others claim he was run over by a streetcar in New York, or murdered in Chicago. The photograph to the right is the only picture of him in existence.

What isn’t in dispute, however, is his musical skill. Blake was known as “The King Of Ragtime Guitar.” His fingerpicking was amazing, and influenced many musicians, including Ry Cooder. He did over 80 recordings for Paramount Records, and in the end they are the only concrete information anyone has about him.

There is a brief Wikipedia article on Blind Blake, but the link above has much more information, including an extensive list of books, articles, and a complete discography.

Below you can listen to some of his recordings found at the Internet Archive. I especially recommend Diddie Wa Diddie; it’s fun and catchy, and he pulls off the neat trick of making the guitar work sound intricate and relaxed at the same time.

Diddie Wa Diddie recorded August 8, 1929

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Police Dog Blues recorded August 8, 1929

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You Gonna Quit Me Blues unknown recording date

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These files are in the Public Domain and may be streamed or downloaded freely.