“Don’t say ‘goodbye’; say ‘au revoir’.” I haven’t a clue as to why anybody ever gives that advice, so I’ll say neither “goodbye” nor “au revoir.”

This is my last post until August 1. Please don’t pass that along to any member of UBA [United Burglars Association].

As Arnold so coarsely put it, “I’ll be back.” As Douglas more eloquently put it, “I shall return.”

“Don’t be dismayed at goodbyes, a farewell is necessary before you can meet again.” – I don’t know who said that, but I like it.

Here’s the woman who almost singlehandedly won World War II, and here is how she did it. CLICK HERE, PLEASE.

If the link is defective, try this version, instead. CLICK HERE.

And here is Miss Loveliness singing it. The Queen of Joy herself. What she lacks compared to Vera’s intensity she makes up for in some other way – the guys who read this Journal will know what I mean. And how can you beat that crowd of geezers who escaped from Lawrence Welk’s Sing Along Asylum? CLICK HERE, PLEASE.

The game of tiddlywinks requires good hand-eye coordination and is much more fun than any of the games and sports you watch on TV. If you haven’t ever played it, you should. If you don’t know what it is, look it up. After you do, you will probably say, “Oh, sure, I know that game. Used to play it in my high school cafeteria.”

Compare it with football and basketball. People take up those sports because they expect something good to come of it – a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. On the other hand, people pay tiddlywinks for fun. Just what is the probability of a high school footballer or basketball player striking it rich? Here are some statistics.

452, 929 young women played high basketball. Percentage of them who went on to play in the NCAA – 3.3% Percentage of NCAA college athletes to the professional ranks – 1.0%. Percentage of high school athletes who ended up playing professionally – 0.02%. Men did better 3.0%, 1.2% and 0.03%. That’s out of 546,336 starters. As for football, 1.071,775 stalwarts took to the field in high school. 5.7% of them went on to the college ranks. 1.8% graduated from college to the pros. Final disposition: of 1,071,775 dreamers, 0.08% ended up as professionals.

But the pot of gold is there. Darko Milicic, a player without a shred of talent, has played 4 years in the NBA and for every point he has scored he has made $18,251. Loving club owners have given him $37.8 million and untrusting coaches have kept his playing time down to the minimum. Even Lebron James does not do as well as Darko. In fact, dollars per point and dollars per minute, James is a cream puff. He plays too much and scores too little. Over the course of his six year career, King James has made only $4,067 per point. He is nowhere near the top 25 moneymakers..

Poor guy and nobody loves him. On the other hand, for 5 consecutive years, Tiger W has ranked as America’s #1 loveboat, not withstanding (and perhaps due to) his peccadillos. Another king of the bedroom, Kobe Bryant is in a virtual dead heat with Tiger.

And how would they do if they took up tiddlywinks? My guess is that they would transform the game into a major revenue producer, and if they pop those winks as well I would expect them to, there would be a rush on to play the game with as many as 1/2 of 1% of high school potters going on to make $millions. Nothing is more colorful than a good blitz shot unless, of course, it is a carnovsky.

Movie buffs will know that I borrowed the above title from a book by Pauline Kael, the late and wonderful movie reviewer about whom even John Simon, America’s most caustic critic, has only praise. I am not, however, concerned with movies but with guns. After 20 years, during which I did exhaustive and exhausting research, I concluded that guns belong in every American household. I went through the massive, learned literature with a fine tooth-comb and came away with the belief that Gary Kleck and his colleagues had won the gun control debate. Today, as I write this, I am not so sure. Some background.

Who is Gary Kleck? Gary is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. He was the winner of the Michael J. Hindelang Award of the American Society of Criminology, for the book which made “the most outstanding contribution to criminology” in the preceding three years (for Point Blank). Gary is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.

Gary writes, “When I began my research on guns in 1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the “anti-gun” thesis, i.e. the idea that gun availability has a net positive effect on the frequency and/or seriousness of violent acts. It seemed then like self-evident common sense which hardly needed to be empirically tested. However, as a modest body of reliable evidence (and an enormous body of not-so-reliable evidence) accumulated, many of the most able specialists in this area shifted from the “anti-gun” position to a more skeptical stance, in which it was negatively argued that the best available evidence does not convincingly or consistently support the anti-gun position.” A bit later, he adds, “[Subsequent research] has caused me to move beyond even the skeptic position. I now believe that the best currently available evidence, imperfect though it is (and must always be), indicates that general gun availability has no measurable net positive effect on rates of homicide, suicide, robbery, assault, rape, or burglary in the U[nited] S[tates]. This is not the same as saying gun availability has no effects on violence–it has many effects on the likelihood of attack, injury, death, and crime completion, but these effects work in both violence-increasing and violence-decreasing directions, with the effects largely canceling out.” All that being said, Gary eventually plumps for the view that it is a good thing for ordinary citizens to have guns in their homes. Believe me, he is well aware – more than you are – of the anecdotes concerning horrible accidents and risks to children. Gary’s studies led him to conclude gun ownership does not affect total rates of violence (total homicide rate, total suicide rate, total robbery rate, etc.). Defensive gun use greatly exceeds the use of guns by criminals and is a major deterrent to violent crime.

About two years ago, I became acquainted with the work of David Hemenway. David is Gary’s most severe critic. David is a formidable foe. He is Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has a B.A. (1966) and Ph.D.(1974) from Harvard University in economics. He is the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. He is also currently a James Marsh Visiting Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont. David has written over 130 articles and five books in the fields of economics and public health.

I wrote to David Hemenway and engaged him in a discussion of the gun issues. A genial chap, he was prepared to continue for as long as I wanted but I decided it would be best if I simply asked him for a good selection of his writings. He argues that Kleck has badly mangled the data and badly did statistical analysis. Maybe so. I am not qualified to express an opinion about research methodology and statistical analysis. You can write to David: David Hemenway, Ph.D. Department of Health Policy and Management,Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115 and he will gladly send you several articles explaining his view and what is wrong with Kleck’s. I imagine he will be happy to e-mail back and forth with you, too. Alternatively, you can try the internet and look for something like “Hemenway on Kleck” or something like that.

In turn, you should read lots of Kleck but, at the very least, his slam bang reply to Hemenway. I hope this stuff fascinates you as it does me. Once you have read a good piece of the exchange, you will be at least as well-informed as I am, and I will welcome any communications from you. But, until then, I don’t want to hear from you. I hate things like, “Well, there was this kid down the block from where I live…” or “I read in the Ann Arbor News all about…”

About all anecdotes, I have this to say. “There is a simple way to state a negative with a double affirmative: Yeah, yeah.” And I happily take refuge in that.

We have a national obsession with lists. We even make meta-lists – lists of lists. But let us stick to plain, garden variety lists. TV stations and newspapers depend on lists. If they don’t give us our daily fix, we will turn to other channels and other news sources. The TV announcer says, “We’ll be back right after the break to give you ….the list.” The newspaper says, “Turn to page 42 for the list.” We can hardly wait. We like lists of bests and worsts. For each of these below, there is a corresponding “Worst.”

10 best movies of the year (of the decade, of all-time). [Or it could be 100, 1000, or 10,000.]
Ditto with TV shows.
10 best recipes for chicken noodle soup. [Or apple pie or sauces for shrimp or...]
10 most beautiful women in the world. [Or 10 "hottest" women.]
3 best moments in your life. [Nobody has more than 3 best moments.]
3 things you hate most about George Bush. [Please select from among the following 10.]
10 best vacation beaches.
10 best hotels. [Please give them from 1 to 4 stars.]
10 favorite musicians. [If you are one of 65,550 persons responding to a TV poll, you don't put down "Vivaldi".]

I have scratched the surface. Scratch deeper and you will get an infection. But go to May 13 and look at “Top This and Top That” for more on this. P.S. How about Top 5 posts ever to be on gendinsjournal?

A few years ago I was having dinner with my friends Cathy and Jim Giles and had some reason for calling attention to “military intelligence,” which I referred to as an oxymoron. Gently, Cathy reprimanded and corrected me. The expression is not an oxymoron, after all. She explained why it isn’t, and she was perfectly right. I have thought back to that evening several times and now, finally, have decided to share with readers the benefit of that lesson.

An oxymoron is the deliberate joining of contradictory ideas. Wikipedia offers these examples:

a living death – sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind
a deafening silence – bitter-sweet – the bigger half
The Sounds of Silence (song title)
make haste slowly – he was conspicuous by his absence

But sometimes all we have is a funny collocation of terms – a joining of ideas that makes us smile in that it suggests incongruity.

friendly fire – airline food [army food, cafeteria food, etc.] – American culture – Apple tech support – mature male
athletic scholarship – California culture – classic rock and roll – civil strife
Just war [and civilized warfare] – Microsoft security – and the classic, example, military intelligence [and Central Intelligence Agency] – compassionate Conservative

The word “oxymoron” derives from the Greek Oxus = “sharp”, Moros = “dull” . Knowing that will put you one up on most professors and, for that reason, is worth knowing.

You can find a great collection of pseudo-oxymorons by CLICKING HERE. In among them are genuine oxymorons. Finding others is a lot more fun than finding pseudo-intellectual palindromes. These exist only to give you headaches and to prove to you that the people who discover them are smarter than you are.

And remember this: There is only one thing in life you need to remember to make your life worth living.

I’d wager a sawbuck or even a tenner and give 4-1 odds that if you were a baseball fan growing up in NY during the years between 1935 and 1957, you were either a Yankees fan or a Dodgers fan. The Giants? The Lost Tribe. People love a perennial winner – ergo, the Yankees. The decided preference for the Dodgers over the Giants is not so easy to explain.

The Giants appeared in 15 World Series, winning 5, whereas the Dodgers played in 9 Series and won only in 1955. In short, the Giants were nearly always better. Still, the Giants do not command the nostalgia the Dodgers do. Nor did they ever win the hearts and minds of fans in the glory days. Manhattan, unlike the Bronx and Brooklyn, is not a community. Players for the Dodgers actually made their homes in Brooklyn and fans rode the trolleys to get to the games. (The Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, as they used to be.) In the 30s, the Dodgers were the good-natured butts of jokes. Babe Herman caught balls on his head instead of in his glove. (In truth, it may have happened once but it is the stuff of legends.) Everyone laughed with and at the Dodgers. Hilda Chester showed up for all the games and rang a cowbell and the Brooklyn Sym-Phony pep band played on. It was an age of “peanuts and crackerjacks and take me out to the ballgame.” 60 cents got you in and, if you had the cash, $1.25 got you a damn good seat.

In truth, there was nothing wrong with the Giants. But who were these guys? We knew where Gil Hodges lived but does anybody know where Willie Mays lived in the off-season? Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider made their careers in Brooklyn but Willie Mays played twice as long in San Francisco than in the Polo Grounds. Love him, if you want, but he is first and foremost a San Francisco Giant.

The Giants had one supreme moment, I will grant you – the celebrated shot heard round the world – that brought them from the brink of disaster to the most incredible rally in baseball history. That was the home run Bobby Thomson hit off Ralph Branca in 1953 that permitted the Dodgers to do what they so often did – snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. The Giants won the pennant and prepared the Dodgers for their exit to Los Angeles.

You can make that moment one of the legendary incidents in baseball history but it is not enough to make legends out of the NY Giants. Where did they play anyway? Where was the Polo Grounds? My guess is that not one in ten NY baseball fans could have found his way to that stadium without stopping to get traffic instructions three times.

The Giants were the Odd Man Out. I know Brooklyn Dodgers fans who regard Walter O’Malley, the evil architect of the Dodgers relocation to the west coast, as worse than Hitler. They mean it. But who among Giants fans feels that the Giants betrayed them by going westward? Go! Good riddance.

BROOKLYN!

Let it ring out loud and clear. When Susan Hayward toured with the USO during World War II, she would begin her act with a scream: Is anybody here from Brooklyn? Thousands of soldiers would go wild with delight, including many who never came close to the spot. What kind of greeting would Susan have gotten had she screamed out, “Is anybody here from the Amsterdam Avenue neighborhood in Manhattan”?

So, it’s the good times we will remember whenever we remember the way it was.

For a wonderful trip down Memory Lane, CLICK HERE,

If you give me four random digits, say 3- 7 – 2 – 8, and ask me to spit them back at you, I haven’t got a prayer’s chance of getting them in the right order. If you call me and leave your phone number on my answering machine, it will take me 7 tries – one digit at a time – to get them all. It has been like this all my life – it is not creeping senility.

Now, I have a name for my condition: aural dyslexia. It doesn’t change a thing but it is nice to know. I am a bit like Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof. You remember. He asks his wife of 25 years if she loves him and finally extracts the confession from her, “I suppose I do.” He also says that it doesn’t change a thing but it is nice to know.

Here’s Tevye, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_y9F5St4j0

On a certain comedy detective show I sometimes watched some 30 years ago, the hero was hired to find a missing person. Two hours later he told the person who hired him the address and phone number of the “missing person.” “Amazing! How did you do that?”, his employer asked. “”Oh, I looked him up in the telephone book.”

In any case, the great mystery concerning Google’s well-guarded phone number is now solved. My friend, Howard Pospesel, had the ingenuity to type the phrase “Google’s phone number” into the internet box for Google. Voilá. Up it popped! Hire this man!

In case you should ever need it: 650 253 0000. I hope Google doesn’t sue me.

I am too frazzled to figure out instructions concerning how to reach Google by mail. I want to telephone the company. If anybody knows how I can do this, please call me immediately at 734 – 973-9012. Thank you.

Someone is Scotland has gotten hold of my e-mail database and is requesting money from friends.

At this moment, my e-mail facilities seem to be blocked and I cannot send out messages to the hundreds of people who are in my data base. DO NOT RESPOND TO ANY E-MAIL THAT SEEMS TO COME FROM ME BUT HAS A SUSPICIOUS ADDRESS.

The friend who notified me of this situation said he would send me a copy of the e-mail notice he got from the scammer but I am unable to receive e-mails. It is my intention to call the FBI as soon as post this message.