How I wish I could lay claim to “Call me Ishmael” but apart from the fact that a much greater man owns that one, I have done nothing in my so far brief sojourn on this planet to justify that appellation. However, put aside Mr. Melville for now and think Fitzgerald and Longfellow.

I refuse to accept runner-up prizes for appreciation of great fiction but I confess to being little better than a buffoon when it comes to poetry. Despite its lack of adulation from literary critics, I adore Song of Hiawatha. I think its trochaic tetrameter rhythm that so turns me on is what turns the critics off. DUM da, DUM da, DUM da, DUM da. How do you improve on this?
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, etcetera, etc. etc. You call that sing-song; I call it great. Billy Shakespeare (the first one, the Bard of Avon), imitated Longfellow in his Midsummer Night’s Dream, but just didn’t have the right stuff.
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Enough of digressions. It is Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat that I want to explore this fine Saturday morning. Although there are at least 1000 translations of this poem into several dozen languages, none dares to criticize it in any of its versions. And you can bet your bottom dollar i won’t either. I have hung around the world of philosophy for 60 and a 1/2 years and perhaps only Plato’s works match its beauty (though I doubt that) and probably no more than a couple of dozen treatises surpass its philosophical depth.

The translation we Americans know best is that of Edward Fitzgerald. It is one of the very few translations that equal the original in Persian. In truth, I take that on faith since I don’t know a word of Persian. When I say “translation” I am ignoring the fact that Fitz did five of them over a period of 30 years. So far as I can tell, the differences are minuscule. The most famous of the quatrains are these:

Edition One:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

In the fifth edition, this becomes:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

I am damned if I understand the reason for the change but, then, I am no Fitzgerald.

A hundred or so years later, Peter Avery put that stanza this way:

I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry,
Half a loaf for a bite to eat,
Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot,
Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm.

I don’t get it. I’ll take Fitz any day of the week but, then, I’m no Peter Avery. A Persian, too, has taken a whack at translating it in to English:

Ah, would there were a loaf of bread as fare,
A joint of lamb, a jug of vintage rare,
And you and I in wilderness encamped—
No Sultan’s pleasure could with ours compare.

It seems nobody is is interested in a literal translation and that may be because, as is often said, poetry is not really translatable. Fitz himself put down his own work as transmogrification. Whatever.

As for the philosophy, there are at least two schools of thought: One claims that he was highly influenced by Islamic mysticism, and particularly sufism, and his references to wine and lovers are allegorical representations of the mystical wine and divine love. A second school of thought refutes the first completely, claiming that Khayyam understood his mortality and inability to look beyond, and his references to wine and lovers are very literal and sensual.

Who knows? Pishers don’t. For more on this, see http://www.okonlife.com/life/philosophy.htm
. In the meantime, while you ponder this, do as my waiters and waitresses always advise me: ENJOY!

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning died, Edward Fitzgerald [He of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam fame] gave a sigh of relief and wrote, ”Mrs. Browning’s Death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real genius, I know; but what is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and their Children: and perhaps the Poor: except in such things as little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better, leaving that which Men do worse or not at all.”

A century earlier, Samuel Johnson wrote that a woman thinking is like a dog walking on its hind legs – it is not done well but, then, you are surprised it can be done at all.

I do not endorse either of these views but I was brought to mind of them by the wonderful announcement that women’s professional soccer is now over thanks to a lack of fan support. The Women’s Professional Soccer league averaged under 2000 fans per game this past season. Like a dog walking, it is a wonder the girls did that well at the gate.

Men’s soccer is awful enough. Efforts have been made for years to persuade the public it is an exciting game. The truth is that one word perfectly describes it – KLUTZINESS. In hockey and basketball, the arms are free to do things. In soccer, one falls asleep waiting for a shot. Although some soccer players earn millions of dollars, not a single one of them is any good. They perform magic with the ball (at all the wrong moments) but are fortunate to get off two shots during the course of a game, and one of them is blocked. Given this display of ineptitude, it is not surprising that women thought, “We can do just as well.” Indeed, they can and do. GOOD RIDDANCE. They had better mind the Kitchen and their Children.

Women will roar with disapproval at this post but that’s female chauvinism for you, heavily wedded to the theme that if you can’t say something nice then say nothing. A few men will gallantly charge in, too, to say the girls (women?) are wonderful but these phonys won’t spend 30 bucks to see a game whether played by the girls or the boys. I invite them not to tell us what they think, for a man who will defend soccer is like a dog walking on its hind legs….etc.

Certain comedians are above reproach: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd. Silence helped insulate them from vulgarity. They never embarrassed us. As comedy reached out to new formats and as the code of the permissible broadened or was totally broken, so did the opportunities for crude, cheap humor become more plentiful.

In its earliest years, vaudeville was distasteful, awful, and insensitive but by about 1915 it had evolved into polite burlesque – mere caricature, satire, and ludicrous, light-hearted parody of serious subjects. Eventually, something or other killed vaudeville. Perhaps it was that theatre gave way to nightclubs, TV and talking movies. In their turn, these have become aggressive forms of entertainment, as the purveyors of these extravaganzas have experienced a felt need to gratify those who pay big bucks for laughter.

Comedic genius still flourishes. Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld and two dozen others still find work. Unfortunately so do Andrew Dice Clay and others of his ilk. They thrive on embarrassment. Audiences are at a loss to know how to respond to a curious mixture of racism, sexism and flashes of very clever wit. The thin blush line confounds us. Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, George Carlin made their choice – to be outrageous. A hundred or more lesser talents have done the same. They straddled the line between orthodoxy and outright viciousness before considerable financial success pushed them over the edge.

Does Chris Rock have the innate ability to be as funny as Bill Cosby? I think so, but he has been emboldened by fame and fortune not to be a mere imitator of a style he supposes, rightly or wrongly, to be as dead as silent comedy. Thus, genius is on the wane. Its glory days are a thing of the past and we had better get used to that.

Most people I know don’t bother me about this but a couple dozen are dismayed about my “frittering away” large chunks of my dough to charity.

Dismayed Person – You like to say your voting makes no difference so you won’t vote. What’s different about your giving a a few measly bucks to some cause?
SG – Probably nothing.
DP – So cut it out. Use the cash you save to go to a nice ski resort.
SG – I’d rather go to a prison for awhile and be raped.
DP – Just explain yourself.
SG – OK. Here’s the deal. Giving money to a charity is not like voting. Giving money to a charity is more like taking part in a water rationing drive. Participating reduces the burden on everybody. My not voting does not increase your burden. In fact, it makes your vote more significant. You should be glad I don’t vote, especially knowing I would not vote for the person you support.
DP – Do you have a point you are so incompetently trying to make?
SG – Maybe. I contribute because you won’t. If you’ll be nice enough to give $200 to Charity X, I will give Charity X 100 fewer dollars. Charity X will be better off and I sure will be. Winners all-round, including you because once you make your mind up you will see it doesn’t hurt at all.
DP – Charity X may be a fraud. Who knows what becomes of the money? Do you?
SG – Maybe I know, maybe I don’t. What I do know is that if you go to a ski resort with the money you won’t give to any charity, you really shouldn’t bitch too much about the super rich. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the average Joe who has income of about $80,000 to $100,000 squanders a higher percentage of his disposable income on worthless junk than Warren Buffett does.
DP – What’s that to you?
SG – Nothing. I apologize.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BydZ3dcr6SY

Don’t cry over your closely held dough. Let it go. You’re going to feel much better once you make your mind up.

One of the overlooked and forgotten miseries of being a slave in Cleopatra’s entourage was that you were always on call for sexual duties. Often enough, Cleo would belt out the dreaded, “Bring me a sexer!” From her point of view, a well hung guy was nothing but a mountain of that “too, too solid flesh” with a steel-like appendage. A bunch of the guys would be sitting around enjoying a game of “Jacks or better” poker when the call came down that one of them had to be sacrificed for the occasion.

Nowadays, poker interruptus has been transformed into something else I can’t quite remember but I recall it has an undeservedly bad name. This is due to short memories and failing to learn the lessons of history. Interruptus is still a very bad thing but poker fans know that in its original incarnation, interruptus really got in the way of a good time.

Sorry, no jacks. I have to pass.

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A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

In the locker room at EMU, some twenty-five years or so ago, a bunch of the boys were whooping it up when all of a sudden a good-looking woman about 30 years old entered and cried out, “It’s okay, everybody, I’m a nurse.” A couple of the guys already had one sock on and somebody was hunting for his jock strap but the rest of us were in our birthday suits. One guy, whom I knew to be, like me, an ex-Brooklynite, said, “Do you think she’s looking for a gang bang?” “Maybe,” I said, “But Im betting against it.” The man from Brooklyn addressed somebody else and said, “Maybe we should go for it.” The other fellow was alarmed, “But what if we’re wrong? There could be trouble ahead.” While the tramp cum-nurse was mysteriously parading up and down the aisles, a few other souls joined the dialogue. I honestly did not know what to do. My instinct was to be valorous and escort her out from the room but I also thought that if this gang bang was going to be a fait accompli, it wouldn’t do any harm if I took my place in the line. Can it much matter if she is raped by 15 guys rather than 14?

This is an instance of philosophical thinking par excellence. In the end, while we mumbled and bumbled, she vanished as suddenly as she had appeared.

“Dark meat is overtaking boneless white meat.” Upon first reading that headline, I thought it meant a switch in the sexual preferences of white guys. Soon enough, I learned my error. People in the flesh industry don’t know what to do with surplus “broilers,” so the absence of demand for white meat is DRIVING the price of the less flavorful junk down. Of course, when I say “driving,” you know from my frequent complaints about that term that there is no such economic phenomenon. Let’s not visit that again. I am not sure but I think the term “broiler” derives from memories of what Nazis did to Jews. You probably recall that broiled Jews were less flavorful than fat Jews who were often caught hiding in attics and who were devoured on the spot. Oh, boy, would I have enjoyed a good taste of Anne Frank. But, wait! She was white meat that never turned dark. May I have a nice chunk of Halle Berry, please. Rare to medium well, will do.
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WHAT PRICE GLORY?……………Who first asked that question? Was it George Bernard Shaw? Maybe Maxwell Anderson? Possibly Al Silver, he of light emitting diode fame? This much I know, thanks to Liza Minelli and the midget who raided Brownsville, Brooklyn to pick up a wife. I refer to the marauder, Joel Grey, who discovered that money makes the world go round.

Accordingly, our best and brightest are going to college, a.k.a. “higher institutions of learning” [sic] to study engineering, business, accounting, computer science and economics. In that order. Bringing up (or down) the bottom five “majors” are social sciences, humanities, agriculture, heath sciences, and education. [Vot dat?] Women are starting life with $18.000 per annum and the guys will begin with $23,000 per. They will accumulate an average debt of $25,000. I didn’t know how to read the chart so I don’t know whether that means “for a lifetime,” “for Year One,” “per millisecond” or what. My not so well-grounded hope is that it is the latter. The thought that 99 and 44/100ths % of our students will never be able to afford Ivory Soap warms the cockles of my heart.

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The cockles of your heart are more metaphorical than physical, although the phrase can be traced back to 15th century medical beliefs. For a more penetrating analysis, just sing the ballad, “Molly Malone.”

As for Joel Grey, I am finished with him but you know where on Youtube to go to find him wax elegant about lucre.

The battle is drawn. In Parawon, Utah, 2,790 well-armed but stupid humans against 3,435 unarmed but very clever prairie dogs. About 40 million prairie dogs live in the USA, all without documented evidence of citizenship. We are entitled to do as Parawon city councilman Dennis Gaede says we should do, annihilate them. I wasn’t sure what he meant so I looked up “annihilate” and found such terms of endearment as “liquidate,” “obliterate,” and “wipe off the face of the earth.” I say, RIGHT ON, DENNIS.

These little gangsters are destroying lawns, burrowing under airports in a way that buckles runways, tunneling into cemeteries and chewing up coffins (and maybe corpses). These indignities can only be described as NOT NICE. To be sure we do the job right, I call for intense nuclear bombing of all that part of the USA that is west of Chicago. If you think we should include Chicago among the targets, that’s fine with me. I do regret that, if we take this action, Frank Sinatra is no longer with us, for I can’t think of a more deserving victim of nuclear holocaust.

How will the war end? At the moment, thanks to the fact that Utah prairie dogs are a special set of prairie dogs and, as such, listed under the Endangered Species Act, annihilation measures are illegal. More’s the pity because that means these Bad Guys are guaranteed to be the ultimate winners. In calling this disaster guaranteed, a note of sanguinity creeps into my voice because I fondly remember that agnostics have told us nothing is certain. [In fact, they have proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. For more on the triumph of the agnostic way of life, see op.cit, loc. cit, ibid, vide infra, and "Your mother's mustache."]

Yes, we know Josh Hamilton is the best baseball player in the world, even better than Albert P. and better than Babe Ruth was. He has been the best for at least a dozen years, even extending back to his high school days and his $million per month salary for the next ten years gives him some consolation for his many woes, but what he needs more than anything else is your love and understanding. Unhappy with the world, he kept mankind waiting for six years after signing his first contract and before revealing why he was worth waiting for.

This permanent drug and alcohol addict is feeling awful because his father was mean enough recently to drop dead. To make matters worse, a fan at a baseball game dropped a ball Josh lobbed to him. He fell out of his seat, crashed to the ground and died. Although the reality of the matter is that this is one of the most hilarious events in baseball history, Josh is feeling terrible and wants to meet with the dead guy’s family to offer the kind of consolation only a drug addict can provide.

Hamilton spends almost as much time on the public speaking circuit as he does playing baseball. He points out that his talent is God-given, so he is very modest about it. Nowadays, after he creates a bit of mayhem in a bar, he apologizes and offers the observation that the incident proves he can’t handle liquor. Maybe not, but when he bashed out 4 home runs in a single game and tacked on a few more in the the next few games, all was forgiven. JUST LOVE HIM.

An article in this week’s Annals of Family Medicine says that [heavily funded] research proves that elderly people who add pedometers to their bicycles are more likely than others to stick to their exercise regimen. My physician-friendly friends tell me that even the most obvious recommendations are more likely to be followed when those in the medical industry [a.k.a. medical profession] tell them to obey. For example, people who eat bacon four times per day are more likely to surrender that practice after their health care provider says, “Cut it out!” On my own bottles of MEDS [imbecile lingo for "medicines prescribed for me"] I sometimes see “take this by oral route only.” In my case, this is helpful because my inclination is to shove the stuff up my ass.

My well-educated friends insist on brand name medicines like Tylenol because their health care providers [a.k.a. "doctors"] either don’t know the names of the active ingredients in these overpriced meds or believe their customers [a.k.a. "patients"] are too stupid to remember the meds other than by brand names.

Every reader is capable of adding a few choice examples of physician madness to the those I just mentioned. I’d like to hear your favorites.

My physician-friendly friends tell me they are not bothered by the arrogance of their “doctors” because, for them, these goniffs are only mechanics. All they want is for these creatures to help make them well. That accomplished, they can put up with everything else, including being addressed by the Young Thing in the outer office by first name while being prepped for the red carpet, and usually late, arrival of His Most Noble Potentate, who is grandly addressed as THE DOCTOR.

Among the dumbest things of all, far more ridiculous that being told not to shove Tylenol up your ass, is that my physician-friendly friends sometimes laugh at me and say I am just eaten up with envy because of the respect that the Noble Potentates get from the hoi polloi and which I crave for myself. I ask all of you: Did these wizards of complex thought receive funding for this ingenious and patently true observation? And should I point out to them that, thanks to having submerged myself for decades in Derrida thinking, I understand the subtext of their opinion, to wit, they are a bunch of contemptible craven cowards who call themselves “Professor” or “Doctor” when talking to 19-year old students but prefer “I’m just a guy called Joe” when cringing in the coat hangerless outer office of His Most Noble Potentate, not daring to complain even about that?
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By the way, eat less fat, exercise more, and be good to your mother. However, if she is dead, do it my way: spit on the bitch’s grave. That will lower your blood pressure. Research proves.

Where do you think you have to go? There is no place on earth you need to go to. Stay where you are. Do you think you need groceries and such sundries? You don’t. You don’t need anybody to bring them to you, either. How will you get by? You won”t. So that is that. But mission accomplished. We have just proved you can stay where you are.

Still, forget my extremism. For a few minutes I will, too. I am going to NY in July. I have no end in view other than to say hello to a few people. Once that is done, it is goodbye forever. I won’t drive, I won’t take a bus, I can’t bike that far and it is for sure that I won’t ever again get on a plane. If I hear that someone I love is near death or has just died or that his great granddaughter is getting married, I won’t be there. By not boarding a plane and going to a hotel, I will save lots of money. All that money can go toward a gift if the event is a mazel tov kind of event. If it is a misery-making event, I will follow the family’s instructions that always say, “In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to…” The family will be better off without me thanks to my oversized donation and I will be better off staying home. Besides that, I cry too much. You can’t drag me to a Holocaust Memorial for all the gelt in the world. I won’t even go to an opera where great tenors belt out “Una furtiva lagrima.” There would be nothing furtive about my tears. By my not going, people who would otherwise be in the neighboring seats are spared a diluvian level flood.

I stay home unless a fire chases me out. That enables me to write feigned hard-boiled blog items in which I call everybody a moron or an imbecile and wish terrible pain to be visited upon their mothers. That’s good because it guarantees nobody will pay me a visit. The people I will see in New York see through my bravado deceit. They know me better than I know myself. Perhaps they know of my boast of being another Goethe. That genius once said he didn’t understand himself and thanked God for his ignorance. I can’t thank God but I know well what the genius meant.

Spirit Airlines wants me not to fly. It now charges a hefty fee for putting luggage in overhead compartments. It charges you $3 for a cup of water. It plans to charge passengers $1 for animal crackers and you can’t have a cookie any longer. It is considering charging for the right to use its toilets. I hope Spirit follow through on this threat because people who fly deserve every mistreatment that airlines can thrust upon them. A certain Ms. Lauren Piatek wanted to cancel her flight because her boyfriend broke his leg and had to be hospitalized. Spirit said that for $200 she could change her reservation. The flight itself did not cost that much. The schmuck thinks that paying an additional $200 is unreasonable. She is going to court to fight this. She should not do this because she shouldn’t go anywhere. STAY HOME, SCHMUCK! Take your lumps.

If you really must go someplace, it had better be under 400 miles. For that journey you need only to buy roller blades and find roads that are not heavily traveled. We all know the poem containing the lines, “I once had no shoes to wear. Then I met a man who had no feet.” Lucky son of a bitch. He had to stay home.

Hats off to the airline industry for doing all in its power to make us stay home.