WILD AND RILED

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-29-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

 
     Did you happen to see that video by a jogger in Utah who encountered a mama cougar on the trail? The puma had him shaking in his pumas for about six minutes while he filmed the whole thing, not because the mountain lion was so unusual, but because no one would ever believe he could run so fast. The guy taking the video seemed either really brave or really stupid, because if a wild animal is chasing you, and you have no weapon, at least throw the damn camera at it. If you happen to come across a unicorn, go ahead and keep filming, unless he looks like he's going to charge you. In that case, find out how much he's going to charge you but keep filming. He only has that one corn, hence the name, but you might be sitting on a viral video goldmine.

     You can sometimes tell if an animal is just about to kill you by reading his body language. I have a cat, so I have some experience with the breed if I might extrapolate a little bit. If he starts licking himself that means he's probably about to fall asleep. By the way ANYTHING my cat does means he's about to fall asleep. Hold on, the mountain lion just lifted his tail. Is that good or bad? Let me consult my Mountain Lion-to-English dictionary. Lifting the tail is good. Now he lowered it, bad. Raised it again, and I'm flipping pages unaware that the mountain lion is sitting with its tail in a pricker bush. Experts always say that the wild animal is more afraid of you than you are of them. Who are the experts that say things like that? Experts who have 1.) never encountered a mountain lion, and 2.) have grossly underestimated how afraid I am of them.

     Sure, open your coat to make yourself look fatter, even though you just suffered on the keto diet for six months to get this thin. "Just to be clear, I am NOT fat, you stupid mountain lion. I am sturdily-boned, which I inherited from my Mom and has nothing to do with ME. I'm using the coat to make me LOOK fatter, so technically the COAT is fat. And there are no mountains around here, so you're just a hillock lion at best." And what is the first thing the mountain lion is going to see when you open your coat? That you're not packing. "No weapon, I see, not even a Swiss Army knife with a pair of tweezers that you can pluck my eyebrows with. Just that cell phone. Maybe you can call your sturdily-boned Mom." Experts say that it's wise not to antagonize a wildcat.

     I read that you're supposed to make eye contact with the mountain lion and stare him down. I also read that if it's a bear, you should NOT make eye contact. I'm never going to remember which to do in the heat of battle so I guess I'll just have to keep an eye on things. I have a "psycho face" that I make if I think someone's going to give me attitude on the subway. I tried it out on my wife and she said I just look like an idiot, but I wasn't fully into character. I have yet to test it on wild animals though.

     You shouldn't underestimate any one of god's creatures, they all have something that they do much better than humans do. My wife has a hummingbird feeder, and they fly at each other and bicker about who hogged the most nectar, all day long. I've thought about going out there to break up the fight, but I'm a little anxious about interfering. What could a hummingbird possibly do to a coward like me? Why don't you let one fly in your ear and hum the "Kars for Kids" jingle for a while and find out.

     And there is a woodpecker attacking our house. There are three reasons a woodpecker taps on your siding: 1.) It's looking for food, 2.) It's making a nesting hole or, 3.) It's learning the drum solo in "Moby Dick." We're empty nesters and the last thing we need is a woodpecker moving in, so I did a little research on how to get rid of them. I read that if you spray the pecking area with hot sauce, they'll toast their little tongues and move on. So I'm out there with a lawn sprayer filled with tabasco sauce hosing my house, and it's just another reason people don't come over.

     The mountain lion was only protecting its young, so don't be too hard on her. In comparison, my Mom told us to go out and play in the streets, and if a jogger had threatened us she would have told him to stay off the lawn. Maybe someday that guy and the mountain lion will get together and watch the video, and have a good laugh over it. "OMIGOD! Look at that face I'm making! And my hair! Jesus, so '20s!" "Nah, you look like a real 'cougar!'" For now, it's a jungle out there, so be safe. I was recently chased by a snail who was protecting its young, and I'll tell you right now, if it ever catches up to me and slugs me, I'm going to video the whole thing. I'll keep you posted.
 

WHAT'S IN A DUMB NAME

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-22-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     By the time you read this, the Tampa Bay Rays could be in the World Series, and I'll be left wondering, who the hell would name a sports team THAT? It's not a great name like the New York Yankees, well, isn't either. The truth is that there are a lot of dumb team monikers in the world of professional sports, and I'm just the person to make no sense of it all. There isn't even a city called Tampa Bay. Attendance is so bad at Tropicana Field that the owner may have been open to mollusks and bivalves from the bay buying tickets to the game. The team from Tampa was actually first known as the "Devil Rays," but the owner had some second thoughts, thinking that Satan himself might start showing up at the games, and he'd have to make good on all those deals he made to get the stadium financed.

     The L.A. Dodgers could be their opponent in the Fall Classic. Is there anything lazier than not changing the name of the team you bought, whose name has nothing to do with your town? The "Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers" was their original name, which made a lot more sense in Brooklyn, where 51 people died from being hit by trolleys in 1893. The Los Angeles "Traffic Jam" would be more appropriate; you don't even need to pluralize it, the place is just one big traffic jam from what I've seen. How many lakes would it take to name your team the "Lakers," even if you didn't mind that basketball players don't have much to do with lakes? Would you settle for none? There are plenty of them in Minnesota, and that's probably where the name should have stayed, even if the team didn't.

     I just watched the Buffalo Bills lose tonight on network television, and I thought to myself, even if everyone on the team was an actual buffalo, and its name was Bill, the "Buffalo Bills" would still be a goofy name for a team. I guess you could receive a big bill from a restaurant in Buffalo, and that would be intimidating. You could just as well have named the team the "Buffalo Bobs," given that "The Howdy Doody Show" was at least seen in Buffalo, and "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" was not.

     Who doesn't like red socks? Most people, I'm guessing, but at least you can save some time by writing "Red Sox" instead. Think how much time writing "thanx" instead of "thanks" has saved us over the years. The team from Boston was originally known as the "Red Stockings," which doesn't sound girly to me at all. I seem to be in the minority here, but if I were naming a baseball team, I'd start with some adjectives about how we're going to kick your cotton-picking coccyx, and about the size of our bats as compared to yours, etc. Naming the team based on the color of our undergarments would not have crossed my mind for more than a few moments, and I would not have repeated them to anyone.

     A lot of teams are named after birds: blue jays, orioles, cardinals. In the team logo they look very menacing, as if they might beat the crap out of you in a bar and take your girlfriend. But really, the worst thing a bird has ever done to me was poop on my car, and it was hard to get off. If you want to cow the opposition, call your organization the "St. Louis Cardinal Poops." Less than half the teams in the NFL are even named after anything human, and in the case of the Houston "Texans," the bar for qualifying to make the roster is set pretty low. Most are named for inanimate objects and animals.

     Some franchises had the misguided notion to commemorate a moment in history that no one really cares much about anymore. The "49ers" named their team when they joined the NFL in 1949, but the name refers to the California gold rush, which happened in 1849. and probably won't happen again. A new NBA team named their franchise the "Raptors," two years after a movie came out featuring a bunch of raptors that grossed over a billion dollars worldwide. I'm willing to bet that nobody in management took a timeout to consider that Toronto is not usually known for its dinosaurs, and that in the next few years more movies would come out about other things.

     If you really want to put a scare into your greatest rival, let them think that your experts have crunched every single number on your player, and know every detail about what they intend to do every second of the game. "Keep watching, he's going to scratch himself right in the old end zone. HA! See that?" The rivalry of the future: The New York Statisticians versus the Dallas Data Miners. The geeks shall inherit the Earth.

THE MOON IS IN THE 7TH HOUSE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-15-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     And if Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars, just like the song says. Unfortunately, that won't happen again for another 32,000 years, so somebody else is going to have to steer the stars for a while. But did you know that Mars is going to be closer to the Earth this month than it will be for the next 15 years? You won't even need your glasses like you did when it was 214 million miles farther away. It will look like a red star in the Southern sky because of its large concentration of what is essentially rust. Mars has been left out in the Solar System for a few billion years too long, it seems.

     In fact, there is a rover from NASA on its way to Mars right now, and when it gets there next year it's going to rove around looking for signs of life. There are a bunch of what used to be lakes on Mars, and scientists think that there could be evidence of microbes there underneath the beds. If it's anything like the evidence of microbes underneath my bed, this should be one of the most successful missions ever. Scientists are probably expecting that microbes on Mars will be a lot like they are here on Earth, not exactly the life of the party, usually the butt of a "how many organisms does it take to unscrew a lightbulb" joke, etc. No one has mentioned the fact that, who the hell really knows what to expect? The rover could run into a an angry mob of genius microbes up there, just waiting for a big hunk of raw material that they can turn into their own spaceship, or even better, a huge espresso maker.

     The probe, dubbed Perseverance, will have a microphone on it, so that if any of the microbes want to get up and make a speech or do a little stand up comedy (no one expects the microbes to have feet though), they can feel free to do so. It has a drill that will go down into the surface and suck out samples to bring back to Earth. If there are any earthworms in there then we'll have to rename earthworms I guess. There is more than one camera on board the Perseverance, so scientists at the command center could conceivably experience a rare simultaneous organism.

     If you're as old as I am, you can remember when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, with that choppy video that even back then was still better than some talk shows I've seen during the coronavirus age. Who didn't imagine themselves as an astronaut, looking down at that cloudy blue planet Earth? You'd cup your hands over your mouth to simulate a static-y radio transmission. "The Eagle has landed!" A chimpanzee flew a space mission in 1961, so how hard could it be? Then I saw this centrifuge contraption that they use for training that spins you around in a giant circle, even worse than the Black Widow ride at the carnival that I threw up after. At the end they scrape you off the side of the simulator with a spatula and hang you from a clothes line until you're back to normal. I used to get car sick when my Mom parallel parked the car, so that was the end of that dream. I went back to imagining myself enjoying a career in consulting, which has been everything I ever dreamed it would be since no one has ever consulted me.

     I fantasize that it's me stepping down from the Lunar Module, balancing my coffee cup in one hand and holding onto the ladder with the other, and I see that my coffee is dispersing into outer space, and It takes seven hours to prepare one cup, and I lose concentration and trip down three rungs of the ladder. Everyone's waiting for me to say something memorable. "That's one small step for man," I say, "and yet I almost killed myself." I take a couple photos of the place, but there are coffee droplets all over the place ruining the photos, and I have no idea that someday people will think the whole thing was a hoax.

     We're making such a mess of this planet that some people are hitching their star to the stars, and maybe someday we can make a mess of someone else's planet. It's mind boggling to think how much there is up there, and how much we'll never know about it. And so we make up a bunch of stuff and it makes us feel better. I know that there are people who put a lot of stock in their horoscope readings, but I'm not going to change my behavior based on whatever's going on Mars, 38,586,816 miles away on a good day. When the Moon is in the 2nd or 3rd house, I'll start paying more attention.

     And I'll keep an eye out for Asteroid 2018 VP1. It's going to pass very close to Earth the day before the United States election. Hopefully there won't be a monumental disaster. I'm talking about the election, the asteroid is only about six feet long, so worst case scenario it might dent somebody's car. But this month I'm keeping the shades to my house closed, because if there is life on Mars, they're closer than they've been in quite a while, and I don't want them peeking into my living room and making fun of the naked eye I'm watching them with.

BLURRED IMMUNITY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-08-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

 
Blurred immunity
     Let me be perfectly clear: I'm not a doctor, I didn't play one on TV, and I didn't even play doctor with the nurse down the street when we were little. Actually I do remember having a "doctor's kit," which had several items in it. It had a small plastic hammer that you could test your little sister's reflexes with by hitting her over the head. And it had a plastic stethoscope so you could check if you still had a heartbeat after your little sister grabbed the hammer and hit you over the head with it even harder. And it had little pince-nez plastic glasses with no lenses so you could see what you were doing, but you couldn't smell anything because they pinched your nose shut. And it had a little mirror with a headband on it that you could wear so your patient could see her tonsils and figure out immediately that you overcharged her for taking them out. Everything was made of plastic so that you could learn how to perform plastic surgery and be the darling of your mom's friends when you grew up. My medical career didn't work out but I'd like to play doctor with you now.

     Everyone's doing it. One unfortunate by-product of inept leadership that undermines science and disregards experts is that people start to feel that there are no real answers, and they start making up their own. So everyone has had to educate themselves and come up with their own idea of what is safe and what is not during a pandemic. Is it safe to go to a restaurant? If no one there has covid-19 you could still be killed if a waiter trips while holding a swordfish, so nothing is completely safe. Can I go to church or synagogue? Even if you wear a mask, there's a lot of singing involved, which is not healthy in a pandemic, but there is also a lot of praying, which may be.

     I'd like to know what percentage of people who tested positive for the coronavirus were asymptomatic. I'd like to know what the odds are of getting the disease from touching an infected surface as opposed to someone breathing on me. I'd like to know if people who are asymptomatic and contract the disease again after their immunity wears off will be asymptomatic again. I'd like to know dumb-sounding things like, if I blow a fan sideways while I'm talking to someone, will it blow all the little covids away from both of us and out the door into the garage?

     It would be helpful to have some accurate science on the proclivities of the coronavirus so that I can make intelligent decisions, something I probably should do more of. There is a statistic in baseball known as "Value over Replacement Player," or VORP. If I have a slide rule I can figure out your VORP once I replace you. And after you've been replaced with a guy worse than you, I'll have to replace him to find out if you were any good or not. Do you get where I'm going with this? If so, call me when I get there. But my point, if there is one, is that we have plenty of meaningless stats in baseball, where hardly anyone dies, and yet there is seemingly no national database for reliable information about the effects of the coronavirus. It's because everyone in government is so concerned about optics that they are afraid to report the truth.

     I just got my flu shot today- it's free at CVS. Most doctors agree that it's more important than ever to get your flu shot this year to avoid confusion of symptoms. If you find you're short of breath, have no appetite and have a fever, it could be the flu or covid-19, or you might actually be in love. If you get the flu shot and test negative for coronavirus, congratulations, I'm sure you'll be very happy together. You can give me a ring to thank me, and I'll certainly wear it proudly.

     What is the status of medical treatments? Plasma from recovered patients and corticosteroids have shown promise during clinical trials in preventing people from dying of the disease, I guess that's better than nothing. An antiviral called remdesivir was used in previous pandemics and prevented the virus from replicating itself. Those deficient in vitamins C and D have shown increased susceptibility to the disease, so there may be a benefit to them. There are people still running around touting the charms of hydroxychloroquine, even though doctors have said a hundred times that it has no proven benefit with covid.

     Experts warn how easy it is to catch the coronavirus. But in New York we've learned how easy it is NOT to. I never heard the words "hand hygiene" used so often, but it makes washing your hands sound really gross. My own hands have some kind of deal worked out, and one hand washes the other. Until this thing blows away we'll just need to do what the experts say you should do. I'm talking about the people who know what they're talking about. Not the ones who say that they are geniuses, but the ones who NEVER say they are, and yet when they say what they say it's obvious that they are.

THE BEST TO YOU EACH MORNING

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-01-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, although if you're an hour and a half late for dinner you may not live long enough to compare the rankings. There are studies linking breakfast to better concentration, lower incidence of diabetes and less chance of heart disease. Of course, you can find a study linking everything to just about everything else if you look hard enough. You could probably find a study linking the eating of used carburetor parts to lower heart disease, although it could give you gas. I like to eat a hearty breakfast, and I borrow a few calories from lunch to make up for it.

     As a kid I don't remember eating anything but cereal for breakfast, but that might have been because my parents had six children. A balanced meal for us was half a bowl of Sugar Smacks offset by half a bowl of Sugar Pops. To make their brands seem healthier, they've since removed any mention of the word "sugar" from all the cereals we used to love as a kid, although not the sugar itself.

     But now I'm an adult in a pandemic, and one way to make use of the slowdown is to fine-tune my breakfast making skills, so I'm going to let you in on a couple of my Sunday breakfast secrets. Making biscuits from scratch is not as hard as you might think, but it's easier to make them from batter. The batter is better with a lot of butter. Then I cut the biscuit in half, butter it, put a fried egg, some cheese and bacon on it and I save a trip to McDonald's. The same routine on a croissant goes over quite well around here. If I have a hard roll, I'll toast and butter it, insert a scrambled egg and sprinkle some cheddar and Monterey Jack. The best part is a slice of ham from the deli that I pan-fry within an inch of its life, and that goes on top of the cheese.

     Have you heard of a Dutch baby? You mix 3 eggs, 3/4 cup of milk, 3/4 cup of flour, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of salt and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. You add them to a pre-heated, liberally-buttered large skillet and bake it at 425 degrees until it puffs up like the surface of Jupiter. If it looks like Uranus you cooked it too long. Some butter and syrup and believe me you will be hailed as a modern-day hero. I've eaten so many Dutch babies that they have zero population growth right now.

     I've been called "The Leonardo da Vinci of breakfast." I invented the "toast omelet," which uses a couple pieces of buttered toast broken into little pieces, some sauteed peppers, cheese and diced tomatoes thrown in with the eggs after they're already cooking. The trick is to let the toast sit around for 15 minutes until it's brittle, and coat it with butter melted in the microwave. Here's one I call the "reverse omelet:" You take a couple tablespoons of margarine and melt it in a non-stick omelet pan, and you add the cheese first, enough cheddar and mozzarella to cover the whole bottom. Once that melts you add the beaten eggs. I like to cover it with a baking sheet to fluff up the eggs, and by that time the cheese is brown underneath. You can thank me later for saving your marriage.

     You don't need to get too fancy with the ingredients as far as I'm concerned. My wife once asked me, did you clarify the butter? No, it seems self-explanatory to me. And I don't mind cheese in a bag from the supermarket, you don't have to import it from Switzerland or anything. You can get day-old bread from the bakery and it will actually improve your French toast. Any loaf old enough to vote and the benefits start to decline. I often use margarine in place of butter, I think it's easier to cook with it and I like the taste. My family grew up using margarine, I think my parents were saving butter for the war effort, in case there was a war that listed it in the ingredients.

     It's impossible to get breakfast in Europe, because they think the concept of eating a big meal so early is vulgar. So when we're in Europe I spend much of the time before noon complaining about how I wish Europeans were as vulgar as I am. English muffins, Belgian waffles, Dutch babies and French toast are some of the great morning meals you can't get in any of those countries. In Paris they eat a baguette with Nutella on it. In Rome you can get a caffe latte with a biscotti. In Madrid they put an egg on top of anything you can order for dinner, but don't bother trying to find one for breakfast. Bacon is a code word that they haven't cracked over there yet. If you want a glass of milk you're going to have to find a willing subject and milk it yourself. None of these things is remotely useful to start your day if you're going to be walking around a museum all day, especially a boring one. Once world travel is back in the game plan I might have to think about packing a waffle iron and some batter, and let the fine folks at the TSA try to figure out what I plan to do with them.