Muphry’s Law in action

The corollary to the famous Murphy’s Law (“anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”) is, of course, Muphry’s Law, which points out that “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”

And so, when I posted this morning criticizing the spelling and grammar abilities of 90% of the people on the internet, I predictably made a typo.

I love it when the universe makes sense. Just wanted you to know that I am, indeed, aware of the irony.

Please note, too, that I know that anyone who comments on this blog is an erudite and confident writer, with impeccable logic and taste.

People are crazy, part 46

One of the things I simultaneously love and fear about the internet is the ability of the world to comment on news articles without having to bother with the tedium of finding pen, paper, envelope and stamp and then putting together a letter to the editor.

It’s a wonderful thing, because it’s far more entertaining than just reading one more article about Skank #32 in Tiger Wilson’s Parade of Floozies. Journalists have to pay attention to libel laws, for example, which takes a lot of the fun out of the content. Commenters, especially the anonymous ones, have no such limitation.

It’s also a terrifying thing, because then you start to see the sense in the system that required a commenter to be organized enough to find pen, paper, envelope and stamp, because it tended to filter out the crazies. And the people w ho cannot spell. And the people who do not understand the niceties of sentence structure. Not to mention the people who think white supremacy is a fine and wonderful thing.

So, because I’m deep that way, I’m reading the fine comic strip, Luann, which, according to Wikipedia, “takes place in an unnamed suburban setting and is mostly about teenager Luann DeGroot, dealing with school, her love interests, family and friends.” Every so often something serious happens, but mostly it’s a treatment of what my fifteen year old son calls “unexplained teenaged angst.”

I’m reading this week’s strips online and notice that there are comments on most of the strips. What in the heck is there to comment on about a comic strip about a teenaged girl that today is centered on a caroling trip to a nursing home?

I’m kinda sorry I asked, because to answer that question you have to actually click on the comments and then read them. I went into brain freeze when the ACLU was mentioned, and then was sort of hoping I’d be struck blind when that same commenter dragged NAMBLA into it. (And no, I’m not going to spell it out. I’m still horrified.)

Into a cartoon about little Luann DeGroot, whose biggest contribution to drama and controversy happened years ago when the author covered her starting her period and caused a minor media sensation.

The next thing you know, we’ll find out that Snoopy is not only battling the Red Baron, that pesky little beagle is a Holocaust denier.

Cigarettes killed the radio star.

Note: this didn’t start out being inflammatory, but I recognize that inflammatory is exactly what it has become. Do me one favor: read the whole thing before you set fire to me, ok?

Or maybe they didn’t. If they did, that’s his problem.

It’s December 18th, and I’m begging myself not to start knitting something.

Fact 1: I have not finished my Christmas shopping.
Fact 1a: Full disclosure: I’m not even sure I’ve STARTED my Christmas shopping.
Fact 2: I do not even know what I’m buying my husband.
Fact 3: Fortune does not favor the tardy in this case; with my husband trying to start his own business, money is predictably tight and so I cannot just run into the nearest Nordstroms and wave a credit card around and run out.
Fact 4: So, if I’m running out of a Nordies it’s because I’ve taken up shoplifting.
Fact 5: I did decide two days ago to make gifts for my coworkers.
Fact 6: Which is proof that I’m insane. I got 22 of ‘em. Coworkers, that is.
Fact 7: Because of various scheduling issues, I must get the project done this evening.
Fact 8: Which adds up to the traditional recipe for Christmas Panic: Repetitive actions in a new technology that I’ve never tried before (in this case, running CDs through a printer, of all things) at the last minute.
Fact 9: Sadly, there’s no chocolate involved.
Fact 10: Which means I’ll undoubtedly be up at 2 a.m. resentfully shoving materials around, making the inevitable mistakes and having to re-do work and crying.
Fact 11: Which is, indeed, the Spirit of Giving.

“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea.”

I’m quoting Abe Lincoln here because I didn’t want to use a common paraphrase of one of his really famous quotes, the one about pleasing (or fooling) some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

I thought of Abe when I was reading some of the discussion around the new Disney movie, “The Princess and the Frog.” Disney isn’t going to catch a break here: blasted for decades for not having a more inclusive ethnic representation in their cartoon lineup, they’re getting blasted now because not everyone likes the way the story unfolds.

Reading some of the comments in this analysis on CNN, I was struck by how all over the place the comments are. (I was also struck by how incoherent so many of them were, but that’s for a different day.)

Some commenters fully support Disney and their effort. Some blast the ‘toon for not providing an African-American prince for the heroine to fall in love with (his race is ambivalent, since his home country doesn’t exist in real life).

Some blast the blasters for not using the term ‘black,’ since not everyone of this ethnic group is actually an American (so says the Jamaican-born Brit who really went off on a rant here, and I have to admit that I’ve wondered about that…my kids report a history teacher who taught in class that Nelson Mandela was African-American. Um, not so much.)

It’s making me dizzy. It’s also annoying me a little. Only one commenter caught the real problem here, the real bigotry that plagues our civilization, the one that Disney is never, ever, ever going to address:

WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET AN OVERWEIGHT PRINCESS? When are we going to get a princess who isn’t a size 2 and still inexplicably gets a prince?

Eldrick, Eldrick burning bright…

There’s that story told about a little boy, apparently healthy, born to healthy parents, who wouldn’t talk. No matter what anyone did, no matter how many experts they consulted, the child just wasn’t talking.  One day, when he was four years old, sitting at dinner, he looked up from the meatloaf he was eating and stunned everyone when he said, “This tastes bad.”

His parents were amazed. Obviously this kid could talk…why hadn’t he before now, they asked.

He simply said, “Everything’s been fine up to now.”

I could insert some long, rambling soliloquy here about time spent away. I could even make up some cockamamie story about how I was abducted by aliens and missed about a year.

I would be lying. So I won’t even try. Let’s just say that everything has been fine up ’til now, but now I have something to talk about.

And THAT, of course, is Tiger Woods, and all the hoopla about his apparent inability to keep his putter in his pants, even though he must have the hand/eye coordination of those aliens who abducted me.

Just some observations:

- Would everyone quit the heck talking about how amazed they are that Tiger would cheat on his gorgeous wife? Enough, already. Yes, his wife is gorgeous. No, that doesn’t seem to stop anyone from cheating. When I was a Weight Watchers leader, one of the things I would caution my members about was the belief that looking great would attract and retain a better quality of lover.

In fact, I’m thinking that the opposite may be true: that a woman is actually better off, monogamous-wise, if she’s average-looking. My reasoning is this: the gorgeous woman gets everyone after her, just because. The pool of men chasing an Elin Nordegren includes some great guys, to be sure. But it also includes a huge supply of mouth-breathers who are going to chase a gorgeous blonde with no thought to whether they have anything in common with her or whether she knows all the words to the Boomtown Rats discography.

A woman like me? With average looks? When I was single, my pool of available men didn’t have one mouth-breather. If a guy was interested in me, he was not going to be easily hypnotized by simple, stunning good looks.  Any guy who talked to me was much more likely to be a real keeper, by default, because my looks had pre-weeded out the non-discriminators who focused only on looks.

- Would everyone else quit talking about how every. single. man (or married man, for that matter) would cheat on his partner if beautiful women were throwing themselves at him?

That’s just insulting to men and I don’t believe it’s true. Would a lot of men conveniently lose their wedding rings if a gorgeous woman came on to them? Sure; I’ll bite. But not every man will.

- If I had to guess why Tiger’s life started melting the week of Thanksgiving, I’d say that it’s a direct result of  Todd Marinovich Syndrome. Seriously: Tiger was putting at age three on Merv Griffin…there had to be distinct pressure on him, some of it self-inflicted, from a young age. Even with his prodigious athletic ability, you don’t win all those majors without incredible hard work and self-sacrifice. I’m thinking that after all that deprivation, something had to give.

I just hope that the next stunt from Mr. Woods doesn’t involve a porn star/ex-hooker flipping off  Touchdown Jesus. 

It would appear that the only endorsement Tiger’s gonna be able to get in the near future will be for Tang.

Poontang, that is.

(Please. I HAD TO. IT WAS SITTING RIGHT THERE, WAITING TO BE SAID.)

Now I get it: I’m living in a Twilight Zone episode.

One thing that’s really fun about having kids is watching them experience things for the first time that are old hat to you. Disneyland. “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Snow.  That kind of thing.

My thirteen year old son discovered Twilight Zone reruns in July, 2007, when some cable channel ran a marathon over Independence Day weekend. He was enchanted, and it was fun to watch him mesmerized by the story lines and astounded by the conclusions, most of which are so old hat and cliched to us decrepit oldsters that we use Zone synopses to describe situations: “You know what I mean! It’s like Burgess Meredith with his glasses broken!”

We’re still wading through the recordings of the July, 2008 marathon and last night watched a classic: Little Girl Lost. The boys were entranced! Where is the girl? What if the dog gets lost, too? Can I make my own voice come out of the TV set?

I was entranced, too, only now I was looking at this through different eyes…If I went upstairs and couldn’t find a kid, I would assume that he or she was stuck under a carton of engineered hardwood flooring. Who do you call, by the way, when you can HEAR your child but not see her? The police? The fire department comes to mind, but they’d probably rip down all the drywall. I can see calling a trusted neighbor, but would it occur to me to call a physicist?

I would hope that my child, if he rolled under his bed and into the Twilight Zone, would think of something creative to say or do, as opposed to the piteous bleating that Bettina Miller cranked out. I do know that if we sent Elmer The Basset Hound in after her he would NOT retrieve the girl but would instead wreak such havoc that the denizens of The Fourth Dimension would probably declare war on us and hilarity would ensue.

And what does finding another dimension in the second bedroom do to your property values? Is this a detriment or an advantage? “Who cares if the house only has one bathroom? It has an extra dimension!” Who needs a swingset when there’s a cool place where everyone is upside down just on the other side of your wall?

And now a recorded word from your doctor.

Or my doctor, rather. Thanks to those pesky HIPAA laws, I’m not even sure anyone’s allowed to admit that they even *have* a doctor anymore.

Remember Marcus Welby, MD? Remember Joe Gannon? (Remember TV doctors from the 60’s and 70’s? They never joked around and did silly things? They took my health seriously. That’s what’s wrong with our healthcare system now. Too many Grey’s Anatomy docs doing the horizontal bop in the supply closet and not enough Alex Stones who kept their pants on because they were married to Donna Reed and that should be enough for anybody!)

Remember when they had just diagnosed The Disease of the Week and they had their hapless victim patient in their clutches and they had to share the news that the damned thing was going to be impossible to cure, Marcus and Joe and Trapper John would always haul the doomed, wan-looking young woman (well, for Joe it was always a young woman, with whom he’d fall hopelessly in love…Marcus was always looking for a good cup of decaf and was immune to the charms of his patients, and Trapper John passed off the gorgeous ones to Gonzo, who apparently worked a stripper pole to get through med school and why don’t my doctors look like that????)…

Oh. Did I say that out loud?

Anyway, the proud owner of TDOTW would always get the news in a book-lined office. Always. Never sitting on the exam table clutching a paper gown around them, or trying to make the ends meet in the back as they limped down the hall clutching the urine sample no one told them what to do with.

No, everyone sat around looking very grave in the doctor’s office hearing about the prognosis of TDOTW.

I just got done with most of my annual well-woman exam, which is called that because I am, technically, well. Right now. But my dear doctor, who looks nothing like Gonzo or even Joe Gannon, is determined to root through every molecule of my being until she finds something wrong, at which point I will cease to be a ‘well’ woman and then I’ll become a wet-my-pants-worried woman. (In two years, when I turn fifty and become colonoscopy-bait, she’s going to start referring me to spelunking professionals who will *really* leave no stone unturned, but that’s for a different day.)

So, to fulfill my doctor’s quest for peaked-looking molecules I got referred out for bloodwork and ultrasounds and mammograms and whatnot and I obediently complied. And then I wait for the phone calls, because she’s not going to schedule an appointment for me to sit in her office. I’m not even going to get a phone call from a live human being.

Instead, I get Terror Waiting, a diabolical new way to deliver the news that I have TDOTW. It works this way:

1. Phone rings.

2. I answer with the traditional “hello?”

3. I am greeted with a Perky, automated Voice, informing me that I have A Message From My Doctor. (The perky voice has never even dreamed that she had TDOTW, so she remains unsympathetic.)

4. I am told to call a number. I frantically try to find a pen. There is no pen. There might be a crayon. No, wait. There’s a pencil with no lead. Oh, crap. Why don’t I just slice open my finger with a steak knife (that, I can find) and scrawl the phone number in blood on my wall???? Because there is no way I will be able to sleep tonight if I don’t get that message; I’ll lie awake for hours wondering if maybe the Perky Voice sounded sad there because she knew something???

5. I manage to transcribe the number.

6. I call it. I verify that I am, indeed, me several times. And then the Perky Voice deigns to deliver my message.

7. Which tells me that everything is fine. I have cholesterol levels that would make Marcus Welby weep with joy. And no TDOTW.

For now.

 

Cover me, I’ve got playground duty.

First, the third-graders organize: http://mominterrupted.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/chickens-are-not-organized/

So it follows that the teachers would get wise: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-teacher4apr04,1,2917312.story

Insert your own joke….here.

That was no basset hound; that was my wife!

Just in case you’re wondering, that’s not a picture of me up there. That’s Elmer, the Infamous Basset Hound, being carried around by my husband (see back of head to the left). What makes that picture really delightful is not the sheer length of that dog’s ears, nor is it the befuddled expression on his little puppy face as he perches six feet off the ground.

No, the real humor lies in the backstory: that when we got Elmer (the day before that picture was taken) my husband decreed that if we must have a dog, well, that was one thing. But the dog was to be raised with the strictest limitations during his formative months: if Elmer was not playing with a family member, he was to be in his crate. Period. End of story.

So it makes perfect sense that He Who Decreed turned out to be the one to carry the dog everywhere like a gigantic purse. Crate? What crate? I don’t see any crate. I’m holding the dog. It made even more sense that the dog’s feet didn’t touch the ground for weeks after he came to live with us. All that sense explains the irony in that, if we find Elmer hiding under the couch nursing the telltale remnants of a bedroom slipper, the remnants are usually HWD’s.

Speaking of dogs, I’d like to discuss looks for a moment. Not dirty looks. *My* looks.

I spent most of my own formative years, not in a dog crate, but in a pre-pubescent haze wishing I were better looking. I spent my college years being the ‘friend.’ (You know what I mean: two frat boys debating who gets the pretty girl and who gets the ‘friend.’)

It was only when I was in my thirties that I came to appreciate what a gift it is not to be Gisele Bundchen’s stunt double.

For example, when you look like me and a guy likes you, there’s better than even money that it’s because he really likes you, and not because he’s just filling time while his best friend sweet-talks the pretty one.

When you look like me:

• There’s no chance anyone will be unpleasantly surprised when they see you without makeup.
• There are no looks to lose. There’s even a chance you might get better-looking with age.
• No photographer is going to live to get a picture of you in a bathing suit, because it’s a foregone conclusion that your rear end looks like Fang (Hagrid’s dog from the Harry Potter movies), so where’s the story?

For the record, this is what I look like: http://mominterrupted.wordpress.com/avatar/mominterrupted-128.jpg?1207200941 The picture is notable in that

• I’m wearing lipstick. It’s the first thing my mother noticed and 
• at no point can you see the resemblance to Fang but
• you may start wondering about my resemblance to Hagrid.

© E. Stocking Evans 2008