--"He's from this country, Mexicans don't read him, so that's good enough for me."--Donald Trump
--"The one thing I didn't delete from my private server."--Hillary Clinton
--"Jimaschizzle!"--Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr. (aka Snoop Dogg)
Original humor, personal rants, nuggets and snippets from columnists and essayists, and other items for your edification and amusement.
By Jim Szantor
Rhetorical questions, questionable rhetoricand whimsical observations
about the absurdities of contemporary life
BY JIM SZANTOR
The chili could be
malicious and downright unforgiving. The
omelets sometimes look like yellow Play-Doh flecked with foreign bodies. The coffee isn’t strong enough to defend
itself, and the waitress puts the plates down with an offhand finality. Breakfast served any time. Eggs any style. The soup? It’s navy bean.
It’s easy to put down the greasy spoon, that
ubiquitous testament to the tacky and the Tums.
But by whatever name—luncheonette, diner, café, grill, coffee shop,
ptomaine parlor—it used to account for 40-50 percent of the eat-out dollar,
according to industry sources. Now? Not so much, as changing tastes and the sweep
of urban renewal have relegated it into a virtual museum piece--a slow-food
square peg in a round hole of a fast-food, instant-everything, drive-through
and highly hyphenated universe. Some things just sort of happen, with no grand
design or Machiavellian malice aforethought.
But the greasy spoon was a slice of Americana
that clung to the fork with nary a nod to fad or fashion. There were no vegetarian plates, as meat and
potatoes carried the day and the night and the mortgage. The Serv-Naps filed out of their countertop
compartments as the daily duet of eat-and-runs and lingerers played their way
through an unconducted arrangement. The
beef was “govt.-inspected”—but did it pass?
There was a counter-top jukebox selector, with some pop, some country,
some rock but definitely no Rachmaninoff.
You know the
place. Everyone, whether through
happenstance, resignation or momentary indifference has ended up at one of
these Edward Hopper-esque establishments, clutching a greasy knife or fork. How
the spoon, which generally just stirred the coffee, got left holding the bag is
a mysteryforever lost in the mists of time.
Whatever their
culinary merits, one could develop an irrational affection for the emporiums of
this genre. And they were more than
eating places. Sociologically they could
be an over-the-counter salve for the tattered psyches of the urban disenfranchised,
who hoped they wouldn’t close on Christmas and trap them in their cheap hotel
rooms. They were sort of halfway hash
house social clubs, with no membership list but plenty of dues, where the help
was as transient as the trade.
Some of these motley
establishments were actually respectable—sometimes good—and do not deserve to
be painted in such tawdry tones. Almost
always locally owned, they were probably more consistent at their level than
some tonier “destination dining” spots and had a more devoted clientele, who
prided themselves on being regulars, never had to state their orders and were
probably as good as the National Guard should someone get surly with the
waitress. Perhaps the key to their fate
is how many such places are opening these days, not how many are closing.
But while there’s
time, the eyes above the menu survey the scene and laugh and marvel at a few
things:
--The waitress
always looks like she is glad they sre out of whatever they are out of.
--The catsup bottle
says “restaurant pack,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.
--The busboy is a
strong man--a bit too strong—but he didn’t shower up with Irish Spring.
--There’s a
fill-up-the-sugar-container fetish that is hard to fathom. Today’s two fingers’ worth on top of yesterday’s
two fingers’ worth. The sugar at the
bottom was refined in 1952.
--The “chef” has
more tattoos than specialties and thinks “Guide Michelin” plays for the
Montreal Canadiens.
--The cream pies and
such are kept at a tongue-numbing 33 degrees.
--The sandwich
plates are larger than they need to be, but the dinner plates. . . .
--The cashier/owner
always seems to be eating ice cream out of a coffee cup on a stool near the
cash register.
--They honor the
“law” that says coleslaw shall be served in flimsy paper or plastic cups and in
minute amounts.
--The spaghetti
always comes with “rich meat sauce.”
--The menu always
has an item or two that no one has ever ordered. Who orders Red Snapper in places like this?
--If you want
something to go, you have to stand in a special place, probably so they won’t
confuse you with people who prefer to eat standing up with their hands in their
pockets.
--The floor is
usually brown-and-yellow tile squares, in accordance with the Seedy Restaurant
Color Scheme Act of 1942.
--Some old guy
always comes in about 10 p.m. and orders a bowl of bran cereal.
---The menu is a
Sargasso Sea of misspelled names and fanciful if not fraudulent
descriptions. From the Broiler. From the Sea.
But never From the Freezer.
--The server never
fills in all those bureaucratic squares at the top of the “guest check” and writes
diagonally across the lined form. What’s
more, she has a Ph.D. in abbreviations.
--One of the
customers always looks like he is doing his income tax at one of the tables.
--Somebody always
walks by the window and waves in just before he disappears.
--You’re the only
one at the counter, and some guy walks in and sits right next to you.
--The french-fried
shrimp comes with enough cocktail sauce to cover about two pieces.
--The table’s wobble
is always half-corrected with a dirty folded napkin or three.
--The clock is
always stopped at something like 2:42.
--The Muzak is
always playing something like “Never on Sunday” or “Nom Domenticar.”
--The cook flip-slides the plates across the high stainless-steel
counter, and they always stop short, as if equipped with disk brakes.
--The cashier always
puts your change down on a spikey rubber thing that looks like an oversized
scalp massager.
****************************************************************************
In the early morning
lull, after the midnight rush hour subsides, the buzz of the fluorescent now
equals the sizzle of the grill as the beat cop walks in and sinks into the
house booth.
“Say,
where’s Sally? She off tonight?”
“Nah, she quit. Went back with her old man.”
“Oh . . . . Say, you
got any a that meat loaf left. Haven’t
eaten all day.”
“Nah, meat loaf’s
out. All’s I got left is thueringer.”
“Thueringer,
huh. Well . . . gimme a piece of that
blueberry.”
(Illustration: Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” 1942)
Forecast Follies (or . . . "Here's Jim with the Weather")
Mark Twain famously said, ”Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
And since reports of Mr. Twain’s death were not highly exaggerated, I’d like to fill in for him and address something we apparently can’t do anything about, either—the nonsensical, downright insulting barrage of verbiage issuing forth daily from what used to be called TV “weathermen” (and they were all of that gender back in the day) but are now known as “meteorologists,” as if space rocks were an omnipresent factor in our lives. As in, “60 percent chance of precipitation by daybreak, with 0.000001 percent chance of meteor collision.” (Meteor showers do occur, but usually are not perilous enough to cancel your picnic plans. They have yet to be seen in the Bus Stop Forecasts or the Car Wash Advisories that “humanize” these bloated segments.)
The weather portions (there are usually two—a fairly brief “teaser” early on and later, the Big Production) of most TV newscasts are, first of all, way too long (and coupled with all those time-wasting teasers about “what’s coming up,” leave precious little time for what we actually tune in for—news). We don’t need to know where the Alberta Clipper fizzled, that an El Nino is in mid-formation or that a front in central Montana caused a “dusting” in northern Iowa. And as for those “pockets of snow” we were supposed to get last night, I looked in mine and, blessedly, found none. But the station has paid serious coin for all of the glitzy graphics and radar capabilities, and by God, they are going to be used, if even just to show us what the rainfall looks like in downtown Racine “right at this very moment.” Gripping.
And then
there is the universal, comically contrived “personalization” factor, apparently
de rigueur on all stations. It’s never “Thursday’s forecast,” it’s (ahem), “the
forecast for your Thursday . . . .”
One can only envision the rapturous glow viewers must feel when luxuriating
in the warmth of that gratuitous pronoun! (As if that forecast applies only to
you, no one else. Ah, exclusivity.)
If one were to awaken from a 30-year coma, he or she would probably be mystified not only by cellphones, laptops and GPS devices but also by the existence of a curious phenomenon known as The Weather Channel: All weather, all the time--a nonstop barrage of jargon, gaudy graphics and arcane factoids. How did we ever exist without it? When it’s a slow weather day (and in this day of acute climate change, there’s always a crisis on the front burner somewhere), footage of past calamities will fill the bill for weather junkies or the aficionados of disaster porn.
Those with (ahem) backgrounds as editors find the nightly weather segments to be cringefests in the extreme. Temps don’t just drop into the 20s, they “drop down,” as if “dropping up” were a physical possibility. Is snow or rain in the forecast? No, we’ll have “snow showers” or “rain showers.” And it’s never just “sun”; it’s “sunshine,” as if that extra syllable ramps up the warmth. These folks never pass up an opportunity to gild the lily, because we’re often told of the possibility of “rain events” or “snow events,” which leads me, at least, to wonder if I will need a ticket, if there will be guest speakers and if refreshments will be served. (Spotty Showers? That was my clown name back in the day, a story to be told when the Vernal Equinox rolls around. Which this year, in the Northern Hemisphere, will be at 10:33 a.m. CST on March 20. Mark your calendar.)
But my pique rises to fever pitch in winter, when we’re often told during our seven-month layered-look season to “bundle up,” as if we lifelong Midwesterners have no prior experience with winter weather--as if we had all just parachuted in from Jamaica in our underwear and had no idea on how to adorn ourselves in these brutal climes. We don’t need to be told how to dress when icicles form—we’ve been there, done that—and resent the insinuation. One of the local weather wordsmiths hails from San Diego, and he’s telling us what to wear? Outrageous. I’d like to send him back to sunny California on his surfboard or his skateboard, preferably when the barometric pressure equals the dew point and, optimally, on a jet stream.
More and more women are seen these days holding forth during TV weather segments, and they have proven themselves every bit the equal of the men—long-winded and grammatically challenged. Positive role models apparently are non-existent; the often-parodied “weather bunnies” are blessedly a thing of the past (their anatomical attributes far outweighed their academic credentials), and the first exemplary female trailblazer with any gravitas has yet to be found.
So please, Mr., Mrs. or Ms. Meteorologist, do us all a favor: Stop behaving as if you are getting paid by the word, spare me the details about weather phenomena that have no bearing on our locale and, most of all, stop insulting our intelligence. Chill out, stick to the weather and let us worry about our wardrobes. Failing that, my fondest wish is that I could take all of you, get you all bundled up and sent to the Sahara. There’s a 99.99 percent chance that you won’t need an umbrella or have to worry about a lake effect, a polar vortex or banal banter with the anchor desk.
And now here’s Al with the Sports.
--Jim Szantor
Biden and the college debt issue
He risks rebranding Democrats as "the party of the free lunch"
SCOTUS leak a symptom of institutional breakdown
Retooling the party for an age of disorder
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/opinion/seven-lessons-democrats-need-to-learn-fast.html
Amend the Constitution to bar senators from the presidency
The
Senate is less about legislating and more about self-promotion
The rise and fall of the White House reporter
A once-plum position has turned a bit sour
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/29/the-fall-of-the-white-house-correspondent-00028272
What to expect . . .
. . . from this year’s hotter and drier summer
The simplest way to explain the metaverse
It can be done in three words--but some experts provide larger context and clear up some major misperceptionsDiscovery! Breaking down plastics in days, not centuries
A group of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have created a modified enzyme that can break down plastics that would otherwise take centuries to degrade in a matter of days.
The researchers, who [recently] published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, used machine learning to land on mutations to create a fast-acting protein that can break down building blocks of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a synthetic resin used in fibers for clothing and plastic that, per the study, accounts for 12 percent of global waste.
It does so through a process called depolymerization, in which a catalyst separates the building blocks that make up PET into their original monomers, which can then be repolymerized—built back into virgin plastic—and converted into other products. Most impressively, the enzymes broke down the plastic in one week.
“One thing we can do is we can break this down into its initial monomers,” Hal Alper, professor in Chemical Engineering and author on the paper, told Motherboard over the phone. “And that's what the enzyme does. And then once you have your original monomer, it’s as if you're making fresh plastic from scratch, with the benefit that you don't need to use additional petroleum resources.”
“This has advantages over traditional belt recycling,” Alper added. “If you were to melt the plastic and then remold it, you'd start to lose the integrity of the plastic each round that you go through with recycling. Versus here, if you're able to depolymerize and then chemically repolymerize, you can be making virgin PET plastic each and every time.”
Their work adds to an existing line of query on plastic-eating enzymes, which were first recorded in 2005 and have since been followed by the discovery of 19 distinct enzymes, the paper notes. These are derived from naturally occurring bacteria that have been located living on plastic in the environment.
But many of these naturally occurring enzymes are made up of permutations of proteins that function well in their specific environments, but are limited by temperature and pH conditions, and thus can’t be used in a wide range of settings, like across recycling centers, the authors argue. The enzyme Alper and his team discovered, by contrast, can break down 51 types of PET across a range of temperature and pH conditions.
The researchers named the enzyme FAST-PETase, acronymic for “functional, active, stable, and tolerant PETase,” and they landed on its exact structure using machine learning. An algorithm was fed with 19,000 protein structures and taught to predict the positions of amino acids in a structure that are not optimized for their local environments. They also used the formula to rearrange amino acids from existing types of PETase into new positions, identified improved combinations and landed on one structure that saw 2.4 times more activity than an existing PETase enzyme at 40 degrees Celsius and 38 times more activity at 50 degrees Celsius.
It was then tested across a range of temperatures and pH conditions,and continued to outperform existing variants.
“What you see in nature is probably somewhat optimal, at least within the local environment around each and every one of those amino acids,” Alper said. “We can start looking at the protein of interest, and start going through each and every one of the amino acids in there and looking at its own microenvironment and seeing what fits and what doesn't fit.”
Alper and his team’s hope is that their enzyme will be more scalable than most, and will truly put PET-ase to the test of tackling the global plastics crisis. Already able to withstand a range of conditions, FAST-PETase must now prove that it can be both “portable and affordable at large industrial scale.”
First, Alper says, he and his team must test FAST-PETase on the wide range of different types of PET found in the waste stream, and the detritus that’s often found in plastic bottles or on top of plastic containers when it’s recycled. Should the researchers find an enzyme or group of enzymes with the robustness to be used practically, they believe it can help tackle the “billions of tons” of waste in our environment.
--Audrey Carleton, Vice
Why the GOP loves grumpy, middle-aged men
That seems to be the lesson, anyway, from a new focus group of eight such men convened by the New York Times to gauge their feelings on the state of the country, and of masculinity itself. There wasn't a lot of happiness in the group.
The guys grumbled about crime and cancel culture, and generally
seemed to long for a better time when --there's no other way to put this--America
was great. Nobody thought that racism or sexism is much of a problem in the
21st Century. They did think that men don't have it so great these
days, though. One offered up action star Jason Statham as his model of
masculinity.
Their complaints seemed at once half-formed and ancient.
Danny, a 47-year-old realtor from Florida, complained about
younger men "wearing very feminine clothes" with "tight skinny
jeans, with no socks and velvet shoes." (Hilariously, another participant
told Danny he was "a little too macho.")
Christopher, a 51-year-old broker from Maryland, declared that
feminists "are actually purveyors of men-bashing."
And Robert, a 50-year-old infrastructure analyst from Texas,
suggested the war in Ukraine was somehow the result of America's
less-than-stout manliness.
"To me, the stuff that's going on with Ukraine--the United
States hasn't filled our role as being masculine as a nation in that
aspect," he said. "And that's why Putin is doing what he's doing,
because when you don't step up into certain roles, then the stronger person is
going to take over."
It's easy to make fun of some of this stuff, and on social
media, lots of folks have. But let's try to take it seriously for a
moment. Conservative men are unhappy? OK. What exactly are we supposed
to do with that information? It's not really clear.
We probably shouldn't expect eight random individuals to come to
the table with bullet-pointed policy ideas. But except for their problems with
crime and traffic--there were a lot of traffic complaints--the group's
frustrations seemed unfixable, the product of a deeply felt but inchoate sense
that the culture has passed them by. That's old news. Conservatism is
practically defined by its nostalgia for a time when men were men and America
ruled the world, not to mention an obsession with movie star action
heroes. We have always been at war with guys in skinny jeans and velvet shoes.
That which can't be fixed can be exploited, however. It's probably
not a coincidence that Republican senators duck questions about their
agenda while delivering speeches about the crisis of masculinity and
waging war over Dr. Seuss books. The grumpiness of conservative men can't
be solved and never will be. It will have to serve instead as an infinitely
renewable political resource, a font of grievances fueling the Republican
Party, forever and ever.
--Joel Mathis, The Week
10 David Foster Wallace quotes
1. “We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?”
2. “Lonely
people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic
costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect
them too strongly.”
3.
“It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the
idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually
involves people feeling some way about you—I mean, people wonder why we walk
around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out
4.
“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted
and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties—all these chase
away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one
box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music,
really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion—these are the places
(for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured,
treated.”
5.
“The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against
loneliness.”
6.
“Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being.”
7. “Good
fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
8.
“There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something
or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these
brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel
unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and
that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in
fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.”
9. “We
all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy’s impossible. But if a piece
of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we
might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This
is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that
simple.”
10. “Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”
Regrettable rules of high-tech happenstance
1. The likelihood that any digital device will fail is directly
proportional to your need for that device to work properly.
2. Your laptop will wait to die until just after your warranty for the system
has expired. The encouraging news is that taking out an extended warranty
of one year will likely extend your machine's life by exactly that length of
time.
3. Voice mail messages always break up and become unintelligible just as
the caller is leaving his or her call-back number. Note that this rule
applies only to important calls that you absolutely need to return.
4. "While supplies last" is a synonym for "until the guy
right in front of you buys the last one."
5. You know the next great version with all the features you really
want? It won't be released until right after you've bought the previous
version. (And if you decide to wait for that next great version, it will be
delayed. Probably for a long time. Or maybe forever.)
--Steve Fox, PC World magazine
Coloring inside the lines
I wrote a play, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," about a conversation between Picasso and Einstein. There's a scene with an art dealer, and he's waxing rhapsodic about a painting, and he says, "You know what makes this painting great? The frame. It forces a containment, and the painter has to work within the boundaries. They have to innovate within." I like that [about bluegrass]. Here's what you've got, now what you can do with it?
--Steve Martin
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Soloist Jim Szantor as lead alto David Bixler gives the cutoff on the final chord.
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Part of the evening's program.
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