This week's Long & Short Reviews question asked reviewers to describe our senses of humo(u)r. (I'm American, so mine is a sense of humor.)
I think we did that before, and maybe the best way to define my sense of humor is to give some examples of things at which I've laughed, by way of explaining where I've been for the last couple of days. Not blogging much, not reading e-mail much...Partly it was weather. The wind is picking up, this morning. Both Internet and electricity are blinking on and off. I expect both to fail today.
Well...I started reading a novel. Most of the writers who have kindly sent me review copies, which are piling up a bit this week, may relax. It's not your novel. It's like a novel for boys, only the protagonist is a mature woman, and it's like action-adventure, only the adventure moves at the pace of an adventure story planned to be a five- or ten-volume series. It's not my kind of thing at all. It's not bad, for the kind of thing it is. It just leaves me cold. Female veteran fights giant space alien, ought by rights to die from the injuries she incurs, but the aliens are benign and fix her right up so in the next chapter she's good for another round, because the alien is teaching her alien martial arts Er. Um.
The idea that these space aliens might be some sort of metaphor for what Trump flatters with the name of "immigrants," which is what they'd like to be, no doubt, but they're not immigrants in the sense that my husband was an immigrant...anyway, whatever they are, that wasn't good for so much as a snicker, either.
Then an Edge started to appear. My little town is fortuitously nestled in among some good-sized hills, which we like to call mountains, though a person needs no special equipment to climb up and down the highest one in a day. Anyway they keep off most of the bad weather. Weather maps always show some sort of weather melodrama taking pace a few hundred miles away, and explain that what we are getting is the edge of it. If the TV did not tell us that these things were Edges, we'd think they were plain old rain, as our elders used to call them. This Edge had a nasty dark yellow look and a lot of thunder about it. A few minutes after the thunder began to be heard, the lights went out.
The idea that the weather wanted me to take a break from all these fight scenes, which didn't sound to me as if they'd be teaching a US Army veteran anything new, was good for a laugh. I curled up with a real printed book and listened to the rain on the roof. The printed book was a snarky comedy-romance-mystery-adventure novel about an advertising agency who make up ridiculous ads for ridiculous products. I laughed.
The electricity came back before it got too dark to read. I read some e-mail. Robert Reich was wallowing in the unpardonable sin of impenitence. Hatespews about Trump, he said, are all right because Trump is so hateful.
Well, he's wrong. Trump is very easy to dislike; almost as easy to dislike as his old buddy Bill Clinton. Murder is even easier to dislike. Let's all face the fact that most D voters don't support the party bosses' agenda, and are if anything more bigoted than R voters, but they vote for the party that offers them handouts. The disability pension vote is a solid D bloc. Many of those disability pensions are going to people with mental illness. Some of those people are using psychotropic medications known to cause hallucinations and delusions; some are taking /SSRI antidepressants known to cause pseudomemories and homicide-suicide thinking. This is not an audience that need to hear blather about "eliminating Trump" or comparisons between Trump and Hitler. This audience need to hear "We respectfully disagree with Trump." If you don't respect Trump for any other reason you should have some respect for his being able to stand up and make speeches while being eighty years old. D pundits need to stop saying anything their audience might hear as encouragement to murder. R poliicians have demonstrated too much willingness to think about keeping censorship around, and using it to pay Ds back, when what we all need to be agreeing on is that censorship harms people and enables crime. And D pundits need to demonstrate intelligence by learning to disagree without screaming hate and calling for violence. They could study many R writers and web sites for good examples.
They could study this web site. This web site hated a lot of the policies of all three of the presidential administrations it has survived, but it has not called for violence or for hate of persons. When it has considered our Presidents as people, it has found either lighthearted chaff or positive encouragement for each one. If only because the members of this web site don't think the bad ideas of any of the three deserved the boost in popularity a martyr gives to an idea, we like to think of politicians who endorse bad ideas just being turned out to pasture, not being murdered.
The idea of D pundits putting a lid on their selfrighteousness, learning to say "We respectfully disagree" and "The weak point in this plan is..." instead of "Rs are evil, or alien, 'weird,' or in any way more 'deplorable' than e.g. Hunter Biden," was good for a laugh. If some of these people had to talk civilly or not talk at all, they really might never be able to talk at all. Picture some Ds who obviously did not learn from the good examples of Art Buchwald, Pete Hamill, Mike Royko, or even Michael Moore, getting on their TV shows or their podcasts, saying, "Trump makes me so angry I can't even talk about him without expressing my violent anger. I don't want to promote violence so..." Then they line up a collection of newspapers and printouts and suchlike, and a big roll of duct tape. Then they put the duct tape across their mouths. For the rest of the show they hold up headlines and point. That could be funny.
Anyway a visitor came up the road, and we ran to and fro, and knowledge was very little increased. I did have an opportunity to observe how to tell which neighborhood out here on the Virginia-Tennessee border people come from. If their home is a farm they say, ritualistically, that the rain is good for crops, even if their actual crops are drowning and going moldy, because that is what they say. If they live in Gate City proper they worry about leaks and mold. If they live in Weber City, which extends from the downhill side of Moccasin Creek to the Holston River floodplain, they worry about floods. Their concerns aren't funny, but the ritual in which they air them without variation, year after year, every time we catch one of these Edges, struck me as funny. Though not so funny that I laughed at people's worries. At least, not until I got home.
Then on Wednesday I was researching another butterfly story, and my attention was drawn to the vagaries of Google's algorithms. I tested the latest one by doing a search for a popular post at this web site. If you want to find a post at this web site, Google has decided, you need to open the web site and then search for the post. If you type into the search field, say, "rice biscuit bread," or "Grandma Bonnie Peters' rice biscuit bread," you will be steered to corporate recipe pages for, say, "Russian Honey Cookies." Well, the R, I, C, and E are in there somewhere, although of course any recipe identified as Russian is going to use the wheat, rye, or barley that grow in Russia; how not? But Google really wants to make sure you see links, probably more than one link if you search through more than one page of results, for those corporate commercial sites and do not see any links to any private people's or small, non-paying businesses' sites. That's not funny. I laughed, though. We might as easily laugh as cry and, having seen documentation of Google's selling out, we should probably laugh at anything that is still "top rated on Google." Definitely students should not be allowed to use search engines when writing term papers. (Bing is worse than Google about this and Yahoo is not much better. Several other search engines claim that they don't sell your search history to spammers, which may be a gain, but what they search is Google so if you want to see that other ninety percent of the search results they're useless.)
There's nothing funny about our great howling need for a new, impartial, objective, and complete search engine, but seeing Russian cookie recipes in the place where GBP's Rice Biscuit Bread ought to be was funny. I think she would probably have laughed. And she might have tried to work out a gluten-free version of those cookies.
Then the butterfly story was done and I went into town again and learned that this particular hurricane's Edge, which was still pouring rain, had generated a Real Tornado with a confirmed funnel cloud in Tennessee. The eastern third of Tennessee gets very few tornadoes and this is the very first one they've ever recorded in September. This is absolutely not funny. The tornado was far enough away that it's not draining local food banks and shelters, but we know that funnel cloud is going to be used to funnel our tax dollars into the towns that saw it. Well, that's a better use for tax dollars than most.
In town someone wanted to celebrate someone's birthday. I think that's sort of funny, for birthdays after number 25. Most people don't like to tell you exactly how much more than 25 years old they are, so why celebrate the day? A television just happened to be blaring the answer to that question. According to some game show's opinion poll, American adults think a birthday is an occasion to eat cake. Urgh. Ick. The first rule of survival, once you find out that you are not lazy, stupid, crazy, a liar, or a hypochondriac, but simply a celiac, is NO SOCIAL EATING. NOT EVER. As a celiac you have to learn what you can and can't eat, and prepare what you can eat for yourself.. You can not allow other people to feed you what they eat, because the majority of it will lead to more of that usually minor illness with symptoms you don't even want to talk about but you can't pull your weight on a job just the same. If you know people who need to be told more than twice that "celiac" means "person who does ALL of per own cooking," you just have to stop talking to them. And especially you need to stay away from birthdays. Because cake.
"You could still eat the frosting," the baker used to say when I was hanging out in the cafe. It was a BAKERY and cafe, so bleep was a celiac even doing there? Every really good cafe contains at least one underpaid, adorably scruffy writer who hangs out all day, nursing a drink and writing. What I used to be doing there was drinking coffee. When I could scrape the money together I bought their gluten-free menu offerings, and, due to glyphosate being sprayed right on food during those years, some of them made me sicker than natural wheat would have done, but I gave the baker points for trying. But although celiacs are known for eating things that are normally eaten with wheat bread by spoonfuls, and nobody thinks twice about eating a fork-load of frosting when eating a slice of thickly frosted cake, I always drew the line at ordering a dish of cake frosting.
But this cake was baked in a big-chain store and, no, I could not eat the frosting. Celiacs have to read labels. Labels are normally printed in tiny illegible type so we have to dig out a magnifying glass and read the label before eating, say, a spoonful of cake frosting. The box in which this cake came was typical. It had FOOD CITY printed all over it in large multicolor type and the ingredients printed in 6-point sans-serif type that ran right over the FOOD CITY logo. Somebody didn't want too much attention paid to what was in the cake.
And I very soon saw why not. Under the magnifying glass, the label revealed that the cake was made with, among other vile substances, propylene glycol in the frosting.
What's propylene glycol? some educated adults will ask. It's not food. You never see it even in the spice section at a store. Propylene glycol is a chemical that apparently tastes sweet and creamy, so when a no-account bakery, like the ones in some big-chain stores, wants to maximize profits they substitute propylene glycol for some of the cream, butter, and eggs. Propylene glycol is usually sold as antifreeze. The kind you're warned to keep away from pets or children, because even animals who don't like sugar have been known to lap up enough antifreeze to kill them. One or two slurps will kill a dog.
Apparently the FDA now allows despicable people to put propylene glycol in food. When we get a competent person in charge of the FDA again, anyone known to have put propylene glycol in food will get twenty years of solitary confinement, food and water to be provided when and as relatives deliver them, and I'm not sure why their cells would need to be more than 5'x5'x5' either.
Never buy or eat cakes from Food City. They are made with antifreeze.
If I'd eaten that cake "just to be sociable" it's unlikely that I would have been able to chop through a healthy maple tree that was blocking the road, a bit later. A bigger, older, dead tree had fallen on top of this maple tree. Parts of the old dead tree and the whole trunk of the maple were lying right across the road. When I came home it was wet; I scrambled around the fallen tree and waited and hoped someone would drive up in a truck that had a chain saw in the back and saw up the dead tree, some time on Thursday. No one did. Finally during the last hour of daylight I went out and gave the tree twenty whacks with an axe, twenty strokes with a hand saw, repeat, and I was more than three-quarters of the way through it when a larger person finally drove up, contained his laughter--well I thought my axemanship was funny--and used his weight to break through what was left of the tree. There would have been a lot of food-grade maple sap in that tree. There is still enough good wood that a seriously frugal and Green person could make a chair out of it. It'd be a pretty chair.
If you are not a little old lady, yourself, you should probably wait for permission to laugh, or otherwise admit that you think the image of a little old lady whacking away at a tree trunk in the rain is funny. I hereby officially state that it is. It was a warm evening and the rain felt like taking a nice shower, not having to wait till after work, but right there on the work site. You may laugh.
So then I came home to watch the You Tube videos commemorating Candidate Harris's interview with a sympathetic TV news station. I'd been primed to expect to be laughing out loud just as she does. She thinks, or she thinks we think, that heavier taxes on the big corporations are going to fund all the handouts she wants to give the young and desperate! She thinks that's going to offset all that Bidenflation they have to deal with! She thinks those corporations aren't going to take that money right back out of the people who pay for their products! For boosters of a vaccine already associated with overnight blood clots and heart attacks, for "lawn care" that gives people a sort of simulation of a bad case of measles, for cakes made with propylene glycol instead of cream or egg, Mean Girl Tackypants thinks that taxes on big corporations don't mean that Joe Sixpack would soon be paying double the price, again? Or does she only think Joe Sixpack thinks that? Tackypants is a mean girl and what her friends have tried to excuse as a nervous giggle is in fact a mean laugh. She does not care what Joe Sixpack thinks. All she thinks about what we the electorate think is that she doesn't want to hear it. She blocks us from our web site. She wants us censored out of the social media, and the news media too. She wants to be the first Black-under-the-One-Drop-Rule female President, and the Devil take the country.
What would be a real hoot? Everybody votes against Mean Girl. If you want to show that race and sex have nothing to do with your vote, write in "Condoleezza Rice" or "Stacey Dash." If you want to make a political statement, write in the name of a politician associated with an idea you like, say "Andrew Jackson" if you want to get rid of the national debt and cut the budget tight enough to keep the nation out of debt in the future, or "James Monroe" if you want to stay out of foreign wars, or maybe "Franklin D. Roosevelt" if you think dropping a bomb on Davos might help. If you do not in fact hate Trump, or you want to vote for Kennedy, vote for Trump. If you want to express profound disgust with the whole election, you could always write in "Broccoli." In any case, let Little Miss "Buy their votes with doubletalk, then let the corporations treat them like dirt and owe them money worse than ever, apres moi le deluge!" watch the election results show her votes trailing somewhere between Richard Nixon (if you think her bright idea for stopping inflation was better planned the first time around) and broccoli. Watch that some-of-her-ancestors-may-have-been-possums grin disappear. Now that will be seriously funny.
But no violence, of course. There is no reason why Tackypants' nieces and nephews should be deprived of an aunt. Maybe she'll be a better aunt after losing the election. Hahaha!
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