(The Second Oldest Profession meets the Bible Belt)

It’s the middle of January, 2012, the Republican Presidential hopefuls have descended upon my state, South Carolina, and it is an absolute nuthouse down here. I don’t see any way to escape the madness, except one:  maybe the Mayans miscalculated.

Maybe, just maybe, the Mayans misread their round rock clock, and the world will end early. I don’t see any other way to avoid this ongoing political ego parade.

But Mayans or not, I think we can say this with some certainty:  the world probably will end wa-a-ay before this endless election season does.

But for now, it’s South Carolina’s job to help pick the President. And the contestants? They’re all here:

• Willard Mitt ‘Glove’ Romney (he squeaked a win in Iowa by … what? … seven votes? Basically, he won Iowa by a family)
• Brick Sanitarium and his sweater-vest collection (who looks like an under-aged son from an Iowan family)
• Nude King Grinch (whose ego is the size of an Iowan family)
• Tron Paul (he fights for the users)
• Rick Prairie (I’m pretty sure he’s not an actual human, but  an animated cartoon character from ‘Toy Story’)
• Jon Huntsman’s son, John Huntsman, who is Jon Huntsman’s son

Just making it out of Iowa alive must’ve been tough. I remember hearing an Iowa politician make this biologically complex promise: “When my head and my heart come together I’ll jump in with both feet.”

Whoa. Never change metaphors in the middle of streaming the rules for a game horse’s level playing field.

While in Iowa, Rick Prairie, in between power-grinning, eating fried lard on a stick, and power-grinning, described Iowans as “just hard-workin’ God-fearin’ freedom-lovin’ people.” So please consider making a donation to the Rick Prairie campaign, so they can afford to buy a box of lower-case Gs.

And remember – after Iowa, Herman Cain suspended his Presidential campaign. And he’s STILL polling at 8%. At this rate, if he drops out entirely, he’ll win.

But after leaving Iowa (their favorite state) and New Hampshire (their favorite state) all six surviving candidates have now invaded South Carolina (their favorite state). And they’re everywhere – in the parks, on the news, in the diners and on the phones.

As you’d imagine, it’s getting ugly, too. Just today, Nude King Grinch accused Willard Romney of speaking French in public. Tron Paul immediately demanded that we withdraw our troops from Willard Romney. Willard could not be reached for comment, since he was campaigning in the South Carolina Upstate, while his hair was holding a rally on the coast.

To be sure, you other forty-nine States should be a bit concerned that South Carolina is playing such a pivotal role in your destiny. Keep in mind that South Carolina is a place where one food group is pork barbecue, and beef barbecue is the other one. (Barbecue sauce, on the other hand, is not a food group. Barbecue sauce, if it’s done right, is a divine appointment from heaven.)

We have our own language, too. We pronounce Manigault as ‘mannigoe’ and Simons as ‘simmons.’ We pronounce boyfriend as ‘beau’ but Beaufort as ‘byoofurt.’ And we still pronounce carpetbagger as ‘collateral damage.’

In South Carolina, we know that one person is “y’all” and we know that the plural of y’all is “all y’all.” We make a clear distinction between ‘dinner’ and ‘supper’ but we make no distinction at all between ‘Can you believe what that clueless idiot just did?’ and Aw, bless his heart.’

We have cities with suggestive names like Ninety Six, Six Mile and Due West. We have a town called North and a burg named Norway.

Not long ago, in Norway (population:  dwindling), the outgoing Mayor refused to give the City Hall keys to the incoming Mayor. So the incoming Mayor broke in to City Hall by breaking out, and crawling in, a window. Shortly, the outgoing Mayor of Norway had the incoming Mayor of Norway arrested, but the incoming Mayor bribed a jail guard with a pint of pork barbecue. The incoming Mayor escaped and fled to Sweden (yes, there is). From there, he hopped a NASCAR convoy to Finland (yes, there is) and ultimately was sent back to Norway after being extradited by Denmark (yes, there is).

It may surprise you to hear it, but here in South Carolina, we’re regularly treated to groundbreaking research and brilliant news analysis, resulting in headlines like this one:

LAKE WATER LEVELS RISE WITH RAINFALL

Whoa. Somebody alert the National Weather Service. Somebody call the Nobel committee.

And how about this one:

“…the bust was dubbed Operation Countywide because it was conducted from one end of the county to the other.“

Whoa. You know, sometimes it’s hard to see the Forrest for the Gump.

Here’s another:

“At a bowling alley in Rock Hill, a man was charged with attempted murder after he threw a bowling ball at a woman who rejected his offer to buy her a drink.“

See, folks, Virginia is for lovers. South Carolina is for hunter-gatherers.

And, once upon a time, we had a Governor who confuses marital infidelity with mountain hiking, and who apparently thinks North Carolina is in Brazil.

Finally, we offer a quick pop quiz. Ready?

Outside, it’s raining in bright sunshine. Here in South Carolina, this means what?

1)      the devil’s beating his wife
2)      our former Governor is ‘hiking’ with the devil’s wife
3)      an angel just got its wings, and then sold them at the flea market
4)      you’re about to witness relative humidity that actually climbs ABOVE 100%

Starting to get the picture? This is why somebody once described South Carolina as “too small to be a country, too big to be an insane asylum.”

And speaking of asylums, here’s a quick Politico Update:  Brick Sanitarium has taken a commanding lead in South Carolina, after switching from sleeveless sweater-vests to sleeveless plaid work shirts.

Another update:  we’ve just learned that South Carolina’s Governor has endorsed Willard. This is our current Governor, mind you, not the one with the backpack full of travel visas, tacos and tequila.

By the way – North, South Carolina? It’s south of the South Carolina state capital.

And North, South Carolina is 100 miles southeast of Due West.

(Ever pondered the ‘horse’ part of ‘horse pill?’)

Well, it’s a brand new year, and already I’ve learned something new. Understand – when you get to be my age, learning something new is Goal Number Two. (Goal Number One is remembering what you learned in Goal Number Two.)

There’s a Goal Number Three, too. I think. It has something to do with not splitting infinitives, or original sin, or bran. One of those. I forget.

That’s just the way it goes. At my age, it’s just a matter of time before I repeat something I just said, or forget what I wanted to say, or repeat something I just said.

So sometimes I forget. Leave me alone. I’m a camel, not an elephant.

Anyway, here’s what I learned this year, so far:  the true definition of the word ‘generic.’ See, till now, I’d always thought ‘generic’ meant ‘bland,’ or it meant ‘undistinguished,’ or it meant you’d wasted the last half-hour at a party talking to someone researching their thesis on ‘Hidden Old Testament References To Ellen DeGeneres.’

Nope. As it turns out, ‘generic’ — in the medical profession, at least — means ‘theoretically affordable medication, if it actually existed in this galaxy, which it doesn’t.’ And ‘non-generic’ means ‘laughably expensive, for no apparent reason.’ Non-generic:  kind of a synonym for the Department of Energy, really.

And here’s how I came to this new-found knowledge. Late last year, at the tailing end of my nineteenth yearly physical, I sat shivering in the doctors’ examining room, looking longingly across the room at my street clothes and reflexively massaging a cotton ball. During the previous hour-and-a-half, I had been duly weighed, splayed, pricked, prodded, dabbed, daubed and bled by a steady procession of future physicians, all wearing Dansko clogs and disposable scrub suits saturated with Scooby-Doo characters.

After the appropriate hope-sucking delay … in whatever way that delay is calculated by the Union of Medical Practice Appointment-Overbooking Agents … there came a tap on the door, a whoosh of air, and my doctor dashed in to the examining room, wearing open-toed soiree stilettos, a foul-weather jacket, and gripping a three-barbed marlin lure between her teeth.

As it turned out, I was her last hurdle before she navigated out the Cheyenne Mountain-like “Doctors Only” door to take several well-deserved weeks off, and make a boat payment. Apparently, she’d been steadily segueing into her civilian clothes, one examining room at a time, self-prepping for a dash to the marina.

As she blasted in, I felt a bit under-dressed, given that I was wearing nothing but an over-laundered paper gown and a cotton ball pressed against my ring finger, though I took comfort in knowing that, if I sprinted fast enough, I was mere seconds away from sporting both socks.

But on this day, Doctor Armada had no time for prurience, nor proprieties.

The doc cut straight to the chase. Consulting a chart, she told me she didn’t like one of my ‘numbers.’ She stared at me in an accusing tone of voice, which was pretty sobering, given that I was nearly naked and she was chewing on a honed marlin spike. In the spirit of cooperative fellowship, I scoffed at my numbers and offered to pick a different number, if she’d just let me know which number had fallen out of favor.

But Doc Bimini was already scribbling prescriptions, or maybe a maritime-meal shopping list, and I don’t think she heard me.

(To be honest, I had more at stake than simple cooperation — I wanted to get out of there before the Scooby-Doo squad came back for more blood samples. They’d already hit me up for so much plasma that I no longer cast a reflection in the mirror.)

Then my doctor let me in on a little “inside baseball” news:  the prescription drug I’d been taking for several years had been recalled. It seems that the drug company had released some recent research, revealing that taking this particular drug, at this particular dosage, could have “undesirable” consequences.

“Undesirable?” I squirmed.

Recent studies, she explained, showed that some test subjects had developed mildly discomforting symptoms, including headaches, something quite foul that involved the word “leakage,” and a sudden manifestation of camel hooves.

I took issue. I pointed out that getting cloven feet is not what normal people would consider “undesirable.” Wouldn’t you agree? I mean, gassing up your car in the rain is undesirable. Getting an over-cooked fried egg – that’s undesirable.

But turning part-way into a leaking dromedary with migraines goes way past “undesirable.”

I don’t think she heard me.

“We’re going to change prescriptions,” she announced.

“We?” I thought. “What’s with this ‘we?’ What’re you now, my partner?“

“Keep in mind,” she went on, avoiding my eyes. “This one isn’t generic.”

“Hey, Doc,” I wondered aloud, “since ‘we’ are going to switch prescriptions, and ‘we’ are switching to brand-name drugs, that means ‘we’ are going to split the brand-name cost, right? Right?“

Silence. No reply.

I don’t think she heard me.

So I did what any self-respecting, virile, nearly naked, totally ignored American male would do when in the presence of a wildly successful female authority figure who owns a boat.

I ran away.

With all the hunter-gatherer manliness passed along by my forebears, I tactically positioned the cotton ball and reached for my socks.

Not that it mattered. My allotted time had expired, and the good doctor had to leave if she was going to float her boat before low tide.

On her way out, she told me to make appointments three times a month for my yearly physical, handed me a prescription form filled out in something, possibly Sanskrit, and reminded me to be sure and floss my hooves.

“Don’t you mean ‘our’ hooves, Nemo?”

We don’t think she heard us.

I tossed my shredded left sock in the bin, grabbed the mate sock and, scowling at the hoof, silently vowed to be more careful with this one.

And on my way out, I stopped by the water cooler to fill up my hump.

(Where do you go to return twelve pear trees?)

I don’t know about you, but I’d pay real money to just skip the whole week after Christmas. There are several reasons why:

• Your waistline’s fatter, but your wallet’s thinner
• You have to go to work, but everybody else is on vacation, so it’s impossible to get an approval, a signature, or sexually harassed
• Everybody at every store is returning stuff, including gifts, but also things like live animals, dead laptops, unwrapped undergarments, and suspect cheese
• You’re stuck with sports options like the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, the Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl, and the PETA Simpering Confiscatory Fund To Help Relocate The Transgendered Spackle-Necked Ozark Boll Weevil Bowl
• You still have seventeen rolls of cartoon-reindeer-coated gift-wrapping paper that can’t possibly be used for mid-calendar occasions like birthdays, weddings, and early parole celebrations

Plus, thanks to a Christmas-carol-induced purchasing frenzy, committed by My True Love (I call her “True”), I’m now several layers deep in redundant gifts … 364 of ‘em, if you add up all twelve days’ worth.

The unmentioned problem with the whole ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ gift strategy is its multiplier effect. I mean, thanks very much, True, but … twenty-two turtle doves? Seriously?

Maybe, I could find a use for one golden ring. Maybe. Ever unwrapped five of them? And then five more, and then five more? Eight times? While you’re trying not to trip over maids, lords, pipers, drummers, geese, hens, swans, doves, calling birds and cranky PETA protestors?

And if you’ve ever had thirty heavily-caffeinated lords leaping in the same room with forty-two egg-laying geese, you know things aren’t going to end well. That’s just goose doom waiting to happen. That’s just pending pâté.

Another problem with the week after Christmas is a sneaky post-Christmas music conspiracy. Here’s how it works:  During the holiday season, we’re persistently bathed in happy, inspiring Christmas music, and it’s wonderful. But then, once Christmas is over, the music gatekeepers box up the good stuff until next year.

And then they pull out the B team. Really marginal stuff. The fringe fa-la-la. Dick Haymes. Patti Page. Tex Ritter (I’m not kidding). Various amalgams called The So-And-So Brothers or The Whatsit Sisters, babbling about bells, fat men, fat men with coal, Mommy kissing fat men, and Frosty the Scary Reanimated Popsicle Person. Paul Anka from his “pre-acne” period (apparently Paul Anka has never been spotted not singing, and has at least two albums recorded in utero). The Ray Conniff Singers, who deserve to be publicly caned simply for horribly arranged syncopation. Roger Whittaker singing Boston Marathon versions of ‘The Twelve Days,‘ which may constitute criminal negligence and be legally actionable.

It’s as if we’d all spent the last few months in a warm, cozy bar relishing the house band, led by Mozart himself, and suddenly we’re stuck with a bad eight-track tape titled “Salieri Is Rocking This Crimmuh, Yo.”

Case in point:  not long ago, because I wasn’t fast enough to turn off the radio, I heard somebody named Buddy Clark singing something called ‘The Merry Christmas Waltz.’

I’m still getting over it.

‘The Merry Christmas Waltz‘ is, without challenge, the WASP-est holiday offering ever over-wrought. Compared to this arrangement, Lawrence Welk was the thug gangsta love child of Jimi Hendrix and Sergio Mendes.

“Wunnerful, wunnerful! Give it up one moe ‘gin for Paul Anka’s fetus and the June Taylor Dancers!”

Besides, there’s something sinister about 3/4 time. It’s just so … feudal.

I understand what the gatekeepers are trying to do – they’re trying to make us so sick of carols that we won’t miss them when they go away until next winter. I understand. They’re weaning us. They’re trying to do us a favor.

Stop trying to do us a favor.

Conspiracies aside, though, America’s Christmas music repertoire in general is out of control. Over time the genre has crab-walked into topics that are, at best, a bit of a stretch and, at worst, downright bizarre. Let’s review some selected lyrics, shall we?

“Hang your nose down, Rudy. Hang your nose and cry.”
What the heck is that?

“Here comes the fattest man in town.”
C’mon, people. It’s Christmas. Leave Newt alone.

“He’s a rootin’ tootin’ Santa Claus. Yippee ki-yo ki-yay!”
This marketing tie-in defies analysis, and the absurdity speaks for itself. Besides, I don’t want to know anyone who is rootin’, much less tootin’.
And just for the record – if anybody ever walks up to me and says “yippee ki-yo ki-yay,” I’ll stab ‘em with a pointy stick. If they’re wearing a red wool suit, I’ll stab twice.

“To see a great big man entirely made of snow,” she sings.
This is an obvious, desperate plea for therapy. When the snow melts, somebody riffle the Yellow Pages for “intervention.”

“Down in Mexico, we have got no snow. Every time we sing, tequila glasses ring.”
Let’s hope they don’t sing much, else it’s gonna be an early night. Have an undocumented Christmas!

“If you want bananas, great big bananas, shake hands with Santa Claus.”
How does that transaction work, exactly? What, is St. Nick now moonlighting as some kind of Chiquita Pez dispenser? It sounds more like some sick Vegas come-on, or street code for a drug drop.

“Tumpety tum tum.”
“Ba rum pa tum tum.”
“Jing jing-a-ling ling-a-ling ling-a-ling-ling. Ha ha. Ho ho.”
What more is there to say, your honor? Psychiatric evaluation completed. Case closed. Bring on the big-arm tuxedo.

Then there are songs that snuck in, like emaciated blonde celebrity addicts at a White House dinner, and now they won’t go away. In our opinion, ‘My Favorite Things‘ is not a legitimate Christmas carol; however, it is a nice “hint hint, honey!” paean to obsessive shopping. And given everything American advertising has done to prostitute Christmas, the jury’s still out on this one.

Nor is ‘Toyland‘ a valid tune for tinsel-time. “Once you cross its border, you can never return again” does not invoke Christmas. This is more a tune for Halloween, maybe, or a cautionary tale about backpacking in Iran’s back yard. It speaks of making a bad decision with no mulligans, like subscribing to that relentless, time-defying Time-Life Book-of-the-Month club, or eating too much Mexican food.

And speaking of Halloween, what’s the back story on this campfire lyric, from ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year‘ – “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”

What glories, exactly? Dude, we’re talking about a federal holiday, not the fields of Verdun or the ’36 Olympics! Did I miss something on the news wire? Did Santa paratroop into Tehran and spirit away the busted backpackers?

But even those tunes, bad as they are, are mere infractions. As Gandalf might put it, there are fouler things in the deep places than Orcs. Musical travesties exist that must be stopped, with due prejudicial intensity and by all available means, military, judicial and otherwise. So, in the interest of promoting a sane, civil society, I propose a new set of Yuletide Music Management laws.

• In the song ‘Jingle Bells,’ after the line “…O’er the hills we go, laughing all the way,” it shall be illegal for a recording studio to insert actual laughter. This prohibition shall include (but not be limited to) the ha-ha-ha’s of children, dogs, and strolling hordes of Lawrence Welk-type Judeo-Christian couples.
• No entity shall be allowed to add lyrics to Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker Suite.’
• It doesn’t make any sense for all-growed-up adults to be singing ‘All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth,’ unless said adult is hopelessly accident-prone, or Leon Spinks. So cease and desist. Find a kid or sit down. Estop it.
• During any given Christmas tune, you may only transpose up to the next key once. Actually, the court would prefer that you not transpose at all or, if possible, less.
• It shall be illegal for anyone, anywhere, at any time, to sing ‘Dominick, the Christmas Donkey.’ Not even as a joke. This proscription really should’ve been part of the original U.S. Constitution.
• The Rule of Thirds:  If a carol is written in a perfectly nice minor key and then suddenly, at the very end of the song, you decide to resolve it in a major key, the court will find you and visit upon you a severe form of vigilante justice. (see “pointy stick”)
• No one shall be allowed to modify, in any way, ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas.’ This carol is much like the Constitution – it may have its flaws, but futzing around with it is only gonna make things worse.

In closing, I’ll confess something to you. As much as I love the holiday season, there’s one American-holiday-oriented thing I’m always glad to know will be going away – wherever it is these things go away to – until next Christmas. And what is that thing, you ask?

Burl Ives.

It’s nothing personal, actually, even though there’s something about Burl’s cover of ‘Frosty the Snowman‘ that makes True and me want to invest in an ice axe. No, my main concern is this:  I just want to make darn sure the gatekeepers have big Burl available, until next holiday season, to sit on the box where they keep Andy Williams.

You know what I’m saying? I mean, the average American’s work-a-day year is hard enough already.

The last thing we need in mid-calendar is Andy Williams jumping up and grinning those teeth at us.

(Scrooge would’ve been proud. For a while.)

Christmas. Arguably, the most well-known holiday in the history of history, if you discount that day in 3050 BC when the Arabs invented zero trans-fat, racial profiling, and fruitcake re-gifting.

Okay, not all Arabs were responsible for fruitcake. According to legend, fruitcake was invented by a confectioner named Mischel-Toeh, who founded the first-ever Semite bakery, “House Wheat It Is.” (Mischel-Toeh would later establish the first non-denominational deli-bookstore combo, “To Bialy Or Not To Bialy.”)

Admittedly, Christmas is an odd tradition, especially when we try to explain it to children. Reindeer fly. Snowmen live. Strange, strangely-clad, obese, bearded men engage in chimney-oriented home invasions, eat other people’s food, and give away stuff, with no regard to any quid pro quo, as if they were fat, hirsute, red-coated liberals.

No wonder kids are confused. Heck, adults are confused. I mean, let’s face it, adults – getting taller didn’t really make us any smarter – it just made us taller. (and our clothes tighter)

But, these days, saying “Christmas” aloud is not allowed, unless you’re selling a product so wildly popular that shoppers would swarm in even as you shrieked “Merry Off-Shore Drilling!” at them.

The only holiday tradition still sacred is the one in which neighbors compete to see who can squeeze 57,500 marginally-yule-related ornaments onto a drab of distressed lawn that’s sized to support, at best, six.

What’s left? That holiest of holiday icons — shopping. So, since we can’t say Christmas, let’s talk about shopping for presents. Here’s a list of some of this year’s favorites:

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Let’s begin our gift list with that government-backed gift albatross that nobody wanted as a gift in the first place – the Electric Car. First of all, thanks to that other Santa – the one in the White House – you already bought the electric car, you generous taxpayer, you. There’s simply no need for you to buy it again.

Here’s how brilliant the electric car is. It hurls you down the highway at a top speed of ten miles per generation (less if any passengers have facial hair, or there’s an oncoming breeze). It’ll transport you about forty miles on a dose of electricity, if you’ve a week to spare.

Here’s the little glitch. In the contiguous forty-eight states, there are over 2.9 million miles of paved roads; however, in those same forty-eight states, there are exactly four publicly-available places to recharge your electric car.

But don’t sweat it, electric car owner. Soon, there will be, oh, six or seven stations nationally … unless Congress gets involved, which could result in there being only three, all coincidentally located on the grounds of a tax-exempt country manor owned by the ranking member of a Senate select committee.

It just makes no sense. Only four places to get replacement electricity? I personally know more than four places where I can get a replacement larynx. (Sadly, all four larynx shops are in South Florida – and unlisted – but you can always hitch a ride with some Jersey Shore grandma making a weekend cocaine run. While you’re down there, be a tourista:  get mauled by a mutant Everglades alligator and take in a snuff film.)

What America really needs is a snap-in device that will de-convert an electric car back to a 1964 Mustang. Or a horse-drawn carriage. Or just a horse. With a horse, the average American could get to the mall and deliver the mail.

It makes one wonder why the electric car ever got named the “Volt.” Should’ve been named the “Watt?”

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Because the world can never have enough burger-making devices, we now have the “revolutionary” new seven-option griddle from SqueezinArt. After all, nothing says “I love you” like another gift-wrapped slab of dishwasher-safe Teflon.

“Merry Christmas, honey. Here’s a flat piece of coated metal that heats up. Lunch ready?”

This culinary breakthrough is a must-have, despite the fact that your pantry floor is already littered with one or more of the previously revolutionary griddles you received in previous holiday seasons:

• The George Foreman griddle, which tenderizes burgers using a patented process known as beating them senseless
• The Black-and-Decker griddle, which not only cooks burgers but also saws the buns in half and constructs a picnic table (patio not included)
• The Hamilton Beach griddle, which we think was named after someone in the Carter administration. It doesn’t actually cook burgers, but it lusts after them.

But now, with the revolutionary SqueezinArt griddle, you can cook burgers using the revolutionary “lid open” option, or the revolutionary “lid closed” option, which somehow equals seven options, suggesting that the griddle was designed by the Congressional Budget Office.

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Parents of aspiring toddlers will flock to pick up a “My First Genetically Engineered Avian Flu” chemistry set. Imagine the parental pride as your budding chemist learns to comprehend useful vocabulary terms like “pandemic” and “acute toxic kill radius!”

Be sure to stand upwind.

Shopper’s Note:  the “deluxe” version includes a complimentary “nolo contendere” waiver from Eric Holder’s Justice Department and Gun Laundry, as well as a $28 billion R&D coupon from the Pentagon.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
For the music-lover on your list, be sure to pick up a copy of the all-new holiday CD, “Yule Hate This,” an eclectic collection of carols and chaos brought to you by Largie Small Puff Step-Daddy and those good folks at Angry Goth Zombie Records.

For openers, the unsuspecting listener is subjected to an 18-minute live version of Wu Tang’s “Jizzle Bells,” followed by Lindsay Lohan doing a cover of “All I Was Wanted For During Christmas.” Some forty minutes later, the punishment ends with the Nick Nolte Noel Singers, more-or-less emitting a rousing version of “The Twelve Days Of 500 Bottles Of Christmas Beer On The Wall.”

Shopper’s Note:  Be sure to get your loved ones far, far away before anybody slips this foul thing in the ol’ CD player.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Unfortunately, the Snuggie is back this year with a vengeance. Apparently, there’s just no avoiding these things. It’s like some inescapable, recurrent family curse, or a year-end celebrity news wrap-up from Barbara Walters.

What’s infinitely worse is that, like your clever youngster’s modified Avian Flu virus, the Snuggie seems to be mutating. We’re being invaded by imperfectly-cloned cousins, malformed outfits masquerading as acceptable fashion. There’s now something called the Hoodie-Footie, which makes otherwise normal females look like a terry-cloth dishrag, but with eyelashes and breasts.

America, we need to take control of this situation, because, if we’re not careful, we could see the re-emergence of velour.

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You’re going to think I’m insane (if you don’t already think I’m insane), but I have to tell you that there is an “Iowa Caucus” iPhone app. There really is. Now you can have instant access to live film footage of Republican Presidential candidates as they carom around both cities in Iowa, documenting their Leader-Of-The-Free-World credentials by getting on a bus, getting off a bus, denying having mocked an opponent’s bus in 1968, or getting endorsed by a bus. (fried lard on a stick not included)

I don’t mean to be the stormcrow or anything, but I believe this particular omen was mentioned as a “last call” harbinger in the doomsday memoirs of Nostradamus – right there in his Last Days schedule, in-between “city-sucking gaps in the Earth’s crust” and “Geraldo Rivera getting a prime-time series.”

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The hot new interactive game this year is “How to Outwit Airport Security Without Having To Get Naked In Cleveland,” v2.1, available for the Wii (by Ninja-Kendo), the Micro$oft X-Box (actual functionality not included), and the Sony Hey-We-Make-Game-Consoles-Too. Unlike previous diversions which catered to familial, multi-player interaction, this year’s game is specifically designed for just one participant – just one sad, quiet, lonely, disaffected, bitter participant. Just one jaded juvenile in a jungle-gym crowd.

Just one missed twisted mister, just one more “stunned neighbors who were interviewed recalled a kind, quiet young man” kind of kind, quiet young man. Just one, simple, strong candidate for an “America’s Most Wanted” full-hour episode about a seemingly normal, plaid-shorts-wearing, obsessive teeth-grinder.

But enough about Joe Biden.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

So, be careful out there, in this holiday traffic, and be sure not to forget the true reason for the season:  out-lawn ornamenting your neighbors.

And I hope you have a very Merry … um … Wednesday.

Or whatever.

(Never trust anyone wearing a lab coat and open-toed heels)

This year, for the first time in years, I actually had a yearly physical.

Now, before I start getting e-hate “tsk-tsk” spam mail from aghast adults, school cafeteria dieticians and annoying nanny-state crusader groups, let me explain. I don’t mean to say that I haven’t been to see a doctor in years. I simply mean that, this year, I had a yearly checkup just once.

See, I have one of those doctors who insist on seeing her patients about twice a week, due to the fact that she cares deeply about her patients, and has a boat payment. But this year, I had seriously threatened her yacht mortgage by not showing up twice a month to gaily lob cash at her.

I had my reasons, thank you very much; for one thing, I’d spent much of the year battling an evil, bipolar corporate dwarf. I’d also spent a good chunk of the year dueling with a government-managed health insurance program named COBRA (the Completely Outrageous Bogus Rates Agency), which is based on the logical premise that the most efficient way to provide affordable health care is to model it after a reptile that spits.

Finally, though, came the battle I could not win. Drugs. My prescriptions ran out, so I had to run in and beg for more. I set aside a few hours, spent a few hours practicing my signature, and drove to the doctor’s.

At the doctor’s window, I paid silent homage to the quantum advances in computerized medical technology by signing my name on a clipboard. A lady wearing a Flintstone-cartoon smock handed me a different clipboard, this one burdened with about an inch of federally-mandated forms. She pointed to a chair, directed me to fill out all the forms, and said she hoped I’d been practicing my signature.

One of these forms had been designed by some sadistic, sub-level bureaucratic optimist who actually expected me to fill out my name five times – on the same form:

1. Me, the patient
2. Me, the insured
3. Me, the owner of the insured’s insurance
4. Me, the person filling out the form on behalf of Me, the patient and Me, the insured
5. Me, the person signing the form on behalf of the other four Mes

(And I’ll bet you five bucks that, somewhere in some government building, there are five departments, with five budgets, five directors, and five staffs, each responsible for reading one of my five names.)

One form was particularly odd. Something about a hippo, though the clever claque spelled it HIPAA. Other than wanting my signature and today’s date at the bottom, I have no idea what it was after. There were, maybe, seventeen-hundred paragraphs of legal-speak, written in some subatomic font, that seemed to be asking for my permission to let the doctor run around in public places, broadcasting my height and other closely-guarded medical secrets.

Several hours later, I finished the paperwork, applied for disability (writer’s cramp), and was ushered back to the labyrinth to be weighed, which would either confirm or nullify my “hippo” paperwork.

After it was confirmed that I did, in fact, have weight, I sat in an examining room for a time, while another Flintstone smock ran through a scripted sequence of pushes, pokes, pricks, prods, squeezes, daubs and queries. It was like pledging a particularly picky fraternity, but without the beer.

And, finally, just before midnight, my doctor popped in, wearing a lab coat, open-toed heels, and a foul-weather jacket. I couldn’t tell if she’d showed to read my chart, or to christen a new aircraft carrier.

She proceeded to complain that one of my “numbers” was high, a potentially fatal medical condition caused by not having yearly physicals twice a month.

“See what happens when you miss an appointment?” she teased, as she logged on to the internet to check the outgoing tide tables. I threatened to hit her with some of my weight.

What was that about? Surely, she didn’t expect me to believe there was some medical cause-and-effect relationship between my office visits and my internal vitals?

Was my doctor hitting on me? Or were she and her yacht simply chasing after my co-pay?

After sharing the bad numbers news, my doctor consulted a well-thumbed copy of the famous medical bible known as the PDR (Physicians’ Deep-sea Reference). She spotted and circled an expensive fish-finding sonar, causing her to notice that I hadn’t had an EKG in two years, and so I simply had to have one today, else my spleen could explode on a freeway on-ramp.

I tried to point out that EKGs weren’t covered by my Hippo or my Cobra, but I was too late. Her eyes were already glazed over. She coveted the sonar, and she was not to be denied. She handed me one of those dreaded examining room gowns and instructed me to put it on, but with an unexpected twist – I was to leave the gown open in the front.

And now, I’ll admit, I was troubled. Cautious. I had definite misgivings about submitting to my doctor’s request for an EKG, for four very good reasons:

1. She, and others in her profession, insist on spelling “cardio” with a K
2. I wasn’t just wearing one of their gowns – I was wearing one of their gowns backwards
3. She had referred to the EKG as a “prophylactic” procedure
4. She was wearing open-toed heels

So I bailed.

I jettisoned the exam gown, shoveled into my street clothes, scrambled for the exit and screamed out of the parking lot.

I don’t know what consequences might ensue, but I’ll worry about that next year.

Unless Doctor Cougar invites me and my gown to have a moonlit EKG on her yacht.

(We all do it, we all hate it. No, not flossing.)

I couldn’t believe it. Had a whole year really passed? Really? But there it was – the appointment card from my eye doctor’s, which brooked no argument. It was time for my annual eyeball tune-up and lube.

End of discussion. Facts are facts, unless you’re a pathological liar, or in politics. (Yeah, I know.)

You know the drill. And you know you have to do it. Even if you think your eyes are fine, you know you have to go. Even if you never mistake your mom for your dad. Even if once, last month, you went a whole day without running into things. You have to honor the eye doctor’s appointment card.

And you get no points at all for being able to actually read the appointment card.

You know the drill. Every year, you have to put aside a couple of hours to get your eyes checked out by a professional Eye Checker-Outer. They don’t actually say “Eye Checker-Outer,” of course. But for some unexplained reason, this branch of the medical profession couldn’t settle for normal medical profession titles, like Dentist, or Pediatrician, or Demon Barber. So they putzed around with a Latin version of Boggle until they had enough syllables to call themselves Ophthalmologists (literal translation: Opthal Checker-Outer).

Step one, of course, once you arrive at the Opthalicron, is to peer through the little sliding-glass window at an empty check-in desk. Eventually, someone will drift past the desk, possibly by mistake, and immediately not notice you (maybe they should go get their eyes checked). After some undefined period of time, the lady (it’s always a lady), who’s wearing some kind of loose-fitting outfit stamped with Flintstones cartoon characters (it’s always either the Flintstones or Scooby-Doo), will not look directly at you and ask you if your insurance has changed.

Your insurance status is what defines what will happen, or won’t happen, next. Your insurance status is more important than incidental trivia like your name, how your kids are doing in school, or the fact that you’re bleeding freely from the forehead and holding your detached left leg in your right arm.

It doesn’t help matters, either, that Flintstone Lady always seems just a tiny bit bitter (perhaps due to having made a career choice that involves going to lunch five days a week with other ladies, all wearing loose-fitting Flintstone pajamas).

Anyway, after you’ve scribbled through the formalities, Flintstone Lady ushers you into the examining chamber, a dimly-lit windowless room inevitably decorated, like all medical and dental facilities, in a neutral-colors theme so foul that you can actually buy it at Home Depot, should you have such an aberrant urge (just ask for Early Appalachian Orthodontia). This color scheme is the result of years of secret CIA research in psychological warfare, designed to turn the targeted human into a pliant dweeb who will numbly accept commands like “Yes, everything but your underwear” and “Okay, now spit.”

There’s something about that chair in the eye doctor’s examining room that makes the visitor feel like an undersized space alien, about to be questioned or … gulp … probed. You’re sitting there in the semi-darkness, surrounded by lots of looming, off-white machinery, as if you’d been kidnapped and spirited off to some sort of evil Swivel Museum.

After tapping a computer keyboard for a while, Flintstone Lady felt her way over to my ecto-chair and, with no explanation whatsoever, handed me a preparatory Kleenex. She began to manipulate the machine’s eerily organic elements, all of which required me to “rest your chin here,” a phrase I haven’t heard since watching a very dismal Lifetime Channel mini-series about the French Revolution.

For a while, we played some kind of weird game where she Gatling-gunned slides at me and kept yelling, “Better? Or worse?”

I never did find out my score.

Finally, Flintstone Lady zapped me with a three-gallon dose of eye drops, turned on a little projector, and made me read very tiny, incredibly misspelled words.

This is it? This is the pinnacle of progress in medical science? You’re sitting in a dark closet with a mildly bitter adult. Your eyes are dripping some kind of eye-drop residue the consistency of queso and the color of three-week-old sun-dried ferret. And you’re being forced to recite words like “LZ3VRTSX” to a professional wearing pajamas.

By the time Flintstone Lady’s silhouette made her exit, my eyes looked like an Audrey Hepburn movie poster. I was so dilated I was afraid I might go into labor.

In spite of it all, though, going to the eye doctor’s office beats going to the “full-body-contact” doctor’s office in three important ways. Firstly, you don’t have to get weighed. Secondly, you don’t have to take off all your clothes, put on a gown that would show off your cleavage if your cleavage was on your back, and sit, shivering, on a roll of generic gift-wrapping paper.

The other advantage of visiting the eye doctor’s is a conspicuous absence of specimen cups. If you’re ever at an eye doctor’s office, and any Scooby-Doo’d staffer hands you a specimen cup, you should demand to see some ID. Or just tell them you have no insurance.

Finally, the doctor himself, the actual Optimal Thologist, decided to drop by. He asked how my insurance was doing; had I experienced any blurred vision; had I noticed any running into poles and nearby people.

I did get some good news, though. I think. I’m not sure, because by this point the eye drops were puddling in my ears, but I think the eye doc said I might get an early Cadillac.

Then he handed me a bill for the Kleenex, opened the closet door, and disappeared into a halo of light.

Minutes passed. Machinery hummed. A speaker in the ceiling looped through bad orchestral arrangements of Neil Diamond tunes, but I was too dilated to escape. In my mind, I began to organize my last will and testament. I calmed my soul.

Not to worry. Flintstone Lady finally re-materialized and outfitted me with an embarrassingly cheesy dark-glasses device – a temporary, die-cut piece of light-defying plastic that was supposed to cling to my glasses and protect my poor, dilated eyeballs from sunlight, as long as I avoided sunlight.

The faux glasses did not deliver – I merely transitioned from living in a blurred world to living in a blurred, dark world. All the glasses accomplished was to make shield my face while cursing at daylight, while simultaneously making me look like Will Smith playing Ray Charles, but less rich.

I couldn’t focus, I certainly couldn’t drive, and I was behaving like Will Smith playing Helen Keller, but less cute. So, for the rest of morning, I sat on a bench outside the office, holding a specimen cup and singing the blues.

Not a bad morning, as it turned out. I pulled down twenty-eight bucks.

That’ll almost cover the Kleenex.

(Some people just take humor way too seriously)

Last week, while waiting to find out if Herman Cain ever hit on Rick Perry, I spent some time reading a fascinating scientific article on the evolutionary origins of humor. I learned three things:

1)    Humor, like sexual repression, has been around for a long time, and both are pretty funny.
2)    Sexual repression is the underlying cause of just about all bad behavior exhibited in humans, lab rats, and politicians.
3)    Some people have a thesaurus that’s way better than mine.

The article was written by two professional synonym-wranglers at some university in northern Manitoba, that internationally recognized hotbed of hilarity. I think the general thrust of their article was that humor has evolved over the last 6 million years, which means the authors obviously wrote the piece without watching much prime time TV.

I have to say that I challenge their thesis. Personally, I’m not convinced that humor has evolved very much at all, as evidenced by a recently discovered glyph of the first jokes ever told:

1)    Two hominids knuckle-walked into a bar…
2)    Take my hunter-gatherer. Please!
3)    Knock.

(Source:  Jurassic Journal of Comic Bas-Relief, 1 April MCXIV BC)

So I’m fairly certain that the article was really just a contrived vehicle to let the authors show off a bunch of big words, probably hoping to impress chicks in Manitoban single-hunter-gatherer bars, assuming they have sexual repression in Manitoba. I can’t think of any other reason for otherwise normal people to deliberately employ silly, made-up words like “exapted,” “phylogenetic conspecifics,” and “Schopenhaur.”

Really? Exapted? Please. “Exapted” sounds like some kind of galactic disciplinary action – like big green alien parents taking away ET’s ray gun.

“EXTRA WILSON TERRESTRIAL!”
(You know you’re in trouble when your parents use your full name. Even in outer space.)
“Nzxtmk?”
“Don’t nzxtmk me, young man! You ate Elliott, didn’t you? You are so exapted! Just wait till your Y-Chromosome donor phones home! Keep it up, young hominid – I’ll turn this spaceship right around!”

But simply saying “exapted” and “quasi-syntactical recursion” with a straight face wasn’t enough for these guys in Manitoba. Not by half. The next time you single guys corner a colleen and are struggling for that just-right ice-breaker, try this crowd-pleaser:

“You know, ontogeny can sometimes recapitulate phylogeny.”
“Weird. I was just thinking that very same thing.”
“Wanna go to my place and see my glyph?”

The authors’ exhaustive source materials on humor even included quasi-exapted observations from Charles Darwin. You’ll remember Mr. Darwin as that 19th Century botanist who was hired to sail around the world looking for examples of Darwinism; instead, however, the shameless little shirker got sidetracked while watching a Galapagos finch trying to suck food through a stick, after which Darwin concluded that a humongous tortoise would eventually evolve into filmmaker Michael Moore. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Darwin also proposed a concept he called “natural selection,” a theory which attempted to describe the complex inner workings of seemingly chaotic systems, like nation-states, and the NFL draft. Darwin conjectured that nature selected evolutionary winners (and culled losers) based on superior qualities, which still doesn’t explain Michael Moore. Darwin referred to this phenomenon as “survival of the fittest,” a proposition that was soon debunked in favor of the more obvious explanation, “survival of the most-heavily armed.”

Obviously, by this point in his voyage, Darwin had … how can I put it gently? … Darwin had popped his clutch. Perhaps due to scurvy, perhaps due to spending way too much time observing giant turtles in equatorial singles bars, Darwin was clearly out of control. As our Manitoban friends point out, Darwin even managed to link evolutionary survival tactics to tickling.

Tickling, as a survival tactic. This may be the best evidence to date that Darwin not only studied interesting plants – he also knew something about interesting brownies, if you catch my drift.

Darwin noticed that the places we tickle each other – the throat, the belly, the soles of our feet – are also the places most vulnerable to attack from predators. So Darwin assumed that this was Uncle Evo at work again, subtly teaching us how to protect those vulnerable spots. This is obviously a stretch; if this theory were true, we’d all be wearing shoes on our neck.

By the way – this deep fascination Darwin had for survival issues is what psychiatrists call an “obsession,” what politicians call an “agenda,” and what students call “is this gonna be on the exam?”

My own “evolutionary laughter” theory is much simpler:  Only mammals can laugh, because only mammals have milk, which is biologically required if you hear a joke so funny that milk spurts out of your nose.

And, if I might, may I humbly point out that Charles Darwin apparently never noticed this vital nose-to-lactose corollary.

Of course, some will take exception to my “mammals only” argument, claiming that if grocers can sell soy milk, then soy must be a mammal. This is a classic example of what psychiatrists call “projecting conspecific transference” and what I call “being rock stupid.” In response, I’ll gently remind that there’s just not a great deal of “soy” humor, now, is there?

“Two tasteless meat substitutes walked into a salad bar…”

But, lest you think our semi-frozen scholars got all that grant money just to talk about tickling, let’s quickly riffle through some of their other observations – opinions about evolution, humor, and why rats giggle.

Witness:

“During conversations with each other, women laugh 126% more than men … and it has been observed that persons in higher positions of authority laugh less often.”
The takeaway here is simple: if your boss is a man, and you like your job, shut your smart mouth.

“Theory-of-mind researchers have shown that children under age 6 have a particularly difficult time distinguishing lies from jokes.”
As do sociopaths, and news anchors at MSNBC.

“Activation in the medial ventral prefrontal cortex bilaterally correlates with how funny the joke is.”
Great. Now they tell me. And all this time I’ve been watching to see if anybody slaps their knee.

“Scientists detected a 50kHz chirp in young rats during social interactions resembling play, and wondered if this positive affective vocalization could be related to human laughter.”
That’s just sad.

Think about that. One day, in some lab somewhere, some over-zealous undergrad shouted, “Look! The rats are demonstrating play-like behavior during a social interaction again!”

But it’s a cautionary tale, isn’t it? I suppose that’s the evolutionary price we all pay for having ever left young, impressionable turtles alone with Michael Moore.

(Full-contact shopping, American style)

Last weekend, I went to a hockey game, and a Black Friday sale broke out.

Ah. We must be getting on toward Christmas. That magical time of year when we wrap and exchange gifts, visit with family and friends, and blast defenseless toy store shoppers in the face with pepper spray.

What in the world is going on with these discount-stalking holiday shoppers? These Black Friday blackguards? I’ve seen better-behaved people at a Hannibal Lector reunion.

Now, to be sure, we ought to have seen it coming. After all, retailers have been building a Frankenstein monster for years. Impatiently pacing behind the curtain, during all that warm Thanksgiving festivity, there’s been this contrived, frenzied, marketing-induced mania associated with the day after Thanksgiving. Slowly, inexorably, retailers have reinforced the idea that if you’re not out there shopping on Black Friday, then you are an ice troll who makes children drink schnapps and doesn’t love house pets.

Shame on you! Good people – decent, patriotic people – they get out there on Black Friday in support of truth, justice and Early Bird discounts.

And this year, the Greed That Stole Christmas couldn’t even wait till Friday morning to lay lures. They couldn’t wait till Black Friday to do Black Friday. Stores started teasing, daring us to not show up by 6am … then 4am … 1am … midnight … ultimately, they had Friday on Thursday. And only because Wednesday was already gone.

Hang on. At this rate, next year we’ll have Black June.

If we can wait till June.

By the way – the pepper spray attack? That actually happened, at a mega-box store on the West Coast. Some dedicated shoppinista, working on reliable intelligence from her forward reconnaissance patrol, identified and vectored a high-value target – a shrink-wrapped pallet of undefended Nintendo Wii. (or Wee, or Whee, or Huiee, or however you correctly misspell it)

Sergeant Majorette accepted her mission. She knew the score, she knew the cost. Collateral damage was acceptable. She bivouacked and waited, repeatedly mumbling her mission:

Purchase, with extreme prejudice.

The rest was reflex. When the indigenous military began to unwra … uh, sorry … when the store’s staff began to unwrap the goods, the alleged lunatic allegedly whirled around, whipped out her handy Girl-on-the-Go-sized pepper spray, and wasted the other Wii hopefuls. Then she pocketed the purchase and escaped into a rabid crowd that was busily disemboweling a late-arriving FedEx panel truck. Later, she annexed Poland.

In another ugly incident, a shopper was arrested for attacking an innocent clerk at a “Returns” counter. Apparently, the dissatisfied patron had just purchased a new smartphone app, the iSleep 3000, which provides a library of sounds guaranteed to help battle insomnia (you know, taped loops of rain, waves, chirping birds, street traffic, Al Gore speeches). According to the poor clerk, the patron went into a blind rage after discovering that the “Sound of Cicadas” option was only available every seventeen years.

Of course, I wasn’t there. I heard about all this random consumer violence from the newspaper, the Hair Helmets anchoring the TV news, and a few eye-witness accounts from recovering survivors. I personally didn’t shop on Black Friday because, well, because I’m scared. And there is no product on the market, made by any company on the planet, for which I am willing to lose actual body parts.

I’m not unreasonably spineless, mind you. When I go shopping, I’m prepared to face a bit of inconvenience, and I’m prepared to face down an acceptable level of violence. For example, I’m as prepared as any other grown man to get chewing gum stuck to my shoe. I am not ready to get mace-blinded by some 300-pound, eight-jelly-sandwich-eating, high-torque Aunt wearing purple-and-peach-striped spandex and sequined flip-flops, all over a $2 DVD copy of Star Wars – The Musical.

And I’m not even talking about your garden variety “check-out line” violence, where one naturally expects a few bruises, some insults, and sixty-eight magazines featuring Kardashian-type mammals caught in various stages of odd behavior (and even odder poses). I’m talking about violence out in the product aisles.

Basically, I like to keep violence at arm’s distance, and I wouldn’t mind having longer arms. I prefer to limit my mayhem exposure to manageable arenas, like “New Release” day at a video store near a trailer park, or visiting the all-you-can-shovel-down Chinese buffet just after Sunday church in a Southern town. But I’ll pass on that intense, armed, Black Friday level of focused, gauntlet-running chaos.

I suppose it’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of these “Customer Slays Nine” headlines were generated inside great, huge box stores with names like Sprawl-Mart, Worst Imaginable Buy, and Pan-Asian Slave Labor Sweatshop Outlet-R-Us. That may be pure coincidence. I have no empirical evidence that points to a causal relationship between crazed zombie-like violence and Montana-sized enclosures full of substandard, imported lead-laced teething rings. I’m just saying.

And, as with any psychotic episode worth its prescription hallucinogenics, there were participants who didn’t fit the mold. In a TV ad, I saw a nice, tranquil lady shopping in some department store. She calmly approached her desired item, lifted it from the shelf, placed it in her shopping cart, and calmly moved on. Why wasn’t she running madly to the next item on her list? Why was she not hobbling nearby shoppers with a modified price labeling gun?

Shameful, it is. Obviously, this woman doesn’t love her family very much.

(It’s sad when the review’s better than the movie.)

Looking for something to do next weekend? Well, you could rent a movie I just watched about the Norse god, Thor. Or you could just spend ninety minutes hitting yourself in the head with a brick.

Either way, you’ll be guilty of murder. Either way, you’ll have butchered an hour and a half.

Imagine this:

“I’m Thor.”
“You are?”
“Yeth. I’m really thor. My arm hurth.”

You think that’s lame? Wait till you hear the real script.

As we all know from our in-depth undergraduate cross-doctrinal studies in ancient Scandinavian theologies, or from comic books, Thor is a hunky, cut-through-the-chitchat-and-get-down-to-business-type god, with blonde hair and a blunt hammer, who hails from Sweden or somewhere like that. (I could be wrong about Sweden, but as an undergraduate, I missed the day when they pulled out a map and pointed to Scandinia.)

Now, before I start getting e-hate mail from the Norse Deity Pantheon Anti-Defamation League (and I’m quite sure there is one), let me say that I was a big fan of comic book Thor. That Thor was this great big football hero-looking guy with long blonde hair, and he could use words like “Thee” and “Thy” without getting called a weenie by his junior high school peer group.

But comic book Thor was nowhere to be found in this movie. This Thor spent most of his on-camera face time whining and saying “No.” No matter what kind of good advice he’d get from his deity peer group, movie Thor would pout and refuse to listen. He just jogged back and forth, from mystical dimension to mystical dimension, along with a nearly dressed deity named Breastus Maximus.

In the entire movie, I don’t think Thor ever said “Thee” once, but it was hard to tell, what with all the whining. And all the Breastus Maximus.

By the way, Breastus Maximus was not her real name. According to the internet, Thor’s distaff playmate was a ridiculously over-mascara’d Valhallan named Jarnsaxa (literal translation:  Gladys Knight, but with Gothic eyeliner).

And movie Thor didn’t even have long blonde hair! He looked like a surfer with chin stubble and questionable dental hygiene. I kept waiting for him to hop in a hopped-up ’69 Dodge Charger and start running moonshine with his brother, Luke Duke.

Somehow, the movie’s “Historical Accuracy” department decided that all the good deities in Valhalla used to wear the same outfit – some minimal undergarment, practically no pants at all, and a 250-pound wooly mammoth fur coat. But they all wore monstrous leather-laced leggings, perhaps because they wore no pants. The leggings looked like paint rollers look after being soaked in water. Everybody looked like they were on their way to some mystical Aesir Aerobics class.

Given this movie’s extremely high Lame Quotient, it wouldn’t be right for me to use the word “plot,” so let’s just discuss some of the scenes. Witness:

• Odin, the immortal god of Valhalla, either gets killed or gets hidden somewhere by that evil prankster Loki, the god of Stupid Pet Tricks And Congressional Ethics. (I know, I know. Odin, the immortal god. Apparently, in Scandinia, you can be immortal and dead.) In the movie, Loki looks like Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsay Buckingham, but with a bad skin condition.
• Odin’s disembodied voice commands Breastus Maximus to protect young Thor until he grows up, or the universe ends, whichever comes first.
• Breastus collects Thor, who asks, “Where are we going?” Breastus replies, “To my dwelling.” See? See what I mean about the script?
• (Author’s note:  “Dwelling” is one of those words that nobody has ever used in an actual out-loud conversation on this planet. Never. It’s like “persnickety,” or “Congressional ethics.”)
• Somehow, perhaps due to Norse deity insider trading, Loki manages to acquire Thor’s hammer, a magical weapon of mass destruction that, to be honest, looks like a concrete block popsicle.
• Thor and Breastus spend the next eighty-one minutes trying to find Loki, Thor’s hammer, and the plot.
• Loki, equally confused about what movie he’s in, unleashes three giant dogs with Egyptian heads and tattooed chests. He and the giant mythical tattooed dogs roam around Los Angeles, which surprises no one.
• Suddenly, Breastus and Thor materialize through a magic portal. They take a moment to consult one of those fold-up gas station road maps, despite the fact that they’re immortals with access to magic portals. Since they’re in LA, she teaches Thor how to use a semi-automatic weapon.
• (Author’s note:  It was at this point in the movie when I started looking for a brick.)
• Loki manages to find Thor by smelling the pavement. I am not good enough to make this stuff up.
• At this point, Thor shows up with two swords, because the movie’s producers forgot to hire a Continuity department. Next, naturally, Thor strips down to his chain mail Underalls and performs that same, tired, nunchuck-like, two-sword-swishy-crossy maneuver that all movie barbarians are forced by law to do at least once per movie. After the obligatory scimitar-swinging, Thor marries a Kennedy and runs for Governor of California.
• It begins to rain, in a film noir slow-motion kind of way. Somehow, Thor finds himself in a cave (see “Continuity department, lack of”). Inside the dark cave are three magic whispering people called The Norns (literal translation:  Gladys Knight’s Original Backup Singers). Nothing much happens, which apparently is the theme of this movie.
• Breastus appears from somewhere (see “Script, lack of”), and she and Thor try to find their way out of the Norn cave. Shortly, she finds a wall. Breastus says, “Can you feel anything?” Thor – the hero of millions of young boys, the immortal God of Thunder – replies, “A wall.”
• I am not good enough to make this stuff up.
• Meanwhile, in an entirely different movie, Loki unleashes a new dreadnought from his eternal arsenal of mystical, immortal weapons – a bone. A magic bone.
• Yeth. A bone, for Odin’s sake.
• Thor, energized by having added “wall” to his vocabulary, reappears in LA and hits Loki. Loki drops his magic bone, because Thor hit him. Next, in a line sure to trigger the keen radar of every Academy Award “Best Screenplay” judge, Loki says, “Give me back the bone.”
• Not to be outdone by Loki sniffing sidewalks, Thor talks to the bone.
• Oh, no, he didn’t!
• Oh, yeth, he did.
• Breastus Maximus did not appear in this pivotal bone-talking scene, because her West Coast agent had landed her a last-minute gig as a guest-god on “Dancing With The Netherworld Stars.” But she did show up just as Thor was shaking the magic bone, as if the sculpted, immortal moron thought that jiggling it would make the bone speak up. She posed in profile and managed not to look condescending.
•  (Author’s note:  At this point, it’s entirely possible that I hit a Derision Overload and passed out.)
• Suddenly, both Thor and Loki realize that there are only five minutes left in the movie. So, naturally, they start fighting, because they’re guys. Thor seems to have misplaced his semi-automatic street gun, but somehow he got his hammer back, possibly thanks to some nebulous Hammer Deity government bailout. Thor hurls the hammer at Loki, but Loki deflects the blow, and the hammer kills two warehouse walls and a commuter bus. Thor pouts, reloads and swings again, but Loki sprays Thor dead in the face with a handful of something – either magic dust, or crack. (after all, they are in LA)
• Fortunately for mankind, Loki trips over the closing credits. Thor closes in and goes all Mallet Monster on him, which is not going to help Loki’s skin condition.
• As Loki lay dying, in an immortal, can’t-really-die kind of way, Breastus appears through a nearby magic portal and poses in profile. Thor tries to hit on her, because he’s a guy. Breastus, however, shuns Thor and reveals her secret – she is, in fact, a he. Breastus is a former football coach, disguised and hiding out in Valhalla, until things settle down at Penn State.

Have a great weekend! Let me know if you want to borrow my brick.

(A history lesson, including the first ever “Here, smell this.”)

Let me ask you something. At dinner parties, have you ever been offered any food that can also, for medicinal purposes, be shoved in a mule’s nose? I mean, lately?

It amazes me how we humans, throughout history, have managed to come up with some of the things we eat. How did we discover that some admittedly unlikely, often bizarre items were edible? And at what cost? How many sacrificial Europeans did we burn through while they figured out which mushrooms could be safely eaten, which mushrooms were fatal widow-makers, which mushrooms could be sold to American tourists at outrageous prices, and which mushrooms, in 1968, would cause Joe Cocker’s lyrics to make sense?

Here’s another example to ponder. Long ago, somewhere, some carefree (but extremely hungry) proto-human was proto-prancing around in the surf. Suddenly, he gashed himself on a cluster of rough black rocks, and immediately had two thoughts:

1)    Hey, I wonder if there’s anything inside that rock that I can eat?
2)    Ow!

It gets better. Later that proto-afternoon, this same bruised but determined human (his name, by the way, was Oog) took a hammer to one of the black rocks, as soon as somebody invented the hammer. Inside the rock was some runny, oily thing that looked like an early outtake from “Alien.” Still famished but a bit hesitant, Oog stared at the shimmering blob for a while, wondering what to call it, until his wife, Oyster, invented cocktail sauce.

And mollusks are but one example of stuff that was just lying around, stuff that we somehow decided we ought to eat. Another example is corn (or as the indigenous Americans called it, “ethanol”). Obviously, somebody once saw those tall stalks, saw those thick, fibery bulges, looked closer and thought, “Man, that is one seriously nasty worm. Wonder what’s under it? Can we eat it? Did anybody invent butter yet?”

Other things aren’t food, automatically. They have to become foods; in other words, they require preparation, sometimes for days and days. Pickles. Have you ever seen a recipe for homemade pickles? You have to really, really want to make pickles – especially if you’re a disciple of the “barrel ferment” school of pickle-making, which requires an investment of 3-6 weeks, which means the recipe lasted longer than Kim Kardashian’s marriage.

To be sure, there are people who really, really want to make pickles. One company wanted to make pickles so badly that it eschewed any concept of a marketing tie-in and just signed the first mascot that showed up for auditions: an animated stork with a Groucho Mark accent (see “mushrooms, circa 1968″).

And you can’t just run out and grow pickles. You have to grow cucumbers. That means somebody once saw a cucumber and thought, “You know, if I took charge of that thing for about a month, it would ROCK a cheeseburger. Did anybody invent cheese yet?”

Of course, you can’t have a cheeseburger with a bun (it’s in the US Constitution). How did mankind ever figure out how to make bread? Who walked through a wheat field and thought, “I’m gonna invent the sandwich! Or maybe artisan beer. Hey, who’s that sad, armored guy in my wheat field? Is that Russell Crowe?”

(By the way – when somebody did finally invent sliced bread, how did anybody compliment them? “Great idea, Atlanta Panera! Sliced bread…why, that’s the greatest thing since sli…um…uh…that’s, um…”)

Making dough can be complicated, unless you’re the US Treasury. Some bread recipes call for sunlight, some require darkness. Some breads need to rise, some don’t. (Some pushy, big-headed breads want to rise more than once, as if they thought they were Cher’s career.) Some breads want yeast, some breads don’t. (Yeast is a biological agent known as an “activator,” a group which includes baker’s yeast, natural leaven, and Al Sharpton.)

But for pure “pardon me?” value, you can’t beat garum.

Single guys:  Here’s a handy “social graces” quiz. You’re at dinner with your neighbors who, thanks to lax mortgage regulations, are second century Romans. Your host, Sirius Girth, proudly uncorks a clay jar and extends it to you, inviting you to admire its aroma. You take a quick whiff of something so foul it makes your grandparents sterile.

Select your optimal response:

a)    “Mmm. Let me guess. Week-old isotope-blasted pork. North slope?”
b)    “Ah! Mule medicine!”
c)    “Is that smell normal, or did your aqueduct back up?”

What is this rancid liquid with the scalp-blistering smell? Meet garum.

In ancient Rome, garum was a type of fermented fish sauce. It was both a delicacy and a staple, an essential flavor in ancient Roman cooking, and one of the main reasons the ancient Romans kept running off to places like Gaul, and England, and Brooklyn.

But what is garum? Well, according to the internet, garum is similar to liquamen. Oh, gee, thanks. I don’t know about you, but “similar to liquamen” tells me absolutely nothing. Liquamen sounds like a catchy brand name for some product made especially for single guys who can’t follow those complicated instructions on tap water.

Although garum was wildly popular in the ancient Roman world, it originally came from Greece, along with other world-molding things, like the Olympics, and suffocating debt. “Garon” was the Greek name for the fish whose intestines were originally used to make garum.

That’s right. Fish guts. Garum is fish guts. We took our “western civilization” cues from a clutch of ancient whack jobs who ate fish guts.

Oh, it gets better.

Not just any old fish guts. Fish guts, softened by soaking in salt, and then left out in direct sunlight for two or three months.

Somebody thought that up. Holius mackeralus. Somebody thought to do that to a fish, and then eat it. Who, for Peteus sakeus? Maybe one of those 27,000 fun-loving hearth gods. Maybe Oedipus’ mom, which would explain some other things, too.

Apparently, garum was a real treat in ancient Rome, a cultural high point, which should serve as a warning to any country that’s considering letting everybody run around dressed like pledges at an “Animal House” frat party. And it was economical, too – garum would keep for years, due to its high salt content, and due to the fact that nobody was exactly eager to eat something that smelled like Sunday morning behind Ulysses S. Grant’s molars.

Sun-baked, three-month-old, fermented fish guts, as food. Kinda makes “Hot Pockets” look like an evening with Wolfgang Puck.

It gets better.

According to Pliny (literal translation:  “of or having pline”), the ubiquitous (literal translation:  “vile molar breath”) garum also had medicinal values, for humans and animals. For example, it was used to treat bone spavin in horses and mules, and was said to cure scabies in sheep.

(NOTE FROM OUR STAFF:  For the half-dozen or so of you out there who aren’t 2,000-year-old ancient Roman veterinarians: Bone spavin is not a disease – it’s actually a theatrical device, wherein ancient Roman vets would artificially pad their bills by following these simple steps:  remove the scholarly glasses, pinch the bridge of the nose, sigh defeatedly, and then interject vague terms like ‘hock joint,’ ‘tarsometatarsal articulation’ and ‘Royal Lipizzaner submission fee.’)

(NOTE FROM OUR STAFF:  Scabies, by the way, is a contagious skin disease marked by excessive scratching, and you haven’t really lived a rich, full life till you’ve seen a sheep trying to scratch its own back.)

(NOTE FROM OUR STAFF:  We should note that ‘Bone Spavin’ would be a great name for a band.)

Garum was considered a good antidote for dog bites, and crocodile bites, too, as long as your HMO plan covered giant lizard wounds and brutally skank-smelling generics.

Other ancient Roman healers, especially those with excellent malpractice insurance, used garum as a treatment for everything from ulcers to dysentery, from sciatica to sea dragon bites (for more on sea dragons, see “mushrooms, circa 1968″). Garum was often prescribed as a laxative and, given what garum is made of, that’s probably redundant.

Garum was also used to treat animals. And here, our story leaps past “strange” and rushes straight to “downright odd.” As the late Hunter S. Thompson might say, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Imagine you’re an ancient Roman horse with phlegm issues. (That exact phrase, by the way, was part of the proposal that led directly to the Kim Kardashian wedding. Or divorce.) Then suddenly one morning, your owner, Bifidus Regularis, reads an article about horse and mule phlegm (it was a slow news day) on the front stone of The Daily Stele (“All the news that’s fit to chisel”), a piece penned by those two famous veterinarians, Vegetius (literal translation:  “meat & three”) and Pelagonius (literal translation:  “Sid Caesar”). And then, heeding the advice of experts, your owner decides to treat your problem by pouring a gallon of garum in your nose.

How humiliating! And what can you do? Who do you get in touch with? It’s not like you can retire to a stud farm, because nobody’s invented Kentucky yet.

And it’s not an option for the likes of you, an aging equus, to make a scene – to just snort, cavil and complain.

After all, down the via a piece, somebody just invented glue.