Put It Away!
We have all seen it and been nauseated. Whence the recent moronic practice of wearing a stethoscope — and so theatrically — around the neck? Why not around the waist? Around the top of the leg? Strategically wound around the jock area? Around the head? Perhaps this idiotic usage originated as a gag in a medical soap opera. Until recently, a doctor would have been despised by colleagues, ridiculed by customers, persecuted by the media, for such inane idiocy. The stethy still belongs barely visible in the pocket of the obligatory white coat. The next time a doctor tries the intimidation racket by wearing a stethy around his neck, consider throttling him with it.
Since You're At It…
Why stop at the stethoscope? High fashion, I hear, is for doctors to wear around their necks a collection of implements, eg otoscope, opthalmoscope, laryngoscope, sigmoidoscope, protoscope etc., some gold-plated with flashing lights, manufactured with holes and strings to fit neatly onto special neck belts. Spot the extra-competitive passive-aggressive nutcase medic, wearing six or more gadgets around his neck over his inflatable folded-arms kit. Can't wait for the consultation. I hear that surgeons have started to wear around their necks scalpels, boxes of blades, forceps, retractors, sewing kits, heart-lung machines. The more successful wear operating-room tables strapped to their backs. Neckwear for cosmetic surgeons includes various designs of breast implant. Anesthetists are wearing blood transfusion bags, vaporisers, Guedel airways, Yankauer tips, Bain circuits and oxygen cylinders.
"Don't Undo Me!"
Of course other professions are not to be outdone: idiotic psycho-dysplay must not be the monopoly of lowly medics. Lawyers are starting to wear sets of lawbooks around their necks; accountants wear heavy over-sized calculators; office carbon units wear on-the-shoulders work cubicles etc. And all are sedulously polishing that vicious 'Who the **** are you' look, and that absurdity of all the Great Scowling Professions, the silly walk.
Getting My Own Back
The customer, rightly wary of all this and at least until we can sort it all out, would now do well to start wearing around his neck at least one household appliance: a food processor, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine. He can start small with, say, an iron, a kettle, a hand blender, and advance from there. In a medical setting, when about to be treated like a piece of meat, he should wear around his own neck at least one or two of his own stethoscopes — toy ones will do — and other instruments etc.
Where's The Money In It?
Profiteers in all this? Manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers and re-sellers of and investors in neck accoutrement straps and harnesses, neck exercise machines, neck massage machines, neck muscle gels, hot compresses, cold compresses, muscle relaxants and anti-inflammatory pills. Osteopaths, masseurs and orthopedic men will do a steady trade. You have heard it here first.
At The (Padded) Cellular Level
Before I — Perceval Residuum-Smythe — leave this important subject, do not those damn folded arms — more modern madness — evoke wearing a straitjacket?
This heroic glorious intellectual advance, from proletariat Soviet intelligentsyum, has recently come to my attention. I freely share it with you dialectically. Worker-peasant vanguard intellectual Dr. Prof. A. V. Schnurgonchinskiiyy (1838-1913) — the same A. V. Schnurgonchinskiiyy (to not be confused with the many others of the same or a similar name) who took the Sverdlovsk Mathematics Academy by storm with his 1911 hypothesis of 1912, and — after his posthumous rehabilitation after his posthumous conviction and sentence for posthumous Ismismisms against Party line after the several attempts to escape from a Don Basin rest home for burnt-out Stankovich smelters — posthumous winner of the semi-prestigious 1937 Jóséf Whó? Prize for the least worst essay written in hot milk on the back of a Makarov pistol about the Soviet monkey chocolate spread, spent last ninety years of his life toiling on it. Conjecture states (in essence, at its briefest, so to speak, in a manner of speaking, as one might say) that every 3,721 years or so, a femto-second occurs in which Nothing occurs, happens, transpires or takes place. Everyone and everything is in repose. No-one (including even any Zinovievite-Kamenevite decadent deviationist revisionist reactionary internationalist saboteur-wrecker theist bourgeois rightist-leftist-centrist cadre bloc center) breathes, talks, moves, struggles or agitates; no animal ditto; ditto plants and plant components such as, for example, leaves; ditto grains of sand, particles of dust, etc etc. Even within and between classes and the class elements, and shock brigades. Apparently next A. V. Schnurgonchinskii(y)y Conjectural Coordinated Synchronised Mutual Proto-Reciprocal Femto-Second is due on or around November 11, 2057, and will be detected by glorious heroic Marxist-Leninist detectors designed to detect disloyalty to Party and incorrect stands and allay lower-peasant concerns about the next famine (did we say 'famine'? We meant harvest).
Probably you'll think this food for thought is in poor taste but it needs saying. If you can do it in America — restaurant buffets, eating contests — you can export it to Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, in fact anywhere. And you need to know that all-you-can-eat — AYCE! — works at this time: there will be no shortage of sand, dirt and air to make the most ravenous, voracious and gluttonous of distended stomachs rest replete. All this is taking it to the next level to make a difference at this time. It's what you need to know. As for condiments of your choice (to accompany the beverage of your choice) to make the dirt of your choice more appetising, if you feel that need, why not need to want to need to go right ahead at this time, like, with various secretions from your dying camel or donkey. [Ed.: Now you are going too far. It is obvious that we are all in trouble. Leave it there.]
Well, back to those buffets. I hear that the Manhattan Uptown Reaching Out To Really Care Club is shortly to hold an all-you-can-eat-and-then-floss social. The idea is to collect the flossed-out food particles in a bag, and send it for famine relief… [Ed.: (*)(*&%^*&!@#!] It all arose from the following correspondence in We Really Truly Care Magazine:-
Dear Aunt Augustinasaurus: What is the etiquette concerning food fragments dislodged — deliberately or accidentally — by flossing? Should one: (a) swallow them (as was the intention); (b) having disengaged them from the floss (is there a special utensil for that or can one use tweezers, or fingers?), consign them down the sink; (c) collect them for starving people in Ethopia (surely); and if so, does one: (a) aggregate them into interesting shapes etc; (b) place them individually on blotting paper to dry; (c) sell them? Yours, Caring and Deeply Concerned
Dear Caring etc.: You ask a good question. It is long overdue that people who really care — caring people like Us, who care — address it. Tons of really good food in the form of flossed fragments are indeed lost to famine victims every evening by thoughtlessly washing them down the sink or (in violation, it must be said, of all the rules of etiquette) swallowing them (surely you will have already eaten sufficiently, and evening flossings make a big difference if one, recently, has not yet had breakfast). Now then. If we as Caring People would only collect and consolidate those fragments and mould them into attractive shapes, think of the hearty, wholesome, borderline-nutritious meals to be enjoyed in Somalia, South Sudan…
Westerns and Toilets
Things that trouble me at this time about 1950s Westerns: no-one ever goes to the toilet, and no cowpuncher ever wears a floral-print cotton dress to the saloon. Nor does Randolph Scott or Joel McCrae. And who launders the barber's towels, especially the ones with the left-over shaving soap when the customer sheriff has had to cut short the shave?
A man and his money
Unless one is a robot, a financial indiscretion at least once a week is, to my mind, inevitable. (It's best to keep an appropriate distance from women, to avoid another dimension altogether of foolishness.) I speak as someone who on occasions has run out of food and had no prospect of timeously turning a shilling. And also being, somewhat uncomprehendingly, in the converse position. A man easily parted with his money despite his most valliant, even desperate, exertions is a danger to himself and possibly to others; his financial ineptitude threatens his very existence, however competent he might be in other things. He had better entrust all but his most essential pocket change to an honest, competent, fully insured, whole-truth-disclosure-in-real-time-all-the-time, professional, bonded, something-to-lose top-rated financial adviser. I intend to look into this on this page.
Sounds familiar
The main theme of How To Marry A Millionaire (1953) is substantially the same as Duck Soup (1933); and of Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997) the same as Take The Money And Run (1969).
Of all the idiotic nonsense…
Now we are told authoritatively that 90 is the new 72, 70 is the new 50, 60 is the new 45, 40 is the new 23, 10 is the new 5 and 5 is the new 3. This provokes reflections on other idiocy. It is now commonplace to lament the loss of words such as 'gay', 'queer', but many other infelicities have arisen at the hands of illiterates. One of my favorites is the American word 'untold'. Of course this is often used as a corruption of the word 'untolled', but rare, on such occasions, is the American with the letters to realise it. 'Reach out' is another idiotic monstrosity. 'Reaching out' is what a drowning man does to a piece of driftwood, or a downhill skier does to a tree prior to sailing off a mountain. A correspondent descends precipitously in my estimation in using this expression to mean 'contact'.
Cookery and Laundry
Using the dishwater to poach salmon is understood. Less familiar is cooking Beef Wellington in the washing machine (forcing it though the detergent dispenser, pastry first). It does come out perfect on 90° one-hour cotton cycle and then an 800rpm spin. No ironing. Next: juicing oranges using the cordless vacuum cleaner (and why carton orange juice tastes foul, and why life without an air fryer is an impossibility, etc)
Casting, Mis-Casting
We are all familiar with disastrous ruinous mis-casting. Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra in Guys and Dolls. Need one say more? Less notorious is the mis-casting of Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind. Selznick's preferrred Rhett Butler was of course George Formby. The part of Rick in Casablanca, originally envisaged for transvestite conjoined twins and musical cement mixer, was first offered to Violet Carson and her well-known French prosthesis, Harry de Carsonne. Louella Parsons put paid to both propositions by engaging in unorthodox relations with [Ed.: Not necessary to be specific, surely.] Is posterity grateful?
Affectation vs Forced Guffaw: Distinction
The standard dictionary definitions of 'affectation' miss the point (and so does Harold Nicholson's Good Behavior (Constable, 1955)). 'Affectation' — which can be acute, episodic and or chronic — is clearly the psychopatic assumption and projection of the persona of one or more persons (who might in turn be affected, and so on) with the sole purpose of materially deceiving oneself and others, dishonestly, of the most fundamental, visceral details of oneself. In this sense one speaks of an authentic phony. Here's an interesting distinction (if that's what it is) brought on by recollecting the unforgettable scene of the spluttering James Crespi holding court at El Vino's of a Friday evening in the early 1980s. How would you describe the congregants' (hypothetical) outward processing, were it to be presented to them, of, say, Kipling's Prologue to the Master-Cook's Tale (The Humorous Tales of Rudyard Kipling, Rudyard Kipling, Doubleday, 1931)? It is not risible. It doesn't raise a giggle or even a smile. Yet it is witty, one knows it is witty, and one would like to demonstrate that knowledge to oneself and others. The only way to do that is by the forced guffaw (an English thing, of course). I think this grotesquerie is not itself affectation as defined. What do you think? How do you process it, for yourself and in company? [Ed.: What is the point of all this please? We have no interest in how people process Kipling, do we?]
The Obvious Question
Exactly what do ants really want, and how before they issue their demands?
When Travelling…
Which Elizabethan ball gown to wear when dining out on a submarine or Sherman tank? And what deportment to observe when traveling in a Victorian bustle in an aeroplane's sardine class (and how to get the trunk and the lady's maid into the overhead)?
Safety in Numbness
Generalised non-specific anxiety: an infantile feeling that everything is wrong but that you're not allowed to put your finger on it or do something about it, and that adults always know best, and that everything is for your own good and anyway you're just going through a phase and you'll grow or snap out of it…
It Wasn't Enough
Until recently, I thought that I had everything a man could possibly need: a roof over my head; running water; writing implements; a few items of clothing, some decent reading material; and, finally, a toothbrush and paste. How misconceived. I realise, now, that i lack the one essential: an air fryer. See how it dehydrates! This leads me to consider other implements one does not realise (until too late, but which time one's life is in ruins) that one does not have. There is the heavily polluting diesel-powered machine, the smallest model being the size of a walk-in closet, the function of which is to make, by the guttering spluttering of its engine, a noise sufficient to cover up a guest's eructations at dinner parties. Each guest brings his own. A Victorian thing. The dining room is soon thick with blue-grey smoke, but at least no-one will have let let the side down. Let it be known, and everyone will want one. And the shoulders-mounted portable inflatable carbon-unit cubicle with integral seat. No sense leaving yours at the office. Simply unplug and go home; return to work fully clothed. Of course after each commute, the subway car is littered with those stupid yellow things, tacks, photos, etc, but it's all worth it for the needful personal protection and sheer convenience.
Woody Allen and The Sandwich
It has long troubled me that, in writing otherwise thoughtfully about the sandwich, Woody Allen omits mention of two elements: (1) the symmetry of the two integuments, without which a sandwich is technically something else; and (2) the manual pressure required, whether or not the sandwich be wrapped, to hold the thing together, especially if we have, say, salt beef on rye from any self-respecting New York delicatessen. (The brightest among us have failed to devise, beyond the simple embossed leather sandwich sleeve, a compact diesel-powered press and feeder machine that holds the thing together while advancing it by degrees into one's open mouth: very necessary in an increasingly moronic world, would you not say?) By extension, we appear to have lost the primal ability to disconnect the lower jaw to accommodate even the lowliest cheeseburger. Snakes do it. Presumably humans must at one point have been able to do it — a now lost pterygoid-masseter-temporalis-labii etc process — in order to swallow the cheeseburger whole, without chewing. I am reminded… [Ed.: What is this rubbish?]
The Leisure Of An Egyptian Official, Edward Cecil (Hodder and Stoughton, 1921; available gratis at archive.org)
This is English wit of high order. It might escape the generality of Americans, who (perhaps unjustly) are not known for their wit and certainly not for their comprehension of anything English. Cecil's accounts of the Suez Canal explosion; the committee meeting; his manservant Suleiman; the train incident on the way to Port Said, and other vignettes, are masterfully done.
Le Cousin Pons, Honoré Balzac (1847; various translations — 'Cousin Pons' — from French into English are available for free at archive.org; I have made no attempt to compare the translations with the original or with each other; perhaps you would like to do that). This is high tragedy in a small compass (Bleak House, Dickens, 1852-3, to which it might in some ways be compared, is a heavier read). What a miserable man must have been Pons, and Schmucke. If you are interested in inheritance crime, Pons has a number of features and situations, vividly conveyed (curiously full of close coincidences to some of my own cases): the dishonest barrister; the pathologically rapacious criminal acquaintances; Pons' valuable art collection; Pons' fateful bequest to Schmucke; a succession of wills; morbidly unsatisfactory law; the disquietingly iniquitous dénounement.
A Code of the Law of Actionable Defamation [etc], George Spencer Bower (Butterworth, 1923; apparently available gratis online, if you can face it). I maintain, as (I maintain) would anyone who has given it serious thought, that law, like human and animal anatomy and physiology, should be taught in elementary school. These subjects could and would then not become the fiefdom of mystics — the intellectual direct descendants, in an unbroken line of succession, of medieval clergy — whose vocation is to turn us into subservient, craven, enthralled, gibbering, tongue-tied, moronic jackasses.
Spencer Bower was an oracle. This book on tort-defamation (cf. fact-derogation), like his works on actionable non-disclosure and actionable misrepresentation ('actionable' in the 19th-century English juridical sense; both free at archive.org; the three subjects, oddly, on which I am most occupied these days), are classic expositions still serviceable at the highest levels of the subjects and full of nuggets. Everyone who can string a sentence together should have a working knowledge of the principles of tort-defamation. This book provides it. If this is your first law book, you have come to the subject late, perhaps too late.
the gene therapy plan – Taking Control of Your Genetic Destiny with Diet and Lifestyle, Mitchell L. Gaynor MD (Viking, 2015). This evolution-centric book being full of well-reasoned technical thoughtful specific bases (including fun recipes) for rational life-affirming, life-enhancing optimism, I am at a loss to know why its author killed himself, aged 59, in the year of publication. It tends to undermine his irrefutable theses. Who could have saved him? Who tried?
The first of two Parts comprises six chapters, 'The Basic Plan' followed by five medical conditions: obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and ageing ('aging'). The basic plan (simplified) prescribes a full-frontal attack on a suicidal diet of the wrong kind of cabohydrates and the wrong kind of fats; a healthy diet of natural fresh food; supplements of a very wide variety, many from natural sources; clean air; relaxation; breathing; and — that intensely annoying word — exercise ("If you don't drink water, you die pretty quickly (around a week). if you don't exercise, you die more slowly, but you're still dying."). The particulars are enlivened by clear, vigorous argument.
This book might be (ironically) a life-saver, if only by inspiring a more thoughtful approach to how and why we expose ourselves and each other to things that kill us.
The English Amongst The Persians During The Qajar Period 1787-1921, Denis Wright (Heinemann, 1977). This book, the attraction of which, as any book, is initially in its feel, its appearance, is designed and typeset execrably. Perhaps a misguided attempt to save paper. Most disagreeable and inconvenient to the reader, it must have been disappointing to the author to have had his manuscript so comprehensively pissed on by the publisher at crucial stages of production. I wonder what went so badly wrong. Remind me to avoid this publisher re any of my books.
Once your eyes have adjusted to the layout and type — which make it difficult for you to return to it and almost impossible to dip into it — you have a most entertaining, enlightening, educating work, notable for its erudition (the Bodleian has his papers, in eleven languages), which is of course understated (an old and probably obsolete English approach alien to Americans). The footnotes are particularly suggestive of the author's range.
A retired Foreign Office diplomat of accomplishment who fitted the mould (as an audio interviewee on official matters, parochially, incongruously pusillanimously pompous — characteristic of the English, however well-travelled, of a certain vintage of a certain background at a certain level; confusingly severe and self-effacing), Wright (1911-2005) draws out three particuarly interesting points: the Shah's habit of lucratively granting extensive commercial concessions to intrepid, venturesome (and in some cases naturalised) British; the resulting displeasure of the Russians, always meddling; and the eventual discovery, in Masjid-e-Suleiman in May 1908, of oil: 'This discovery marked a turning point in Persian history as well as the beginning of the Persian, and indeed the Middle Eastern, oil industry.'
If your interest in Persia, its geo-petro-politics and other curiosities is to be brought up to date to say, 1976 by an empirical expert rather than a researcher, this is the one.
Lawrence of Arabia (Columbia, 1962). Jack Hawkins' profile is uncannily close to Augustus John's sketch of Allenby. Bad points: (1) Brighton's clapping; (2) O'Toole's "You really don't know?" outrageous pointless overacting; (3) the blood, an incredible lapse of judgment from an obsessional director and a dismissable offense by the color consultant; (4) 'Johnny Turk': I doubt T.E. would have ever said this: too English provincial, and the Turk was not close to being a 'johnny' in any relevant sense; (5) casting a six-foot-something to play a five-foot-two-ish. Norman Wisdom would have been perfect as T.E.; (6) Antony Quinn's obviously false, sometimes badly fitting nose; (7) not one scene in which T.E. is shown characteristically reading a book; (8) 'Pound them Charlie, pound them'. When said, clearly refers to 'this Arab army on the right'. The next apparent reference is 'god help the men who lay under that'. We are told that the Turks are under that, not the Arabs; no indication that Arabs were ever pounded by the British; (9) the flippant part of Maurice Jarre's score.
Angels One Five (ABPC, 1952). A superb tragic, understated depiction of certain magnificent English types. You have to know them to 'get' it (though John Gregson's character is not familiar to me): apparently over the head of the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther (his crass April 30, 1954 review). Dulcie Gray's acting is a mistresspiece of subtlety, Veronica Hurst's of English emotional repression; Jack Hawkins and Michael Denison are perfect; Gordon Bell is a delight. Some of the actors (Cyril Raymond, Ronald Adam) were re-enacting (we fancy the idea that Humphrey Lestocq did get the AFC / DFC; but he did air-tow targets…). Every time I watch it, a new impression. One wonders how G-C Small's valediction to "Never get into a kite until you're sure you can out" Septic would have been in real life less or more sympathetic ('Cheerio old boy, best of luck, tally-ho'?). By a long way one of my favorite films.