What's Wrong With This Picture?

Here's part of page 3 from today's edition of the Columbus Dispatch:





It took me awhile to figure out that this was actually two separate ads rather than one very weird ad.

Now I need to figure out if the editor was messing with me or if it's time to change my medication.

What do you think?

My Favorite Needle

So, do you have a picture of YOUR favorite needle? If so, please share. (And if it happens to be something that a house mother can use to defend herself against today's breed of fella, please share it faster!)

Alexander's Loss Of Face

I'm still reading Anthony Everitt's biography of Augustus.

I started it about three weeks ago.

I think the older I get, the slower I read.

At the rate I'm going, I expect to start reading backwards by the time I'm 60.

Which is different than unreading things. That's an ability no one has apparently acquired yet.

Which is too bad because I really, really wish someone could teach me how to unread Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

But I digress. What I really wanted to say here is that I'm enjoying reading about Augustus and those who knew him.

I just finished the chapter in which he visited Alexandria after defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra once and for all.

Like a lot of tourists to Egypt back then, he made it a point to go see the tomb of Alexander the Great.

Unlike all other tourists, however, he wanted to meet the long-deceased Alexander face to face, so he had his body disinterred.

I guess when you're the supreme ruler of an empire, people will do anything you ask them to do.

Unfortunately, something seems to have gone horribly wrong during this meeting of Augustus and Alexander and... well... somehow Alexander ended up losing his nose.

Today there's nothing at all left of Alexander or his tomb, so in retrospect the loss of a nose seems pretty minor, nothing more than the merest hint of what was to come, but still... it seems rather surprising and uncalled for all the same.

Just because the monuments of Washington DC are probably destined to eventually turn to dust is no excuse for Obama to dig up the body of JFK and break off his nose, you know?

Somehow "Oops - I didn't mean to do that!" seems like a pretty lame excuse no matter how many centuries pass.

And I don't think even today's ultra-sophisticated spinmeisters could convince the masses that a faux pas like that was actually a sign of deep respect.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that history often seems to me to be one long catalog of the grotesquely and/or hilariously unexpected. That's what keeps me reading.

Of course the unexpected confirmation of things I thought I already knew is nice as well.

Everitt's biography of Augustus provided me with one of those, too, when in the course of talking about how Mark Antony and his men were bottled up in Actium harbor it mentions in passing how disease started spreading through the ranks because "the barely perceptible tides of the Mediterranean" weren't enough to dissipate all their garbage and waste.

Ha! If the frickin' Mediterranean Sea doesn't have much of a tide, certainly Lake Erie has even less of one - which is one of the things I was trying to convince my S.O. of this past June while we were vacationing in Vermilion.

Thank you, Mr. Everitt, for inadvertently offering this tiny bit of proof that I really *do* know what I'm talking about sometimes.

And thanks as well for sharing your take on the whole "Cleopatra killed herself with an asp" story. Like others, you dismiss it as probably a myth. What makes your dismissal so memorable and worthy of thanks, however, is your revelation that Egyptian asps tend to be some 8 feet long and thus rather difficult to smuggle into a closely watched chamber.

The picture you generated in my head of Elizabeth Taylor clutching an 8-foot-long snake to her breast in an attempt to kill herself in 20th Century Fox's cinematic version of the tale is worth MUCH more than what I paid for your book.

Thanks ahead of time for the other smile-inducing revelations that doubtlessly await my history-hungry eyes.

Monkey Morality

I recently finished reading Alex Boese's book, Elephants On Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments.

Perhaps you did, too.

If so, you now know that giving LSD to a pachyderm is rarely a good experience for anyone involved.

You also know that car drivers stop more readily for a woman pushing a baby carriage than a woman pushing a shopping cart, that those engaging in sexual intercourse end up leaving behind a pubic hair on their partner only about 17% of the time, and that the longest a dog has ever lived after having a second dog's head transplanted next to its original was 29 days.

As fascinating and/or revolting as all that might be, however, the thing I found to be absolutely the most fascinating and/or revolting came in Boese's chapter about Stanley Milgram's famous "Obedience To Authority" experiments.

You remember those, right? No? Well, you can find Wikipedia's entry on them here.

My short summary goes like this: When people are asked to give an electric shock to another person as part of an alleged experiment to determine whether or not the infliction of pain helps people accurately memorize a list of randomly paired words, most people will shock that other person. In fact, they'll give that other person greater and greater shocks even as that person moans and begs for mercy. About two-thirds will even deliver an obviously dangerous jolt of 450 volts after the other person has started screaming or become ominously silent.

Did I mention that the other person indicated at the start that they have a heart condition? My bad. They did.

It was all a ruse, of course, designed to probe the human tendency to obey the increasingly outrageous requests of authority figures even as Very Bad Things start happening as a consequence.

Milgrim's conclusion: "I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment... that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we have seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

All of which I've known for many, many years. (I probably began to suspect as much from the time I encountered my first playground.)

What I didn't know until Boese told me was that other researchers have conducted similar experiments with monkeys.

Specifically, they locked rhesus monkeys in cages and required them to pull on a chain to obtain food. Pulling on that chain not only gave them food, however - it also delivered a shock to another monkey in a neighboring cage.

"After witnessing the agony of their neighbors. the majority of the monkeys refused to pull the chain again. They starved, some for as long as twelve days, instead of inflicting pain on another. The monkeys, in other words, did something most humans could not: They said no."


I look forward to the day when a political, religious, or business leader steps up and begins to promote a system of morality that's at least as good as that of the average rhesus monkey.

(Hell, at this point, I'd be happy to stop seeing news stories with titles like GOP Glock Raffle Succeeded So Well It Sold A Deer Rifle Also.)

The Big Change

On Friday it was sunny and 97 degrees here.

Today it's cloudy, damp, and 65.

The year seems to have been blown from summer to fall during the series of storms that rolled across Ohio after I went to bed Saturday night.

My sinuses were *not* happy about this sudden change. I spent much of Sunday trying without much success to break free of the invisible bands of pressure that ran across my cheeks, nose, and forehead.

I'm almost back to normal today.

Other things, of course, won't be back to what they were like last week for months.

Here's one example:



Cedar Point (Friday)


Cedar Point (Today)

This is the first Tuesday the midway has been this desolate since May 10.

It'll be like this (or worse) every Tuesday for the next 8 months.

If you happen to live in Ohio (or any place like it), I hope you seized the opportunity to enjoy the good weather while you had the chance.

Are You Missing YOUR Panties?

I don't mean to be forward - and I certainly don't mean to be rude.

But if you DO happen to be missing your panties, I may be able to help.

According to a story in my newspaper today, some 1700 panties have turned up along a country road about 30 miles to my southeast.

A local news station says the figure might be as high as 3000.

Until dedicated investigators release a precise count, suffice it to say at this point that we're talking about a lot of panties.

So, if you just happen to be missing yours AND they continue to be missing after a thorough search of your house, car, and place of employment, you might want to contact the Fairfield County sheriff's department and see if they've been taken into protective custody.

Apparently a wide variety of colors and patterns have now been successfully apprehended without a struggle, so be sure to be prepared to give as precise a description of yours as possible when you call lest you have your hopes raised inappropriately or (horror of horrors!) you accidentally end up with someone else's.

Of course if you happen to have a photo of your missing panties you should turn it over to the proper authorities as soon as possible. Not only will this make their job easier, it will also save you the trouble of having to pick your panties out of a line up.

In the meantime, try not to think about the rough fabrics, skewed stripes, and obnoxious polka dots your poor panties might be having to co-exist with in the extremely cramped and poorly ventilated quarters of a rural Ohio evidence room.

And maybe before another day goes by you'll finally make the time to do what my loved ones and I just did and sew a few identifying microchips into whatever panties you might still have in your possession.

Scenes From The Garden

Aug 22 Cicada



Aug 25 Woodpecker



Aug 27 Morning



Aug 27 Sunflower



Aug 28 Hummingbird



Aug 30 Bunny



Aug 31 Chipmunk



Sept 1 Grasshopper



Sept 1 Night