Old Man, Take a Look at My Life, I'm a Lot Like You Were.

I am a well-meaning, elderly man. I am tired and achy and desiccated. I am so old that in a mere nine years I will be as old as Joe Biden is now.

Like Joe, my short-term memory is fried, too. I’ve written this before. (At least I think so. Pretty sure I remember that.) If you asked me where I went to dinner yesterday, I’d have to think a bit to remember, and maybe never get there.

But I can still roar through the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle — the really hard one that people curse at. My long-term memory is fine. I can recall the original names of many African countries from the 1960s …. remember Rhodesia, Upper Volta, Dahomey, Belgian Congo? No? Well of course not; you are not an old man.

With the exception of Pat Myers, I spell better than anyone in the D.C. - Maryland - Virginia area.

I still know the meanings of obscure and words you’ve likely never heard of, words that don’t even look like words. Yclept, for example. (It means “by the name of.”) And yet, just four days ago, in this space, I told a story about my dog Harry that a reader noted that I had told, more or less the same way, a mere four and a half months ago. Plagiarizing oneself is not unethical, but as a commenter pointed out , it is not exactly laudatory, even if it is by accident.

Just yesterday, Rachel referred to a play we had seen about a year ago, about a 19th century hospital where they performed hysterectomies to cure women of “hysteria.” This is a narrative you’d think would stick with you. I had no memory of it. Rachel had to prompt me with details before it hit me, wham, total recall, like a sack of ballast sand swinging on a rope from the rafters of a theater.

Also, on the rare occasions when I write a check, I sometimes begin writing 19— for the year. I am not proud of this.

This is all called “mild cognitive impairment,” and it is typical — almost universal — in older people. It is usually of no concern, so long as the codgers can still think clearly, speak clearly, use good judgment, write coherent Substacks, negotiate with Hamas, etc.

The point I am trying to make is that savaging Joe Biden for minor short-term memory lapses is like savaging an elephant for its BMI. The hit was a cheap one by a biased prosecutor. The guy couldn’t indict, so he decided to hurt Biden politically. Prosecutor Robert Hur worked in the Trump administration’s Justice Department, and has been blamed for helping to spearhead the release of the Mueller report in ways that misleadingly appeared to exonerate Trump.

That his Biden report was a politically motivated smear is actually not easily disputable — prosecutors are not supposed to issue polemics against targets whom they are not prosecuting. As laymen without medical training, they are not supposed to gratuitously opine on the mental state of a subject. They are not supposed to speculate on how the subject would appear in a courtroom. It’s all against the norm, if not the law.

You don’t go ‘tsk tsk’ if the bottom line is that the person has done nothing legally wrong — especially if it is an ad hominem attack, as it was with Biden, unrelated to the investigation. (Mueller mentioned Trump’s actions that were not indicted because they were directly central to the case, about possible illegalities he could not prove, notably obstruction of justice.)

James Comey first set a bad precedent in this area with Hillary Clinton; his report on her emails contained a scattershot condemnation in which he brought no charges but tutted about her careless handling of correspondence. I am surprised he didn’t criticize her for having cankles. (Have you ever seen the two-part 2020 TV miniseries “The Comey Rule,” starring the stolid, righteous, square-jawed Jeff Daniels? It portrayed Comey as a hero, a martyr to honesty, following the dictates of his conscience, defying those who wished him to compromise and sully the basic tenets of democracy and fair play . It is based on a book written by (wait for it) … James Comey. It is absolutely infuriating to watch.)

But I digress. I’m not going to go into the unequal comparison between Biden’s mind and gaffes and Trump’s mind and gaffes and bizarre observations and adolescent attacks and just plain dangerous idiocies, such as threatening to encourage Russia to attack NATO countries that are behind in their dues — others have done that more than adequately, and the most entertaining evidence exists on many Trump-speech compendium videos. I am not going to veer off into the obvious: Biden has been a pretty good president, if for no other reason than undoing the Trump disasters, and Trump will almost certainly be judged by historians left, right and center, as the worst president in history. I will note, in conclusion, that Merrick Garland appointed the politically compromised Hur, no doubt so he (Garland) will appear unbiased and high-minded and evenhanded and non-political and noble and incorruptible and shiny pristine. Perhaps he will write a book, too.

It does occur to me that I could have used Merrick Garland as an example of the question that readers are responding to today: “Give examples of a smart person who did a stupid thing.”

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Which brings us to today: Please send in questions and observations to this revoltingly orange button:

And you may comment here:

Now for today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll, based on some readers’ contention that I was wrong about Ted Cruz’s appearance.

Getty Images / Fox News/ Youtube

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Finally,

In last week’s Gene Pool, someone discovered an unusual aptonym: a nurse practitioner in OB/Gyn whose last name is “Klam.” To juvenile men of a certain era who are familiar with certain vulgarisms, it is pretty funny. I didn’t want to press this matter, but it occurred to me that there was one person to contact, someone who would treat it with dignity and class and sympathy and understanding: Dr. Dick Chopp, about whom I once wrote. You can find the interview here.

Dr. Dick Chopp was a urologist from Austin, TX. He did vasectomies. Dr. Chopp’s practice employed a Dr. Stephen Hardeman, who was a specialist in erectile dysfunction. He also employed a Dr. Les Wang, who did circumcisions. I am not making any of this up. Read the original.

The interview was from 17 years ago; the column actually got him on the Jimmy Kimmel show.

Dr. Chopp is now retired, but still associated with his former practice. I called him, and reached him at a shotgun tournament in Florida. This guy has an active retired life.

I asked him if the practice might consider hiring someone in the OB/GYN field, and he said absolutely, that they now have a significant female clientele. So then I told him about Ms. Klam. Might he be interested?

A brief pause. Dr. Dick Chopp was considering, weighing medical imperatives.

“I like it,” he said, with finality. “She’d fit right in! Tell her to apply.”

So. Just a job tip for you, Ms. Klam.

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Here comes the real-time question and observation part. It’s exciting. Many but not all of the questions and observations are in answer to my call for examples of smart people doing dumb things or dumb people doing smart things. If you are reading this in real time, please keep refreshing the screen as new observations, and my reactions, roll in.

Q: Back when I was working, marketing materials developed by my team would get altered by muckety-mucks with no marketing expertise or skills. Not surprisingly, more often than not these changes were for the worse. Too embarrassing to allow to leave the building worse. I had many years of experience, so this didn’t bother me much. It meant extra work (mutter, mutter) but we could usually come up with something less good than our original but less bad than their “brilliant” idea. On the flip side, I was so very pleased when they liked something right out of the box—even though I had absolutely no respect for their opinions. AITH? 

A:  Yes you are, but I think this is common.  For very short periods in my life I worked for people I didn’t respect, and rolled my eyes at their decisions.  But I still basked in their compliments.  It’s a sort of intellectual cherry-picking. Many of these editors were  humorless, and overly cautious, not a good fit with a humor columnist.

I once wrote a column about the “vaccine hesitant” that had this passage:  The principle behind “vaccine-hesitant” seems to be that giving offense to these ignorant people might result in greater social disruption, civil war, etc. — that if we got these people really mad, they might start indiscriminately coughing or vomiting or wiping their noses on strangers. To me it is a ridiculous euphemism, the way you might refer to cannibals as “practitioners of nontraditional culinary adventuresomeness.” I propose, instead, as I have just made clear, “idiots.” 

My bosses ordered me to put in this cowardly, sniveling qualifying parenthetical: 

(Some people — those with legitimate medical or religious reasons to hesitate — are hereby officially exempted from contempt.) 

I was heading out of The Post and just sighed and did it, even though the religion part was, well, unfunny and factually indefensible and absurdly namby-pamby.   And after column was published, I got several emails from people wanting to know what possible religious reasons could exist.  

They were right. Even the Christian Scientists accepted and authorized the Covid shot.  I almost always answer my reader emails but just didn’t respond to those. The explanation was humiliating, and would have outed my bosses.

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Q: If Republicans seriously believe Donald Trump won the election in 2020, shouldn't he be ineligible under the 22nd Amendment, having been elected twice, regardless of any of the 14th Amendment issues? 

A: I like the way you think.

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Q: Smart individual doing dumb thing: my ex-husband 

Tried to install a fan belt while The  ENGINE WAS RUNNING 

A: Hahaha.   I once wrote about a colleague of mine, Christian Davenport: 

In college, he had an old Volvo that (1) ran fine, but (2) was hard to start. Because Chris had to drive from Maine to New York, he decided the logical thing to do was to make the eight-hour trip without ever killing the engine. At potty breaks, he’d leave the car running. At fill-ups, he’d leave the car running. Chris does not consider any of this to have been his big mistake. His big mistake occurred at a gas station near the end of his trip, when he decided the car needed some oil. Oil does not pour well when whipped by the wind from a fan that is running full speed to try to cool a molten engine block, which, when spattered with oil, ignites in a rather spectacular way. A fire extinguisher was required. 

Q:  A friend, a decent sort, was low on gas, and so, afraid he might run out before he reached a gas station, tapped on the glass cover on the gas gauge, in attempt to bump the needle a bit higher.

A: Even better story. And succinct.

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this right now, on an email: Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Old Man… ”) for the full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.  

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As always, you can choose to upgrade to paid status, if you are unpaid. I mean, you are unpaid: We don’t pay you for your contributions here, and you are entitled to feel abused. But just in case you are also feeling generous:

Q: My father was probably the most intelligent human I have ever met. However, he maintained that anyone could cook anything by following the recipe (a theory he seldom tested). Evidently when he read the spaghetti instructions they did not include "drain water before serving." – Ann Martin. 

A: I lifted this from the comments on Saturday, because I love it. Perfect example. 

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Q; You asked about smart people doing something stupid, or stupid people doing something smart. Same answer for  both.  Smartest: Trump marshaling government and private industry resources to create Covid-19 vaccines in amazingly short time. Dumbest: not taking credit for the result and instead attacking and all use of the vaccines when available.  -- Al Larsen 

A: Interesting point. 

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Q: Ted Cruz's beard was not smart. Did you notice he grew it around  the same time he stopped being anti-Trump and started kissing Trump's ass? It's like when Spock gets a beard and becomes super evil. 

Another Q: :

Q: You are wrong about Cruz looking better.  He used to look like a pasty-face jackass.  Now he looks like a sparsely bearded jackass.    

A: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think you are letting your distaste for the man affect your aesthetic judgment.   You should look at the results of today’s poll.   Also,  a few years ago Esquire weighed in as I did.   Headline:  Damnit, Ted Cruz's Beard Looks Tolerable Now

Subhead:  

His greatest political opponent has always been his face. A few weeks off the razor has changed that.

“His greatest political opponent has always been his face” is an excellent line.

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Q: I just let my annual subscription to your substack renew. You’re welcome. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’ve had some health issues over the last year; do I get some sort of refund if, say, you croak in March?

A: If I croak in March, you’re gonna feel bad. Or maybe, you’re gonna feel smart. Serious answer: Yes; there is a system to return outstanding money.

Q: "Just a job tip for you, Ms. Klam." Actually, it's a tip for Dr. Les Wang, the circumcision doctor.

A: Thank you.

Q: Take heart. I’ve read that neurologists believe that as the brain gets older, it does shrink but the memories remain; it just takes longer to retrieve them. So, barring dementia (which is a whole different matter), all it really means is you might not do so well on Jeopardy as you might once have.

A: I never would have done well on Jeopardy! I have a nine-second synaptic delay. By the time I hit the button the other two players would have done so already.

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Q: Auntie Syl was my great aunt. She was not smart. That’s what she told me. Perhaps she meant unsophisticated. Anyway, it didn’t seem to bother her. She once worked in an office. Her hobby was sewing dolls' clothes. She liked little girls and enjoyed making dresses for her nieces. Like her smarter siblings Syl put her savings in the stock market. Unlike her smarter siblings she sold her shares just before the crash of ’29. So unsophisticated Auntie Syl became rich Auntie Syl. She bought a mink coat. And jewelry. She moved to an apartment in Miami Beach and sent postcards from exotic locales like Honolulu. She took her nieces on trips to places like Mexico City. As she got older she continued sewing, now making dresses for her grand nieces as well as for her collection of Madame Alexander dolls. I remember once at a gathering at a relative’s apartment in Chicago someone shouting in surprise, “Auntie Syl just pulled up in a taxi!” An aunt gasped and hustled her young daughters into a back bedroom where they changed into their Auntie Syl dresses. They emerged looking like three disgruntled yellow lampshades. When Syl died the relatives fought bitterly over her estate. The lawyers got all the money.

A: Rachel’s grandmother, a widow, lived frugally.  She would unscrew some lightbulbs in a large fixture, when she didn’t “need” the light, to save money.   No one had any sense she had significant resources.  When she died, she had $6 million in the bank.

Q: I was driving along a busy road near Rehoboth Beach. In the bed of the pickup truck in front of me was a queen size mattress. Whenever we pulled away from a stoplight, the mattress quivered, gently at first, but then more enthusiastically. As the road turned into a highway, I said to my daughter, seated next to me in our car, “I think we should get out from behind this truck,” and I nodded to the increasingly enthusiastic mattress in the truck in front of us. She chuckled. I moved over one lane, and sure enough, as we and the truck approached and then exceeded about 30 mph, Poof! Up, up, and away went that mattress. Cars swerved, horns honked, and the pickup driver quickly made for the shoulder and a walk of shame to retrieve the mattress. “Basic physics,” I said to my daughter. “Or basic stupidity,” she replied.–

A: I don’t think you’ve established the presence of a smart person.

I once found myself behind a truck hauling a big mound of gravel that was spewing onto the highway and patter-rattling windshields, including mine.   On the back of the truck was a sign that said something like:  “Keep 100 feet away.  We are Not responsible for any windshield or other damage.”   I almost wanted to tailgate him so I could go to court and get that obviously legally unenforceable sign invalidated, and win a settlement.

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Q: This is a second-hand story, but it is an excellent example of a very smart person doing a stupid thing: There was an professor who enjoyed Ding-Dongs, and would bring a package to the weekly departmental seminar. However, Ding-Dongs are messy, and weeks after week, the professor, being absent minded, would forget to bring napkins. About 3 minutes into the seminar, he would be sitting there with chocolate-covered fingers, wildly looking about the room for something to wipe them on, when he'd notice his copy of the seminar paper. Wiping them on the paper did clean his fingers, but it was very loud and also made his copy unreadable. Fortunately, he was very smart, so had already read the paper and analyzed its shortcomings. By the time this absent-minded professor became Secretary of the Treasury and then President of Harvard University, he'd learned to use a napkin, or perhaps he just had someone assigned to carry around napkins for him.

A: Let’s just stipulate the obvious. This is Lawrence Summers, but you don’t know if it is true. Funny, though, and well written.

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Q: I won't pass up an opportunity to quote Al Franken on Ted Cruz: "Here's the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz: I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz."

A: Indeed.

Q: If you lie through your teeth, you are doing something somewhat different than when you lie out your ass. When Trump denies knowledge of specific names, dates, crimes, etc. that he actually remembers, he’s lying through his teeth. His daily prevarications (in stump speeches, on “Truth” Social, etc.) mostly come from his “lower mouth”.

A: Thank you.

Q: This is far from an original observation, but I just can't make sense of who looks at Biden (old/ slow mental reflexes) and Trump (old/ slow mental reflexes/ hateful/ treasonous/ poor policies) and says they won't vote for Biden on his age. How does this work? It has to be the same group who polled as- changing their probable vote to Trump over Biden's response to the Gaza situation. I mean, say you won't vote, that's just stupid in its own right, but to declare you'll vote for the candidate that is worse on that topic , as well as threatening to target Muslims here in our country? What is broken in these people's logic processing?

A: Ditto the people who don’t trust Biden on the economy, during a rare economic boom.

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Q: Dumb thing a supposedly smart person did. 

I was talking with a fellow engineer and she asked, “How long would it take for a radio broadcast to reach a star system beyond our solar system?”

I answered, “Alpha Centauri is about 4.3 light-years away (yes, I knew that off the top of my head), so about 4.3 years.”

She responded, “But that’s at the speed of light and sound travels…”

My jaw dropped at that point. This holder of a science degree had never grasped the concept of a carrier signal. I began to think of how she waits for several minutes between portions of a conversation on a long-distance phone call. 

A: I think I’m translating this correctly from science-speak. She did not know that radio waves also travel at the speed of light, yes?  That they weren’t the same as “the speed of sound.”

The ignorance of some very, very smart people can be awesome.  I used to be Tony Kornheiser’s editor.  At one point he told me that he did not know the difference between a planet and a star.  He said it was immaterial to his life.  

I don’t want to be hard on Kornheiser.  Sherlock Holmes once said much the same thing.  As Watson reports:  “Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth traveled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.”

Holmes responded that now that he knew it, he would try to immediately forget it, because he had no use for it, and it crowded out other more important things in his brain.

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Q: I just came across this "Doonesbury" from 2019.  Wow!  Trudeau sure called it with the first three panels.  I just hope the last three are equally prescient! 

A: Wow!

Q: My husband is an objectively smart on paper guy - multiple degrees in computer science and economics, successful software developer, well read, and picks up things light as a whip. Once were hanging out in the backyard of in our newly-purchased first home, it was late spring, and lots of plants were starting to come in for the first time. A nearby planter had leafy green growth of what I speculated were strawberries. He says "well, couldn't we just check?" I wasn't sure what he meant so we went back and forth for a bit until finally he said "couldn't we just dig a little and see if there are strawberries in there?" My brilliant mate thought, deep in his 30s, that strawberries grew underground like potatoes. 

A: Nice.   This is a digression, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to note.   It’s a sign of the existence of a philosophically mischievous, or maybe a particularly artistic God skilled in juxto.   One of the homeliest naturall things in the world – the potato – has some of the most beautiful flowers.  

Okay here’s an emergency Gene Pool Gene Poll. No cheating.

Q: Why Trump? -  You have written about not understanding why people find Trump compelling. I don't like it, but I think I understand the appeal. The "me first"-ism, saying the "quiet part out loud," being unafraid of criticism. It's like he is holding an invisible FUCK YOU sign everywhere he goes. (which, of course, does not apply to his fans but to everyone else.) Do you find this article/explanation from The Guardian compelling? 

A: I find the discussion of intrinsics and extrinsics interesting.   But aren’t extrinsics in much smaller supply?  Not a majority electorate, I would think.  

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Q: Something unexpected: Seeing a contractor whom I’d hired in the past to work on my house appear on Dateline for being suspected of murdering somebody who had employed him.

A:  Whoa.  The closest I have come was a contractor who was arrested for domestic assault.  My father worked with a guy at the IRS – he sat next to him in the office – who was arrested for shooting his wife – not fatally.   I was a kid at the time, and my father didn’t tell me about it for years.  I think he was afraid it would reflect badly on him, for some reason.  The guy’s name was Hanrahan.  I don’t know why I remember that.

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Q; A woman of my acquaintance, now retired, lived in the Seattle area.  Her job was to work for a company that sold appliances (often on the installment plan) and arranged for delivery, including to remote areas.  So she was responsible for traveling around Native towns in Alaska and making sales.  To use outdated language, her job was literally selling iceboxes to the Eskimos.

A: I once wrote a story about Savoonga, Alaska, an island closer to Siberia than to the U.S. mainland.  When reporting it, I discovered that you CAN sell refrigerators to Eskimos.  They had lots of them.  Often it is just too cold to store food outside without it getting  severe freezer burn.  They need the refrigerators to keep their food warm. 

Carrying coals to Newcastle is a different matter altogether. 

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Q: James Comey is obviously a smart person. But, in 2016, he did something that was so dumb, in his own words, it “made him a little bit nauseous” to think it created the result of electing Donald Trump. I probably would have done the same dumb thing — candor is my downfall, too.  – Audrey Liebross

A: Sorry, what does candor have to do with it, Audrey?

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This is Gene. We’ve come full circle, so I am going to call us down here. PLEASE keep sending in questions and observations, which I will address on the Thursday Gene Pool, which will feature some excellent results of the old contest, and an intriguing new contest.

Send em here.

And (poem coming) if you are of a mind / to be kind / please upgrade / to “paid. “