Spank You Very Much

I very seldom spank readers, for one very good reason: I am usually the one in need of spanking. Over the years you have put me in my place often and effectively — you are not bashful about this — sometimes altering my behavior and attitudes. You’ve busted me for misogyny, xenophobia, fact-deficient declarations of truth, moral ambiguity, unsupportable opinion, etc.

But last week you guys did a particularly unpardonable thing thing for which you must now be taken to task. This process will begin in a paragraph or two, just after we dispense with today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll. I’m giving you an opportunity to ridicule me in advance.

Rachel and I have gotten into vinyl records because of a vinyl-based play she is in. We bought a turntable, and found an unhandsome, over-engineered oak cabinet I hand-carpentered 30 years ago, and we put it to use. But we still needed something appropriately old and charmingly obsolete to support the speakers. Something that is retrograde, anachronistic, and a little … melancholy. Something with soul and grief, to create a tableau. Something that is beautiful, and defiant, but weeps for a past that is gone.

We considered obtaining some old wooden crates, but then I had an AHA! moment and went in an entirely different direction. It arrived in the mail the other day; didn’t cost much, for evident reasons, though the shipping fees were formidable. Rachel was bemused, unimpressed, but acquiesced.

Here it is, in place: the complete 1957 Encyclopedia Britannica, with its atlas volume. Your poll question follows.

Okay, now for your spanking. We begin with the results of this past weekend’s Gene Pool Gene Poll, in which we asked you if you’d change your meat consumption practices by eating lab-grown chicken meat, a biotechnology the FDA has now approved. The chicken thus produced will not be faux chicken made from soy and wheat gluten, which taste roughly as you’d expect. The chicken from this new process will be chicken, cloned and cultured from chicken cells, molded into familiar shapes. Asked if you’d eat it, only 38 percent of you gave an unreserved “yes.” You have aversions. You have reservations. You are not entirely … comfy … with this new technology.

One likes to say — it sounds noble and inspiring and encouraging — that there is no such thing as a bad answer. But, honestly, there is. You gave it.

According to your answers, you worry that the bioengineered chicken is “icky.” You worry about “health concerns.”

People, the ick factor does not exist, unless you are prepared to dismiss hamburgers as an icky form of cow. And “health concerns” are laughable. You want health concerns? Try eating chickens grown on factory farms. Oh, wait, you probably do.

Chickens are coprophagic. They eat their own poop, unavoidably and incessantly. The meat you dine on is ripped from chicken parts lying next to explodable, seeping organs that carry disease such as campylobacter and salmonella. Chickens are typically raised in such loathsome conditions that, to be edible to humans, they need to be drowned in antibiotics. Here is a partial list: aminoglycosides, to treat intestinal infections; bambermycins, to prevent the synthesis of the cell walls of bacteria; lincosamides, to combat joint and bone infections; macrolides, to treat a fatal condition called necrotic enteritis, which is caused by grotesque overeating, which is sometimes occasioned by the grotesque antibiotic diet, and because the birds have nothing to do but to eat, onaconna the stultifying nature of their life in jail.

Farm-raised chickens are routinely tortured to death. Scalded to death. Boiled to death. Crushed to death, asphyxiated to death by sheer numbers and crowding. Their poop runoff fouls waterways.

None of this will happen with cultured meat. Cultured meat will (likely) have no gristle. Cultured meat will not be produced under the supervision of children working in factories worldwide. Get over your icks.

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Okay, this Gene Pool is getting a little dark, so first, you get this, from Reddit’s Facepalm feature. It’s not unrelated in subject matter.

Send in questions or observations to be answered today! Send them here:

This week’s readers’ questions and observations, and my answers, will begin right now. The new subject for the week — as solicited on Saturday — is your history of funny / pathetic / eye-opening run-ins with technology. But you are still examining musical lyrics that blew you away, and I am happy to keep accepting them, for better or worse. The Gene Pool philosophy is that there is no statute of limitations on humor. Remember to refresh the page from time to time: As of this point, the Gene Pool is in real time.

Q: I am 82. Back in the mid 1980s, everyone was leaping into home computers. They were too complex for me, but I didn’t want to fall behind the marvelous march of technology. So I compromised. This was an error.

I bought an “electronic typewriter,” a deservedly short-lived product produced by several major typewriter brands (Smith-Corona et al) that were competing for the clueless-hidebound-old-idiot market.

Electronic typewriters had a typical electric typewriter keyboard, and, yes, you typed directly onto paper. The great innovation is that there was one line — a single line — of digital type display, the line you were currently working on, produced by a tiny primitive electronic brain. One line. You could revise that one line as you typed it, but once you entered it, it was … gone onto paper, transferred to the keyboard at an excruciatingly slow 15 characters per second, which added to your total writing time. And then it was a done deal, and that’s when Wite-Out would come in, again.

(Kids: Wite-out was goop you smeared over typos, so it would look sort of like blank paper — a kind of muddy, fingerprint-stained paper you could type over.).

The whole thing was excitedly advertised as the height of technology. Here’s a line from an electronic-typewriter manual in the mid-1980s: — this, from a manual at the time: “An entire word can be removed at the press of one key!” (Remember, there were actually functional computers out there, already, like the Kaypro II or the Commodore 64. This silly halfway measure was for the “technologically hesitant,” like me. We were no better than the vaccine-hesitant of today.)

I felt invincibly modern! But the thing was essentially useless.

Too many people resist change, and adopt it reluctantly and stupidly. It reminds me of a car that was made during the very, very early era of gasoline engines. It had a full-sized model of a horse’s head in front of it, so horses in the streets wouldn’t be freaked out by machines.

A: It was called the “Horsey Horseless!” I once wrote about it. It’s an example of a Skeuomorph, a mid-tech product that has useless elements of old tech, for familiarity sake.

There are competing theories about the Horsey Horseless. One is that it was designed, but never built. Another is that it was built and was a brief disaster because the gas tank was in the horse’s head, and in a head-on collision, things would go very bad, very fast. ,

Q: Regarding lyrics. Maybe you missed the last time I asked about this, but have you listened to Don McLean's OTHER masterpiece, On the Amazon?

First verse:

There's a danger zone, not a stranger zone
Than the little plot I walk on that I call my home
Full of eerie sights, weird and skeery sights
Every vicious animal that creeps and crawls and bites!!
On the Amazon, the prophylactics prowl
On the Amazon, the hypodermics howl
On the Amazon, you'll hear a scarab scowl
And sting, zodiacs on the wing
All the stalactites and vicious vertebrae
Hunt the stalagmites while laryngitis slay
All that parasites that come from Paraguay in the spring.

A: Sigh. Okay, we have to talk.

Folks, I mostly loved readers’ nominations for great lyrics; you introduced me to artists whose work I had not known, and the words enriched The Gene Pool. But more so than with most topics, there was a whole subset that were, well, sappy. Short on poetry and imagery, long on treacle, long on obviousness. Sucked dry of sentiment until the teat was blistered and bleeding. This was no problem for me: I just ignored them. There were beaucoup others that were worthy.

Every once in a while came a nomination so misinformed it hurt; I just ignored those. But you — the anonymous poster above — forced my hand. You did not like that I ignored you. You petulantly wrote BACK to chastise me for missing your sagacity.

This song does not belong to Don McLean. It is a charming bit of lyrical silliness, written in 1928 by Clifford Grey, Vivian Ellis, and Greatrex Newman, for a musical called “Mr. Cinders,” which was a forgettable play that rather clumsily inverted the genders in the classic tale of Cinderella. “Mr. Cinders” was a menial manservant pursued by a very vigorous and determined rich young lady. A shoe was involved. “On the Amazon’” was not considered an important part of the show, and was sometimes uncredited, as mere frippery. It was released separately in 1929 by Jack Payne and the B.B.C. Dance Orchestra. It was a foxtrot.   Jaunty, clever. Not Don McLean’s.  McLean covered it as a sort of a joke, and of course he never claimed authorship. It belonged to him only in the sense that the delightful “A Mother’s Lament” belonged to Cream. That was an old British bar song of dubious ancestry. (A Mother’s lament was one of the few times Ginger Baker sang lead. Worth listening to.)  

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Q: So, technology.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, houses had TV antennas. Setting it up was a three- person operation. One person stood on the roof and oriented the antenna in a succession of positions. The second person sat in the house watching the TV reception, and noting how it changed, moment by moment. The third person stood outside the house, shouting instructions to the roof person from the TV screen person. This went on in most households in America, as did the occasional flailing roof-plunge to death or disability.

A: My uncle Irving was on the roof. My father or brother was in the house. I was the relay man. My uncle sometimes, uncharacteristically, got testy with me because my reports came a little too late. I argued that it was inevitable because sound waves were slower than radio waves!

Okay, so now we entreat you. The Gene Pool has many thousands of people around the country and globe who read us weekly for free, and many hundreds who pay us a little money ($4.15 a month). Will you take the graceful, gazelle-like leap from the first group to the second, upgrading from “free” to “paid”? If you scratch our backs, we’ll scratch yours. Literally. I will come over to your house and scratch your back. Here’s how to arrange it:

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, “Spank You… “) 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 from about noon to 1 p.m. ET today.

Also, send in questions, observations, complaints. Right here to this orange button.

Q: When I was a kid in the late 50s, a computer was the second coolest thing I could imagine having. The first was a spaceship, of course. (As you might gather I was a math and science nerd.) Then I got older. I finally got one, at the office in the late 80s-early 90s. I was disappointed and frustrated that I had no problems in higher mathematics to solve on it. Now that I have several of them, same deal.

A: Yeah, here comes the old question of why we still call it a “computer.” .  Does anyone?  I do know that hundreds of years ago, if you looked up “computer” in a dictionary, it would define it as a person able to do mathematics in his or her head.   I do know that in 1965, for his 50th birthday, my family bought my dad a “Bowmar Brain,” which was a handheld calculator.  It cost, I think, $220.   It could multiply, divide, add, subtract, and do square roots. Period.  I also once had a dictionary from 1930.  I looked up “television,” and the definition was “vision over a great distance.”   All of these things are related, but I do not know how or why. 

Q: Lyrics (by the under-appreciated Andy Partridge of XTC) 

Books are burning,  in the main square 

And I saw there, the fire eating the text

 Books are burning, in the still air, 

And you know where, they burn books people are next 

I believe the printed word should be forgiven 

Doesn't matter what it said 

Wisdom hotline from the dead back to the living 

Key to the larder for your heart and your head 

Books are burning, in our own town 

Watch us turn 'round, and cast our glances elsewhere 

Books are burning, in the playground

Smell of burnt book, is not unlike human hair

 I believe the printed word is more than sacred 

Beyond the gauge of good or bad 

The human right to let your soul fly free and naked

Above the violence of the fearful and sad. 

A: This is good, but I penalize him for rhyming “sacred” and “naked.”  I am no fun at parties. 

Q: About 30 years ago, I ran an interactive media demonstration lab for the Office of Secretary of Defense. The lab offered visitors a look at what at the time were emerging training technologies like computer-mediated courseware, interactive video, and voice recognition. The voice recognition technology could be programmed to execute verbal commands on a desktop computer. For example, saying "Computer, list the files in the utility directory," would cause the computer to do so. Additionally, the computer could be programmed to verbally respond to a command as a confirmation that it received and understood the command it had been given. We had trained the voice recognition software to recognize the command to shut down the computer. Then, someone surreptitiously added a verbal confirmation response. One day I was conducting a tour of the lab to a couple of executives from the Office of Secretary of Defense. I demonstrated the voice recognition software by commanding the computer to perform some standard operations. Then, I commanded the computer to shut down. As the computer shut down, it exclaimed, in the style of The Terminator, "Fuck you, asshole!" I was fortunate that the executives found the response to be funny.

A:  Thank you.   I believe this gives me an opportunity to link to this spectacular sketch by Tim Robinson from the Netflix show “I Think You Should Leave Now.” 

Q: Do you, or can you, write to music ? 

A: I initially read this as “do you write music,” and the answer is emphatically no.  Creatively, I am a music idiot.  But I do, and have, written to existing music, including a couple of songs to which ASCAP credits me.  The most notable is this one – my rewriting of the National Anthem – which was recorded by my friend Christine Lavin, the folksinger.   (This is less than a minute and a half.)

Note, as far as “writing to music,” I cannot have music playing when I write.

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Q: Being the young professional in the 75- person genetic engineering company, I was sent to the info library to play with VisiCalc and try to get our cost allocations in 14-column paper to recalculate on a computer. It worked but 75k didn’t allow us more than a 5-row 10-column spreadsheet. On the new Compaq portable (sort of as big and heavy as a plumber’s toolkit) I got slightly bigger models that could be saved on floppy and I might have flown with it to be in negotiations. I fooled around with reading dBASE BASIC language and was able to make dbase II spit out line-by-line a relational database, the first MS-Access of its type. Later in career I put a 20,000-part-number by 20-country list onto its successors, Paradox and MS-Access. I was always the wonky kid to do this, now I’m the wonky adult to hack and make old softwares work forensically.

A: I think this is a joke on me, right? 

Hi.  This is Gene.   For some reason, some of the best stuff I have written about technology is from the past and crushingly sad.  I loved this column.  

Q: Double story from working a tech support line long ago for a company that provided spreadsheet software. There was a farmer who called for help with an advanced macroinstruction he was programming into his expense-tracking spreadsheet. He had organized his outlays on seed, fertilizer and other resources and wanted to project what market price he would require to make a profit with yield and other factors built in as variables. I was able to get him past the problem. He was grateful and I was thoroughly impressed with his skills. 

Then, there was an angry accountant who immediately accused the company of selling shoddy goods. I asked what the problem was and he said he had tried booting up our software and nothing loaded. This was at a time when people could start the operating system from disk simply by powering on. “I put the disk in the drive, turned the computer on, let it spin for a while and the screen stayed totally black.” I asked if he had also turned the monitor on. After a pause I heard, “Oh” followed by the click of the phone handset.

A: This is my kind of story.  The dumb ol’ farmer was smart, and the smart ol’ accountant was dumb.

Q:  This is a tech story because I was a techie, okay?  I was dating a guy way out of my league. I'm a nerdy engineer and he was on the cover of a local magazine as one of Atlanta's most eligible successful young business owners. He was beautiful also. He’d been chiseled out of whatever stuff God makes beautiful people out of in perfect proportions. My chest fluttered a little every time he looked my direction. I still couldn't believe he'd have any interest in me.

On our third or fourth date, I'd met him at a Mexican restaurant after work for dinner. I'd had a terrible day. As we waited for a table, I was filling him in on the series of calamities that had frustrated my work all day and he interrupted me and goes, "Aw, does my baby need a drinky-poo?" in a jokingly cajoling voice. I was so floored he'd called me his baby (remember, I was smitten) that I didn't even care he was being patronizing. We laughed. A drink lightened my mood and we had a nice evening.

The next week I had a big huge important meeting I was super stressed about. It went awful. He'd known that I had this big meeting on the horizon and as soon as I got home from work, I had a text from him asking how it had gone. I thought I'd be cute and responded, "Well, it's over but I definitely need a drinky poo" using his joke from a few days earlier. I put my phone down on the counter and went and opened a bottle of wine and started making dinner.

I realized after several minutes that I hadn't heard a notification that he'd texted back which was odd of him so I picked up my phone to look. Now...this was my very first iPhone. I'd had it all of about a week. I'd never before encountered this mystery saboteur of text message known as 'autocorrect'. And I saw with absolute unfettered horror that my message did not actually proclaim my desire for a potent potable but instead it proclaimed that I was instead in need of a 'stinky poo.'

A: I accept it as a tech story.  Another key principle of The Gene Pool is that there are no “appropriateness” strictures when there is a good punchline.

Q: I was at a restaurant in Olney where I asked for a medium rare (bison) steak. It came out basically raw in the middle and apparently the chef was angry that I complained as I got it back the same way.

A: My most dramatic case was the opposite.  Complained that the steak had been ordered medium rare and arrived well done.   This destroyed the steak for re-use, and the replacement was raw through and through, tepid to the touch.  A chef tantrum.  We took it home and cooked it medium rare.  

Q: These lyrics may not be awesomely brilliant, but they have at least a certain zeitgeistiness …

A: Ah, thank you.  These are campaign slogans, and would seem to be from this book.   They are magnificent in their hokiness and earnestness and viciousness! 

For William Henry Harrison, against Martin Van Buren, in 1840  Who never did a noble deed? / Who of the people took no heed? / Who is the worst of tyrants’ breed? / Van Buren! / Who, while but a little boy, / Was counted crafty, cunning, sly, / Who with the wily fox could vie? / Van Buren! / Who, when an urchin, young at school, / Would of each classmate make a tool, / In cheating, who the roost would rule? / Van Buren! / By scheming who to England went? / By intrigue who is President? / By proxy who has millions spent? / Van Buren! 

For John C. Fremont, against James Buchanan and his “Buchaniers,” in 1856.  Ye friends of freedom rally now and push the cause along. / We have a glorious candidate, a platform broad and strong. / “Free speech, free press, free soil, free men,/  Fremont”  / “”e have no fears. / With such a battle cry but that we’ll beat the Buchaniers. /  Then rally rally every man who values liberty. / Who would not see our fair land giv'n to blighting slavery. / Our cause free speech, free press, free soil, free men, so now three cheers / For the peoples’ candidate Fremont who frights the Buchaniers. / 

For US Grant, against Horace Greeley, in 1872   We’ll hang the Lib'ral Greely on a sour apple tree / Because he bailed Jeff Davis and he set the traitor free / He never can be President as you can plainly see As we go marching on. Hurrah, hurrah for Grant and Wilson Hurrah, hurrah for Grant and Wilson, etc.

 For Grover Cleveland, against James Blaine, in 1884 We have grown so sick and tired of Republicans and fraud / We’ve resolved they shall be fired from the nation's bed and board / And along with many thousands we are praying to the Lord/ To let us have a change. / We demand the rights of free men and we’ll not be bluffed again / We mean to seat our candidates in spite of scheming men / With Democrats to rule the land we’ll all be happy then Good Lord, let’s have a change. /Do you wonder, do you wonder, is the thing absurd or strange? / After twenty years of plunder we should want a little change. 

For William McKinley, against William Jennings Bryan.  The time has come to make a stand Shoulder to shoulder and hand to hand / To save our homes and save our land / By a vote for honest money. / We want a chance to work and eat / We want a country that can’t be beat / We want a man in the president’s seat / And we vote for honest money. Gold, gold, we are for gold We can’t be bought and we won’t be sold /For a dollar that’s honestly earned and spent / And William McKinley for President.

Q:   Here's something, posted to Twitter by a poet, that I thought would appeal to your sensibilities: 

A:  Very nice.  This gives me an excuse to link to my brief interview with Billy Collins, then the U.S. Poet Laureate.  It is largely on the same subject.

Q: I'm a librarian in a semi-rural town of about 6,000 people about 45 minutes west of Minneapolis. It's a fairly red area. I'm new here, and have been diversifying our collections. So of course in my first week here, I ordered "Me and Dog" It finally came in recently, and my staff set it out with the other new books. Today at story time, while waiting for the program to start, a 1st grade teacher read it aloud to her first grade summer class. I'm not sure any of the kids really understood the book's real message, but I'm counting it as a win for sanity, one picture book at a time. (And it's a great book, my thanks to you and Eric!)

A: Excellent! Thanks. For those unfamiliar — ‘Me & Dog” is a picture book by me and Eric Shansby. It is for kids roughly 4-8. It is about how there is likely no God, and how that is okay.

Q: When the waiter asks how I want the meat cooked, I always ask how the chef likes to prepare it. The answer is usually "medium rare", which is what I like, so that makes everyone happy. If I don't get that answer, I ask for medium rare, and that is almost always what I get. Occasionally it is more on the rare side but rarely (heh heh). I'm assuming your meat is usually too well done?

A:  Always.  Except for at Duke’s Grocery on 21st and I Street in D.C.

Q: Ten years ago my family moved to a rather bucolic section of Montgomery County, in the agricultural zone. Neighbors had apparently breathed the proverbial sigh of relief when our family took possession of the house and its several-acre lot instead of a developer. So the first April Fool’s Day we were there, I put up a big vinyl sign at the end of the driveway that read “Coming soon! High rise apartments” with a graphic of the hypothetical monstrosities. I very quickly learned which of my neighbors had a sense of humor and whose critical thinking skills weren’t quite up to snuff.

A: Thank you.   You are an a-hole.  This is exactly a thing I might have done, too.  Now, I have a feeling I might have run this question, and my answer, last week. That is my clue that I am tired, so I am calling this Gene Pool down.

Meanwhile: Please sending in questions and comments and observations. This is a great place to send it, and once you do, it has a higher chance of getting responded to.

Send it to this orange button:

And finally. Well you know where this is going. We need your support. I come to your house and scratch your back, etc. It’s worth it for so many reasons. Convert to “paid.” Then I become your employee. Hire me.