The Invitational Week 45: The Perfect(ly ridiculous) Gift

Offer up some products for people-who-have-everything catalogs. Plus winning 'life lessons' to be learned from the movies, from Costco, and more.

We can safely say that no one resembling this man will be buying this “whole body pedaler” from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. (From hammacherschlemmer.com)

Hello. This is Thursday, which means it is The Invitational Gene Pool, which is a hoot, but first a non-hoot. Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll.

The Shop Treatment: This week’s Invitational

This week’s contest asks you to come up with items to be sold in mail order catalogs such as Hammacher Schlemmer’s, which we are leafing through right now.  Do you get mail order catalogs?  If you don’t, it doesn’t matter, because we are going to help you out right here. But just in case, many of them are easily found online.  The thing is, very often the very best item these catalogs offer is the catalog itself. 

This one, and many others, seem to be directed at a market that includes grannies and grampies with more disposable income than they know what to do with, middle-aged people with more disposable income than they know what to do with, but not young people, who are simply too hip for all of this stuff.  The contents are corny, mostly useless, hilariously overpriced ($89.95 for a manual kitchen grater), and largely absurd. The for-oldsters comfort items are frequently modeled by people who’d never touch these items were they not being paid to do so, such as the one at the top of today’s Gene Pool, featuring a buff, handsome twentysomething giddily employing a watered-down baby-type stationary bike you can use while sitting in a stuffed armchair.

Here is a list of other things taken specifically from the current Hammacher Schlemmer print catalog:
— A waffle iron that makes waffles in the shape of a toy train set ($79.95).

— Q 19-foot inflatable lawn Grinch ($399.95).
— A plush piggy bank that, with each deposit, wiggles and sings about the joy of saving money ($39.95).
— A hand-painted rocking horse that neighs and whinnies and makes clip-clop noises ($259.95).
— A handmade Irish shillelagh ($89.95).
— A wireless computer keyboard that looks like a manual typewriter from 1935 and clacks and dings just like Grampy’s but also for some anachronistic reason has LED lights on the keys ($149.95).
— An Advent calendar that dispenses a little toy each day — for your dog ($169.95).
— And, on the cover of the print catalog, a record turntable that operates vertically; it looks like a guitar, and you hang it on the wall, and somehow it presses the tone arm against the record, sans gravity, with — as confirmed by online reviews — a fidelity level of two cans and a string.  ($349.99).

For Invitational Week 45: Invent an item, with a catalog description, that would be a humorous addition to the Hammacher Schlemmer or a similar catalog (e.g., Harry and David, The Sharper Image, J. Peterman, Neiman Marcus). Your entry may be any length at all, but shorter writing is often more entertaining.

Click here for this week’s entry form. Or go to bit.ly/inv-form-45. For formatting, all we ask is our standard request that you type each individual entry as one line — in other words, don’t push Enter anywhere in the middle of that entry. As usual, you can submit up to 25 entries for this week’s contest, preferably all on the same form.

Deadline is Saturday, Nov. 18, at 4 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, Nov. 23. Yes, that is Thanksgiving. We will be there for you.

The winner gets, speaking of shopping, a vintage but brand-new Whole Fools Grossery Bag, designed by the renowned funny artist Bob Staake for The Style Invitational, this contest’s previous incarnation; Pat used to give these to runners-up. This canvas tote, made of genuine plant matter, is also available for purchase in the Invitational Wish Book™ for $799.95 plus shipping.

Runners-up get autographed fake money featuring the Czar or Empress, in one of ten nifty designs. Honorable mentions get bupkis, except for a personal email from the E, plus the Fir Stink for First Ink for First Offenders.

Meanwhile, we need questions / observations / reactions that Gene can answer right here, in real time. Send ’em to this tasteful orange button:

Learning the Har Way: The ‘life lessons’ of Week 43

In Week 43 we asked you to give us some observational humor in the form of “life lessons” to be gleaned from various situations — the movies, the gym, Costco, or any other milieu.

Third runner-up: In the kitchen: Whoever says “easy as pie” never made anything involving flour, buttery fingers, and a rolling pin. (Pam Shermeyer, Lathrup Village, Mich.) 

Second runner-up: In Las Vegas: You can meet a lot of women in bars who honestly don’t care how you look.  (Steve Smith, Potomac, Md.) 

First runner-up: At the gynecologist: When your feet are in stirrups, your private parts fully exposed, and you think your ass is about to slide off the edge of the table, it will still be possible to “scoot down just a bit more.” (Judy Freed, Deerfield Beach, Fla.)  

And the winner of the cat-leg socks: From being an insomniac with ADHD: The dorid nudibranch has a plume of gills around its anus. Turtles can also absorb oxygen from their butts. In fact, butt-breathing is fairly common in amphibians and reptiles. It’s true, the technical term for butt breathing is cloacal respiration. Birds have a cloaca. Speaking of birds, did you know owls can’t move their eyes? That’s why their heads turn so far. An owl can rotate its head through 400 degrees in full rotation. Tarsiers can rotate their heads 360 degrees, which is impressive for a mammal... (April Musser, Georgia) 

None the Wiser: Honorable mentions

From online dating profiles: No man is 5-11. (Jesse Rifkin,  Arlington, Va.)

At the movies: Anytime a bullet is removed from a victim, it must be dropped into a metal container of some kind, producing a resonant clink. (Cindy Clendenning, Colorado City, Colo., a First Offender)   

From listening to WTOP’s traffic reports: There exists a way for someone named Dave Dildine to survive middle school. (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.) 

From online dating:  Nobody is searching for a partner who shares a disdain of moonlight walks on the beach. (Judy Freed) 

From observing Kevin McCarthy: It is possible to sell your soul to the devil and still not get anything worth having. (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.) 

At an Eagles vs. Commanders game in D.C.: What it’s like at a Commanders vs. Eagles game in Philly. (Jon Ketzner, Cumberland, Md.) 

At shopping malls: You don’t have to be in peak physical condition to get hired as a security guard. (Leif Picoult, Rockville, Md.) 

At the movies: Never use an alley as a shortcut, unless you’re prepared to climb a chain link fence. (Steve Smith) 

At a restaurant: The time it takes to order, receive, and finish eating your food is usually equal to the time it takes the server to bring the check. (Lee Graham, Reston, Va.) 

At the therapist’s office:  Your most urgent, emotionally laden issues will surface 47 minutes into the session. (Judy Freed) 

Reading “Beetle Bailey”: Trees grow horizontally from the sides of cliffs, and are quite sturdy, so it’s easy to grab on and be supported if you fall over the edge, even if you are a fat sergeant.   (Roy Ashley, Washington, D.C.)

Feminine hygiene product ads: The first thing I should be thinking of when I feel a cool autumn breeze is the smell of a woman’s genitalia. (Mark Raffman) 

Fox News: Biden is increasingly old and feeble.  MSNBC: Trump is increasingly old and feeble. The U.S. Census: Everybody is increasingly old and feeble. (Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md.) 

From Costco: It is possible for one person to consume an entire one-foot-diameter pumpkin pie between the Sunday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  (Jeff Contompasis) 

From lying in a gutter with a bottle of Ripple: Wine is coldest at 3:47 a.m. (Jon Gearhart, Des Moines) 

From the 2020 presidential election: The “some of the people” you can fool all of the time turns out to be about 47 percent of the population. (Michael Stein, Arlington, Va.) 

From The Washington Post: Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. (Jonathan Jensen, Baltimore) 

From Trump trials: When faced with jail time, Trump’s former colleagues pee out the Kool-Aid very quickly.  (Leif Picoult) 

The book “Hillbilly Elegy”: “Flyover country” is populated by real-life flesh and blood human beings with hopes and dreams that are just as deplorable as I thought. (Mark Raffman) 

While doing your taxes: Even though he calls only when he needs money, it still feels all warm and fuzzy inside to call your college kid a “dependent.” (Karen Lambert, Chevy Chase, Md.) 

The headline “Learning the Har Way” was submitted independently by Beverley Sharp, Jesse Frankovich, and Chris Doyle; Tom Witte wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.

Still running — deadline 4 p.m. ET Saturday, Nov. 11: Our Week 44 contest for monorhymes — poems in which all the lines rhyme on the same sound. Click here for details.  

Last, if you are a free subscriber and can afford a paid subscription, please consider supporting The Gene Pool. Our paying subscribers let us continue to expand and experiment while keeping most of this newsletter free and open to all. It’s $50 a year or $5 a month.

And lastly, I would like to make a further observation from Tuesday’s Gene Pool, about Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, and his maniacal fascination with resisting the urge to masturbate to porn, involving the creepy online compact with his then 17-year-old son (“Jack” Johnson) so that they will rat each other out when there is online evidence of their dirtiness.  Without disclosing his own scores, Mike has said his son has a clean record. 

Here comes my observation: 

Has it not occurred to Mike Johnson that Jack Johnson, being a denizen of the modern online world, unlike Mike Johnson who seems to think that the main purpose of the web is to control your instances of self-abuse — that Jack Johnson might have a second online identity that Mike Johnson knows nothing about?   Just a thought. 

So here comes the renowned real-time questions / observations part of the Gene Pool, and answers thereto. Many relate to Gene’s call, on the weekend, for awkward encounters with bureaucracy.

REMINDER: If you are reading this in real time, keep refreshing your screen to see more Q’s and A’s.

Q: Just yesterday your fellow substackian, Danny O’Neil, a fine writer, formerly a reporter for the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and a graduate and ardent fan of the University of Washington Huskies, titled his latest entry in a way you would appreciate. You’re welcome, though mostly for the commas. (Gordon from Rain City)

A: Thank you.

Q: Because my schoolgirl study of U.S. Government was lackadaisical (and now ancient history), you have just taught me that Mike Johnson is 2nd in line to be POTUS! I did not need this extra worry in my life right now. Thanks Gene!

A: It doesn’t end there. The third in line to the presidency is the president pro tempore of the Senate, who is, by statute, the most senior member of the majority party, meaning he or she is almost always a really old fart. The current one is Patty Murray, the senator from the state of Washington, who is a sprightly 73, but previous president pro tems have been in their eighties, and arguably half senile.

President pro-tems have a full-time security detail, paid for by taxpayers, even though they are largely powerless and clueless. And old as dirt.

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, “The Invitational, Week 45… “ 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 roughly 1 p.m. ET today.

Also,

Q: I’m not sure if this qualifies as a prank; it was maybe more of an experiment. Years ago I was at a conference, in a large auditorium. I was sitting a little to the left of center, a few rows from the front. Every time the speaker looked my way, I would look alert, maybe make a note about what he was saying. As he moved back and forth across the front, I would ignore him when he moved farther away from me, but nod and make eye contact as he moved toward me. He gradually started staying on the left side of the room, and by the end of the class was standing directly in front of me, speaking directly to me. I thought it was funny at the time, but ugh now it just seems mean.

A:  I was a psych major in college.  This is called operant conditioning, where certain behaviors are reinforced.  The most famous example of this was done with pigeons in something called a Skinner Box, created in the mid-1900s by famous quack psychologist B.F. Skinner. 

He put a bunch of pigeons in boxes where they were given a kernel of corn at completely random intervals.  And left them over the weekend.   Three days later he checked in on them.  Each was doing something bizarre, but they were different bizarre things.  One was hopping on one foot, another was flapping it wings constantly, etc.   It established superstitious behavior: Each bird tried to figure out what it had been doing right before it got the food, and then began doing that continuously, which of course was reinforced every time it got food. 

Q: A math professor told me this: He was a young new professor assigned to teach a large introductory lecture class. The first day, he sat in the front row. A friend posed as him and began to teach. My prof repeatedly interrupted the "professor," suggesting more advanced approaches to the problems. The "professor" finally yelled, "If you're so smart, then you teach the class!" and left. The guy counted to 10, then walked up in his baggy shorts and cap turned backwards and continued the lesson. Gradually, the shocked looks from the students turned into smiles and chuckles.

A: Very nice. 

This is Gene. It is still early, but the first results of the Gene Pool Gene Poll reveal something interesting. I asked almost the same question not long ago, and a far higher percentage of respondents said Biden should hold his ground. Something is happened that I do not understand. It may be brilliant messaging by the right.

Q: Expanding on a comment posted Tuesday, I wonder how close a person has to be for you to hold a door open at the entrance to a store or public building. This needs a scientific study. I'd guess 10 feet for the average person, 20 feet for elderly or handicapped, and if you're male, half a block for an attractive young woman.

A: The end of your suggested is funny, but gross. But funny. Also, I don’t think that the distance should increase for the elderly or handicapped. It puts an undue burden on them, and reeks of condescension.

Q: I have a friend who is a horse whisperer. Now, while this may mean different things to different people, my friend brought out something special in the horses she met, namely a special something of theirs. This is to say that when she made kissy noises at them, they all got massive horse boners. I have seen it on multiple occasions. If you have never been at Busch Gardens watching a nice middle-aged lady giving a Clydesdale the time of his life, I cannot recommend it enough.

A: Noted. I just felt this had to be published.

Q: This is about bureaucracy.   I am a graduate of Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.  It is a fine school.  It is not, however, the College of William and Mary, which is in Virginia.  Unfortunately the  company for whom I am employed, and have been for the last 13 years, thinks I am a graduate of William and Mary, which is objectively a more prestigious school.  I do not know how this happened.  I have never lied about where I come from, but apparently when I was first hired, they transcribed my resume, and made the mistake.  I spent two years trying to get this changed but the bureaucracy would not budge.  As far as they are concerned, William and Mary is an Established Fact in my personal history, never to be changed.

I am writing this here for the first time, and only because I am now senior management at the same firm, a valued employee, and probably beyond firing.  If I am ever “caught” at this non-crime, I plan to cite this entry to this website as proof of no ill intent. 

A: I went to NYU, and dropped out with three credits to go, to write a story in New York Magazine. Never went back.  My resume, ever since,  has said, truthfully, that I attended NYU from 1968 to 1972.  I never claimed a degree because I do not have one.  But if employers chose to assume that the four years implied graduation, I never specifically disabused them of this notion.  And now I am 72 and probably technically unemployable, so it worked. 

Q: So the George C. Marshall High School sports team names may have been the wimpiest on Earth: "The Statesmen" and the “Lady Statesmen.” My niece attended Earlham College; at that time (they've since changed it) their sports team names were The Fighting Quakers.

A: Excellent. The Genocidal Pacificists.

Q: I went to an NJ Motor Vehicles unit to register a new-used car title. Requires you to sign the back and not deface it. This was in the hard times of Christie Whitman 30% cutbacks in staff, was a bad time.They only had pencils at the desk, I signed in their presence in pencil. They said it had to be in pen. (I’m a CPA, and know commercial law.). I said no it doesn’t. They insisted, I carefully traced over the signature in pen. They said I defaced it. I said no I complied with you and signed it in your presence, twice now. They said, no I was going to have to GET THE PREVIOUS OWNER TO REISSUE A TITLE for me to sign properly. I didn’t drive my car through their window which I wanted to do. I called the state and they gave me another office to complete the transaction, as their usual solution to this office’s glaring incompetence.

A: I will fill you in next time on what fresh hell awaits me trying to get my car registered.

Q: I hope The Post is happy ruining the candidacy of Susanna Gibson. Bastards.

A: I am of a mixed mind on this, so let’s poll it. This was the story.

Q:  This is about truth and falsehood in comedy. I just discovered the existence of standup Nate Bargatze when he hosted SNL last week and, finding him funny and charming, immediately binged on everything I could find of his on youtube. Like everyone else his performances are a bit uneven, but the reason I'm bothering you with this is that there was one story he told that seemed pretty obviously made up, and (I think) by the same token not very funny. He said he'd once when he was a teenager met a couple who said their names were John and Jane Doe. Being young and naive he believed them, and only decades later suddenly realized those weren't their real names. (He was riffing on being dumb and naive.) He then added that he'd googled them and it turned out they had been murdered. Ha-ha! My point is that most of his schtick is charming and funny, but this struck me as being not funny. And then it occurred to me that it wasn't funny because it was (obviously) made up, and made up as a conduit to the punchline of "they were murdered!" Whereas the rest of his routines are pretty much all funny, because he's a funny guy with funny delivery, and also because it seems clear that he's talking about real stuff from his real life. This rumination was inspired by your discussion, and so I offer it up as an instance of real=funny vs made up=not funny.

A;  I’ve seen it four times online, without the murdered line.  He clearly has re-thought it.  But I am not sure why.  I finally found it.  It is here.   It starts around the 3 minute point.  But I have to say that your description may not be fair.   Number one, I am not at all sure the central fact was made up.   But even if it was, it’s not really tasteless.  The joke, as I see it, is that he went online, googled “John and Jane Doe,” and found a report of a murder of two people whose identities were unknown.  That’s kind of funny. Actually, it is very funny.   No harm, no foul, IMO.

Q:  From HawkRapids: Many years ago when we were adopting a baby from a foreign country, we had to fill out an application for her to become a U.S. citizen. At the time, they didn’t have a separate application for children so they just used the one that adults used. One of the questions was whether she “advocated the forcible overthrow of the United States Government “. Given the fact that she had just turned one year old and couldn’t speak yet, we obviously had no idea! She could have been laying there in her crib advocating all sorts of things and we would not have known. We decided to take a chance and give her the benefit of the doubt. She will turn forty next year and the US is still in business, so we appear to have made the right decision.

A: But is she a traitor to the United States? 

Q: Bureaucratic absurdity. I used to work at a large federal agency with a pretty good cafeteria run by an outside company. Napkin dispensers were on counters out beyond the cash registers, along with salt and pepper packets, etc. Apparently the company - or maybe the agency - decided we were going through napkins too quickly. So one day we found the napkin dispensers before the checkout lines with a sign that said henceforth napkins would cost 2 cents apiece. Cue the troublemakers who thought this was insane. Suddenly rational people who had probably taken 3 napkins before were taking dozens. When the cashiers asked customers to count them, the troublemakers said if you want them counted, you count them. This was not well-received by the cashiers and within 3 days, the napkins were back beyond the cash registers. Go troublemakers!

A: Nice. 

Q:  Truman and Biden. Great link. He has done the work. Now he has to let people know.

A: I absolutely am gobsmacked about how negatively Biden is perceived as a dodderer..  For one thing, he handles public speaking quite well. 

Anyway, here is a video of Harry Truman kicking the shit out of Tom Dewey and the press.   Notably savaging the conservative radio-TV guy H.V. Kaltenborn, of whom Truman does a great imitation. 

Q; First incidence of governmental bureaucracy: The Army. When I was about 16 years old, my doctor, Dr. Katzev, was examining me routinely one day, and took an exaggerated amount of time checking my heart. Then he said, "Hm." Now, even at the age of 16, I realized that "Hm" uttered by a doctor during a heart examination was problematic. I asked the doctor what the problem seemed to be. "Oh, it's nothing," replied Dr. Katzev. "Nothing to worry about." You have a heart murmur. "Is that bad?" I asked. "Am I going to die?" "No, it's no problem," he said, to my relief. "But it'll keep you out of the army.: This was during the early days of the Vietnam era, and being kept out of the army was not at all a bad thing. Let us fast forward now to 1967, when I decided to test the theory. I had received my brand new draft card, and, rather than wait to be drafted, I allowed a brutally dishonest recruiting sergeant to convince me that there were all sorts of benefits which would accrue if I actually enlisted. Well, I wasn't worried. There was that heart murmur. I had been checked by several different physicians in the intervening years, and all of them, without exception, had found the heart murmer. And the recruiting sergeant, may he burn forever in hell, was very convincing. After you enlist, they schedule you for a physical. I waited patiently until they examined my heart. They even gave me an EKG. I had had EKGs before. They invariably showed the heart murmer. I had it covered. When the guy had finished, he handed me my papers back, and sent me down the hall. No mention of a heart murmer. I tried to point out the error. "I have a hear murmer, you know." He looked firmly at me: "Nope. No heart murmer." A week later I was in the army. Periodically, during what passed for my army career, I would have a physical examination. And each time, I would think, "this is the day they'll find it." Nope. Never did. Until, of course, upon being processed for discharge at the end of my service, I received an exit physical. "Do you know," the tech announced, "that you have a heart murmur?"

A:  I see what you did there.  No one else has any idea, but I see it.  Is there anyone else within the range of these pixels who gets the interior joke?

This is Gene. FWIW, I agree with the majority of you who felt the story about the politician was legit. I don’t feel it necessarily showed moral turpitude, but I do feel it showed bad judgment, and that is an issue for a person who expects our votes.

Q: Experience with bureaucracy: The Bill. Some years ago, I got a bill in the mail. This was before the internet changed the world, and one still paid bills by mail, although computerization had happened, and those bills were generated by computer. And while computers generally did not make mistakes, programmers often did. Accordingly, I once received a computer-generated bill -- I don't remember offhand from which mega corporation - let's say it was AT&T for example - in the amount of $00.00. This amused the hell out of me. My first instinct was to frame it and put it up in the hallway. Then I had a better idea. Carefully, I wrote a check in the amount of zero dollars and zero cents. I filled out the required stub, which included identifying information, also in the amount of zero dollars and zero cents, placed it in the supplied return envelope, and sent it back in. I felt strangely content at having done so. In short order, I received the check back from the bank. It had been endorsed by the corporation, and cashed. Neither the corporation nor the bank had apparently found anything in the slightest odd about this transaction. My bank statement that month included the check for $00.00, which I had to account for in balancing my checkbook.

A: I feel that I have recounted this story recently, but can’t find it in the Gene Pool archives.  Many years ago, Rachel worked on two stories for the Post in a one-month period.   The first was assisting in my story on Joshua Bell: She was one of three reporters who stalked and interviewed people after they passed him by.  In the shorthand summary the Post used, that story was called “genius.”    Also that month she wrote a piece for the Post Magazine about her breasts; it was part of a themed issue called “looks.”  It is the best story ever written about breasts.   

On the wall in our home we have framed her two pay stubs.  It is marvelous juxto. They read, in succession:  “Genius, $100” and “Looks, $1,000.”  

Q: On the general subject of Twitter: I left abruptly when the fascist swine arrived. I have no wish to remain; in La Resistance or otherwise. The problem is that Musk has taken what was once a fine, bright forum, and turned it into a swamp. I no longer can trust virtually anything I find there, and I will not partake. At all.

A: I think what he has done will come to be seen as the biggest act of financial self-destruction in the history of business and possibly in all of humanity.

Gene again. I’m outta here. Please keep sending observations and question. I will answer them next time. Send them here:

Also — and only if you feel we are worth more than a single Starbucks Grande Latte once a month — consider this: