Thursday Chat #5 -- The Invitational & Dogs
Thursday Chat #5 -- The Invitational & Dogs
Greetings. Below begins the internationally famous interactive part of today’s chat! The introduction can be found here. Send questions for this part here, and I will answer as many as I can. This chat will be updated as we go; you may have to renew the screen.
And lastly, yes, you can also comment and talk amongst yourselves at will. I will pitch in where appropriate.
Q: As a man of the word, what's your take on (to me) the strange notion of removing the power of slurs by constantly using them. This seems to be a present rage especially among white academics when it comes to the n-word. My take is that words have consequences whatever the intent.
A: I like “man of the word.”
I am torn on this. On one hand, I kind of agree with (sigh) Louis C.K., who said he hates “the n-word.” Not, he said, the actual word, but the expression “the n-word.” He points out that it is disingenuous and manipulative — an expression that compels you to put that damn word in your head. He says that if you are going to use the word, use it, and if your reason turns out to be suspect, suffer the deserved punishment. The trend will be self-limiting.
On the other hand, I am a white guy. I cannot even pretend to understand the pain this word delivers. The thing that most bugs me is when white people complain that it is, like, unfair, that black people get to use the word but white people can’t. If you do not understand this, or claim to not understand, you are a racist. It’s obvious why: Black people, and only black people, have a right to appropriate that word and blunt it by using it in an ironic/hostile fashion.
Which gets to your question: No, white people don’t have that right, period. This is not Leibniz calculus. Or even basic geometry.
Q: What is your position on backer-inners vs. front-inners? I refer to those people who back into parking places, as opposed to us normal people who just pull in, as God intended. My position is that backer-inners are being antisocial, at least when they make a line of cars in a parking garage wait while they slowly and methodically berth their supertanker, all so that they can pull out with a clear line of sight. Simply parking front first takes half the time, and as for backing out--well, that's what rear view and side mirrors are for. In short, backing in is saying "My time is more important than yours." It drives me crazy. Your thoughts?
A: This is a shocking admission, because I love debate, but my thoughts are identical to yours. Point by point. Backing into a spot so you can leave more conveniently is rude and selfish. There is a street in Capitol Hill (8th Street SE) that requires you to back in. There are constant traffic jams there.
Q: So, after a shipwreck, you wash up on an island, not even on the map. You're never, ever going to found. If you could pick one person to join you on said island, who would it be? And why, of course? Roger Dalrymple.
A: I understand your nomination, but I would not choose Roger Dalrymple. The obvious answer would be my girlfriend, but I would not consign her to life alone with me on an island; she deserves a better fate. I think I’d choose someone with similar and endless interests to mine. I think I’d choose Scott Pitoniak. I do not know who he is, never heard of him before, but the Web summarizes him as “an expert on The Yankees.”
Q: Gene, have you ever heard of a "mechanical allergy"? I've always been unable to wear wool because it irritates my skin, and finally went to an allergist. He listened to me and then said, "You don't have a chemical allergy, you have a mechanical allergy." Seeing my mystified look, he said that if you look at wool fibers under a microscope, they look like tiny, barbed wires. And that there is no cure for a mechanical allergy.
A: There is almost no trace of this term on the Web, and I never heard of it. Those are two powerful facts. I hereby declare your doctor a quack. Tell him I said so.
Q: Re: Somatization disorder/hypochondria: Have you heard of a fellow by the name of Dr. John Sarno? He came up with a theory of chronic pain in which the pain comes from the subconscious mind. It causes the pain in order to distract a person from something that the subconscious thinks would be bad for you to face head-on. Dr. Sarno wrote a few books about this. If you have it, the cure is to (a) ignore the pain and do what the pain prevents from you from doing; (b) figure out what the pain may be distracting you from; or (c) both. It sounds crazy. I would think it was crazy if I hadn't an extreme case of it myself a couple decades ago. There are whole online communities of people who have had this happen to them.
A: Yeah, he focused almost entirely on back pain and essentially felt much of it was psychosomatic. I have always felt he was on to something because of a simple phenomenon: the Placebo Effect. If it works 30 percent of the time, some damn thing is happening involving your brain and not your viscera.
Q: Are you taking suggestions for future Invitationals? Just in case, I offer the two sentence story (not an original idea, something I bumped into). They can be funny, mysterious, scary, whatever. Here's an example of a scary offering: I can hear one year into the future. Today, the noise stopped. Roger Dalrymple
A: Why do you keep mentioning this Dalrymple fellow? But yes, your idea is a good one. I will discuss it with The Empress.
Q: Do you have any favorite archaic words, and if so, what is your most favorite?
A: “Pantaloons.” For obvious reasons. It’s a ridiculous sounding word AND it is the root of “pants,” a word we use all the time without realizing the hilarity it is short for. This does remind me of another phenomenon: Hilarious words we no longer realize are hilarious because of familiarity and re-pronunciation. One is “business.” It means “busyness.” “I am engaged in my busyness.” Also “o’clock,” meaning “of the clock,” which is absurd on its face, but also rendered in some sort of Gaelic, as though we are all leprechauns.
Q: He's not dead yet. Do I have to wait until his demise to nominate him for aptonym status? Thanks!
A: You do. Aptonyms are a stern mistress. They must be perfect. I will note — without being cruel or judgmental — that Mr. Posthumus has two drunk-driving convictions, so he may become an aptonym sooner rather than later. Two additional comments:
The Brits call it “drink driving,” which is just so adorable British, and…
The most perfect aptonym of all belongs to people named “Self.”
Please remember always that I am your go-to person on aptonyms. It’s worldwide. If a Bedouin tribesman needs aptonym advice, he finds a computer, then finds me.
Q: You have to eat one of the following: someone else's booger, a live worm, or a live cockroach. Which is it? (You can't choose whose booger.)
A: Since I cannot choose whose booger, I’d definitely do the worm. I mean, it could be Marjorie Taylor Greene’s booger. The worm doesn’t faze me much, actually. I am (in)famous for eating almost anything that people somewhere define as food. Worms in Southeast Asia are often eaten live, as a delicacy. Plus, worms have very primitive nervous systems. Norwegian scientists studied them and concluded they feel nothing recognizable as pain.
The most unsettling food experience I ever had was at a once-excellent restaurant in Bethesda, named Hinode. There was a great chef there who knew I liked odd things, and one day he offered me lobster sashimi — completely raw lobster. I said sure. Then, before I could react, he whipped out a live, squirming lobster, took a cleaver and whacked off its tail. Then he chopped up the tail meat and put in on my plate. THEN he took the head and body and threw it into boiling water. The lobster half-climbed out of the pot and watched me eat its tail.
I am sorry to have related this so bluntly, but it is what happened, and I guess the point is, I ate the tail. It was incredibly succulent. Never had anything quite like it. And yes, even I was disturbed.
By the way, on an unrelated matter, I see in the news that the United States has hit its debt limit. You know, our system is really broken. Broken like an egg in a clothes dryer.
Q: Pat Myers, Empress of The Invitational: So this was the first Invitational contest for which people had to find us over here at The Gene Pool. And it was truly gratifying to receive entries from 120 people -- not that many fewer than for our typical poetry contests at The Post.
A note on procedure, for those to whom it matters: For today’s contest, Gene and I each read the whole set of entries, then compared our shortlists -- which overlapped for only about a dozen of the 26 poems that get ink here. We then argued for or against particular choices, usually persuasively -- this Czar person is kinda smart! In a couple of cases, Gene tweaked a poem that I had ruled out, and I liked it a lot more with his small but significant change.
In general but not always, Gene preferred poems that were quicker to get to a clever punchline (the poems had to be no longer than eight lines, but some of them were eight LONG lines). Today's winner is Pam Shermeyer, a retired editor for the Detroit News who wrote a mass obit for "25 Russian Billionaires" who all died under, er, surprising circumstances. Pam didn't start entering the Invitational until just over a year ago, but immediately proved herself prime Invite material (first ink: How is Donald Trump like Mike Pence? One traffics in fibs and lies; the other’s pestered by libs and flies,). Today's win is her second, for 35 blots of ink in all. Pam hasn't been Inviting long enough to have done a Joint Legislation contest, but I think she's going to ace it.
A: What she said.
Q: If humans are so smart, how come we're the only mammals who need lactation classes? Or, for that matter, sex education?
A: You missed an even bigger question! Why are we the only mammals who need to … wipe?
Q: I'm white and my wife is black. We are able to talk to each other much more freely about many social and cultural issues than either of us (especially me) could ever do with the general public. In my opinion, one of the most important things to come out of this paradigm of free inter-cultural communication is this: if it were possible to strip away all of the cultural context and racial animus, "jungle bunny" is actually pretty adorable.
A: This is very funny. I hope to hell you are not trolling me.
Q: I too hate peoples backing into parking spaces, but I am given some pause by this question: why is it worse than backing OUT.
A: This is a good question by a bad person, my editor, Tom The Butcher. I will answer it, not because Tom deserves an answer — he deserves nothing — but because it might help others navigate this field. If you are backing into a spot, you are compelling others to wait while you maneuver; and if you are a relatively incompetent driver, it will take a long time. If you have to back out into traffic, the onus is on YOU. You must wait until traffic has cleared. You are compelling no one to do anything. This ain’t rocket science.
Q: Gene: one of your most infamous columns was "You can't make me eat this" for which you (rightly) received pushback from writers all over the world regarding your criticism of Indian curry. Do you think this column had anything to do with your termination from the WP?
A: A fair question. A fair question in response is why the parenthetical “(rightly)” when we are talking about an opinion, about food, in a humor column that was all about how my opinions about food are worthless. Worth discussing, anyway. But we needn’t go there just now. We probably will later. To your broader question, the Post didn’t exactly terminate me — they offered to renew my contract but under circumstances I couldn’t accept. I think it would be disingenuous to claim the two things were unrelated, so yes, that column helped end things between me and The Post, a paper I still admire and respect.
Q: I've been watching "Derry Girls" on Netflix - very funny, highly recommend, but make sure to turn on your captions because the accents are tough to follow. I think the nun on the show steals every scene she's in. Which reminds me - care to update the ten best sitcoms characters for the modern era? - Marc from the Military.
A: I am going to rework it in light of the passage of time since the original. (By the way, I think that original post MIGHT have coined the expression GOAT.). I do believe one ranking that won’t change is my nominee for the best character of all time: Art Carney as Ed Norton. Liz Lemon would be up there. Job Bluth? Thinking.
Q: Atul Gawande has written some great stuff about placebo/pain that's in the brain. Here's one .
A: I love that guy. Great writer, great doctor.
Q: Silver Spring - The backing in thing cannot solely be because of personality type. (as Hidden Brain suggested) It has only proliferated in recent years because of backup cameras in combination with land ship-type SUVs. Right?
A: I am sure backup cameras have influenced it, but think about it: It has simply facilitated selfishness. You now have the ability to more efficiently annoy and discommode other people.
Q: Is the Roger Dalrymple who chats here any relation to Clay Dalrymple, a catcher for the Baltimore Orioles during the glory years of 1969 – 1971 (when they were in 3 consecutive World Series)?
A: We can ask and maybe he will answer. He does seem awfully involved with himself.
Q: Thank you, commenter, for telling me to google Roy Pearson. Jeez.
A: This is in reference to a poem in a comment, below. It explains everything re “pant—loon.
Q: Regarding "You can't make me eat this", the word "rightly" (and the pushback) was regarding your description of "curry" as a single spice, which I assume you know by know is inaccurate.
A: And why would that imprecision be worthy of global protest?
HEY, this is Gene, and I’m calling this one done. Thank you. Great questions, great comments, except for Tom the Butcher’s, which is, perforce, beneath contempt.
See you on Tuesday.
The only time I ever back into a parking space is in a parking lot with a) very little traffic, and b) the handicap space available has the no parking/unloading space on the left while my wheelchair ramp is on the right. The one exception to this was when I was getting my Driver's License to be able to drive with hand controls and the DOT Examiner TOLD ME TO BACK IN. I did it, but afterwards I asked why she made me do something that needlessly tied up traffic. She said she wanted to test my backing abilities while under duress to see how I handled myself. Jon Gearhart
Look --- it's clear with every start-up and especially one building on the bones of a predecessor and with a paywall (to come) no less, that there be a unique selling proposition. May I suggest the "Novitational ?" A DIY version of the hoary humor/wordplay contest that dare not speak its name. Much easier on both sides of the divide (or is it an abyss ?) of what is funny. Entrants simply make up their own weekly contests, with prizes and abuse awarded on the basis of incomprehensibility and ---oh yes --- everyone receives a participation trophy.