Yay!

Hello.

This is an extra special Gene Pool, in that it celebrates the first-year anniversary of the Gene Pool. We have been alive for just about a year, with 4,000 subscribers, exactly 782 of whom are paying $50 to $60 a year for the privilege, which is a number I am not supposed to disclose. But I never follow rules. and because I have limited math skills, I calculate the total amount to me is $237,098.03 a year, so I am happy.

By the unspoken rules of Substack, I think I am not supposed to add any more information to this post, so as to incentivize the message, but inasmuch as I never follow rules,I will tell you an irrelevant joke. It takes place in the middle of the Cold War, roughly 1973, in New York City, on the east side of Manhattan.

Four diplomats are walking out of the United Nations building, and a TV reporter rushes up to them, and says to all of them, “Excuse me, what is your opinion of the meat shortage?” The Russian says “what is meat?” The American says “what is a shortage?” The North Korean says “what is an opinion?” And the Israeli says, “What is “Excuse me?”

Good, then. I am allowed to tell that joke because I am Jewish. Statistically speaking, you probably don’t have that privilege.

Wait, I am going to tell you another Cold War joke. It takes place in the Soviet Union, circa 1967. There is a Communist food outlet, and a line snaking all the way around the block, in the cold of winter, to get loaves of bread. The line isn’t moving at all. After an hour, a Soviet official comes out with a megaphone and says: “We are running short on bread. All Jews will have to leave the line.” So the Jewish people leave. The line doesn’t move. Another hour passes. Megaphone guy comes out again, and says, “All non-party members have to leave the line.” They do. Another hour passes. Megaphone guy: “Everybody go home. We have no bread.” People grumble and disperse. One guy mutters: “As always, the Jews have all the luck.”

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Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Now we enter the real-time, question-answer-observation part of the fabulously successful one-year-old Gene Pool, which is still in diapers. Many of the items below are in response to my Weekend Gene Pool, reporting on my police-involved adventure in Kansas City, and asking you for likewise personal and amusing crime stories. Also, items involving your advice to your 15-year-old self.

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Q: Do you ever make up questions and then answer them?

A: Only this one, and yes, I know what you are getting at with this seemingly innocuous question: Those of you who have yearly subscriptions should allow them to renew automatically because you are wonderful, generous people and I consider you all close friends.

Q: Wait, are you also making up this question?

A: No. Okay, yes. But I will stop now.

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Now we begin the vaunted real-time question and answer and observation segment of the Gene Pool. If you are reading this in real time, please remember to keep refreshing your screen, to get new stuff. And send in questions / observations to this ugly orange button. I will answer them.

Also, you can send in comments for sharing amongst yourselfs.

Also, $.

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Q: Are there places you love much more than people (whom you are supposed to love)?  – Elsa 

A: I love New York City and Rachel.   I thought I loved them equally, but your question forces me to make a choice, and the fact is I would choose Rachel to be with for the rest of my life, at the exclusion of the other.   Yes, I have actually answered this humorlessly, damn you.  Behold what you did, and feel shame.  

Q:  I always take Ambien. After many years of unrelenting insomnia, Gene, I have finally found something that lets me actually sleep. Puts me to sleep and, within limits, keeps me there. And no, I have never driven a car, sleepwalked, assaulted my wife sexually without her consent, or done any of the other weird shit I keep hearing about. Sorry you seem to be one of those susceptible people who do, but I personally think Ambien is the greatest thing since indoor plumbing. 

A: The greatest thing since indoor plumbing is the Bidet.  

Q:  I wrote in earlier today noting that you'd mentioned your Indian food fiasco (which I suggested should be called "Lakshmi-gate," but now realize should be "Currygate") a couple of times recently, and asked if you were still dealing with the fallout. In retrospect, I framed that question in a stupid way. OF COURSE you are still dealing with fallout from what I am sure was one of the most frustrating and upsetting events in your professional career. What I specifically meant to ask is has there been a recent new development that has brought this back to the front of your mind. I apologize for writing so inelegantly before, and please let me know if you'd like the name and address of my employer to demand my resignation.

A:  Oh, I am long over it.   I mention it because I think it is ridiculous and I can finally flog it to death and thus own it forevermore.  Also, I am not at all angry at Padma. But, yes, I do demand your resignation.  And it shouldn’t end with mere resignation.  You should be forced to walk around with a shirt, but no pants, like Donald Duck.   Unless you are a woman;  that would be harassment and I will have to resign.  Again.  

Q:  Geographic aptonym: Cape Disappointment in Washington State.  So named because it apparently didn’t go where European navigators hoped it’d go, and also for all the sailors it kills because the waters are so deceptively treacherous.

A: It’s not an aptonym.   Aptonyms cannot be deliberate.   They must be inadvertent.   The perfect aptonym is “Andy Dick.”  He was born “Tomlinson” but was adopted at birth by Allen and Sue Dick.  Came by the name honestly.   There was also an undercover secret service agent named Jeffrey Undercoffer.  

Q:  What are we to make of the fact that there's a wide disparity between men (21%) and women (9%) who snore "often or always" but that identical numbers (28%) snore "sometimes"?   And doesn't "sometimes" cover "often or always"?

A: I think gentlemen are less likely to tell their ladies that they snore.  And how would they otherwise know?  And no, “sometimes” and “often” are connotatively different.

Q: To my fifteen-year-old self: In about four years time, that girl who just passed you in the hallway and took your breath away will be back in town for homecoming weekend. As you are exiting the cinema with your bros, she will wave to you from inside the glass-enclosed lobby resulting in your heart skipping a beat just because she acknowledged your existence. Even though you drove everyone in your group, toss the keys to one of them and say you will recover the car the next day somehow. Run to her. Even if it does not work out, at least you will not squander a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend some time with the prettiest member of your graduating class.

A: This reminds me of the fact that, as a freshman in college, I was always the designated driver, not because I was less drunk and stoned than the other kids, but because I could drive better when drunk and stoned.  They tended to try to distract me, to see if I could handle it, including tickling me..  The lesson is: Don’t ever go to college. 

Q:   Thieves once stole the knobs off my car radio. I’m not sure what they wanted to do with them. Throw them at people? Someone once threw a hamburger at me from a speeding car. I was riding a bike. It felt like being clubbed with a bowling pin. Worse was the time I thought I was shot on Capitol Hill. I staggered back, put my hand to my chest, and felt something sticky. It was an egg thrown from a speeding car. Lastly, while resting on a rock during a country hike, someone snuck up behind me, grabbed my backpack, and tried to run off with it. It was an enormous horse. Happily, no one threw the horse at me from a speeding car. There’s always something to be thankful for.

A:  This made me laugh out loud.    When I was 17, in the day of rage after the MLK assassination, my friend Steve Zelman and I were ambushed on the street by a small gang of 14 year olds.   They punched me in the face, and I fell onto the pavement and blacked out for a moment. .    The odd thing is they were all White kids.  They did not rob us. They seemed to have no reason to be angry.   I have no idea what that was about.   Also, a few years ago someone broke into my car, and took nothing, but urinated in  it.

Q:   It seems like all my stories relate to my music and writing career, reminding me how my life and my work, like Robert Frost’s wonderful poem, are clearly linked together. So, the first story: we were in NYC for a family celebration and had a few hours between events, so we took our young kids to the World Trade Center, so we could get a view of the Statue of Liberty. We parked our car on the street and weren’t away from it for more than a half hour. We came back to find the window of our car smashed and the suitcase gone. Explaining to our then young kids that “bad guys had broken into our car” and stolen their dirty underwear, I realized right away that this would make a great song title, recorded a year or two later. (“They took my pillow, took my stuffed bear/What could they want with my dirty underwear?”) 

Some time later, I was in Florida for a three week concert and author tour in the schools. I would move everything from my car into my hotel room every night except for a ratty old satchel which contained a stack of old rough draft manuscripts that I would use as a visual prop to show kids the stack of rough drafts and editing work that went into one book. Reading from the first draft and then comparing that to the final version, the kids would inevitably see the improvement and it was a great tool in my school visits. I reported the break-in to the police who assured me that I likely disappointed some junkie when they opened up the bag. No song from the second break-in, but it reminded me of that great Allen Ginsburg poem "Mugging” in which he describes being mugged at gun point as the attackers take his wallet, his watch, and his cash...leaving ten thousand dollars of poetry on the street. 

Barry Louis Polisar

A: Hey, Barry.   This column that I wrote with you and your wife is one of my favorites.    And it contains the best titled song of yours EVER:  “Stanley Stole My Shoelace and Rubbed it in his Armpit.” Only a genius writes a song like that.

Q: I am nervous about mail delivery (Informed Delivery keeps telling me about mail that I ought to have received, but have not) and I know, know for a certainty, that the USPS does not answer the phone, if it has a phone. Still, I have a question. I am sending out cards and I am short on stamps. I am left with very old stamps, the pre-FOREVER kind, with denominations on them. I have 60-cent stamps (old airmail stamps) and 10-cent stamps (just old) which together total 70 cents. These were paid for a long time ago. If I affix them to an ordinary envelope and take them to the post office for mailing, will they be mailed, or do I have to stand in line to buy new FOREVER stamps in the middle of December? You can probably tell which answer I prefer, but I really want the answer to be accurate.

A: Wait. You want an accurate answer and you are asking ME?? I’m putting this out there for the hive mind to consider.

Q: Did I tell you this Yakov Smirnov joke. Russian gets a call, it’s the car place. “You’re getting a new car!” “When?” “Twenty years from today, it’s a Tuesday.” “Well, can you change the date?” “Why, it’s twenty years from now.” “Because the plumber is coming on the same day.” I told this to 2 beautiful friends who were teenagers in East Germany when reunification happened. They were polite but said this wasn’t funny to them.

A: Made me laugh. I’m still laughing.

Q: I answered yes to the poll. I’d like to believe that a college president would be intellectually strong enough not to need coaching from WilmerHale. Am I wrong here?

A: In my opinion, you are not wrong. They sounded like idiots who were playing into the whole bogus right-wing “woke” phenomenon. They’re not antisemites, I think. They just exhibited horrifying judgment. I do see that you and I are in the minority, so far.

Q:  To my 15yo self: the best makeouts are band camp and theater rehearsals. Take all the ballroom dancing at every level you can, it’s 80% women. The least are lifeguarding and sports.  No one at your age knows this. Many of the popular people are peaking now.  Be a friend and popular to the people who value you, don’t waste time with others.

A:  Thank you.   

Q: Almost forty years on, my wife remains horrified by aspects of the in many ways charming, story of our daughter’s birth. We were living on the Main Line outside Philly. Just as “60 Minutes” was beginning on a hot July Sunday, my wife announced that our second child was on the way, stat. I hustled our 2 year-old next door to the home of our pediatrician and took off with my wife to the Birthing Center that was only a short drive away. This Birthing Center was a little home directly across the street from a huge but unaffiliated medical hospital and center. My wife insisted on using the Birthing Center, an ersatz health services provider in which you called a hotline when you went into labor who would then scramble a couple of mid-wives and everyone would meet at the little home and deliver a baby. As it happened, we got to the Birthing Center parking lot first, our daughter arrived next and then two midwives showed up to say hi to a squawking and angry ball of protoplasm delivered in the backseat by a catatonic Dr. Dad.

 The kid was born before Andy Rooney’s monologue aired on that “60 Minutes.” Tickticktick. 

The tumult was rescued by the crackerjack mid-wives and we returned home with a new healthy baby by noon the next day. The physician who babysat our son while I delivered a baby returned the new older brother, amused by the irony of the situation. Everything was fine. Later I went shopping for some necessaries. While in a store, some n’er-do-well smashed my car’s back window and grabbed a tote that the midwives had given us that contained some of my wife’s soiled clothing ( ha ha) but nothing of real value. I did call the Birthing Center to make sure they had not placed some important or necessary papers in the bag too. They had not; BUT ( wait for it), they had carefully and lovingly packed ,in a plastic container, my daughter’s placenta. Apparently, many of their clients liked retaining the placentae for Christ knows what. I have always hoped that the smash and grab guy , after realizing his efforts were mostly fruitless, mollified his disappointment by thinking “ at least I got a nice London broil.”

A:  Great kicker.  

Q:  Per Wikipedia, in a proper limerick "The first line traditionally introduces a person and a place, with the place appearing at the end of the first line and establishing the rhyme scheme for the second and fifth lines." Which means that, ironically, it would be rather difficult to write a limerick about Limerick.

A: Pimaric is a carbolic acid.   Jimmy-Rick is a name I just made up.  Turmeric is a lousy spice. The limerick would be feasible if difficult – because with limericks, playing with the form is allowable.  I once won a contest with this:

A vulgar old man from Schenectady / Made unfortunate use of Synecdoche / He called a young doctor / The c-word (he mocked her) / So she gave him a penknife vasectomy..

Q;   It‘s hardly fair to just mention your “appearances” in Frazz (which in fact were only “mentions”, since you were never actually seen) WITHOUT mentioning the actual DATES: 10-Mar-2002: https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2002/03/10 AND 30-Nov-2004: https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2004/11/30 

A: You nailed me here.    

Q:  I know that I snore, but I do not know the frequency (probably "sometimes"). What I DO know is that my WIFE snores ALWAYS.

A: If you send in her name to the Gene Pool, you will soon be divorced.

Q:   My wife is not a reader of the Gene Pool, so I will answer on her behalf. After college, before I met her, she got an unusually great job opportunity in the DC area, requiring her to leave Boulder, CO, her then home town and also where she went to college and gained the highly unusual training (satellite operations) that suited her for the new job. She set out on her modest odyssey and found she had to spend the night in Kansas City, white bread and barbecue capital of the nation (you left the barbecue out of your description). Her car was broken into, and the vicious thieves made off with several cassette tapes and a camera, but did not attempt to steal the car. Unlike you, she had to get the car repaired, which is the actual point here: her insurance company connected her with a garage located in Subtropolis. Subtropolis is a network of artificially carved caves located at the base of a limestone bluff, rented out for various businesses to use for slightly damp windowless office space, controlled-climate storage space, heavy machinery work and, yes, auto repair shops. I suppose there are other businesses, too, but who cares? I have visited the place and it is a weird experience. Anyway, they fixed her car, she drove to Maryland, got the job, I met her there, and now we have adult children. The opportunity for irony escapes me, except that her car was far crappier than your rental, but still it is the one that thieves decided in 1986 would be worth breaking into and stealing trivial crap.

A: The rental car was better than her car, but my current car is far crappier than her car was.   I am sure of this.  One fender is affixed with duct tape and bolts.   I do not believe any woman on Earth has a crappier looking car than I do, except for Rachel.  We were born for each other. 

Q: When I got married, in the year of no-cell-phones 1992, my fiancé and a couple of friends headed out for a low-key bachelor party shooting pool. Not too far into the evening I get a call from a Chicago cop who sounded right out of central casting, asking for my fiancé. Cop (sounding hesitant): Well do you know where is? Me: (thinking the cop just doesn’t want to tell me he’s dead) I hope at Goose Island Brewery? Cop: Oh good, so I’m not getting him in trouble. (Lesson 1: if you are a guy at a bar, the Chicago cops are not going to rat you out to your wife). He asked me to call there and get my fiancé to come out and attest that he did not invite the man they had in custody to break his window and take his car radio. So I call and have him paged. At first he accuses his friends of faking the page as a joke, because, while one of them had a wife who would definitely check up on him, I would not. But he eventually takes the call and makes the report. He later learned that he was not needed in court after all because the thief had gotten picked up for something else and faced other charges, so he kicked an officer in the nuts and fled out the door pretty much into the arms of another officer arriving for work, who figured he was up to no good. (Lesson 2: Running out of a police station looks suspicious.)

A: Thank you.  

This is Gene. I am calling us down. We meet again, over the Invitational, on Thursday. In the meantime, please keep sending in observations, right here: