It's Indian. You Wouldn't Understand.

Sign in the restroom of the Spice Bowl Indian Restaurant:

"Employees Must Wash Hand Before Returning To Work"

Hopefully, they wash their left hand.

What's the Good of Having a Toilet, Anyway?

A sign inside the one-holer men's room at my gym / spa:



With regard to the 2nd sign, does this strike anyone else as rather restrictive? I mean, if the only thing I'm allowed to flush is toilet paper, where do I put the stuff that makes the using of toilet paper necessary?

In Which the Light Saber Ends the Trilogy Before It Begins

Luke Skywalker comes back to consciousness in Ben Kenobi’s cave somewhere out in the desert of Tatooine. He’d just gotten the crap knocked out of him by a Sand Person while out looking for that ornery ‘droid, R2D2. Ben tended to the unconscious Luke until he woke up, and then began to give him a wee history lesson about the old Jedi order, Luke’s father, Ben’s relationship to him, and so on.

Familiar scene. We’ve all seen it. But while watching it, again, a couple years ago a thought came to me.

Ben hands Anakin Skywalker’s old light saber to Luke. It’s clear that Ben thought Luke had never seen one before (or, at least, that the audience had never seen one - sometimes exposition for the sake of the audience really annoys me). He pronounced “Light Saber” with such enunciation as to send a happy chill up the spine and down again of your high school drama teacher. With the Jedi all but gone, the rubes on Tatooine certainly hadn’t seen one in decades, if ever. Blasters were all the rage, after all.

There’s no warning to Luke to be careful. No mention of how it works or what it does. Does Luke have any clue? The scene sets it up as if he doesn’t. So, what happens next? While Ben is talking, Luke hits the “on” button, and out pops the It-Can-Fuck-Up-Anything light blade. Luke swishes the thing around in front of him with a “whooooaaaa” look on his face.

Now, in my mind, for that scene to be believable, it would need to go something like this:

BEN: This was your father's LighT SabER, a weapon from a more civilized . . .

[Sound effect of light saber being energized]

LUKE: HOLY-MUTHERFUCKIN-SHIT-WHAT-THE-HELL!?!?!?

[He drops it.]

BEN: Dammit kid! Did I TELL you to turn it the FUCK on??? That thing will sever a storm trooper’s armor-shielded Johnson without thinking twice about it! Pick that up, and don’t touch the ON switch until I TELL you!

What if the boy had that light saber pointed at his belly when he had hit the switch? What if it had been aimed at R2D2, or Ben?

Yeah. End Of Scene.

Ascending Interrogative Imitation

I am often fascinated by the inflection and rhythm of a talker when I overhear conversations, listen to radio and TV, and even sometimes when I’m engaged in conversation. With the latter, fascination makes it way too easy to miss what’s being said to me; so I have to be careful. Thinking way back to my earliest lessons on dissecting the English (American) language - somewhere in the elementary school days - I remember the teacher talking about how “the voice voice goes up at the end of a questioning sentence.” I really don’t remember anything else about that lesson, but that particular rule is clanging around inside my brain these days because of something I heard last week.

Fans of the NPR radio show, “Car Talk,” regularly are treated to a caller’s imitation of a car sound - often with much coaxing from hosts Tom and Ray. The imitations are frequently good for a chuckle or two, if nothing else (a really good one can take the hosts from zero to “peeing my pants” in an instant). Often they do actually help to diagnose the car’s problem. A couple of weeks ago I heard something in one of the imitations that got me to a-thinkin’.

The caller was asked to try to make the sound her car was making: “RrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrr,” she rasped. Probing further, trying to diagnose whether or not the sound was connected to engine speed, Car Talk Guy asks, “If you speed up, does the ‘RrrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrrrrr’ go to ‘RrrrRrrrRrrrRrrr?’”

Audio clip: Ascending Interrogative Imitation, from Car Talk

What made me chuckle was hearing the pitch of his imitation go up at the end of this interrogative sentence - following the rule I learned as a kid. The funny thing about this to me is that there was a teeny, tiny inconsistency in that sentence if you look at it from a certain point of view. And, of course, that’s exactly where my mind went: If the purpose of an imitation is to try to sound just like the imitated thing, and the thing was not asking a question when it made the sound, then putting the imitation at the end of a question requires changing it so that it sounds like a question. You have to make your “voice go up at the end.” That immediately makes the imitation less accurate but more funny. At least, that’s how I see it.

In the case of the car on Car Talk, I’m guessing it wasn’t asking a question at all. It was probably saying the automotive equivalent of, “OhMyAchingBack!”

"Really Smart" versus "Thinks Just Like Me"

If I indulge in the Sin of Pride it is where intelligence is concerned. I think I'm a smart M*therf*cker - have for a long while. I don't take full responsibility for my attitude about my brains, though. I had a good deal of brainy-praise from teachers as a kid, and I had relatively good grades in school: A Pretty Solid B+ Kid. I had confirmation of my braininess in other forms, too. I definitely was a geek in my school days (I still am, but am now tempered somewhat by other, less geeky, interests... and tact). There was no doubt about it - President of the AV Club (Jr. High), President of the Amateur Radio Club, and Chief Engineer of the radio station (H.S.). Hell, I think I even actually joined the Math Club once. I was definitely into computers.

My dad always told me that, "You could be an A student, if you wanted to be." Apparently just having the knowledge that I could be an A student was enough for me. "The difference between someone who is an A student and someone who could be isn't brains, it's motivation," I preached to myself. As long as I had the brains, I was OK with not having the motivation.

I made it through my undergrad time in college in a fairly tough field, at a fairly tough university without having to work too hard. And, once again, I was A Pretty Solid B+ Man. I even continued on in the same discipline at the same university to get my Masters. Now, that was a challenge. And, again, A Pretty Solid B+ Man.

Even in my full-time career work (at the same university, again!) I was the Go-To Guy when it came to my areas of expertise, and I again got no small confirmation of My Smartness.

So, perhaps you'll understand the presence of a little pride on my part - I guess I always have. . .

My purpose for going into all of this really isn't to toot my own horn. Rather, it's important for you to know how I thought about myself if you are to get the earth-shatteringness of the question hinted at in the title of this entry.

This is how my little Ego World started to unfurl.

Only once or twice in my life in my adult years in Texas, and once or twice since I moved to Chicago, had I met a peer who I really, really felt was as smart as me in job-related stuff: An honest-to-goodness peer. Someone whom I felt had at least as much competence in the issue-at-hand as I did. I never gloated about it; never felt it made me superior as a person. But whenever I found one of these peers, it was so refreshing! When we worked together, there was such a buzz in the air as we grooved our thought waves together! We had a kind of geek "vibe" buzzing through the ether between us.

If you hang out with anyone long enough, you begin to see their flaws. This is no new wisdom, certainly. So, over time, I began to find some chinks in the armor of these smarty-peers. Well into my adulthood, in the process of learning that they're "just human," I began to learn the same thing about myself. Dammit. As Life forced me to acknowledge that there really are loads of things that I don't know (I'd given plenty of lip service to that idea without believing it, really) I began to wonder how Smart I really was. I think it was then that I finally passed out of that "know-it-all teenager" phase. Hmm . . .

So if I was not so smart, how smart could these people that I thought were so smart actually be? I mean, after all, our brainwaves "grooved."

Could it be that I just thought they were smart because they thought so much like me? Was that why there was such a groove? Because I was smart, that meant that they were smart, too. Well, now that I'm not so smart, what does that make them???

Earth.

Shattered.

Suddenly, everything's not so shiny.

. . .

That revelation hit me long enough ago that I have been able to put my life mostly back together, but not so long ago that I'm not still terribly humbled by it. I think it's OK to admit that I'm pretty good at the few things that I do well. But this psychological crash revelation helps me to feel a whole lot more connected to everyone around me.

. . .

I have to believe, though, that I actually have met some folks who both Think Like Me, and are also Really Smart.