What's So Funny?

Back in the Saddle

2007-08-30T13:11:00.000-04:00

After four lessons, the score remains: Horse 4, Me 0.

Something tells me that in the old days of the Wild West cowboys never took riding lessons. Well, maybe they did in the form of basically being born on horseback. But I doubt anyone ever hollered at Billy the Kid, "sit up straighter," "Keep an eye on the diagonal" and "more weight in the heels, Billy." Whatever, I'm sure it just came natural for them. For me it ain't natural.

The horse named Tanner hung with me for the first three lessons, and we were coming along OK until it came time to "canter." You learn to walk, trot, then canter, then who knows. Basically you are increasing in speeds from a pace that could merely break your arm to one that could leave your innards scattered across the width of Wyoming itself.

From a distance, cantering looks harmless enough, just as — seen from five miles below — it never looks as if a jet is going that fast. But when you are actually connected to the animal, cantering feels much as if you are riding the drumstick of a marching band member.

To go from a trot to a canter, you loosen the reins, dig in your heels and yell — prepare to be impressed with the precision of horse language — "canter."

Except that Tanner seemed to be a bit behind in his vocabulary lessons, because he took "canter" to mean "buck." This was explained away with a wave of the hand and the comment that to him it "was a joke ... kind of a game." Whatever the game, I wasn't big on the rules. All the horses in the world, and I get Chris Rock. Tanner would pitch me skyward and when I returned to earth, there would be open air where there used to be a horse. Keeping Tommy's mantra in mind — always keep the horse between you and the ground — I'd make a wild grab for anything solid — saddle, neck, passing tree, whatever. I always got seated again, feet out of the stirrups and facing backward as a general thing, but seated.

After watching this spectacle a time or two, Tommy reckoned I could use a new model, so Tanner got traded in on "Cappi," a smaller animal that was less of a comedian.

First time out, we went on a "trail ride," which means following a path over hill and dale, up, over and around various obstacles. We were doing all right, avoiding low-lying limbs, descending steep swales and crossing small streams. It was a beautiful evening too, with a late sun filtering through the trees, and peace and a bit of haze in the air.

And that's when we first saw the snake.

Tommy helpfully pointed it out. A black snake it was, making up in size what it lacked in venom. I know black snakes are harmless, but that wasn't my concern. My concern was whether the horse knew they were harmless. For all I knew, Cappi had left her Field Guide to Reptiles in the barn. The horse didn't panic, but I did. I thought i was about to be dragged into the next county. But apparently the old cliche is flawed. Cappi couldn't have cared less. She gave it half an eye and walked on.

We followed it up with a nice canter, the proper kind, not the clown-inspired kind. I didn't even go airborne this time. I like this horse and am ready for the next lesson. At least I was, except that I could have sworn I heard Tommy say something about "jumping"...

A Medical Cure for Fat?

2007-08-21T11:26:00.000-04:00

Can a day go by without another news story on the obesity front? Apparently not.

I swear, if the press had paid half the attention to WMD that it pays to F-A-T we wouldn’t be in this mess over in camel and goat land.

As a matter of fact, fatness as a news story is emblematic of the obesity problem in general — we’re lazy. People are lazy and won’t exercise, the media are lazy and only covers stories that are — sorry about this — spoon fed to them.

You really expected us to investigate the sub-prime mortgage warning signs last year when there was a new study out reporting that Twinkies might make you fat?

Look at me. I could be doing a meaningful piece on clean coal technologies or the ethics of human cloning, but — you know. That would take work.

So instead, I turn to the story today about how a virus may be responsible for obesity.

Yeah, a virus. Like what causes you to catch a cold.

Whew. So it wasn’t those six pork chops with a banana split chaser after all. It was a bug. You can’t help that.

I don’t get the science behind this, but basically they say there’s a virus that causes stem cells to turn into fat cells.

Be honest, you want to believe this, don’t you? You want to believe it’s that simple. I want to believe this. I want to believe that if I get fat I can just pop a couple fat-formula Sudafed and it will all be over.

Matter of fact, make it night time Sudafed, so I’ll wake up skinny.

Not that I doubt the report, but I still can’t help but notice that people who eat more tend to weigh more. People who eat less tend to weigh less. What does some virus have to do with that?

I mean, I’m real happy that the pharmaceutical companies will have one more pill to sell us, but somehow I can’t help but think this will do more for big business than big bellies.

Gives a whole new meaning to “fat profits.”

But beyond that, what if it’s true? What happens if there’s a medical cure for being a lard-ass?

I don’t know if I want that, truth be told. What’s the point of being thin if everyone is thin? Yeah, there are health reasons, but everybody’s gonna die of something so in the end it’s basically cosmetic.

If you’re a hot babe, do you want all other women in the world to be hot babes as well? ’Course not, because if everyone is gorgeous, your looks ain’t worth jack.

We need fat. We need the contrast. We need a world with John Belushi and Jackie Gleason and — depending on what week it is — Oprah.

If you’re chunky, who cares? Not me. It’s who you are.

Feel free to have a salad instead of a cupcake every now and then, just to keep them from having to take your foot, but beyond that, the stress people go through worrying about their weight is probably more deadly in the long run than the weight itself.

2007-08-10T13:38:00.000-04:00

Against my better judgment, I have enrolled in horse-riding classes.
You do these things when, for one reason or another, you start your life over. Mine was a forced restart and not my idea, but it is working out for the best because after too many years of waiting it is finally allowing me to proceed with my god-given right to a mid-life crisis.
Except that mid-life doesn't seem quite long enough for a crisis. Sports car, trophy broad, two years tops then you flame out and go back to clock punching and couch warming for the rest of your life.
What fun is that?
No, I'm shooting for a mid-to-the-time-that-i-lose-all-my-teeth-life crisis.
Enter Tanner.
Tanner is half thoroughbred, half draft horse. He's bigger than Brando and faster than Joan Collins. He's owned by some breeders in Frederick, Md, who — I mean to say they breed horses, not to imply that ... oh never mind — are teaching me the ropes.
I need the human intervention because Tanner is a nice enough horse but as training goes, he, left to his own devices, would tend to leave out a few steps.
My first time out, Tanner assumed the instruction should go something like this: Lesson 1: Get on the horse. Lesson 2: Go from 0-60 in three seconds flat in a full bore, heels to the sky, hell for leather gallop.
I closed my eyes, grabbed his main like a vice and felt around for the ejector seat. Not that this would have really been necessary, as Tanner was in the process of performing an admirable ejection on his own. Fortunately Tommy, my instructor, stepped in at this moment and reminded the animal that a horse has to walk before it can fly. After that, Tanner strolled along quietly enough, although clearly preoccupied. This worried me a bit, as I thought he might be plotting out some other experiment to try out on the new meat.
But I was afforded enough time to learn to walk and steer. I don't think "steer" is the generally accepted horse word for it, but I was concentrating on too many other things to be working on expanding my vocabulary.
"The key," Tommy said, "is to keep the horse between you and the ground."
I was all for that.
We commenced from walking to trotting and something that is known as "posting." Having four legs, a trotting horse goes up-down, up-down, up-down, up-down. Posting is the means by which the rider partially stands in the saddle two beats, thus eliminating the pounding of two of the up-downs. Ergo, up-down, up-down, up-down, up-down becomes up-down, up-down. If you are a woman, eliminating half of the up-down pounding is important, but if you are a man it is VERY important if you know what I mean.
Our first day's lesson concluded with me not getting it. I had it backward, going up on the downs and down on the ups. This made for roughly eight violent blue jean/leather collisions every 10 seconds.
But I haven't been defeated yet; I signed up for another lesson.
And when as I was leaving, Tommy paid me a compliment. Of all the riders he had ever coached, he said I dismounted with the fastest time on record.

Novak meltdown

2005-08-05T15:46:00.000-04:00

Judith Miller might be surveying the landscape and figuring out that she's better off in jail. Better there than doing the slow, horrible and public meltdown that Robert Novak is performing before our very eyes. Both journalists are mixed up in the Bush Administration's apparent outing of an undercover CIA spook, and up until now I've been feeling sorry for the most famous she-con since Martha. But now I see it's the dude on the outside who is in pain.

It's all very Wizard of Oz. Dorothy (Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald) throws a bucket of water at the flaming scarecrow (Miller) but hits the Wicked Witch of the West (Novak) who screams as he shrinks and sizzles into a puddle of goo, until there's nothing left but his broomstick and hat.

Yesterday, Novak swore and walked off the set of one of those CNN shoutfests that absolutely nobody with a life cares about. What will kill Novak, when he looks back on it, is that he was goaded into this meltdown by arch nemesis James Carville, who basically called him a tool for the far-right establishment. Which of course, he is. Carville — for some reason, Novak didn't think to call him a tool of the far-left establishment — had the mother of all smirks on his face, but no one else was amused. Both CNN and Novak apologized.

Figures. The only interesting thing that's ever happened on "Inside Politics," and CNN is apologizing for it. Sorry folks. Didn't mean for a little real drama to taint all this fake drama we churn out five days a week.

Space Shuttle

2005-08-02T18:10:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive in this overly sensitive age of ours, but I can't help but think NASA could have handled this whole space shuttle situation better. Here they blast these people into orbit and once they're up there, NASA frantically announce that OHMYGOD THE SHUTTLES ARE UNSAFE AND THEY MAY BLOW UP AND ANY SECOND AND WE'RE GROUNDING THEM FOREVER!!!
I mean, what are these poor astronauts supposed to think? Are they looking at each other, saying: "Unsafe?" "Grounded?" "Um. Like where does that leave us?"
Bummer. You're already skittish because of the unsatisfactory results of the last shuttle ad NASA goes Major Tom on you. Of course maybe the astros don't get the live CNN feed. Maybe NASA is, to their faces, telling them "Remain calm, all is well."
Or maybe they don't care. It just seemed like bad timing, is all.

steroids

2005-08-01T15:32:00.000-04:00

So Raffy gets busted while Giambi plays on. You can say what you want about the Yankees' dominance over the American League East, but at the end of the day there is simply no denying that New York, fair and square, year in and year out, continues to acquire the league's top masking agents.

cure

2005-06-22T22:11:00.000-04:00

Did you ever think that maybe they cured cancer 15 years ago, but have kept it quite to keep getting the donations?

Quotes

2005-01-17T16:28:00.000-05:00

Everyone has a point to prove, and I wish they would just go ahead and try to prove it on their own rather than relying on dead people. You’ve heard it a million times: “Thomas Jefferson said this, this and this.”
And then they just leave the point hanging there, because they believe there is nothing more to say. That since Thomas Jefferson said it, there is no more need for debate, because it must be so.
I’ve often wondered how Thomas Jefferson would have felt about this. If he could have known that every brain-dead hick in a wifebeater and a Cat Diesel Power hat would end up using his words to prove, for example, that Ford is superior to Chevy.
And does anyone ever stop to think that Thomas Jefferson may have occasionally been wrong about something? Maybe Thomas Jefferson just had his head up his tuchas one day, or maybe he was hungover, or maybe he had taken a fact from the wrong press kit.
But none of that matters to anyone. He could have been staggering up the steps of Monticello one afternoon with a whiskey bottle on one hand and a couple of Vicodin in the other and hollered to ye olde scribe “All men are created equal, but the redheads are masters of them all! And you can quote me on that. Hahahaha.”
You know that contributers to the editorial pages of today’s newspapers would be writing, like they’re all intellectual and stuff, “…and in the words of Thomas Jefferson, redheads are our masters.”
Just because they’re dead doesn’t make them right. Look at Lincoln. He said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.” Wrong. Every school kid can recite the Gettysburg address, whether they have any idea what it means or not.
The problem with ancient quotes is that they give us no sense of context. When Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” for all we know he could have been speaking at an Antioch Pacifist Union women’s auxiliary breakfast. What else was he going to say? You know how those things go. The speaker always tells the audience what it wants to hear. He may hate dogs, but if he’s speaking to the Humane Society he’ll tell them he laps coffee out of a dish.
Have you ever noticed that nobody ever quotes Hitler? I’m sure that along the way he must have said something that made sense. Something like, “The first step in establishing a civilized community is an adequate public sewer system.” But you never see the head of the local Sanitary District stand up and say, “As we move forward on our $14 million, gravity feed collector system, I can only recall the words of Hitler when speaking about civilized communities…”
At least no one is trying to put words in his mouth, a status Jefferson could only wish for — which, in the words of Monty Python, “is a hell of a thing.

Social Security

2005-01-06T16:42:00.000-05:00

So now they're having a go at our Social Security benefits. Fine. They can have them. I would gladly sacrifice the estimated $23 a month (adjusted for inflation and incompetence) I stand to be raking in each month, if everyone would just agree to shut up about it until I reach the age where my hearing gives out of natural causes.
Now a leaked White House memo says a Social Security benefit "recalculation" may be necessary to avoid insolvency. For those who do not deal much in public policy, "recalculation" is a government word meaning "screw the public." This particular recalculation would result in benefit reductions of as much as 50 percent, although I think we can all relax a bit, because they will probably only take the full 50 from the people who need it.
For the rest of us, who are counting on Social Security in our retirement about as much as we are counting on Paris Hilton to deliver a white paper on astrophysics, it is unlikely to have much effect at all. Besides, we'll have this hefty 2 percent we will be able to invest in our own, private account, which we will trust to the same Wall Street investment brokers who brought us derivatives, Global Crossing and just last week were speaking glowingly at the "buy opportunity" at Krispy Kreme. Better the government would let us take 2 percent of our payroll deduction tax and put it under a mattress. Sure, the mice might get it, but if that is what it takes to keep it out of the clutches of J.P. Morgan Chase, I consider that a small price to pay. At least it would support the ecology. Otherwise, we just might as well take the two percent and put it straight into the pool for the investment bankers' Christmas bonus.
Of course all this is not to say that I fall in with the "remain calm, all is well" crowd that doesn't want to do anything to Social Security whatsoever. The thing is, I just don't think it's as horribly complicated as everyone makes it out to be. We know that soon more money will be going out of the fund than is coming into it. So you basically have two options: Bring in more money (higher taxes) or pay our less money (lower benefits). What's so tough to noodle through about that? Sure, I don't like it, but I don't like low-fat diets either. And sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Big deal.
One thing I DON'T want to see, though, is upping the retirement age. I don't mind working to age 82 myself, but I definitely don't want to see OTHER people working to that age. I don't want to have to shout into the drive-through box at Wendy's because the geezer with the headset only has his hearing aid turned up to 3. I don't run into an attendant at Home Depot who's never heard of "air conditioning." If I go into the hospital for outpatient surgery, I don't want to see the doctor rooting around the ER for his Coke-bottle-sized glasses, which have been perched on his head, the whole while. I don't want an airline pilot whose midafternoon cross-country route to Los Angeles coincides with naptime.
You can reform Social Security all you want, but if it involves going to the strip club and having one of the dancers suggestively remove her teeth and hurl them into the audience, leave me out of it.

Christmas Trees

2004-12-14T16:42:00.000-05:00

Thanks for nothing, St. Boniface.
He's the dude responsible for this whole insane tradition of dragging a seven-foot slab of shrubbery into your house every Christmas. Seems he was tooling through the woods 1,000 years ago last Thursday when he came across a group of pagans worshipping an oak tree. In a fit of rage — saintly rage, but rage nonethelesss — he cut down thhe oak tree and that put an end to that. It would have been a suitably happy ending (well, except for the pagans) except that a fir tree germinated where the oak tree had been. And of course if saints have a fault, it's assigning meaning to things. So the rest is history, history which has complicated my life.

Fortunately, we're scaling it down. Our first year, we waited for the first snow, then headed out to the property in West Virginia and scoured the forest until we found a suitable model. The next year we went to an actual Christmas Tree farm, where we still had to cut our own, but at least they had a high-tech machine to shake out all the dead needles. The third year we left the saw at home and drove around the county until we found a very nice but very expensive tree that, prepare to be impressed, was still at least 60 percent green. This year we punted. Right down the block to a spot that sold them to benefit their Christian school. Didn't even get out of the truck. Just pointed. Next year my goal is not to even come to a full stop.

But you still have to set it up and all — Andrea takes care of the "and all" for which I am greatful. But man, I can't help but wish St. Boniface had cut down the oak and in its place had popped up, say, a spider plant. Would that have been so wrong? And So Much Easier. It would have worked — gather around the spider plant on Christmas morning and open gifts. It even fits the song:
Oh spi-der plant
Oh spi-der plant...
I suppose I should just be grateful that the Boniface Episode didn't happen the other way around. You know, the pagans were worshipping a fir and then up sprouted an oak. Wouldn't want to have to haul that into the house. Every year you'ld need a new string of lights and a skidder. And who wants to spend three months after Christmas sweeping up acorns. So for the time being I'll keep my mouth shut. But I'm not terribly happy about it.

Martha Stewart

2004-12-08T16:24:00.000-05:00

Can't wait for the new martha stewart reality show. No way that misses. Once she gets out of the caliboose, the picture-box execs who brought us 'survivor' and 'the apprentice' says she'll 'do what she does best: offer advice on style, cooking, entertainment and lifestyle' in what is being billed as an elimination-style competition.
I got nothing against martha. I watch her cooking shows sometimes. She seems nice enough, although you get the sense that coming out of the break she's been screaming at the technicians 'i'll kill you! i'll kill all of you! oh hello and welcome back, now the key to a good spiced cider is the cinnamon sticks...'
A cooking show's one thing — but a reality show like survivor? how does that work? a bunch of fiftysomething women get liquored up and have beehive augmentations? martha raises herself up to her full height at the boardroom table, looks sternly at one of them each week and says 'you're retired' or something?
like 'survivor—the hamptons' is going to have the same drama as grilling cockroaches over a tribal fire in madagascar. in martha's world, the worst thing winning contestant is going to have to force down her pie hole is a slice of processed american cheese.
ah well, let her have it, she's earned a break. can't have her working out of a halfway house busing tables at stuckeys.
or can we?

What's so funny?

2004-09-30T23:43:00.000-04:00

What’s so funny? Everything’s so funny. But with your busy schedule, you need a hired gun to look out for you and help you figure out why everything’s so funny. Think of humor writer Tim Rowland as an au pair for your funny bone, but without the Swedish accent. He looks at society with an eye for the absurd, and explains in clear, concise language why everyone and everything around you is just plain nuts.

Tim’s humor is sassy and sarcastic, but in a homespun kind of way, like a cross between George Carlin and Charles Schulz. Unlike some of the milquetoast media of the day, he is proud to be unfair and unbalanced. He is biased against everything that gives him (and you) a hard time, from misbehaving pets to Wall Street analysts who said Enron was a steal at $75.

If something’s bothering you, chances are it’s bothering Tim as well, and he will be more than happy to ridicule the offending party into oblivion, while providing you with more laughs than you’ve had since the release of "Silence of the Lambs."

Tim writes humor columns for the Hagerstown (Md.) Herald-Mail newspaper, a collection of which is available in his book "Petrified Fact: Stories of Bizarre Behavior that Really Happened, Mostly." He produces a bi-monthly online column, and is author of the upcoming novel "Home Detention"—set for release Oct. 27, 2004—a chronicle of a tired, aging male thrust into a houseful of young, energetic and highly opinionated females.

A Mark Twain for the computer age, you will find Tim’s writing to be a breath of fresh exhaust in an increasingly mechanized, pasteurized and traumatized world. Humor, our ability to laugh at life’s injustices, is the key to unlocking the insanity of the day—and that’s What’s So Funny.