About the Shaft: Some good news and some bad news

 

By Joseph Walther

 

We’ve all heard tails of woe from people who claim to have gotten the “shaft.” This past Friday, I heard one so dim-witted, that it compelled me to probe deeper into the alleged victim’s circumstances. It also got me to thinking about the times in my life when I, or someone I knew, had felt “shafted.” Um, guess what? Getting “shafted” is mostly a consequence of inviting a “shafting.”

 

            He told me his name, but I’ve decided to use the initials, NN, in place of it. NN truly believes—heart and soul—that he, in his words, “got screwed in my butt for trying to help some people out.” Well, OK, his EXACT words were more direct and colorful, if you get my drift. Even though the events took place several months ago, he’s spent a small fortune trying to clear his name and get out of debt. “Life is so unfair,” he said with a sincere groan.

 

            I asked him to give me some more details. He told me that two guys approached him outside of a convenience store and offered to pay him $50 to deliver a small package to an address that was less than 3-miles away. “Did you know these men?” I asked. “No,” he said. “They seemed sincere, though. They told me that their car had broken down on I95 and that they had walked about 2-miles to this parking lot and saw me about to get into my car.” They also convinced him that it was an emergency. They wanted to deliver the package, but they had to get back to their car before the police towed it. He agreed to deliver the package, took their money, and drove off to make the delivery.

 

            So, two men, complete strangers, convinced him to deliver a package, the contents of which he did not question, to someone he didn’t know. The only thing he knew was the location of the address. He apparently could not smell the foul odor wafting about from the I95 breakdown/emergency bit. As he explained to me, “Fifty bucks is fifty bucks. And for only about 5-minutes of my time. I mean, like what’s that, about $300 an hour?” Actually, assuming no coffee breaks, it’s $600 an hour, but I’m sure he felt bad enough without adding math illiteracy to the list.

 

            The two men left; walking toward I95, as NN pulled out of the parking lot. Unbeknownst to NN, a drug trafficking task force had the delivery address under surveillance. When he arrived and attempted to deliver the package, the police arrested him, along with two of the address’s occupants. The two strangers who had initially commissioned him are still on the loose. Additional details only make him look dumber.

 

            “NN” is short for Numb Nuts. Two men didn’t “shaft” him. He invited a “shafting.” They simply took him up on his offer. He might just as well have turned his back towards them, bent over, and told them to stick it up here. That’s what they did and they didn’t even bother kissing him first! NN didn’t feel the agonizing initial penetration pain because either it wasn’t his first time or because he was “really in the mood.” I’m sure that the lubricant—the fifty bucks—helped with the penetration, too.

 

            “Fairness”, as it applies to life, is an illusion. The word does not appear in either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. People like NN raise gullibility to a completely new level. When it comes to getting the “shaft”, there is good news and bad news for the NNs of the world. The bad news is that the “shafting” will never cease in either frequency or intensity. The good news is that the more times they get it, the less it will hurt. After a while, it will begin to feel good. They’ll start longing for it!

 

            The scary thing about this incident is the fact that there are many NN types walking the streets of the United States. They are the most dangerous of the dumb because they have no idea that they are dumber than rocks. Scarier still, is the fact that these people are capable of breeding. Their existence lends great credibility to the notion that heredity is nature’s version of telling the same joke repeatedly.

 

            There is another kind of stupid. This one is non-criminal. It happened Saturday, mid-morning in the food court of the Christiana Mall, in Newark, Delaware. Stan and Irma—husband and wife of several years, I’m assuming—were discussing the dress she had purchased at J. C. Penny about an hour earlier. “You really like it, Stan? It doesn’t add undue emphasis to my hips?” For me, time came to a screeching halt!

 

            Sometimes a man becomes distracted by important stuff, particularly a long time married man. The list of distractions can be legion: how to end the Iraqi war, or the growing number of people without adequate health insurance, or global warming, or whether there’s adequate financial support for the opera and ballet. Or, it could be a distraction of monumental importance, such as a 30-something brunette with legs to die for and a perky set of breasts practically popping out of the cleavage of her hot pink blouse, screaming, “LOOK AT THESE!” I seem to recall a similar type of distraction seated in front of him but to his right.

 

            Whatever the case, Irma didn’t seem to occupy his thought processes at the time she asked the questions about her new dress. I’m sure he heard her words, but he just couldn’t process them because of the distractions. Yes, he heard them, but he couldn’t connect them with Irma and her tone of concern. So, in a valiant attempt to act cool and appear as though he was NOT ignoring her, he said something that sounded colossally stupid to everyone else, but highly intelligent to him.

 

            Like radar tracking a speeding car, he had locked his gaze on to something at the table to his front, right—not sure what it was, but it was NOT IRMA. Without so much as a glance in Irma’s direction, Stan said, “Not any more than usual.” There was about a 5-second delay at which point the man suddenly realized what his wife had asked him. All color drained from his face as the severity of the situation set in. He tried desperately to smooth it over with something cool, calm and collected, “Irma! Sweetheart! At your age, I mean our ages, what difference does it make?” People started to back away, slowly.

 

            The last I saw of him, Stan was trying to dislodge Irma’s purse from his chest, hoping that the paramedics would soon arrive and reinflate his lungs. That’s how hard she threw it at him. She called him a name in a loud, hissing sort of way, and it wasn’t “Stan”, either. From the word she used, everyone in the food court logically assumed that Stan’s parents had never married. Oh, and that he was a rotten one, at that. I don’t think that Stan heard her, though, because grim thoughts as to whether his heart was going to start beating again had diverted all of his attention.

 

            We humans seem to be the only species that need compensation for what we’re not. I’m sure that’s why Nature provided us with imaginations. Unfortunately, we are what we are; Nature compensated us for that, too. It’s called a sense of humor. Just be sure that you cover your butt whenever you bend over in public.

 

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Where's the damn stove?

 

By Joseph Walther

 

Since when has “Remove the external plastic wrap, place in microwave for 7 ½-minutes, and let stand for 2-minutes before serving,” become cooking? It isn’t; it’s reading directions. Following these directions and then placing the food on nice chinaware along with attractive garnishing, and serving a roomful of guests isn’t cooking either. It’s attractive presentation, but it’s not cooking.

 

            Taking credit for the perceived culinary expertise, on the other hand, has many benefits, especially for single men. For one thing, good presentation skills go a long way toward convincing women that a guy’s in touch with his feminine side, which, from what I’ve been able to surmise, increases the chances of getting laid.

 

            Over the past week, I’ve gone though several grocery stores. I didn’t need anything, actually. Well, that’s not true. I did need something, but while I was there, I decided to write about something different. This divine inspiration came to me as I made my way through the refrigeration and frozen food sections of the stores.

 

            In the days of my youth, if a man couldn’t cook, didn’t know anyone—defined as “a woman”—who was willing to do it for him, and couldn’t afford daily trips to restaurants, he starved to death. This is precisely what happened to old man Wassaman who lived up the street from me back then.

 

            Oh sure, when they found him dead, he was surrounded by empty gin bottles. And, yes, it’s true that the pathologist accidentally dropped the deceased’s liver during the autopsy and it cracked the floor tiles. It’s also true that the medical examiner listed the cause of death as—I can’t make out some of these terms—“something acute something something liver something failure.”

 

            All of this was typical medical mumbo jumbo, as far as I was concerned. The medical examiner had to write something official looking. Alcohol was a secondary factor; he drank to ease the pain! The fact is that the real reason he died was that the man didn’t have a clue when it came to cooking. For God’s sake, people, this was BEFORE microwavable foods, mainly because there were no microwave ovens.

 

            Yes, there were TV dinners but a man had to know how to get that aluminum foil off the container. Even if he could accomplish this, he had to know: one, what a stove was, two, where the stove was located, and three, how to use it. For most men in those days, knowing these things was not exactly a foregone conclusion! Um, to listen to many women today, nothing has changed.

 

            My mother could cook anything. She never threw ANYTHING away because she could use it for either soup or some kind of stew later on, sometimes, MUCH later on. I remember some of that soup and all of those stews. They’re why I developed a fondness for the taste of cardboard. It doesn’t taste that bad, very similar to McDonalds, actually. But, McDonalds didn’t arrive until years later. Even now, though, all bets are off if they outlaw ketchup.

 

            My father couldn’t boil water. The only reason he could find the kitchen was that he was afraid of starving to death. Also, the kitchen was where he bellowed like a wounded seal if we didn’t have mashed potatoes and gravy at EVERY DAMN meal. The potatoes didn’t come from a box. They had to be hand mashed, using a potato masher. This was the only way to make sure there were lots of big lumps.

 

            And, the gravy didn’t come from a can, either. She made it from the drippings of whatever she was cooking with the potatoes. I think it was meat, but I couldn’t tell for sure because my father liked it shoe leather tough. For sure, though, whatever it was would eventually show up in one of her soups or stews later on.

 

            To this day, I gag at the thought of mashed potatoes. As much as I loved my father, I admit to fantasizing about tripping him down the stairs over those freakin’ mashed potatoes.

 

            One good peculiarity remains with me because of my parents. They both liked—Horrors, call child protective services!—REAL butter. I do, too! As usual, back in those days, there was no such thing as margarine as we know it today. Either people ate real butter or something called “Oleo”, a crappy-tasting precursor to, “I can’t believe it’s not butter”. Even the modern margarines such as this one taste terrible. The only reason they call it, “I can’t believe it’s not butter” is because, “Eeewww, what the hell is this crap” wouldn’t sell much margarine.

 

            As I looked over all of the stuff in the refrigerated/frozen food sections, I did not find a single item that a man could not “cook” in a microwave. However, he MUST, be able to read simple directions, as well as be able to work a microwave timer. Never again need a man starve to death. Then again, maybe not! “Simple” is a relative term.

 

            I have no idea why I did it because purchasing some usually entails taking out a 2^nd mortgage, I took a trip down the cereal isle, where I found the “Pop Tarts.” Did you know that they have cooking instructions on the sides of the boxes? Well, they do. Here they are. First, “remove contents from paper pouch.” Second, “Place in toaster or toaster oven.” Third, “Do not over heat.”

 

            The fact that these instructions are there does not upset me. But, ladies, if you meet a guy who NEEDS these instructions or, even worse, does not understand these instructions, RUN away quickly!

 

            Next Thursday is Thanksgiving. Millions of people will be on the road. Have a great holiday; stuff yourselves, even. Stay safe and don’t drink and drive, though. If you’re going to kill yourself or someone else, do it in a worthwhile endeavor, such as getting to one of those Black Friday bargains!

 

            I’ll be back next week. Hopefully the subscriber emails will go out on time this week. The company I use had a power failure that affected the notifications the past two weeks. The notification emails are scheduled to hit inboxes by 1AM each Monday morning. We’ll see.

 

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

So, what'd ya think of them thar alexzuns?

By Joseph Walther

 

Last Tuesday, November 7, 2006, the Democrats became the majority party in both houses of the United States Congress. They took over the House of Representatives convincingly. In the Senate, they took control, but not by much. Political pundits and editorial writers, depending on their politics, have been on a writing frenzy expressing varying degrees of shock, enthusiasm, and indifference. If you’re sick of the stale “expert” rhetoric, read on, here is a different perspective.

 

            At the outset, I’m sick of hearing people tell us that it’s our right, privilege, and civic duty to vote. This is true but there’s an implied condition to it. If you know what you’re voting on, PLEASE vote. Otherwise, you have the right, privilege, and civic duty to stay home. PLEASE don’t vote!

 

            There was no need for me to conduct my own poll to see what the country was thinking. The legitimate pollsters had already done that. Their polls indicated that the “people” were in a nasty mood. Because they know—and strictly adhere to—the polling rules, they were, as usual, accurate.

 

            I wanted to talk to some of those who rarely appear on pollsters’ lists of people to poll. I wanted to talk to people who are representative of the lesser affluent areas in virtually every county in this country, to see how, if at all, they voted and why. I won’t name the neighborhoods because I don’t like to mix the majority good people in with the minority of the low-lifers. All you need to do is just sit back and imagine the most dangerous, endemically poor subsidized housing communities you know about, you’ll know precisely the type of places I went to.

 

            THIS is where I conducted my own, non-scientific poll. People have always told me that I have brass testicles—OK not all of them said “testicles.” The point is that I love a challenge, but more importantly, I don’t think people are idiots just because they live in subsidized housing.

 

            I selected four subsidized housing neighborhoods in my home state of Delaware: two in New Castle County, one in Kent County, and one in Sussex County. I knocked on 112 doors over four days beginning November 8^th and ending November 11^th. I landed an interview with 39 residents of which 18 lived in New Castle County, 10 lived in Kent County, and 11 lived in Sussex County. This was NOT a scientific poll. The responses do not represent the opinions of anyone but those I interviewed.

 

            While I maintained a constant sense of caution, I never felt a physically threatened. I thought how Urkel would have done this. So, I wore a $9 IZOD knit pullover shirt purchased at BJ’s Warehouse and a $14.95 pair of khaki pants—some call them Dockers, but they’re actually pants for the bigger-butted male. Essentially, I looked like a white, much older and heavier version of Steve Urkel of Family Matters fame. The only thing missing was a neck strap for my glasses. One glance and the residents took me as a traveling stand-up comedy routine in search of someplace to destroy.

 

            I’ve always been comfortable talking to people. I love to talk, one-on-one or in front of audiences. Either way, I’m comfortable. When I was but a young lad of twenty years, a mentor taught me that the size of the audience does not matter as long as the members of the audience think that you are speaking to them as individuals. She also taught me that how we say it carries more weight than what we say. By God, everything this woman taught me about people, except for accordion players, has turned out to be true.

 

            Be truthful now. Assume that you’re (fill in the racial/ethnic label) and live in subsidized housing. You hear a knock and open your front door to find a 64-year-old white, gray-haired male, dressed as described above, who greets you with an Urkelian-like, “Hi, as you can see, I’m a dorky-looking white guy, but I’d love to ask you some questions about this last election if you’ll let me.” Come on… Your sides would hurt from some deep, gut-cramp producing laughter. After a couple of snorts of oxygen to help you get your normal breathing rhythm back, we’d be like old friends.

 

            I knocked on 112 doors and I only netted 39-interviews. Many of the residents were simply not home. Others refused to talk, mostly out of fear. But, you know, those 39-interviews were great. These people had a lot on their minds and were willing to talk about things. Many of them would not win any articulation contests, but I knew what they were saying and I’m glad that I did it. Of those thirty-nine residents, 31 of them invited me inside and seven of those fixed me a cup of coffee, which I accepted.

 

            My poll does not give a clue as to how many people living in subsidized housing vote. I knew this before I started. On the other hand, I have always believed that the majority are caring and decent people, forced by external circumstances to live under such conditions. They outnumber, by far, the losers that we all get to read about daily. Most of them do not enjoy living on “welfare.” If the 39-people I spoke to are an indication, most of them vote, too. I doubt that any of these folks woke up one morning and thought, “By God, I think I’ll demean myself and my family and go on welfare.”

 

            We have to realize that our problems do not exist in a universe of certainty because they don’t. In fact, there’s no such universe. But this doesn’t stop people from acting as though there is. Until the majority of us voters come to understand that “right” answers are mostly illusionary, we can’t begin to solve anything worth solving.

 

            Our universe is uncertain and we have to live and survive within its confines whether we like or not. We have to come to grips with this and understand that the only applicable rules are possibilities and probabilities. Faulty mindsets in our universe are a constant and give birth to obvious mistakes. But we can’t correct them if the mindsets that created them remain unchanged.

 

            It isn’t the fact of the Iraqi war that helped bring down the Republicans. It was the way that George Bush’s faulty mindset compelled him to fight it. Along other lines, people who claim the moral high ground lose all of their credibility when people catch them in all sorts of illegal money-grubbing schemes or conducting themselves in sexual ways that they’ve vociferously condemned others for doing.

 

            There’s nothing wrong in occasionally throwing the bums out. But, we have to stop throwing the babies out with the bathwater. All Republicans are not bums. There are just as many bums in the Democrats’ gang. The voters threw out some decent people in this last election simply to send a message to George Bush. This kind of mindless action does nothing but reduce the voters’ mindset to about the same faulty level as the Bush Administration’s has been since 9/11.

 

            Finally, I have to tell you about the one person I interviewed who was clueless. I’m not even sure she knew what state she lived in. She ranted for over 15-minutes. She used many words but about 90% were either f#*k, f!&%ing, mother f$&ker, or c!*k s*%ker. All of her comments pertained to the Republicans. I asked her what she thought of George Bush, but she didn’t seem to know him. She also seemed to think that Iraq is in South America. So, if you’re a Republican, don’t tell her. Or, if you accidentally let it slip, run for your life. You’ll be safe in Iraq because she’ll be in South America looking for you.

 

            Stay tuned for more exciting episodes of whatever. I’ll be back next week. If I can’t find something factual to talk about, I’ll make something up.

 

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Um, how do you spell skeerd?

 

By Joe Walther

 

Dear Dr. Walther, the letter began. It continued, “. . . being that you are in a position of significant influence, we would like to seek your help in reaching our goal of feeding millions of starving children.”  It continued, loaded with illiterate clichés to the point of nausea. The lead sentence in the concluding paragraph, “We are so very anxious for you to join us in this crusade.” Mercifully, the letter ended, but not before this gem of a final sentence: “It is not known how many people we can help when people like you get involved.”

 

            As a standard practice, I NEVER respond to such letters or emails. My reasons for this are obvious, but I’m not going into them here. Instead, I’m going to take advantage of the opportunity such letters provide for me to rant about um, you know… crappy writing.

 

            I do not possess writing credentials. People who expend the effort to acquire English degrees, particularly the PhD, do it because they are, well, OK, I have no idea why they do it. Trust me on this, obtaining a PhD in Astrophysics, Astrobiology, Chemistry, Mathematics, or any of the Engineering disciplines, is substantially easier than English. I have a friend who has a Masters in English and he seems to be in a perpetual state of pain. Also, the person who wrote the letter I’ve referred to here—P. Jackson Dillard—does not have an English degree, either. I’m willing to put myself on the spot and say that, if he has a degree at all, it only strengthens a growing body of evidence that idiots get though the system.

 

            I learned to write because the Sisters of Perpetual Pain—most notably—Sr. Helena, Sr. Magdalene, and Sr. Charles-Edwards. They scared the hell out of me. They could draw blood with a ruler’s edge without even being in the room. Those of us who violated grammar rules, sentence structure, and spelling, even accidentally, found ourselves bleeding from the knuckles in short order. Mom and dad couldn’t help, either, because they were just as afraid of those nuns as we were. Man, I hated those nuns then, but now I remember them with fondness, love and admiration.

 

            In Catholic high school, Father Spragg picked up where the nuns left off. Of course, he assumed that we knew how to express thoughts in complete sentences without spelling errors. It was a reasonable assumption for him because, back then, students didn’t get out of elementary school without knowing how to do these things. This provided Fr. Spragg with the opportunity to move us to ever-higher writing skills.

 

            I was not fond of Fr. Spragg, either. He was older than dirt and mean. He had been in charge of the Inquisition back in the Middle Ages and he LOVED his work. We could tell this because he had a temper that even God wouldn’t mess with and his eyes glazed over at the mere mention of the word pain. He hated the misuse of adjectives, such as using “anxious” to mean “eager” as P. Jackson Dillard did above. The only thing he hated more was the use of passive voice under any circumstances. He convinced all of us that our parents and the school board had given him the authority to electrocute anyone who violated his rules.

 

            The fact is that none of us would have even considered using such terms as “being that” because, along with their cousins: “being as”, “being as how’, “seeing that”, “seeing as”, and “seeing as how”, fall just short of being grammatical felonies but definitely rank up there with snoring during the ballet! Actually, I rather undergo a vasectomy with a weed whacker than attend the ballet; but you get the idea.

 

            The good sisters in elementary school, along with that nasty-tempered old coot in high school, made it possible for the late Dr. Alma Kindrick, to teach me how to write. Dr. “A”, as we called her, did not teach grammar, sentence structure, or vocabulary. She didn’t have to because students who didn’t already know these things, did NOT get into college, let alone into her writing class.

 

            Dr. Kindrick was one of a kind. A spelling error, other than an obvious typo, was grounds for an immediate “F” for the assignment. She would tolerate a maximum of two grammatical errors, but even one eliminated any chance of receiving an “A” on the assignment. Also, she never crossed things out on a paper. She would simply write her choice of expression above or below the ones we submitted. She encouraged all of us to feel comfortable on the page and to write the way we would speak. She even encouraged us to make up a word or two as long as its meaning was clear in context.

 

            There was nothing mean, stuffy, or scary about Dr. “A.” She was perky, outgoing, and a fantastic teacher. I read her obituary a couple of days ago. I happened to spot it when I linked to a small town newspaper that links to my column. I regret never having told her how much I admired her and how much she taught me. So, I’ll tell all of you in the hope that, if you know someone like her, you’ll tell them before they die.

 

            Dr. Alma Kindrick was an awesome human being—totally, incredibly, unbelievably amazing. Had she been an actor, she would have won every award possible. At the very least her students should have presented her with one of those huge trophies…the kind with a ginormous GOLD-plated person perched atop a wooden block with a golden plate that reads, Dr. Alma Kindrick—the most awesome person EVER! Also note that ginormous is not a word, but Dr. “A” gave me the license to make things up.

 

            That’s it for this week. If you have a clue on November 7^th, make sure you vote. Otherwise, stay home. Unlike others who encourage EVERYONE to vote, I don’t. The country is in deep doo doo nowadays. Part of the problem is that too many stupid people are voting. Knock it off; there must be something on TV that you could watch instead.

 

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.