2009, APRIL

April 27

I hate feet. Not all feet; elephants’ feet, for example, have a tremendous bearing surface that is ideal for holding up an elephant and keeping him from sinking in the mud. And flamingoes’ feet are so stable that when they’re just standing around, they only use one of them.

But if you want proof that Intelligent Design is a myth, look down at those odd things at the end of your legs. It’s hard to imagine anything more ill-suited to their purpose. In the first place, there are only two of them. If you were designing feet you’d make at least three and maybe more, so you could have one in the air while maintaining a stable tripod on the ground. And what about the size and shape: a couple of inches wide and maybe 9-12 inches long? The part that’s actually on the ground amounts to maybe one-half of a square foot-- only half of that at any given time if you’re walking. Would you try to support something 6 feet tall and 200 pounds (more or less) on a couple of sticks?

Proper feet should hold you up without difficulty from day one, but these silly things are so poorly designed that children spend an entire year just learning to balance on them, and another few years of what we call toddling before they can maneuver comfortably. Fortunately, permanent teeth don’t come in until later.

Then there’s the arch, a concavity right in the middle where your leg comes down. So the part that should be bearing the weight isn’t even on the ground! That’s a great concept for a device to unclog toilets, but for feet it’s just dumb.

Do your feet hurt? Of course they hurt: they were never meant to do the job we ask of them. You are constantly clenching and unclenching your toes just to keep from falling over. And what’s up with toes, anyway? Why only in front? I tip backwards easier than forwards, why don’t I have toes in back? And why five? That fifth toe is completely useless, curled up in there like some extra string theory dimension.

Your feet not only have to hold you up, they have to propel you down the road. It seems to me that a system that is essentially a prolonged, controlled fall is not the best way to accomplish this. If you had a few more feet, it would certainly work better (do you think a two-legged cheetah would still be the fastest land mammal?), but it still seems like a singularly inefficient way to travel. Why not wheels? Or, better yet, balls that could roll in any direction?

If I were designing people, they would have at least three and more likely five legs that ended in large, free-rolling balls like Dyson’s vacuum cleaner. Jimmy Choo would have to find honest work, but with rollers you could go downhill without even moving your feet. All an infant would need to learn is how to lock and unlock the balls. Maybe I should make arms longer while I’m at it: we’re going to need brakes.

April 22

It seems like the drug companies are always coming up with new maladies for their existing cures. Well, pharmaceutical companies aren’t the only ones that can invent new diseases.

When employees slack off in December, more interested in parties than work, it’s called Seasonal Effective Disorder. It would have been called Christmas disease but that was taken.

Sudden Infant Dearth Syndrome is what happened when the Chinese instituted the one-child-per-couple rule.

Alzheifer’s Disease: a degenerative condition affecting elderly bovines.

Lumpus Erythematosis: an autoimmune disease characterized by large, red growths.

Pshittacosis: an infectious disease of birds, especially parrots, whose most prominent symptom is diarrhea.

Kapusi’s disease: common lay term for gonorrhea in women.

Perkinson’s disease: abnormal carbohydrate metabolism caused by excessive pancake intake.

Hyperthighroidism: severe hemorrhoids, so-called when the abnormal veins extend to the upper portions of the lower extremities.

Ulster: abdominal pain caused by corned beef and cabbage.

Carpal funnel syndrome: hand pain caused by nerve compression when the wrist becomes abruptly narrower.

Restless lag syndrome: a rare neurological condition in which the sufferer moves in response to external stimuli, but only after a noticeable delay.

Munchousen’s syndrome: a form of childhood obesity caused by excessive consumption of gingerbread.

Hemporrhoids: a little-mentioned side effect of habitual marijuana use, caused by straining while holding in smoke.

Overeating disease: I didn’t make this one up: there really is such a thing, and it’s highly fatal, but it fortunately only happens in lambs.

April 17

Many person has asked me about my experience at the bar—no, not that kind, I mean the Bar. “What the hell would you know about the law?” is the way it was phrased, as I recall. And so in the interest of full public disclosure I thought I would tell about my short but extremely brief legal career.

I never had any intention of practicing law; I went to law school at night in the late 70’s because I thought it would be fun. It was, and then it was over. I don’t remember who talked me into taking the Bar exam, which was never part of the plan, but in those days I think it cost about twenty bucks, so I signed up.

The most important factor in my passing the exam was the fact that I didn’t give a damn, an attitude I recommend to anyone facing that situation. I did study some for it, but my chief concern was that I finish in time to catch my flight to the Bahamas.

A friend who passed the bar with me joined a local law firm, Ganeff & Crook, and asked if I would like to be listed as “Of Counsel” to the firm. This means your name appears on the letterhead and they let you use a desk if you want to come in and work for them once in a while. They don’t actually consider you a member of the firm and, as it turns out, they don’t pay you. I didn’t know about that part.

The firm didn’t last too long, since Ganeff did not in fact have a law license and Crook was in New York. Ganeff, attracted by a license to steal, went into banking, and subsequently into jail.

My friend started his own firm and I went back to my day job teaching at the medical center, where I undertook the only legal case I ever handled from start to finish: I had the criminal record of one of my residents expunged.

Since I never took on another, I can honestly (well, honestly for a lawyer) say I never lost a case. Denny Crane and I are probably the only ones who could say that. I continued to pay my full Bar dues for several years, until I discovered they had something called “Inactive Membership.” An Inactive Member is not permitted to practice law, but is entitled to all other rights and privileges of a member of the Bar. Of which there are none.

After ten or 15 years, I figured this out and I called the California Bar Association and told them I wanted to resign. “You shouldn’t do that,” they told me. “If you resign and then want to come back, you’ll have to retake the Bar exam. But if you don’t resign, you just have to pay your back dues.” So I just stopped paying. For a while they threatened me, and I believe I have actually been disbarred for nonpayment. But they still send me a bill every year, so I guess if I ever want to practice, all I have to do is pay my arrears. And take 28 years’ worth of Minimum Continuing Legal Education.

April 13

As someone who sells his creative work, I tend to be pretty respectful of copyright. I’m one of the few people I know who paid for all the software he uses. (OK, full disclosure: I started my digital career with what was almost certainly a purloined copy of Photoshop 2. But I bought PS4 and I’ve been clean since.)

That may not mean so much today, but ten or fifteen years ago, it was pretty easy to copy a friend’s software and everybody was doing it. Nowadays it’s a lot harder because of the anti-piracy software built in to practically everything. It may not have been Microsoft that first started to protect their interests this way, but they certainly perfected the art. They have records of everything they have ever sold and you can’t use it without registering the serial number.

Interestingly enough, it now appears that Microsoft got their anti-piracy software the old-fashioned way: they stole it. A federal jury recently ordered them to pay a Singapore company $388 million for infringing their patented technology. Microsoft response is that the patent was invalid because the technique was obvious.

April 9: I could swear I was around here somewhere…

An argument can be made that a child is best reared by two parents of opposite sex who are married. It’s not an argument I wish to make, or even support, here. In any case, the fact is that this particular arrangement, however desirable, obtains for a minority of families in this country today. With adoption, surrogate mothers, and various forms of artificial insemination, many children grow up without knowing their biological ancestors. This is a social problem, or at least a social question, unlike ignorance of one’s genetic history, which is a medical question.

Personally I don’t see it, but apparently it is a real problem, since so many people coming into adulthood spend a great deal of effort trying to answer the question “where did I come from?” It’s a terrible thing to be in this situation, we are told: “A child who doesn’t know his ancestors is like a stream that doesn’t know its source.”

Excuse me? No stream knows its source, and none of them is the worse for it. People do extensive research to find out “who they are,” when the best they can hope for is to find out who their parents were. It’s not the same. You are what you are, what you have made yourself, not where you came from. The army wants you to be all you can be (which seems an excellent argument for staying out of the army, but that’s neither here nor there), not all your father was.

In India, it matters if your father was an Untouchable, though not as much as in years past. In England, it matters if your father was a Lord—even if he lost his fortune. In America your father might have been a horsethief or a CEO or a Cabinet Secretary—or all three. Who are you?

Searching for your roots isn’t quite the same as searching for yourself. The latter is what people say they are doing when they drop out of school, grow beards, and scratch a lot. It’s a time-honored tradition among people who can afford to do nothing.

Self-realization, or self-actualization, is something else again, though it’s a fuzzy line. The dictionaries say it means something like “fulfillment of one’s personal potential,” but that’s not what people mean when they use the term, as judged by such statements as “macrobiotics continues to serve as a bridge toward my own self-realization.” Eating elephant ears (macro + bi + otic = two large ears) helps you achieve your capabilities? That’s more the sort of thing a person would say if he was searching for himself.

I’m not really clear whether self-realization is the same thing as self-actualization. Presumably if you are not self-actualized, you are merely virtual. But does self-realization mean to make yourself real or to become aware of yourself? I just realized….

April 5

I have a theory that North Korea’s missile launch was overcompensation for Kim Jong Il's sense of inadequacy. If you saw the map they showed on TV, it's pretty clear: the launch was from a place called No Dong.

April 3: Remark-to-market

Remember the mark-to-market rule (10-2-08)? It’s the accounting standard that says if you’re a bank you have to list your assets as being worth what you could get for them. This seems reasonable enough to me, but it caused some consternation on Wall Street when banks were forced to reveal that a lot of their holdings were worthless.

Apparently it’s time to revisit the question. Congress has pressured the Financial Accounting Standards Board to relax the rule and give the banks “more discretion” in valuing questionable assets. Quick show of hands: how many think it’s a good idea to give the banks more discretion in anything?

It’s kind of a back-door way to boost the economy: overnight the financial institutions will add several hundreds of billions of quasidollars to their balance sheets, thereby averting insolvency and freeing up credit so we can go back to business as usual.

Business as usual??? Hey, Seuss! Haven’t we learned anything from this mess?

April 2: It would have been April 1, but I was afraid to turn on my computer.

I remember an election some years back when the people of California approved the state lottery. The profits were supposed to go to benefit the schools, which Californians back in those days thought would be a good thing.

And it might have been, except that our leaders decided that, since the schools got the lottery money, they didn’t need any other support. And since the lottery money turned out to be less than expected (I am still trying to find out how much actually goes to “administration”), school funding has dried up like a lawn in Lancaster. Every time there is a budget shortfall (i.e. every time there is a budget) funding for education is cut again.

UCLA, once part of the greatest public institution of higher learning in the nation, has announced that they are suspending the requirement that students must take at least one seminar course. Seminars, in case you went to some other school, are classes based on discussion rather than lecture, in which the students actually speak to and interact with the professor. They are necessarily limited to about 20 students. And UCLA no longer has the resources to provide them.

I think it might be time to reexamine our priorities. And we had better do it quickly, because if we wait a few years the people doing the examining will all be graduates of one of the worst institutions of higher learning in the nation.

One of the wheels on the President’s Recovery Train is education. Among other things, he wants everybody to have at least one year of college. I think he’s on the right track, but going the wrong way. There are people who regard school as cheap entertainment, and we don’t need any encouragement. But I doubt that the people who couldn’t wait for the bell to signal the end of class will be thrilled to hear that the new standard is thirteen years.

Twelve years used to be enough to provide a basic education and prepare a high school graduate to go out and earn a living. Granted, there’s more to learn than when I was a kid; nobody should get out of school without knowing how to operate a computer, for example. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that our school system has deteriorated so badly that twelve years no longer prepares anybody for anything. The first year of college is remedial, teaching freshman what they should have already learned. Fewer than half of the entering students at Cal State, a four-year university, are qualified to skip the classes in Dumbbell English, Dumbbell Math, and Dumbbell Everything Else. Obama’s extra year is intended to make up for the lousy education our students get in high school. That’s shameful, and a waste of our pedagogical resources. I don’t know if UCLA has the same problem as Cal State, since they are more selective, but maybe they could afford seminar courses if they didn’t have to spend so much to prepare their students to learn.

We don’t need to make it easier to go to college, we need to make it harder—or at least more meaningful—to get out of high school. People who are not particularly interested in learning for its own sake will not be interested in spending another year in school. And it wouldn’t be necessary, if the high schools did their job.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do.

all materials on this site ©michael grossman. all rights reserved.

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