I’ve always wondered about the English tradition of hyphenated last names. The whole concept strikes me as a perfect example of vain impracticality. As if a woman named Chuzzlewit didn’t have enough problems already – could changing her last name to Havisham be all that bad? Apparently so, and here comes Ms. Chuzzlewit-Havisham, tripping so lightly out of the church door on her way to a life of wedded bliss and a female child who will choose to continue in her mother’s footsteps upon marriage, thereby gracing the world with a Ms. Chuzzlewit-Havisham-Dingleberry or something. I mean, really, in general, the practice is plainly absurd, at least in most cases. I suppose there are compelling reasons sometimes, though. Such as when you are a female English physicist and your last name is Newton. Nobody has to be a genius to figure out that it’s going to help your career, having somebody named Dr. I. Newton on those grant applications. So I can see why Ivanna, a dear friend from mine from Old Blighty, elected to hyphenate her last name when she married an astronomer named Figge. And since they were British, and knew not much, if anything, about things here on the other side of the Pond, it was at least even money that, after doing so, she’d end up Dr. Ivanna Figge-Newton.
She’s in town for a couple of weeks at the moment, staying at the Willard, because, she says, it reminds her of hotels back home. I can see that – the Willard’s been perched on its Victorian haunches at the corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue since before Franklin Pierce stayed there 1853, which makes it nearly the same age as a typical English hotel. Besides, as she told me while we sat at the Round Robin Bar, with the dollar where it is these days, it’s not like the rooms at the Willard are particularly expensive for English visitors to occupy.
But not that, on the other hand, things are all so rosy for poor Ivanna and her husband, who, christened Eden Adam Figge-Leafe, got tired of being taunted, and, after obtaining his Ph.D. in astronomy from Cambridge, changed his name to Dr. Eden A. Figge. “Old Duff,” as she calls him, remains at home for the moment, while she carries out the family expedition to explore the New World and seek job prospects for herself and her husband.
“Today,” she told me over a Glenmorangie on the rocks, “I finished up a series of interviews at the Johns Hopkins Department of Physics and Astronomy. Old Figgy Duff and I could both work there.”
“Sounds feasible,” I agreed, sipping a Bombay Sapphire 9:1 dry martini, up, with a lemon twist. “But why are you over here looking for jobs?”
“Oh,” she nodded, knowingly, “I suppose you Yanks don’t keep up with things like the Science and Technology Facilities Council, do you?”
“Well,” I admitted, “I’ve heard of it, anyway, but I doubt the average American knows what it is.”
“Of course not,” she shook her head, assured of her correctness. “And why should they? You Americans have plenty of other things to worry about these days. But, you see Tom, the STFC has told British physicists and astronomers that the U.K. has got too many of them now, and it simply can’t afford to support all of us anymore.”
“You don’t say?” I was, truthfully, taken aback. “I’ve always thought that England, unlike the United States, was a civilized country where respect for learning was a key element of societal values.”
“Yes,” she sighed, “I know it sounds hard to believe, but science research funding in Britain is down eighty million pounds. And while Sir Peter tells the press…”
“Sir Peter?”
“Sir Peter Knight,” she explained, “head of the redundancy panel – you know, the committee that determines the funding cuts. Sir Peter tells the press that ‘Every single programme we looked at was worthwhile,’ then carries right on to emphasize that something, nonetheless, must go.”
“And you and your husband are concerned that Sir Peter might gore your oxen, so to speak?”
“As it were,” she affirmed, “to turn a phrase, yes. My field is sub-atomic particle physics, and I’m working on the ALICE project at the Large Hadron Collider.”
“Ah, yes,” I mused, “sub-atomic particle physics. You know, I’ve always wondered about this, what with all the incredibly expensive experimental apparatus you folks use and all the time you’ve been at it since, what it’s been, 1920 or so? Tell me, just what have you sub-atomic particle physicists discovered?”
“A blooming huge lot of bloody sub-atomic particles, that’s what.”
“Right. How about your husband, then?”
“Oh, dear, sweet Figgy,” she murmured, “he’s been on tenter hooks, just like every other astronomer in Britain. The STFC says scientific projects should – listen to this, Tom – ‘contain mechanisms to capture those new ideas to benefit the economy.’ Now, tell me, Tom, can you imagine any single, possible thing my poor Old Figgy Duff could suggest that would relate pulsar radio emissions to increased Inland revenue for the Exchequer?”
“Offhand,” I confessed, “I’d say that’s a definitely pretty tough order.”
“So what’s a scientist to do,” she asked with a rhetorical flourish, “quit research and start cobbling pornographic Web sites that advertise British-made condoms and stiffy pills? Is that what the STFC thinks will give the English economy the lift it needs?”
“I don’t want to discourage you,” I cautioned, “but American society has behaved pretty much the same way, and for considerably longer, I believe.”
“Really?” Ivanna motioned to the bartender for a refill. “But you Yanks came up with the atomic bomb and put a man on the moon! What about the Hubble Telescope and the Space Shuttle and all that rot?”
“It’s a truly ironic situation,” I responded laconically, “but here in America, our leaders are constantly calling for more scientists while our educators extol scientific achievement to innumerable captive audiences of young citizens forced to listen during various classes and school assemblies. Then our society consistently bestows its greatest rewards on entertainers, professional athletes and big-time swindlers. There’s no way I would ever recommend that an American student get a science degree. ‘Science is for suckers,’ that’s what I’d tell them, ‘Americans do nothing but sell each other fast food and defective Chinese products. Get into marketing and be as dishonest as possible – that’s the only way to survive these days.’”
“But why is that?” She seemed truly puzzled.
“Because, decade after decade, vast malodorous mobs of superficial bozos, intellectual midgets and Bowdlerizing sensation peddlers in Washington, Hollywood and New York led the mind of the Man in the Street to associate science with miracles, and therefore the public came to expect miracles from science. But look around you – where is the Utopia that Joe Sixpack was waiting with boundless enthusiasm for science to deliver? Where are the fusion reactors providing unlimited energy for everyone? Why isn’t everybody flying around in anti-gravity cars, riding on jet packs and vacationing on the moon? Where is the machine that should have teleported you from your living room in Watford to the lobby of this hotel? Why haven’t we found those friendly space aliens who were supposed to invite us to join the Galactic Federation of Planets? Where are the domed cities with moving sidewalks and perfectly controlled climates inside? Why can’t everybody become slim, beautiful and healthy by taking a couple of tablets every morning with their breakfast? And for that matter, why the hell isn’t everybody immortal yet? Why is it we can’t communicate by telepathy, or move stuff around just by thinking about it? How come we still have to undergo twenty years of education instead of just learning everything in four hours while hooked up to an electrode helmet strapped to our heads?”
“So what you’re saying,” Ivanna echoed, “is that scientists get no money or respect because we haven’t achieved any of the things on an absurd list of improbable fantasies that the public obtained by reading, hearing or watching the works of hopelessly juvenile science fiction writers, the television documentaries, newspaper columns and magazine articles authored by pathetically ignorant, gullible journalists, and the dithering, fairy tale pie-in-the-sky speeches of mindless, corrupt and amoral politicians?”
“Exactly. Your problem, Doctor, is that the Future just isn’t what it used to be.”
Now, let’s see what’s in my latest Quarterly Mailbag:
The account of my travails running around Washington in the wake of the Bhutto assassination drew a large number of e-mails from alleged Pakistanis all over the world – except Pakistan, where apparently nobody was allowed to read it. The general gist of the messages I did receive was that Pervez Musharraf is widely misunderstood, and that by dissing him, I’m “just a member of the herd, not a real leader of the pack,” and, that, furthermore, I got all my key facts about Pakistani history dead wrong and that nobody in the Pakistani government knows any more about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden than the CIA does. All of the e-mails contained similar wording, and more than three quarters of them contained identical misspellings of “ungrateful,” “ridiculous,” “alarmist,” “biased,” “uninformed,” “sedition” and/or “outrageous.” Consequently, for obvious reasons, I suspect the ISI of using bots and proxies to spam me with mountains of bogus e-mails intended to create the illusion of a grass-roots ground swell of dissent, which is not only tacky, but also extremely pasé – astroturfing went out in, what, 2003? Get with it, Pervez, before people realize how clueless and Web 1.0 your pathetic ISI net krewe is! Have your LAMP-stack lackeys mash up an animated video denouncing me and post it on YouTube or something like that, okay? (GZPZ, you sure know the world’s a pretty fine mess when you have to give basic IT strategy advice to nuclear-capable dictators who rule more than a hundred million benighted towelheads.) There were a few other e-mails about the post, mostly from Ivy League twits looking for cushy positions in federal government, all claiming they could have done much better jobs of representing the United States than the ones I wrote about. And, since possession of a degree from an Ivy League school entitles them to anything they ask anybody for, of course, would I now put them in touch with the appropriate people so they could assume their rightful places in the corridors of power? To that I say, yes, “Harvard” is a magic seven-letter word, all right. Say you went there and poof – you magically turn into an insufferable jackass.
A couple of people wrote in to inform me that the joint FBI and Sudanese military police task force had arrested a couple of suspects in the Granville shooting, and that Khartoum at last admitted that the killing wasn’t an “isolated incident,” but rather the work of an organized conspiracy of some sort. Well, duh, I guess so. And the FBI agent who visited me about the Sudan task force sent me an apology for acting like such a complete dick when he came to visit me at my office. Apology accepted – now please stop tapping my telephones. He went on to tell me that he’s completely certain I’m all wet about the U.S. foreign aid program being totally infested with CIA operatives and that his task force uncovered “conclusive evidence” that Granville was only an ordinary foreign aid worker. When I wrote back and asked what that evidence was, however, he said he can’t tell me because it’s classified Top Secret, Need to Know Only, and, even though I have a Top Secret clearance, there’s no need for me to know.
I lost count of the e-mails asking me for the name and/or location of that “don’t ask, don’t tell” military gay bar in Crystal City I wrote about in my post concerning the Bush Administration’s ongoing attempts to lure Iran into open armed conflict on the Persian Gulf. No way I’m going to flash the full Monty on that, but here’s one final hint – look for the burly concierge with the Burt Reynolds moustache and say “I hear you got one hell of a tattoo while you were in the Navy SEALS.” That’s the sign. His countersign is when he says, “No, I got it while I was a Green Beret, and I’ll let you see it if you can guess why I wear a moustache like this.” Then you counter-counter-sign with “I bet it’s to cover the stretch marks.”
My post about the Administration’s fiscal stimulus package elicited about a hundred messages seeking to differ with me on my explanation of where money comes from – that being the explanation I gave the Rastafarian who was trapped in the elevator with me and the other gentlemen I wrote about. According to my erudite correspondents, I was wrong – banks don’t create money when they make loans. No, according to these folks, money comes from a) the Federal Reserve – “You can see for yourself, the Federal Reserve bank that created it is identified on every bill;” b) Fort Knox – “Our money is just paper certificates that are backed up by the gold in there;” or, c) The Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, DC. I hereby respectfully request that the readers who sent me those e-mails please go read somebody else’s Web log from now on.
Boy howdy, did I ever get deluged with responses to my post on the controversy about who’s blacker – Hillary or Barack. The opinions were about evenly split each way, though, and I can’t say there was any clear winner – sort of like the Democratic nomination race. But, as Nixon used to put it, let me make one thing perfectly clear – as far as I’m concerned, in my book, for my money, IMHO, and so forth, in the final analysis, in the long run, at the end of the day, et cetera, both of them are blacker than Sammy Davis Jr., who, I’m sure most Americans will agree, would have been the most entertaining President ever.
Many angry French persons wrote to protest my post concerning the exploits of Jérôme Kerviel, financial mastermind. They informed me in no uncertain terms that it is the Americans who are to blame for all of this business of banks collapsing all over the place from underhanded, dishonest, illegal flim-flams and that poor Monsieur Kerviel is being unjustly persecuted. Upon backtracking the e-mail addresses, however, I found that all such messages had originated at various French banks.
I was truly amazed by the number of women who wrote in claiming that they were the mental patient who thought she was Britney Spears and was engaged in telepathic communication with my room mate Veronica. Surely, I thought as I considered the situation, they couldn’t all be correct, could they? Then, it hit me – what the hell do I know about telepathy? So maybe they are all being absolutely truthful – I can’t honestly say I can tell one way or the other. At lot of them demanded money, though, and I can say, with complete certainty, that I definitely don’t owe any of them a red cent – so those e-mails, I forwarded to Veronica.
Plenty of irate Southern Baptists wrote in, too, complaining of my portrait of Kirkland, whom I found consoling himself with sweets shortly after Mitt Romney bowed out of the Republican nomination contest. Apparently, candy binges and related compulsive overeating disorders are a big, sensitive issues with people who are too conservative to develop more adult, interesting and sophisticated addictions like smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling and sex. I was criticized roundly for what they saw as my insensitive use of Kirkland’s behavior for purposes of levity. I was reminded that “no decent comedian does drunk jokes anymore,” and asked why I thought that jokes about fat, childish conservatives shoveling chocolate truffles down their gullets in search of a massive sugar rush would be any more respectable. Well, I hate to upset these folks any more than they already generally and constantly are, but the fact is, you can still find chocoholic jokes in the Sunday funnies. That said, Kirkland recently joined a twelve-step sweets abuse management program called Candylanders Anonymous. I’m told he finally realized he had hit bottom this Easter, when he overdosed on jelly beans, chocolate bunnies and Peeps, passed out in a diabetic coma and woke up on his neighbor’s front lawn at dawn the next morning, surrounded by fourteen empty Mallomar boxes, nine empty Circus Peanuts bags and twenty three partially eaten Moon Pies. I was told that the poor wretch didn’t remember a thing, either. Maybe that’s just as well.
Meanwhile, far on the other side of the political spectrum, it seems like somebody told the workers of the world to unite, reminding them that they had nothing to lose but their time, because my Inbox was absolutely jammed with e-mails from angry Reds, calling me all kinds of nasty things, in reaction to my post about the Mighty Chickadee Calypso Androgyne and Esso Steel Band’s performance at Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location. All I can say is, gee whiz, I wish I was just half as popular as Hugo Chavez. Also, thanks to the twenty or thirty folks who wrote in with more naughty meanings for the word “esso” in various foreign languages. I found the one in Xesibe about the duck and the millet porridge particularly amusing.
Another virtual Niagara of e-mails followed my post about Hillary’s accusation of plagiarism, many from the same people who felt compelled to write me about the flap over Obama’s allegedly insufficient blackness. While most of them proved to be no more than the usual pro- or anti- Hillary or Obama rants, I am now nevertheless in possession of no less than fifty one e-mails, each of which not only claims to prove that Deval Patrick stole the quote Obama used, but each of which also claims that Deval Patrick stole that quote from a different person. Oddly enough, twenty six of those think their evidence exonerates Obama, while twenty five of them think they have proven he’s such a scoundrel he shouldn’t be elected dog catcher, much less President. Obviously, this fight is going all the way to the Democratic convention. Republicans must be pleased as punch, just thinking about it.
To the mob of guys who wrote in, concerned about Veronica after that guy Merkin stormed into my house looking for a stolen lap top, don’t worry. Merkin was just damn glad to get the lap top back and it would have been way too embarrassing for the White House to do anything to Veronica for taking it. As usual, I’ve forwarded all your e-mails to her for response. But unless you’re that guy who mentioned his Ferrari and private jet, well, I’d say don’t hold your breath waiting for Veronica to write back. To those of you who wrote in requesting the recipe for shad roe Chesapeake, I recommend you just Google it – I’m still kicking myself for mentioning shad roe in my Web log, because the week after I did, everywhere I looked, it was sold out.
Nader supporters (believe it or not, there are such people) e-mailed me in droves, all madder than scalded chickens at my implication that Nader’s 2008 presidential candidacy is doomed to be only another Quixotic feather in that eccentric crusader’s cap. Do I not realize, they demanded, that having Ralph Nader in the race provides the American public with the only real choice among the candidates? Right – sorry about that – silly me, thinking that having to choose among a young black dude, a middle aged woman and a white man who’s older than dirt would offer enough variety. You’re right, Nader fans, we need a hopeless, gawky, nerdy guy in a cheap suit, too.
Oh, yeah, and a raving nut cake from Bizzaro World. Ron Paul’s crew read me the Riot Act nine ways from Nottingham for posting about that 3 a.m. telephone call I got from David Burnet VI concerning Ron’s inability to correctly pronounce Dmitry Medvedev’s last name. All I can say is, if Ron Paul doesn’t get elected President of the United States because he can’t say “Medvedev,” then the universe is stranger than even I could have supposed.
The mail on my post about the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke down along the following lines: 38 percent said shame on you for writing about it, Tom Collins, prostitution should be legal and poor Governor Spitzer got a raw deal; 21 percent said shame on you for writing about it, Tom Collins, prostitution oppresses women and Eliot Spitzer should have been castrated on national television; 14 percent said shame on you, Tom Collins, for saying that the EPA is nothing but a big whore house; 11 percent said congratulations, Tom Collins, for having the courage to tell the world that the EPA is nothing but a big whore house; 9 percent said please, Tom Collins, tell your friend Marcus he should marry that woman he’s living with so their child can grow up normally; 4 percent wrote in to vigorously declare that coitus interruptus is the best sex they ever had; 2 percent wrote in to ask what coitus interruptus is and how to do it; 0.9 percent wrote in to say that they didn’t know that members of the United States Civil service could get away with nearly any kind of incompetence or malfeasance and still keep their jobs – and about half of those subsequently offered me money to procure federal Civil Service positions for them (I turned them all down, BTW); and, 0.1 percent said you are wrong, Tom Collins, we do indeed care how people in the federal Civil Service behave and your friend Marcus should lose his job for hiring a two-thousand-dollar-an-hour hooker, just like Governor Spitzer did.
A lot of Republicans wrote in to gleefully point out what a hypocrite Blebs, the Democratic super delegate is. They enthusiastically took him to task for behaving as he did at the Normandie Farm Restaurant, talking to that poor Guatemalan waiter in such a manner as I recorded in my post about him. Well, I just love hearing from Republicans with a bone to pick about hypocrisy. That kind of thing is a real treat, no doubt about it. Getting e-mails from Republicans complaining about hypocrisy is like receiving long distance obscene telephone calls from perverts who ask you to accept the charges.
I was peppered with irate e-mails from Christians, Jews and golfers alike after posting about my trip to GW University Hospital on the first day of spring. And despite the fact that the notoriously silly Jewish holiday of Purim fell on Good Friday this year, and that I dared to write about it, I also wrote briefly about a golf accident, and the prize for most aggravated correspondent reacting to my March 22, 2008 post goes, hands down, not to a morally outraged Christian or a self-righteously insulted Hebrew, but to a jumping, screaming, spitting-mad, frothing-at-the-mouth angry golfer:
“Just because your girlfriend’s a duffer and doesn’t know any better than to get hit on the head by a golf ball, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the sport of golf. I bet your [sic] just jealous because of all the important business deals and political stuff that gets done on the golf course that you will never, ever get in on because you don’t know how to play. That’s why your [sic] sitting around writing a sucky Web log, because your [sic] to [sic] spastic to hit a golf ball straight. If me and my golf buddies [sic] got ahold [sic] of you, Collins, we’d tie you to a chair and make you watch ‘Caddy Shack’ until you went totally [expletive] insane. Then we’d stake you out at the end of a driving range where golf balls would come flying down at you over 100 mph. After that, we’d bury you up to your neck in a sand trap and let stupid [expletive] like your girlfriend take shots at balls balanced on your head…”
It goes on like that for nearly six pages. Incredible. I guess it must be all those years of frustration – those missed two-foot putts that looked so obvious and easy, that triple bogey on the seventeenth green after finally playing sixteen entire holes at par for the first time, the nightmare drive that bounced off into the water after hitting an unseen tree root knot, what should have been a winning chip shot disappearing into a divot some moron just walked off and didn’t replace after he dug it out with a God damn nine iron – all of it, building up, bit by bit, until, at last, something deep inside simply snaps.
But my account of a telephone call from Chelsea Clinton received such blasts of vitriol from True Believers, I can only conclude that her supporters are bigger fanatics than the most rabid followers of Jesus, Moses or even Tiger Woods. An inspection of the correspondents’ names was interesting – discarding the ones that are obviously artificial Internet handles from further consideration, and giving the benefit of doubt to all the Pats, Robins, Frances, and so forth, assuming they were males – still, only about fifteen percent of the Chelsea Clinton cheering section who wrote in suggesting that being boiled in toxic waste or fed to starving weasels would be too good for me appear to be men. So it looks like Hillary Clinton definitely has the dyke vote in the back pocket of her pant suit. But we all pretty much suspected that already, didn’t we? Now, at any rate, it’s obvious why Chelsea regularly refers to her boyfriend during her speeches, and then invariably tells the audience that he has requested not to be publicly identified – she needs to make sure everyone knows she has a boyfriend and the boyfriend needs to remain anonymous so he doesn’t constantly get beaten up by envious, spiteful, homosexual women.
Last, but most certainly not least, there’s not much controversy about my latest post, though admittedly, e-mails have only been rolling in for a few days. But, so far anyway, absolutely nobody has sent in a single message defending Wall Street or saying they think Secretary Paulson’s plan is going to do anybody, anywhere the least bit of good. As for what most of the e-mails I have received to date suggest regarding the financial professionals who got our nation into this current pickle, let’s just say that they beat everything the religious zealots, golf fanatics and Chelsea Clinton worshipers wish would happen to me by a long, stony and rutted country mile.