A Lighthouse for Your Soul

From time to time, I receive emails asking questions about history, culture and life in general. Recently, I receive the following:

“What’s the point of lighthouses in our modern world? Are they just to give photographers something to point their cameras at, or do they still serve a purpose?”

In order to understand this, we need to go back to ancient times: the 1950s.

In the 1950s, man had a dream.

Women didn’t have the dream because men felt that women were only good for cleaning out the cave and caring for the children. We now know that those men were “chauvinists” and “sexists” and “pigs”. In their minds the only thing worse than a male chauvinist pig was a broad who doesn’t do what she’s told.

But at the time they were all we had, having killed off any feminist males, and so they had a dream.

Their dream started simple: to walk across the vast sea.

You see, if they couldn’t walk across it, then they had to walk around, which took a lot of time, and they had to stop for bathroom breaks. Bathrooms weren’t invented yet, and so you can imagine how hard traveling was in the 1950s era station wagon with ancient men holding it until the invention was created.

This is why the average male life expectancy was around 25 years.

Seriously, you try to hold it for twenty years while someone figures out how to build a flush toilet!

But I digress.

1950s man’s dream, which remains the male dream still today, was to shatter last year’s record travel time for the journey to the in-laws during the holiday season. Walking on water would make the dream a reality. Unfortunately, early experiments resulted in a confirmation that the density of water to male foot ratio only resulted in soaked loincloths. An uncomfortable sensation, especially during the monsoon season.

Then one day, likely while drowning witches (from Webster’s II, witch: n. an uppity woman who fails to clean and should be drowned), he realized that certain things would float. Wood and sheep’s bladders were especially good at this, but also getting really drunk and being hit on the head by another man also worked. Of course, it’s hard to navigate when drunk and hit on the head, so this mode of travel was quickly abandoned.

Instead, men found that they could fashion crafts, which they would call bobs, since that’s exactly what it would do when it was placed in the water. The Anglo-Saxon corruption of the word ‘bob’, was first written down by in Ye Very Olde Englysh by Venerable Bede around 1951:

To the most glorious King Ceolwulph, Bede, the servant of Christ and Priest
Of the situation of Britain and Ireland, and of their ancient inhabitants
Caius Julius Caesar, the first Roman that came into Britain
The invention and creation of the first wondrous and wooden Boebbs . . .
(Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum)

The only problem with these bobs (or boats for you land-lubbing cretins) was that in the dark, near rocky shores or dangerous shoals they would suddenly and mysteriously, lose their ability to float and disappear. Pirates also lodged complaints that they couldn’t stay close to land in their pursuit of treasure-laden booty at night. No one was certain how or why this was happening. This was especially prevalent in the city of Alexandria, Virgiana, where they built one of the Six Wonders of the World (the Seventh Wonder, a giant cigarette at Marlboro, Virginia, having been smoked): Pharos of Alexandria.

This made clear to all the vessels as they came closer to land that they were about to dash themselves against rocks, coral reefs, other ships, or whales (blubberous maximus). Bobbers, or sailors as they’re now erroneously called, knew exactly when to scream their last as they plunged against sharp and unforgiving terra firm.

And so, dear reader, you can see that even today, the lighthouses that once illuminated the deaths of thousands of innocent, pious and charity-driven men is still as important today as it was fifty years ago.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

There’s a cancer among us.

An evil not seen since the Fall of Lucifer, or perhaps the birth of Keanu Reeves.

Evil, I tell you, most foul and unnatural.

It is called: the forwarded email.

Long, long ago, annoying snippets of useless wisdom and semi-humorous anecdotes were the bastion of the family reunion, the wedding reception, and Bob Saget. There, they safely dwelt, at times railing against the confines of their imprisonment, bashing slavering mandibles against cold steel bars, but mostly content to remain, sulking in the dark and feeding off skateboarders who strayed too near.

But no more.

With the advent of the internet and email for the masses, now the ability to annoy hundreds if not thousands is no longer the exclusive realm of Pat Buchanan. Aspiring jokesters, urban legend creators, and wannabe inspirational speakers can spread their vile mutterings with a few key strokes and the click of a mouse. There is no insidious genius behind this mad plot, other than the well-wishers, “close” friends and dear relatives who think it their duty to try to bring a little cheer or provide a little down-home wisdom to their address book.

It is fascinating to note that these same individuals, who will send en masse a slew of no less than a baker’s dozen of forty-two-times-forwarded emails, can’t seem to take the time, effort or bother to let you know how they and their family are doing, or inquire about your health and the well-being of your loved ones. While they seem capable of using email, they apparently can do nothing more than read their own mail, and then forward it to you, with little or no consideration as to whether the forty-two emails they’re sending might not stuff your in-box, and cause the emails that really matter to bounce back like so many unwanted copies of Eregon.

Like how to get a larger penis in just six days, hot and horny women in your area, and nutritional supplements at rock-bottom prices.

After all, if you do improve your penis length, you’re going to want to take it out for a test spin, and what better way to stave off the near-certain infections from said partners then a healthy dose of vitamins and miracle-cure shark cartilage.

But bigger versus better arguments aside (for the record: size does matter; anyone who tells you differently is savings your feelings), the evil that is the forwarded email is one that the Vatican is now considering amending their list of Seven Mortal Sins for, and placing it right between murder and voting Republican.

A more deserving action I can’t think of.

Consider, for a moment, the emails that suggest the way in which you currently live your life, as compared to someone with infinitely higher hurdles such as having their arms, legs, torso and most of their head amputated, and how your current attitude should somehow be adjusted so that your world-view will be witty and pretty and gay. No offense, but this didn’t exactly work for the British and the French when Hitler was expressing his need for additional elbow room. Rose colored glasses didn’t stop Panzers at the border, and they’re not going make your mortgage, your bills, or that bulge around your waist go away either.

On the other hand, slightly less useful, are the forwarded-to-the-nth-degree emails which provide some kind of useless, blathering, heart-n-flowers dross of a poem stating the “true” definition of friendship, love, and/or family, and then blithely advising you that you (and the five-hundred-forty-two other recipients in said sender’s address book) are part of the sender’s general circle of love, life and well-being. Never mind the fact that a simple, “Hi. How’re things? I miss you!” would at least have a personalized touch, without relying on the recycled ramblings of some half-wit who was moved by an urban legend involving two wide-eyed Dickens-type orphans in search of ballet shoes for their dying mother that’s been floating around since the Reagan era.

My friends, the orphans are now on Wall Street, having cashed in their story to Reader’s Digest, and are living like kings while you sob at your outdated $2,042 computer screen.

Finally, we come to the most banal and yet the most evil of all the evil of forwarded emails yet brought in to date: the self test.

Most of these seemingly innocuous, yet devilishly clever tests, start out asking you who sent it, and finish up with a question that would put a Jewish mother to shame: Who is most likely to NOT respond to this email? We don’t fill these out to get to know our friends and relations better. If that were out goal we could use our cell phones on nights and weekends to . . . shock of shocks . . . talk to them personally and compare notes on favorite ice-creams and colors.

No.

We fill these out and forward them to illicit a response from those friends/acquaintances that we would most likely want to grab, shake furiously and yell, “IT’S AN EMAIL, DAMNIT. I TOOK THE TIME TO SEE HOW YOU WERE DOING. STOP BEING A STUPID-HEAD AND HIT ‘REPLY’ INSTEAD OF ‘FORWARD’! MY PENIS ADVERTISEMENTS AREN’T COMING THROUGH!”

My fellow Americans and Citizens of the World in general, stop the madness.

Stop all the pandering to the writers of these urban legends, half-truths, and heart-wrenching tear-jerkers who have you believing that by forwarding this email to forty-two people in the next twelve seconds you can earn a hundred-bazillion pounds of Nazi-Aztec-Nigerian gold; and that if you don’t forward it you will cursed by having your ears removed and replaced with two yapping Chihuahuas.

Because, and this comes from the bottom of my heart, the more often you forward these puerile excuses for wit and/or wisdom, the lower on my Christmas card list you go.

DST - I Hate . . . zzzzzz

Well, it’s happened again.

Daylight Stupid Time.

This year we’ll be extending it.

Whoopie.

If anyone is awake enough to read this, congratulations. I’m sleep-writing.