Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Environmental Insanity

I saw a magazine on the rack near the check-out yesterday. I am such a piece of work that I don't need magazines like this, but the sub-title above the title, NEW BEAUTY, caught my eye. It's part of the insidious virus that is going around which causes people to, for lack of a better description, lose their reasoning skills, or, as some would describe it, act like morons.

I might be totally wrong about this looseness of the mind that has spread across this country being caused by a virus. It might be some chemical in the environment causing these anomalies in human behavior to occur. After all, if lavender can cause breast enlargement in pre-pubescent boys, who knows what other chemicals can do.

But getting back to the magazine I saw, above the title, the cover announces: "The World's Most Unique Beauty Magazine." Now, I'm not a word-master, but this particular use of a modifier of "unique" bothers my sensibilities. Does the publisher mean that the magazine is one of a kind or "the most unusual?" The latter just might be, since the magazine is touted as informing the reader about the wide range of beauty-creating or beauty-enhancing choices available to man- and womankind, such as lipo-suction, injections of all kinds of substances, foreign and domestic, in various parts of the human body, plastic surgery, and the like ... let's say, drastic measures. I wonder if the magazine has designs on promoting the regular application of lavender to enhance breast size in some women.

I don't know if the plethora of news outlets has created the impression that the population of this country is infected with some disease agent. It could be that it has always been this crazy, this weird -- after all, Stanley Kramer made a movie about just that 40 years ago -- and we are being pelted day in and day out by the stories of killing, mayhem, and craziness. My profession brings me into daily contact with the strange and stupid; so, perhaps, that is the answer to my question. I can't really tell you whether the human condition has gotten worse from a professional standpoint.

Or maybe I've been infected. Whereas I might have taken, let's call them, situations in which people find themselves (You see, they find themselves in these situations. They never get into trouble by their own design. It's an outside agent acting upon them. It's the virus or other environmental agent, you see. As a lawyer friend of mine once said in defending a killer who got the death penalty, the Twinkies made him do it.) a lot more seriously in the past, now I can't help but laugh at most of them.

Let's take the guy who drove his car north on Moore Road across Lake Road, north onto the short stretch of West Shore, and then down, literally, the stairway to Lake Erie. He didn't make it to the beach. The car got hung up on the stairs. When the police arrived, the guy was trying to back the car up the stairs ... not successfully, mind you, but he was giving it a try. The police officer told him to turn off the car and abandon the attempt to extricate the vehicle ... the guy wondered why it works in the movies and on TV. He slurred his words in the way that people who have been drinking way too much slur their words and nearly fell down the steps when he got out of the car in the way that people who forget they are stopped on a stairway might fall down the steps and roll down to the beach when they forget where they parked because they've had too much to drink. He smelled pretty much like he'd been tipping quite a few for quite a while just down the street at the local publican. So, the police arrested him for drunk driving.

You might say, after a chuckle or two, "Why not? Makes sense." I'm not saying that the fellow who was arrested is the one who has been infected, although he may be. His lawyer was in court today arguing that the police had no right to arrest the guy. He argued that there wasn't any reason for the police officers to think that the guy committed a crime. Now, for sure, that's crazy.

I have been working on a potential cure, by the way, while writing. I just sprung the cheesecake from its pan. I should refrigerate it overnight, or I could hang it out the window and allow nature and her 15 F to take over for a couple hours.

Posted by Bill at February 1, 2007 07:16 PM