Watermelon Disappointment Sounds Like A Progrock Band

Grocery Store - Interior - Day - The Fourth of July

Cashier: "Picking up a watermelon for the big BBQ, huh?"

Me: "Yup. I hope it turns out to be a good one. I don't really know what I'm doing, picking out watermelons; I just sort of slap them and listen to the sound for some reason. I don't even know what I'm listening for."

Cashier: "Looks like a good one to me!"

Me: "So watermelons come from the Sahara Desert. They grew naturally around oases, buried in the sand. Arab traders used to gather them up and load their saddle bags up with them to take across the desert. Isn't that wonderful?"

Cashier: "Noooooooo, it isn't!"

Everybody's Doing It

Every year around this time you hear a lot of fatuousness about Valentine's Day and how it is a phony holiday created by the greeting card industry or other rot like that.

But, a quick primer:

What we call Valentine's Day is really an amalgam of several ancient and modern festivals celebrated at this time of year, many of them half remembered and gutless after a couple thousand years of watering down, but even so.

For the ancient Athenians, who had different months, the period of time between what we call the middle of January and the middle of February was set aside to celebrate the marriage of Zeus, king of the gods and Hera, his sister and bride. Being ancient Greece, one can assume this was mostly celebrated by having sex with young boys.

For the Celts, Imbolc fell in the first week of Febraury, a kind of Fertility festival celebrating rebirth ('Imbolc' means, roughly, "in the belly" and referred to the ewes and other animals who became pregnant at around this time and would birth in the Spring). As this was the time of year when winter's grip began to loosen, people would gather together to have sex. Lots of sex. Pagan sex. You know, the good kind, with ram's horns and wicker.

And, oh yeah, I suppose there was a kind of veneration of the feminine about Imbolc as well, and we've hung on to that part also. After all, I have very seldom been wined or dined or presented with degrading articles of underwear on this day. Because I'm a man. I get it.

Sexists.

For the Romans, the early part of February was the Lupercalia, where, again, fertility and sex were venerated, along with Juno, the goddess associated with marriage. They would also venerate the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus. Men would run through the street wearing bloody wolf pelts and this would get them invited to parties where girls became very drunk.

I mean, really. They would sacrifice a wolf in the main square and these young men would come up to the altar naked where the priest or priestess would tie these long thongs of flesh cut from the wolf's pelt around their arms and legs. The boys would run through the streets, lashing at the women who gathered on the sidewalks in white gowns. If you were the women, you hoped to be lashed by the bloody thong because it would bring you love in the year to come, or fertility, or ease in childbirth.

The bloody thongs were called "Februa." Ahem.

In fact, the Lupercalia was such an orgiastic free-for-all that the early popes spent centuries trying to do away with it. Eventually, under the "if you can't beat 'em, change the name of the thing they like so much and pretend they've just been doing it wrong for a thousand years" school of management that had worked so well with Christmas, the popes started associating the Lupercalia with an otherwise not especially noteworthy couple of dudes called Valentine, who were early Christian martyrs. That they were chubby toddlers with wings and a mastery of archery is less well known, but makes their martyrdom all the more poignant.

In the Medieval period, the mythologization, poeticization, and refinement of romantic love really got off the ground. The idea of "courtly love," of a code of honor relating to the pursuit of a paramour, became the major topic of art and literature, especially among the upper class. In Hamlet, Ophelia is even shown to be thinking about Valentine's Day, and we know well things turned out for her. Take heart, single ladies!

But, as with so many of our great traditions and holidays, the real architects of the way in which we celebrate Valentine's Day today are the Victorians. They get a bad wrap for being prudes, but they invented porn! (not sexy pictures, as such, but the idea of sexy pictures being something illicit that you hid in your sock drawer because your wife doesn't ever have any reason to look in your sock drawer - not even if someone mentions this blog to her. Look it up!)

Yes, the Victorians gave us the greeting cards and the chocolates and the obsession with the images of those chubby little gremlins called putti. (No idea if they were also responsible the everpopular tradition of the Valentine's Day lingerie purchase and the ceremonial refusal to wear.)

So quit bitching. Cranks and conservatives and curmudgeons have tried to whine and moan their way out of our remarkably festive civilization, turning up their noses at the redolent smell of paganism in everything we hold dear. Some people won't be happy until we have nothing to celebrate at all and just spend all our time in church or at work. SNORE.

Humans have been celebrating this time (and, indeed, in many cases, this exact day) for centuries and millennia as a time to think of erotic love and overpriced, underwhelming prix fixe dinners.

Embrace it.

Here Is Some Trivia About An Animal That Unfortunately For My Trivia Became An Internet Meme And Now Probably Only Gets Read By People Looking For That Meme (Sigh)

1. Honey Badgers are not really badgers (they are more closely related to weasels and skunks)
2. They got that name because they go around tearing into beehives, but they don't even really want the honey as much as THEY WANT TO EAT THE BEES (or anyway, the larvae). They get stung hundreds or thousands of times and they do not give a shit.
"FUCK BEES" -- a Honey Badger
3. They routinely fight off much larger animals in order to defend their territory or their kills. They have been documented fighting with lions and winning - because the Honey Badger likes to get underneath the lions and RIP THEIR BALLS OFF. I'm serious.
4. Honey Badgers eat pretty much everything. They have one of the most diverse diets in nature and are true omnivores. They will eat all parts of an animal they kill, including the bones.
5. They eat cobras. They get bitten by the cobras when they try to eat the cobras. Cobra venom can kill a human in under half an hour. The venom nearly kills the Honey Badger, too. They get bitten and then fall over, paralyzed, their bodily functions shutting down. To all the world, it looks as though the Honey Badger has been killed. Then, after a little while, the Honey Badger sort of shakes it off, comes back to life, and goes right back to killing everything in the world and just generally being BOSS.
6. They eat tortoises. Because their jaws can crush the shells.
7. They have been known to dig up corpses to eat those, too.
8. Their skin is extraordinarily thick and loose on their body so, even if you manage to pin one or something, it can turn around enough inside of its own skin to bite and claw you to death.
9. An army of Honey Badgers could take over the world. Luckily, they don't give a fuck about politics. They just want to murder and eat everything they can get their teeth or claws into.
Here is a charming little video about Honey Badgers doing all those things (and more!)

Hard to Swallow

Got to talking about how, when we were in school, Nathan and I used to eat lunch together. He would eat a sandwich or something with maybe chips or a piece of fruit. Sometimes I guess he’d have a cookie or a cupcake. It used to drive me nuts because he didn’t drink while he ate. He would eat all sorts of foods and take no fluids for the whole hour. I would remark on it pretty much every day.

"How come you never drink anything?" I’d ask.

"I don’t need it" he’d reply.

I thought that was just bizarre. I used to bring people around to watch him eat things without drinking anything: Bags of peanut butter; chocolate bars; sawdust on dry toast.

My mom once told me how, when she was a girl, her parents used to take her over to have dinner at some friend’s house once in a while and no one was allowed to drink at the table in their house. They’d sit there, the whole family, eating chicken or something, and no one was allowed to have a drink.

There weren’t even glasses on the table.

I imagined it as just this long, wheezy, coughy, sticky-mouthed torture hour. I asked my mom why they weren’t allowed to drink and my mom said she thought it had something to do with the parent’s thinking the kids would fill up on liquids and then not eat their dinner.

I’ve never heard of that in people, but once I read how dolphins, because they don’t drink and get all their moisture from the food they eat, can’t distinguish between the sensations of thirst and hunger. So, sometimes, in captivity, they’ll spray a hose into the dolphin’s mouth and it won’t eat for a day or two because it thinks it is full. But I understand the dolphin’s point of view.

Hose water just tastes better.

A Smell of Satisfaction Prevails Throughout

Bertrand Russell relates a story told by William James:

A man found that whenever he was under the spell of ether he knew the secret to the universe but, when he came out of it, the secret was lost to him. Finally, after enormous effort and many failed attempts, he was able to write it down one afternoon after it came to him from the ether. When he had slept off the effects of the drug, he looked to his note. It read: A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

I don’t know about that, but a bottle of port is a delicious companion on a lazy afternoon.

It also does wonders for the sounds of a melismatic travesty wafting in from another room when one’s wife is watching American Idol and one is trying to listen to the Luna album Penthouse.

By tradition, port is always passed to the left around a table (to port, as it were). If ever the passing is suspended, it is considered bad form to ask the person then possessing the bottle for the port directly. Rather, one should ask the person who has the bottle whether they know the Bishop of Gloucester (or anywhere else). If they reply that they do not, one should then inform them that the Bishop is a nice fellow, but he never remembers to pass the port.

It seems unclear what one ought to do if the person so queried does, in fact, know the Bishop of Gloucester (or anywhere else). Engage him in a conversation about bishoping?

Alternatively, you might switch to a drink that is less fussy about decorum.

Barring that:

Try the Fonseca 20 year old Tawny or the Taylor Fladgate 10 year or the Dow's Colheita.

Please enjoy them with a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

On the Platypus, Bitches

1. Although it is a mammal, the female lays eggs. The only other mammal to do so is the (related) echidna.

2. It maintains an average body temperature well below that of all other mammals - about 90 degrees fahrenheit.

3. Its ‘duck-bill’ is not a bill at all and does not open. it is their nose, more or less, and the mouth is underneath. Also, as adults, they have no teeth.

4. The platypus is one of the only venomous mammals. The males have spurs on their back feet which deliver a powerful toxin that, while probably not fatal to a human, can cause excruciating pain lasting for months.

5. You might think (as I did) that they are about the size of a beaver or river-otter - that is, more or less the size of a smallish dog. In fact, they are tiny. They are scarcely larger than a small housecat. And that includes the tail and everything.
6. The platypus uses electrolocation to hunt for its prey, sweeping the sensitive bill back and forth underwater to detect the tiny electrical currents given off by the muscles in the bodies of small crustaceans and the like. It is the only mammal known to have such a sense.
7. When the animal was first taxidermied and brought back to europe, naturalists were convinced that it was an elaborate hoax.

8. The plural is not “platypi” as this is a Latin-style plural and “platypus” is a greek word (it means flat-foot). The correct plural is either "platypuses" or "platypus" or even "platypodes." (Incidentally, this is also true of octopus, another Greek word often incorrectly given a Latinate plural.)