Mind Scalpel

Years ago, I received some deep wisdom from an extraordinary, modern-day Vietnamese philosopher. Oddly enough, this philosopher appeared on late-night television, surrounded by bikini-clad women, and was aggressively hawking his real estate seminars.

Nevertheless, I learned several important lessons from him, the most prominent among them (for me, at least) being the following (reproduced from memory):

“So I come to the United States, I tell people I want to be rich. They look at me and say ‘You crazy! You poor guy, you poor immigrant, you barely speak English, lots of other people smarter than you, they not rich, how you think you going to get rich? You crazy!’”

“You know what I say to these people? I say ‘You are a loser! Get out of my way! I make it somehow!‘”

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A quick observation and inference:

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments today on the meaning of the Second Amendment (it’s examining whether Washington D.C.’s gun ban is unconstitutional, and in deciding that issue will likely discuss whether the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms). It also recently agreed to hear a case on the FCC’s power to prohibit foul language on the airwaves.

Here’s my prediction:

The Supremes will decide that we don’t have an unfettered right to defend ourselves with firearms.

But we’ll be able to swear about that as much as we want.

One thing that I focus on in this blog is the creation of original content. In other words, blogs primarily full of links to other work don’t interest me as much as blogs where more effort goes into them.

Nevertheless, given the emergence of a mini-theme on Mind Scalpel these last few days of the weaponization of everyday things, I could not resist highlighting this story in the <shudder> Boston Globe:

Owner fights off meat thief with frozen ham

March 15, 2008

GLOUCESTER, Mass.—A prosciutto-wielding meat thief in Gloucester met his match when a restaurant owner fought off the assault by slamming the thief’s face with a ham.

Joe Scola of Scola’s Place heard a noise in his restaurant Wednesday, then saw a man fleeing with his arms full of meat from Scola’s freezer.

Scola caught up, and started taking the meat back.

That’s when the man raised a five pound log of frozen prosciutto over his head, presumably to whack Scola.

Luckily, Scola had his own frozen pig product on hand.

He tells the Gloucester Daily Times that he slammed the ham in the man’s face, leaving a gash. The thief was so stunned, he dropped the meat and ran.

Police searched the area, but couldn’t find the suspect.

Possibilities abound, here: “Look out! He’s packing meat!” “We must address the problem of assault prosciutto…”.

Look, we’ve got to face facts here: Most states’ names are either incredibly dorky, completely illogical or downright offensive.

Seriously, I mean, “Rhode Island”? Not an island.

“West Virginia”? No “East Virginia”.

Washington D.C.? There’s a huge freakin’ state all the way on the other side of the continent that everybody confuses with our national capitol.

Okay, technically, D.C.’s not a state, either, but you get my point.

So Something Must Be Done. We’ve got to change those names!

You might think, first of all, that this is just too large a task even to contemplate. I disagree. Prince was able to do it (heck, he went all the way to an unpronounceable symbol just to mess over his record company — you go, [Unpronounceable Symbol]!), and I’ll wager that more people have heard of him than, say, “North Dakota.”

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As if more proof were needed of the infallibility of The Mind Scalpel, my previously-articulated thesis that men have an innate instinct to weaponize anything has received even further support by this description of how water-cooler jugs are being used as cannon projectiles.

Sometimes the lonely heart of a Future Global Despot is soothed by the awareness that kindred spirits really are out there somewhere.

Off to figure out how to weaponize a cheesecake….
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I’ve been trying to ignore the insults that Sergey Brin’s throwing at me via his little automated-ridicule-generator (also known as Google AdSense), but I’m beginning to take umbrage at the subjects of the ads appearing most frequently on this blog. A small sample, with comments (and the irony is that by listing these ads, I am driving up the likelihood that they’ll be displayed even more often):

• “Scalp Problems?” — THIS is the best this multi-billion-dollar internet juggernaut can do when confronted by the word “Scalpel”? We’re doomed, I tell you, doomed!
• “Relationship Counseling” — Yeah, I think I’ll get some counseling…ON THE INTERNET. That will work well.
• “Fix Your Marriage” — Doing just fine, thanks! All four of them! So far none of them’s found out about the others!
• “Inside a Boyfriend’s Mind” — Women always say they want to know what men are thinking. Trust me, they don’t. As Larry Miller says, if they did, they’d never stop slapping us.
• “Do Men Want Intimacy?” — Arrgh! No. We want food, big flat-screen televisions, and maybe private jets.

So trust me, Sergey — I’m keeping track, here. You’re on my list for when the Revolution comes, my friend.

But in the meantime, keep those checks coming.

And hey, all you readers — keep clicking on those ads!

Okay, no schadenfreude on Mind Scalpel! I have an entirely different blog devoted to that.

Well, maybe a little schadenfreude. Fine, it’s a schadenfreude fest! I bathe in schadenfreude.

But the main thing I wanted to do is give a nod in the direction of Nick Galbreath, a New York resident whose domain-registration reflexes are as sharp as those 13-year-olds who, jacked up on Jolt and Red Bull, play Halo 2, Team Fortress 2 and other fine first-person shooter computer games with eye-blurring speed.

See, apparently within minutes of the Eliot Spitzer Emperor-Has-No-Clothes Club VIP scandal breaking on March 10, Mr. Galbreath registered the client9.com domain name. No word yet on what Mr. Galbreath intends to do with the domain, but he does have a blog at http://blog.modp.com/ with a cryptic FAQ about it. Come on, Nick, make some bucks!

Now that I am on this subject, I have to say that I am just aching for one of these spouses who is forced to do the “clutch walk” (degrading parade to confessional podium clutching hand of philandering spouse) to interrupt her husband’s speech, right after he says “Good Morning,” by shoving him out of the way, grabbing the mic, and saying “That’s enough out of you, Eliot, you pathetic bastard. My god, I can’t believe I actually married someone named “Eliot.” Or “Spitzer,” for that matter. Okay, reporters, here’s a short list of my husband’s inadequacies… [ten minute laundry list, with reference to new web site with more details, maybe titled "www.daddys-five-hundred-million- dollar-fortune-isnt-enough-to-compensate-for-being-married-to- Eliot-Spitzer-anymore.com"], and I’ve drained a few million dollars from our bank account to pay for the ten nastiest lawyers in the country to break our prenup.”

That must happen someday soon to terminate this whole drag-your-shellshocked-wife-to-the-podium-as-cover phenomenon. It’s disgusting. Make the walk alone, dude; take it like a man.

Okay, I didn’t mean that. There are actually quite a few damn funny people hooked into that site; humor-blogs.com is like the hub of a multi-spoked, demented, seriously off-balance Wheel of Funny.

Plus it’s a convenient stepping-stone for identifying my competition; now that I know who they are, I expect to ruin their credit ratings by stealing their identities and buying millions of Chia Pets in their names.

Mmm…Chia Pets…so tasty…

But I digress. Check out humor-blogs.com.

Apologies for the short gap in posting. I’ve been thinking about how to respond to a surprising “cease and desist” letter I received last week. Normally, these things shower down upon me like snow in January, to as little effect, but this one was different.

You see, it was signed by a few people whose name I recognized: Bill Gates (yeah, the Microsoft guy — former minion of mine, now in open rebellion, due for a comeuppance, long story), Sergey Brin (Google, same basic siutation), Jeffrey Bezos (CEO of amazon.com) and Pierre Omidyar (EBay dude).

Rather than try to summarize the letter, I’ll just reproduce it here in its entirety:

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Proving once again the appropriateness of my long-standing affinity for Japanese culture and tradition, I give you this Word For The Day (this is a rare non-English WFTD, merited by its elegance and compactness):

Tsujigiri: “The testing of a new sword on a chance passerby.”

If you ever wondered why the Japanese evolved that highly intricate and ritualized politeness, the fact that there’s a single word in their language for this concept shows you the reasons for it.

Metaphorically, I practice tsujigiri all the time.