In several hours (most of which, judging by my watch, I should probably go spend sleeping), I head out for a week in New York to spend Christmas with my family. Regular updates to the weblog will be suspended until I get back. In the meantime, though, I’m leaving you two essays in my “Trousers Talk” series, #9 and #10 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8). Read them at your leisure, or not at all. The choice is entirely yours. Here’s #9:
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been thinking a lot about monkeys lately.
Among other things, I sometimes wonder why we still haven’t trained monkeys to sell encyclopedias. I refuse to accept the conventional wisdom that says it’s just too difficult or time-consuming. I’ve seen what monkeys can do. They’re hard workers. Give a monkey a banana and he’s your friend for life. Give him two bananas, and he might even kill a man for you. Surely we can work out the ratio of bananas it would take to get a monkey to go door-to-door with encyclopedias. We’re smart enough for that.
I remember the first time I saw a monkey kill a man for a banana. It was July of 1972, I was somewhere in Reno, and I might very well have been hallucinating, but I swear I saw a chimpanzee beat a man to death with one of the casino’s complimentary bottles of champagne just to get the banana the blackjack dealer was about to hand to him. It was a disturbing sight. With those long hairy arms and that cheap bottle of Brut at its disposal, the poor bastard never stood a chance. But, frankly, I can’t really say I was surprised.
Because, really, just what are chimpanzees anyway? What’s with that word, with that “zee†at the end? That’s not normal. That’s not natural. And where do chimpanzees come from? What do they want from us? When your government tells you that chimpanzees are gregarious anthropoid primates of equatorial Africa, having long dark hair and somewhat arboreal habits, just what the crap are they trying to get at?
Sure, some people will tell you that chimpanzees are actually apes and not monkeys, because that’s what it says in their fancy science books and because chimpanzees don’t have a tail. Monkeys have tails, they’ll tell you. But, really, whose fault is that anyway? Do you need a tail to sell encyclopedias? I don’t remember seeing that anywhere on the job application, no sir. I think it’s high time these zoology nuts stop protecting Bonzo and the other chimps from doing an honest day’s work. I mean, really. Encyclopedias are not going to sell themselves.
But you know, hey, there’s an idea…
And here’s #10:
Sometimes, when I’m feeling low and like the whole world is against me, I like to amuse myself by making my calculator spell out funny words. The number 0.7734, for instance, spells out the word “hello†if you flip it upside-down and then read it backwards. “Boozeâ€, which usually leaves me feeling upside-down and backwards, is really just 32008 — ironically enough my locker combination in junior high school, which is where I did most of my heavy drinking in the first place.
Numbers are funny things, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha, although any joke that involves the number sixty-nine will have me giggling like a schoolgirl for hours. I mean funny weird, as in bizarre, otherworldly, as if numbers fell to Earth many years ago on a dark night in a fiery storm that probably killed the dinosaurs and did some other things they don’t teach you about in no fancy history book. Not that there’s anything wrong with history — don’t do drugs and stay in school, kids — but it’s definitely a page out of a different book than numbers.
The truth is, numbers are such an integral part of our lives, and yet how many of us can truly claim to understand them? How many of us really know what mathematicians are talking about when they use words like theorem, cosine, differential equation, and dear god in heaven why won’t you stop hitting me with that hammer? Math is confusing stuff, and just because I get my kicks by using a calculator to spell out words like “goose egg†(66335006) and “boobies†(5318008), that doesn’t mean I’ve got any of it figured out.
To be perfectly honest, numbers scare me a little. My wife says that this is no excuse for refusing to balance a checkbook, or for spending our retirement money on that mail-order kangaroo I bought last month. I think she’s just a little jealous of all the time I’ve been spending with Joey lately, and so she doesn’t recognize just how freaky numbers can actually be. Though, come to think of it, kangaroos can be pretty freaky sometimes, too.
I wonder if maybe I can ask for a refund.
Damn, I hope that won’t involve any sort of math.
Hope you like them. Happy holidays, everyone.