Category — Casual Observer

EXCESS

(Who needs it?)

by Mark Levy

This is an age of excess. I bought a car that can go way faster than I have the nerve to drive. And the speedometer also includes speed markings in kilometers, which makes the speed look 38% faster. Oh, and there are seven − count ‘em SEVEN − digits on the odometer. That’s over a million miles in one car, or two round trips to the moon. Who drives that far? A million miles. Sheeesh. I’m lucky if I can get to a tenth of that − one hundred thousand miles − without my engine blowing up, like it’s already done in a couple of my previous cars.

The point is, my speedometer and my odometer and my car itself have much greater capacity than I need. The car also has four exhausts, which is one more than the space shuttle used to have. And it’s not just the car that exceeds the comfort range of most humans.

I also have a computer with a memory that’s the envy of every other computer on my block. If I write a 300-page novel every other day and store it in the memory of my computer, I won’t need to get another computer for a million years; well, over 850 thousand years, at least.

The folks who make hot dog rolls sell them in packages of eight, even though hot dogs themselves come in packages of six. I’ve been to many, many barbeques, but darned if I’ve ever heard someone request an extra roll for her hot dog.

My wristwatch is accurate to a hundredth of a second, but I can’t change my habit of telling my friend I’ll meet him for lunch “around noon.” The watch is guaranteed to work up to 200 meters under water. It would have to be quite a downpour to result in that much water on my street. And if I did find myself 200 meters under water some day − the equivalent of over two football fields deep − I don’t think checking the time of day would be my highest priority.

The hot water in my kitchen sink is capable of scalding the feathers off a chicken. But all I need is warm water to rinse plates before the dishwasher takes over.

As long as I’m in the kitchen, let me tell you about my new microwave oven. It exceeds my desire or capacity to use it. Its keyboard has about 90 settings, so I can thaw, simmer, and overcook. I can start the process immediately or I can instruct the machine to start cooking six days and 23 hours from now. I can vary the heat and the time for each of up to 999 cooking steps. If I google a microwave recipe someday, for example, maybe I’ll prepare pheasant under glass in that unit. But like most of us, now I use it just to boil water or make popcorn.

Speaking of popcorn, we all know that movie theaters now sell large, gargantuan, and humongous sizes of popcorn. But did you know that big box stores sell Cheerios in a cardboard box that’s 6 by 8 by almost 14 inches high? Who has a family that big? And who has room for a box that size in their kitchen? I would need a separate parking space for that thing.

My TV has a sound system that can be cranked up enough decibels to shatter my windows. I could be deaf as a post and still not miss a syllable. And the size of that TV! Gosh. The images are bigger than life. I get nightmares sometimes when I try to sleep after seeing Nancy Grace’s disapproving smirks two-and-a-half feet high. The TV has dimensions that overwhelm my bedroom or any other room in my house. In fact, if I didn’t have an exterior wall, you could see it from space.

ROMAN NUMERALS:

Is it time to turn back the clock?

Am I the only one who’s pretty darn tired of those Arabic numerals we’re all stuck with? I’m not saying they don’t work, or that the person who invented the zero wasn’t a genius. In fact, I think someone should award a Nobel Prize in mathematics posthumously, if we ever discover his or her name. Why not? You have to be dead for 10 years before you get a postage stamp issued in your honor. On second thought, a big zero on a postage stamp might be confusing, so forget the postage stamp idea. But the posthumous Nobel Prize is still a possibility. And think how much that would be worth now, with compound interest.

By the way, Arabs did not invent Arabic numerals. A person in India, reputedly a Hindu, did. Although how anyone knows his religion is beyond me. It happened around 500 A.D. How’s that for trivia? The rest of the civilized world didn’t adopt Arabic numerals for about 700 years. Some ideas just take longer to accept than others. Just ask Italo Marchiony, who may have invented the ice cream cone. Oh, bad example. Anyway, that’s an essay for another time.

Well, let’s get back to the Arabic numerals themselves. Sure we can express size, distance, dates, and quantities conveniently. Sure we can add, subtract, multiply, and the other thing I forgot. But where is the beauty, the elegance? Can numbers like 1 and 4 and 7 really rise to the aesthetic level of, say, MMDCXIV?

Obviously, I’m not alone in preferring Roman numerals for some things. That helps explain why the movie Rocky IV was popular, I think. More trivia: Sylvester Stallone is an Italian American, as you probably know from his 1970 movie, “The Italian Stallion.”

How about athletic events? Who could possibly want to see Super Bowl XLVI referred to any other way?

For all you analog people out there, how convenient is it to have Roman numerals on your wristwatch? Or does anyone still have a wristwatch now that cell phones have taken over the planet?

Speaking of arithmetic operations, why can’t we use Roman numerals to balance our checkbook? It’s really very simple. Let me show you.

Let’s say you have MLXII dollars in your checking account and you write a check for XII dollars to the IRS. MLXII minus XII equals ML. Simple, right?

“Ahh,” you say. “But what if — now that the IRS is paid off — I want to write a check for, say, LIV dollars to donate to my public radio station? How do I subtract LIV from ML?”

“Just like with Arabic numerals,” I say, smugly but patiently. You have to borrow an I from the sixth to last column, leaving DCCCCLLLLXXXXX or DCCCCLLLLXXXXVIIIII, if you’re thinking ahead like Julius Caesar should have before he bumped into Brutus who was enjoying a pizza one day.

Now simply remove LIV, digit by digit, from that awfully long expression equivalent to ML, and what do you get? Let’s see, VIIIII minus X, borrow from the closest D, move one of the Cs to the right column, make change of XXXXX. Of course, X minus IV equals VI, and the answer just falls out: MCMILVI. Easy as rigatoni. What could be simpler?

Honestly, with a bit of training, we can go back to basics, back to the good old days, just like the last 1600 years never happened.

REFRESHER COURSE:

Credit: Kent State University
(and ancient Rome)

________________________________ 

Anthony Haden Guest

Mark Levy and "Sam"

Civilization is Relative

Reflections on Life in the Slow Lane

During my recent trip to Ecuador, I had occasion to meet a gentlemen who lives in the Amazon. He is a Huaorani (Hwă răh’ni), a people who have lived in their neighborhood for thousands of years, going back to the Stone Age. It is estimated that about 3,000 Huaorani exist. This new acquaintance of mine ─ call him Sam ─ stands about 4’9” high and has dark, but not leathery skin. He has black hair and not a touch of grey, probably because he lives a stress-free life. All he has to do is spear tasty looking animals and occasional enemies, and supervise his wife, who does everything else for the family. I was going to say household, but there is no house. No clothing, either.

Sam looks 50 years old, but I could be off by 20 years one way or the other. He seems pretty healthy, considering he has no access to a health care plan. His chest has fully developed muscles that make Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Woody Allen. He also has a hole in his earlobe big enough to slide an iPhone through.

I met Sam at a rather rustic resort near a town called Mindo, Ecuador, a couple of hours from Quito. I felt sorry for myself having to drive so far to get there until I learned that Sam had traveled by foot and canoe for three days from his home in the Amazon. Now, Sam didn’t mention this fact to me directly, because he speaks only the Huaorani language, so his Spanish-speaking son did the translating.

Let me tell you about this rustic resort. A raging river borders the property, so to get across from the dirt road out of the town of Mindo, you have to ride precariously on this flat, wooden, one-person seat suspended by a rope and pulley. The seat has no sides to protect you from the raging river and its formidable boulders.

Once across the river and onto the property, I locate a common, open-aired-dining area ─ really just an unenclosed, platform and I find my wooden cabin ─ quite spacious, actually ─ with a grass thatched roof surrounded by a swarm of moths the size of pterodactyls. It could be a scene from Jurassic Park. No electricity, but there are two candles and, believe it or not, a flush toilet. That’s where technology ends.

I thought that was pretty rustic, especially for a place that calls itself a resort. But then I realized that the same location that represents a giant step backwards, civilization-wise for me, is actually a great improvement for Sam, who was quite accustomed to living without a roof over his unkempt head. He doesn’t have a satellite TV, either ─ not even basic cable ─ or a heater or an air conditioner or a refrigerator or a dish washer or even, let’s face it, a roll of toilet paper.

How can he enjoy a Barry Manilow Christmas collection on CD while munching on microwave popcorn if he doesn’t have a CD player or a microwave oven in the first place? The poor fellow doesn’t have a toothbrush or a pair of Diodoro sneakers. He has survived, day after day for maybe 18,000 days, without a cell phone and without a full-length bathroom mirror. We take so many things for granted he doesn’t even know exist.

I continued to feel sorry for Sam all the way up to the day I returned to civilization to discover my mortgage, my satellite TV bill, and two credit card payments were overdue. My electricity had been shut off, too, for the same reason.

Yes, civilization can be a relative thing. You have to feel sorry for people who don’t know what they’re missing.

About the author:

Mark Levy is a contributor editor of Ragazine.  He is an attorney with the Binghamton law firm of Hinman, Howard and Kattell.

Dole pineapples have just the right amount of burrs.

 

Funny Thing About Pineapples…

by Mark Levy

Quick, think of a joke about pineapples.

It’s not easy, is it?

Actually, this is one instance where the Internet let me down. After much searching, I am embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t find one funny joke about pineapples, and you’d think they would be crying out for humorous social commentary. Perhaps no one wants to take advantage of their odd appearance.

Sure, I found jokes about grapefruits and kiwis and mangoes and pomegranates and even tomatoes, which are fruits, even though we use them in salads. And bananas, of course. Just the word, “banana,” is funny if you’ve drunk too much fermented pineapple juice. But I found no pineapple jokes to relate that even my four-year-old grandson would appreciate, and he laughs at everything I say.

I started doing research about pineapples. There is no consensus about where pineapples originated, although a number of countries have been proposed, including Hawaii, when it was a country, Paraguay, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, and the Guadeloupe Islands in the Caribbean. Some say Christopher Columbus got in the act along the way, transporting them to Queen Isabella, and I have no reason to doubt that, although it wasn’t his most famous accomplishment.

Pineapples are awfully versatile, culinarily speaking. They are used to complement green salads and fruit salads, ham, pork chops, fried rice, pizza, fondue, and Jell-O. You can make ice cream from them, ice cream topping, sorbet, juice, smoothies, and alcoholic beverages with Spanish names.

They can be grilled and eaten by themselves or sliced into rings or bite-sized chunks and eaten with a toothpick. How’s that for simplicity?

Of course, this brings up a number of questions that are probably eating you alive, like:

How do I know if my pineapple is ripe?

What are them little, ugly burrs called, the ones that may are left in the fruit after the skin is removed?

How do I cut pineapples safely?

Is it dangerous to eat them little, ugly burrs?

How do I remove them little, ugly burrs without mangling my pineapple?

What purpose do them little, ugly burrs serve?

Can I place the peeled, outside skin in my garbage disposal?

Can I place them little, ugly burrs in my disposal?

What emergency steps should I take if I puncture myself while cutting a pineapple?

Do them little, ugly burrs have nutritional value?

Are there particular recipes to make them little, ugly burrs delicious?

Are them little, ugly burrs dangerous to my pets?

And probably a thousand other questions about them little, ugly burrs.

I’ll tell you if you haven’t guessed by now that this essay is pretty much totally about pineapples. So if you’re not intensely interested in the subject, it’s not going to get any better. You may want to pour yourself a glass of -– oh, say, orange juice — and come back in a minute.

I have a limited amount of time now, so I’m afraid I won’t be able to discuss them little, ugly burrs after all. By the way, sometimes they’re called “eyes,” but I think that’s way too anthropomorphic, don’t you?

Here’s the good news: I can tell you how to tell if your pineapple is ripe. Smell it right at the fruit stand or grocery store. If it doesn’t smell like anything or if it smells like anything other than a pineapple, don’t buy it. And if you’ve already bought it, don’t eat it. And if you’ve already bitten into it, you might decide not to savor the juice escaping from that first bite and flowing down your chin.

In case you have a bad sense of smell, there’s another way to tell if your pineapple and you should become one. If you can pull off one of the leaves from the very top of the pineapple without much effort, the pineapple is ripe. Hmmmm. Then again, it could be rotten.

Peeling a pineapple can be tricky. The important thing is not to cut yourself with a sharp knife and avoid being gored by the thing. In a way, that’s pretty much the same advice I give to aspiring bullfighters.

Mark Levy is an attorney with the Binghamton-based law firm of Hinman Howard and Kattell. He is a contributing editor to ragazine.cc with Ryan Miosek (Feeding the Starving Artist), and an occasional contributor to NPR, where his comments can be heard some Saturdays at noon.

Ignorance is a Blessing

(aka, Playing Gadget Gotcha!)

Roll back the years www.columbuswashboard.com

We often don’t miss what we don’t have. But once you have something, boy can you miss it when it’s gone.

I’m thinking about automatic dishwashers. Some of us lived many years without one. Some of us, I dare say, still may not have one. But once you have a dishwasher, you absolutely cannot live without it. Generally, you can’t get water as hot in the sink as a dishwasher can. You can’t dry all of your dishes, pots and silverware at the same time, like a dishwasher can. And you can’t walk away from the dishes in your sink and come back some time later to find that they’re all clean. So once most of us have a dishwasher, we can never go back.

Take another example: garage doors. Again, if you’ve never had an automatic garage door opener, you probably don’t know what you’re missing. But as soon as you get a motorized garage door opener, operated by a push button on the door frame or, preferably, from a remote control in the warm comfort of your car, you will never, ever want to go back to pre-garage opener days, when you had to exit your car, run over to your garage door in the rain, sleet, or snow, and risk injuring your back as you jerked the door open or closed. Living without an automatic garage door opener after you became accustomed to it would be like trying to survive in America without a television. It’s possible to do that, but why would you want to?

Of course every modern convenience has a drawback. With an electric garage door opener, in the case of a power outage, you are out of luck. The garage door cannot be opened by anyone weaker than the Incredible Hulk. It’s not catastrophic when your vehicle is in your driveway, but it’s more than a bit inconvenient when your car is incarcerated in your garage.

Another convenience we soon take for granted is a computer that operates quickly. If all you have is a dial-up system for your computer, you may not know how fast Internet access can be. But once you play some games or do a little Internet surfing on a fast computer, you will not be able to deal with a much slower machine. Every second seems like a week when you’re downloading what may be -— let’s face it -— a frivolous image or video clip. There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting for a long time for something you didn’t want. I think hospitals must be overflowing with anxiety-ridden patients who took out their anger on their computer. There are times when I wonder if the risk of getting caught wouldn’t be worth the satisfaction of smashing a computer monitor to smithereens.

Consider, also, the little bitty cell phone. What a wonder that is, a fulfillment of Dick Tracy’s wristwatch with more functionality than D.T. ever dreamed of. It was only 30 years ago that two-and-a-half-pound cell phones and their power supplies required a separate briefcase to drag them around in. If you don’t have a cell phone, you don’t know what you’re missing. But once you get one, even if only for emergencies, before you know it you’re using it to make appointments, tell people you’re running late again, check in with the kids, and call into radio talk shows.

I remember the first time I called someone who was on the road. I was on the road, too. Point to point communications! Who would have imagined that? What seemed awesome, like magic, when we first got cell phones is now as commonplace as ordering a pizza on the way home.

I can’t make calls from the road on my handheld cell phone now; it’s unlawful in my state. Seems like 10 years ago we didn’t have them, and they’re already illegal. That must be some sort of record.

Certain things in the home can be operated remotely. You can have your oven turn on when you call home or your burglar alarm system turn off when you return. What I’m waiting for is a way to open my garage door from a couple of blocks away, by using my cell phone. Now won’t THAT be great?!!

Trophy Envy

By Mark Levy

My archery trophy sits atop the mantel of my fireplace. It’s almost as high as the living room ceiling. It’s the biggest trophy I’ve ever seen, about four feet high. The base is a solid rectangle of marble, four inches by six inches and about half an inch thick. Anchored to the base rise up two majestic Greek columns, also of marble, and some sort of imitation gold insignia spanning the two uprights. Then there’s another tier above the columns with another large marble platform and a column above that. It must be 14 pounds, the weight of an average Thanksgiving turkey.

The statue itself is gold-colored plastic and depicts a slender male archer with perfect form and with his bow extended. There’s a black metal plate attached to the front edge of the base and it says, “Mark Levy, First Prize, International Archery Competition.”

The whole trophy is impressive as heck.

In fact, it often elicits admiring comments from guests who visit my house, which was the whole point in displaying it in my living room in the first place.

I have to admit that I’m more than a little proud of the trophy. It really dominates the room, especially from the point of view of a guest whom I direct to the cushy chair that faces it.

The conversation usually goes something like this:

“Wow, what a trophy,” they say.

I just smile, modestly.

“Is that yours?”

“Yup,” I admit.

“I didn’t know you were into archery.”

I continue to smile. Sometimes I say something like, “Well, I don’t like to brag.”

“When did you get that?”

“A few years ago,” I say. “I’m a little embarrassed that it’s so big. Barely fits above the fireplace.”

I can keep the conversation going for awhile, but at some point, I usually have had enough basking in their respect. So I confess that, although it’s my trophy –- I mean, I own it — I didn’t really win it. I merely purchased it at a garage sale for fifty cents.

Oh, and the name plate cost an additional two bucks a few years ago. Turns out, trophy suppliers don’t really question authenticity of the name plates they produce. If you want them to engrave something, they will. Truth to tell, I could see that my local trophy maker was pretty impressed with the size of my trophy, too.

Dead silence usually ensues after my confession.

“I’m looking for a fishing trophy to make it a set,” I say. “Do you think that would be too much? Would people actually believe I won… I mean I own… both of them?”

____________________________________

Itsy Bitsy “Baker Street Journal”

by Mark Levy

I subscribe to an interesting publication that you may not have heard about. The number of readers of this publication is barely greater than the number of contributors. In fact, the motto of the Baker Street Journal — that’s the publication for Sherlock Holmes scholars — used to be:  “Never has so much been written by so many for so few.”

Sidney Paget illustration, Strand Magazine, 1891.

You wouldn’t think there would be much to write about what some unenlightened people think is a fictional detective whose best cases were solved around 1895. But boy, would you be mistaken. There’s worldwide Sherlockian interest — an industry, really  —  that includes or produces novels,  articles, cartoons, poems, songs, plays, stories, annotations, satires, horse races, trips to moors and graveyards, coffee table books, movies on DVDs, musicals, web sites, and assorted esoteric memorabilia like coffee cups, lapel pins, magnifying glasses, tobacco pipes, capes, and life-sized sculptures.

Contributors to the Baker Street Journal — or BSJ, as we Sherlockians call it  — are often scholars who analyze Sherlock Holmes and Victorian society, customs, and motivations. Why did the dog do nothing in the night-time, for instance, when a stranger came into a stable and stole a horse? And how many times per day did London postmen deliver mail to businesses? (The answer is as many as 10 times per day.) And did it snow in London on February 23, 1886? And why were so many of Sherlock’s clients named Violet?

Over the years, writers have speculated that Dr. Watson, Sherlock’s faithful companion and roommate, was a woman, and that Sherlock himself was really a computer, and that occasionally Sherlock’s older brother, Mycroft, was the British government. (Okay, that part’s not speculation.) And that the evil Professor Moriarty had one, or maybe two, brothers, all of them named James — sort of the George Foremans of the archenemy crowd.

Sherlock, some of us believe, actually met or crossed single sticks with Sigmund Freud, Jack the Ripper, Tarzan, Fu Manchu, Dracula, the Phantom, Dr. Who, James Bond, Arsène Lupin, Karl Marx, Gandhi, and the Phantom of the Opera.

Discussion groups, sometimes called scions, meet in members’ homes from Antarctica to Zambia. By the way, the Antarctica scion is appropriately called the Penguins of Antarctica. These groups remind me of Bible study groups, but in this case our Bible is what we call the Canon  — the 56 short stories and 4 short novels that bear the name, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sherlockians are fond of saying things like, “I hear of you everywhere,” and “You see, but you do not observe,” and “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

But they never, ever say “Elementary, my dear Watson.” That’s because that phrase  — perhaps the most famous one attributed to Sherlock  — does not appear in the Canon. Sherlock never said it. You could look it up, which I suggest you do, since “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

________________________________________

Career Advice

by Mark Levy

When I was barely a teenager, as clueless about my future as most teenagers whose parents are not physicians, I took some career aptitude tests. I had always done well on academic aptitude tests that featured math problems. Notice, I said
“Well,” not “Phenomenally well.”
But even at the tender age of 13, I realized that the number of professions for which solving elementary math problems was required couldn’t be great. I mean, I had never heard of one, except for my seventh grade math teacher, and he had weird taste in neckties — weird even by math nerd standards.
Anyway, there came that point in my life when I realized I had to get serious about my future. It was stressful not knowing the direction I should be going. Not so stressful that it was affecting my appetite, of course. I wasn’t obsessed, but I was stressed enough to think about my situation every week or two. My ever-helpful parents arranged for me to take a couple of hours of aptitude tests.
Here’s the strange thing: when my test results were analyzed, the counselor recommended that I consider a career in … fashion design. Fashion design! I — who couldn’t tell the difference between culotts and mu mus and couldn’t care less — I become a fashion designer?

It wasn’t until years later that I realized the counselor was somehow motivated to direct students to attend a particular fashion school, regardless of their lack of aptitude or interest.
That experience was not entirely a waste of time, although I thought so for the last 40 years. The fact is, though, I scored highest in the subject called academic research aptitude. That’s not the same as scientific research, by the way.
In any case, I had no interest in becoming a librarian, so I filed that factoid away until recently, when I had an epiphany of sorts. It turns out I am good at academic research — research on the Internet. I look up information eight or ten times a day.
It seems like I’m confirming how words are spelled, or I’m locating appropriate synonyms every other minute.
For essays like this, I have researched not-so-famous national days, like national Talk Like a Pirate Day, and the number of people in America named Roy Rogers, and people and things whose acronym is B.S., and which famous people were born on my birthday. I’ve discovered that lobsters are related to cockroaches and that Marilyn Monroe’s last, incomplete movie, also starred Dean Martin. It was to be called, “Something’s Got to Give,” by the way, and I guess it was Marilyn’s life that was the “something.”
I use the search engine Google, and the Internet tells me that word, spelled correctly — g-o-o-g-o-l — was made popular by Edward Kasner, who used it in his book, Mathematics and the Imagination, published in 1940.
It means one followed by 100 zeroes, which is actually called ten duo-tri-gintillion, if you care.
Anyway, thanks to the Google Internet search engine, I can retrieve pretty much anything I want to know by typing is two or three words. My talent — and I have to refer to talent with a lower case “t” — comes in useful for those trivial purposes I mentioned, as well as for searching inventions on the Patent and Trademark Office database.
Of course, the Internet database didn’t exist when I was informed that I had academic research aptitude.
So even though I don’t get to solve simple math problems for a living, at least I was spared from a life of fashion design.

* * *

http://www.jscotthardin.com/

(Click for larger image)

By Mark Levy

Movies I Regret

I make amateur movies and I’ve been doing that for years. They are somewhere between home movies and Hollywood productions. Okay, perhaps they’re a bit closer to home movies, because they feature the friends and those members of my family who can be coerced into acting in front of my camcorder.

I suspect that many movie makers have regrets about some of their work. I’m one of them. I’m not talking merely about not winning an Academy Award® this year (or last year or the year before, now that I think of it). And I’m not talking about failing to entice Kim Basinger to act for free in one of my amateur productions. I’m referring to the movies themselves that I should have created differently.

The worst thing about knowing what I should have done is that I have to watch my movie over and over again when friends come to visit or I am invited to someone else’s home. (Being invited to others’ homes is occurring less frequently, too, but I like to think it’s not all my fault. Anyway, that’s a subject for another essay.) The audience may not notice anything amiss, but every time I see one of my defective movies, the mistakes are more evident than they were the last time.

Not only do I know what doesn’t work so well; I usually also know how I could have made the movie perfect. Hindsight is 20/20, as my grandfather used to say. Ironically, he became legally blind in his final years, so his aphorisms don’t always ring true. He also said that if you have a good suit, you’ll never go hungry in a big city. But I digress.

Often, as occurs in other art forms, the solution to perfecting a movie is trivial. Just like adding a teaspoon of baking powder to a cake recipe might make all the difference, a half-second cutaway close-up or a reaction shot inserted into a video sequence might be all that’s missing for the sequence to gel.

Before finalizing the movie, I sometimes ask another person to review my work. That can be very helpful. Of course, I wouldn’t dream of paying him or her for that service. Wouldn’t want to jeopardize my hard-fought amateur movie making standing, you know.

Sometimes I don’t notice the error in my movie until months after I’ve completed it. It wouldn’t take me much time to revise the movie, assuming I have the appropriate shots in my out-takes. But I resist going back and revising instead of moving forward to the next project. Now that I know what I did wrong, I say to myself, I don’t have time to revise it, but I’ll be sure not to make the same mistake the next time.

There’s a perverse comfort in knowing that, every time I embark on another movie adventure, I’ll be able to go on to make fresh, new mistakes.

Mark Levy is an attorney with the Binghamton-based law firm of Hinman Howard and Kattell. He is a contributing editor to ragazine.cc with Ryan Miosek (Feeding the Starving Artist), and an occasional contributor to NPR, where his comments can be heard some Saturdays at noon.

Fear of Just About Everything

By Mark Levy 

I don’t always look up interesting topics on the Internet. Honest! Sometimes a web site finds me. For example, the other day I was minding my own business when a web site called phobialist.com came to my attention. To be truthful, I may have provoked the event by googling “fear of running out of topics for Ragazine.” In any event, I now have a list of about 600 phobias in alphabetical order. I’d like to share some of the more obscure phobias with you and leave the mundane ones for another day. No need to talk about fear of floods, fear of wet dreams, or fear of vomiting on an airplane right now.

Did you know some people have a fear of frogs? That’s called betrachophobia. You can have a fear of being tickled by a feather, in which case you’re pteronophobic. I suppose you might have a fear of being tickled by a frog, in which case you’d have betracho-pteronophobia, which is easy for me to say when I’m not being tickled.

Looks like many people have fears of other people. For example, you might have a fear of young girls parthenophobia), a fear of teenagers (ephebilphobia), or a fear of old people (gerontophobia). So you can move easily from one fear to another as your relatives outgrow your fear of them.

For every occupation, there seems to be a fearful word. If you don’t like your dentist, you may have dentophobia. See how easy this can be? And if you must walk to your doctor’s office across a side of town that beggars and hobos inhabit, I hope you haven’t developed hobophobia. I once had a dentist with breath bad enough to be a hobo’s breath, but lucky for me, I didn’t have hobodentophobia.

Scared of foreigners? In general, that’s xenophobia, although there are separate words for fear of the French, the English, the Chinese, the Greeks and, of course, the Germans. You might know these words if you attended more parties. That wouldn’t be easy if you’re an enochlophobe, fearing crowds or mobs.

There’s always a silver lining: If you avoid crowds, you won’t be visiting the circus, so your coulrophobia, fear of clowns, won’t act up.

I think a number of people fear childbirth, but I wasn’t aware there are actually four words to identify that phobia: maleusiophobia, tocophobia, parturiphobia, and lockiophobia. Those are run-of-the-mill childbirth phobias. But if you’re unusually concerned about delivering a deformed baby, you’ve graduated to teratophobia.

One of my favorites is the word that means an irrational fear of chopsticks. It’s consecotaleophobia, which seems harder to say than to use the darn things, but then again, I’m no psychiatrist.

If you suffer from enissophobia, you may decide not to be an essayist for Weekend Radio, because enissophobia is the fear of criticism —— not that Robert Conrad would ever criticize anyone.

Here’s another cutie: the fear of everything. It’s known as panophobia, which is not exactly what I’ve been developing myself —— a fear of phobias. Oh wait. There’s a name for that, too. It’s phobophobia.

You can find all these and more online, if you don’t have cyberphobia, a fear of computers, that is. The web site, again, is phobialist.com.

New Orleans

New Orleans, Woven Photo, Copyright 2010, Valerie Brown

Mark Levy

I Like My Present Age the Most

            Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes walked down a street when he was 90 years old or so and reputedly saw an attractive young woman. Holmes turned to his companion and muttered, wistfully, “Ah, to be eighty again.”

            I wonder if I will have the same wish when I get as old as Holmes was. I know a few, much younger people who already are pining for their even younger selves. That helps explain the reason many people are obsessed with looking younger. They wear fashionable clothing and hair styles and they get face lifts and tummy tucks. They listen or try to listen to rap and hip-hop music and use teenage expressions, like “omigod” and “fly girl” and “cheese” and “phat,” spelled with a PH. Now if they have that sort of never-young-enough temperament, they might also wish for younger years when they hit the advanced age of 30.

            If they regret reaching, say, the 40-year milestone, how will they feel when they reach each succeeding year or decade? Life must become more and more disappointing to those folks as they age. That’s really too bad. It means they have less to look forward to every day. Where’s the fun in that?

            I, on the other hand, enjoy my present age more than I did my age last year. And last year was better than the year before. Now I’m not saying that each of my faculties is better than ever, or that there aren’t more insidious signs of failing health; but I have a better adjusted attitude with each year. I have a better appreciation for how the universe works and how and why people act as they do. Now I also know better how to urge some people to react the way I would prefer, from the cashier at the supermarket to my boss. I still haven’t figured out my wife, but I’m optimistic even about that, as foolish as that sounds.

            I’m increasingly empowered with knowledge, and that feeling of self-sufficiency should continue to increase as I live through more events, meet more people and gain more experiences. It’s a shame it will end, but I try not to think about that.

            I am free not to have to prepare for events that I now know will never happen. I don’t feel the urgency to rehearse with an air guitar, for example, since the prospect of rock stardom has already passed me by. And I’m not writing and rewriting my acceptance speech anymore for the Oscars or the Nobel Prize ceremony. What a relief. That saves me a great deal of time and, of course, anxiety. Nowadays, the only thing I rewrite is my last will and testament.

            I don’t have to practice catching fly balls to right field or get nervous about meeting my teen-aged girl friend’s parents or explain to my own parents why my 8^th grade report card in Spanish isn’t as high as they had hoped. I don’t have to stay up half the night trying to remember the capital cities of 50 states or the names of the explorers who discovered each little dinky Latin American country — information that I was pretty sure I would not need in the next 50 years… and I was right.

           I spend little time thinking about what I’ll be when I grow up, although I have to admit fleeting thoughts of that still cross my mind on certain Monday mornings.

            Besides the obvious advantages of qualifying for senior discounts at the movies, at restaurants and at sporting events, and the deference youngsters pay me occasionally, when all of the seats are taken on the bus, here’s another benefit of being older. Recently, I completed a Master Degree in creative writing. (You might not realize that from these little essays, because they are essentially non-fiction. Let’s face it: you can’t make some of this stuff up.) Anyway, my writing class of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings spent time learning how to think of subjects to write about. I could have skipped those classes, because coming up with new ideas is no problem for me. By now, I’ve experienced all sorts of things that I can write about. I felt sorry for the younger students in my class, who could just imagine events that I had already experienced. It seemed like an unfair advantage for me, in fact.

            No, compared to my earlier years, I am completely satisfied with my present age. I just wish I could somehow remember those early years better.

Everybody Should Go To Law School

By Mark Levy

As crazy as this sounds, I think everybody should go to law school. I know what you’re thinking: we have too many lawyers already; an entire society of lawyers would be like a science fiction horror movie come to life. But hear me out, please, before you call the men in the white coats.

Law school can be an enlightening experience. It requires only three years after you graduate college —— four if you go to night school, which law schools like to call “part time” or “the evening division.” Really, in the great scheme of things, what are three or four years of your life? You’ve already probably spent more time doing unimportant things, like spending quality time with your family. You’d hardly miss three or four years. Trust me; I’m a lawyer.

Here’s another benefit of going to law school: you get to read about all sorts of crimes and bad behavior. In a way, it’s a TV reality show without the pictures or the sound effects.

I know three good reasons to attend law school, even if you never want to practice law a day in your life.

First, a legal education will teach you how to negotiate. That’s an important skill, since we all negotiate dozens of times a day. When I wake up in the morning, I have to negotiate with my wife who will get to brush his or her teeth first. Then we negotiate who will prepare breakfast, what the breakfast will be, who will walk down the driveway to retrieve the newspaper, who will use the last five drops of milk in his or her coffee, and who will decide where to meet for lunch.

That’s the typical morning routine that I engage in on Saturdays and Sundays alone. During the work week, I negotiate with business associates, with retail store employees, with bank tellers, with grocery store cashiers, and with taxi drivers, not to mention dealing with a fairly long list of requests demanded by my children, of course.

So you see how valuable it is to have good training in negotiating tactics.

Here’s the second reason I think a law school education is helpful: you get to know how to get around the law.

Take the simple “do not enter” sign. How often have you seen that sign and been deterred from going where you want to go? How often have you had to pack up your suitcase and rush out of a hotel room before the 11:00 a.m. checkout time? How often have you had to pay your income taxes? (Just kidding, all you IRS agents out there.)

How often have you heard someone say, “You can’t do that” or “We can’t do that” or “Nobody can do that?” When you’re a lawyer, you don’t blindly accept those statements; you take them as a personal challenge.

Going to law school means never having to take “no” for an answer, with the possible exception of when an aforementioned IRS agent says it. There’s almost always a way to accomplish your goal if you learn how to approach every problem as if there must be a solution. Of course, that’s what lawyers get paid to help you with, but if you get the education and you can develop the correct mindset, most of the time you won’t need no stinkin’ lawyer to help you out. Look at the money you’ll save by attending law school for yourself.

Which brings me to the third advantage of going to law school and perhaps the most important reason I think everybody should have a legal education: you learn when you should call a lawyer. You may think that’s a trivial reason for spending so many hours reading cases about plaintiffs and defendants, but you’d be surprised how often people go to a lawyer too late in the game.

For example, in real estate only a small percentage of home buyers consult a lawyer before they sign what the real estate agents call a “binder,” but which lawyers know is a contract. Turns out, the lawyer they select has one hand tied behind his or her back, since the client has already agreed to certain terms and conditions and forfeited some options in that binder agreement. Usually, it would have cost the buyer the same to engage the lawyer before the binder was signed as after.

In the patent business, where I spend most of my time, I can’t tell you how often inventors approach me more than a year after they’ve publicly disclosed their invention. That’s a shame. The patent law states that an inventor cannot obtain a patent unless the invention has been publicly disclosed, if at all, for less than a year. If the inventor had made the appointment with me a year earlier, he might have obtained a patent. But because he didn’t know when to call a lawyer, he’s  out of luck. That’s why Mr. Rubik never received a patent for Rubik’s Cube, by the way.

So there you have it. Everybody should go to law school to learn how to negotiate, learn not to take “no” for an answer, and learn when to call a lawyer. Luckily, it’s never too late to go to law school, so start saving up for the tuition now. I should have mentioned that earlier.

Hey, tuition fees may be negotiable. If you look for loopholes, as we say in the legal biz, and you don’t take “no” for an answer, you’re already on your way to being a lawyer. See how easy that is?

The Litchfields Copyright Lynda Barreto

Ordinary People

With Famous Names

In Denver, a woman named Amelia Earhart reports on traffic from a helicopter for a local news station. The broadcast news people at that Denver TV station don’t crack a smile when they introduce Amelia Earhart in her helicopter. Maybe they were all born too late.

This got me thinking about famous names in unlikely places. With the help of an Internet search engine that uses U.S. census data to arrive at its statistics, I discovered that there are over 79,000 Amelias and almost 3,000 Earharts, but only one Amelia Earhart in America. Apparently, she’s the one flying around in a helicopter. And how many of the three Charles Lindberghs even have pilot licenses?

            There was a Howard Johnson in a company I worked for once, but sadly, he didn’t work in our cafeteria. There are 2,837 Howard Johnsons in the U.S.

            It must be difficult going through life with a famous person’s name. People either expect too much of you or don’t take you seriously. If you’re one of the three Frank Sinatras, for example, you probably have to be ready to sing a few bars of My Way at the drop of a fedora.

            Not too many Tiger Woods, yet, because only some 1,500 or fewer people are named Tiger; but I’ll bet that situation changes in the future. At this time, there’s only one Tiger Woods, which should provide some comfort to the rest of the players on the Professional Golfers Association tour. We might eventually see some Tiger Smiths, Tiger Browns and Tiger Johnsons become celebrities, for that matter. Or we could soon see other not-so-famous Shaquilles, Beyonces and Chers. I’m surprised there are only 15,000 Elvises.

            Barack Obama is not high on the list of popular names. In fact, there’s only one. I think Barack Schwartz or Barack Harrigan would have a nice ring.

            Have any other of the two Mickey Rooneys or the 4,400 Elizabeth Taylors been married eight times?

            There doesn’t seem to be an Alfonse Capone, but apparently there are nine Albert Capones, five Alfred Capones, and 13 Alan Capones. At least some of those 27 Capones are called “Al Capone” by their close friends, I suppose.

            Of all the 18,000 Lincolns in America, how many would you guess are Abrahams? The Internet says only three.

            Are all the 342 Bob Hopes funny?

            You probably don’t realize that over 500 people are named Roy Rogers, yet there are only 429 Dale Evans’ to go around, making for almost a hundred lonesome cowboys, assuming they’re all cow people who want to hook up with a cowgirl counterpart having her famous name. Good luck, pardners, and happy trails to you.

            There are estimated to be 19 William Shakespeares, but nary a Hamlet in sight, prince or otherwise.

            Here’s another interesting statistic: only 276 people are named Jaclyn Smith, which just doesn’t seem like enough.

            Although there are over 42,000 Levys, 201 are named Mark Levy, believe it or not, but I’m the only one you get to hear on Weekend Radio.

            If you’d like to check the frequency of your name or someone else’s, visit the web site: HowManyOfMe.com.

Mark Levy is an attorney with the Binghamton-based law firm of Hinman Howard and Kattell. He is a contributing editor to ragazine.cc with Ryan Miosek (Feeding the Starving Artist), and an occasional contributor to NPR, where his comments can be heard some Saturdays at noon.