Knock Knock Blog

Never Enough Sin

We've been off for a while finishing our new book on religion, to burst onto the public scene in July. It turns out you have to do a lot of research when you're writing about religion—who knew?

As reported by Bloomberg News today, seven deadly sins just weren't enough for the Catholics, and it's been far too long since the sixth century when those were cataloged by Pope Gregory I. Now you can go to hell for the following "social" sins:

1. "Bioethical" violations such as birth control
2. "Morally dubious" experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

I've definitely already committed at least five of the seven, but then again, I don't believe in hell.

And it's just one more reason why I like Santeria. Eleven commandments, modeled on the basic ten, but with this important extra (which I have yet to commit): no eating human flesh. Though I did recently run across this quote, from the inimitable chef James Beard: "I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around."

What's a Synonym for Thesaurus?

For those of you who are word mavens and writerly sorts, you know the value of a good thesaurus. I never got into Roget's—the idea of looking up a word in order to look up a word feels like too much work to me. Also, if you're already somewhat well-endowed in the vocabulary department, you need something that goes beyond telling you that you could also call a mountain a big hill. My favorite—and only—thesaurus for a very long time is The Synonym Finder by J. I. Rodale. Everybody I give or recommend it to is an immediate convert. I have copies on two coasts and in three rooms and about twenty in the office. (In case anybody at Rodale is listening, it's high time you put it online—and I'd pay a lot to subscribe.) I was reminded of it when Jamie Thompson Stern, intrepid editor, sent me the following poem:

To A Thesaurus
by Franklin P. Adams

O precious codex, volume, tome
  Book, writing, compilation, work,
Attend the while I pen a pome,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

For I would pen, engross, indite,
  Transcribe, set forth, compose, address,
Record, submit—yea, even write,
  An ode, an elegy to bless—

To bless, set store by, celebrate,
  Approve, esteem, endow with soul,
Commend, acclaim, appreciate,
  Immortalize, laud, praise, extol

Thy merit, goodness, value, worth,
  Expedience, utility—
O manna, honey, salt of earth,
  I sing, I chant, I worship thee!

How could I manage, live, exist,
  Obtain, produce, be real, prevail,
Be present in the flesh, subsist,
  Have place, become, breathe or inhale

Without thy help, recruit, support,
  Opitulation, furtherance,
Assistance, rescue, aid, resort,
  Favor, sustention and advance?

Alas!  Alack!  And well-a-day!
  My case would then be dour and sad.
Likewise distressing, dismal, grey,
  Pathetic, mournful, dreary, bad.

        *    *    *    *    *

Though I could keep this up all day,
  This lyric, elegiac song,
Meseems hath come the time to say
  Farewell!  Adieu!  Goodbye!  So long!

I'd never heard of Franklin Pierce Adams—turns out he was an Algonquin wit. (My favorite, and oft-quoted, Algonquin bon mot came from the "Use this word in a sentence" game. Dorothy Parker was given "horticulture." Quick as could be, she popped back with, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." If you don't get it, say it out loud.) Adams also toiled as a newspaper columnist and radio panelist. This poem comes from a collection delightfully called Tobogganing on Parnassus.

Happy John Frum Day!

For those of you who, like myself, have their misgivings about Valentine's Day (isn't it funny how hatred of V-Day is now more cliché than the holiday itself?), there's an alternative: John Frum Day, celebrated February 15, the most sacred holiday of the John Frum followers on the Tanna island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. The John Frum movement is one of my favorite religions out of the entire 99 profiled in our forthcoming book on religion because it's a cargo cult. Here's what we have to say about that in the book:

Cargo cults are a fascinating example of the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc: “after this, therefore because of this,” meaning if one occurance follows another, the first must have caused the second.

Flourishing after World War II in the South Pacific, cargo cults arose among tribal societies after seeing Western technology and goods for the first time. Soldiers came to the islands and built airstrips, after which planes arrived carrying a wealth of cargo. The natives concluded that the gods had sent the cargo because the airstrips had been built, and also due to other observed rituals such as marching in formation.

With this reasoning, the islanders began building their own relics—mock landing strips and straw airplanes, for example—and mimicking troop behavior in order to make more cargo fall from the sky. When no additional cargo came, the cults faded. One remains, however: the John Frum movement, begun in the late 1930s, which continues to predict the return of the American military and its precious cargo.

We have a whole profile on the John Frum movement in the book, but I just fell in love with the idea that people who'd never seen Western goods would—of course!—find a spiritual explanation for why they'd suddenly started falling from the sky. Sort of The Gods Must Be Crazy taken to the extreme.

There's a great article on this in Smithsonian Magazine, in honor of last year's John Frum Day. It's a great read and will have you racing out to find yourself some kava and coconut shells to drink Valentine's Day into oblivion.

Alternative to JDate

We're doing a book on religion (in the typical Knock Knock vein, for Fall 2008), and as you can imagine, the research takes us to some amazing places. One of my favorites today is a dating site for Muslims, in part for its charmingly unslick presentation. It's 123zawaj.com; zawaj means "pair" or "mate." I'm sure there are countless other dating websites for the devout of many stripes, but this is the first one I've come across—€”without looking, of course. The headline is "Marriage is solemn Contract. ALLAH created mercy btw Man and woman." I love that it's okay to abbreviate "between" and that "Man" is capitalized while "woman" is lowercase. However, given that "Contract" is uppercase and "solemn" is not, perhaps it's just poor English grammar rather than a statement about the sexes . . . but I suspect otherwise. Following the usual marketing text about how great the site is for meeting people is this warning: "REMEMBER you should be committed and take it seriously, ALLAH watching you." Wow. And I thought I faced dating pressure.

Collecting the Dough

Every business that extends credit requires the services of a collections agency to go after those folks who not only don't pay their bills, they don't call to tell you they can't pay their bills for some very good reason which of course we'd be inclined to understand. After we have no reply to our first three inquiries, and an account is more than, say, 90 days overdue, we turn them over to collections.

The way it works is, the collections agency agrees to chase the delinquent account for some percentage of whatever is recouped, generally 20-25% percent. So, if someone owes us $100, we get, say, $75 back rather than the $0 it was increasingly looking like we were going to receive. This check comes from the collections agency, because the delinquent account pays the agency directly. The agency takes its cut and then sends along the rest to us.

A couple months ago, however, the funniest thing happened. Our collections agency stopped returning our phone calls. Upon investigation, we realized that the collections agency had altogether stopped existing, owing us some $2,500 in collected proceeds. So not only did we need to find a new collections agency, their first order of business was to collect from the old collection agency. How's that for fun?

We did not, however, hire Nationwide Collections, Inc., of Fort Pierce, Florida, though I kind of wish we had. As reported by the Associated Press, Nationwide is now in trouble for addressing a recipient as "shit" (as in "Dear Shit,"). The envelope was addressed to "Shit Face" with "Face" standing in as the surname.

Unfortunately, Nationwide has a good reason for violating the law (in the United States, who knew, debt collectors are prohibited from using obscenity when collecting). They claim the recipient signed up for the Columbia House music club under that name, which I am inclined to believe.

Why shouldn't debtors be addressed this way? Perhaps profanity isn't required, but how about "Dear Deadbeat" or "Dear Thief"? I'd support that legislation.

Pig Brains that Might Kill You

I love weird diseases and medical mysteries, probably like most of the House-watching population. For some reason I don't have a tendency toward hypochondria, which is probably why I enjoy making fun of it so. Also, I just believe we're all going to die of something, and the likelihood that it's going to be a rare, arcane ailment or a plane crash is far less than, say, heart disease or a car accident. As you can read about in The Complete Manual of Things that Might Kill You, our life expectancy has skyrocketed, but with that improvement and access to medical care, we just seem to have more to complain about. Check out this sidebar from Kill You:

Health Makes You Sick

It’s been formulated that happiness is the gap between expectations and reality. According to Richard Layard in Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, this results in the “hedonic treadmill, where you have to keep running in order that your happiness stand still.” We quickly become accustomed to what we have, and then we want more. This equation doesn’t stop at medicine: the healthier we get, the more we complain about our health.

Rapidly inflating expectations for longevity, physical fitness at older ages, illness prevention, and the curative power of science don’t appear to result in greater contentment. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite. A 2002 study by Amartya Sen, reported in the British Medical Journal, compares health perceptions in 2 states in India: Kerala and Bihar. Kerala has the highest literacy levels in India and a life expectancy of 74 years. Bihar is poor, lacking in medical care and education, and has a lifespan 15 years less than Kerala’s and much lower than India overall. Yet Bihar’s “self-reported morbidity,” the perceived prevalence of disease, is only a tiny fraction of Kerala’s—and Kerala’s self-reported morbidity is less than the United States, despite Americans’ greater longevity.

The unfortunate conclusion? “The more people are exposed to contemporary health care,” states Dr. Iona Heath, also in the British Medical Journal, “the sicker they feel.”

Today in the New York Times was the kind of article I love—about a rare disease (and medical mystery) that may result from pig brains being blown all over you in aerosolized form. Which means, I suppose, that pig brains could pose a terrorist risk, except that Muslims don't eat pork. If you are a hypochondriac, at least you can be relatively certain whether or not you're in the vicinity of aerosolized pig brains.

Go Fatosphere!

We are a nation killing ourselves slowly with food. Fat or overweight people are lazy and ugly.
Fat people get paid less, promoted less, loved less. Fat is unhealthy, and all of us will pay the medical costs of an impending disaster as diabetes and heart disease come to roost. Or not!

As we all know (but don't do anything about), fat is the last acceptable bastion of discrimination, prejudice, disgust from afar. What paradigm shift took place to equate thin with moral superiority? How many lazy, unhealthy, ugly, and/or despicable people do you know who are thin? Quite a few—ergo no moral generalities to be applied to body size, right?

Even if you're "fat-friendly," however, that doesn't mean you have to touch (e.g., have sex with) someone who's fat, and most of us don't want to—even the fat ones. Overweight men on online dating sites rarely signify that they would accept a woman in the overweight categories ("shapely," "a few extra pounds," "Rubenesque," "large"); instead, despite their own category, they request "slender," "athletic," "height-weight proportional." Steve Nicks, in Behind the Music, said she never got so much criticism as when she went on stage somewhat overweight after kicking a decades-long cocaine addiction that almost killed  her, left her without a septum in her nose, and was responsible for many a mortifying—but comparatively uncriticized—performance.

All this despite recent studies that attribute greater longevity and disease resistance to the overweight. All this despite the larger numbers of people classified as overweight (thanks, in part, to reclassifications of weight-height tables), meaning we're moving into the majority—hello, self-hatred! All this despite the fact that fat people are more sensual and orgasm more readily (see studies cited in "How to Get Fat"). All this despite the fact that we're hilarious and jolly, the eternal friend.

Fortunately, there are those out there braver than I: the fat bloggers. Per an article in today's New York Times, there are courageous renegades collating the studies and typing the commentary on the real epidemic—hatred of fat people. Bravo!

What Are the Odds?

In the annals of weird parenting and its consequences, a pair of twins who were separated at birth upon adoption later fell in love and married. This was brought up in some weird right-to-life presentation by a peer at the House of Lords (the couple is British) attempting to curtail the opportunities for gays and lesbians to have children via in vitro fertilization. Never mind the fact that 99 percent of in vitro occurs among heterosexual couples, including in the case of the poor newlyweds. But the peer's point was that the process should be more transparent so that individuals can always know who their biological parents were, not such a villainous perspective. Sad to say, the first reason I clicked on this Yahoo headline was because I took "separated at birth" to mean conjoined twins who had been surgically separated at birth. If previously conjoined twins could marry and gays and lesbians couldn't, well, that would be sick and wrong, no?

I've long thought that a book of nothing but Yahoo headlines over the years (with multiple refreshes per day), since Yahoo's inception, would be one of the most salient cultural documents of our time.  "Tom Cruise Sneezes" right next to "Genocide in Darfur" and so forth. I hope Yahoo is keeping track so they can assemble this artifact for the good of the next race of beings to populate this planet.

Spam Poetry

Love this concept: Spam headlines as poetry, thanks to blogger Jerry J. Davis:

Do you want Rolex?
I practically choked
My boyfriend's putz keeps slipping out
Now it is possible to have sex more than ten times a day
See my penis pictures as proof
Join to society of real Men
Feel new sensations with your partner
This product is sooooooooo amazing
Just call the number below
With the advance in science…
You must be the Real Man with “huge dignity”
Be full of energy and fill your partner with it!
What is the dosage guideline for Wondercum?
I know you’ve thought about it.

He himself filed it under Procrastination Techniques, which I just happened to be "researching." Just don't try to email it.

Separated at Birth?

Per our previous two posts, "separated at birth" is probably an overused phrase from 1988, when Spy Magazine first commemorated its famous column with a compendium book. It's still fun, though. Check out this picture of social X-ray* of the moment Posh Spice. Now compare with pictures of Gloria Swanson in her famous role as pathetically aging movie star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. We all know Posh Spice should really have been named Scary Spice (though Melanie Brown also deserves the moniker—perhaps they could share).

* Tom Wolfe coined this delightful term in Bonfire of the Vanities (the book, of course, notably better than the movie) to describe socialite women of the 1980s such as Nan Kempner and Pat Buckley: "Social X-rays . . . They keep themselves so thin, they look like X-ray pictures . . . You can see lamplight through their bones . . . while they're chattering about interiors and landscape gardening . . . and encasing their scrawny shanks in metallic Lycra tubular tights for their Sports Training classes . . . And it hasn't helped any, has it! . . . See how drawn her face and neck look . . . He concentrated on her face and neck . . . drawn . . . No doubt about it . . . Sports Training . . . . turning into one of them—" (all ellipses and italics Tom Wolfe's).