Herb Hoffman – Page 10 – HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH

A Windfall, of Sorts

I am usually quite skeptical of religious or mythological beliefs but recently, during a stormy night, I was awakened by a terrific noise which suddenly made me realize that the ancient Greeks, bogged down as they were by a heaven and an underworld full of gods and goddesses, actually hit it right on the nose when they believed in Euros, the god of the unlucky wind from the east. I now believe in him, too. He knocked over the fence I share with my neighbor. Well, not the whole fence, but two eight-foot center panels that fell towards the neighbor’s tool shed to the west of our house. So it must have been that god whose name is prounced oí-ross and has nothing to do with the currency. Zephyr would not have done that. He is the god of the mild breeze.

As we, my neighbor and I, were surveying the scene in the morning we were relieved that the damage was almost negligible. So we laughed it off, mockingly. ‘Nice try’ I remember saying. I shouldn’t have said that. During the night there was an even bigger storm and the rest of the fence, all ninety feet of it, came down with a tremendous crash, burying the dwarf orange tree and several roses. What’s his name, Euros, obviously had me in his sight and was determined to show me just how unlucky his east wind can be.

But he really had the wrong man. In principle I was never much enamored of fences. When I was a youngster in occupied Germany after the second World War I loved to listen to the Armed Forces Network radio. A cowboy song was then in vogue that included the words “don’t fence me in!” I had a guitar then and sang that with gusto. I knew that I would get to that land without fences eventually. When I finally came to settle down in California I studied English and American literature and found more to agree with in Robert Frost’s Mending wall. Be careful what you wish, he seems to say in that poem. What are you walling in or walling out?
Whatever. It seems to me that old Euros is alive and well. He did a number on our fence. Now I wonder how he would handle a wall. As the folk song says, the answer is still blowin’ in the wind.

Two Cities

The first house we bought, my wife and I, was small. Two rooms and one bath. But we had not bought it for size. We had fallen for the garden. There were two orange trees, a Valencia and a Navel. There was a lath house full of fuchsias. We had a jasmine bush and several deciduous trees around a lawn. The small living room had a picture window looking out on this little paradise of ours.

Clearly, other people feel the same way about the beauty, even the necessity, of flowers, fruit, and greenery. Many a community prides itself of being the “Garden City” of the West or East or whatever. But as sure as variety can be said to be the spice of life there are also those, bless them, who go for the clean shave: some concrete to step on, a pool, and a few pots with geraniums and voilá, the perfect “garden”.

We occasionally chatted with our neighbors over the back fence. I remember the lady praising us for the beautiful garden we maintained. But her folks, she admitted, just were not garden people. “We are car people”, she once said, “from Detroit”. As she said that she motioned with her arms to indicate the three half-disassembled automobiles that were the only ornaments on her side of the fence. I have often thought of this episode, reflecting on the fact that people so much alike in many ways can yet be so different at the same time.

On a visit to Paris the first thing we saw in Parc Monceau, a lovely green spot in the 8th arrondissement, was a statue of the novelist Alfred de Musset. That same day my wife stumbled upon a statue of the dramatist Beaumarchais on rue St. Antoine near the Opera Bastille. On the Left Bank we found a bust of Chateaubriand, the first of the Romantics. Then we noticed that the offices of Air France were located on place Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, a play written in 1897 and last turned into a movie in 1950. North of the Marais was the blvd. Voltaire and near the Étoile, the rue Balzac. We found a rue Chenier and an allee Cendrars, not to forget a rue Hugo and a square Zola. It was quite obvious that in Paris poets, dramatists, and novelists are kept in high esteem. As we searched some more we found that all Parisian streets have names and that at least 175 of them are named for writers.

I do not know about Boston or New York, but on a map of Los Angeles I found only seven streets named for men of letters. As far as I was able to determine Willa Cather, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, J.D. Salinger, and Mark Twain, to count off a few prospects, did not make it. Maybe I am reading more into this than is reasonable but I have a suspicion that it says something about our two cities when I tell you that there are at least 650 streets in Los Angeles that have no names, just cold numbers.

Playing With Our Food

Food has always been a popular topic. The Bible reports that even in the days of Solomon food was already something a king would pray for. “Feed me with food convenient for me”, as the translator of the English Bible of 1611 put it (Proverbs 30:8), anticipating the age of convenience foods by 3000 years.

We all, of course, want food that is convenient. We want good food (it tastes good), but it should also be healthy (good for us).

There are essentially three pathways to nutritional happiness. There is traditional food: a plain cookie, for example, or Kelloggs Raisin Bran. But consumers are so skeptical nowadays that the manufacturers of the cereal thought it wise to add the phrase “With Pure Fruit” to the label, referring no doubt to the raisins and implying at the same time that other cereal makers use impure raisins. Or, god forbid, raisin flavor; or even more heinously, natural raisin flavor.

Then there is takeout food, i.e. food that has something taken out, like cookies baked without salt and/or sugar. Or milk for example. Milk leads in the take out category. You can have it with fat and all, or else without any of the fat or with some of it, by percentage points. Most other dairy products are also available without fat or with low fat content. The latter kind are sometimes called “lite” which means that even the orthography was taken out. The choices here are either taste or health. You cannot have both at the same time. I am prepared to do without the fat, but I draw the line when it comes to fat free half and half. I see this as a logical dilemma.

And then there is food that has something added, perhaps stewed tomatoes with added garlic, thyme, basil, oregano, basil and oregano, pineapple, or papaya, the variations are endless. I think the prize in this category goes to coffee. Some coffee may still taste like coffee, but beware the Mad Mixer. He is the playful gnome that lives behind the roasting pans, thinking up new flavors. If you don’t pay close attention to labels your coffee may taste of vanilla, cinnamon, mocha, buttery caramel, almond, banana, blueberry, chocolate, chocolate mint, coconut, hazelnut, or peanut butter, to name a few varieties.

We must not forget the extreme convenience foods. There is, for example, a certain kind of salad dressing. The 355 ml bottle, the label indicates, is free of calories, sugar, fat, carbohydrates, gluten, and cholesterol. There is nothing left in it, it seems. If you now just remove the lettuce as well you needn’t even wash the salad bowl. How convenient is that!

Or Maple Grove Farms’ “Low Calorie Syrup with Butter Flavor”, a substance that has nothing whatsoever to do with butter, or with maples for that matter. But it is sugar free. According to the label it consists of water, sorbitol, natural and artificial flavors, cellulose gum, salt, caramel color, sucralose, phosphoric acid, sodium benzoate, acesulfame potassium, aspartame, potassium sorbate, citric acid, phenylketonurics, and a little phenylalanine.

God may have made the Leviathan for the sport of it (KJV, Psalm 104), but surely he would not have played with Solomon’s syrup for the sport of it. Even the Old Testament God who could be pretty inscrutable on occasion would not have sent him butter-flavored artificial manna with sugar free syrup for the “hellth” of it, would he?

No, God knows better but Mr. Wilton is less concerned with the details of what you eat: Wilton’s chocolate sprinkles, for example, contain sugar, cornstarch, cottonseed oil, cocoa processed with alkali, soy lecithin, dextrin, glaze, natural flavor, artificial flavor, and carnauba wax, a substance that is also used on cars and floors in addition to chocolate sprinkles. But don’t let me stop you. They are delicious on vanilla ice cream.

Which in turn may contain guar gum, locust bean gum, carrageenan, xanthan gum, polysorbate 80, mono- and diglycerides, and possibly artificial vanilla flavor and gelatin. If we are what we eat I am surprised we have not all turned purple yet, or something.

Picture credit medicalnewstoday.com

On Drinking Tea

Tea is a plant and all plants, thanks to the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, have binomial Latin names. So we are talking about Thea sinensis. But not really. We usually talk only about the leaves. How they are plucked, fermented, and dried. Not even that, actually. We are mostly interested in the drink that results from pouring hot water over those dry leaves. In short, we drink a cup of tea.

Some people drink tea for breakfast. In a Chinese restaurant you might get tea for lunch or dinner. In Great Britain, on cruise ships, and all the finer hotels in the world you have afternoon tea which includes not only tea, the drink, but also cucumber sandwiches. A certain class of people call that high tea. It is usually brought by somebody called James. High tea comes close to being a ceremony or ritual, in addition to being a meal.

Another way of high tea is celebrated in Japan. In the Japanese order of things the preparation and consumption of tea is vaguely connected to Buddhism and yes, the tea may be thin or thick, powdered or leaf, and for all I know, even bag. But to do it right, i.e. with respect, grace, and proper form you may have to go to Tea School and learn from a master and that could take years, no kidding.

Another group of ritual tea drinkers is found in Brasil and Argentina. The “tea” in those parts is called Mate. It is brewed in a gourd which is passed from person to person. One drinks it through a communal silver straw which is also passed around for all to use. Think before you book a vacation in South America. Are you prepared for this? It is considered an insult if you decline the invitation to participate, I think.

You drink English tea out of a cup with a handle, preferably Spode china. Japanese tea is sipped out of ceramic cups without handles. In Mongolia tea is more like a hearty soup, slurped out of bowls. Mongolian tea is very strong. It is churned with a little salt and a generous blob of butter made from the milk of yaks. In the days before refrigeration the butter was often rancid. That was considered normal, however, and then as now a Mongolian man’s proper breakfast is a bowl of butter tea. I understand that these days cheaper teabags and cows’ milk are acceptable. There goes the age of ceremonial living. O tempora, o mores.

And then there is Russian tea. One drinks it out of a glass. Without sugar. Between swallows one takes a spoonful of varenye, or jam. At least according to my father who was born there.

In Germany, my native country, and also in China I understand, people are intrigued by the variety of dried plant leaves other than Thea sinensis that can be made into a drink. Thus the word “tea” became a generic term for any such infusion. As a child I especially liked peppermint tea. Recently I heard that peppermint is bad for the eyes. Maybe that is why I have had to wear glasses since I was ten and why my Latin is so bad because I could not read what Herr Kache wrote on the black board. And why I still hate Herr Kache because he made fun of my Latin in front of the class. And all this because of Mentha piperita. The stuff is dangerous!

Nowadays, ending most of my days as a nervous wreck, I drink a cup of “Relaxing Tea” at bed time. It makes me go to sleep because it contains valerian, passion flower, skullcap, chamomile, and catnip. According to the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, I believe, it should actually kill me. But then the War did not kill me, either. I am lucky, I suppose.

If you are queasy you may not want to read on because we are crossing a line, from tea as an infusion of dried plant matter to tea as an infusion — well let us just say a liquid produced by pouring hot water over the antlers of a dead deer. Antler tea, in other words. I understand that the CDC has issued a warning that this tea may really kill you. It can give you botulism.

Enough of tea suitable for human consumption. But there is more. I have heard of garlic tea. It is supposed to smell so bad that aphids and tomato worms run away and have dinner elsewhere. There is also a liquid we could call “compost” tea. It is made from decomposed plant matter and manure. Let me emphasize that it is delicious and nutritional for anything you plant in your garden. For the rest of us caution is advised: toddlers and dogs also love that sort of stuff.

By the Elephant’s Early Light

What happened a hundred years ago may be considered old by many of us. What happened in 1492 was already considered history by our Founding Fathers in 1800. “Old” is a relative term, it depends on your viewpoint. On the scale of history, however, the entire 500 year span of European discovery and settlement is brand new. If you want old in America you have to look to what we call the Native Americans. Depending on where you went to school you learned either nothing about their origins, when and from where they came, or perhaps you heard of the Alaskan land bridge and tribes from Asia that arrived about 15 thousand years ago on the American continent. If I look at it from this angle I have to admit that all of us who came here after 1492 are newcomers.

It made me feel better when I read a report in the newspaper about humanids (pre-homo sapiens, apparently) that lived in San Diego (or what passed for San Diego then) some 130 thousand years ago. Now that would make even the above mentioned Native Americans newcomers. We may all be fellow newcomers in the end.

Those early people, unfortunately, are now extinct. On the basis of fossils that were excavated, archaeologists speculate that they hunted mastodons, forerunners of the elephants. Those early Americans were sloppy eaters judging by the leftover mastodon bone fragments that were found lying around, together with stone tools used to crack open femurs to suck out the fatty marrow. That they did that is not at all hard to believe because I have seen my own grandfather use his knife to poke around the bones in my mother’s stew for the marrow, a messy affair. And I am sure he was not related to any of those folks in San Diego.

The mastodons are also extinct, by the way. Their descendants are the elephants. Good thing other foodstuffs were invented since then, because if I had to eat a lot of mastodon bone marrow or even grilled elephant trunk, for that matter, I would probably be extinct too before the year is out.

Street Talk: The Ghosts of Rue du Bac

Street Talk: The Ghosts of Rue du Bac is the title of an article I wrote for the Paris magazine FRANCE REVISITED. You will find it if you google for “france revisited ghosts”.

(picture credit: parisadele.com)

On Birthright

Some scholars and philosophers claim that you belong where you were born and that it is important to know that. Belonging somewhere is your birthright. Hence the slogan “America for Americans”. It is not a new formulation. Theodore Roosevelt used it, and the Ku Klux Clan did too. A preacher in New York, I understand, once used it as the title of his sermon. I suspect they all meant different things. The first thing that comes to my mind, however, is exclusiveness. The slogan does not evoke the image of welcoming open arms. It rather divides people into Americans and non-Americans.

From the day I entered the United States as an immigrant I saw that America is more than a geographical entity. I felt and still believe that America stands for and is recognized as a value the world over, the champion of democracy, the leader of the free world. America, in other words, is something big. If you take that slogan at face value, however, and apply it to our present reality America has suddenly become something very small. It sounds almost pitiful and desperate.

Time will tell if “America for Americans” really means something or if it is just empty rhetoric. In the meantime, who qualifies as an American? Not visitors, of course. We love tourists and foreign students provided they leave again. Ditto undocumented workers. They are not Americans either, but employers welcome them as cheap labor. Immigrants with Green Cards? No, they are not Americans either. Citizens! That’s it. All citizens are Americans by definition.

But there are two kinds of citizens. Some are born Americans. It is their birthright. Others are immigrants (i.e. non-Americans) but studied to become naturalized Americans. Thus we have two kinds of Americans, naturalized citizens and native citizens. Lately voices are being heard that only native citizens, citizens by birthright, should be considered Americans in this context. A precedent, some believe, would be the constitutional dictum that “no person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of president”. If that view wins, perhaps the slogan ought to be more specific, like “America for Native Americans”.

Sitting Bull would have liked that. I don’t think it will fly, though.

Is There Humor in Religion

We have all been admonished at one time or other not to discuss religion in polite society. The danger, I think, is that we might hit on something patently absurd which would tempt some of those present to laugh but deeply offend others. This is where the written word comes in handy. Reading is a solitary act. You are not forced to listen to your conversation partner’s offensive tales. You can simply skip what you don’t like and read or do something else.
So in a blog like this it is alright to hit on a few absurdities in religion and the ensuing humor. One of the funniest stories I know is found in the Bible of the Hebrews. The ancient Hebrews were people soaked in their faith, but at the same time they were Jews, respectful of the power of logical argument and thus quick to grasp the absurdity of a situation and the humor of it. As the tale develops in the Book of Genesis 18: 22-33, here looms God himself, all powerful and as tall as the Empire State building, ready to wipe out the entire neighborhood of Sodom. And there before him stands that little mite of a man, Abraham by name, saying — saying to God! — “Stop! What do you think you are doing?”

I mean, if that is not chutzpa I don’t know what is. You don’t have to be a Jew to laugh out loud if you try to picture this situation. Maybe you remember the ensuing hilarious sequence of Abraham haggling with the Allmighty over how many righteous people, minimum, it would take to save Sodom? There is humor in religion, at least in the Hebrew Bible. In the Greek Bible we also find humor, if subtle, such as Jesus’ eye-winking reaction to Nathaniel’s belittling of Nazareth (John 1:47).

Some one once said that if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans. You could also make him laugh by telling him what trivial details some religious people find important. One I have heard was the “problem” of hand gestures a priest should use when blessing the people. Should his thumb touch one finger? Or two? He might also find it funny that we print “IN GOD WE TRUST” on, of all places, our Federal Reserve notes. “Have the money changers been readmitted to the Temple?” God might ask with a twinkle in his eyes.

More seriously, in the Judeo-Christian scriptures are contradictory passages. One declares Yahweh to be the only existing god, that there can be no others. In a different section, however, it says that there are others and that he is greater than all of them. Scholars go out of their way to explain that the scriptures do not mean what they say which, according to Gallup, does not discourage 3 out of 10 Americans from reading the Bible literally. There is humor in that. There are also numbers in that, millions of voters.

There are other absurd but less humorous topics that sometimes vex religious people. For a long time the Church of England found it troublesome when women tried to enter the priesthood. The Anglican version of that Church in America had by then solved that issue but was now struggling with the issue of homosexual priests and bishops. No sooner was this issue overcome a new issue arrived: homosexual marriages. Suddenly those who left their Church over the women’s issue and those who left because of homosexual priests were now joined by those opposed to homosexual moms and dads. They have not even touched Roe vs Wade yet. In a quasi-theocracy like ours this promises to become an issue way beyond humor.

My Jewish friends tend to have thicker skin. They will not be offended when I snicker at the way they divide themselves into groups. Sarah is a reformed Jew. You can tell by the fact that she stores her milk and her hamburger meat on the same shelf in the refrigerator. Gloria, on the other hand, is not a real Jew but she is married to one and has two Jewish children. Her family is unreformed. They lean toward the orthodox faith, which means that they store their milk and their meat on separate shelves.

I understand that there also are ultra-orthodox Jews. They cannot even store meat and milk in the same refrigerator. So they live on milk and feed the meat to the dogs.

Be that as it may: we tend to be polite and do not laugh at things other people are passionate about. Important is that we are Americans. We could laugh, if we wanted to.

I will not touch the Koran, however.

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Stepping on Cracks

As far as I can remember, when I was a child the sidewalks in my hometown were made of precast pavers. Adults did not notice such details but children, living closer to the ground, were keenly aware of the cracks between the pavers. Infantile mythology had it that there were gremlins of one kind or other lurking under the pavers and the only way to get safely from one’s house to the street corner was to avoid stepping on any cracks. Occasionally one would lose one’s balance and hit the crack right on, to the amusement of the other children. As superstitions go, this was a mild form and a far as I can think back nobody was ever harmed.

You know, of course, that a black cat crossing the street ahead of you will bring you bad luck. As if you needed a cat to remind you. However, you cannot do anything about it. You are now in the world of grownups’ superstitions. I know it is silly, but I would like to find out if there is a way to mitigate the misfortune, short of stepping on the cat.

Bad luck will also befall you if you break glass. If it is a mirror you just carelessly smashed you are headed for Dante’s Inferno: leave all hope behind! But In some parts of the world there is a remedy. You make the sign of the cross. A clever move because it gently steers you from superstition to religion, a safer place. Less serious but still bad are the consequences for a woman who is invited to dinner in a fine restaurant and places her handbag on the floor. That invites bad luck, in case you did not know. Not finding any other place to put it she would be well advised to cross her fingers, just in case. Of course I do not know who invited her but I would cross my fingers anyway.

Actually, being German, I would not cross my fingers. I would hold my thumb, a gesture that is also useful if you are forced to say something you do not believe yourself. Holding the thumb of one hand behind your back while you talk invalidates the perjury. It re-boots your conscience, so to speak.

An additional pitfall for the superstitious is a flight of stairs. The unwritten law of occult caution dictates that you must not cross another person on the stairs. If two reach the same stairway at both ends simultaneously one must stop and wait for the other. This holds true for wide as for narrow stairs. If you ignore this law the other person will probably not speak to you again, ever.

In latitudes where thunderstorms are common, such as my native Germany, lightning strikes are feared. In addition to fire insurance folks often “buy” additional protection from Saint Florian, the saint in charge of fire and flood victims. The proper formula for addressing him is a ditty like this: “Dear Florian, forgive the bother. Please save my house, burn down another”.

One must not forget that superstitions work both ways. To find a four-lobed clover leaf, for example, brings you good fortune. When you are going on a trip and the taxi is waiting outside to take you to the airport, briefly sit down with your packed suitcase at your side. Then get up again and go. This guarantees a pleasant accident free voyage. At least in Russia where my father came from.

When I lived in Canada I noticed that men going for a beer after work never ordered “a” beer. They always ordered two bottles. Must have been some superstition about being caught with the last of something, the end of life, the last supper, the last beer. Just a guess. I also noticed that pubs had two doors, one for men, the other for ladies. Funny though that both doors lead into the same pub, smell of stale beer, tobacco smoke and all. A subtle reminder, I assume, that we will all end up in the same heaven.

Knock on wood.

Pinched Pennies

The safest way to keep your purse filled with money is to not spend any. A penny saved is a penny earned, can’t argue with that. Yet one must eat and pay rent and give alms. That is where your grocers, utilities, and retailers come in. They have developed ingenious methods to make you feel better while spending.

The Gas Company, for example, will allow you to spread your bills evenly throughout the year. Pay a little more in summer, and a little less in winter. This improves your cash flow, but it is a deception. It does not save you a penny. It just makes you feel better in winter.

My supermarket, on the other hand, really does save me money. They have formed a “club”. If I scan my club card before paying I get a discount, and so I continue to shop there. Which is, of course, what the store wants to happen. They also bundle certain things. If you buy six of the same item the price-per-item drops a little. Cheaper by the dozen, as the saying goes.

Another way to transfer money from your pocket to the cash register is the “save by spending” gambit. ”Sale!” the sign will announce. “Only $8 each, buy one get one free. You save 8 dollars”. By spending 8 dollars, that is. But don’t knock it: the trick works. People love to be took.

Retailers large and small, without exception I believe, also practice a simple form of price deception. They have discovered that merchandize priced at $4.00 a piece will not sell as long as the store across the street offers the same thing for $3.99. There is even a chain named the “99 Cent Store” where everything is packaged so that the unit price comes to no more than a dollar, which in retail language means 99 cents because the word “dollar” is a dirty word, a no no. Any store that tries to sell merchandise in terms of full dollars is sure to go broke very fast. Such is the quaint psychology of the consumer. Shoppers know, of course, that the difference between 30 dollars and $29.99 is only a penny but they love to be duped. Obviously, or why else do price tags everywhere end in .99?

There is an even less rational type of consumer: the fuel consuming driver. If you try to sell him or her a gallon of gas for $2.99 you will be out of luck as long as the gas station a block away sells the gallon for $2.98 and 9/10. This absurd little bit of softheadedness is repeated in cities, hamlets, and truck stops all over the country. We are dealing with a difference of one tenth of a penny. You would have to buy 10 gallons to save 1 penny. And spend a nickel to drive to the cheaper station. We all understand that a tenth of a penny in a retail sale is essentially nothing. But we are creatures of habit, and so we continue the foolishness. Our Chihuahua with a brain the size of a walnut, on the other hand, stops licking the bowl when it is empty. I don’t think she would knock herself out for 1/10 of a crumb the way we carry on for fractions of pennies.

I take that back. She probably would. But then she is only a dog.

Picture credit: morguefile.com