Ongoing Research of Our Committee

Long perplexed by the seemingly random usage of "in front of my nose" versus "in front of my very nose," I was ultimately driven to consult all back issues of the Berliner Zeitschrift für Otolaryngologie at the medical section of the Harvard U. Library system. Then, Bd. 47, 9 Juli 1919,  seemed like a good place to begin in earnest, viz. our standard study by O. Furchtbarer-Nasendreck, M.D., Dr. Phil. on 4725 Psychiatric (?) patients in the Berliner Institut named after him — a study that, first of all, isolated a Typus A and Typus B that encouraged me. If my painstaking translation is accurate, there was a statistically significant finding—although his staff’s methodologies of obtaining sufficient exudate samples aren’t entirely clear to me—that one type of nose, without exception, always exhibited precisely two (2.0) nostrils, while the other type was reliably limited to a pair. The remaining conclusions appeared relatively nebulous to me, but I believe my ongoing search to sniff out the ultimate truth has now been pointed forward.

Katzenjammer Kidd,  PhD

Political Wisdom, And Its Rarity

It was becoming astronomically expensive for our political parties to keep narrowing down potential voters statistically to those populations who were best at predicting the outcome of our presidential elections. It began with finding the few swing states that determined the outcome. Then it progressed to the key neighborhoods. Billions of dollars were spent on the research surrounding this sensitive instrument of predictability and reliability that focussed upon smaller and smaller groups.

The idea finally arose that perhaps there was one individual who was always right in determining the outcome, and that while it might be even more expensive to determine statistically who it was, it would save so much more money in the long run. So the thinking went in our highest circles of the elite.

Thus it came to pass that our finest minds became engaged in the requisite number crunching with the most up-to-date parallel computers at their fingertips. After four months of this, and as cash began running low, it appeared that one such individual was found, one who had never erred in determining election outcomes all over the country as well as on the presidential front: it was Yankel Fishbein, an inmate in the back wards of an obscure mental institution in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He was a catatonic who almost never was moved to speak, but his electoral predictions were absolutely perfect, and thereafter no money was spared by either major political party in giving him the best care known to medical science. Yankel was old enough to have covered all the elections from the years 1972 until the present and future with absolute perfection, although he was never observed reading any newspaper or otherwise engaging with the news of our world.

Democrats and Republicans alike worshiped his wisdom, whatever its source might be, and they came to him, imploring his aid. Indeed, most recently, when asked who the next President of the United States was going to be, he opened his eyes wide, as was his wont when thus queried, and he gazed heavenwards to receive his message. Then, after the passage of some weeks, he delivered his oracular prediction with total confidence in its rectitude, and his words sped through our Internet, as all the newspapers around the world printed them in wonderment.

The presidential election of 2012 in the USA came and went. For the first time in his life, Yankel Fishbein was found to be wrong in his prediction! All the best reporters flocked to speak to him at his bedside, asking why. Yes, they asked him, over and over again, how it could be that he was now wrong for the first time in his life.

Three months later, when these people from all over the world had asked their persistent question to the weak and aging Yankel Fishbein yet again, for who knows how many times, his lips began to tremble. Slowly, he opened his mouth, displaying its missing teeth for all to see. Lifting his heavy head laboriously from his pillow, and now speaking clearly to the assembled multitudes before him, he said, “Oh, shit!”. He never spoke again.

Kashaknishra's agent,  11/7/2012

Plan for Health Care & Employment

Hello, this is Gritti Chompers, your representative from the National False Teeth Recycling Foundation Consortium, asking you to consider making a small donation of any amount you deem comfortable towards the continuation of our charitable work. Our short-term objective is, by reducing the downtime of false teeth in the mouths of those fortunate enough to possess this valuable commodity, to provide a courier service that can rush these to other people needing them, on a round-robin basis, according to when they have just eaten or are just about to eat—which of course differs from person to person, as we have found in our field surveys. This reduces the need to import false teeth from foreign countries, and puts our local people to work driving the vehicles that deliver the teeth from person to person. In the long run we can create nationwide false teeth banks that can accumulate the teeth for future use as needed, most especially as people die and bequeath their false teeth to these banks. Won’t you consider making your donation to this worthy cause? We will surely win this battle of driving down health care costs, while creating employment, one bite at a time.

Hidden Assumption Revealed

Clearly it is time for Kashaknishra to declare the inauguration of the Church of the Hidden Assumption, whose principles may now be brought to light:

I. Evolution is a misnomer for the process that brought us humans to the present point. For we are truly in thrall of a technology of human design, while most of humankind fervently continues its beliefs frozen in time in the Middle Ages and earlier, times whose goals appear immutable today.

II. This fervor, oft expressed as febrile anticipation of the End Times, has two facets: 1) instigation of conflict in every sphere, in order to hasten that End; but also 2) the ingathering of Jews, whose conversion remains necessary to bring about that selfsame End.

III. Our new Church of the Hidden Assumption is, instead, to become the focal point for that ingathering, which will declare unto all Christendom: “Make us Jews, and friends thereof, an offer sufficient to hasten the transformation of our beliefs, so that your End may be brought closer to fruition. A generous monetary sum may well help us as we strive towards the continued payment for the advanced education we hold so dear in the interim.”

IV. And in the interim, we shall make our own way for Evolution to begin.

New Political Party?

New Party Time, 9/20/00


Renfrew had just about had it with the current election season. The old hackneyed argument of more versus less government mouthed yet again by Democrats and Republicans, respectively, was of course easy to resolve and not philosophical in the least. Yes, it was purely practical. Two or three major ideas lay at the center of his crashing insight:

a) Bureaucracy is not a matter confined to centralized government. Business bureaucracies also exist, as for example HMOs, though that term is avoided like the plague in that context in the public arena.

b) Government bureaucracy at least claims to have a heart (when it dares to do so), while any such claim is clearly anathema to the bottom line approach of business.

c) Government bureaucracy is far preferable because its graft and corruption are far more visible to our watchdogs than would be the case if bureaucracy were dispersed amongst many private businesses out for themselves. Social Darwinism behind the closed doors of corporate privacy is clearly not in our public interest.

Renfrew knew that his next decision was therefore forced upon him by the operation of his intellect in a huge room where all the other lights had been turned off long ago — i.e., form his own political party as a beacon of truth. This was a frightening prospect inasmuch as he had never run for any political office, not even class president in public school. But nobody out there was championing the cause that called upon his action at this historical moment.

Would the Internet suffice to get his message out, and could that be achieved without recourse to SPAM mailings and with the very little money at his disposal? How could he hope to win any following under his new party slogan, “Let’s keep graft and corruption visible through more centralized government”?

Penitent Penguins of the Falkland Islands

There comes a time in every man’s life when, despite one’s better instincts, one embarks upon an adventure one had, for good reason, avoided over the course of a lifetime. Truly this is such an instance, as I trust will soon become apparent.

Perhaps it was in June 1847, if recollection serves, that whilst conducting my researches anent quite a different issue, I chanced upon a dusty tome in the British Museum bearing the very title of the essay now before you. I daren’t be sidetracked, said I to myself (dutifully attempting to remain unheard by my nearest neighbors in the reading room in question), and yet I grasped the volume with quivering hands and barely began to read its contents; my lips were buttoned so as to avoid further glances of annoyance from my neighbors.

The frontispiece bore the date 9 December 1763 as well as a melodic line with lyrics suggesting some manner of penitential hymn apparently addressed to the Virgin. Though I dreaded perusing yet another theological tract, its aviary connotations continued to pique my curiosity even after I had re-shelved the volume out of sight.

As you may well imagine, I slept only fitfully that night, though I briefly dreamt of a procession, the likes of which I dare not describe whilst maintaining my balance of mind. But I also knew, right there and then, that I must hold that book in my hands once again, though it be my last act in this life.

****** ****** *****

As Fate had it, it was snowing bitterly the next morning (thus one suspects it cannot have been the June of 1847); yet my determination remained firm and I set out upon what was soon to become my life’s new mission (but I daresay I am getting ahead of myself in this tale). I trudged my usual route, one whose features were being covered by the falling snow that day.

Up ahead, lingering at the window of the tobacconist’s shop, I espied Wilfrid Dirfliw, an old acquaintance from our Oxford University days. As usual he was smoking his pipe (and spitting madly upon the walk, as was his custom). His mangy old bloodhound, Pippin, was straining against the leash in a vain effort to access the hindquarters of a loose bitch running by, as one faintly recalls. “Hallo, Doctor,” called out Wilfrid, glancing expectantly in my direction.. For my part, I was exceedingly hesitant to blurt out my momentary preoccupations, and I returned his salutations in as civilized a manner as I could.

“Chilly, eh?” I must have mumbled dismissively, hoping for the best. How startled I was when he replied, with what I took to be a derisive laugh, “Right you are, Doctor. Only a bloody school of Penguins would be happy cavorting about in this weather.” I pretended amusement, whilst fainting from within my own soul, and proceeded onwards as the snow grew deeper. (I heard Wilfrid expectorate behind me and was determined not to take personal offence.) Pippin barked pitifully, or should I perhaps say howled painfully, into the strong wind, as I recall. What might this portend, I wondered? (No, June is definitely out of the question here.)

You cannot imagine my relief when I finally regained entry into my reading room, beyond the somnolent guards. I retraced all my steps of the previous evening, and at length felt my way to the open shelf where the spine of my aforementioned tome fortunately protruded just enough to beckon to my hands. And I began to read of matters both arcane and unimaginable.

***** ****** *******

NYC Chinatown Days of Yore

3/29/08

“Baby Elephant” strikes me as an elegant phrase with which to inaugurate my return to an illustrious writing career that had become sidetracked by other pressing matters many months ago. On second thought, the phrase “Pressed Duck” might provide a more appropriate beginning, and lo, images of Pell and Canal Streets in the Chinatown district of New York City readily come to mind.

Dare I admit in print, as I have often done privately, that quite a bit of my New York State Regents Scholarship of 1955-1959 went towards dining in George Goon’s atmospheric Canton Restaurant on 6 Mott Street? I can still savor the aroma of lobster with shrimp sauce, as well as the shrimp with lobster sauce, amongst other delicacies I enjoyed there during my undergraduate days of totally free education at CCNY, an education that appears to have been chiefly gastronomic, to judge by what I remember best from my college career of so long ago.

In hindsight it seems that the aforementioned elephant might well have blocked the doors of creativity had I let it do so. Nearby there lay a small arcade featuring a fortune-telling captive rooster. Feeling compassion towards this unfortunate soul, I inserted my quarter as instructed, thereby feeding our rooster a measly food pellet, in an act that also pulled a lever that released a small card bearing my daily fortune. I clearly had a fortune to be told, unlike that poor creature trapped in its cage till the end of its days. Ah, existentialism!

Walking a bit further along Mott Street, I often noticed a gift shop with an overhead sign that said “Yick On Lung.” Today, while in the throes of pneumonia, I clearly see that sign again, down across the years. For further solace, I can backtrack and turn the corner onto Pell Street, where there was a mysterious door to my right bearing the message: “Stop! If you haven’t a friend in the world, enter!” What was inside, and is it still there today?

Is my old acquaintance P.D. still squatting outside in the cold, nearby on Canal Street, as I once saw him after he was evicted from our tenement? He had initiated me into the secrets of boiling white rice in a large cauldron: the rice was ready to serve after the steam surrounded the lid and drifted towards the center. The remaining hot water was good for the stomach and could also be used in the preparation of a thick peasant soup variously known as “dzhuk” or “congee.” P. sliced tasty bits of Chinese sausage into the pot, and we had a nice dinner. As I recall, he was hoping we could pool our resources and open a casino together, with “bad girls” as temptresses, and with me in the role of fluent English-speaking manager. And then he was gone.

During the Chinese New Year celebrations, there were always paper dragons and colorful lanterns in the store windows of Chinatown, and with luck I could witness a lovely procession going down the street. For ethnic contrast a few blocks away, one could also partake of the Festival of Saint Gennaro in the Italian neighborhood.

And I walked onwards into other cities and into different times.