In India, trains & elephants share the tracks with predictable results

(736 words)

I remain so troubled by the news story I read last Thursday that I’m urging a drastic solution and here it is:

All train travel everywhere must cease until we can ensure the wild elephant herds anywhere can no longer linger on the train tracks.

If you’re sensitive to gruesome news details, I advise you to move along right now, something I wish an ill-fated herd of Indian elephants had known to do.

What happened near New Delhi is truly horrific.

This from Thursday’s “New York Times:” “A passenger train speeding through northeast India barreled into a herd of wild elephants as they crossed a set of tracks late Wednesday, killing five.”

Imagine how that poor engineer unloaded when he got home and his wife asked, “And how was your day?”

You’d think with ears like that, your standard elephant would be able to hear and grasp the significance of an approaching train whistle.

A simple search will, I’m sure, provide you with all the gory details. I will not. 

Funny, but it was just two weeks ago today when I warned against the over-use of the term “train wreck” to describe things like government shut-downs and botched websites.

Those aren’t train wrecks. An actual train wreck, I said, is much messier.

Little did I know.

Trains into elephants? Do you know how big a train is? Do you know how big an elephant is? The average elephant is about 12-feet high and weighs about six tons.

They’re like trains with trunks!

I’m reminded of the Paul Hogan line from “Crocodile Dundee.”

“You call that a knife? This is a knife!”

So let’s cool it with all the stupid Beltway “train wreck” analogies.

It gets worse. In India, the elephant is closely associated with the Hindu god of wisdom. They are used frequently in temple festivals, marriages and important social functions.

So anyway you slice it this is no trifling hillbilly roadkill. The elephant is a beloved symbol of national heritage.

It would be like if here in America Bill Cosby weighed 12,000 pounds and was dawdling on the track right as the 5:15 came roaring ‘round the bend.

Imagine the horror -- times five!

My first thought was, well, who are they going to get to clean that up? The carnage of five mutilated elephants is terrifying to conjure, our worst slasher flicks couldn’t begin to do it justice.

Our home is in the woods. We share the acreage with ample deer herds. The deer, much more nimble than your average elephant, are frequently struck by vehicles. And it without fail always makes me equal parts sad and sick.

But if one dies in our yard -- and that has happened -- we call PennDOT and they send one stout gent with thick work gloves and a truckload of dead deer to swing by and heave the battered carcass into the bed. What they do with them then, I do not know.

I’m sorry to see any creature get hurt, but my main concern is just getting the thing the hell off my yard before the afternoon school bus stops by to drop the second grader off.

Now, let’s change “deer” to “elephant” and “vehicle” to “speeding locomotive.”

I think it would take teams of men with power tools and cranes to clean it all up. I don’t know how any man earning probably a few meager rupees an hour could ever get over the duty.

I’d rather be ordered to mop up nuclear waste.

The story said India is home to more than 26,000 wild elephants. That’s incredible. 

My ignorant impression of India is it’s so overcrowded they don’t have room for even another Volkswagen. 

And then there’s this: Thousands of miles of train tracks run through the elephant habitats and environmental groups have been pressuring transportation officials to urge slowing the trains from 50 to 25 mph to reduce the likelihood of collisions. Seventeen have died in train wrecks this year.

Officials have refused to do so saying it would hamper economic development.

We here in America have a name for the ensuing chaos to which that kind of narrow thinking inevitably leads.

We call it a train wreck, a term meant to signify temporary political inconvenience.

It must mean something completely different in India.

It must mean it’s time to pull on the hip waders and fire up the chainsaws.

Related . . .

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"Breaking Dad" considering a life of crime

(701 words)

I was driving through a gritty section of rural western Pennsylvania the other day and thought, man, an enterprising meth chef could make a fortune in these parts.

Then I wondered logically if I might be just the right guy for the job.

I don’t think many people would be surprised if it turned out I had a criminal sideline. It would help explain my frequent “working” vacations, ample free time and ability to coast through life with no visible means of support.

I wondered how my wife would react if she found out I’d gone into cooking meth to make ends meet.

Who am I kidding?

You and I both know she’d be overjoyed.

It would show the first real initiative I’ve taken since I announced one summer about seven years ago that I was on my own undertaking an important home improvement project.

I saw it through and today during the warmer months I can often be found napping in the comfortable hammock I screwed up between two big oaks out back. And a hammock remains one of the few things a guy can really screw up that has some recreational benefits.

Of course, me being a meth cook would have many parallels to Walter White, the star of the recently-concluded AMC show, “Breaking Bad.”

You remember it. Walter, like me, was 50, struggling with his obligations, family discontent and chronic illness. The only difference is Walter was susceptible to cancer relapses and I’m susceptible to Saturday hangovers.

But in the end -- SPOILER ALERT! -- it all worked out fine. Walter made a fortune selling meth, fell back in love with his wife and with Jesse Pinkman opened a faith-healer church where together they revived the bullet-riddled bodies of Hank and Gomie and everyone lived happily ever after. Well, everyone except Lidia.

At least I think that’s what happened. I might have been tripping on a meth bender during the finale.

But Walter is a true inspiration, I’m sure, to many middle-aged men more nervy than me.

They see with just a little risk how much money there is to be made. So desperate men and many women, too, sit there and think, “If I play my cards right I can make a fortune leading a life of crime.”

No one in history has ever said that about a life of blogging.

But meth kingpin would be difficult for me because I’m uncomfortable with confrontation and confrontation is what guys like Tuco and the rest of the creepy Salamanca boys are all about.

White collar crime seems suitable until I realize it probably involves more math than meth and I only have one white collar shirt.

I wish I had the skill set to be a gentleman jewel thief. It has an appealing Robin Hood element to the crime: me stealing from the rich and giving to the poor (and that again would be mostly me).

My favorite criminals of all time are probably Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker. They were the dapper Paul Newman/Robert Redford characters from the great 1973 movie, “The Sting.”

The movie features maybe a dozen great cons against people who mostly had it coming, especially mob boss Doyle Lonegan, as played by Robert Shaw.

There were crooked card games, heists, switcheroos, wire fraud, faked horse race results, and in the end a massive con so cleverly executed that the mark never even knew he’d been had. It’s beautiful.

I saw it when I was 10 and remember thinking even then, wow, that sure looks like a great way to make a living. You spend all your time in bars and pool halls scheming with your buddies and, then, in the end you get the great big score.

I guess I’ve lived up to the first half of that, persevering as I have through what even I often consider a life of crime minus all the crime.

It’s a shame that one big score remains so elusive.

Somedays that really stings.

So I hereby promise I’ll initiate the necessary career alterations if one day it seems like it’s never going to pay off or the instant it simply stops being so much fun.

Related . . .

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Sunday Re-Run: Movember & my magnificent mustache

I can’t let Movember pass without re-posting one of my occasional tributes to the hairy ribbon. Writing so often about my facial hairs makes me wonder what I’d write about if I were a woman. I’m guessing breasts. I’d say we may never know, but I remain open-minded about the future and all the crazy twists it can bring so I’ll leave it open to speculation.

This has a link below to my ’11 story about the Aussie origins of Mo-vember.

Enjoy your Sunday!

(730 words)

Chances are as you’re sitting there reading this on your computer or smartphone, I’m standing in some brightly lit bathroom admiring the reflection of my mustache in the mirror.

It’s magnificent. It’s salt ‘n’ pepper. It’s unruly. It’s better than Tom Selleck’s.

It’s a sad fact of life that as men age our mustaches become more splendid even as the faces to which they are attached continue their inexorable march to hell.

You may not know it, but we are nearing the end of the month of the mustache.

Yes, there’s only two more shopping days in Movember.

Movember is an Aussie import -- “mo” is Aussie slang for mustache -- that grew out of some friends seeking a playful way to call attention to prostrate cancer awareness.

If it seemed like a bigger deal last year it might be because greedy NHL owners are locking out greedy NHL players.

Hockey players had really embraced Movember. At least half of the players grew really cheesy mustaches that had people wondering if hockey players were moonlighting as porn stars.

They wish, I’m sure.

Just hearing about uncomfortable things like prostrate exams makes the butt cheeks of most men tighten right up -- and when you’re talking about prostrate exams nothing could be more counter-productive.

But I like Movember more for its focus on facial hair.

I’ve been tending a mustache ever since I was about 20. 

I shaved it once when it was still a toddler, maybe 3 years old.

My late father hated it and challenged me to a round of golf. If I lost, I’d shave; if he lost, he’d grow one.

Dad played that day like Arnold Palmer without all the dignity and scruples. He was a terrible golfer, but a very skilled cheater.

“I golf for my health,” he’d say, “and I feel better when I can tell people I shot a good score.”

I had to admit his logic was impeccable.

My efforts to bust him kicking the ball to a better position distracted my otherwise superior game. He kicked the part of me doctors need to access when they’re checking my prostrate.

So I shaved and immediately resumed growing it back. I had for the next 10 years what could be called a spite mustache.

I could give my father the finger simply by smiling at him.

But he was right. It was a terrible mustache. Had zero character. 

So now my mustache is about 25. It could walk into a bar by itself and not have to worry about getting carded.

I haven’t grown up, but it has.

And we’re very close. It understands I’ll always have its back.

It has character, depth, and it’s now superior to Tom Selleck’s.

Selleck played a key role mustache history. He was one of the world’s most handsome men in the ‘90s. And everyone loved him, the girls because he was sexy and men because he was a real guy’s guy. “Magnum, P.I.” still holds up.

I always admire anyone who is both beautiful and funny, or beautiful and smart, especially women because if you’re beautiful you don’t have to be anything else.

In fact, you jeopardize your beauty simply by opening your mouth.

My brother was taller and more appealing to the babes than me. When he grew his mustache everyone said he looked like Magnum.

They said I looked like I didn’t get enough sleep.

Growing the mustache didn’t change any of that. So I gravitated to bars where it was dark and the girls either weren’t so picky or just too drunk to care.

I was thinking about all this when I saw an ad for Selleck’s show “Blue Bloods.”

He’s really gone to hell, hasn’t he? What happened to him? He looks like such a mope.

He used to be so cheerful and funny. I haven’t heard anyone say, “Man, you have to watch ‘Blue Bloods.’ Selleck’s still got it.”

You know what I think happened?

He betrayed his mustache. He trimmed it to surface whiskers and put paint on the stubble. Clearly, he’s dying his hair. That’s disgraceful.

I vow to never dye my mustache or do anything to depress its joyful individuality.

I do this because I know it could get even with me the way Selleck’s is getting even with him.

And I don’t want to do anything to risk losing my mo-jo.

Related . . .

• Movember getting hairy for mustache men

• How I look with half a mustache

5-hour swim meets too long, driving me crazy

(802 words)

Concerned friends are asking me how I’m coping. They want to know if what I predicted would be one of the worst things that ever happened to me is as bad as I pessimistically thought it would be.

I tell them I was mistaken.

It’s worse.

Our oldest daughter joined the swim club.

I’m never near the water, but I feel like I’m the one that’s drowning.

Saturday the team is scheduled to have a meet that starts at 9 a.m. and is expected to grind on until almost 2 p.m.

And this is one of the more convenient ones.

Most of them have been from 4 to about 9 p.m. on Saturday, times when I’m conditioned by cheerful habit to be to be in my jammies in front of the fire engrossed in college football and Kentucky bourbon.

Instead, I’m up at the swim meet. In street clothes. Sober.

See why I’m riled?

It takes a brave father these days to admit he detests having to attend one of his daughter’s school events. That makes me eligible for service medals.

I’m thinking The Purple Heart.

Or maybe The Black ‘n’ Blue Butt. Those cramped bench seats are a real pain in the ass.

Let me make this clear: I adore my daughter and will happily stare at her for days on end just to savor every observable detail of a life that is flying by faster than Michael Phelps in the 200 meter butterfly.

That’s why I enjoy taking her to practice three or four nights a week from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. and would never dream of complaining (even though that time cruelly conflicts with the heart of the Happy Hour where I know all the boys are crestfallen whenever I’m not there).

When she’s practicing I can take a book and spread out in the uncrowded stands. I glance at the book, but most of the time I’m watching my first born swim. It’s magical.

I love that she’s part of a team. I love watching her encourage her teammates and learn a discipline that could help keep her fit and competitive her whole life.

And I love that I can do all that in 60 jiffy minutes, and that she’s involved the entire time.

That’s about what it was like when my old man took me to play youth hockey. Games lasted about an hour and I was on the ice about half the time.

And, damn, I was good.

It’s not at all that way with the marathon meets.

These team meets can last nearly five hours, involve as many as 75 six-lane individual heats and a cast of thousands.

My daughter is in three of them. Three!

And she’s in the water for maybe four minutes.

That means I have a vested interest in her swimming more slowly so I’d get to see her more. But that’s not the way swim meets work. I need to encourage her to go faster! Faster! Faster!

So the more she improves, the less I’ll get to see her swim.

But the event leaves me plenty of time to observe other parents and I can only include that some of them have been sniffing chlorinated water for so long that it’s damaged their ability to think logically.

Some of them think this all makes sense. In fact, some of them think screaming at 13-year-olds to swim faster is reasonable.

It might be, too, if any of the kids were capable of swimming with their ears above the water line.

And while I adore my children, I confess I’m mostly indifferent to everyone else’s.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to see any of them sink to the bottom of the pool when they jump in the water, but observing them splash around in the pool just isn’t one of my priorities on Saturday evenings.

I’m not offended if you feel the same way about the success of my darling daughters, as idiotic as that concept may be.

Yes, it takes a village, but the chief gets to prioritize who gets served first in our own teepees.

Worst of all, this conceivably could be part of my life for the next six years, 15 if her 7-year-old sister follows in her fin steps.

I’m not sure I can take it.

Happily, on Saturday I won’t have to. I’ve been invited to a Barnes & Noble-sponsored book signing at the Carnegie Free Library in Connellsville from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

It’s the book that contains large passages that have caused many readers to surmise I’m a wise and loving father.

If they only knew.

They’d think I’m all wet.

I guess when you’re a pool parent that sort of comes with the territory.

Related . . .

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Now ear this!

Farewell trans fats! What'll take your place?

(743 words)

I wonder what we’re going to do with all that excess trans fat and if it’s too late to make it irresistible to insects like bed bugs.

I’m one of those guys who never paid too much attention to trans fats because I have a simple view of nutrition: the more fancy the packaging the more likely it’d be unwise for me to put what’s inside it inside me.

Take Lucky Charms. I’ve loved them ever since I was a kid.

To be accurate, I’ve loved about one quarter of them since I was a kid. Yes, I love the marshmallow part and disdain the frosted toasted oat they use as marginally nutritious decoys.

I’m what you call a Lucky Charms prospector. I pour a big bowl, add milk and then with surgical skill begin to scoop out all brown turd-like oats and hustle them down the gullet as quickly as possible. 

After about seven or eight minutes of tasteless cereal, I have -- voila! -- an entire island of magically delicious charms clinging together in a ocean of milk.

Then begins the feast. I take hearty spoonfuls dripping with the treats. When they’ve been decimated, I guzzle the candy-flavored milk and repeat the whole process maybe two more times.

Now, I know that’s not healthy. That’s why I only buy Lucky Charms for breakfast about as often as we tinker with the hour hand on the clocks.

The cereal helps define my snazzy-packaging-equals-nutritional-desolation theory.

Do you recall it? Each package is orgasmic enough to qualify as cereal porn.

Out of the cereal are bursting three silver-dollar sized rainbow marshmallows each riding rainbow waves exploding out of a milk-splashed bowl. Observing this candy euphoria is the chipper little leprechaun who’s seen only from the waist up because, I guess, General Mills executives figure it wouldn’t help sell cereal if they treated us all to his leprechaun erection pup-tenting his knickers.

You never see this kind of packaging promoting the carrots.

That’s because healthy eaters know we need to eat fruits and vegetables to stay fit.

I typically eat fruit for breakfast and a big salad for lunch along with soup, a sandwich or a piece of fish. Dinner’s often a family crap shoot. Val’s very scrupulous about healthy options, but like many go-go American families we’d get docked for the occasional pizza or frozen dinners.

What’s the least appealing consumption of my day?

It’s by far the salad.

I enjoy my fruit, but all you need to know about salad is they make salad dressings to choke it all down.

But I grudgingly eat it -- usually without dressing -- because I know it’s good for me.

Where I differ from more staunch nutritionally-minded folk is I try and make sure each day I consume at least one or two portions of things I know are bad for me.

See, people who eat healthy do so because they want to make sure they live right.

I eat my share of chocolate, Fritos, candy corn and other refugees from the grocery store crap food aisle because I want to sure I die right.

Too many people eat right because they want to extend their lives.

I eat wrong because the years that others are adding are the ones I don’t want to live.

I’d like to live to be about 80, but dread the thought of living to be about 84. I’ve seen too many old-timers complain about what a bitter hell those last four years are. Saw it with my grandfather, who lived to be 97 and spent the last 10 years of his life praying nightly he’d die.

My own father died at 76. He was fine in the morning and gone by dinner, victim of an aortic embolism. That was one tough night, but in hindsight it was beautiful.

I don’t know if trans fats cause aortic embolism, but if they do then I think they should be prescribed in what I guess you’d paradoxically call healthy doses.

I read a list of things that will be less tasty when deprived of their trans fats. The list included donuts, frozen pizza, movie theatre and microwave popcorn, coffee creamer and canned frosting.

For whom are those items daily staples?

Not me.

Reducing my consumption of any of those items isn’t going to kill me.

I’ll just have to find something else that eventually will.

Related . . .

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For big profits, USPS needs to start mailing people

(748 words)

News that Amazon is partnering with the USPS to deliver Sunday packages is being hailed as a boon for those of us who root for Ben Franklin’s federal baby to survive.

It just doesn’t go far enough.

The post office has lost $41 billion since ’07.

This should come as no surprise. Postage is way too cheap. It is still miraculous to me that any organization can deliver, say, a poetic love letter from New York clear to San Francisco and have it only take four days and cost just 46-cents.

Of course, those same two hypothetical lovers could porn-Skype for free and today  everything is all about instant gratification and that’s the problem. 

But I want the post office to succeed and delivering Amazon’s packages on Sundays won’t quite cut it.

What will?

It needs to begin mailing people.

This idea occurred to me last evening when I was sitting in the bar and Mailman Joe walked in and announced he was going to order a drink in Klingon. And he did.

Or so he said. There were no Klingons in the bar who could verify the authenticity. Tuesday must be Klingon bowling night.

Either way, the English speaking bartender responded with what I guess you’d call working man’s sign language -- he flipped him off -- and brought him the same thing he always does.

But Joe’s a perfect example of why people still love the creaky and often inefficient postal service. It has a human face, even when it’s speaking Klingon.

Most of us grew up with a regular mailman or woman showing up nearly every day with a smile and stack of mail, often containing actual human letters for us to cherish

People still connect to mail carriers. Take Joe, always a lively source of conversation. He said -- in English, by the way -- that the holiday postal rush is already underway and he’d been busting his hump all day delivering an assortment of oddly shaped packages.

I told him about the time I did a story for National Enquirer that ran under the headline, “The Post Office REALLY Delivers!” It was about the day we mailed an assortment of oddball objects around the country. Items included a rubber snake, a set of false teeth, a hula hoop and a big bag of goo.

Understand, none of these items were wrapped. We’d put the stamps on the addressed objects and send them on their merry way.

Delivery rate? One hundred percent!

It didn’t surprise Joe: “Yeah, we’ll deliver anything,” he said.

Anything?

Here in Western Pennsylvania, yesterday brought winter’s first bite. It snowed about four inches and if past trends hold true, it’ll likely suck being a human here for the next four months.

I asked Joe if he’d mail me to Key West.

He gave it some thought and said, “I don’t think we could mail a human being.”

I was determined to find out how much it would cost. I asked about the cost of shipping a 190-pound package that far.

“You couldn’t get a package that weighed that much up on the scale.”

What if the package could climb up on the scale itself?

I’d stumped him. I could see he wanted this to work. He’s a real idea guy and if he could figure out a way to earn the postal service more revenue maybe he’d get a better route where poodles outnumber the Rottweilers.

Chuck chimed in that being all cramped up in the unpressurized belly of a freight transport plane at 30,000 feet would likely kill me.

C’mon! How much worse could it be than flying commercial?

And I could probably talk my way into the cockpit. Heck, I could even be an apprentice postal worker for a day to help defray my delivery costs. I could walk Joe’s route with him and deliver the other side of the street, further slicing postal expenses.

Multiply that across the country and imagine all the added revenue.

Most of today’s mail is aptly considered junk.

Many kids today get their Aunt Minnie birthday wishes through social media. They don’t know what it’s like to open the mailbox and discover the joy something so human as a hand-written letter can bring.

So just imagine the joy -- and revenue -- it would bring if during this holiday season the post office delivered something truly human.

Hello Aunt Minnie!

Or in case the old babe speaks Klingon, that’d be “nuqneH, Aunt Minnie!”

Related . . .

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