Cerebral fortune cookies: recent tweets

I posted 65 tweets in the past 40 days. Sometimes I’d go two or three days without posting anything and then have a burst with about five dandies in two hours.

I could probably do more, but tweeting these cerebral sorts of fortune cookies is even less consequential than deadbeat blogging.

But I do enjoy it. It’s like web graffiti. Plus, as I’ve mentioned, a lot of tweets lead directly to blog posts.

I was ruthless in cutting out weak tweets this month, renewing my vow to never let my total rise above 1,001 tweets. I shaved off more than 150 weaklings. One day I will have the only Twitter account with the essence of pure Tweet.

And won’t that be something!

Try and guess which of the following 25 won’t make the cut six months from now. Hard for me to say. I think this is a strong bunch.

• Tim Tebow's inexplicable gridiron success is the greatest miracle since Cosmo Kramer dropped that Junior Mint in the guy's abdomen.

• Call it a gamble, but I'm off to Kmart to purchase thousands of dollars worth of electronics in the hopes some layaway angel bails me out.

• I can see people 500 years ago thinking earth was flat. Then understanding it's really round. But did anyone ever suggest it was cubic?

• New rules aimed at giving pilots more sleep will ensure they’ll have more time to go out and party all night long.

• Will & Kate seem so friendly and engaging I half expect they're going to show up at my house on Christmas just to say hey. Better tidy up!

• Question for the ages: Am I a pig because I eat too much Christmas ham or does eating too much Christmas ham make me a pig?

• How come you never hear of a kid named Santa? It's a great name with cheerful connotations. Only other name so culturally embargoed? Judas.

• True dreamers fly kites with no strings attached.

• Foolish mortals! You think you can tell time. Time tells you!

• Hoopla over Kim Jung Il's death has me confused. I thought Rudolph was the 'deer leader.

• Since the group formed in '72, The Marshall Tucker Band has featured 27 members, none of them named Marshall or Tucker.

• Pundits refer to Ohio and Pennsylvania as swing states. But Wisconsin has the most playgrounds per capita. It's THE swing state.

• Pittsburgh, Jan. 7, 58 degrees. In 10 years there will be indoor winter theme parks where parents will take kids to experience snow, cold.

• The Lord moves in mysterious ways . . . and so does Tebow when he's flushed from the pocket.

• Tebow throws for John 3:16 against my Steelers. Good for him. Now I hope he throws for 666 against the hated Patriots.

• Wondering how long before our smart phones can shoot bullets or our guns can take pictures. Seems some redundancy there.

• Friend says in four months the new Christmas will be August 14. That's the day Tebow was born on in 1987.

• For reasons of global preservation, the Doomsday Clock should be subject to Daylight Savings Time.

• In honor of the annual Super Bowl nonsense about to swamp us all, my phone number in Roman Numerals is DCCXXIV CMLXI MMDLVIII. Call me!

• Just came to me: Superman would sometimes escape wearing an S cape. Alas, this is destined to become my e=mc2.

• I hope next year's Tebow is like this one in every way except that he's either Muslim or openly gay.

• When Yosemite Sam says, "Say your prayers, rrrrrabbit!" does Bugs Bunny pray to the same God as you and I? Or is He animated and voiced by Mel Blanc?

• I'm opposed to spanking but whenever I hear a father say this is gonna hurt me worse than it hurts you I think he needs to spank harder.

• Does it make me liberal or conservative if Jimmy cracks corn and I don't care?

• Parenting advice from Elton John I consider sound enough to follow: Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.

Thanks for reading. Now go ahead and take the rest of the day off and, yeah, tomorrow, too. Weekends rule!

Not going down with the ship

I mentioned yesterday how I didn’t want to write about the shipwrecked Costa Concordia for reasons of tasteless morbidity.

Well, that was 12 hours ago, more than 248 times the span acceptable to satisfy internet sensibilities regarding matters of taste.

This shipwreck demands our full attention.

Who is Capt. Francesco Schettino? Why didn’t he do more to help his stricken passengers? Hadn’t he ever seen “Titanic?”

Heck, hadn’t he ever seen “The Love Boat?”

Early indications are the ship crashed due to human error. Know what the human error was?

The captain steered the ship. That’s right. He wasn’t supposed to touch the controls.

The ship’s path was set by a computer and Schettino erred by seizing the big wheel and steering the $450 million vessel close to the island of Giglio, Italy, supposedly to impress on-shore residents.

What? The captain of a 4,200-passenger pleasure boat couldn't get laid on board?

And that part about the big wheel? That’s landlubber conjecture. I know there’s a big wheel like that at the local Long John Silver’s. They let me pretend I’m a pirate while the fry cook renders an alleged piece of former fish into something resembling a beach sandal.

If Schettino got in trouble for steering the ship, I wonder what they teach in boat captain school these days.

I’m sensing it’s purely social, like which fork to use and how to tango without stepping on an old widow’s arthritic toes.

The transcripts of the discussion between Schettino and coast guard officer Gregorio Maria De Falco are as gripping as any I’ve ever witnessed.

De Falco, distraught, says to the clueless Schettino, “Go up on the bow -- now! You need to get back on your boat and tell me if there are women and children and what kind of help they need . . . Is that clear? Look, Schettino, you may have saved yourself from the sea, but I will make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Dammit!”

Schettino says something like, gee, it’s dark and the water’s cold, causing De Falco to ignite in furious mockery.

“And what do you want? To go back home, Schettino? It’s dark and you want to go home? Get on the bow of the ship and tell me what can be done. Now!”

This De Falco is a great man. He shouldn’t be patrolling coastal Italy for drug runners and drunk fisherman. He should be solving the European debt crisis.

At one point, Schettino says the tilting of the ship “catapulted” him into the water. Now he’s saying he tripped and fell into the lifeboat, a line straying husbands will do well to remember if their angry wives ever catch them in bed with another woman.

One of the stealth facts of the story that’s heretofore escaped my knowledge was just how big these cruise ships have become. There are 300 of them operating around the world and one of them, the Allure of the Seas, has a capacity nearly three times the Titanic’s 2,228 passengers and crew.

Scientists are blaming global warming for the rise of the oceans. Has anyone thought what would happen if all at once, these water-displacing pleasure behemoths were removed from the seas?

The shorelines might instantly revert to what they were when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.

For not going down with his ship, Schettino is sure to go down in history with Capt. Joseph Hazelwood, drunken skipper of the ill-fated Exxon Valdez.

He is a scoundrel, deserving of condemnation and criminal prosecution.

I’m curious as to from where the sea-faring tradition of going down with the ship stems.

I imagine it has something to do with the captain and the ship being inseparable, but I’ll bet the romantic code’s cost us a lot of good men.

I confess when news of Schettino’s conduct emerged my simple mind went immediately to Capt. Merrill Stubing and “The Love Boat.”

To me, Stubing was the perfect skipper. He was firm, kind and never did anything to put his ship or Charo in distress.

I don’t know whether he’d go down with the ship, but I dimly recall an episode where it hinted he was going to go down with the woman who played Marion Cunningham, Richie’s mom on “Happy Days.”

A pity Schettino wasn’t doing something along those lines below decks when he decided to hot dog it and captain his ship.

Making bad days better

One day after my daughter had a bad day, I started out having one of my own.

Understand, her day was way worse than mine. She’s 11 and must endure the daily repressions of compulsory primary education.

I’m 48, work above a tavern, and no one tells me what to do. More on that later.

She hadn’t felt well and a teacher had scolded her for being tardy with some classroom duties.

She came home, went straight to her room and closed the door. It was rare dark behavior from a girl so sunny her classmates call her “Smiley.”

Luckily, she has a Daddy who’ll move heaven and earth to make her feel better. Her mother was out last night with our youngest, the one so moody I’m convinced her classmates will call her “Stormy.”

So it was just me and Josie.

After about a half hour, I slid a note under her door: “Some days are diamonds. Some days are stones. Let’s talk if you feel like it.” It had crudely drawn smiley faces and frowns where they belonged.

That diamonds and stones part is a memorable line from an old John Denver song I’ve otherwise forgotten.

It’s true.

I guess we need the contrast to appreciate the good days and shake our lethargies on the bad.

She came out and in two hours I found myself wishing she has what she considers a bad day once a month.

She baked some snickerdoodles and I cooked up a noodle and Italian clam sauce dish we both find tasty. She’s still open-minded enough to enjoy two uninterrupted hours of Bruce Springsteen on the satellite radio.

We talked about so much: her friends, her teachers, boys and we danced right up to the edge of what happens when boys she likes start liking her back.

In the background, we heard The Boss sing about the promised land, getting Mary pregnant and taking her down to the river, and the profanity-enlivened tale of what happens when the ragamuffin gunner is returning home like a hungry runaway.

It was just three hours of me realizing, wow, this is why I’m here. It was beautiful.

Now, here’s my bad day:

Near zero sleep last night. Got to the office intent on writing a blog post and found inspiration evasive.

Write about the sunken cruise liner? Too morbid.

The GOP debate? Too political.

The death of a 3,500-year-old tree? Too arboreal -- and I’ve vowed to avoid topics that subliminally include the word “bore” at the, ahem, root.

Know what I decided to do?

Screw it. I’d beaten my noggin against the wall long enough. This writer was writing this day off. I decided to head downstairs for lunch.

But it wasn’t going to be just my usual lunch. It was going to be a dangerous lunch.

I was going to skip the iced tea and have my first beer before The Price is Right showcase.

And I was going to sip suds and banish my isolation with an afternoon of camaraderie and laughter as soon as any of my friends walked in.

But on this down day none of my friends were there to cheer me up and Dave, the owner, was just busy enough that he didn’t have time to jabber.

So I had one beer and spent lunch reading the paper all by my lonesome and returned to my office wondering if my bad day would ever improve.

It did, and without any alcoholic assist.

Here’s what happened: I spent about an hour thinking about the little things I did last night to vanquish the sadness of someone who matters most.

And I turned a stone into a diamond.

Note: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s “Cutting Edge” column on the Sunday Forum pages featured a mention of Eight Days To Amish, thus allowing me to revel in the irony that something with the word “Amish” in the title is considered cutting edge.

A real pisser of a national scandal

I predicted via Twitter four days ago that Rick Perry would soon announce he supports and encourages U.S. Marines who wish to urinate on slain and captured foes and anyone they suspect of looking even a little bit French.

Except for the part about the French, I was right on the money. The man who grew up partying at a camp called “Niggerhead,” said on Sunday, shucks, when a man’s gotta go, a man’s gotta go.

“Obviously, 18- and 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s what happened here,” he said, adding the most disturbing aspect of the whole episode was -- surprise, surprise -- Obama opposed it.

Inflammatory stupidity is Perry’s knee-jerk reaction to any issue.

Or would it in this case be a jerk-off reaction?

Growing up in America, I never thought I’d evolve into the role of the nation’s moral conscience, but 9/11 and 10 endless years of war have thrown many more cerebral thinkers off kilter -- and don’t mistake my use of “cerebral thinkers” to conclude I’m referring to the current Texas governor (or the last one).

Now, let’s all pay attention: We’re the good guys. We don’t piss down on the dead. We lift up the living.

We’re the Berlin Airlift, The Peace Corp and The Marshall Plan.

The trade surplus of all that’s good that America’s given the world will never be exhausted. We gave the world the cure for polio, the iPhone and Bugs Bunny.

We’re Benjamin Franklin, Elvis Presley, and Arnold Palmer.

It wasn’t self-evident that all men were created equal until we said it was.

There’s never been a people more devoted to helping the helpless. We’re the nation of good intentions and there is tremendous value in that for people who like to travel around the world, walk into a strange place and say, “Hello! I’m an American!”

It’s the sort of thing we shouldn’t so carelessly piss away.

A friend of mine said, “Strapping bombs to a kid and sending him into a crowd to murder innocents is fine for them to do, but it’s wrong for us to piss on dead terrorists?”

Well, yes, my friend, it is.

We do unto others as we’d have them do unto ourselves.

Notice, it’s not “we doo-doo unto others . . .”

Because there’s this: There are a lot of good men and women in harm’s way who joined the armed forces for the very reasons I mentioned. They want to help good people and kill bad ones.

They believe that stuff about winning hearts and minds. They are guys like Pat Tillman or guys who are inspired by guys like Pat Tillman.

And some of them are going to be captured and some of them are going to be killed.

For God’s sake, why would you do something that would put your buddies in any more jeopardy?

As justification for his pro-urination stance, the idiot Perry cited a picture of General George Patton “doing the same thing in the Rhine River.”

Here’s the obvious difference. Patton never did it on the body of a dead enemy; he did it on a body of water.

Like Patton and Winston Churchill, also cited by Perry for urinating on a German fortification, I’m a worldly man prone to enjoying a ceremonial pee.

I’ve peed in both American oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and leaked in great lakes named Michigan, Erie, Superior and, of course, the one pronounced “Urine.”

I’ve peed off a 7,000-foot Canadian Rocky precipice and once took a squirt from high atop Old Smokey. There’s something about peeing from a proud perch that always thrills men like me.

Maybe someday we’ll mature and give yodeling a shot, but for now that’s just the way we are.

But one perch from which you’ll never catch us tinkling is atop the moral high ground.

We understand what Perry and those four now-disgraced Marines do not: Pissing on anyone pisses off everyone.

That’s enough preaching from me for now.

I gotta go.

And rest assured, it’ll be someplace responsible.

Proper prayer posture

I was in the fetal position in bed praying that God doesn’t discount the prayers of guys too lazy to get down on their knees to worship.

I mostly pray in bed with my fingers crossed like they taught in Sunday school. But unlike Sunday school, I’m naked and usually cuddled up against my wife, not at all what they teach in Sunday school, at least in the boring ones I attended.

My most traditional Christian prayer posture is at the bedside of my daughters. I try and pray with them every night when I’m not out in the bar getting all gooned up with my buddies.

I cherish those moments -- and I mean the ones with my daughters (and, yeah, the ones with the guys, too).

With the daughters, I think if God grades prayers he’d give mine an A.

Knees on the floor, head bowed, hands folded, prayers concise -- I’m talking as much to the daughters as I am the Lord. I ask God to help the sick, the lonely and the sad. Really, I don’t expect God is going to do any of that stuff so I want the girls to know it would be nice if they pitched in and sort of did what we all wish He would.

I never really thought much about prayer posture until about five years ago when I remember seeing a pictorial study of President George W. Bush absorbed in prayer. Watching him in prayer was like watching a magician try to bend spoons with his mind.

He looked deadly sincere, like if he furrowed his brow deep enough God was going to stop watching Tim Tebow play football and say, “Holy cow! George Bush has something really important to say!”

The Bush presidency really challenged my faith. I always wondered what he was praying for.

I can’t imagine he prayed he’d preside over a failed presidency and global condemnation over his unholy Iraq war and a wrecked economy.

The only prayer of his I can imagine God possibly answered in the affirmative was maybe, “Dear Lord, please let one of my daughters grow up to be a Today Show correspondent.”

At least that’s working out.

The Muslims are fierce prayers. Five times a day they tilt toward Mecca and assume postures fitness crazed Americans do only in yoga class when they want to achieve a tight fanny.

Hearing children pray is a delight. My all-time favorite was when our youngest was 4. It was the evening before Easter and I said a very moving prayer about about the resurrection.

After my amen, the little one chimed in, “And God bless the Easter Bunny and God bless yourself,” a perfect mingling of the sacred and the secular.

I’ve said a lot of prayers with my fingers gripping a steering wheel, and I used to say a lot of prayers in lecture halls holding, not a Bible, but a No. 2 pencil. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve even said prayers while bent over 6-foot par putts.

God’s been about 50-50 on granting the latter.

To try and gain some insight on proper prayer posture, I engaged the source men and women of faith reach for whenever they seek spiritual guidance.

Yep, I Googled it.

The Biblical Research Institute cites chapters and verses where the Bible tells how holy folks prayed.

It cites examples of men and women communing with God while kneeling, standing, sitting, lying down on a bed (yes!), or prostrate on the ground with their noses in the dirt.

It says there is not one recommended prayer posture: “Any attempt to select one as superior and indispensable over the others lacks biblical support.”

I guess that means Tebowing is okay, too.

Faith in this world of woe is often elusive. I spoke with two people this week who are questioning their faith.

I encouraged them to struggle through their doubt and believe.

I’m perfectly happy deadening the logical part of my brain in favor of thinking there is a God who loves us and wants us to love one another.

All we can do is pray our prayers have even a prayer of being heard.

Twinkie bankruptcy: time to nut up or shut up

I was overcome by an alien impulse as I strolled down nutritionally desolate aisle 6 of the local grocery store.

Seize the Twinkies!

News that Hostess Brands, makers of Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos, was going bankrupt had apparently triggered a run on the golden sponge cakes with creamy fillings.

Some Twinkie fiends had already laid siege to the shelf. There were only three 10-packs of the indestructible treats still for sale for $4.29 each.

The boxes show the smilin’ Twinkie the Kid cowboy, the creation of some former art student who may once have fancied him or herself the next Picasso, and a supersized Twinkie with the nitpicky legal disclaimer “Product Enlarged to Show Detail.”

That Twinkies were sinking is something that just last year would never have registered with me.

It’s probably been more than 30 years since I’d last eaten one.

If that makes me sound like some sort of snack food snob, it’s misleading.

I eat tons of crap. I love chips, pretzels and about any dark sweetness produced in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a lovely company town that looks like all company towns would look if companies were run by 6 year olds.

And, as I’ve said before, the day chickens start laying Cadbury eggs is the day I become a chicken farmer.

So while the Twinkie’s never tickled my taste buds, something about its forbidden waste always tempted.

The reason I felt compelled to start hoarding Twinkies has less to do with the unsinkable pastry -- for experimental purposes I just submerged one an hour ago (still afloat) -- than it does with Tallahassee.

Not the city.

I’m talking about Tallahassee, the redneck zombie slayer.

Tallahassee is the name of the Woody Harrelson character from the uproarious 2009 movie, “Zombieland.”

It’s a difficult comedy to sell to dainty viewers who are put off by films that include graphic scenes of the living dead feasting on human flesh.

So now when people ask me what “Zombieland” is about, I never say it’s about zombies.

I say it’s about one man’s quest for the world’s last Twinkie.

And it is.

Tallahassee -- to prevent from becoming too familiar, they call each other by their hometowns -- realizes that the zombie apocalypse means production of his beloved Twinkies has forever ceased.

Somewhere exists, he knows, a box of Twinkies.

“Not just any box of Twinkies, the last box of Twinkies that anyone will enjoy in the whole universe. Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, life’s little Twinkie gauge is gonna go . . . empty.”

So, being a careful sort, I had to buy a 10-pack.

Like I said, I haven’t eaten a Twinkie since the late 1970s, but something about them has always beckoned. It’s just so iconic.

It’s the subject of a book I have to get around to reading. It’s Steve Ettlinger’s “Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover how the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined) and Manipulated into What America Eats.”

Ettlinger explores how things like Polysorbate 60, Sodium Caseinate and beef fat become part of a simple snack cake.

The concept is pure genius.

I showed Val the box of Twinkies like it was a new puppy.

“Look at this!” I said. “I’ll bet I haven’t had a Twinkie since 1979!”

“That’s probably about when those Twinkies were made,” she observed.

Deciding to savor the anticipation, I put the box aside until the kids were in bed.

Coincidentally, Val had taped a movie made at roughly the same time she suspects the Twinkies were. It was “Broadcast News” from 1976.

What a great, prophetic movie.

It’s funny, because I grew up in the ‘70s and remember it being a time of innocent joy. There was The Partridge Family, Speed Racer, The Steel Curtain and the dawning awareness that life was getting more interesting as one-by-one the girls began filling out their sweaters.

“Broadcast News” reminded me of all the unholy tumult that was off the radar for a boy who’d yet to grasp the importance of the daily news.

There was Patty Hearst, the Munich Olympics, Pol Pot, Watergate, the Nixon pardon and the chaotic conclusion of the Vietnam War.

It wasn’t nearly as idyllic as I remember. Sure, parts of it were decent, but overall it hurt a lot of people and left a bad aftertaste.

You know what?

So did the Twinkie.

Men with tails making monkey out of me

Shortly after losing to Alabama in the national title game Monday night, LSU Tiger coach Les Miles told reporters his boys “played their tails off.”

The remark caused me to sit up.

His players had tails?

This was extraordinary news.

It was confirmed later when I heard a distraught LSU player say “we got our tails kicked” in the 21-0 loss.

I hadn’t heard nor could tell by viewing that players from one of the nation’s best college football teams had tails. You’d think the uniforms would have needed obvious tailoring.

I’ve always been drawn to stories about human birth oddities. I think this curiosity stems from reading “Weekly World News,” which often features stories like, “Baby Born with Wooden Leg!”

The WWN at one time or another has published stories about babies born with tattoos, ear rings, halos and false teeth.

I remember reading one story about a baby born without bones. His parents used to carry him around in a bucket. There was a picture of this smiling little face cascading down the steps like a human waterfall.

I like to ask prospective fathers what they’ll do if their newborn is born with a tail.

I don’t pose this to mothers. They are often in a delicate emotional state and would be horrified at the thought their offspring might be different from any of the other neighborhood morons, as if goofball homogeny is some sort of genetic virtue.

Evolutionarily speaking, babies born with tails aren’t much of a stretch. Nearly all human embryos have tails that are one-sixth the size of the actual embryo.

In adult scale, that means a surviving tail would hang down just past the butt cheeks.

It’s a pity most of our human tails are eventually absorbed into the fetus because it’s hard to dislike any creature with a tail.

I can’t think of wagging tails without thinking of Casey, our beloved golden retriever who was with us from 1992 through 2007. His tail was like a big shaggy tennis racket.

It was forever clearing coffee tables of newspapers, wine glasses and microwave TV dinners.

The mess never bothered us because Casey was just such a big, lovable galoot.

Today I have a lot of friends who fit that description so I don’t miss Casey all that much.

If LSU players had tails, I’m surprised they didn’t play better.

A human tail in some cultures is believed to bestow God-like powers.

That’s the case with Chandre Oram, a West Bengal, Indian, tea smith. His 13-inch tail has made him an object of devotion to many who believe him to be the human incarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman.

What I read in Wikipedia about Hanuman is too confusing to repeat here, but he must be a monkey god of great humility.

If anything about me led strangers to conclude I was worthy of adoration, you can bet I wouldn’t be schlepping tea to parched Indians.

Some of Oram’s devotees claim to have enjoyed miraculous healings after touching his tail.

So Oram is remarkable as much for his restraint as for his tail.

I know many, many men who would use the surplus appendage to convince women it had healing powers. They’d lure them into dark rooms for therapeutic petting. Only these men would be fraudulent about what they let the women pet.

One other factoid from the on-line en-pseudo-pedia: Oram says the tail makes him think he’s part monkey, just like Hanuman, because he likes to jump, climb and eat bananas.

I don’t see a correlation there. Most men enjoy those things.

Perhaps further study is needed.

We need to find for observation a sampling of monkeys who’ve lost tails in accidents or been born without them.

It would be interesting to see if they display urges to spend long hours in bars talking sports and spousal dissatisfactions.

Who knows? They might make dandy bloggers.

Even with the anatomical alterations, I’m sure a real monkey would still have a compelling tale or two.