I'm gaining on Jackie Robinson!

I didn't know that Linda Lovelace was dead.

For those of you old enough to remember, Linda Lovelace was the star of Deep Throat, unquestionably the most talked-about porn film of the 1970s.

And guess what? She lived exactly 10 days less than I have. How ABOUT that?

Welcome to one of my addictions. It's a web site called Dead-or-Alive-Info.org. This web site can tell you whether almost any famous or once-famous person is alive or dead, and if they're dead, it will tell you when they died and sometimes, how.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It sounds ghoulish, doesn't it? You're thinking I'm some grown-up incarnation of the character Bud Cort played in the film Harold and Maude. Remember that one? Until he meets Ruth Gordon, he's a kid so relentlessly morbid that his hobby is attending funerals.

I encourage you to visit Dead-or-Alive-Info.org. But unless you have a thick skin, don't question the accuracy of anything you read there in anything so froward as an e-mail. The webmeister is a guy named Kent. I have had some dealings with him. "Prickly" would be a charitable way to describe Kent. He usually responds to corrections with snarky replies. He LOVES being right, and if you turn out to be wrong, he'll tell you so in very nasty tones.

That said, I occupy a distinguished position vis-a-vis this web site. Kent has a standing offer for all of his cyber-visitors: if you can catch one famous dead person before Kent does, you'll win a $10 reward.

As far as I know, I'm the only one in the history of this website who has actually won the ten bucks. One day I came across the obituary of Mercedes McCambridge, the great actress, then checked the site and Kent had her listed as alive. I informed him of this, and he sent me the $10.

But this is how prickly the guy can be. In a subsequent e-mail I made reference to having won the prize. He quickly came back with "You didn't win it, you earned it." How prickly can you get?

Kent's website doesn't just list dates of births and deaths. It has other swoopy lists like "People Alive Over 85," "People Who Lived to 100" and "Put 'Em In Order Quizzes." (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Tsar Alexander I, and so on.)

Not too very long ago Kent added a wrinkle that I find barrels of fun: "Who Have You Outlived?"

Now, this is cool. You poke in your own date of birth, and then the website tells you how many days you've been alive. Then, listed above and below you are the names of famous people who, respectively, lived fewer days than you have, and lived more days than you have. These are the people you have to catch up with.

Another cool twist. You can set "Who Have You Outlived" for high, medium or low, which gets you paired up with "A" List Celebrities, "B" List Celebrities and finally, people like Sonny Tufts and Julius LaRosa, whom nobody remembers anymore.

This morning, for example, learned that I, at age 53, have lived 19,470 days, and I have outlived the following people on the "A" List:

Grace Kelly (171 days)
Judy Garland (2,291 days)
John F. Kennedy (2,492 days)
and...
Elvis Presley (3,909 days)

Now it gets really cool. If I live another 155 days I will have lived as long as Jackie Robinson did. If I make it another 1,369 days I catch up with Humphrey Bogart. And after that I'm breathing down the necks of Richard Burton, Clark Gable and Truman Capote, the last of whom I don't think I'd particularly want to be caught breathing down his neck.

On the B List I have outlived:

Gene Siskel (87 days)
Maurice Gibb (of the Bee Gees) 91 days
Jerry Garcia (104 days)
Lou Costello (115 days)

Those on the B List I still have to catch up with include:

Cleavon Little (32 days)
Jim Henson (122 days)
Vivian Leigh (132 days)
Warren Oates (160 days)
and...
John Denver (174 days)

John Denver (whose real name, by the way, was Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr.) occupies an honored position in my pantheon of famous dead people: he died on my birthday. Denver crashed his plane into the Pacific Ocean on October 12, 1997, the day I turned 42.

Now, on to the nobodies...This will test your knowledge of famous people you never heard of.

I have outlived:

Cornelius Gunter (8 days) (He was a member of the Coasters, and he was murdered.)

The aforementioned Linda Lovelace (10 days -- seems I didn't "choke." Sorry.)

Mohammed Amin (Kenyan journalist, also murdered insofar as he was aboard a jetliner that was deliberately crashed into the ocean) (25 days)

Mary Ford (1950s singer and wife of guitar virtuoso Les Paul) (27 days)

On the C List, there are a cluster of names I'll be catching up with very quickly:

Terence McKenna (drug guru) and Spike Jones (bandleader) (27 days)
Jack Wild (remember him on H.R. Pufnstuf?) (40 days)
Jim "Catfish" Hunter (42 days)
Vic Morrow (47 days)

Baseball fan that I am, you'll have to forgive me for being thrilled. This is as close as I'm ever going to come to matching records set by the likes of Jackie Robinson and Catfish Hunter.

Hey, I take my achievements where I can get them. Is it my fault I'm healthy?

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dig up (get it? "dig up?") the Washington Post obituary page and see if I can cadge another 10 bucks out of Kent.

Party Time on Garbage Mountain

I just had a terrific idea for a novel.

If I can find Thomas Pynchon (I'll probably need the assistance of the FBI--he hasn't so much as had his picture taken in 40 years) I'm going to suggest it to him.

If you're familiar at all with the works of Pynchon, you know that he was to paranoia what Lawrence Welk was to champagne bubbles. Conspiracies of every conceivable kind abound in the works of Pynchon, including, in one of his early novels, a shadow post office. I kid you not.

Well, if Pynchon is fascinated by conspiracies, I've got a hell of a notion for him.

Supposing the spammers are organized.

Scary, huh?

Picture it: right now, at this very moment, a couple of thousand of the sleaziest creeps this planet ever puked up might be meeting in some off-the-beaten path little town like Bullhead City, Arizona where they won't be noticed by anyone, all of them keeping a low profile by staying in scattered motels along Interstate 8, getting together in little pockets of eight and ten at a time to share trade secrets and arcane software that they developed themselves: "FilterBuster," "Back Door Man," "Under The Radar," "MegaWorm." At night they have a secret conclave in the back room at Denny's, where some malignant Poindexter wearing Nikes, Dockers and an Arnold Schwarzenegger T-shirt, speaking in a low voice and using a PowerPoint program on his laptop (with the door closed) explains the logarithm system by which he has just figured out 3,560,956,743,289 new ways to spell "Viagra" and "luxury watch."

Did I say I was going to tell Thomas Pynchon? Oliver Stone would love this.

I'm drawn to these musings because I got up this morning and, after my second mug of Folgers (I've had to give up Eight O'Clock whole bean due to budget constraints) I went to check my e-mail.

Now, I always expect to see spam in my inbox, and just as methodically, I go in each morning and mark each spam message, whether it's some slimebag offering me the Dick of Death that will Keep Her Moaning All Night, or a great new opportunity with an up-and-coming company that's so legitimate they're farming Craigslist for e-mail addresses to call in the suckers, or a chance to buy a $5,000 Rolex for $39.95, "ADD TO BLOCKED SENDERS LIST."

Generally it's a question of one, two, maybe three pieces of such garbage at the most. But this morning when I opened Microsoft Outlook, I had nine new messages, and every one of them was spam. I went in like I always do and started clicking away, siphoning all of these chances for great sex and great bargains right off into the cyber-sewer where they belong.

But lo and behold, more kept coming, even as I sat here. I went to refill my coffee cup, came back and there were three more.

In other words, I'm getting the impression that spam somehow runs a cycle, like a woman's menstrual periods. But unlike a woman's menstrual periods, this cycle has nothing whatever to do with natural causes or biological evolution.

This has to be PLANNED somehow, somewhere, by someone. I mean, all the spammers in the world wouldn't suddenly become active, like fleas on a summer afternoon, unless they were somehow (shudder!) organized.

You know, I think this scares me almost as much as the idea of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

Once, in Berlin, I stood before the now-defunct Berlin Wall and saw where someone had spray-painted on its western side "Tyrone Slothrop, where are you?"

Tyrone Slothrop was one figure in Thomas Pynchon's epic novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973.) He's the object of a massive, supersecret conspiracy involving Germany's V-2 rockets, the ones that rained down on London during World War II.

I'm thinking about poor old Slothrop this morning. Where is he? And is there a coven of techno-maniacs hiding somewhere inside a mountain cave somewhere in Maryland, plotting the creation of some modern-day Schwarzgeraet like the one in Pynchon's novel, this one with the purpose of jamming every inbox on earth, at the command of the Grand Spammer, (who lives in a town in Norway so small that it's not even on the map) with so many advertisements for sexual potency and bogus real estate mortgages that, at a stroke, all the world's governments will be more paralyzed than usual and some latter-day Blofeld out of Ian Fleming, only wearing thick glasses and sporting a bad haircut, will be Master of the Earth?

Sean Connery, where are you?

Here they come again

I've been re-reading Erasmus' The Praise of Folly. Published in 1511, it's one of the most famous satires ever written, and still gets read a lot, usually in university survey courses dedicated to the culture of the Renaissance. But it's funny, real bite-ass funny, and one of the reasons it's still read today is because it's still relevant. Boy, is it relevant. Old Erasmus was 400 years ahead of his time.

Folly herself speaks, in the guise of one of the gods of antiquity, or perhaps as the muse of the truly stoopid. Erasmus spares no one: kings, princes, popes, philosophers, the mighty, the low; Folly speaks of them all, and praises them for how unfailingly they follow her counsel. To hear Folly speak, the entire human race is hellbent on doing whatever and precisely does not make sense.

If Voltaire and the other architects of the 18th century Enlightenment knew this book, and it's probably safe to assume they did, one wonders where they got the idea that man is a reasoning, rational animal. Erasmus was telling it like it is 200 years before any of them came along, and it ain't pretty.

How seemly to be reading this classic screed on the subject of the relentless lack of good sense shown by the entire human race since time immemorial, when we're about to have a change of administration here in Washington.

Now, don't hit the panic button, anybody. I'm not going to discuss politics. Well, maybe sort of, in the sense that it's hard to bring up the subject of taxation without mentioning politics, since politicians are, after all, the source of all our taxations, right?

Sometimes I think that Washington is the only city in the world in which the word "DUH" has no meaning whatsoever.

A couple of days ago I posted a list of things I would like to see disappear forever in the coming year. Included on the list was "do-gooders." I cannot stand do-gooders. Charity is one thing, but the relentless refusal to mind your own business is something else entirely.

Unfortunately, the relentless refusal to mind your own business is the chief prerequisite, or so it seems to me, for a career in politics.

I smoke cigars. And I regularly receive cigar catalogues in the mail, since I buy most of my cigars online. And just last week I received such a catalogue from a cigar dealer who was advertising an "S-CHIP sale."

What, I hear you cry, is an "S-CHIP?" I didn't know myself, so I read the introductory blurb about the inevitable arrival of this S-CHIP, whether it's a man or a horse.

Well, surprise! It's a proposed government program. Grab your wallets.

S-CHIP appears to be the latest attempt by those relentlessly determined moralizers in our government to Punish Sin by forcing it to Subsidize Virtue.

S-CHIP stands for "state children's health insurance program." The idea is to create a health insurance plan for children. Now, nobody could be against a health insurance plan for children. The part of that acronym that gives me the willies is that "S." "State." Any time the State gets mixed up in anything, something is going to be done Stoopid.

The rub here is that S-CHIP is going to be funded entirely by tobacco taxes. Now, all of you anti-smoking bores out there are jumping up and down yelling "hallelujah" at the reading of these words I'm sure, because there is nothing a zealot loves more than hearing that the thing he hates is going to be punished in the kingdom.

Yes, they're at it again. The do-gooders are out to stamp out smoking by making it pay for health care, in this case for children. S-CHIP would amount to yet another tax on tobacco products, this one 53 percent. As it is, nearly all of that $5.00 a pack you pay for Marlboros is taxes, but no, they want more. That health badness just has to be punished, punished, punished!

This tax was actually passed twice last year, but was vetoed twice by that ogre Bush, who is obviously in the pocket of Big Tobacco, right?

Well, in giving this bill the veto, Bush reasoned that it doesn't make sense to fund a program that's going to grow over the years by slapping a tax on a product whose sales are declining.

But the Democrats take over Washington this month, and arguments like that one are lost on them. Sin taxes have an irresistible allure on the left side of the aisle, like the odor of Chanel No. 5.

Here's where "DUH" comes in. Regardless of what you thought of Bush, he, like my father, couldn't always be wrong about everything. My father was wrong about practically everything, but every now and then, once every leap year or so, he got something right. By the way, my father was a smoker, and every time the price of cigarettes went up he would merely shrug. "If I'm dumb enough to smoke these things, let them raise the price to $20 a pack if they want," he said.

You can't be more candid than that.

Now regardless of what you think about anything else the Bush administration did, it's hard to deny the validity of Bush's logic in this particular veto.

Ah-HAH! I hear you zealots yelling. "DUPUIS IS IN THE POCKET OF BIG TOBACCO!!"

Would that it were true. I could use the money.

But would you please please please please (to paraphrase a character in Hemingway) THINK about this for a moment?

Funding a health insurance program for children by slapping a tax on a product whose use we are trying to stamp out.

I'll go get a cup of coffee while you all think about that for a minute.

Okay, I'm back.

Now, if the truly lunatic logic of that proposal hasn't sunk in yet, let me offer a couple of hypothetical parallels. Let's set aside for a moment the fact that the states have already figured out ways to funnel tobacco-tax money intended for anti-smoking programs into such things as road-building projects, creating what Dave Barry himself called the perfectly idiotic situation wherein if we want more and better roads, we have to smoke more cigarettes.

Let's just set that aside for a minute.

Imagine we're back in the beginning of the last century. It's 1900. Horseless carriages are beginning to huff and chuff along the nation's roadways, pushing aside the horses and buggies that have had those roadways to themselves since the beginning of the republic and before.

Now, I'm a progressive congressman of 1900, and I see this as progress. So I decide I want to help this process along, encourage more people to put Old Bessie out to pasture and buy a Winton Flyer or a Stanley Steamer or whatever.

And I come up with this great idea: to encourage more paved road-building and encourage more people to swap their horses-and-buggies for automobiles, what we should do is slap a tax on the blacksmith industry! Blacksmiths are holding up progress by providing a service dedicated to All Things Horse, right? So we get the blacksmiths to pay for the new roads! Brilliant!

To Wile E. Coyote, maybe. Do you see the problem here? As the horses disappeared, so did the blacksmiths. Blacksmithing as a trade is obsolete now except on your occasional horse ranch here and there. So...where would my pool of money to pay for roads go when the blacksmiths vanished?

DUH.

Now don't get me wrong. I do understand why people get emotional about this issue, causing logic to fly out the window. I had real difficulty, for example, explaining my position on this to my friend Holly Inder. Her 14 year-old son Mason suffers from asthma, and she recently caught him with a pack of cigarettes, causing her to bristle and fume, as any parent would. Because her emotions were involved, she had trouble wrapping her head around my idea that funding children's health insurance programs by punishing people for using tobacco just doesn't make any reasonable sense. You persuade the goose to lay the golden egg, then you start chasing it around the barnyard with an axe, trying to kill it? Holly?

Or if that cliche doesn't do it for you, you know the old cartoon gag where the guy climbs up into a tree and then starts sawing away at the branch he's sitting on...BEHIND him?

I am all for providing health care for children, but funding it by taxing a product you're trying to get people to quit using is...well, I'd like to hear what Erasmus would say about it. Why not a tax on something whose use is increasing, like say, Sony Playstation? (Or are we already taxing that for programs to fight childhood obesity?)

Isn't this sort of thing that the state lotteries were supposed to be for? Folly would be a happy camper if she showed up today and saw how many billions of dollars are being ponied up by idiots to play a game in which their chances of winning riches are one in 150 million. How about funding these children's health insurance programs with another lottery? I promise you, you'd have no shortage of players. Or maybe a tax on gambling in general? A special casino tax?

Ah, but there the moral message is being lost, right? The idea here is not so much to provide a needed service, but to punish the sin that made that service more urgently needed, right? Why punish the gambling industry? Gambling doesn't give kids asthma. The most important thing here is to make sure we're punishing the right people.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it must be equally true that the road to Washington is paved with the queasiest theology since a bunch of anabaptists somewhere back around the time of Erasmus decided to take Christ's exhortation that they "become as little children" literally, and began sitting around in a circle, babbling baby-talk at each other.

Don't believe me. Go look it up.

Some of those people could have found great jobs in Washington.

The List

It is January 2, 2009. Those who follow my blog regularly (both of you) know that for four years now I have been kicking off the new year with my annual list of things I hope will go away this year, but probably won't.

We're doing something a little bit different this year. Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears are being left off the list. And no, it isn't because Britney has a "new look," nor is it because Jennifer appeared nude on the cover of the last issue of GQ and we were told that she is now "hotter." (I never thought she was "hot" to begin with.) It's because every year I wish they would go away and every year they don't. I give up. I think I'll just start wearing dark sunglasses when I go to the grocery store in the hope of somehow avoiding both of their vapid, stupid mugs on every other magazine I walk past.

Okay, here's my list of things I hope not to see anymore next New Year's Day:

1. Superannuated election campaign bumper stickers. Do you know there are still some yo-yos driving around with Kerry/Edwards stickers on their cars? What are you people, bitter? Obama gets inaugurated Jan. 20th. Get over 2004, already.

2. Stupid white guys wearing baseball caps backward because they think it makes them look like rappers.

3. Stupid white guys wearing baggy pants that practically show butt-crack because they think it makes them look like rappers.

4. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and that whole asinine "New Atheist" fad. I always suspected that the "New Atheist" fad had something to do with George W. Bush anyway, and he's packing up to move back to Texas, so it's time for the next pseudo-intellectual fashion trend.

5. Speaking of fashion trends, can we get rid of those shoes for women that make them look like medieval court jesters? You know the ones I'm talking about, those shoes so long and pointed that they look like the best accessory to go with them might be a cap and bells.

6. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, or whatever the hell it is the "food police" are calling themselves this year. I'm talking about that prune-faced bunch of busybodies that comes out every couple of years wagging its fingers at us about something we're not supposed to eat. I'm not especially inclined to eat movie popcorn, seeing as how I haven't been inside a movie theater to see a feature film since 2006, but if I want to eat movie popcorn, dammit, I'll eat movie popcorn. Get out of my face, you freaking do-gooders.

7. Do-gooders in general, and PETA in particular, that organization of whack-balls who think Bambi and Thumper are not only real, but should be provided with lawyers so they can sue Disney for larger dressing rooms.

8. I don't know why this annoys me so much, but I'd like a stop put to people walking around in near-or-subfreezing weather wearing rubber flip-flops on bare feet. Rubber flip-flops are for the beach in July, not downtown Chicago on Christmas. What are you people, stupid?

9. Speaking of doing things at the wrong time, how about let's crack down on those die-hard NFL kooks who drive around with banners for their favorite football team flapping every which way all over their cars...in the middle of baseball season?

10. And speaking of baseball, allow me a personal foible here. I wish the San Diego Padres would get rid of Kevin Towers. As long as that cheapskate keeps yelling "poorhouse" and going on a salary-dumping binge every year, we Padres fans are never going to see the postseason again.

11. Never mind about people driving while blabbering into hand-held cellphones; I've squawked about that enough, including letters to newspapers and legislators. If the cops aren't going to do anything about it, nobody will. But how about people who walk mindlessly down the street, just rag-chewing away, completely oblivious to the world around them, just because they CAN? More than once I've been tempted to run over one of these cud-chewing morons on the premise that he or she probably wouldn't notice I'd done it.

12. Washington, D.C. residents who go around sporting "Barack Obama" T-shirts and hats. Folks, this is not a concert tour!

13. Television advertisements for fitness equipment featuring people who don't need it.

14. Since I brought up advertising, why is it that the only kind of beer you ever see advertised on TV is LIGHT beer? I happen to regard light beer as a crime against nature. Can we at least advertise REAL beer? What is this, some kind of sop to the nation's collective guilt about calories?

15. Body-piercing. Come on, enough is enough.

16. Ted Kennedy and his girdle.

17. Obnoxious buttheads who think it's funny to gun their engines and race past bicycle-riders within inches, at 90 mph.

18. That goes double for truck drivers who do that.

19. California Congressman Bob Filner, who has the grin of a jackass and all the charm of a dock strike.

20. I wish spammers would run out of ways to spell "Viagra."

21. Now that we're finally going to have a black president, can we get rid of Al Sharpton?

22. Computer games for kids that center around mass murder. What is it with us, anyway? We get hysterical if Junior glimpses a woman's nipple on cable TV, but we have no problem with him playing XBox games all day long with names like Grand Theft Gang Rape Part IV and Genocide Raiders of The Planet Splat.

23. Grossly-obese guys with shaved heads. Since when was Jabba the Hutt a fashion plate?

24. People sitting in restaurants texting while they eat. "Enabling" is something else that's gone too far.

25. And the best for last, because it actually looks like this one is going to happen.......O.J. SIMPSON.

Happy New Year.