My Grand Organization Plan

1. This country needs the metric system. When they tried to roll it out in the late '70s, Americans behaved like little children who didn't want to go to the first day of kindergarten. They pouted, refused to use it, shot bulletholes in KPH signs on the highway (seriously, they did) - come on, you babies! Every other developed country has been a big boy and accepted it. We need to do the same. Plus, it would have the added benefit of making Sammy Hagar's song "I Can't Drive 55" sound ridiculous. Well, more ridiculous.

2. Make all months 28 days. Then everyone could keep calendars in their heads. Everyone would know that the 27th is a Friday and the 1st is a Sunday, etc. (And we would make sure that the 13th happened on a Thursday or something, which would prevent any more "Friday the 13th" movies from ever being made.) Then for all the leftover days get stuck at the end in a new month called Rocktober! (The exclamation point is part of the word.) At Rocktober!, all we do is rock. I think that part will sell this idea. 

3. No more time zones. Fuck it. It's too complicated and annoying. I spend half my time trying to figure out if people are a few hours ahead of me or a few hours behind. (This might be my own mental block, but I didn't say these things would make things simpler for everyone -- I'm more concerned with making life simpler for me.) Everybody will have the same time simultaneously. For people in some countries, that means eating lunch at midday, which is 3 a.m. For others, it means "Lost" comes on at 12 noon, after they've finished a hard day's work. They're just arbitrary numbers anyway. Again, people will get used to it. 

4. Along the same lines, we have to rename either "east" or "west." I always get them confused. I'm always on the highway unsure if I need 94 East and 94 West. I'm sure it's just my mental block, but all the more reason to change it for everyone. I think the words are too similar. Let's call "west" something that's easier to separate from "east," like "flibadeefloo." It would also entertain the kids, because it's a silly word. And it would never, ever get old.

5. No more kitchen cupboards. Everyone gets two dishwashers. When one dishwasher is full of clean dishes, you take the dishes directly from that and use them. When they're dirty you put them in the other dishwasher.  When the other dishwasher is full, you run it, and then it becomes the dishwasher that stores clean dishes. Saves time and effort by cutting out the middleman of cupboards. Oh, and dishwashers will probably need big readouts saying "CLEAN" or "DIRTY" that come up automatically so you don't get confused. And some people may need more than two dishwashers, I guess, if they have big families. Most people could use fewer dishes though, in my opinion. At our house, we have different, specialized cups for juice, coffee, water, beer, wine, champagne, and martinis. That's too many glasses. Maybe we keep coffee mugs (it's really gross to drink coffee out of a glass -- I've tried) and standard glasses. That's plenty. 

6. Greetings will be simplified. "Hello" and then down to business. "Good-bye" and then I'm gone. No more "How are things," "Good to see you," "How's the cat,"  etc. on the front end and then "Thanks for having us," "Have a good weekend," "Good luck with the disposable enema," etc. on the back end. Takes too damn long. Especially when leaving a place after a small get-together -- you're stuck in limbo for a few minutes, because you're likely standing there with everyone else, who were all waiting for someone to be the first to think of a good excuse to leave, and you all have to get your coats on, and stand for a while as everyone does their various good-bye rituals, and oh, someone forgot their scarf, and ... bah. 

7. No more subjects in sentences. Only short, declarative sentences. "Like pizza." "Type silly crap." No more articles, either. Went to car. Drove to store. Picked up disposable enema. Used it. Fun.

8. We need a supreme ruler. A benevolent dictator, like Peter the Great. Someone who always has the best interests of the most people at heart and gets things done quickly. It's agonizing to elect a great, smart guy (Barack Obama) and then watch his plans slandered by Republicans who are just trying to confuse voters and score points, and then watching Congress dicker endlessly about this and that. I say, whatever the supreme ruler says, goes. Why has no one tried this before? It seems foolproof to me. 

9. While we're on the subject of politics, since when does everything have to have 60 votes to pass through Congress? It is supposed to be a simple majority, right? But then the people in the minority can say the word "filibuster" and we're supposed to let that shut everything down? I say, call them on their bluff. Make Mitch McConnell actually filibuster. I'd love to see him read the phone book 24/7. Put that on the news and see how many people get angry at McConnell for wasting everyone's time. Unless that would make everyone sympathetic, like he's making some kind of bold "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"-esque stand or something. Hm, maybe I should pass this idea through committee first. Then I could build grass-roots support, go across the country promoting it, build alliances in the Senate, promise to support subsidies for whiskey-drinking racehorses to get McConnell's vote (joke explanation: He's the senator from Kentucky), make compromises that water it down to a proposal to maybe think about possibly making any filibuster-er read the phone book to themselves on their own time with a nice glass of scotch ... eh, never mind.

10. No more facial hair allowed on men. I'm sorry, but men have proven they can't handle it. I'm seeing more and more soul patches every day. We will have to get rid of some cool full beards in the process, but you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. What we do is, we make all men go through electrolysis or whatever it's called to zap all those follicles to death. We could do it when they're young and make it sort of a rite of passage to manhood. You can get away with lots of horrible things if you call it a rite of passage to manhood.

11. We need more rites of passage to manhood. Not sure what exactly, but something that turns men into soulful, quiet, strong types instead of allowing to go through the late teen and early-20s period of douchebaggery, in which they wear fitted baseball caps backwards and drink lots of Budweiser and go "woo!" and think Dane Cook is hilarious. Maybe we could just outlaw Dane Cook. But that would only attack the symptom instead of the problem.  

12. Only one child per family. And everyone has to wear the exact same clothes, drive the exact same cars, and say the exact same things at the exact same times. And then Rod Serling has to pop out of nowhere and say "Man, this is the worst episode we ever did. We're not even trying any more ... in the Twilight Zone." 

Things Joe Finds Irksome: Being Told We Have Eight Planets Instead of Nine

Pluto is a planet. There. I said it. Come on after me, scientific community - I dare you. Your "logic" and your "classificatory consistency" and "your" "reasoned consensus" don't scare me"."

Seriously, though, I think it's fine to call Pluto a planet, even if it's barely bigger than its own moon; even if there are bigger things in the solar system that we don't call planets. If it's in the Oort cloud, it doesn't count in my book.

How come? Because I grew up with Pluto as a planet, and I'm comfortable with it as a planet, and we already have the mnemonic device with it as a planet in place (see previous Joe post). Basically, it feels like a planet to me.

To which you might respond: "Hey, Joe - where're you goin' with that gun in your hand?" And you smirk, because you're sure you're the first person ever to ask me that. Oh you are a clever one, aren't you? Well, guess what - I've heard that one about eighty-five thousand times. And you know what? Sometimes, it's actually funny. Depends on the delivery.

Anyhow, after all that, you stop smirking, and instead raise your eyebrow knowingly, and say, "Well, what about before they found Pluto? Those people grew up without Pluto as a planet, and they seemed to get through life just fine, thank you very much." And I agree with you, sirrah. However, those people are all either dead or like a hundred years old, so I don't care about them.

What I'm trying to say, and the thrust of this post, is this: there's all kinds of scientific truth that we as a society toss out the window in favor of stuff that we're familiar with, and that's okay. In fact, it's necessary.

I'm not talking about creationists, or the global warming naysayers, or the dumb people who think the Earth is flat (the round Earth is a well-funded conspiracy of the globe-building industry, you know.) I'm talking about the received, cultural-literacy-level scientific-mathematic knowledge of educated people. Much of which is wrong.

To wit: parallel lines never meet. Okay. But out in the universe, parallel lines meet all the time, or fan out in different directions. Because the universe is not a neatly-gridded cube. So Euclid gave it a good shot, but didn't quite get it right. And we've known this for well over a century now. Non-Euclidean geometry is a familiar subject for advanced mathematicians. But in fifth grade (or whenever geometry happens), what do we tell kids? Parallel lines don't meet. It's true, more or less, for most Earth-scale calculations, and with things like lines of latitude on a globe. (Another globe-manufacturer conspiracy, perhaps?) So it's a useful thing to be taught.

Or the atom. I'm not sure, but I bet they still teach kids about the parts of the atom: electrons, neutrons, and protons. And they show that nice little model of the little globes going around the big globe in the midd...hey! maybe there really is a giant globe-industry thing going on here! Anyhow, I'm pretty sure that they're not talking about string theory in middle school - that's my point.

The other half of which is, that's okay. Every field of specialty has its body of knowledge. Only a relative few people actually know what's going on in each field, and are actively discovering things and refining previous knowledge in that field. The rest of us don't need to know any of that, unless we're curious about it.

So give us our parallel lines, our centrifugal force, our atomic masses, yearning to quantum leap. And please, let us keep Pluto. I'll let you keep believing that Law & Order is a totally accurate picture of the legal system. Do we have a deal?

Things I Hate: Emotions

So I was watching "The Real Housewives of New York City" the other day, because that's something you do when you're married, and it's not as bad as you think. "The Real Housewives of Orange County" is too painful to watch, but the New York City chicks at least have some modicums of personality -- some of them anyway. 

Point is, there's a real-life countess on the show, and one of the ongoing fights was about an incident in which she insisted on being called "Mrs. De Money" or whatever her name is instead of "Luann" when speaking to their limo driver. "Why does it matter?" everyone asked quite reasonably. The argument went on very well for a while until Countess Luann DeSnootypants said "Well, it just makes me feel uncomfortable." And the other New York chick, who would normally stay on the attack until her opponent was crying in the corner and flagellating herself with barbed wire, suddenly let up. I was disgusted.

And I hated being disgusted because I hate emotions. What they ever done for us? Why do people get angry and start wars? Emotions. Why do people watch and enjoy "According to Jim"? Emotions. Why do people fall in love, get married, and have fulfilling lives? Emotions. Blech.

But seriously, I do think emotions are sort of a low-level, oversimplified program for connecting observations with actions. Like, when we were all lizards (in the 1980s, during the time of the TV mini-series "V"), we operated entirely by emotions. Thing moves past us quickly. Scared! We jump and run away. Thing looks edible. Happy! We eat it. 

But what if that thing moving past us was a hot female (or male, depending on your lizard-y sexual orientation), and we just blew our chances at some hot lizard sex? If we had an intellect, we could stop ourselves from overreacting and say "Well, hold on. The last ten million times I ran away, nothing chased after me, not even a little. Maybe this is a hot lizard of the sex I am predisposed to want to mate with. Is this the case, indeterminate fast-moving thing?" And then the fast-moving thing stops and says "Duh! 'Bout time you noticed -- I've run past you real fast ten million times already! What's it take to get a man around here?" And then "Let's Get It On" comes on the soundtrack and the lizard lovin' begins. 

Instead, without an intellect, we'd keep running away and die childless, and then wait for the slow march of evolution to create a genetic mutation that would tell lizards to stop and look at fast things before running away like a punk. Bah. I ain't got that kind of time -- I want hot lizard sex now. 

But I know, I know, we couldn't get rid of emotions entirely, or we'd have no motivation to do anything, ever. We'd just sit around coming to conclusions, most of which would be, "yeah, but why bother?" We need the emotions, but we also need the intellect to tell us when the emotions should shut the hell up. 

Which gets me back to Countess Luann De Pretentious. When she said it made her feel uncomfortable, the argument was over. Instead, the response should have been "Well, that emotion is wrong. Get over it." 

The way I look at it, emotions are a big lumbering lug who comes into a party and says "Eat!" "Fuck!" "Punch!" The intellect is, ideally, standing behind him, leading him on a leash and whispering in his ears, "OK, you can eat, but no fucking or punching. Understood?" 

Don't get me wrong -- I'm a namby-pamby liberal pants-wetting type who does believe in acknowledging emotions and crying and shit like that. But I think too many people feel all emotions are legitimate and should be acted on or at least expressed. Actually, a lot of emotions are stupid and should be ignored or changed. 

If you feel icky about gay people, that's an emotion you could get past, and not use it to fuel an insane paranoia about the evil gay agenda to turn everyone gay and abort all babies and abolish all pickup trucks and drink only cosmos and etc.  

Maybe it's all about judgment, knowing which emotions to act on and which ones to try to ignore. And I acknowledge that judgement is a very hard thing to get right. 

Example: When my dad left home and was trying to express emotion for the first time in his life, he would express everything, regardless of what effect it would have on others. I would answer the phone and say "hey" and then he would berate me for not sounding excited enough to hear from him. I would be thinking "hm, well, you just left home and shacked up with someone else, shattering mom's psyche and breaking our family apart,  and also you lied about where you were living for six months ... and I'm supposed to answer the phone and be like, 'Yo, what up, my nigga!!!!'?" But, see, I felt that, and didn't say it -- instead I said "Oh, of course I'm happy to hear from you, but I'm tired from thinking all day about how great you are ..." etc.

My point there is that I'm glad my dad was learning how to express emotions at the time, but he hadn't learned yet that it's not an all or nothing proposition. Some you express, some you don't, and the ones you don't express you should probably try to get over in other ways. You can change your emotions, too, by the way. It's very hard, usually requiring a lot of thought and self-reflection, but it's necessary to grow up as a person. I guess that's what therapy is right? Hm. I'll have to think about that. Rationally, that is. Not with my emotions. I hate my emotions!!!!!!!!! KILL!!!

Things Joe Finds Irksome: Mnemonic Devices

You know what I'm talking about, right? When people had to remember a list of something for a test, they'd come up with some clever sentence where the first letter of each word in the sentence corresponded to the first letter of each item in the list they wanted to recall. The ones I remember people using were for the planets and for the classifications of life. You remember that one, don't you?


King Philip Came Over And Ordered A Pizza For Lunch With Sauce.


Which, as we all know, stands for Kingdom, Phylum, Carnivore, Ostriches, Aphorisms, Oxygen, A'a, Phylum (part II), Foxtrot, Lunch, Wolfram, Species. Couldn't be simpler or more straightforward.

I always had more trouble remembering the mnemonic devices than I did whatever they were supposed to be mnemoning. Like the planets. When people were like, oh, you should just use the mnemonic device, I'd be like, okay, let's see - My Very Something Mother....um...alright, I know it's some kind of mother, so, hmm, what's a good adjective that could stand for Earth...? The whole point of the device was lost on me, because I was forced to use reverse mnemonification to reconstruct it.

I think that was largely because the devices always seemed so random. I mean, who's King Philip? Why was he coming over again? And what in the world does that have to do with genuses? If you're going to take the time to memorize something, why not just remember what you actually need to know, instead of going through the rigmarole of constructing some nonsense sentence that you then need to take the time to deconstruct for its first letters. Seems like a waste of time, especially in a test taking environment. No wonder our schools are doing so poorly. There's just not enough time to mnemonicize. All these kids, sitting there at test time, going, "Okay....My...Very...Elegant...Mothe..." Sorry, kid, time's up. Pencils down.

An educational system based on the mnemonic device is doomed to fail. It's time to demnemonicize our children.