Let Your Discourse be Short and Comprehensive

To practice his penmanship, the 16-year-old George Washington copied the entirety of Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, a 110-page book compiled by the Jesuits in 1595.

Rules contained the standards of morality and etiquette for Colonial America's elite—the class the impoverished Washington was anxious to enter.

Showing humility and respect—especially before superiors—was the keynote of Rules. Humility and respect formed the very pillars of civility.

Rule 35 applied that civility to writing and speaking: Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.

Today, we'd do well to alter that rule: Let your communication with customers be short and comprehensive.

When your customer communications are long-winded, you show them they don't deserve your respect. You signal you think they're stupid. Not a formula for sales or retention.

Here's an example of silly verbosity from a large insurance company's website:

Property insurance is a type of insurance policy that can provide coverage for property owners or renters. Examples of property insurance include homeowners, renters, and flood insurance policies. These policies can provide coverage for damages caused by fire, flooding, theft, weather, and other risks. Let us help protect where you live and what you own with our different types of property insurance. Get a property insurance quote for your home, apartment, and more. We also make managing your policy easy with online access. You can make changes, request documents, and make payments.

The company asks you to suffer through nearly a hundred words, simply to tell you it will sell you property insurance. The same message could be stated in fewer than half the words:

Property insurance protects owners and renters from bearing the costs of damages caused by fire, flooding, theft, weather, and other risks. And managing a policy is easy: you can make changes, request documents, and make payments on line. Contact us for a quote.

By George, show customers a little respect! Sharpen your red pencil before you publish.

Let your discourse be short and comprehensive.

We're All Trash

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

— Emma Lazarus

Twice daily, some news item triggers me and I fulminate against my fellow Americans. 

Nowadays, they're stories about the unvaccinated—and their loathsome cheerleaders.

How can these fools deny science, eschew common sense, and cling so adamantly to moronic beliefs? How can they be such trash?

But then the words on the base of Liberty remind me: we're all trash.

Some trash gather at motorcycle rallies; some, at country clubs; some, on street corners; some, on private islands; some, in megachurches; some, in art museums.

Some trash don't gather anywhere, but sit alone on the couch watching Fox News or The Bachelor or reruns of Barnaby Jones; some sit alone watching TikTok, reading Facebook, or writing blog posts.

But, all the same, we're all trash.

You're here because your forebears were refuse.

The quality folks—the gifted, good-mannered, powerful people—stayed in the old country.

Only the trash came—or were deported—here.

That's American exceptionalism.

Get your shots, trashy people, so the rest of the trash doesn't catch Delta Plus (or, as I like to call it, Covid with Cheese).

No Matter How You Slice It

No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.

— Al Smith

A series of interviews with literary agents about their pastimes in the current edition of Poets & Writers has convinced me college educators have stuffed everyone's head with baloney.

I arrived at this conclusion when one of the agents, self-described as "passionate about creating spaces for those from historically marginalized communities," mentioned she was using her free time to ponder whether or not "to cling to one's own marginalization."

Another, self-described as "queer," said she was using her free time to study the "rise of the feminist anachronistic costume drama."

A third, self-described as an avid foodie, mentioned that she was using her free time to "exchange tweets with a BIPOC travel blogger" while she studied "decolonizing veganism."

WTF?

These are bright, educated, well versed people.

Why do they think and speak in these patently silly terms, leftover scraps from French philosopher Michel Foucault's lunch?

Teachers are to blame—and what conservatives call the "absence of intellectual pluralism" in colleges. 

Teachers have allowed '70s-era jargon to substitute for thought, and identity for virtue.

Ask yourself: before you can "decolonize" veganism, you have to "colonize" it in the first place.

But how do you do that?

Do you sail a ship full of conquistadors to the New World and take over a vegan coop by storm? Do you loot and pillage the kale section and enslave all the stock boys? Do you seize all the kale, repackage it as Swanson's Cheesy Spinach, and ship it back to Spain? Do you cite divine rights to justify all this?

Possibly.

I had a logic teacher in college, a Brit, whose Cambridge training prohibited him from ever telling a student that his or her comment in class was inane. 

He'd just listen politely, smile, and reply, "Possibly."

After a couple of weeks in his course, you understood he was saying, "That's utter nonsense!"

While I have nothing but admiration for queers, feminists, vegans, BIPOC, and literary agents, I cringe whenever I hear one of them say she wants to "decolonize" something or "open a space for the marginalized" (lest we be "uncritical" and "non-inclusive").

A voice inside me—with a British accent—says, "Possibly."

Because, no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.

Ice Cream Blonde

You might remember Thelma Todd, the "Ice Cream Blonde," from her appearances in Marx Brothers movies. 

She so attracted men that, at age 15, Thelma was fired from her job as a dime-store clerk in Lawrence, Massachusetts, because the owner disapproved of the fellas lurking in his aisles.

Jobless, Thelma enrolled in teacher's college and began entering beauty contests for cash.

A Lawrence theater manager spotted her at a tryout for the Miss America pageant and wired Thelma's photo to a Paramount Pictures executive in Hollywood. 

The 20-year-old's career path was settled, overnight. For her part, she was glad for the opportunity, glad to get away from Lawrence, and glad to get away from an abusive Irish father.

Her first movie role (as a dance-hall girl) was in 1926's God Gave Me 20 Cents.

On the beach at Malibu

Studio-head Hal Roach noticed her in the film and quickly plunked Thelma into his Laurel and Hardy comedies. 

She was so funny on screen, Roach soon gave Thelma her own series of slapstick shorts, and began loaning her to other studios, which was how she wound up playing with the Marx Brothers.

Thelma made, in total, 50 films in less than nine years. 

But she knew her looks wouldn't last, and did what many aging Hollywood stars do: she opened a gambling casino.

Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café—a 15,000-square foot nightclub on the ground floor of her Malibu home—proved an immediate sensation among tourists, screenwriters, celebrities, studio executives, gangsters, and gamblers. 

It appeared Thelma was now set for life.

But it wasn't to be.

The Ice Cream Blonde had a dark side.

An inveterate "party girl," Thelma drank heavily and played around with married men. She dated mobsters; eloped with one, then got divorced and took up with another. She cracked up cars and was arrested for drunk driving. And she gobbled amphetamines to fend off weight. (Hal Roach inserted into her studio contract the proviso that she'd be fired if she gained five pounds; he named it the "Potato Clause.") The amphetamines made her manic.

Friends said she was drawn to dangerous men, men who, like her father, were physically abusive.

Thelma was found dead by her maid on the morning of December 16, 1935, her body wedged behind the wheel of her Lincoln, which was parked in the garage of her business partner and lover, who lived next door to the casino. 

The Lincoln had been running, and the garage door closed, when the maid came upon her.

The actress's nose and mouth were bloody.  

A grand jury ruled the 29-year-old actress's death was a suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning.

The ruling came despite the fact that an autopsy revealed Thelma had a broken nose, bruised throat, and two cracked ribs; and despite the fact that none of her acquaintances believed she was suicidal.

In the trunk of Thelma's Lincoln, the grand jury was informed, were wrapped Christmas presents, meant for lovers, friends and family.

Postscript: In 1987, Hal Roach (age 90) told writer Marvin Wolf that three Los Angeles sheriff's detectives visited him the day after Thelma Todd's death and told him her business partner and lover had confessed to murdering the actress. Roach, wanting no scandal, advised the detectives to cover up the crime. "I told them I thought they should forget about it," Roach said. "He wouldn't have gone to jail anyway." Thelma's partner and lover confessed to the murder a second time 16 years later, while on his deathbed.

Organized Lightning

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

— George Carlin

Three times a week I receive "stim" during physical therapy.

Stim (electrical stimulation) is used on patients whose injuries cause pain or curb mobility.

To apply stim, the therapist tapes electrodes to the patient's skin, connects them to the stim machine, and dials up the current, until the patient cries uncle. He or she will feel a strong tingling sensation wherever the electrodes have been placed.

"Medical electricity" like stim has been in use since 1744, when it was unveiled in Europe as a branch of "experimental philosophy."

Propelled by amusing experiments and the invention of the Leyden jar in 1746, British, French, German and Italian "electricians" began touting electricity's miraculous healing properties, playing to crowds that assembled at soirées and in theaters, churches and temples to witness "this new fire that man produced from himself, and which did not descend from heaven." 

One professor of medicine and philosophy in Germany, Johann Gottlob Krüger, claimed electrical shocks could be used, in particular, to treat palsy. Soon thereafter, electricians claimed shocks could be used to treat other maladies, including paralysis, tetanus, tumors, gout, rheumatism, toothaches, headaches, menstrual cramps, sleepwalking, fevers, tics, ulcers, and St Anthony’s fire.

Instrument-makers soon flooded the market with portable medical devices that delivered shocks, and in 1756 the first textbook in English on medical electricity was published.

Two centuries later, psychiatrists discovered another application for medical electricity: electroconvulsive therapy, generally known as "shock treatment."

Invented in Italy in the 1930s, shock treatment uses electrical jolts to induce seizures. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, shock treatment was used worldwide to treat depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and homosexuality. Its use declined during the 1980s, although an estimated 100,000 Americans are still treated annually through shock therapy today.

While shock treatment has declined, there's an emergent form of medical electricity: "electroceuticals."

Electroceuticals are small medical devices that are attached to the skin or surgically implanted. They emit electrical impulses that fire up or quiet down neurons, and are used to treat such maladies as heart disease, diabetes, incontinence, high blood pressure, obesity, chronic pain, and arthritis.

While still considered experimental, electroceuticals hold the promise of working miracles.

Miracle-wise, however, no application of medical electricity can compare to that found in Frankenstein—the movie versions, anyway.

The novel's author, Mary Shelley, had in mind an alchemist, not an electrician, when she penned Frankenstein in 1817.

Although familiar with medical electricity through demonstrations by the philosopher Luigi Galvani, in which he passed an electrical current through the nerves of a corpse, Shelly based the novel on folktales about an eccentric German alchemist, Johann Konrad Dippel, who claimed he'd discovered the "elixir of life."

Dippel, who lived in Frankenstein Castle, liked to stitch together bodies from the parts of dead animals and try to bring them to life with chemical compounds.