Bob Lancaster

Bob Lancasterhttp://www.arktimes.comen-US60End of the road http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=b2f5c552-a967-401e-8b97-25b0bb18d107One of you readers sent in a question that?s beyond my ken, so I passed it along to the sage Assmunch, who?s always game for queries, however difficult, unless it?s a put-up job by one of these tea-bagger phonys. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMTbob@arktimes.com (Bob Lancaster)One of you readers sent in a question that's beyond my ken, so I passed it along to the sage Assmunch, who's always game for queries, however difficult, unless it's a put-up job by one of these tea-bagger phonys. Those people don't want answers; they just want to get on TV. That's why they'll bring in a gun, or do whatever it takes. Anyway, here's Assmunch's take on the subject. Do I think the world's going to end in 2012? Probably not, but just in case, I've been trying to put my affairs in order, which, if you know me, is? no small undertaking. I've redone my will, put on some vinyl siding, and ? how's this for an act of faith? -- put in four rows of strawberries of a variety that aren't due to fruit until a year after the scheduled apocalypse. I've been trying to exercise and eat right and have regular checkups to head off diseases that themselves have only three years left if the Twelvers ciphered as good as Jethro. In short, I've been tying up loose ends, so that when the time comes I can cross over into campground without the nagging sense of having left some essential thing undone. I don't know why that's important to me, but it is. I know that in a flash all will be rubble, but you have to live with yourself up to the moment the flash occurs, and that requires the peace of mind that comes from having cleaned the gutters and fixed all the faucet leaks. Why is it again that they picked 2012? Something mysterious in the Mayan calendar ? a doomsday prequel with scary special effects, coming to a theater near you? ? more cryptic jabber from the old gasbag Nostradamus,?? the Jack Van Impe of his time, if you follow the televangelical specialists, and not just because both of them found their niche in prophesy only after early career washouts as accordion players. But I suppose the year doesn't really matter, as most of us have lived our entire lives in the valley of the shadow. All the Orwellian years leading up to 1984, for example. All the years creeped out by 2001, when the red-eyed friends of H.A.L. would be taking over. Jitters over? Y2K and the approach of the Millennium Bug, supplanted now, I understand, by what the computer whizzes are calling the 2038 Problem. For the Grannis end-timers, the climactic year was the Bicentennial if memory serves. My own watershed year was 1962, the night during the Cuban Missile Crisis when we all stood out on the dormitory portico waiting and watching for the nuclear fish to come swarming up over the southeastern horizon, fully expecting them to, and calmly resigned to our fate as eared cinders. Another year was lost to the alarums of one Immanuel Velikovsky, and I used to trip along toward Armageddon with Garner Ted, usually waking up in a cold sweat. Huddled under our classroom desks against the mushroom, we knew only one year, really -- the concurrent one, always with the hair trigger, too tenuous to be carrying a future.? It's curious that creatures with such dinky lifespans would assume a comparably short-lived wide world. But that's what we thought. The Creation had had a good long run ?? 6,000 years --? and was bound to expire anon from sheer decrepitude. Wasn't entropy one of Newton's laws? I came from people who for centuries had known with dead-solid certainty how the world would end -- with a trump and a shout, with the sky peeling back in azure folds and the King of Glory on a gold throne descending in an opalescent spiral cacophony of angels, saints and patriarchs, come to separate the saved from the damned, the sheep from the goats. There was no doubting that this would happen literally and soon, and that all flesh would see it together. The only question was when. I've wondered at times here in superannuation how hard it must have been for those who held this belief ? or still hold it --? to get up every morning and go on to work. They sang ? and still do ? ?work, for the night is coming,? but if that's the case, why bother? Why worry about tomorrow if there's not going to be one? The true believers at Mena divined this pointlessness and on D-Day eve gave away all their possessions, even their shoes. Sheep or goat, they knew they'd not be needing shoes. I have to say too that I've long suspected that this Second Coming surprise extravaganza might have been devised and perpetuated at least in part as a way to scare youngsters out of mischief. That is, if you know the Last Judgment's liable to commence about two seconds from the beginning of the misdemeanor you're now contemplating the commission of ? flogging an old bishop, say, or something of that nature ? then the prospect might inspire or terrify you into hauling your young ass up. If that's indeed the plan and the hope, then I'd venture the results through the ages have been mixed. The Devil losing a few, winning perhaps more. ? Netlorehttp://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=d33d0166-3919-4699-aade-70232b437c65Things I wouldn?t have known if Al Gore hadn?t invented the Internet. Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMTbob@arktimes.com (Bob Lancaster)Things I wouldn't have known if Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet. (I can't vouch for the veracity of all of them, but it's still good stuff to??know if, like Aristotle or Ken Jennings, you aspire to know it all.) • There are 2-million dust mites on a typical bed. • Notable people who have discussed hypnotizing chickens, according to a website of that same name, include Helmut Kohl, Werner Herzog, Al Gore, Steve Fairnie, Will Smith, Friedrich Nietzsche (in ?Thus Spake Zarathustra?), Federico Fellini, Ernest Hemingway and Criss Angel. Unmentioned but undoubtedly best is Charles Portis in ?Norwood.? Record time for a chicken to remain hypnotized is 3 hours 47 minutes. • It was only after the arrival of their third that the Duggars learned that young'uns aren't brought by the stork. • Tennesseeans get just about the quality of representation you'd expect from a congressman named Zach Wamp. • An unusually tense Presbyterian minister in New Jersey invented the Graham cracker in 1829 in the belief that God had revealed to him a combination of host ingredients that would kill enthusiasm for masturbation in young communicants. Old Dr. Kellogg in Battle Creek thought several decades later that his new-fangled corn flakes would serve the same purpose. Of course they were both right. The wicked practice petered out early in the 20th century and is now virtually extinct. • On the other hand (pardon that), most often web-recommended aphrodisiac foods are figs, oysters, avocados, and bananas. Most often cited as wilters or poopers: cherries, barbecue, tofu, and 5 minutes of watching ?The View.? • There were six TV Lassies during the 19-year series, all of them taped-up female impersonators, or imdoginators. All six of the Francis the Talking Mule movies had a male immuleinator hinney named Molly in the starring role. 9Lives has declined to say how many finicky lookalike Morrises have come and gone or what their gender was. • Janis Joplin's favorite pain-killer (Hunter S. Thompson's as well, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's) was Wild Turkey 101. Among the comments on Pearl's Wikipedia vita is the scurrilous allegation that she once dated Bill Bennett, the world's slimiest man, way back when she was still sober and he was still sane.? • Despite No. 412 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, there is no record of anyone named Billy Joe McAllister ever having jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, which was dismantled in 1972. • There are more bacteria on your body right now than there are people in the United States. • The playwright George Bernard Shaw was a Socialist of the types that were big fans of the rock-and-roll singer Fabian (Forte). • Armadillos make fair to middling potted meat. If you get to them within eight hours of their having been run over. • Walmart now sells caskets online. • Lenny Bruce once described a hung acquaintance as having a tallywhacker of a size that it looked like a baby's arm holding an apple. • Ruth Madoff is reported to have joined the human race, using 50 cents off coupons to buy breakfast burritos at Taco Bell. • Give or take 1.93 million, nearly 2 million people attended the big tea-bagger march on Washington. • Stephen Hawking died at least five times in the past year. • All 605 people who live in Austin, AR, are kin to one another. • Just for the record, there was no late-night benediction at the Y'all Come Back Saloon. • Even if the Supreme Court finally excludes Manger Babe and all the religious trimmings, Christmas will still have the traditional mas part, which includes mistletoe, tree, Grinch and dog, and TV weather radar tracking Santa's sleigh on mas eve.? • The concept of boredom didn't exist among American children before 1955. • John McCain was the first major-party presidential nominee to say publicly that he didn't know how many houses he owned. President Lincoln once confided privately that he didn't know how many mail carriers the Pony Express had, but that's a horse of a different color.? • Moonlight doesn't cause skin cancer. • The astronomy pioneer Tycho Brahe of Denmark made himself a metal nose to replace the original, lost in a midnight swordfight. He also had a boarder dwarf he kept under the kitchen table to scurry out on cue and snatch food from astonished dinner guests. And he kept a pet moose in the house until it died from injuries sustained when it got drunk one night and fell down the stairs. • It was estimated in 1993 that filling burger orders at McDonald's restaurants necessitated the annual slaughter of 10 million cows. Sounds low to me but does explain the Eat Mor Chikn campaign. • Alta Faubus was the last Arkansas First Lady to keep yard fowl at the Governor's Mansion. ? Bread linehttp://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=62da6f03-f239-489c-adb2-9f9186e856daOn the same day last week that unemployment went over 10 percent, we had our first bread line at the little community center here.Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMTbob@arktimes.com (Bob Lancaster)On the same day last week that unemployment went over 10 percent, we had our first bread line at the little community center here. It was like something out of the Great Depression. The whole scene was black-and-white. Even the autumn leaves raining down were black and white. A black and white stray cat on the periphery. November sunlight and shadows were black and white in the photos that Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange ? I'm sure it was them ? were here taking with their early Leicas. Ragged, unshaved, demoralized-looking people shuffled along in the long line. They wore mittens that were more holes than fabric, and dirty cotton jackets, and iron work shoes with the laces gone, and battered caps with the earflaps pulled down. A glum bunch. Little talk. No signs, chants, mugging for the TV. Some carried tin cups, a good idea inasmuch as the breadlines always have soup or stew, but not always bowls to serve it in. The big iron kettle of stew was a gesture of a local benefactor, a Socialist no doubt ? or not ? maybe just embarrassed into the gesture by his own good fortune here in New Hooverville, or appreciative to the extent of wanting to give back one pot of stew. Though most of the bailiwick's moguls aren't conscience-bothered. ACLU-looking matrons in long dresses and dun head covers ladling out the portions, one dollop per idler, per deadbeat, along with a hunk of coarse black Solzhenitsyn bread. The bread had to serve as push ? as both fork and spoon. Jostle and slurp at the line's head. This was not Miss Manners. It was not ?No coffee, tea, or punch, thank yew.? At one point, a cauldron tender looked up, said something,? all very newsreely, and what I heard her say, or imagined I did, was,? ?By the pricking of my thumbs, something piggish this way comes.? And what I thought was, ?You don't want someone with pricked thumbs serving your vittles these days. Not with all that's going round.? A telling bourgeoise sentiment in the context, I realized later. First thing Pig did when he and his toady arrived ? disgorged from a long black car ? was to issue a bull (good word for it) demanding that the length of the serving line be inflated in the news accounts. ?Make it one point seven million desperate people,? he told Toad. Toad made a note and said nothing, though a skeptical look passed over his countenance ? if indeed toads can be said to have countenances. Because, make no mistake, Toad is a genuine toad, and not just in the sycophantic sense of a Fox News or Associated Press reporter being ordered by a metaphorical pig, a Limbaugh, say, to inflate a partisan crowd count. A real toad, one that mightily favors Charles Krauthammer or a spoilt cheese. And Pig was a real pig ? I'd guess of the faux major middlewhite breed ? though he could talk, or rather bloviate, and walk about upright on his hind legs, if you call a pig's legs ?legs,? all the while peering snootily down his snout at those he considered his inferiors, which is to say, everyone else at the scene. If Toad had peed on you, in other words, you'd have warts. And despite Pig's haughty manner, you half expected him at any moment to drop down on all fours and run off squealing like Ned Beatty in ?Deliverance.? Pig appeared ecstatic to see the breadline. He saw hundreds and thousands of beaten, hungry people for every one that stood in actuality there before him, and he sighed with delight and satisfaction ?Just the failure we've been hoping for, Toad,? he said. ?For us, you know, failure equals success. Their failure, our success.? ?Ignorance is strength,? Toad said, obviously repeating something he'd heard earlier from Pig. ?Their ignorance, our strength.? ??Indeed,? said the $400 million pig. Then Pig said, ?They say we got nothing but we got this. To show the power of no. The party of no. No, no, a thousand times no. [Prompting] And after that what?? ?I give up,? Toad said. ?More noes?? ?No, no, no, no, no. Then Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.? Toad glanced guiltily at the long line shuffling past. He didn't think they looked like Nazis ? black and white not brown ? but he kept the thought to himself. Toads rarely challenge Pigs on the judgment calls. Toads toady and pigs wind them up with keys in their backs. Pig said, ?Three months ago, all you heard was how fat we were. ?A? nation of the obese.' Now look at these scarecrows. What do they do with the big fat unemployment checks they get? Buy lottery tickets?? Someone could ask them, Toad thought without saying it. But it wouldn't be Toad. Etc. Etc. Submitted for your consideration. Postmodern street scene, with caricatures. ?Or it might've been just ordinary-looking Century 21 people in the flu-shot line. Or some other ad hoc 15-minute matrix gatherum here in the Epoch of No We Can't. A black and white sunset at the end of the day.