Politically correct Santa

“A Visit from St. Nicholas”, also known as “The Night Before Christmas” and “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” was published anonymously in 1823. It was later attributed to Clement Clark Moore, who finally acknowledged his authorship about 15 years later.

Due to the fact that it is one of the most popular Christmas poems ever published, it has been subject to constant parodies over the years, including a few that I’ve written myself. If you’d like to view a few of them, just click on the click below:

Santa parodies

My favorite of the bunch, though, is one that the author titled “Politically Correct Santa”, which you can read below:

'Twas the night before Christmas and Santa's a wreck...

How to live in a world that's politically correct?

His workers no longer would answer to "Elves",

"Vertically Challenged" they were calling themselves.



And labor conditions at the north pole

Were alleged by the union to stifle the soul.

Four reindeer had vanished, without much propriety,

Released to the wilds by the Humane Society.



And equal employment had made it quite clear

That Santa had better not use just reindeer.

So Dancer and Donner, Comet and Cupid,

Were replaced with 4 pigs, and you know that looked stupid!

The runners had been removed from his sleigh;

The ruts were termed dangerous by the E.P.A.

And people had started to call for the cops

When they heard sled noises on their roof-tops.



Second-hand smoke from his pipe had his workers quite frightened.

His fur trimmed red suit was called "Unenlightened."

And to show you the strangeness of life's ebbs and flows,

Rudolf was suing over unauthorized use of his nose

And had gone on Geraldo, in front of the nation,

Demanding millions in over-due compensation.

So, half of the reindeer were gone; and his wife,

Who suddenly said she'd enough of this life,



Joined a self-help group, packed, and left in a whiz,

Demanding from now on her title was Ms.

And as for the gifts, why, he'd ne'er had a notion

That making a choice could cause so much commotion.



Nothing of leather, nothing of fur,

Which meant nothing for him. And nothing for her.

Nothing that might be construed to pollute.

Nothing to aim. Nothing to shoot.



Nothing that clamored or made lots of noise.

Nothing for just girls. Or just for the boys.

Nothing that claimed to be gender specific.

Nothing that's warlike or non-pacific.



No candy or sweets...they were bad for the tooth.

Nothing that seemed to embellish a truth.

And fairy tales, while not yet forbidden,

Were like Ken and Barbie, better off hidden.



For they raised the hackles of those psychological

Who claimed the only good gift was one ecological.

No baseball, no football...someone could get hurt;

Besides, playing sports exposed kids to dirt.



Dolls were said to be sexist, and should be passe;

And Nintendo would rot your entire brain away.

So Santa just stood there, disheveled, perplexed;

He just could not figure out what to do next.



He tried to be merry, tried to be gay,

But you've got to be careful with that word today.

His sack was quite empty, limp to the ground;

Nothing fully acceptable was to be found.



Something special was needed, a gift that he might

Give to all without angering the left or the right.

A gift that would satisfy, with no indecision,

Each group of people, every religion;



Every ethnicity, every hue,

Everyone, everywhere...even you.

So here is that gift, it's price beyond worth...

"May you and your loved ones enjoy peace on earth."



Notice: This poem is copyright 1992 by Harvey Ehrlich. It is free to distribute, without changes, as long as this notice remains intact. All follow-ups, requests, comments, questions, distribution rights, etc should be made to mduhan@husc.harvard.edu . Happy Holidays!

(Editors note: even “Happy Holidays” is a source of controversy today. No matter what you do, you’re bound to insult somebody, which means that you just can’t win)

Suicide is painless

M*A*S*H*, the television show, was one of the most popular shows on television for at least 10 years. It premiered on September 17, 1972, and concluded on February 28, 1983. The final show was the most watched television show in history at the time, with a record-breaking 125 million viewers for the final episode. Like many people, my wife and I attended a M*A*S*H* party with some of our close friends in Wisconsin. Like many people, we also were hoping for a happy ending for the series, but the writers had other ideas.

In view of the fact that the title theme for the show was “suicide is painless”, my thoughts for a happy ending were hopelessly optimistic, but it’s still an enjoyable song to listen to:

M*A*S*H* theme song

Oddly enough, the show came to mind again a few days before Thanksgiving, due to the fact that Flagstaff got another dusting of snow, even though we live in “sunny Arizona”. Fortunately, Flagstaff also gets a fairly high percentage of available sunlight, which generally melts the white stuff off fairly quickly, and keeps everybody’s spirits in an elevated state. As a matter of fact, Flagstaff actually gets more sunshine than either Los Angeles or San Diego.

In contrast, Washington State has 15 cities that receive the LEAST amount of available sunlight, which has led to the popular belief that Washington State has the highest suicide rate.

It’s a logical conclusion, but it’s simply not true.

The state that has the highest suicide rate in America is Alaska, and Washington State isn’t even the top 10. Almost without exception, the states that have the highest suicide rates also have the least restrictive gun laws.

By far, the group that is most as risk for suicide is white males older than 65 years old, and the “method of choice” for suicide is firearms, which is the cause of nearly 60% of all suicides. Logically, you’d think that it would make sense to limit gun licenses to 4 years, and require a mental health check be performed before they could be renewed. Since the NRA and the Citizens Defense League are no longer capable of logical thought, it’s unlikely that a mental health check every 4 years would every get through the legislative process.

It’s also common knowledge that there are more suicides during the wintertime due to the fact that there are a lot more days without sunshine during that time period. Again, though, it’s a conclusion that simply isn’t valid. The majority of suicides actually occur during the springtime, which psychologists have termed “the suicide season”.

Admittedly, the holiday season is a stressful time for most of us. If you’re intelligent enough to avoid the Black Friday (and Gray Thursday) sales, December is a time of the year when we all have higher expenses (utility bills and Christmas shopping) and less income (due to unpaid days off). We’re all familiar with the Hallmark character named Maxine, and her summary of the holiday season happens to be right on the mark.

This is also the time of the year when the phrase “happy holidays” gets some people all tied up in knots, and one example (which is being sold by the Republican Party) is shown below:

The phrase “Merry Christmas” doesn’t offend me, but neither does the phrase “happy holidays”. In addition to the Christian holiday of Christmas (which is patterned after the pagan holiday of Saturnalia), followers of the Jewish religion celebrate Hanukkah, African-Americans celebrate Kwanzaa, Hindus celebrate Diwali, and pagans celebrate Yule.

For now, let’s set aside thoughts about suicide, since it’s hardly a topic that’s going to bring holiday cheer. Instead, I’d like to close with a phrase that Charles Dickens wrote in 1843:

“God bless us,everyone”.

The story of a cancer survivor, part 2

I first learned that I had cancer on June 23, 2011, and I took some preliminary steps at that time to bring myself back to health again. Those steps were documented in an article that I published on July 1, 2011:

the sky is falling

Not long after my visit to the doctor, I retired from my job as a car salesman, and less than two months after that, I moved to Arizona.

Retirement is a nice stage of life to be in, but if you retire at the age of 63 (which I did) you immediately run into a couple of vexing problems. The first, of course, is that you have less money to live on, which is why I have un-retired a few times since then, and currently work for the local school district.

The other problem is that I no longer had any health insurance, which moved the date for my cancer surgery until a month or so after I turned 65 years old (more than a year later), and had obtained coverage from Medicare. I purchased a Medicare supplemental plan recommended by AARP at the end of the year.

The second problem illustrates why the Affordable Care Act, for all its faults, was long overdue in our country. There’s a bit of blame on both sides as to why the roll out didn’t go as smoothly as it should have, and two of the reasons are listed below:

1) The House Homeland Security Committee has discovered that the government website used to sign people up for insurance coverage had been subjected to at least 16 cyber attacks by “Obamacare” opponents, and at least some of the attacks were designed specifically to deny access to the website.

2) The other problem with the Affordable Care Act was that the administration knew as early as March that there were problems with HealthCare.gov, but failed to correct them in time for the October 1 launch date. The government has initiated some procedures to improve the enrollment process, and have detailed those steps on the website.

The fact that the Medicare Plan D coverage that was started during the Bush administration had significant “teething” problems early on is small comfort to the folks who initially had trouble getting on the website. Medicare itself, of course, had a shaky start in 1965, and Mitt Romney’s universal health plan in Massachusetts took a while to become fully operational.

None of the paragraphs above, though, will help to explain my “K-mart face”, so a little more information is required.

Apart from the fact that the surgery on my back last fall removed the basal cell carcinoma that I had acquired, it also highlighted the fact that I had VERY HIGH BLOOD pressure, which led to a visit to a local cardiologist later on the same day. On a daily basis, I now take medication for both my blood pressure and my cholesterol, and both areas are now under control.

I pretty much forgot about the “pre-cancerous” cells on my face until the end of summer, when a bout of eczema encouraged me to make a trip to a local dermatologist. A week’s worth of a treatment with a tube of medicated cream (which cost $54) cured the eczema, but it led to an appointment to have the “pre-cancerous” cells on my face taken care of.

That appointment occurred on Friday, November 22.

The procedure used to remove my facial cancer is called the BLU-U light treatment, which is what I called it “the K-Mart special”. After an initial treatment with a Levuan Kerastick was allowed to be absorbed into my skin for about an hour, my eyes were covered with protective goggles, and I was exposed to bright fluorescent lights for 16 minutes and 40 seconds. The end result is that the cancer cells have been fried away, but I’ll be sunburned for about a week, and will be unable to shave for a while.

Many folks who are covered by Medicare may not be aware of the fact that Medicare will pay 100% of the cost of a yearly “wellness” visit, which I took advantage of about a week ago. I’ll be getting the lab results in the mail sometime this coming week, but a phone call from my doctor the other day assured me that I had no significant problems to worry about.

I’m as reluctant as anyone to spend money from my tightly managed monthly budget on doctors and dentists, but my recent experiences have convinced me that it’s important to do so. My experiences also reinforce why it’s important that EVERYBODY had health coverage, even if the current program has some flaws. As one pundit said recently, “you wouldn’t throw out your ice cream because you couldn’t find your spoons”.

Enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday, but try to stay away from K-Mart on that day. A lot of their stores will be open at 6 a.m., which almost seems sacrilegious, and calling it “gray Thursday” instead of Black Friday doesn’t make it more palatable.

If you’re REALLY health conscious, and want to avoid “genetically modified” turkeys, you’ll be happy to know that there ARE specialty stores across the country that will sell you “heritage turkeys”, which are significantly different than the large-breasted birds that we are accustomed to.

You no longer have to worry about cranberries, since the substance that caused the cranberry scare of 1959 was banned long ago, but go easy on the coffee. An average cup of coffee contains hundreds of natural-occurring chemicals, and at least 80 of them (in large doses) will initiate cancer in laboratory animals.

Bon appetit

The Thanksgiving dinner that can’t be beat

Up until about 10 years ago, I still owned the vinyl record shown below:

Since my Dual turntable hadn’t worked for years, it seemed to be a good time to clean out the balance of my record albums and the non-functioning record player, all of which were happily purchased by a baby boomer that we knew in Wisconsin.

I was still in college when Arlo Guthrie played the song in front of a live audience for the first time at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, and I’ve listened to it hundreds of times since them.

Since I was stationed on the East Coast for basic training and A.I.T, I took the opportunity to travel through Stockbridge, Massachusetts on my way back home to Minnesota.

I took pictures of the church and its bell tower, the original location of Alice Restaurant, and the police station, but decided to not visit the town dump.

The original location of the restaurant is STILL a restaurant, and it’s now known as the Stockbridge Café. The restaurant has gotten good reviews, and has a fairly extensive menu, but you can no longer get whatever you want when you walk in the door.

Alice Brock, who had been the librarian at Arlo’s boarding school in Stockbridge before opening her restaurant, now owns an art studio in Princetown, Massachusetts.

The church and its bell tower where purchased by Arlo Guthrie in 1991, and converted to the Guthrie Center, an interfaith meeting center. The center provides free weekly lunches for families living with AIDS/HIV, and hosts an annual "Thanksgiving Dinner that Can’t be Beat” to raise money to cure Huntington’s disease (which was the disease that killed Arlos’s father, Woody.)

Arlo still sings the song today, and still has a moderately active tour schedule, which you can view at his website below. Like most of us, he’s a lot grayer, and more wrinkled, than he used to be, but he’s still fun to listen to.

Arlo’s website

Like his dad, he often sings songs against social injustice, and actively campaigned for George McGovern in 1984. Since then, he’s become a registered Republican (gasp!) , based on the theory that “We had enough good Democrats. We need a few more good Republicans”. In view of the fact that a lot of folks today view the Republican Party of today through the prism of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, his current position actually makes some sense.

If you’re in the mood for a little nostalgia, you can listen to the entire album again by clicking on the link below. If it doesn’t come on right away, just wait a minute, and it will come around again.

do you remember Group W?

Day of the dead

On October 31, 1994, the city of Chicago experienced a torrential downpour.

Although the home town football team is famous for beating its opponents in inclement weather, the Bears managed to get trounced by the Green Bay Packers 33 to 6 later that evening at Soldier Field.

About an hour after returning from a business lunch with my new boss, John Platt, I was drying my socks in the microwave (seriously) when the phone call came from Minnesota. My mother called to let me know that my dad had had a heart attack while having lunch at their little house on 3rd Street in St. Paul. Although an army of paramedics arrived just a few minutes after she had called them, it was too late to save my dad.

Just as I think of my dad on February 3 (his birthday) , I also am reminded of him every year on the 31st of October, because that is when he left us for a new and better location. Although Halloween is usually a day of joy (especially for the younger generation) it always carries a sense of melancholy for my sister and me.

If you dig deeper into the origins of the holiday, Halloween SHOULD be a time of joy, not only for those who have lost loved ones on October 31, but other folks as well.

Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a three day Mexican festival that has ancient origins, possibly going back to the pre-Columbian times of 3000 years ago. In modern Mexico, the holiday focuses on family and friends getting together to pray for departed loved ones. The purpose of the meetings is to encourage visits by folks who are no longer with us, and the gatherings generally include offerings such as favorite foods, beverages, and memorabilia.

The offerings are called ofrendas, and may sometimes include items that would likely be considered unusual by most people. For reasons that I’ve explained previously, I brought a bag of oranges and 2 quarters to the ofrenda offering at a local church a few years ago.

Mexico isn’t the only country that celebrates the Day of the Dead, since it is celebrated in a number of countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. In 2004, I was stranded for 4 days in Hong Kong due to the fact that I had traveled there just before the Qingming holdiday (also called Grave Sweeping Day). Since the government office that I needed to go to for my visa was closed on the following Monday (Qingming) I had to wait until the following Tuesday to obtain the paperwork that I needed to return legally to my residence in Guangzhou, China.

I’ll never know for sure, but I strongly suspect that all the energy generated by the Day of the Dead offerings around the world will generate enough energy to bring the ghost of Larry Brennan a little closer to earth again.

After all, to quote one of my cousins (at his funeral), he was a really good guy.

yes, we have no bananas

Here’s a quick quiz for you.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is:

1) the name of a religious singing group

2) the lunch special at the local St. Vincent DePaul shelter

3) a country

If you didn’t pick #3, don’t feel bad. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is indeed a country, but that’s a fact that’s not known to a lot of people. It’s not a very big country, it doesn’t have a lot of people, and it has a fairly tiny GDP.

It’s total area is 150 square miles, roughly 2/3 the size of the city of Tucson. It has a total population of 120,000 people, roughly the same size as the city of Surprise, Arizona, and its GDP is $1.259 billion. To put that in perspective, its GDP is less than the Tea Party caused our country to lose per day during the recent shutdown.

Formerly a British colony, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines become fully independent in October of 1979. It is located in the eastern Caribbean, and is a very lovely place. The video below will allow you to take a tour of the islands that make up the country:

let’s take a tour

Since it is located in the Caribbean, it is subject to the tropical storms that are very common in this area - and therein lies the problem.

The main source of income for the country is banana production, although tourism and a secretive financial sector also make their contributions to the economy. Volcanic eruptions, and fairly frequent hurricanes, have caused extensive damage to the country’s banana plantations on occasion, causing the local plantation owners to sing a song that was first made popular in 1922:

yes, we have no bananas

The country came to light this morning, when it became the “topic of the day” on Bing. In the event that you aren’t familiar with Bing, it’s a search engine that was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in May of 2009.

The country’s reliance on a single crop for most of its income mirrors the problems faced by the island nation of Nauru, which is the third smallest country in the world. When the phosphate mines that fueled the county’s economy petered out, the country briefly got support from the Russian mafia, but eventually switched to a reliance on tourism to sustain itself.

Few of us will ever get to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, but the recent filming of the Pirates of the Caribbean pictures has led to an increase in both visitors and investors, which should bode well for the country.

Eventually, the country will figure out a way to further diversify its economy, but until that happens, consider this option:

What a GREAT PLACE for a vacation !!

The Crisco kid

A couple of weeks ago, Sharon made another batch of her world famous chocolate chip cookies, filling the house with a marvelous aroma, and replenishing the supply of tasty treats in our glass cookie jars.

Naturally, she used Crisco as one of the ingredients, which got me to pondering the following question:

Where did Crisco come from?

In order to keep fats solid at normal storage temperature, it is necessary to hydrogenate the substance. The hydrogenation process was discovered in the late 19th Century, and was patented by a man named Wilhelm Normann in 1903. The patent was acquired by the Proctor and Gamble company a few years later. Although the original purpose of the patent was to produce soap, Proctor and Gamble used it to produce the world’s first shortening made entirely of vegetable oil. The name “Crisco” is actually a modification of the phrase “crystallized cottonseed oil”.

Even though the formula has been changed in recent years to reduce the fat content in Crisco, some nutritionists still feel it may not be good for your health, but it’s better than the alternative.

Lard.

Lard is pig fat in both its rendered and engendered form, and can be obtained from any part of the pig as long as there is a high concentration of fatty tissue. Despite its higher fat content (as compared to vegetable shortening) lard is still popular with many chefs and bakers because of its distinctive taste and wide range of applications. Rumor has it that lard was even used in Mrs. Wagner’s pies, which were made famous by Simon and Garfunkel in 1968. Sadly, even though Mrs. Wagner’s was the largest pie bakery in the country in 1940, the company went out of business in July of 1969.

Crisco contains less total fat than lard, even though it has a higher amount of polyunsaturated fat. Surprisingly, it also has less total fat than most other vegetable oils, including olive oil.

Trying to determine the health effects of hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils can be enormously difficult, but it appears that the real villain is something called “trans fats”, which can result from the hydrogenation process. Even though the can of Crisco in our pantry includes both fully and partially hydrogenated palm oil, it has ZERO trans fat.

Those delicious chocolate chip cookies in our cookie jars may not be the healthiest way to end a meal, but I’d heartily recommend having a couple for dessert on occasion.

After all, life is short.