by Peter Rodman
The Dutch government has established a six-member Manure Problem Steering Committee to, presumably, steer the annual excess of 14 million tons of manure out of Holland. So far, all they've been able to come up with is a proposal to fill the tankers that deliver oil to Holland with pig poop once the tankers unload the oil. Sort of like a gift.
There are no statistics on how much manure sea captains can absorb, but I'm willing to bet very few captains will be bringing ships back to Holland after the first boatload.
My friend Henry is not a member of the Manure Problem Steering Committee, but he considers similar problems. (My friend's name is not really Henry, it's Rick--I changed his name to save him embarrassment.)
In real life Henry and I are both bureaucrats, but Henry is much better at it than I am (he makes more money doing it.) He is disturbed by the amount of paperwork we government workers generate. Besides the necessary paperwork we make, government produces quite a bit of unnecessary paperwork. But the unnecessary documents have to be typed, copied, routed, signed off, mailed and filed just like the necessary documents. Henry is concerned that soon we won't be able to see the governmental windmills because the excess paper poop will overwhelm us.
Coincidentally, my estimate of the amount of excess paperwork all government agencies in the state of California produce annually is--14 million tons.
Also coincidentally, the United States imports much of its crude oil and California has several supertanker ports where this oil is unloaded. My solution is to ship out the excess government paper in the empty tankers. Henry disagrees; he feels I have my eyes on the horizon when I should be watching where I step.
Henry believes in stopping the problem at the source. He reasons you can't have paperwork without paper and would limit each government employee to one 50-page 8 1/2 x 11 lined tablet per month. No exceptions.
This seemed foolish to me at first. I thought people would just use dictating machines or else supplement their ration of paper with old grocery bags, cash register receipts, and the backs of fliers that get stuck under their windshield wipers in parking lots.
But actually his idea has merit. People need lines on their paper or they can't write. Actually they can write, but they're embarrassed to. They don't know how big to make their letters and can't string words across a blank page without lines to guide them. The writing ends up with some letters big and some tiny and everything slanting up or down or trying to dive down to the bottom corner of the page. Any boss who gave something like that to a secretary to type would never be able to condescend to her again. No one could be arrogantly told to clean up the conference room after a meeting. The whole structure of the organization would crumble.
People also need a standard size page to fill--8 1/2 x 11 with 26 lines is usual--otherwise they don't know when they're finished. Give the bureaucrat a dictating machine or even a nonstandard tablet, and he'll either make his memo too short or too long.
Because he doesn't think in terms of getting across ideas, only of filling volume (how many pages does an assemblyman rate?; how many pounds should the final draft of a ten-year master plan weigh?), if you take away his standard of measurement (the number of tablet pages he's filled,) the bureaucrat won't know when he's finished writing.
So it actually looks as though tablet rationing would cut down on excess paperwork except for one thing. Photocopy machines are just about foolproof today--almost anyone can use them. What's to prevent a person from making 20 copies of his blank tablet every month? Nothing.
Henry's idea is good, but it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work with Dutch pigs either. Cutting down on feed could certainly cut down on pig manure, but who wants a skinny pig?
Hot? This?
Sometimes I forget that not everyone I meet around town is from the Sacramento Valley or is used to the heat.
There are even people who live here who are not used to the heat and don't like it. It's their own fault of course, people who spend the summer in air conditioned malls, homes, cars, and offices can't complain if they lack the adaptations to life that more practical residents have developed.
Adaptations like the ability to stare unblinking directly into the sun for twenty minutes at a time. Or the capacity to store five gallons of water in the abdomen if you are a man (we call these beer-bellies) and up to three gallons over the hips and thighs if you are a woman (saddlebags).
Residents who refuse to deal with the heat deserve whatever happens to them, but I'm frankly a little alarmed by the innocence of the people driving back and forth between the Sierras and the Bay Area every weekend during the summer.
A kind of misplaced tolerance is at work here: people who don't live in the Valley simply can't believe summers are as bad as everyone says. They are.
I hope these suggestions will help travelers.
You must have air conditioning in your car. Not only is the Valley an oven in summer, but the air is poisonous. The Sacramento Valley provides most of the world with one sort of vegetable or another, mainly catsup. We use pesticides abundantly; the dust in the air is contaminated with poisons. Travelers need air conditioning so they can make the crossing with their car windows rolled up, enclosed in the constantly recirculated bubble of clean air they trapped by closing their car doors in the driveway at home.
Take water--a minimum of three gallons per person-- there is precious little in the Valley. Except for the Sacramento River, the raging Putah (Creek), and the American River (lately renamed the Little East Bay MUDdy) the landscape is bleak and stone dry.
Travel early in the day or very late at night. The Valley is cooler then and there are fewer Valley folks on the roads soaking up the residual heat from the asphalt. But do watch for roving packs of rabid skunks; they're nocturnal, and protest strongly if disturbed.
Listen to the radio for news of The Fire. We have any number of grass fires during the summer, but there's only one, "The Fire." It roars down the Valley driven by a dry north wind, blackening all the land from Chico to Modesto with flames up to 150 feet high. It usually melts the interstate, making driving difficult, and the added heat will overwork even the stoutest car air conditioner. Avoid the Valley during The Fire.
Do not stop and get out of your car. The heat will sap your strength, the air will rot your lungs, and you may be robbed of your water.
Make sure you fill your car's tank with gas. In the Valley we cage our most violent gas station attendants in shatterproof glass compartments, but the combination of heat and gasoline fumes can trigger rages in the most amiable attendant. It has been estimated that more travelers meet their ends in Valley gas stations than any other way, except perhaps by walking into frozen yogurt shoppes. Don't risk it.
Even we don't understand frozen yogurt shoppes. There have been two Yolo County Grand Jury investigations, but to date no one has discovered what becomes of a person who walks into a frozen yogurt shoppe. The first grand jury actually visited a frozen yogurt shoppe. The second, convened to investigate the disappearance of the first, is still in session. What happens to these people? where do they go? Shoppe owners aren't talking.
Wax your car. Valley air is as corrosive to automobile finishes as it is to your lungs. You may also want to cover the exposed chrome with masking tape to keep it from being discolored.
Finally, plan your route and stick to it. Don't be detoured by billboards or frozen yogurt shoppes. When the kids complain, ask them this simple question: "Is it worth dying to go to the bathroom?"
Remember: if you get lost, you're lost. Yours will be just one more BMW bleaching beside the road with a yellow Highway Patrol tow-away ticket fluttering from the antenna.
Road Rage
Some days I can't understand why so many jerks look for me on the highway, actually find me--even when I wear my sunglasses--then go out of their way to get in my way. Other days, I know exactly why.
My new car helps me understand why.
I am now the owner of a 1977 O
ldsmobile Leviathan.
Although a big car by today's standards, it was mid-sized 11 years ago: larger than the Olds Behemoth, but smaller than their Juggernaut. This is a car from the days when cars drove over a pothole rather than down one side of the pothole, across the bottom, then back up the other side to the roadway as modern cars must. (No, potholes aren't bigger.)
When I wash the Olds, I have to hose the Yugos, BMWs, and Suzukis out of the grille along with the mothwings and dragonfly parts.
It's a big car.
And when I drive the Leviathan with the air conditioning sighing a breeze through my hair and the radio tumbling classical tunes over my ears something odd happens to me: I feel peace, brotherly love, and charity towards all those on the road around me.
And they in their turn leave off messing with me.
Why, when I drove the Gremlin, Toyotas would cut me off- -TOYOTAS!
In the Gremlin I could have a quarter mile of clear lane behind me on the freeway but the housewife in the Volvo station wagon would have to speed up to get ahead of me so she could force her way into the 30 feet between me and the car in front of me to make her offramp. And even when I sped up to close up the hole and keep her out, she would still crowd her way in. Nasty: unpleasant.
It was a struggle to keep my speed down in the Gremlin. 55 mph was intellectually pleasing to me, but the Gremlin was built for speed: it didn't even start whistling and rattling loud enough to drown out the radio until I hit 60, and the thumping noise didn't kick in until 65. It was hard to hold the Gremlin down to 55--it wanted to run.
The Leviathan is different. Although the Oldsmobile can cruise at 85 in surprising silence, I don't. I've looked down at the speedometer more than once and been surprised to see I was driving 45 mph on the freeway--just like those codgers that always used to irk me.
Almost no one cuts me off in the Olds. They all seem to know that it's a heavy car and that no matter how much turbocharging and fuel injection their car has or how many watts their sound system is, if their car happens to be where the Oldsmobile is going, the Oldsmobile will go over their car.
Lastly, I find I am remarkably accepting of multiple- car crashes that don't involve me while I am driving the Leviathan. I drive right by the crumpled cars, the police men, and the ambulances without staring and without blasting my horn at the guy in front of me who is staring.
All of which makes me quite proud of myself. Today it is natural for me to be law-abiding (I don't speed anymore-- not even accidentally); I'm not bothered by people cutting me off and therefore don't cut them off; and I am accepting and tolerant of the shortcomings of the drivers around me.
This is quite a bit of progress for me. It's almost as if I am a different person today, that I operate on a more spiritual plane and am relieved of the rages that used to overwhelm me when I drove.
Except for one thing.
After several weeks of driving the Oldsmobile with all the equanimity of the Buddha driving a sofa, one day I wasn't able to take the Olds and had to drive the Subaru.
It all came back; they found me again--the Toyotas, the housewife with the Volvo station wagon--all of them. I found myself speeding, weaving from lane to lane, crowding folks out because they had expensive cars, and tailgating anyone who wasn't burning diesel fuel.
It was as if my spiritual plane was overbooked and I'd been bumped from the flight.
There is a very real point here. I had not changed; my situation had changed. Instead of being an insane driver in a car that gave my insanity a twitch, I became an insane driver in an Oldsmobile Leviathan--wrapped in comfort, coddled and insulated. I didn't act crazy because nothing touched me off.
As the saying goes, "If you're heading down the freeway and everything in the world seems to be coming right towards you, then you might (possibly) be going the wrong direction."
My problem is that sometimes I can go the wrong direction for a long time before I see any traffic and it dawns on me that I might have a problem.
Non-Sex Words
And my friend said to me, "Yeah, she's really nice. I've seen her a couple of times now."
"So are you dating, or what?" I said.
"No, no, nothing like that. We'll go out to a movie or dinner or just sit and talk."
I was confused. "But you don't date?"
"No, we're friends. It's a friendship."
"Friends don't date?" I said.
"Of course not. We're not sleeping together, we're friends."
"Oh."
The vocabulary has changed on me again. Evidently the word "dating" now means "having/doing/performing sex regularly with" someone.
Few people will argue the need to have euphemisms in polite society. After all, people can't have sex every moment of the day, and when a couple is not having sex they occasionally are seen together in public. How are they to explain themselves at those times?
For instance, suppose I see my friend Sid Notrealname at a party with a strange woman at his arm. They cross the room to me and Sid makes the introductions:
"Peter, this is Lucinda; Lucinda, my friend Peter."
We exchange pleased to meet yous.
"So," I say, "how did you meet Sid?"
"In a bar," Lucinda says.
"I see. And are you showing each other the town, or what?"
"No," she says, "we rut like voles."
See? Messy and embarrassing. There has to be some way of saying things in public that you don't say in public. These days, the way seems to be, "We're dating."
The problem is it keeps changing, and soon there may not be any words left that don't mean, "we're having sex." Society keeps taking innocent words and loading them with secret messages. In my own brief lifetime this has happened several times.
I recall an unmarried couple on a talk show. She blushed and lowered her eyes and he smirked as he said, "We're just good friends." Does that mean, "We've known each other for years, have talked on weighty and profound matters, and supported and advised each other in times of need"? Of course not. At that time, "just good friends" meant, "We don't know each other's last names, but we can find one another when we need a paroxysm of ecstasy or two."
It became embarrassing to be good friends.
For years people had been "going together," which for all those years meant "seriously dating one person." (This is dating in the old sense, not the modern.) When it became widely known that "just good friends" meant "having regular sex," people started saying they were going together to avoid the stigma of being good friends.
Then "going together" came to mean "having sex," and people had to start having relationships to show they were serious. After a period of time it became necessary to distinguish between the relationships where you cared about the person and the relationships lasting twelve minutes (not counting the time to dress and undress). So people started having significant others. Predictably, some people started having frequent and sometimes overlapping or concurrent significant others.
But all this time the word "dating" had been left alone. You could be in a relationship and still date, or your significant other didn't care if you dated. The word wasn't sacred, just untouched by innuendo. And now it's gone.
This is distressing. Pick up a copy of an unabridged dictionary of slang. It has to be unabridged. The abridged versions (by comparison very slim books) leave out all the slang words for sex to save impressionable youngsters from being corrupted, and all you'll find in them are the insulting names for men and women and obscure ways of talking about murder, theft, alcoholism and drug use.
Flip through this dictionary. Almost every word we have has a sexual color. Try "it" (get it on, make it). Look up "home run" and "score." Words don't even have to have a rational connection to sex to have sex slathered all over them.
Which leaves us with what? With nothing. What parent is going to let his eight year old go out on a first date? We now have no innocent word for what an eigh
t year old can reasonably be expected to do with another eight year old of the opposite sex.
The problem is even worse for adults who can have sex but aren't. What word can a man use to get across the idea that he wants to have lunch with a woman and walk around the zoo and nothing else?
Sects in Sinema
Once again a movie has popped up that offends one sect or another. I figure if I don't mention the name of the movie this time, I'll be able to use this column again the next time it happens.
And it will happen again. Even people who make "safe" religious movies (like Franco Zeffirelli,) can run into trouble by tweaking someone's idea of what God should be.
In Franco's case, his Jesus was too much of a wimp. He was always loving and accepting, always helpful and tolerant. The protesters wanted more of a holy Buford Pusser, walking tall through the Holy Land.
It isn't just the Christians either. Moslems don't want the face of the prophet shown on the screen. No doubt Hindus have their own blasphemies to protest. In the past, witches have protested they way their religion is portrayed in movies.
I guess my problem with the situation is that it keeps recurring. If there is a solution to the problem of these movies, life will be quieter and the TV news reporters will be able to move on to other, more pressing stories like grass fires and fun runs.
To make everyone happy I have a few suggestions I think may help.
(1) Put some sort of obstruction in the way of people to prevent them from accidentally finding themselves in one of these movies. I suggest having only one entrance to theaters and having each person checked as he comes in to make sure he wants to see the movie.
Theater owners might even go further and make these people prove they want to see the movie by forcing them to pay some money--say a dollar and a half--to get in the movie.
(2) People should never be forced to go to a movie. If a person does something bad, he should be sent to his room without his dinner, or to prison. And even in prison a person shouldn't be required to watch movies.