But Enough About You: Essays Read online

  In Bigelow v. M&Ms, the Court ruled, 7–2, that a candy manufacturer could not be sued by someone seeking damages for adolescent acne. In a scathing majority opinion, Justice Scalia wrote, “Those who bring such suits deserve far worse than acne. They should, per antiqua lege Romana, be put in burlap sacks with wild cats—or, as Justice Stevens would no doubt prefer, raccoons—and thrown into the Potomac.” In his dissent, Justice Souter said that the ruling violates the equal protection clause, “as not all Americans have access to cats and water, or pari passu, burlap.”

  The Court ruled, 5–4, in Lamar Buford Podine v. State of Florida that a state is entitled to seek compensation for the wattage expended in executions by electric chair. Writing for the majority, Justice Thomas cited the sixteenth-century precedent of “tipping the headsman.” In a dissent, Justice Stevens wrote, “Earth to Clarence: this is the twentieth century. Or did you not get that memo?” Justice Rehnquist, who co-wrote the majority opinion with Justice Thomas, suggested that there should “definitely” be compensation if the electric chair in question was powered by coal.

  The Court strengthened the hand of bank examiners by ruling 6–3 that they should be permitted to administer physical torture while conducting routine audits. In another banking-related case, the Court ruled along straight ideological lines as to whether Screen Actors Guild actors who use ATM machines should be paid residual royalties for appearing in the film taken by security cameras during transactions.

  In a bitter dispute involving Chief Justice Rehnquist’s basement parking space, the Court ruled, 8–1, that he should take “immediate steps” to repair the leaking crankcase of his 1997 Chevy Impala, which has been spilling oil onto Justices Kennedy’s, Ginsburg’s and Souter’s parking spaces. Writing for the majority, Justice Souter noted, “The Founders clearly intended for high officials of the land to maintain undercarriages that were not ‘inherently loathsome’ (Madison v. Conoco) to their fellow man.” Justice Rehnquist, writing for the minority, cited Messy v. Ferguson, “in which some court somewhere in like, Ohio or Iowa or one of those places,” ruled that it was “legal, if not entirely considerate” for a person to empty a 45-gallon container of radioactive waste in the parking garage on the grounds that he had paid the full daily rate for the space.

  —Forbes FYI, October 2002

  THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE LOBSTER BIB

  Volume II: Rome to the Present Era

  A.D. 20—Pristinus, tunic-maker to the Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar, is tasked with protecting the imperial purple robe from stains caused by seafood particles during the emperor’s prolonged feasts on the Isle of Capri. He devises a protective garment that he calls a “bibulus,” because it also protects Tiberius’s clothes from imperial drool caused by drunken gorging. The bibulus is embroidered with rubies in the form of a Mediterranean spiny lobster. Tiberius’s mother, Livia, comments in front of the entire court that the garment makes her son look like a Zoroastrian hermaphrodite. Tiberius makes Pristinus eat the bibulus and has him thrown off the cliff from the imperial villa. The incident has a chilling effect on further lobster bib R&D.

  564—Ergo of Fluny, a Benedictine abbot, oversees work on Les Milles Malheures du Beurre, a thousand-page illustrated manuscript depicting the evil effects of drawn butter spilled on priestly vestments. Ergo’s interest in this theologically recondite area is due to a previous manuscript having been ruined by a monk-scribe prone to snacking, who dribbled food onto it, thereby ruining twelve years of communal labor. The book is denounced as heretical by Pope Indolent III on the grounds that melted butter on priestly garments is an outward manifestation of divine grease (foi grasse). Depictions of Ergo being lowered into the papal pot of boiling water become a popular motif among medieval artists.

  622—Padraigggth Cro Ma Uch Na Gorbthflp, called Anapatrick, or more simply, Anapaddy, a Celtic slave from Ireland, saves his English owner when he falls into a pool of holy lobsters. Anapatrick loses a toe in the process, but is granted his freedom by his grateful master. As a sign of his manumission, Anapaddy is given a hempen apron crudely decorated with several lobsters of fierce aspect. The garment, remnants of which are on display at Trinity College, Dublin, is thought by scholars to have been both the first full-length bib as well as the first to depict multiple lobsters.

  892—Grim the Odious, a highly unpopular Viking, begins using buxom women as human lobster bibs after his raids on English fishing villages. Grim decides that this is a superior method of shielding his breastplate from chunks of raw shellfish than using the flayed hides of defeated warriors. From this point on, contemporary accounts begin referring to him as Grim Mellowpuss.

  1000—The Norseman Leif Ericsson lands in what is now Bar Harbor, Maine, thereby discovering the Western Hemisphere. He and his men are met by natives who, taking Ericsson’s arrival as an ill omen, pelt them with rocks, driftwood, and the plentiful creatures that they call “stupid slow-moving things that turn pink when you drop them in hot water.”

  The creatures, whose names will eventually be shortened to “lobstahs,” bounce harmlessly off the breastplates of the Vikings, but the gesture annoys the Norsemen, already grumpy after being blown thousands of miles off course by savage storms, so they slaughter the Indians. Afterward, the hungry Vikings eat the creatures, which have conveniently been shattered into edible pieces by the metal breastplates. For the next two centuries, Vikings will break lobsters by slamming them against their chests, but these “hard bibs” will soon give way to “soft bibs” as people become less violent in their dining habits.

  1216—The English “red” barons and King John meet at Runnymede, where the barons assert their right to wear “bibbes” to protect their chain mail from being rusted by seawater dripping off “lobbesters and other such crustacean victualles that dribbleth from our mouthes whilst feastinge and whoringe.” King John, weary from last year’s meeting with barons at Runnymede, signs the document, which will become known as the Magna à la Carta, but he holds firm on his refusal to provide the barons with “moiste towelettes.”

  1240—A bib alleged to have been used by Jesus at the so-called Clambake of Cana is given to William of Dipp, a knight-crusader, by some Muslims he is about to behead, in exchange for not beheading them. The bib shows what appears to be a man’s chest soaked in butter and the impression of two lobster claws. William gives the bib to an archbishop in return for a temporal indulgence and what is now Yorkshire. It disappears from history until 1389, when it reappears in the Convent of the Wretched Sisters of Penury in Umbria. They display the bib as a holy relic, drawing pilgrimages and donations. In 1395, the order changes its name to the Formerly Wretched Sisters of Penury and purchases what is now Umbria.

  1994—Bowing to pressure from the Vatican, whose scholars can find no reference to a “Clambake of Cana” in the life of Jesus, the Extremely Well-Off Sisters of Penury allow a team from Cal-Tech’s Jet Propulsion Lab and the Cornell Institute of Bibliological Studies to subject the bib to sophisticated spectrographic and carbon-14 analysis. The experts conclude that the bib is in fact a fake; moreover, that crustaceans were unknown in the Sea of Galilee. Nonetheless, the bib continues to be revered by many, in particular by a group of strict penitents who flagellate themselves with lobsters as part of their annual Lenten observance.

  —Forbes FYI, May 2000

  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BUG ZAPPER

  1506—Leonardo da Vinci invents the first bug zapper on May 3. Also on that day, he invents the first toaster oven, gyroscope, electric toothbrush, Q-tip, cheese knish, flush toilet, ball bearing, hypodermic needle, global positioning system, helium, heart-lung transplant machine, Botox, and the paper aeroplane. His “Device for the Immolation of Pests of the Air” is powered not by electricity, which he won’t discover until May 7, but by nuclear energy, which Leonardo invented on May 2, along with fluoride, quarks, the submarine, the stop sign and pantyhose.

  1552—Ivan the Terrible, the first Tsar of All the Russias, is distracted
by mosquitoes while torturing boyars in the Kremlin. He offers a prize—not having your head chopped off—to anyone who proposes an efficient means of eliminating the “proklyatj vozduh d’yavol” (“f— devils of the air”). Oddly, no one comes forward with ideas. Ivan relents and changes the prize to life imprisonment at hard labor, but still no one voices a proposal. Furious, Ivan annexes the Tatar states of Kazan and Astrakhan. His subjects, too terrified to point out that this will accomplish little toward eradicating insects, praise him. Progress will not be made for another 350 years, when Stalin declares all mosquitoes counterrevolutionary and has them shot or sent to Siberia.

  1752—Benjamin Franklin electrocutes a moth by tying it to a kite that he floats aloft into an electrical storm. He sends his friends in England a dissertation entitled “An Experiment on the Effects of Violent Lightning Bolts Upon a Specimen of Lepidoptera.” His conclusion: A million volts of electricity will likely incinerate not only the moth but quite possibly the person holding the kite string. George III falls asleep while Franklin’s treatise is being read to him, though this is attributed by court insiders to a surfeit of gin. A subsequent attempt to electrocute a rat by similar means fails when the rat bites Franklin and escapes.

  1863—During the siege of Vicksburg, Lieutenant Homer Suds of the Union Army’s Corps of Engineers is tasked by his commanding general with coming up with a way of “killing these swarms of goddamned bugs.” Suds’s method, still considered a masterpiece of battlefield improvisation, consists of honey, molasses, saltpeter, and unstable nitroglycerin. It dramatically reduces the local mosquito population, but is discontinued after it blows up a lieutenant colonel and two brevet majors who mistakenly dip their spoons into it, seeking to sweeten their coffee.

  1934—The Düsseldorf electrician Heinrich Himmelring designs a prototype of the first truly modern bug zapper, called Insektver-BrennnungsofenMaschine. Powered by twin hydroelectric turbines, his IBM is capable of frying one million insects simultaneously, but fails to catch on commercially, since it causes massive brownouts (lampedämmerung) throughout North Rhine–Westphalia. Himmelring offers his services to Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, but is frustrated when he cannot find a single electrical socket in the entire country. A treadmill powered by thousands of Somali “guest workers” not only fails to generate the required kilowattage but triggers war with Somalia. Distraught, Himmelring commits suicide by drinking tap water.

  1942—Einstein writes FDR a letter in which he warns the president that “the German government is close to achieving a means of mosquito elimination utilizing blue lights and directed energy.” Roosevelt orders the Office of Strategic Services to create facsimile zappers in order to deceive German agents into believing that the United States already possesses bug-incineration technology. The fake devices consist of boxes containing blue fluorescent lightbulbs and dwarves covered with shoe polish who make “Zzzt!” sounds.

  1948—Jean-Pierre Blumière is charged by the French colonial authorities in Indochina with devising a means of keeping French generals from being bitten by mosquitoes during their daily four-hour lunches. Blumière’s device, consisting of bulbs imported from Paris’s red-light district, is effective, but the generals complain that the smell of the roasting insects is interfering with their enjoyment of the food.

  1958—The documentary movie The Fly portrays a Montreal scientist’s obsession with creating a means of killing houseflies by electric current. His experiment backfires tragically when the scientist’s molecules are fused with those of a housefly that he is trying to teleport to the United States so it can torment Americans.

  1966—As the Vietnam War escalates, the U.S. Navy secretly trains dolphins to eat mosquito larvae before they can hatch in the Mekong Delta and pester U.S. troops.

  1967—Stoned hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury receive painful electric shocks and blistered tongues when they lick bug zappers, mistaking them for “psychedelic” black lights. Governor Ronald Reagan announces that it serves them right.

  1991—The Sharper Image company introduces the “Mother of All Bug Zappers” in its spring catalogue. Sleekly designed to look like a cross between the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and a flat-screen TV, MABZ boasts patented nonclogging vertical killing grids and uses spent plutonium and argon gas, causing bugs to glow iridescently in up to twenty colors before succumbing painfully to radiation poisoning. Each time an insect drops to the ground, MABZ emits a tape-recorded squeal, “Help meeeeeeee!”

  —Forbes FYI, May 2003

  SCRUTINY ON THE BOUNTY

  Captain Bligh’s Secret Logbook

  No monster on the high seas has equaled the infamous ship captain William Bligh. And no movie fan can forget the scene in which Charles Laughton, the definitive Bligh in the 1935 film, instructs his crew to keep flogging a man. That he’s dead makes no difference to Bligh, lips curled with unfettered malignancy.

  “Everything you think you know about Bligh is utterly wrong,” says best-selling writer Caroline Alexander . . .

  —USA TODAY

  February 2, 1789. Position 18°52´3˝ S, 129°27´45˝ W. Winds light, W by WSW. Seas 2–4 feet. Am much vexed on account of Mr. Christian. His mood-compass vacillates sharply between Hysterical Agitation and Sullen Lethargy. I had so wanted this Voyage to be special for him.

  Last night upon seeing him brooding, I told him I would stand his Watch and to go below and curl up in his bunke with a saucy book and a tot of grog. Whereupon he expostulated at me with such Violence that all I could do was mutter, “I keenly regret that you should feel so, dear man,” and retreat to my own cabin.

  Calmed myself by redrawing the Admiralty charts of the North and South Atlantick, which I found to be rife with Errors.

  Febr. 10. Upon examining the Log, I found that Fletcher, who of late hath taken to addressing me as “Captain Bilge,” had put us on a course not for Otaheite but for the Greate Barrier Reefe—named by myself on my Voyage with the late Captain Cook, God rest his fine soul.

  Not wanting to embarrass him in front of the other Officers, I quietly ordered the helm up 2 1/2 points. Whereupon he appeared on the quarterdeck, wearing no Breeches but only a nightshirt and a most fierce look in his eyes, and proceeded to accost me in a manner alarming and disrespectful, calling me Names which Decency prevents me from here enumerating.

  I could only reply abashedly, “But your course, good man, though indubitably well intentioned, would have set us upon Sharke Rocke!”

  But he would hear none of it, and called me the sharke.

  “Fletcher, Fletcher, Fletcher,” I said to him with a soothing aspect, “pray lie down, and I shall send Surgeon to bleed you of this unbecoming Humour.”

  Thereat he threw his grog cup at my feet and stormed off, beating an angry quadrille with his boot-heels upon the deck.

  To the men looking on this unfortunate incident I said, “Mr. Christian is not himself, but he is a fine officer and will be well soon. Now look lively, lads, and spruce the t’uppergallants! Lively, now! Strike the foresnocker and slack the trice-halyards! Look sharp, my chickens! We shall have a tasty surprise at supper—I have ordered a well-drenched rumcake, and after, we shall dance a jig or two!”

  March 3. Otaheite. At anchor. The putting aboard of the Bread-fruit proceeds. It is good to see the men so happy. The Native girls are exceeding generous with their charms.

  March 15. Otaheite. Cross with myself over incident last night. Returned to the ship after surveying the island for the Admiralty, to find Fletcher in mine own berth making exceeding merry with three Native Dollies, one of whom, a girl not twelve years of age, is the daughter of the High Priest Mahoota-ete, upon whose Good Will the success of our mission very much depends.

  This rude surprise, coupled with an fierce Migraine, the result of a Malaria contracted whilst ashore harvesting Bread-fruit, the men being too occupied with fornicating to assist me, put me in no good temper, which I thereupon proceeded to lose.

  I abused F
letcher most severely, calling him a “randy ram” and “disgraceful” and “unprofessional.” It is with Mortification that I recall my speech. Fortunately, my expostulations went unheard, as he had passed out, either from Surfeit of Eros or my (rather good) ’78 Madeira.

  At anchor. This morning’s muster attended only by the cabin boy, Tom, three men of the larboard watch, two of the starboard, the carpenter, and the ship’s Parrot, Algernon, the rest of the crew being still ashore in pursuit of Venery.

  Have resolved to sail upon the morning tide and commence our historick voyage to His Majesty’s slave plantations in Guyana with our cargoe of nutritious high-fiber Bread-fruit. (Reminder to self upon return to England to mount a Campaign for the Abolition of Slavery, a most unnatural and abhorrent practice.)

  The sooner we are under the discipline of the sea, the better.

  April 21. At sea—finally! Men very sullen at having left their Toffee-darlings behind and glower at me if I so much as suggest—for I no longer bother ordering them—that they might attend to the sails.