Give Papa an Asterisk

So much attention has been focused in recent months on a number of athletes who – fearing that their career statistics would only be remembered by a few trivia-crazed fans at a Vegas card convention – decided to elevate the level of their performances by taking various illegitimate substances.

Marion Jones, Floyd Landis, Dana Stubblefield and Barry Bonds are just some of the prominent athletes whose names have been tarnished — to say nothing of the sports in which they participated — by charges of using performance-enhancing substances.

Each has been deservedly berated and lambasted by a sporting public which through the years has developed a “guilty until proven innocent” cynicism towards successful professional and Olympic athletes.

Nevertheless, we would be remiss if we were to limit the scope of our disillusionment solely to those who make their living by throwing a ball or peddling a bicycle and overlook others whose impact on our culture has far more significant repercussions.

Take, for example, some of the great literary talents who have written the works which form the established canon. It is common knowledge, but not so commonly discussed, that William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway all partook wholeheartedly in the use of a myriad of stimulants to assist them in the creative process.

We must now, for the sake of the students, aspiring writers and other devotees of these so-called “great men of literature”, reexamine what has heretofore been considered the pinnacle of creative output.

In the same way it has been determined that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa would have been lucky to have batted 20 homers in a season were it not for steroids, we should also dissect what some literary works would have looked liked had the creative minds behind them not availed themselves of performance-enhancing substances with such gusto.

For example, had it not been for the use of mild-altering substances, then Rene Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” would have been written as “Dude, I, like, just had this wildest idea.”

If Shakespeare had not been under the influence of a pint too many of ale, then high school students around the world would see the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be, That is the question”, .the most famous line in all of English literature, as “There’s something I have been meaning to ask you, but it escapes me at the moment.”

The last line of the well-known work by poet Dylan Thomas’, a performance-enhancing abuser extraordinaire if ever there was one, “Do Not Go Gently into the Good Night” would no doubt have read something like this: “It’s no problem if you decide to leave the lights on.”

Other giants of modern writing must also be held under the microscope to ascertain whether their masterpieces were not in fact ameliorated by dabbling in drink. Could Mark Twain have reached the outer limits of man’s imagination, as he did in “Huckleberry Finn”, without a bottle of bourbon at the ready.

Would the witticisms of Oscar Wilde have achieved their dagger-like sharpness without the occasional drop of absinthe? Could Hemingway have so masterfully encapsulated the voice of an era had he not imbibed copious quantities of jungle juice?

Naturally, we shouldn’t stop with the printed word. Paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali would in all likelihood be confused with those of Leroy Neiman and Red Skelton were it not for their suspected partaking in multiple substances.

In the oratorical realm, the famous speeches of Winston Churchill would be on a par with those of George W. Bush had the war-time prime minister not kept his stocks of brandy fully stored.

We’ll discuss music another day.

Mobileless on Planet Earth

This past Friday, at exactly 4:04 in the afternoon, I officially became the last person on the planet not to have a mobile phone. The news was delivered to me not by any formal ceremony or letter, but by the sound of Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” emanating from somewhere on Mrs. Taylor, my 81-year-old neighbor, who I ran into at that time by the front door of our apartment building.

“No, I want you to short 10,000 shares of SXB on the NYSE and I want you to do it now. You call yourself a broker,” she belted into her sparkling new mobile device.

“Excuse me,” she said when she saw me, placing her Nokia back into her coat pocket. “My grandson and his fiancée bought this silly contraption for me last Christmas. I didn’t want to be the last person on the planet to own one, if you know what I mean.”

“Incidentally, why is it I never see you carry a mobile phone?” she asked.

Nowadays it is clear that it is not merely a matter of my being the last human to store a mobile on his or her person at every hour of the day and night. Judging by the news accounts one reads in various segments of the popular press, many an animal has mastered the ability to dial on a digital numerical board to rescue families from hurricanes and fires, as well as book a two-week winter vacation in Hawaii.

It would appear that in the very near future instead of having to rely on fingerprints and retinal scans for identification, it would be far easier for federal agencies to supply all the inhabitants of a country with a personalized, individual ringtone.

I have not always held such antediluvian opinions on the subject of mobile phone. In the mid-1990s, as the first in my circle of friends to possess a cell phone, I held various delusions at the time of being on the cutting edge of a trend, quite an accomplishment for me as I am usually on the edge that doesn’t cut.

Indeed, in the time before cell phones had hit their stride I would frequently be the only person on a bus jabbering away with my distant interlocutor — while having to use both hands to hold the ancient device — in a conversation that usually went something like this: “Hi Bob, can you hear me? I’m on a bus. I’ll call you back when I get off the bus.” Today I am leading the way by being the only person on a bus not talking to some unseen third party about what I had for lunch, what a jerk so-and-so is or intimate details of my private life at a volume audible to all my fellow passengers.

Likewise, I was at the forefront of the ancillary text message craze. Back in 1999, I spent four hours drafting the following SMS to one of my friends: “Out. Back at 5. C U then.” These days I clearly stand out as someone whose fingers can remain relatively stationary for more than ten minutes at a time, refraining from any impulse to text a message to my wife such as “Don’t forget to take the peas out of freezer” – a message which I had already posted on our front door, on the fridge and at 50 other assorted locations in the apartment before I left home in the morning.

While perhaps not the ultimate geek when it comes to numerous other aspects of technology, I hardly consider myself a Luddite. In fact, I have two websites, I am regularly on Facebook and I reveal every minute, trivial detail of my life on Twitter. The difference between unveiling information about myself on these forums is that others can choose whether or not they wish to watch the latest video of my cat playing with a bottle cap, read my recipe for Moldovan dumplings or discover my innermost thoughts about Sarah Boyle.

Whereas with mobile phones, trifling tidbits of the lives of strangers follow me wherever I go: on the aforementioned bus rides to movie theaters, restaurants, at work, baseball games, even while I was recuperating from appendicitis in the hospital. There is no escape. Certainly one cannot find solace from the mobile epidemic abroad where the citizens of most other countries make mobile phone usage by North Americans look tame and tranquil by comparison.

Notwithstanding the anti-social annoyances – which incidentally every mobile user in the world seems to agree are annoying when they are not performing the annoying acts themselves – are the costs of using the darn device, a device that in 99.9 percent of cases serves as nothing more than a spousal GPS system.

Unless the vast majority of the world’s cell phone users have connections I don’t, the money saved by not joining most calling plans would be enough to take Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen out for one night on the town each month. But then again, she probably wouldn’t want to be seen with a guy who doesn’t own a mobile.

Turn Late Night Talk Into Late Night Monologue

One question that seems to have been overlooked in the recent brouhaha at NBC over the futures of Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and the network’s late-night franchises is: Who needs it?

Why not just do away with late night talk shows?

After all, the bulk of these shows – regardless of network – is nothing more than a gabfest in the middle of the night that deals with all the minutiae of celebrity lives that nobody in his or her right mind should care about and which are punctuated by an endless series of commercials. Who really wants to watch that?

The only part of these shows worth watching are the monologues.

So our proposal would be for NBC, ABC and CBS to sign a deal in which Leno, Conan, David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon would all get together each night for an hour-long show which would be comprised only of monologues.

Harmony would be restored. Conan could perform. And journalists could actually write about the important issues of our day.

Of course, as with every solution there are unforeseen problems: if this were to happen, a lot of late-night bandleaders would be put out of work.

Traditional Media Must Really Be Financially Depressed; Nobody Is Buying My Stuff

This may sound like a childish, petulant rant. And lo and behold, there is an excellent reason for that: Because it is. If one ever needed a sign as to just how depressed the traditional media is, then look no further than the one on my front door which reads: “Nobody Is Buying My Stuff.”

I sent this story about the man who broke the record for most goals in the Slovakian Hockey League and then was sent by the referee to the penalty box for excessively celebrating to several media outlets. Nobody purchased it. Ten years ago, I would have believed it was a sure thing.

I should explain that to a freelance journalist ten years ago a sure thing meant that you would send a piece in to 100 publications and one would accept it. Now one can send a piece into a 1,000 publications and still not get it published. (Of course, these days 999 of those 1,000 publications belong to Rupert Murdoch.)

Has the English-language media declined to such a degree that nobody in this day and age would consider buying a quirky story about the eccentricities of Slovakian hockey? Perish the thought.

I Left My Appendix in Bekescsaba

“Ouch! Ouch again!” I said to myself, my favorite conversation partner when I am out and about alone, as I was during a recent trip to Bekescsaba, Hungary (220 kilometers southeast of Budapest). . This is nothing more than a touch of indigestion, albeit a tad more acute than usual. It was most likely the result of digging – somewhat overzealously — into some spicy and juicy kolbasz (Hungarian sausage).

Back home I eat lots of garlic and wash it down with green tea – plenty to counter any deleterious effects from indulging in fatty sausage. Further, a diet concentrating heavily on antioxidants, I knew, surely must make me immune from serious ailments. Okay, perhaps my physique is not going to be mistaken for that of Michael Phelps. But at 43, having never experienced any illnesses beyond a common cold in all that time, why should I spend an extra few bucks for insurance on this trip. The odds of not falling ill on this journey were strongly in my favor. The expense was simply not worth it.

The pain, though still noticeable, had subsided later in the afternoon. I had a light dinner and turned in for an early night. By midnight, however, the pain had returned with a vengeance. It was excruciating. In fact, if there is a word that signifies a type of pain beyond excruciating, then that’s what I would use to describe it. There was nothing else to do but put an end to my stupid male stubbornness and ring for an ambulance.

Within minutes I was at the hospital and answering questions at triage. The pain at that point was so great I hardly knew my own name, yet the nurse on duty insisted on extracting that morsel of information from me, as well as my mother’s maiden name and my date and place of birth. I thought was going to ask me the name of the president of Botswana and who won the National League batting title in 1953 next. Why is it that wherever one goes the people at triage seem more interested in extracting information which at the time appears trivial when compared to alleviating a person’s suffering?

Alas, I was eventually wheeled into an examination room. An ultrasound indicated that I probably had appendicitis and – as there is no 24-hour surgery in Bekescsaba – I would be operated on at 6 am the following morning. Thenceforward, I was ushered into a room at about 2 am and supplied with ample intravenous injections of all sorts during the interim.

The nurses in the ward seemed to marvel at the curiosity which had fallen in their midst – a North American, by all appearances the first of its kind to be treated in the hospital, certainly it this wing.

I tried to look on the bright side during the four hours that preceded the operation: if a person needs to have surgery it best to be alerted to it and have it down with the span of a few hours rather than be provided a date months in advance. In the latter case, all one can think about in the intervening period is, “Heavens to Betsy, I am going to have surgery on such-and-such a day.”

The operation went as scheduled. When I returned back to the world of the conscious, I was told that I did indeed have appendicitis, and not just any old kind. The operation found my appendix had perforated. Burst. It was the kind of ailment that would warrant an extended hospital stay, I was told. How much was this going to cost? I wondered.

Though landing in a hospital has to rank at the top of a traveler’s worst nightmares – right after getting stuck with a middle seat on a transatlantic flight with an insurance salesman on your left and another insurance salesman on your right – I felt that I was in competent medical hands throughout the experience.

Perhaps the stay could have been enhanced by better food, most of which seemed to be feeble attempts at luncheon meat. But moaning about hospital food appears to be a universal gripe and one that is surely outweighed by the overall price tag of my ordeal, which totaled an infinitesimally smaller amount than the horror stories of other uninsured individuals who underwent the same procedure in less fortunate locations, ie, a hosptial in the United States.