Henrietta Hay's Column

Doldrums: 1. a period of stagnation or slump. That is an exact definition of my brain right now. Somehow it always goes to sleep between the 4th of July and Labor Day.

Mike Royko had a similar problem recently on returning from a vacation and finding himself "brain dead." He dug into his backlog of stuff on e-mail and copied some material I had my eye on myself.

So I can't use the "Worst Analogies Taken from High School Papers," because Mike beat me to it, but there are some other gems in my files. An amazing amount of creative material goes floating around on various e-mail networks. What with college kids, librarians, lawyers, editors and friends in various other professions putting me on their mailing lists, I get a wide variety.

Dr. Seuss is a prime source for Internet satire. Somebody on one of the college circuits did this one. Here's a stanza from "What if Dr. Seuss Did Technical Writing?" which strikes a tender chord with every computer owner who has tried to find the answer to a problem in the accompanying manual:

"If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,

And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,

And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort

Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report."

Yeh!

Professional models are not expected to be Einsteins, but this one would leave physicist Einstein somewhat bemused. In a list of quotes titled, "It's Hard Being a Super model..." Carole Mallory says, "Everywhere I went, my cleavage followed."

Some anonymous college kids somewhere are researching the profound question, "Why does a chicken cross the road?" Some possible answers include:

Plato, "For the greater good;"

Sir Isaac Newton, "Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road;"

Julius Caesar, "To come, to see, to conquer;"

Pyrrho the Skeptic, "What road?"

Somebody on the library network came up with what might have been a letter from the Court of King George III to Thomas Jefferson if bureaucracy were as entrenched then as it is now:

"We have read your 'Declaration of Independence' with great interest...In your opening paragraph you use the phrase 'the laws of Nature and Nature's God.' What are those laws...'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness' are not measurable goals...Please clarify. You must submit an evaluation design. We have been requiring this since Queen Anne's War."

A librarian somewhere researched elephant hunting:

Mathematicians hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant and catching one of whatever is left.

Statisticians hunt the 1st animal they see N times and call it an elephant.

Economists don't hunt elephants, but they believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves.

Having been born into a solid Republican family and later recovered, I find Daniel Mendelsohn's tongue in cheek discovery very comforting. He says that:

"Affiliation with the Republican party is genetically determined...The finding has been greeted with relief by parents and friends of Republicans who have tended to blame themselves for the political views of otherwise lovable people -- their children, friends and unindicted co-conspirators... If conservatism is not the result of sheer orneriness (as many suspect) but is something Republicans can't help...there's no reason why we shouldn't tolerate them in the military or even high elected office."

One of the college networks takes on language:

"Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger... In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? ... English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects that creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at all) That is why when the stars are out they are visible, but when the lights are out they are invisible and why the alarm clock goes off by going on."

Doldrums: a period of stagnation or slump. Fortunately all those bright souls out there in space are working full time. It's a long time 'til Labor Day.