Stevieslaw: My Voices Article for October

Posted on October 3, 2012 by stevieslaw

Give me Strength—The Less-intelligent-than-average American Guide to Staying in the Pink.

Need I remind you of what a klutz my genius cousin Myron is? Just yesterday he missed the curb on Flatbush Avenue and turned his ankle with a sound so loud that all six hundred dogs on his small block in Brooklyn started to howl. When his ankle swelled up to the size of a watermelon, I decided to drive him over to the local hospital emergency room. The hospital had made some small changes. They had installed a gated entry to their emergency room parking lot that requires you to swipe an insurance card to gain entry. It was the same thing with the door to the triage nurse’s station. It turns out that they have to treat you, insurance or no, once you show up at the triage desk—but not until them. That’s nothing. We have learned that the tea-party has decided to replace all forms of health insurance with vouchers. In place of health care, seniors will get a voucher for a half priced “grand slam” (aka The Assisted Suicide) at Dennys and each woman will get a voucher that just says no. The rest of us will each get a voucher redeemable for an audio get well card, with a jingle sung from the heart by the Koch brothers to the tune of “I Ain’t Got a Barrel of Money.”

There is only one solution for troubled Americans—oops, sorry if we scared you—we don’t mean voting, we know you aren’t voting. Americans must simply avoid getting sick—forever. But we are all confused over just how to do that—diet, exercise, a bubble boy suit—so that we at Stevieslaw are proud to publish, Give Me Strength—The LAguide to Staying in the Pink. In the guide you will learn the core techniques, practiced by luminaries as diverse as Dr. Oz, Lance Armstrong, Oprah Winfrey and Betty White, to staying healthy well into your platinum years (older than 150) . In the guide you will learn about the importance of:

1. Eating Right: You will learn that maintaining a proper diet is mostly a matter of timing. If broccoli is good for you on Tuesday, you can be certain it will be really bad for you by Thursday. Here, in a stroke of Stevieslaw brilliance, the guide will give you instantaneous food alerts on whatever smart device is currently occupying your every waking moment, so that you can stop chewing on that once-healthful pastrami sandwich and move on to Greek yogurt with embedded m&ms. In the guide you will also learn which 400 supplements are essential to enriching your urine, why dirt is the perfect food, and why Irish coffee can not only improve your mood but will help make you feel like a veritable superman.

2. Exercise: Don’t. Exercise is for people with health insurance. When people say that sports, like tennis, can be played forever—forever actually means until you break something really important that requires metal rods to fix. By all means you should go to your local gym. There you can watch other people exercise—grunt, sweat, gasp and strain—with the understanding that laughter is not just the best medicine, it is also aerobic. In the guide you will learn just how to laugh effortlessly—so that you don’t bust a gut when someone drops a 400 pound weight that just misses their toes.

3. Sleep: In the guide, you will learn that sleep is overrated. It is worrying about not sleeping that will kill you. You will learn the nearly forgotten technique of near sleep; a coma like existence which people mistakenly believed could only be induced by watching reruns of Liberace or Pat Boone TV specials. We will also open up an entire universe of medicinal near sleep inducing herbs that can be smoked, toked or baked in brownies—oh wow.

4. Stress: Avoiding stress is the key to living healthy forever. Sure, your mortgage is underwater and six months late, your job and your spouse were outsourced to Burma, your daughter with the Ph.D. is working as a cashier at a supermarket, your son is over enjoying non-FDA approved medicinals, and you have no health insurance—but don’t worry, be happy. In the guide, you will learn the age old technique of reality avoidance through song. There are hundreds of songs about blue skies alone: how about— Blue skies smilin’ at me Nothin’ but blue skies do I see or Gray skies are gonna clear up. Put on a happy face… Sing, sing, sing.

5. Good Genes: Wish you were born into a family whose members routinely live to be 100? Or perhaps a family with money dating back to the Reformation? Rejoice! If there is one thing we have learned from the birthers, it’s that there are birth certificates and there are birth certificates. We will introduce you to the new rebirthcertification concept that is sweeping the nation. Be reborn into the family you deserve— completely fool Mother Nature and possibly the voting police.

What are you waiting for? Walk, don’t run, to your local store to buy a guide. The life you save may be your own.

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Stevieslaw: The Biggest Deadline of the Year

Posted on September 29, 2012 by stevieslaw

Stevieslaw: The Biggest Deadline of the Year.
As many of you may have realized, with a sigh and an odd tear, the hot-dog stand on the corner of Allen and College will be closing for the season any day now. No more boiled dogs with mustard/ketchup and sauerkraut, a can of Pepsi and a bag of greasy chips after that sad day. That is the reason it is essential that you send us $15 or more for your chance of winning a dog day lunch with Steve. Have your dogs on one of several benches out in front of the famous Corner Room Restaurant—whose motto is “At Least We Won’t Make You Sick.” There may be conversation! And, on the odd chance it isn’t raining in State College, you will get to see the famous and the near famous State Collegians troop by. Remember that JoPa himself walked past this spot at least 10,000 times. Perhaps someday you might refer to this lunch as the day I saw “what’s her name.”
Cash only!

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Stevieslaw: Fair and Balanced

Posted on September 6, 2012 by stevieslaw

Stevieslaw: Fair and Balanced
Fox News, following the lead of the Republican National Committee, summarized the convention speeches of Sandra Fluke and Bill Clinton with the following tweet:
Impeached ex-pres goes after slut at podium.

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Stevieslaw:My Voices Column for September

Posted on September 5, 2012 by stevieslaw

From Whole Cloth: The Less-Intelligent-than-average American Guide to Science and Nature:

In Ethan Canin’s title story from his prize winning collection, a retired high school biology and astronomy teacher listens in one night as his next door neighbor identifies the stars and constellations for his teenage son. “It was direct and scientific, and he was lying to his son about what he knew. “These,” he said, “these are the Mermaid’s Tail, and south you can see the three peaks of Mount Olympus, and then the sword that belongs to the “Emperor of the Air.”

In a recent study in the United States, researchers found that only 1 in 7500 citizens over the age of ten knows that there is a world outside of their den and that the athletes and entertainers they watched on their TV set are real people. When coupled with our fine understanding of the scientific method, which we define as a thought, based on nothing special, that must be prefaced with the phrase “in my opinion,” we, as a nation, have a unique opportunity to create our own names and descriptions for all the scientific wonders we’ve never had a clue about. We can also pretend to know how they work and what the consequences of their uses are. That is the reason we, at Stevieslaw, are thrilled to publish, From Whole Cloth: The LAGuide to Science and Nature. Use the guide to turn your stunning lack of understanding—a liability in a reasonable world—into an incredible asset, using many of the same techniques that the blowhards on Cable TV use to their advantage. Some of the techniques you will learn about in the guide are:

1. Sounds like: You are confused by terms like Higgs Boson because you haven’t made the “sounds like” connection. Could the Higgs Boson be the last remaining American Bison? No, but no one else knows that either. Connect the boson to the bison. Perhaps the last remaining boson is currently is the San Diego Zoo. Higgs? A nickname given the Boson by Delores Simpson, an adorable three year old girl, trying to say the word “hugs,” to the remarkably ugly 3000 pound creature.

2. Mythologize: That’s right. Just make it up. In the guide, we will invent enough history to show you that all of these scientific names were made up in the first place. Moreover, they were usually made up to aggrandize the name of the person that got there first. Take Avogadro’s number for example. A household name if there ever was one. Since we no longer know what it means, why not give it a name we can at least spell? And why not have 3 billion names for the Ebola virus? How could it hurt? I suppose it might even make for great conversation, though only for a short while. Right now, Stevies law can be simply expressed as—all action has an equal and opposite reaction—which we might have thought of long before that guy that got hit by an apple, if only he had waited.

3. Rely on the experts: As the Guide carefully explains, the difficulty here is in determining who the experts are. Do you rely on the physicists, with their complicated equations, biologists, with their extensive fossil records, and climate scientists, with their massive computer codes, to explain the origin or the universe, evolution and global warming, or do you go with the radio talk show host—a former grocery store owner from Topeka? The guide will, through countless examples, convince you to rely on your intuition— easily a match for a good education, in choosing an expert to follow. Go with the guy who makes you feel like a smarty!

4. Blame god: Recently, on Facebook we found excerpts from a creationist science text, “Science 4 Christian Schools,” that declared “Electricity is a mystery. No one has ever observed it or heard it or felt it.” Sure, some snots from as early as 2750 BC might disagree, but it’s not the statement, but the principle behind the statement that is topic of the guide. We will introduce you to the amazing principle of “least expenditure of mental energy.” Sure it sounds difficult, but we guarantee that it will be the last thing you will ever have to learn. What’s more, you probably know a number of people already practicing it. In our world, it is Aunt Edith, who has maintained the same position on her couch continuously for forty years while watching professional wrestling and sipping lime Gatorade and vodka. Recognizing the principle will allow you to smilingly explain away any troublesome science with a conversation ending, “it’s god’s will.” Will you be ignoring several thousand years of human progress. Of course! But it will allow you to retain just enough mental energy to, for example, get the correct phone number for your American Idol vote.

Buy the Guide wherever the Guide is sold. Use it to explain the world of science and nature. Perhaps with practice you too can become a radio talk show personality.

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Stevieslaw: Herbal Tea

Posted on August 27, 2012 by stevieslaw

Stevieslaw: Herbal Tea
I hadn’t seen Arnold Slanzky in years. The last I had heard he was working toward a doctorate in Public Health with a thesis that purported to show that the pets of the top 1% had much better access to health care than did Americans earning less than $50,000 a year. They had generally better outcomes as well.
I was surprised to see then, as Smokey and I drove through Southern Ohio, Arnie’s picture plastered on billboards every few miles. It had his portrait—a smiling face on a balding head—with the boldly lettered statement, “Throw off the Yolk of Big Government.” My old ultra-liberal friend Arnie was apparently running for Congress as a Tea Party Candidate with bad spelling.
We gave him a call and got to meet him for lunch at the local Dennys—his new favorite restaurant. After we had caught up a bit, I asked him about his candidacy.
“I was teaching and doing some research at a University,“ he said. “It’s too much work for too little pay.” “So I asked myself what else I could do.” “A job as a US. Congressman is a no-brainer, especially with this Tea Party business.” “You no longer have to know anything at all—in fact it seems the less you know and the crazier the things you say the more secure your job is.” “And Congressmen are on recess like half the year.”
“But your views are to the left of Bernie Sanders,” I reminded him.
“Still are,” he said, “but you can’t get elected with those views.” “So one day I was talking to the local Tea Party people and told them, as a joke, that I had a religious conversion over my easy over eggs at Dennys. Jesus told me to “throw off the yolk of government.” “They loved the slogan, even when I wrote it out for them, misspelling and all.”
“My campaign is going very well, He said. “My major theme is the need for American women to wear Burkas.” “It’s offensive to nearly everyone, so it’s a great Tea Party cause.”
“Once I’m elected, I’m sure I can go back to being a bleeding heart liberal.” “I just need to say the crazy stuff the right wants to hear—loudly.” “The tea party members have absolutely no sense of humor, so thinking up crazy things is like taking candy from a baby—which is also an integral part of my program.”
“I can do this,” he said. “People will someday recognize me as the first member of the Herbal Tea Party.”
“Did you hear about Obama’s meeting with witches in Salem this morning?” he said suddenly, in a booming voice that caught the attention of everyone in the diner. “He plans to carry the state by bewitching the independents to vote for him.”
“My waffle tells me that we must start watching for witches here,” he went on. “Any woman not wearing a Burka is a suspect,” he said with a loopy grin.

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Stevieslaw: Mitt’s Motherboard Crisis

Posted on August 27, 2012 by stevieslaw

Stevieslaw: Mitt’s Motherboard Crisis.
Republicans fear that Mitt’s new motherboard, Empathy III, will not arrive from China in time for the convention. As you have no doubt heard, Empathy II fried during the Mitts attempt at a birther joke. Sal Hapatica, Mitt’s chief for computer simulation, agreed that a joke was a huge stretch for the available Mittsoftware.
“Actually, it was the giggle after the joke,” he told Smokey Diamond, our intrepid reporter. “We should have never tried to program the giggle.”
For those of you following the Mittepic, you may recall that Empathy 1 went bad during Mitt’s European trip—that sad business with the Brits and their Olympics.
“We need to have Mitt show great empathy with the American public—particularly with the poor and the middle class he doesn’t really give a damn about, and I fear the Chinese are just not taking this seriously.” “If they are late with the motherboard, we will have to go with Plan B.”
“And what’s Plan B?” asked Smokey.
“In Plan B we go with a silent Mittbot and an empathic ventriloquist, but the camera angles will be a nightmare.”
“It only has to work for an hour,” Sal whined. “just during the acceptance speech.”
“After that the MIttbot can just recite the party line as outlined in the Republican platform.” “That platform is as cold and as dead as Ayn (pave the planet) Rand’s philosophy.” “It’s perfect for a robot.”

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Stevieslaw: Somebody Help Me

Posted on August 6, 2012 by stevieslaw

Stevieslaw: Somebody Help Me
I woke a week ago Monday to find three representatives from Americans for Prosperity; the superpac formed by the billionaire Koch brothers, in my living room. They had somehow learned that I was a registered independent voter in the swing state of Pennsylvania. “We are nearly neighbors,” they said, hoping I knew so little geography that I wouldn’t recognize that Wisconsin is not next door.
Now, every time I walk into my living room, one of the three gives me a 50 second spiel on why Obama is bad for America. Yesterday, I got the spiel three times while I was shaving in my upstairs bathroom. Now, I have 30 sheets of toilet paper stuck to my face, in an attempt to staunch the bleeding. What’s worse is they are apparently planning to stay until after the November election.
I tried to convince them that it would make more sense to spend 50 million dollars or so bribing people to vote their way. I suggested that they offer a $10 coupon, redeemable at Chik-Fil-A restaurants, for a vote for Romney, but they reminded me that those people are already in their camp.
When I suggest they leave—which I do often, they mumble a few words about corporations, people and first amendment rights. Inevitably, though, their talk turns to their second amendment rights. You know, the ones that Obama will personally take away.
What’s worse, when I looked out my front window this morning, I saw an American Crossroads truck parked right outside. I’m pretty sure I spotted Karl Rove in the driver’s seat. Ninety two more days of this? Somebody help me.

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Stevieslaw: Practice, Practice, Practice

Posted on August 4, 2012 by stevieslaw

I have known engineers who, when faced with a new piece of research equipment, will spend several weeks pressing every button, tweaking every knob, and observing the results with some sort of geek glee—all without recourse to the manufacturer’s manual. Almost always, this sort of high-level play produces an engineer who knows all there is to know about the equipment—someone who logically concludes that it is pretty safe to move the equipment to the lab and use it to make some measurements. Some time wasted? Perhaps. But in essentially rewriting the manual many of the fine points have been thoroughly learned.
Financial firms have a better way. Knight Capital, under CEO Thomas Joyce, decided to take their untested or poorly tested software to the floor of the market and try it there. After all, what could happen? Your pension fund—that’s just chump change. And don’t forget that testing it could cost seconds or, Koch forbid, minutes of profit taking. The resulting mess appears ready to put them out of business.
Here’s an idea. Why don’t the financial kids—the wizards that brought us the baseball card and comic book boom and busts markets before moving on to real estate and financials—hire some adult engineers or scientists? There are plenty of unemployed ones to choose from and many of them would be interested in making sure that things work.
Hey, Tommy. Call me.

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Stevieslaw: I am the King of England

Posted on August 2, 2012 by stevieslaw

Stevieslaw: I am the King of England
In my freshman year at college, my calculus professor set out to show the students in his class how woefully undereducated they were. He offered up the following challenge: If he could prove that 2=1, than we must recognize that he was not only a college professor, but also the King of England and we must address him as his highness for the entire semester. The proof involves some simple algebra and most of my (engineering undergrad and grad) students pick up the trick easily. If
a=b, and we multiply by a,
we have aa=ab and by subtracting bb: aa-bb=ab-bb.
Factoring gives (a+b)(a-b)=b(a-b), and dividing by (a-b) gets us to
a+b=b and since a=b
then 2b=b.
Dividing by b, 2=1.
Got that? If Andrew Hacker, writing in the prestigious NY Times Sunday Review, has his way your children won’t. Andrew argues in “Is Algebra Necessary?” that we should drop the teaching of algebra (and calculus and trigonometry) because our students’ inability to learn it is the main reason they drop out of high school and college. Thank goodness he doesn’t suggest that the students try harder to learn it and the teachers harder to teach it. No. Andrew believes that by forcing these students to leave school because they can’t pass math, we are decimating our future talent pool. Clearly, there would be many more lttle Shakespeares, Bachs, and Picassos, if only the little darlings weren’t stuck on their math homework.
In a country that no longer values the teaching of history, literature or science while simultaneously decrying the loss of the American “edge,” the idea is not surprising. Still, I am somehow not convinced that our budding Shakespeare, brimming with self-esteem, will be able to write much more than his or her name. More likely the genius will, on finding himself outside on some sunny summer day, wonder just what kind of fool could ever believe the earth rotated around the sun.
Oh, and Andrew, drop algebra and most of your budding geniuses will certainly still be capable of finding other ways to fail.

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Stevieslaw: Your Roots Are Showing

Posted on August 1, 2012 by stevieslaw

Stevieslaw: Your Roots are Showing
Lt. Gov David Dewhurst lost a GOP runoff election to Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz yesterday because it was rumored that he had once uttered the word democrat in a student production in third grade. Tea Party spokesperson, Dom Ash, said that level of interparty cooperation would unacceptable for a US Senator.
Smokey Diamond, our intrepid reporter, asked Dommy about the appropriateness of the term “grassroots,” which is often used to describe the Tea Party. Since grassroots specifically refers to the rank and file or common people of a nation, Smokey wondered how that might be reconciled with the huge amount of Super Pac money that is often donated solely by the very wealthy. “That sort of money went a long way to electing Ted Cruz,” Smokey noted. Mr. Ash who seemed unfazed by the question, pointed out that, “the definition of grassroots will be only one of many definitions we will change once we achieve power.”

Perhaps Sarah Palin can provide a new set of definitions?

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