An Idiot With an iPhone

There are occasionally events that demonstrate without doubt that I’m an idiot. Such was the phone call to my mother this afternoon. I try to call my mother, now in her mid-80s, every two or three weeks, to keep her up on how her wayward semi-retired son is somehow surviving. For the past couple of years, since my wife got me a cellphone and we disconnected our land phone’s long distance, I’ve phoned my mother on my cellphone. It’s about the only phone call I make. I don’t use my phone as a phone. I use the calendar, I check the weather, when I’m away from home and my laptop I check my email and use the iPad. But I seldom have reason to make a phone call, and there are precious few people in the world who ever call me.

So as I was talking with my mother today, I glanced from my chair to the side-table where my phone usually sits and noticed that my phone wasn’t where it always is. I got up and checked my pocket. Before my call I’d been to the store, and when I ever go out I take my phone with me, just in case I may need to make some emergency call (which I’ve not had to do in three years), and I put it in my pocket. But it wasn’t there. I walked to the table where I keep my sunglasses and checkbook, but the phone wasn’t there either. My wife came through the room, and I said to both her and my mother, “I’ve lost my phone.” And in that instant I realized I was holding my phone up to my ear, talking with my mother. My wife rolled her eyes, just one more speed bump on the way to widowhood. My mother didn’t say anything. But then she’s had 63 years of suffering an idiot for a son.

Mona Lisa

A controversy in the art world re-emerged today after being dormant for some 40 years. Apparently, before World War I an art collector discovered what he considered an earlier version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, a portrait of the same woman painted 10 years earlier than the famous version in the Louvre. During the war the painting was moved for safe keeping in the United States, and then after the war moved to Switzerland where the Mona Lisa Foundation has spent years trying to prove or disprove the painting’s authenticity. They now have decided that it is indeed an authentic da Vinci portrait. (Can anyone say “Ka-ching!”)

According to Stanley Feldman, an art historian and foundation member, “When we do a very elementary mathematical test, we have discovered that all of the elements of the two bodies – the two people, the two sitters – are in exactly the same place. . . . It strikes us that in order for that to be so accurate, so meticulously exact, only the person who did one did the other. . . . It’s an extraordinary revelation in itself, and we think it’s valid.”

I’m no art historian (or art anything else) but I think that’s bullshit. What artist would 10 years later recreate an earlier work with “all of the elements of the two bodies – the two people, the two sitters – . . . in exactly the same place . . . so accurate, so meticulously exact,” including the exact same pose, costume, and expression (the smile). Is there any other example in the history of art? And there are only 15 extant paintings of da Vinci, various in style and subject, because he was always experimenting with subject and technique. He also relegated much of his work to his assistants and apprentices. It’s much more likely that the painting in question is merely a discovery of a copy from one of his students or admirers. But again, what do I know about art? I do, though, know about ka-ching!

Bad Feet

For the past week or so I’ve had bad feet. My right ankle may be sprained. My left foot has what I suspect is a neuroma, a tumor on a nerve between the metatarsals. I sometimes limp on my left foot, and sometimes on my right. When both are in pain, I limp on both, which doesn’t look to be limping at all, just a slow waddle, an old man with two bad feet. Coming down the stairs in the morning, I’m Walter Brennan in The Real McCoys (and if you don’t get that allusion to age infirmity then you’re just not old enough, and should be glad).

This is one of the things that’s fucked about getting old. There are so many different aches and pains that you don’t know what to think about any of them. Do you have an injury? A disease? Should you see a doctor? Or are you just a decrepit old fart who should shut up and shuffle along, or just lie down, quit whining, and die already? For now, I choose to whine, complain about the pain, and rage against the age. What do we have if we don’t have that?

Fanner 50

Probably the best Christmas present I ever received was a pair of Fanner 50s, complete with genuine leather holsters:

I was around 10 years old and a typical American boy with a fixation on violence, particularly the black-and-white wild-west violence that was prevalent on the three TV networks of the time – The Roy Rogers Show, The Gene Autry Show, The Cisco Kid, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, Cheyenne, The Rifleman, Maverick, Tombstone Territory, The Lone Ranger, Colt .45, Death Valley Days, Lawman, Wyatt Earp, The Virginian, Wichita Town, Gunsmoke, The Rebel (there were more). I have a picture of me, age 5, shoveling snow, wearing a coonskin cap from the Davey Crockett Show (“Killed him a bear when he was only three”). The Fanner 50 was the must-have weapon for 10-year-olds in the late 1950s, a cap gun marketed by Mattel through Disney. If you had a Fanner 50 – or better yet, like me, a pair of Fanner 50s – you couldn’t be out-dueled at the OK Corral in the vacant lot next to our house on Fairmount Avenue. The big selling point of the Fanner (and why it was named Fanner) was the wide flair on the hammer. Instead of having to pull the trigger, wasting precious time wasting the bad guys, you could just whip the Fanner 50 out of its holster with one hand and “fan” the hammer – quickly pulling it back with the palm of your other hand, making it a proto-semi-automatic cap gun. Deadly.

Granted my playing gunfights with my Fanner 50s was not on a par with the violence of Mortal Kombat  or Grand Theft Auto that kids today get to play. But it’s what we had, all we had back then. I blew away many of my playmates, and many more imaginary foes, falling before me in the mirror of our living room, the cap smoke floating from the barrel of my gun. I’m not sure what the effects of all this violence in my youth had upon me. I’ve never actually killed anyone in my adult life, though. And beyond some drug use and traffic violations, I’ve never broken the law. But there are times when those Fanner 50s still make their way into my dreams.

Mensa Rescinded

On a long flight across country recently, I found a flawed question in the “Menza Quiz” in American Way magazine:

4. To the best of our knowledge, only one good English word can be made from all of the letters in the word rescinded, using each letter only once. What is it?

The intended answer is “discerned,” and I knew that. But there is another “good English word can be made from all of the letters in the word rescinded, using each letter only once” – “rescinded.” I realize that I’m being finicky here (probably overly so), and no doubt my three years spent as a Test Specialist at ACT and 30+ years as an English teacher make me particularly aware of such errors in tests, but the question would be better expressed as “only one other English word” (I’d not only add the word “other” but also delete “good,” as I’m not sure what the difference is between a “good English word” and a “bad English word”).

Yes, I’m picking nits. It’s a professional flaw, one my students regularly find frustrating. But we all, I would hope, have our little fixations. How else can we, even if only fleetingly, feel better than others? Especially better than “to the best of [the] knowledge” of the writers of the “Menza Quiz.”