Its difficult to bid too fond a farewell to 2006 because continuing to endure the presidency of George Bush kind of reminds me of being an impatient little kid in the back of a car on a very long cross country trip, kicking the seat in front of me and driving everyone crazy by constantly whining, "Are we there yet?".
But here on the cusp of 2007, as a lot of people celebrate by drinking too much and watching all that desperate TV programming that culminates in a count down where spokesmodel wanna-bes of both genders pretend to be excited when something falls off of something else, I have my own way of ringing in the new year. I celebrate the one holiday about which I am truly passionate.
No, not La Tomatina, an annual event in Valencia Spain where thousands of people throw tomatoes at one another for no discernible reason. Although I guess its no secret that I would like to see it replace Valentines Day. And the sooner the better. Actually I am referring to THE FEAST OF ZOVER which involves the consumption of a tasty meal, a careful assessment of the damage incurred in the holiday season now past, followed by ecstatic chanting of the sacred mantra "Yippee. I'm so relieved. It's Zover."
This year, as I celebrate Zover 2006, one of the things I have been thinking about is blogging on this site. A lot of times I have trouble figuring out what to blog because there are so many better informed and more astute political observers weighing in on every important topic. I don't really like to repeat what others have already said (though I sometimes consider submitting a post that only says "Wow. That guy really IS an asshole!")
But I never do. Instead, I feel compelled to try and weigh in on other things. So on this, The Feast of Zover, 2006, I am listing a few blog premises I meant to write about in 2006 but never got around to.
1. Famous deaths for which there was no national day of mourning. Some of these people contributed at least as much to the cultural landscape as Gerald Ford, and he got a lot more press. Only a small obit marked the passing of Robert E. Rich, father of the non dairy whipped topping. (He was one of the first men picked for the National Frozen Food Hall of Fame!) And in that eery way that deaths come in threes, we also lost James Conway Sr. founder of Mr. Softee. AND Petra Cabot, inventor of The Skotch Kooler. Also gone are some men whose words had more effect on the lives of people in this country than anyone can calculate: Wilson A Sibert Jr. , the man who gave us "a silly millimeter longer." (for Chesterfield) as well as "Pan Am makes the going great." and "My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer." And as if that wasn't legacy enough, he also came up with "The Marines are looking for a few good men." Talk about your a phrase that had a life of its own! Mr. Sibert passed only a short while after we lost James Jordan, who wrote not only "Delta is ready when you are," but also "You're not fully clean until your zestfully clean."The words of James Jordan haunted my childhood. Not only did I make my mother buy Zest for several years, but many were the showers I took in which I fretted over whether or not I was in fact fully clean.
2. Which brings us to a psychological syndrome called The MacBeth effect, so named because of a study social scientists conducted this past year where they learned that after people do or even contemplate doing unethical things, they have the need to clean up, wash their hands etc. Along these lines, the unethical contemplators also rated the value of cleaning products signifigantly higher than their more ethical counterparts. This made me wonder if any research has been done in to the amount of cleaning products being used in the White House these past few years. I'm thinking it must be way way up.
3. On an unrelated topic, I thought of writing something about the new trend toward corporate sponsorship of people's weddings after I attended one at which the happy couple said "I do" under a banner that said "Absolute Vodka". ( This despite the fact that the bride and the groom were both fanatical non drinkers. ) What's driving this fad is something else that is hard to fathom: the average price of a wedding these days is up around $28,000. But, as good old fashioned American irony would have it, right next door to this craziness is another parallel trend in love and lifelong commitment . Apparently couples on the verge of marital bliss are carefully rephrasing their vows to make sure they are making promises they feel they can keep. Thus "til death do us part." has increasingly been morphing in to the more oblique but realistic "As long as our love shall last." Seems like it is just a matter of time until my recommendation is taken and the landscape of weddings is enlarged to embrace the terms of the eventual divorce. If you're going to fork over a giant sum like $28,000., it only makes sense to get all the nerve wracking paper work and unpleasantness over with all at once. (Not only that, I think that the guests in attendance should be off the hook for having to buy pricey gifts until the seventh annibersary or the third wedding, which ever comes first. Not too surprisingly, the couple who spoke their vows by the light of the Absolute Vodka bottle are a couple no more.)
4. On a sort of related note, there was a piece I've been saving all year from the science section of the New York Times on insect cannibalism explaining the romantic saga of the female mantis who, during the sex act, devours the head of the male with whom she is mating, (thus offering new meanings to the million and one love and sex related phrases in which the word "head" appears. So go ahead and make up your own jokes.) Now there is new evidence that nature sets up these suicidal male mantises (and a couple of breeds of like minded spiders) to be complicit in their own mating related deaths because they get to leave a plug inside the female that insures that their genes will be the ones that impregnate her. Thus what looks like a simple case of incredibly bad judgment in love is actually a very big investment in the future. I believe there is something to be learned here about the behavior and psychology of the male participants in those much obsessed over celebrity couplings that occupy so many gigabytes of cyberspace. I speak of the Kevin Federlines of the world, and countless other lesser known publicity seeking boy toys who hurl themselves in to the mouths of the Brittanys, the Parises and the Lindseys. Perhaps in 2007 my theory will coagulate and I will figure out what it is we have learned.
5. In closing, I meant to write something this year about branes and string theory. Scientists call it "the theory of everything. " In it, they break down the smallest particles imaginable in to tiny strings vibrating in "a tortured ten dimensional landscape." of "brane worlds." which Stephen Hawking says are "bubbling up out of the void and giving rise to whole new universes."
Ten dimensions is an amazing thought, but what keeps occuring to me is what a mess we have already made of our boring old fashioned three. The thought of ten dimensions of pointlessly warring sects, trillion dollar debts, famines, environmental disasters, cruel and thoughtless politicans, crazy religious cults, trans fats and narcissistically disordered celebrities is a frightening thing to contemplate. So tonight, on this The Feast of Zover, let us hope as hard as we can that people finally start to act with enlightened perspective and true compassion. Let us hope that they begin to protect the greater good and behave less like mating insects. And let us hope they get around to it before we make an irretrievable mess out of those other seven dimensions.
Goodbye 2006. And yippee. It's Zover.