Do you think the Cinnamon Challenge or the Tide Pod challenge were for sissies? You’ve come to the right place!
GROT1 Challenges Inc. is a nonprofit organization devoted to thinning the herd. The average teen is–let’s be candid here–really stupid. GROT aims to raise teen IQs by removing the ones dumb enough to eat laundry detergent or Carolina Reapers or concentrated spices. The problem is that they aren’t deadly enough.
We’ve included this free starter kit with suggestions to pursue GROT policy a bit more aggressively. Post these anywhere dumb teens congregate: Tik-Tok, Instagram, and so on. Or print stickers with a challenge or two and put them on their lockers in school.
If these inspire you to create any of your own GROT challenges, post them in the comments. Every little bit helps!
Kool-Aid Challenge: Scream “Oh yeeeeahhhhh!” and run as fast as you can headfirst into a brick wall.
Woodchipper Challenge: Jump into a running woodchipper. Extra points if you dive in feet-first.
Sliding Down the Razor Blade of Life Challenge: See who can slide down the razor blade the most times while listening to Tom Lehrer’s “Bright College Days.”
Mad Max/Crash Test Dummy Challenge: Spray yellow and black paint on your face and into your mouth, accelerate your car to at least 100mph, then scream “Shiny and new!” before crossing lanes into a head-on with a semi.
Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog Challenge: Infiltrate an underground dog-fighting ring with your friends and take turns attacking a pit bull.
Ultimate Taste Bud Destruction Challenge: Take shots of Carolina Reaper peppers marinated in a mixture of grain alcohol, capsaicin, cinnamon, crystal meth, paprika, nutmeg and acetone. The shots must be lit on fire before consumption.
I just bought a used guitar, so I wanna talk about hands.
I’ve always had big hands and even bigger feet. Today I look like an average-sized guy with big hands and feet, but when I was a kid? Oh boy.
From left to right: First Sister, Thing 1, Thing 2, and holy crap I look creepy!
I have a picture of my sisters and me taken when I was 4 years old. I didn’t look like a kid with big hands and feet; I looked like a kid wearing kayaks on his feet and wearing a pair of those giant foam hands they use to play Slapjack on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.
The used guitar I just bought is a Gibson Les Paul. I’ve always wanted one, but they’re hella expensive. Best Half spotted a guy on Craigslist selling a Les Paul, though—he was selling a lot of equipment, including the Les Paul, for which he wanted only $350.
A Les Paul these days can run $2,500 or more, especially if you get chrome PAF Humbucker covers, mother-of-pearl fingerboard inlays, the sunburst finish and some of the other goodies on the one I just bought.
I drove down to Cordes Junction to take a look at the guitar. The seller was a groovy older guy who looked like a cross between Gandalf and Jerry Garcia: gray and white shoulder-length hair, ZZ-Top beard, tie-dyed T‑shirt, the works. We could have been long-lost twins.
The Les Paul was in beautiful shape; almost mint condition. Gandarcia said he had a bad shoulder and the Les Paul was just too heavy, and he had arthritis so he couldn’t play as much as he used to anyway.
He didn’t care about getting his money back as much as he cared about finding a good home for the guitar. I liked him and I liked the Les Paul, so I bought it.
(He also had a 100-watt Marshall amp he wanted to place in a good home, but I like being married so I regretfully declined.)
Click to embiggenate!
Back in 1982, when I was 20, I saved up and bought a Gibson Invader, which was a budget Les Paul: It didn’t have the sculpted maple top, the mother-of-pearl fingerboard inlays, and other pricey options.
But it was still a damn fine guitar, and since it was less expensive it was like having a project car: I didn’t mind hot-rodding it up. I replaced the bridge pickup with a Seymour Duncan model I found at a pawn shop; drilled a hole between the knobs and added a phase switcher; yanked out the stock pots and installed butter-smooth CDS (or was it Alpha-Control? Don’t remember) pots with handmade caps so crystalline they could make a brave man weep, locking strap buttons—Eddie Van Halen may have coined the term FrankenStrat, but I think I could legitimately claim the name Mutant Invader.
My friend Rob, who has a habit of naming things I own, named the guitar Sledge. And I played Sledge, to use a tired old cliché, until my fingers bled.
Not long after I adopted Sledge, I moved in with my friend George. George is an amazing drummer, and our living room was jammed with both our stereos, my guitar and amp and other accoutrements, and George’s drum kit, which looked like the mother ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, except it was bigger and more expensive.
Amateurs.
And we had a lot of friends who would come hang out: the aforementioned Rob, Tori, Dave,Daniel—who gave me an Electro-Harmonix Golden Throat talk box: DAMN Daniel!—Kim, John, and I’m sure there were others.
And they were all excellent musicians, and we would jam, which means they would jam, because I was still learning to play, so I stumbled around in the background on guitar, sounding like Linda McCartney sort of playing keyboards and kind of singing along with Paul, who was too kind to tell her the sound guy had her microphone turned off.
Harsh truth: I loved playing guitar, but I was caught in that frustrating trap of having juuuust enough talent to understand what really good guitarists were doing, but knowing I’d never ever be that good.
That was okay. I didn’t need to make a living playing guitar, and I was lucky enough to spend time with some really good musicians and enjoy bothering the neighbors with them.
Like most guitar guys, I accumulated a lot of gear: stomp boxes (although like most guitar guys, I had five favorite stomp boxes, but unlike most guitar guys, thanks to my size-13 feet they had to be spread out in a 10-foot long line of cables so I could stomp on just one of them at a time), a real live Fender tube amp that tried very sincerely to kill me, but that’s another story, and a pink paisley Telecaster that yes, looked just like the one Prince played, although I hadn’t heard of him yet.
I mutated the Telecaster even more; primarily with EMG active pickups that were encased in black ceramic blocks and looked unbearably cool, plus other stuff I won’t bore you with, before I finally admitted I just didn’t like the Telecaster.
Oh, it looked cool and it sounded good when I played it, but it sounded GREAT when any of my real musician friends played it. Also, Rob never named it anything, even though it looked like it was painted with Pepto Bismol. What was he supposed to name it–Dr. Pep and the Toe Biz Maulers? I’m sorry, but–wait; that’s actually an awesome name for a band, much less a guitar. But I think he knew it wasn’t going to work out for us and he didn’t want to make the breakup any more painful.
It was the neck. A lot of Fender guitars have one-piece rock maple necks, and the Telecaster was one of them. But it was too skinny, and with my freaky huge hands I felt like I was playing a pencil.
Our pastor’s son was 12 at the time. He’d saved up lawn-mowing money and bought a really beat-up, lifeless acoustic guitar. He was saving up to buy an electric guitar, and then he planned to save up even more and buy an amplifier.
So I gave him the Telecaster and said he could just worry about saving up for a new amp. I didn’t see any point in trying to recoup the money I’d spent fixing it up when I could give it a good home with someone who needed it and was already a far better guitarist than me.
And 30 years later, I found a beautiful Les Paul that needed a good home. Karma, baby.
Not acid-washed jeans. I wore bell-bottom jeans because my feet are so big, but no one sold acid-washed bell-bottoms, so Rob and I would put our jeans in the sink, splash bleach on them, then throw them in the washer. Rob called ’em “Cloud Pants.”
I have exactly one photo of myself from the years I spent living with George and the musicians’ commune we operated: I think I was 22, and I’m playing Sledge. I was about as tall as I am now, but pipecleaner skinny, and my hands are still ridiculously big, if not as X‑Man mutant big as they were when I was a kid.
When 1995 rolled around, I’d been married for a while and No. 1 Son was on the way, so I did what any red-blooded American man would do: I quit my job, sold our house and moved us all to Oregon so I could go to college.
And while we were packing up to move, I made two bad decisions that still haunt me: I looked at the big pile of guitars and amps and stomp boxes and other gear I’d accumulated, and I decided it took up way too much room.
So I loaded up the car with all my gear, except for a grungy old JDS acoustic I wanted to keep because I liked dragging it to concerts to see if I could get signatures on it, so Randy Stonehill, Phil Keaggy, Terry Talbot and Barry McGuire had all signed it.
The other bad decision was that I had an antique barber chair I’d bought from an activity therapist at the mental hospital where I worked,2 and decided it was just too big and heavy to move all the way to Oregon.
Sometimes you see these memes asking what you would say to yourself when you were a teenager; I would tell myself not to get rid of my guitar stuff and not to give away the barber chair. But I probably wouldn’t listen. I’m stupid that way.
(Speaking of the musicians who’ve signed my grungy old JDS, I also have a Village Inn kids’ coloring book/placemat that No. 1 Son and Barry McGuire colored together when No. 1 Son was 3, but that’s yet another story).
So I drove to a music store in Topeka, the name of which I forget, but it was on 17th Street behind a no-kill cat shelter that used to be a Hardee’s, and I traded in all my gear on a really nice 12-string Washburn acoustic, which I still have but play only on the rare occasion when I want to play Supertramp’s “Give a Little Bit,” because my stupid-big fingers on my stupid-big hands make the guitar sound like a couple of cats running around fighting on top of it.
It didn’t take long to regret my decision. Three days later, as we hit Interstate 70 west on our way to Oregon, I exclaimed “Why the HELL did I get rid of 12 years’ worth of stuff I loved? Why didn’t I just get rid of the sofa or the TV or Best Half?”
Best Half, who was in the car with me, expressed her displeasure at this remark by giving me a pinch that still hurts today.
And so I went to college and met many other musicians who were better than I’ll ever be, including Andy Gurevich (the titular guru of the Gurevichian cult, which is also another story), Matt, John, and some more folks I hope I don’t offend by not remembering them.
And I watched them play and I enjoyed it, but I missed being able to stumble around uselessly behind them.
And I vowed that even though I was a ho-hum guitarist, someday I would buy another electric guitar and amp and other fun gadgets, just as soon as I could afford to feed my family with something more than Top Ramen.
But that didn’t happen until I bought the Les Paul, because I was too busy ruining my hands. Which reminds me of my dad’s funeral, which I’ll get to in a minute.
I had a series of stupidly dangerous jobs in my 20s and early 30s: I worked night shift in a convenience store, in a state hospital with the mentally ill, and as a rescue mission chaplain before college. No, not as dangerous as being a cop or a firefighter, but then again cops and firefighters have training and equipment and insurance and stuff.
During and after college I also worked as a concrete mason and on security teams in college and in church and elsewhere.
After that I got a job doing web development, which I loved, but which also helped me build up a lovely nascent case of carpal tunnel syndrome.
But after all the stupid dangerous jobs I’d had, I got bored with having a safe office job, so I joined a Kempo karate school to spend more time with my kids, and wound up liking it enough to get my second-degree black belt and helping teach (even though I was about as good at martial arts as I was at guitar). Which also did not do my hands any favors.
Comedy is not pretty.
I have some really cool scars and stories about grievous injuries to my hands and forearms: A spectacular (human!) bite scar on the back of my right hand; a scar and nerve damage on my right wrist from being hit with a broken bottle; a fractured ring finger that healed crooked; a nasty burn scar on my thumb from being splashed with sulfuric acid (yet another story), several broken knuckles, assorted connective tissue injuries from breaking bricks at Kempo demos, and other stuff I forget.
That was just my right hand. I abused my left hand even worse:
During a Kempo sparring match I blocked a punch with my left pinky finger3, which emitted a gloriously horrible snap that made everyone in the room wince; I caught my hand between an engine block and a garage floor; I got hit on the back of my forearm so hard it spawned a bunch of ganglion cysts; and I got mauled by dog who took a couple of good chomps out of my forearm and hand and left behind a big numb area.
Oh, and I also got diagnosed with MS, which causes some stiffness and numbness in my left arm and hand, and to top it all off I’ve got a bit of arthritis here and there in both hands that I’m sure will be loads more fun in the future.
(A couple months ago I saw an orthopedist to look at some arthritis in my left hand. They sent me an intake packet and wanted extensive, detailed info on any injuries I’d had to my hands. So I wrote down all that stuff you just read. The doctor came in, skimmed my stuff on the clipboard, and said, “What’s all this? Are you Jackie Chan’s bodyguard or what?” I told him I’m just clumsy.)
Just before Dad’s funeral two years ago, I… what? No, that’s not a non sequitur; I said I was going to talk about my dad’s funeral right up there, didn’t I? Pay attention!
Just before Dad’s funeral started, Mom and my sisters and my kids and Best Half and I all went up to view him in his casket, and to give him some gifts: I gave him a Johnny Cash CD; The Chowder gave him a little apple pie (another story), and others I can’t remember.
The funeral director was there, discussing Dad’s appearance with Mom, and he looked at Dad’s hands and remarked, “These are the hands of a man who worked hard.”
True. Dad was a glazier for more than 40 years; he also did handyman work on the side for those 40 years and also rebuilt or remodeled just about everything in our house to boot.
After he retired he did handyman stuff almost full-time (I remember him joking that retirement was boring, what with only 40–50 hours of work a week). He was in demand as the maintenance guy for a number of rental houses and small apartment buildings.
Today I was looking at a picture of Dad taken in April, 2002: He’s sitting on a hotel room bed next to No. 1 Son, who was 6 years old, and he’s holding The Chowder, who was 7 months old.
Right to left: No. 1 Son, The Chowder, a couple bags of walnuts, and Dad
The hotel room bed was in Changsha, Hunan Province, in China. And the reason we were there was to adopt The Chowder.
Dad’s hands were smaller than mine (hell, Bigfoot’s hands are smaller than mine). But they were thick and callused and corded with muscle and scars, and they looked like two lumpy bags of walnuts.
Right now I’m the same age Dad was in that photo. And while I’ve never made a living working with my hands, other than the aforementioned stint as a concrete mason in college, I like to think I’ve inherited some of his better traits:
He had a beatup old poster in the glass shop he worked in; it said “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
He wasn’t preachy or pushy; all he did was set a standard and then demonstrate it.
I delivered the eulogy at his funeral; later some guys he’d worked with, plus his former boss, told me his co-workers would gripe at times that Dad was kind of slow and didn’t turn things around as fast as everyone else.
His former boss told me how they answered that gripe: “Yeah; he’s a bit slower. But he never, ever has to go back and redo anything.”
It’s only been for about the last 10 years of my life that I’ve realized just how much that influenced me, without him lecturing or preaching at me once.
I’ve owned three houses; I’ve worked as a writer, a graphic designer, an editor, a web designer and a web developer. When I do stuff I try to find a way to do it elegantly and simply, to avoid quick-and-dirty solutions in favor of doing it right the first time.
Draw me. Draw me like one of your French Bulldogs!
The other day I was sitting on the floor in our living room and tuning the Les Paul. Pepper was lying in front of me with her head on my knee, gazing adoringly up at me like she was Rose DeWitt and I was Jack Dawson.
Best Half thought that was cute and took a picture with her phone.
When I saw the photo I chuckled at the way Pepper was making eyes at me, but then I noticed that my hands looked like lumpy sacks of walnuts, just like my dad’s hands.
Most of the jobs I’ve had in my life don’t create a tangible legacy; I can’t point at very many things I’ve made or fixed, or artwork or books I’ve written or things I’ve built.
But my hands look a lot like my dad’s hands—a coincidence of genetics and life experiences for sure, but I can live with having huge, half-ruined hands if it means I can honor my dad’s legacy a little bit.
Oh by the way—my friend Rob named the Les Paul for me: Its name is now More Paul.
My friend Rob has a mildly unusual last name. I’ve witnessed him being asked to spell it a few times, and he jokes that it’s spelled just the way it sounds, but with only two W’s.
I’ve never gotten much humor mileage from my name. Sometimes someone will say “Is that Greg with one or two G’s?” And I’ll joke, “Two G’s: One on each end!”
Now this right here is the difference between a good joke and a meh joke:
“Only two W’s” is pretty obviously a wisecrack (unless you’re Welsh or Czech and your name is something like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch or Nejnedoobhospodařovávatelnější).
On the other hand, if someone says “Is that Greg with one or two G’s?”, they’re asking you if your name is Greg or Gregg. And “It’s two G’s; one on each end!” isn’t funny; it’s just confusing.
Pope Gregory the Somethingth.
Mom once told me I was named after Pope Gregory. When you grow up Catholic, being named after a Pope is considered quite an honor, and I was their only male child. There has, alas, never been a Pope Thing 1, Pope Thing 2 or Pope First Sister, so Pope Gregory it was.
I looked the dude up once and discovered the dude was dudes: There have been 16 Pope Gregorys (or is that Popes Gregory?). Some of them were were notably good Popes:
Pope Gregory I (590–604) was a chill dude who earned the nickname Gregory the Great; the Gregorian Chant was named after him. The Gregorian Calendar was named after Gregory XIII (1572–1585).
On the other hand, Gregory IX (1170–1241) revved up the Inquisition from the equivalent of a Congressional inquiry to the Inquisition we all know and love, with the seizing of property and torture and burning at the stake and all that fun stuff.
I once asked Mom and Dad which Pope Gregory I’m named after. Pope Gregory XVI died in 1846, so I assumed I wasn’t named after a Pope in recent memory. They were a little surprised that there have been 16 Pope(s) Gregory(s). Mom said she wasn’t sure which one, but they knew he was a most excellent and bodacious Pope and she’d look it up and let me know.
That was 48 years ago, so Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m still curious.
If my name was Rockefeller or Kennedy, I’d expect to be asked if I had Kennedy or Rockefeller kin. Being named after a Pope? Ain’t gonna happen. No one’s ever going to ask me if I’m related to one of the Pope(s) Gregory(s), or tell me I look just like the Pope.
I’ve been mistaken for other people, though.
Way back in 1986, my friend Stan and I drove up north of Chicago for a music festival, picking up his friend Blue4 in St. Louis on the way. The festival was held on a great big piece of rented farmland, like Woodstock, except Cornerstone was a Christian music festival, so we didn’t have folks running around naked or ignoring the warnings about the brown acid. As far as I know.
I was wandering around looking at the product tables of albums and T‑shirts and other music festival accoutrements, and someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned to see a pair of excited teen girls. When they saw me their smiles vanished; one of them said, “Sorry!” and they both slunk away.
This happened several more times in the next few hours; come dinnertime, my friend Stan and I were waiting in line to get some BBQ ribs before the big main stage concert, and someone tapped on my shoulder again. I turned to see a young guy holding an album and a Magic Marker; his crest instantly fell.5
“Sorry!” he said as he started to slink away. I said, “Hey, wait a sec. Did you think I was someone else?”
“Yeah,” he said, “you look like Darrell Mansfield.”
We got our ribs and found a place to sit and watch the big main concert, and lo, Darrell Mansfield entered from stage right.
My friend Stan stared at Darrell, then at me, then at Darrell, like Darrell and I were playing tennis.
Turns out Darrell Mansfield’s the best harmonica player6 I’ve ever seen, and he’s a heck of a nice guy.
Change my mind.
My friend Stan later sent me a picture of Darrell and I when Darrell was signing autographs, which I promptly lost, so you’ll have to be content with one of Darrell’s album covers and a blurry photo of me my friend Stan also took during the festival. As you can see, Darrell’s about 10 years older than me, but if you squint you can see how I could sort of look similar to Darrell to someone who just lost his glasses and saw my back from 100 feet away at night.
Which no doubt explains why the people who wanted Darrell’s autograph looked so disappointed when I turned around and they realized I was just some miscellaneous guy with long hair and the appalling bad manners not to be anywhere near as talented or good-looking as Darrell Mansfield.
Best Half and I went to the same music festival a couple years later, and one night we bumped into Darrell taking his tube amp and other stuff over to one of the side stages.
He remembered me and made an “evil twin” joke when I introduced Best Half, and he invited us in the back door of the cattle auction barn where they were playing; we got to hang out with the rest of the band and watch the soundcheck and enjoy front row center seats.
Like I said, heckuva nice guy. He’s in his 70s now and had to stop performing a couple years ago due to dementia, the same demeaning, cruel way my dad was also robbed of his memories and cognition. But my dad was one of those sweet, gentle guys who just got sweeter as the dementia progressed. I bet Darrell’s just the same.
Okay! On that depressing note, being mistaken for Darrell was my only brush with celebrity, so let’s—
Wait; that’s not true. I’d almost forgotten this, but The Chowder just reminded me that 15 years ago, she thought I was unbearably cool for a couple of days because she thought I was Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Zaphod is far more attractive than me, but he’s also a clueless doof, so I can understand the confusion.
This was for two reasons:
Zaphod Beeblebrox was a character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the film version of which had just been released, and
Zaphod, played by Sam Rockwell, wore a messy blond wig that also resembled my hair if glimpsed from a distance during a blizzard through cracked binoculars.
The Chowder was only 4 years old, so she still thought I was awesome (quite rightly of course, until Fake News disavowed her of that belief, for which I will never forgive them).
And now, the moment you haven’t been waiting for: It’s way past time for me to explain the title of this post, so let’s talk about My Three Sons.
My Three Sons was a sitcom that aired from 1960 to 1972. The plot was layered and complex, so you might want to take some notes:
My Three Sons—bear with me here—was about a guy who had three sons. Got all that?
The youngest of the titular sons was named Thompson. Ernest Thompson. Suspiciously, everyone else’s last name was Douglas. Even more suspicious: Ernie’s brothers (Robbie and Chip) and their dad (Steven) were all tall, handsome, talented, and confident, and they had studly, cool names while Ernie was a short, clumsy geek with a clumsy geek name. It’s almost like Steven Douglas wasn’t really Ernie Thompson’s dad at all.
Which of course was the truth: Ernie was adopted. And being around four tall studly guys who were far more handsome and talented and older than Ernie was no doubt an honest-to-Tony-Robbins confidence boost.7
And I get that; I really do. I bet every scrawny adolescent geek guy wishes he had a cool studly name: Steele Hawthorn or Ripley Edward Absalome (Ripped Abs, for short) or even just Cool Studly McStudlycool.
I was not an Ernie fan as a kid. I was vaguely aware of the sitcom and the character (played by Barry Livingston, which was itself a cooler name than mine).
That all changed when I was 15. I was a 9th-grader at Hayden High School, which was extremely Catholic. Dead serious Catholic. To quote Jim Gaffigan, it was a Shiite Catholic high school.
And like most geeks in Shiite Catholic school, I spent most of my time being stuffed into my locker, punctuated with the occasional wedgie or WTSNA.8
I did enjoy going to Campus Life every week, and I enjoyed going to their week-long camp thingy in the summer out in Quaker Ridge, Colorado. Most of the other attendees were geeks and nerds too, so it wasn’t so awkward socially. Kind of like it you were 4’ 11” tall but once a year you got to hang out with like-statured people in a convention titled Nobody Over 4‑Eleven.
Anyway, halfway through my freshman year, something very strange happened:
All the girls in Campus Life and at school started calling me Ernie. I still have no idea why.
You stay out of this!
One day at school, a girl in class said, “Hey, you look like Ernie!”
I wasn’t used to girls talking to me willingly, so I kept my reply simple:
“Huh? Like on Sesame Street?”
“No, Ernie!” she said. “Ernie, on My Three Sons! Doesn’t he look like Ernie?” she said, elbowing another girl in class, who agreed with alacrity.
By the end of the day, every girl in school was calling me Ernie.
I was befuddled. Hornswoggled, even. I wasn’t used to being popular, or even noticed. I’d worked hard to learn how to be invisible at school and I liked it that way.
This was in 1977, so instead of Googling My Three Sons and Ernie and Barry Livingston, I went to the library and pored over archived LIFE, Time and TV Guide magazines.
Ernie had thick black hair; I had thin blond hair. Ernie had a Freddy Mercury-style overbite; I didn’t. Ernie had a strong jaw with a well-kirkled chin;9 I had a shapeless mooshy chin that looked like an uncooked Pillsbury Dough Boy biscuit.
Left: Ernie. Right: Not even a little bit Ernie.
Over here
←
is irrefutable photographic evidence: Photos of me and Barry Livingston at various ages.
The “HI ERNIE!” hollers from across the room tapered off, to my relief. But then something even stranger began to happen:
The embarrassing spotlight faded out, replaced with casual, but genuine kindness and affection: So many people called me Ernie that the teachers at Hayden picked up on it, along with Campus Life staff. I remember having to ask teachers and coaches to correct report cards or other documents referring to me as Ernie.
The summer before my sophomore year, I went to the Campus Life camp thingy in Colorado yet again. And on the first day, two or three girls gave me a Campus Life T‑shirt with “ERNIE” ironed on the back.
It revved up the whole “Hey, there’s Ernie whose name isn’t really Ernie but I don’t remember his real name so HI ERNIE!” thing again. But this time I didn’t mind it so much. Public schools can be tough environments; Shiite Catholic schools can be even worse. Geeks and nerds like me learned to be invisible at school because being the object of attention usually means being bullied.
But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s okay to get a funny nickname or to be teased about one quirk or another. Not in a mean-spirited way, but in a welcome aboard, goofball-spirited way.
I still don’t know which Pope Gregory I’m named after, and I still have no idea why the girls at school started calling me Ernie.
But that’s okay. Just call me Pope Ernie. Or His Holiness Ernest the Oneth, if you’re a Shiite Catholic. I’ll answer to either of them.
Vonnegut10 was one of those important authors who make you feel vaguely guilty, given that you’ve never read any of his stuff except maybe Slaughterhouse-Five. And while some of his stuff is dystopian or mildly sci-fi, where do I get off saying he, not Douglas Adams,11 is responsible for a sprawling sci-fi epic like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
Stay with me here: In 1965, Vonnegut published God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which included a lengthy excerpt from a fictional novel titled Venus on the Half-Shell, by a fictional author named Kilgore Trout.12
Kilgore Trout showed up frequently in Vonnegut’s work as a literary alter ego for Vonnegut himself, but Trout’s name was also a poke at Vonnegut’s friend, sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon:13 “I think it’s funny to be named after a fish,” were Vonnegut’s exact words (he may have been a great writer but apparently part of him never left middle school).
Another sci-fi author, Philip Jose Farmer,14 was so amused he snagged the Venus on the Half-Shell excerpt in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and fluffed it up into an entire book.
And so, in 1975, Venus on the Half-Shell hit the bookstores, just three years before The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began on BBC Radio. The byline read Kilgore Trout, but the author was really Philip Jose Farmer, using characters created by Kurt Vonnegut.
Got all that?
What does this have to do with Douglas Adams or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Adams was a huge fan of Vonnegut, for one thing. That’s not tantamount to plagiarism, of course. But if you’ve ever read, listened to or watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’ll notice some startling parallels:
1. The Everyman Galactic Wanderer
Someone forgot to explain this to the cover artist.
Both stories follow the adventures of an everyday schlub snatched from his everyday schlub’s life into an intergalactic adventure. HHGTTG stars Arthur Dent, who worked in a small radio station before roaming the cosmos in a bathrobe.
VOTHS, on the other hand, stars Simon Wagstaff, a folk musician who likes wearing faded jeans and comfy old sweatshirts. He has curly dark hair, a big nose and looks a lot like Kurt Vonnegut.
2. The Earth Gets Destroyed by Bureaucrats
When Hitchhiker’s Guide begins, Arthur Dent is lying in the mud in front of his house, blocking the bulldozers that have shown up to demolish his house. At the beginning of Venus on the Half-Shell, Simon Wagstaff and his girlfriend are having sex on the head of the Sphinx in Egypt.
Oh. This would be a good place to explain that according to Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout was a hack who wrote a lot of thinly-disguised porn and was published mostly in adult magazines.
And Philip Jose Farmer was the perfect ghost writer for Trout, given that Farmer’s favorite themes were sex, religion, aliens, sexy religion, alien sex, religious sex, sexy religious aliens, alien religious sex, sex as worship, alien sex worship, worshipful sex with aliens—you get the idea.
Anyway, Arthur and Simon are both minding their own business when aliens show up and destroy the Earth: The Vogons blow the Earth out from under Arthur to build a hyperspace bypass, while in Venus on the Half Shell, the Hoonhors decide Earth is too polluted and clean things up by triggering a worldwide flood, a la Noah. Turns out they cleaned up Earth a few thousand years ago already but are unhappy things are already so dirty again.
3. Pursuing the Ultimate Question With Neurotic Robots in Stolen Spaceships
Arthur manages to snag a ride on a Vogon ship and later winds up roaming the galaxy on a ship called Heart of Gold, which was stolen earlier by one Zaphod Beeblebrox, looks like a giant running shoe, and is named after a Neil Young song.
Conversely, Simon leaves Earth on a Chinese ship christened Hwang Ho, which looks like a giant chrome penis and is named after the Yellow River (remember what I said about Philip Jose Farmer being a religious/alien sex fiend?).
Arthur is traveling with a small handful of human and alien friends, plus a neurotic robot named Marvin, who resents being a lowly maintenance robot when he has a brain the size of a planet, and Eddie, a shipboard computer who tries way too hard to be cheerful.
Simon’s on the go with Anubis and Athena, his dog and owl, plus a neurotic robot named Chorwktap, who has free will and far too much intelligence to enjoy being a sex robot (this doesn’t stop her and Simon from having lots and lots of sex anyway–ref. P.J. Farmer, the sci-fi sex fiend author, again). Tzu Li, the Hwang Ho’s computer, is just a computer, despite Chorktap spending all her free time trying to prove Tzu Li is self-aware but shy.
Our heroes have the fastest spaceships ever made and a universe to explore, so they set out for some answers:
“What’s the ultimate answer to, you know–life, the universe and everything?” Arthur wants to know.
Simon’s question is this: “Why were we created only to suffer and die?”
4. The Genius Vermin Secretly Running the Show
As they travel and enjoy various hijinks in pursuit of the truth, Arthur and Simon discover the Vogons and Hoonhors are just what they appeared to be at first glance: Clueless, careless and callous bureaucrats. It turns out there are masterminds behind the scenes who have been running things all along, hyperintelligent beings everyone mistook for harmless or annoying vermin. They don’t really mean Arthur or Simon any harm, but they aren’t exactly nice to them either–the vermin masterminds, it turns out, are using Arthur and Simon as part of experiments to answer the same ultimate questions.
In HHGTTG, Arthur discovers mice are the most intelligent beings on Earth. They’ve been manipulating science all along while pretending to be laboratory test subjects; in reality they’re pursuing the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Drink beer for all eternity with cockroaches? Meh. I’m fine with that as long as we don’t have to share glasses.
Simon, on the other hand, discovers a mythical alien race called the Clerun-Gowph, who accidentally populated most of the universe with messy scientific outposts that dumped waste products into the primordial soup of the planets they were studying. And the Clerun-Gowph, Simon is shocked to learn, are cockroaches.
This is a huge blow to the ego: Arthur discovers he’s nothing but a test subject in an experiment run by laboratory mice, while Simon realizes all life on Earth is just, as he puts it, the end of a process that started with cockroach crap.
5. The Planet-Sized Computer
Every seeker of truth needs an Oracle, and our heroes are no exception. In HGTTG, it seems Earth and all life on it were an enormous computer built in pursuit of the answer to life, the universe and everything (I know, I know — it was built to specifically help ask the question after another giant computer gave an accurate but useless answer — the point is that the whole planet is a computer).
When Simon, on the other hand, finally meets the Clerun-Gowph, he discovers they built a planet-sized computer to answer all the questions there are. Having nothing left to discover or learn, they decide to quit exploring/fertilizing the galaxy and devote themselves to drinking beer.
6. The Useless Answers (spoiler alert!)
At long last, our protagonists are about to learn the question to their ultimate questions. The problem is that in both cases, the answer is useless:
Arthur’s question: “What is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything?”
Answer: “42.”
Possible alternate answer: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Simon’s question: “Why are we created only to suffer and die?”
Answer: “Why not?”
Don’t give me that look. I said they were useless answers, didn’t I?
I know how to prove that men and women are fundamentally different:
Put a man and a woman into separate rooms alone with a new appliance—say, a bread machine—and watch what happens. The woman will make some bread. On the other hand—bear in mind that this is a brand new appliance, right out of the box—the man will take the bread machine apart to see how it works.
There’s a corollary here: I have a sermon/demo I’ve presented in various churches, wherein I break a stack of concrete blocks, then talk about how breaking concrete blocks with your bare hands is just exactly like becoming a Christian and going to heaven.
After I’d done it a number of times I realized that when I said looky here; I’m going to smash all these concrete blocks with my bare hands, the audience response is divided right down the middle between men and women:
I’m not sure what drives men to take things apart. Maybe some psychiatrist has it figured out. If so, I bet the psychiatrist is a man. Why? For the same reason psychology has traditionally been a male pursuit: Psychoanalyzing people is very much like taking them apart to see how they work.
I think the drive to take things apart is genetic, not learned. For instance, I saw a TV show once about Underwriters Laboratories. This company takes new products, disassembles them down into molecules to see how they’re designed, and then figures out ingenious ways to break them.
Underwriters Labs pays the guys in white lab coats you see on TV commercials who build a robot arm to open and close a refrigerator door 38 billion times in two weeks. All guys, mind you—you never see women in the commercials. These are the men who send cars hurtling into concrete walls at 90 miles an hour to see what will happen to the dummies inside.
I’ve often dreamed about working for one of those companies that blow up buildings so that they collapse into their own basements.
Oddly enough, their research has conclusively proven over and over again that the dummies (surprise!) get demolished. But for some reason, they still find it necessary to crash an average of 10 cars a week.
Don’t tell me it’s all about safety and research—these guys are having the time of their lives. I’m not sure why Underwriters Labs even bothers to pay them; most men would probably work there for free. I know I would.
I’ve often dreamed about working for Underwriters Laboratories. I’ve also dreamed about working for one of those companies that blow up buildings so that they collapse into their own basements (c’mon—you have, too, haven’t you? Let’s see a show of hands, guys … I knew it!).
My favorite destructive fantasy, though, involves working for one of the big auto manufacturers. Their research departments have teams that secretly buy competitors’ cars. Then they completely disassemble the cars and mount all the parts on sheets of plywood, which they hang in a warehouse.
You must understand, though—when I say they disassemble a car, I’m talking a level of disassembly rarely seen on this earth. If a butcher rendered a cow the way these guys take on a car, he would need 17 square acres of countertop. Every single part in the car is broken down completely: The door locks are taken apart into piles of tiny springs and wafers. The engine is transformed into a heap of pistons, rings, bolts, bushings, springs, valves and bearings. The starter motor is unwound to see how much wire is in the armatures.
Every hook, pin, screw, nut, bolt, gear, spring, bushing, staple, clip, clamp, strap and wire in the car is unfastened, until the engineers have thousands of parts to catalogue and mount on the boards. They even unstitch all the upholstery, separate glued-together pieces, and cut all the welds apart until they have the original pieces of metal that make up the body and frame.
They say this is done to help them better understand their competitors’ designs. But it sounds like a labor of love to me. I bet they draw straws to see who gets to take things apart and who has to do the paperwork.
Yep, I’d be really good at that sort of thing; I’ve always been a champion disassembler myself. When I was 8, my parents gave me a watch. I pried off the back to see how it worked (and my mother has never quite forgiven me). Since then, I have disassembled electric razors, toasters, an electric knife, radios, car stereos and tape decks, a variable speed drill, an electric guitar, a See ‘N Say, and anything else I could get my hands on.
Last year I sawed an 8‑foot-wide aluminum satellite dish in half.
When I was 19, I took the engine out of my car and put it back. It was so much fun I did it again a year later. Last year I sawed an 8‑foot-wide aluminum satellite dish in half (don’t ask).
I suppose (I said don’t ask!) I can understand why, when my parents gave me a bicycle for my 24th birthday, my mother looked me right in the eye and with a straight face said, “Now don’t go taking this apart to see how it works!” She needn’t have worried. Bicycles were kid stuff; I was in the big leagues by that time.
The all-time highlight of my deconstructionalist career was when I murdered a piano. My roommate, George, had bought an old upright piano for $100. This beast was made by a German company called Gulbransen, and it was so heavy it took eight people to move it into our house. I think moving one of the rocks at Stonehenge would have been easier. The piano’s wheels left ruts in the wood on our front porch, it was so heavy. In fact, I think the Germans designed that piano to hold pillbox doors shut against enemy mortar fire in World War II. It was that kind of heavy.
Anyway, after we all got hernias moving this battleship anchor of a piano, George discovered it had six keys that didn’t work at all. The remaining 82 were so far out of tune they made my dog howl when we struck them. George called a piano tuner, who came over, listened to the piano, and then left, laughing so hard he was drooling.
Needless to say, George didn’t want to take the piano along when he got ready to move out a year later. The problem was that he had no way to dispose of it, and he was too kindhearted to sell it to some other sucker—I mean, victim.
So while George was at work one evening, I decided to surprise him: I took the piano apart and put it in a Dumpster in a parking lot behind our house. I used pliers to cut the strings; a crowbar took care of everything else (champion disassemblers don’t need hundreds of tools; that’s for wimps like Tim Allen).
Over the course of an hour or so that night, my friend, Dave, and I stealthily carried the dismembered piano to the Dumpster, armload by armload. Finally, only two pieces were left: the back frame, which was made of huge oak beams, and the harp, a thick steel framework over which the strings had been stretched. These pieces weighed several hundred pounds each and were the only parts that were difficult to maneuver into the Dumpster.
The Dumpster squatted at the end of the alley like a land mine as George and I gleefully peered out the upstairs bedroom window.
George nearly had a heart attack when he got home and found nothing but a major dent in the carpet where his piano had been.
At 5 a.m. the next morning, George woke me excitedly. One of those trucks that picks up Dumpsters and turns them upside down to empty them was rumbling up the alley toward the Dumpster. The Dumpster squatted at the end of the alley like a land mine as George and I gleefully peered out the upstairs bedroom window.
The driver positioned the loader’s arms in the slots on the Dumpster’s sides and turned on the hoist. George and I clutched our sides with laughter as the truck’s engine roared—and nothing happened. The driver scratched his head and put the hoist into a lower gear. With the truck’s engine bellowing in protest, its suspension groaning and the hoist’s gears screeching, the Dumpster slowly left the ground.
As we held our breath, the Dumpster turned over, the lid flipped open and the harp and frame tumbled out into the truck’s bed, which—and I knew God loved me when I saw it—was empty. The harp and frame landed flat in the truck’s bed with a resounding, thunderous boom. The rest of the pieces slid out on top, crashing and rattling into a heap atop the frame.
The noise echoed up and down the predawn street; lights began appearing in windows. The driver and his helper staggered out of the truck, holding their ears, and climbed the side of the bed, no doubt thinking an asteroid had just landed in the truck.
They looked over the side of the bed in astonishment. I could hear them excitedly questioning each other: “How on God’s green earth did a piano get in there?” the driver said in amazement.
I closed my eyes and sighed wistfully, knowing I would probably never again experience a moment so sublime this side of eternity.
Way back in 1986, my friend Stan and I drove up north of Chicago for a music festival, picking up his friend Blue
