Thoughtless for the Day

While other critics are currently busying themselves with their "Best of the Year" and "Best of the Decade" lists, I'd just like to take a moment to enlighten the entire world to the ponderous tome that is When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow by Lance Rentzel.

Until a few weeks ago, when I stumbled upon WAtLDiS (or "WaltDis", as I like to call it) at a flea market, I was completely ignorant (and as the Rozz Tox Manifesto clearly states, "Ignorance of one's own culture is not considered cool") of the slow-motion dioxin-car-carrying train wreck that is the life story of Lance Rentzel. If, like me, you were also absent from school on the day when your classmates were ushered into a crowded auditorium to hear The Cautionary Tale Lance here's the scoop:

• Lance Rentzel was a professional football player who had been a wide receiver for the Vikings, the Cowboys, and the Rams (coincidentally, the original Vikings employed a device known as the "cowboy ram" to batter down the doors of the Alamo).
• Lance Rentzel was briefly married to "entertainer" Joey Heatherton. For you youngsters, Joey Heatherton was not a dude. Joey was a sort of proto-Paris Hilton who was "famous for being famous". Today, Joey is best remembered for inspiring the SCTV character Lola Heatherton. Bring da noise, Joey:

• Lance Rentzel would also, on occasion, expose his private parts to children. This proclivity for show and tell led to Lance getting busted on two occasions. The fist offense was quietly swept under the rug, but the second killed Lance's marriage and nearly ended his career

Now, by today's NFL standards, that last item item may not be so shocking, but what you need to remember is that Lance was arrested in 1970 - long before the public's begrudging acceptance of the fact that the overwhelming majority of America's star athletes are raincoat clad monsters who hang around playgrounds. Which brings us to the book itself...

To call WAtLDiS "unflinching" is like calling Joey Heatherton "a bit of a ham". Whereas contemporary ballplayers, attempting to redeem themselves in the eyes of the public, might have a biography ghostwritten for them in which their misdeeds are tersley dispensed with in two small paragraphs on page 179, Lance Rentzel dives right into the muck and mire from the start and keeps returning to the trough with delirious regularity. Here's Lance, just a mere six pages into WAtLDiS describing how his second arrest for public indecency triggered memories of his first arrest for public indecency:

I got dressed and the fear dwindled, replaced by speculations,. I wondered what might happen, trying to figure out an approach, but my mind kept referring to the past. I'd been in this exact spot before. In 1966, when I was playing for the Minnesota Vikings, I was at practice, and it wasn't my mother, it was Coach Norm Van Brocklin who broke the news. He brought me into his office, trying to figure me out. It was one of the few times I ever saw him ill at ease. He said to me, apologetically, "I hate to ask you this, but did you expose yourself to two small girls?"

Talk about your yes or no questions. And with that, WAtLDiS establishes its own habitual pattern of exposure. On page 56, Lance regales us with a tale of young love:

My first affair was with a lady of my choice - an attractive girl from another school. Once we bagan (and it was the first time for both of us), we made love frequently, wherever [sic] we could find the time and privacy. Inevitably there were problems [emphasis mine], like the time we were in the back room of my house and heard someone coming; we quickly gathered our clothes and rushed into the bathroom. We dressed hurriedly, frantically, silently, only to come out and see my mom holding up a forgotten pair of panties.

While we never learn whether the panties belonged to the young lady or to Lance, we do get a glimpse (on page 29) into Lenny Bruce's dark legacy:

"Say, did you hear that Lance Rentzel's problems have been solved?" Henny Youngman began telling audiences. "Sure, he's just been traded to the Montreal Expos."

"There's no doubt about it anymore," said singer Don Cherry at a nightclub in Oklahoma City , "Lance Rentzel can really handle the fly pattern." My older brother, Del, was in the audience with his wife, Kay, and some business associates.

Ahhh, you can almost hear the rim shots over the weeping of Del and Kay.

While you have to admire Rentzel's brutal honesty (if you doubt he's got a pair of balls, just ask the kids at P.S. 154 - they've seen 'em), you also have to be equally dismayed at Lance's repeated naming of the father of the young victim, as well as his decision to have his psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, pen the book's epilogue.

In the end, WAtLDiS is best enjoyed as a mildly deranged historical curiosity (not unlike The Malleus Maleficarum or Going Rogue): a strange time-capsule from the dawn of the era of celebrity tell-alls and power couples.

I'll let Lance's mother have the next-to-last word:

I am convinced that civil rights are only for minorities and mass muderers.

Phun Phact: Cyclist Lance Armstrong was allegedly named after Lance Rentzel.

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Here's a completely random listing of interesting things I found on the web:

• Slate has a piece about my favorite TV show of the moment: Hoarders
...as well as a look back at the accomplishments (and lack thereof) of The Replacements [Phun Phact: I once saw the Butthole Surfers open for the 'Mats at City Gardens in Trenton. I think Jon Stewart was still bar-tending there, back then]
• The Onion has created the greatest "Area Man" piece of all time
• Same-sex marriage is now legal in Mexico City!!!
• and the genomes for two different types of cancer have been mapped

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Once again, I have failed miserably to conceive a caption which has even the slightest chance of winning this month's Biblical Archaeology Review Caption Contest.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Holiday edition of the Punk Rock Flea Market will be held on Saturday from 10 am until 5 pm at the Starlite Ballroom on 9th and Spring Garden.

And on Sunday there's the not-to-be-missed Punk Rock Xmas Xtravaganz (Featuring Decontrol and another 100 other people I know) at Kung Fu Necktie from 3-7 pm

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Here are the latest religious stats as of 9:00 AM EST on 12/17/09:

• Oral Roberts is still dead (and, perhaps partially responsible for our current financial crisis)
• Speaking of financial crises: Rod Parsley is going broke
• Ray "Banana Boy" Comfort is in trouble
• Charlie "Is it me or the outhouse?" Daniels is still an idiot
• The Catholic Church may have killed the sequel to a movie that nobody saw
• Idiots toss kid out of school for drawing Jesus (although the kid seems to have confused Easter with Christmas)

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The eminent philosopher Joe Jack Talcum used to own a copy of a nineteenth century "dream book". Basically, if you had a dream about - let's say - a horse, you would look up "horse" in the book, and next to the word "horse" would be some advice like "Now would be a good time to check in on a sick relative". Oddly, if you looked up "cheese" the book informed you that nothing good could ever come from a dream about cheese. Even more oddly, a recent study found that eating different varieties of cheese can help you choose your dreams.

For centuries our ancestors thought that dreams were visions or veiled prophecies which, if properly interpreted, could reveal the future. In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud hit upon that idea that our dreams were trying to tell us something ourselves: that our dreams were a window into the sub-conscience. This was of little comfort to those people who regularly dreamed of hot-dogs and donuts.

Today, we know that both of those theories are wrong (OK, most of us know those theories are wrong. This guy is still a holdout...and his website says nothing about cheese!). The current understanding is that dreams are evolution's way of allowing us to test our reactions to different scenarios and to learn from those imaginary reactions. This seems to make a great deal of sense, since many mammals dream, and I have yet to meet a cat who needed the gift of prophecy or a dog who had unresolved issues with its mother.

If you need further convincing, think about nightmares for a moment. When our ancestors roamed the plains of Africa, tens of thousands of years ago, having the occasion nightmare in which one was chased by lion might turn out to be useful if, during the dream, the hunted escaped by climbing up a tree and remembered that strategy latter. This might also explain why small children still have nightmares in which they're being chased by monsters.

In a way, our dreams are like the appendix, something that once had a useful function, but that, over time, has become obsolete, at best, and downright dangerous, at worst (my wife's nightmares have caused her to pop me in the face approximately a dozen times. Or, at least she says it's her dreams that are making her do this). While it's nice that our dreams are still trying to teach us things, there really is only one survival tactic that's useful for modern humans: Have plenty of cash on hand. And that's why RATYHL is proud to introduce Dream Money:

Image via Wikipedia

The first thing that you need to do is print out several copies of the bill above and either burn them in your fireplace or stack them next to your bedside - they make excellent bookmarks, by the way (I keep plenty of Dream Dollars of these around the house, just in case I eat the wrong kind of cheese). Then, before you go to sleep, just remind yourself that, at least in your dreams, you have plenty of pocket cash. This way, if you should find yourself having a nightmare in which some crazed, deformed mutant is chasing you with an axe, all you have to do is whip out a wad of dream cash and settle on the exact amount needed for Mr. Mutant to curtail his murderous activities. Or you could use your dream money to purchase a "dream Uzi" and deal with the issue in a more direct manner. It's that simple.

OK, since I've gone and done something really swell for humanity by inventing a currency you can use in your sleep, I'd like all of you who try Dream Money to write in and let me know how it works (or doesn't work). You see, I'm hoping to finally achieve my lifelong dream of winning the Ig-Noble Prize for Economics.

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Every two or three years or so, I re-read the Bible and the Koran. Although it neither has the exciting narrative style of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the raw ferocity of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the poetic beauty of the Bhagavad Gita, nor the balls-to-the-wall comic insanity of the Book of Mormon, The Bible is still as captivating on my tenth read-through as I was on my first.

One of the many great qualities of the Bible (Yes, I'm being series. The Bible is a fascinating tale of a people's journey from a hunter-gather tribe to an agrarian society) is that it unapologetically jumps right into the high strangeness. Take, for example, Genesis 6:4 (which I believe takes place about five pages in to the King James version):

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

The sons of whom did what to whose daughters???? No clear explanation is given. We hear about God's frisky lads and then the story just moves right along to Noah. It's as if you were to find a paragraph in a history book about how much George Washington's time-traveling cyborg son loved cake, and then the next paragraph was all about Valley Forge Forge.

So, who were the sons of God? I'm glad you asked. Here are four possibilities which I've ranked in what I believe to be from the least plausible explanation tot eh most plausible (Based on city mileage: your level of belief may vary) :

1) The sons of God were aliens - as in space aliens
OK. OK. I'm just tossing this one out there for the sake of argument. So please keep on reading and don't click over to the Decemberists' site to see if they're writing something cleverer (because they most likely are).

Yes, there are more than a few folks out there who see Genesis 6:4 as proof positive that ET got it on with Wilma Flintstone. There are, of course, three rather serious flaws with this theory. The first is that it implies that someone from an advanced civilization would be attracted to a dirty, smelly Bronze Age hippie chick. The second is that geneticists have yet to stumble across any group of people - or single individual - with Vulcan DNA. And the third argument against the Copulating Klingon Hypothesis is that it's completely batshit crazy.

2) The sons of God were fallen angels

I actually like this theory. Not because I find it even remotely plausible, but because it not only shows what natural story-tellers human beings are - being able to take a single sentence and construct a separate narrative around it - but because many Christians and Muslims believe this: in fact, this is the Koran's official position on the sons of God. The Koran explains that the purpose of the Great Flood was to wipe out the race of giants - the Nephilim - who were spawned by the angelic/human coupling.

If even you believe in angels - which I don't - this theory has both a scientific and theological holes in it. The scientific problem is the aforementioned DNA issue. Just as with the Raelians (yes, they're promoting "Intelligent Design"), no angelic haplotype has ever been identified.

From a theological perspective, the angels are described elsewhere in the Bible as genderless non-corporal beings. It's not clear why they would suddenly sprout genitals and pop off for a wild weekend in Cancun. And why use the term "sons of God"? Why not just say angels?

3) The sons of God were the descendants of Seth and the daughters of men were the descendants of Cain

This theory proposes that the sons of Adam and Eve's third son, Seth, copulated with the daughters of Adam and Eve's troubled middle child, Cain. While it eliminates the troublesome intervention of UFO's and over-sexed angels, there is a problem with this idea: why would the pairing of run-of-the-mill humans result in giants or "men of renown"?

4) The sons of God are actually the sons of Gods - plural

The actual Hebrew term applied to the sons of God is "beni ha-elohim", which translates as "sons of Gods". The same name - beni ha-elohim - is later used in the when the sons of God(s) again turn up in the Book of Job.

This theory holds that the words of Genesis 6:4 are a hold-over from an earlier time when the ancient Hebrews were polytheistic and accepted that the gods of the peoples who lived around them were just as real as their god and that these gods often fathered children with mortal women - just as the gods in classical mythology did, siring many of the heroes of the Greco-Roman world.

The biggest problem with this line of thinking is that some Biblical scholars will point out that the plural of God was often used by the ancient Hebrews as a term of respect. Still, if you consider passages such as "Thou shalt have no other gods before me", the polytheistic approach does have certain advantages over the other three.

It just isn't nearly as much fun.

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You might be aware of the fact that Edvard Munch's The Scream was returned to Norway's National Gallery, located in Oslo (a city I had the unique "pleasure" of visiting during the month of February ), in 2006 after having been stolen two years earlier, but did you know that Munch actually created multiple versions of The Scream? Two are in the Munch Museum, one is owned by a Norwegian billionaire (don't tell the teabaggers that there are billionaires in Socialist countries), another hangs in the aforementioned National gallery, and the fifth (below) may be found on a shelf in the Super Fresh on 10th and South.

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Last month, the following video appeared of the Dead Milkmen playing an acoustic show at Crash, Bang, Boom:

Since then, my inbox has been flooded with literally ones of emails asking for information on the instrument I’m playing on "Joe’s Song with No Name/William Bloat" (and later played on "I hear your name").

The instrument is known as a "Hurdy Gurdy", although most hurdy gurdy players call them "gurdies" for short. Although there seems to be no consensus on exactly when and where (and for that matter, why) hurdy gurdies first appeared (although many musicologists believe it was developed in the Middle East sometime around the 9th Century, not unlike the Plague), it’s universally agreed that they reached the height of their popularity during the Renaissance. Hieronymus Bosch even included a gurdy in his painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights."

So, how does a hurdy work? What sets the gurdy apart from other interments is that it has a wheel, which is turned by a crank, over which both its melody and drone strings pass. This wheel is coated in rosin, by the way, just like a violin bow. The melody string passes over the bridge, through a "keybox", to the tuning pegs. Inside the keybox are tangents which press against the melody string when the keys on the outside of the keybox are pressed. The drone string sits outside the keybox and simply rests on the wheel, producing one continuous note when the wheel is turned (and making the gurdy sound like a bagpipe).

A few facts about my hurdy gurdy:

• Although I’ve told people that my gurdy was built in 1802 by Elias Hurdy (who invented the hurdy gurdy and named it after his wife, Gertrude), the truth is that I built my gurdy, myself, from a kit I purchased for about $500 from Lark in the Morning. Then I had some adjustments to the bridge and wheel made by Chris DiPinto of DiPinto’s Guitars fame.

• After my gurdy was completed, I got the not-so-bright idea into my head to stain and paint it. This completely changed the sound (for the worse), and it took nearly a decade for the wood to cure.

  

• I currently only have one melody string - set to open D – (see photo below) and one drone string (G) set up. I’ll be adding a second melody sting before the end of the year. If you watch the video carefully, you can see me play an open D, an E (first key), and a G (third key)

  

• You may have noticed that I’ve painted "Vienna" on the keybox. When my wife asked me why I named my gurdy after her, I replied that it was because it’s high-strung and cranky.

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  If you're thinking about buying a hurdy gurdy (building them often turns out to be more expensive in the long run), then I strongly suggest that you start your search HERE.

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