Skip to main content

How Minds Get Boggled

Hearing, by a fetus, apparently starts by the 8th month of pregnancy.
Some scientists surmise that the mother’s voice may have something to do
with a child’s later sense for language; maybe. Other people play Mozart,
loud, hoping that the little tad will prefer it to acid rock, or rap music.

A few entrepreneurs have even wondered if there might be a market
for a “Fetal University”, a device that could be strapped,
something like an electronic bumper, out in front of pregnant women,
reciting the Periodic Table, conversing in French, or playing Schubert.

Joel, the Nokomis Beach Coffee Café customer in charge of Parking
and Random Thought, says he realized when he read about these things
that his mother—who had a house full of kids—ran the vacuum cleaner a lot,
and that explained why he so often found himself snuggling up to the vacuum
in the same way that more normal children snuggled with the dog.

As any normal person would do, I immediately wondered what
Sarah Palin heard when her mother was pregnant, and it is obvious!

Sarah’s mother, up there in Sandpoint, Idaho, had the State's only copy
of "Jabberwocky", by Lewis Carroll. You know how it begins:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."

Sarah's mom recited Jabberwocky, and toted a rifle.
"Hey! Hand me ma rifle! There's a turkey!
'Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'"

It isn't just Sarah who proves this theorem about fetal learning.
Consider George W. His momma never said a sensible word
the whole time she was pregnant with little George Walker,
but she did sing lullabies: "Hush, little Georgie, don't you scream,
Daddy's going to buy you a baseball team!"

A simple glance at Mitch McConnell makes it clear that
the first thing Mitch heard was the sound of bread dough rising,
and I will bet that is the first thing he ever saw, too!

I'm not sure Rush Limbaugh had a mother,
but I will bet his daddy worked in an oil and gas field.

Think about John Boehner! Or old Everett Dirksen,
whose mother must have played the pipe organ.
What was Pat Robertson's mother's favorite hymn?
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

And Arnold Schwarzenegger? Born in Austria. Ach! Du Lieber!

It is a theorem that boggles the mind!
Especially if your mother continued to boggle,
even after she learned she was pregnant.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...