PHILOSPHER STONED

If there’s one thing I think we can all agree on about Donald Trump, it’s that he isn’t a philosopher. If, however, he can be said to have one guiding precept remotely resembling a philosophy, it has to be IT’S ALL ABOUT ME….or, secondarily, DON’T BLAME ME (which happens to be the title of a song I was going to link here until — faster than you can say Niccollo Machiavelli — Google removed share, embed & copy from their music clips, leaving technologically-challenged mistermuse at a loss as to how to post them).

Be that as it may, I got to thinking that if THE DONALD were a lit-wit (rather than a nitwit) who wished to appear philosophical, there must be any number of wise philosophical quotes he might plagiarize to his greater glory (or, if he were stoned, learn from). Here are some I drug up which could fill the (Duck’s) bill:

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed if repeated often enough. — William James, American philosopher

Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others. –Oscar Wilde, Irish wit, poet and playwright

Any man can be a philosopher if he only thinks enough about his own foolishness. –Edgar Watson Howe, American novelist and editor

Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. –Karl Marx, German philosopher, political theorist and socialist revolutionary

If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn’t have time to sleep. –Tamora Pierce, American fantasy fiction writer

Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. –Plato, Greek philosopher

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end. — Immanuel Kant, German philosopher

Philosophers before Kant had a tremendous advantage over philosophers after Kant, in that they didn’t have to spend years studying Kant.  –Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, writer and social critic

Only one philosopher in history had a perfect alibi for doing nothing, and his name was I. Kant. –Evan Esar, American humorist

THE ART OF BAD POETRY

Oscar Wilde quote: “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” Maybe so, but you can’t blame a guy for trying.

A few days ago, in pondering the possibility of posting a post of putrid poetry for BAD POETRY DAY (August 18th), I took the precaution of reviewing a decade (my blog began in 2009) of August posts to make sure I hadn’t previously perpetrated poetic perfidy on unsuspecting readers on this day. Unluckily for you , I found that I’ve never posted a post on Aug. 18, so we’re good to go….make that, I’m good to go. Or bad to go. You have to stay, because if you don’t, you’ll break my poor art — and that wouldn’t be polite.

Perhaps you think that my calling bad poetry an art
doesn’t pass the smell test, like calling passing gas a fart.

Not to put you on the spot, but was that a bad-ass poem, or what?
Granted, it has a perfect rhyme, but is that such a crime?
As bad poetry, I still say it’s sublime….speaking of which, I’ll have you know there are actually high-class contests to determine how low a bad poem can get, such as:

With that behind us, it’s time we get back to sum-more of my cool august poetry:

CLOCKING OUT

Hickory, dickory, dock,
The doc ran up the rock.
The rock was more slippery
Than doc’s hickory dickory,
So down he fell, which cleaned his clock.

HAIR APPARENT

A Whig party wig
Is my saving grace —
It diverts your gaze
Away from my face.

I WILL ONLY STOOP SO LOW

I don’t do windows,
I don’t do lawns —
But when I doo-doo,
I do do johns.

And with that, I bid you a fond adieu-doo.

 

SENIOR MUSE SOUNDS OFF FOR OLD TIMERS SAKE

In 1984, members of the Oxford Library Club for Retired Professional People were especially looking forward to hearing a guest speaker on “Old Age, Absent-Mindedness, and Keeping Fit.” Unfortunately, the speaker forgot to show up. –excerpted from the book 1,000 UNFORGETTABLE SENIOR MOMENTS

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MAY being OLDER AMERICANS MONTH, and ME being an older American, I’ve decided to post a post predicated on passing on — make that on passing along — hoary words of wisdom concerning a subject I’m surpassingly qualified to write about, namely …. ….hmmm….uh….ah…. longevity (ha ha — you thought I forgot what I was going to write about, didn’t you?).

Actually, I must admit to being a bit of a senior citizen-slouch when it comes to longevity — at least, compared to this guy:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/worlds-oldest-man-146-birthday-long-life-location-country-name-celebrates-old-age-a7505401.html

And of course, that there this guy is himself a slouch compared to this here this guy:

Methuselah, as all my bible-believing brethr’n and sistern know, was said to have lived 969 years (Genesis 5:27), so you might think this song is my inspiration to keep marching on:

But (and I quote) “Who calls that livin’ when no gal’s gonna give in to no man what’s 900 years?”

So there you have it from Bobby Darin singing the lyrics of Ira Gershwin. Or you can take it from Senior Muse quoting the words of Oscar Wilde: “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is not young.”

 

 

 

WHEEL OF MISFORTUNE

When misfortune comes, take it like a man–blame it on your wife. –Evan Esar

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Many of us suffer an unanticipated misfortune at some point in our lives. It could be the missed fortune of being left out of the will of a rich cousin you loved like a brother (until the ungrateful s.o.b. left every cent he had to his actual brother)….or it could be distress under duress, like your mistress taking egress, leaving you in a mess, no less, with your wife. Or, if you are a wife, perhaps you got wind of, not only the mistress on the side, but the ‘steady at the ready’ and the ‘wench on the bench’ (otherwise known as having too many loins in the fire). Yes, friends, misfortune is an ill wind which blows no good…

Now, far be it from mistermuse to blame his misfortunes on his wife. As a matter of tact, if it weren’t for my wife, I don’t know what I would do (or is it, wouldn’t do?). Yes, friends, mistermuse has been a sappily married man for 49 years, 10 months, and 13 days now, and I can honestly say it doesn’t seem like a day over 49 years, 10 months, and 12 days.

That said, game on. Let’s see what other men have had to say on the subject:

Wives are people who feel that they don’t dance enough. –Groucho Marx

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who treats her as if she were a perfectly natural being? –Oscar Wilde

If Presidents can’t do it to their wives, they do it to their countries. –Mel Brooks

No matter how happily married a woman may be, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not. –H. L. Mencken

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher. –Socrates

Some wives are like fishermen: they think the best ones got away. –Evan Esar

I’ve had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me and the second one didn’t. –Patrick Murray

A man placed an ad in the classifieds: “Wife wanted.” Next day he received over a hundred replies: “You can have mine.” –Anonymous

NOTE: The last quote is absolutely NOT mine!

LIKE WISE

Noble goal like chasing rainbow — beautiful while it lasts.

If the above quote sounds familiar, you have the memory of an elephant. It — the quote, not you or the elephant — appeared in my previous post as a Charlie Chanism which I made up after a trip to the latest local library book sale where my returns are becoming re-nowned and their books are becoming re-owned….and one of my new buys was titled CHARLIE CHAN — The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, by Yunte Huang.

If you’re an old movie buff like me, you’ve probably seen a number of 1930s-40s Charlie Chan films (based on the 1920-3os novels by Earl Derr Biggers) in which Charlie chanted such gems of wisdom as these:

Hasty deduction, like ancient egg, look good from outside.
Mind, like parachute, only function when open.
Trouble, like first love, teach many lessons.
Facts like photographic film — must be exposed before developing.
Advice after mistake like medicine after funeral.

You will find these, and many more, Chanisms in Appendix I of the book. But that’s just a bonus — the real story of this book is “The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective”…. a story I can’t tell you because either I would have to kill you (leaving no clues), or it would spoil the story and leave you without a motive to buy the book. But I will tell you that the fictional Honolulu detective Charlie Chan was based on real-life Honolulu detective Chang Apana, who was a character in his own right and whose career included jobs ranging from gardener to gumshoe. So get the book, plant yourself in your favorite chair, and enjoy the read.

Speaking of flowery characters, Earl Derr Biggers was no shrinking violet. Before turning novelist, Biggers (a Harvard grad)) was an outspoken newspaper columnist and drama critic. In one of his columns, he wrote of “a citizen of Mingo, Okla., [who] whipped out his trusty six-shooter the other day and shot the mustache off another citizen. We sincerely hope that the gentleman who lost the mustache appreciated the fact that he had a mighty close shave.” Shades of such baldfaced punsters as Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde and mistermuse! (The latter includes himself in such company on the grounds that the dead can’t object.)

But enough about me. Here’s Charlie!

 

TRUTH BE TOLD

When in doubt, tell the truth. –Mark Twain

Truth be told, I just found out that July 7 was TELL THE TRUTH DAY.  Better late than never?  That may or may not be true, but today I’m in the mood to post, and at this “late” juncture, truth is doubtless as good a thesis as any (if you believe Mark Twain).

Friends, I don’t claim to be in the same league as such legendary and current truth-tellers as Pinocchio and Donald Trump, but I am (almost) always in favor of telling the truth. In fact, one of my favorite TV quiz shows back in the day was TO TELL THE TRUTH. But before we go there, I need to set it up with a clip from a quiz show I featured in a previous post (I’VE GOT A SECRET)….the reason being that one of the panelists on the latter program (a humorist who is little-remembered today) plays a big part in the surprise ending of the TO TELL THE TRUTH clip, and it helps if you know he was once famous.

Assuming you can abide a bit more truth-telling, I will close with some quotes on the subject:

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and simple. –Oscar Wilde

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. –Aldous Huxley

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. –Albert Einstein

Beware of a half-truth: you may have gotten hold of the wrong half. –Evan Esar

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. –Charles Spurgeon

All men are born truthful and die liars. –Luc de Clapiers

Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move.
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.
–William Shakespeare

 

HUSBAND APPRECIATION DAY

The third Saturday in April, which happens to be today, is HUSBAND APPRECIATION DAY. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), I have but one wife to appreciate me. Not that I’m greedy, you understand, but I can’t help wondering what it would be like having many wives appreciate me — like in such open-minded countries as Afghanistan, where polygamy is a common practice. Speaking of practice, practice may make perfect, but prudence dictates that such things should be checked out before one plunges into it.

Luckily, one has only to turn to Googlepedia to find pertinent reports. For example, a well-educated Imam of Islam, Mohammed Bello Abubakar, was quoted in The Christian Science Monitor and the BBC as saying, “I married 86 women and there is peace in the house — if there is peace, how can this be wrong? A man with ten wives would collapse and die, but my own power is given by Allah. That is why I have been able to control 86 of them.” By the time of his death on January 28 at 92 (years, not wives), he actually had not 86, not 92, but 120 wives, and had fathered 203 children. And I thought I was busy.

But Bello Abubakar was a piker at polygamy compared to that wisest of Old Testament wife hoarders, King Solomon, who is said to have had up to 1,000 wives….not to mention 300 concubines on the side. Apparently, it helps to get religion if one hopes to honey-up and handle hives of wives. Bee that as it may, the problem is that one can’t grab unto just any religion in order to have one’s fill of mates. For example, I was raised Catholic, which is not the most reasonable religion in the world when it comes to conjugal largesse. On top of that — though I am now free of such doctrinaire prohibition — the secular powers-that-be in America maintain equally unenlightened views in marital matters. So you can see what we poor, monogamous men are up against in so-called liberal democracies.

Of course, we could resort to bigamy, but at what cost? It’s a sad state of affairs when you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. But never let it be said that I’m not a broad-minded guy — thus, I call on the following sexpert testimony, which unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be) includes no female witnesses:

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same. –Oscar Wilde

The best argument against bigamy is that it leaves a man no place to hang his clothes. –Evan Esar

Bigamy is the only crime where two rites make a wrong. –Bob Hope

Why a man would want a wife is a mystery to bachelors; why a man would want two wives is a bigamystery. –Evan Esar

Polygamy, n. A house of atonement, fitted with several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which has but one.–Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary)

Brigham Young originated mass production [in America], but Henry Ford was the one who improved on it. –Will Rogers

Polygamy: an endeavor to get more out of life than there is in it. –Elbert Hubbard

Every man should have four wives: a Persian, with whom he can converse; a woman from Khorasan, for the housework; a Hindu woman to raise the children; and one from Transoxiana, whom he can beat as a warning to the others. –Mirza Aziz Koka

That last quote seems a bit over the top, I must admit. How could the average person be expected to know where the hell Khorasan and Transoxiana are?

 

ST. PATRICK’S DAY? BAH! HUMBUG!

Here it is two days before March 17, and I’m resigning myself to be the Grinch who stole St. Patrick’s Day. Being a writer of (part) Irish heritage — and thus feeling obliged to beget my readers a post to celebrate the occasion — I’ve been roiling me brain to come up with something about Ireland’s fifth-century snake-chaser that isn’t the same old blarney, but I’ve hit a stone wall stouter than those that subdivide the Irish countryside:

The Stone Walls of Ireland

Enough already. If St. Patrick thinks I’m going to waste another second of my busy day refraining from raining on his parade, he’s got another think coming. There are plenty of other dead fish in the Irish Sea who merit time in the sun, and though it may raise a stink, I am going to turn this post over to them and say “Bah! Humbug!” to St. Patrick.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could. –George Bernard Shaw

I am allergic to all Irish wit, charm and humor not provided by myself. –Denis Brogan

Good Lord, what a sight/After all their good Cheer/For people to fight/In the midst of their Beer. –Jonathan Swift (from THE DESCRIPTION OF AN IRISH-FEAST)

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there
Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer:
May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.
If I asked her master he’d give me a cask a day;
But she, with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange!
May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may
The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange.
–James Stephens (from RIGHTEOUS ANGER)

For the Great Gaels of Ireland/Are the men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry/And all their songs are sad. –G. K. Chesterton

Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis. –Oscar Wilde

The actual Irish weather report is really a recording made in 1922, which no one has had occasion to change. –Wilfred Sheed

I saw a fleet of fishing boats…I flew down, almost touching the craft, and yelled at them, asking if I was on the right [course] to Ireland. They just stared. Maybe they didn’t hear me. Maybe I didn’t hear them. Or maybe they thought I was just a crazy fool. An hour later I saw land. –Charles Lindbergh (2nd day of first solo transatlantic flight, 5/21/1927)

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF QUOTING ERNEST

Did you fathom that the title of my last post (THE OLD MAN AND THE SEASON) was a play on Ernest Hemingway’s last completed novel, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA? Because that post was about aging and autumn, perhaps I was remiss in not including a Hemingway quote (such as the first one below) among those I gathered for the occasion.

This post will attempt to make up for that shortfall with a selection of Hemingway quotes, starting with this autumn-appropriate eulogy he wrote for a friend:

Best of all he loved the fall/the leaves yellow on cottonwoods/leaves floating on trout streams/and above the hills/the high blue windless skies./Now he will be part of them forever.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. 

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

In modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

True nobility is being superior to your former self.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. 

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

There is no lonelier man, except the suicide, than that man who has lived with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.

But hold on — happy or not, this isn’t the end. The title of this post is another play on words, this being Oscar Wilde’s peerless comedy of manners titled THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST….a parody of Victorian age social standing previewed in this trailer for the 1952 film (not to be confused with the inferior 2002 remake) of the Wilde play:

Now (as the movie says when it’s over) this is THE END

NONE LINERS TO ONE LINERS

Because my last post (TITLES FOR BARE NAKED POEMS) featured ‘no-line’ poems, which some readers might consider devoid of substance, I will try to wrecktify that air with a whole caboodle of one-line poems for you nit-pickers who insist that poems should have words — followed (in a spirit of munificence) by a bonus kit of one-line quotes, just for the tell of it. Now, far be it from me to make threats, but be forewarned: if this post isn’t enough to placate your unreasonable expectations, I may have to up the ante next time with a post of two-line poems….and you wouldn’t want that two happen, would you?

POET AT WORK

Have an angst day.

A VERY SHORT, PASSIONATE POEM

Would I lie to you?

WE LIVE IN IGNORANCE

Who knows why?

GOD ONLY KNOWS

So….I suppose.

DEER HUNTER TRIES SHOTGUN

Anything for a buck.

BLUE NOSE STUMBLES UPON RED-LIGHT DISTRICT

Whores!

DEAF SQUAD SEARCHES HENHOUSE

Nobody hear but us chickens.

TEMPUS FUGIT

Please excuse it.

MOLEHILLS AS MOUNTAINS

What’s up with that?

GREAT POEMS NEED GREAT READERS

Sign here ______________________

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There are two ways of disliking poetry: one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope. –Oscar Wilde

I like to think of poetry as statements made on the way to the grave. –Dylan Thomas

All that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it. –William Hazlitt

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind. –Don Marquis

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. –Robert Frost

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you. –Joseph Joubert

Poetry is a gift; maybe that’s why you can’t sell it. –Evan Esar

In a poem, the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind. –Marianne Moore

Once in a while I meet someone who has read me; it did him good — I mean it served him right. –Robert Frost

What stimulates me to write a poem is that I have got something inside me that I want to get rid of — it is almost a kind of defecation. –T. S. Eliot

Gotta go.