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?

 

MARK TWAIN FROM SEA TO SHINING SEE

No article about Mark Twain would be complete without quotes by Mark Twain. –mistermuse.

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Thank you, mistermuse, for calling attention to the lack of Mark Twain quotes (outside of two questions to Dorothy on an ocean liner) in the previous post, THE UNIVERSAL MARK TWAIN. But, for all we know, such absence may have been on purpose: merely the first leg of a two-port voyage, with Port II awaiting ship with its cargo of such quotes. In fact, unless our eyes believe us, we seem to be putting into port forthwith:

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

God created war so that Americans would learn geography.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir…mighty scarce.

One frequently finds out how really beautiful a beautiful woman is after considerable acquaintance with her.

I am silent on the subject [the afterlife] out of necessity. I have friends in both places.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

WINE, WOMEN, AND SONY

What do alcohol, females and electronics have in common, you ask? I thank you for asking, as that just happens to be what I was about to write about (while I’m sober).

The answer to that question, if you must know, is that all three facets of it have the inherent property of being able to confuse me if indulged in excessively. Correction — with the last two of the troika, even the least interaction has the potential, at their whim and discretion, to turn me into a quivering paroxysm of bumfuzzlement (a word which, for those ingrates who don’t make it their business to follow me faithfully, you will find defined in my previous post).

Now, you take my wife — please! Ha ha ha (I bet that Rodney Dangerfield, if he were still alive, would wish he’d thought of that one). I love my wife as much as any man, which might impress you more if I were bisexual….but the point is that my wife is a woman, which doesn’t always work to my advantage. For instance, if I (perish the thought)  or any man should take his beloved for granted when he wants food or sex on demand, she may get the mistaken impression that he’s an insensitive boor who thinks only of himself. But enough about her.

Now take electronics — specifically, computers. Like females (which computers probably are), they seem to have minds of their own, can immediately and irretrievably dismiss my most brilliant postulations if I touch the wrong button, and they have no conception of, or sympathy for, the unfairness of it all. Furthermore, certain computer alternations seem to live in different time zones.

For example, suppose I were writing a post about Friday the 13th which, being a logical man, I might wish to publish on Friday the 13th. So here it is, just before midnight on Thursday the 12th, and the time at the bottom of my computer screen nears 11:59 PM. So I wait until midnight — even one minute after, to be safe —  and click “Publish,” but is my post dated the 13th? Of course not — in that alternation, it’s 11:01 PM –still June 12, and my post bears that date instead of June 13.

Now, if computers were like high-rises which often skip from the 12th to the 14th floor without committing building code violations (or collapsing), I might be able to overlook such high-handed treatment. But my computer is no taller than a breadbox, and in any case, I doubt that it’s superstitious. Obviously, this leaves me with but one choice.

I give up.