WINNING COMBINATIONS

Ron Holmes, the father of basketball star Shabazz Muhammad, didn’t leave things to chance or waste precious time on romance. He saw point guard Faye Paige perform and said to himself: The two of us would make a great genetic mix. “She’s going to be my wife, and we’re going to make some All-Americans” (LA Times 22 March). It’s as simple as that, friends.  So, let me suggest a few other winning combinations:

• Donald Trump & Kim Kardashian = millionaire with real hair
• Arnold Schwarzenegger & Jerry Brown = enough muscle to push through gay marriage
• Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days) & E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey) = discount airline

All that mixing and matching has the FDA in a tizzy. “It’s a bit of a mess,” Jennifer Kuzma admits, speaking of genetically modified foods (LA Times 23 March).  When you eat corn engineered to keep down weed, is it still food or is it a pesticide? When you eat salmon on growth hormones are you eating fish or taking drugs?

I’m also wondering:

• Teenager & cell phone= armed and dangerous?

There has been a spike in cell rage recently (LA Times 23 March). No, I’m not referring to jail riots. I mean teenagers hurling cell phones in anger. Not sure I like that, but electronic shops welcome the new trend. As far as they are concerned,

• Cell rage & broken screen=more cell phone sales.

Have you been to a pop concert lately? Stunning! Mesmerizing! Or should I say paralyzing? Watch performers scaling walls, riding motorcycles onstage, bursting from eggs, doing aerial stunts against a background of fireworks. It’s a winning combination. Pyrotechnics & ambulance sirens, acrobatics & concussions.  So:

YOUR SIGNATURE HERE.

Signatures matter! Learn from the sad experience of Dr. Dimowo of Anaheim, who put his signature to Oxicontin prescriptions without asking questions. He did take some precautions. He required patients to sign a declaration that they weren’t undercover agents. But guess what? The undercover agent who ratted on Dimowo lied when he signed the paper (LA Times 23 March).

So here are a few guidelines when dealing with signatures.

Signing credit card slips. Practice diligently. Your signature should closely resemble that of the credit card owner. Buy only from carefully selected merchants. Dealing with Date Drug Ltd or Wholesale Cannabis may draw unwanted attention.  Keep to lawful means of impairment, such as vodka or whiskey, and adjust size of order to the habits and personality type of the credit card owner: anal-retentive (1 quart), regular guy (2 quarts), party animal (3 quarts), addictive personality (4 quarts), suicidal type (5 quarts), etc.

Signing buildings. Start small. Practice by spray-painting your neighbour’s fence. Then go on to schools, libraries, and bridges. Never refer to your signature as graffiti. It’s street art. If you leave the spray can behind, it’s an installation. Make creative use of bodily functions to give that extra touch to your art. For inspiration check out vomit painter Millie Brown who uses well digested colored milk for her “signature” abstracts.

DNA signatures. Do not leave them on corpses. Wear latex gloves or wipe fingerprints carefully before disposing of weapons and bodies. Or use Chef David Viens’ recipe (LA Times 23 March): Boil body for four days, let cool, and strain out. Questions about how to refine the recipe? Put them on hold. Chef Viens’ style is sadly cramped at present. The jail’s kitchen is off limits to him.

Valuable signatures. Are you in the market for autographs? Watch out for forgeries. Always do your homework before buying. A George Washington signature in red ballpoint may not be genuine. A Babe Ruth signature on a hockey puck is suspicious. Be aware that Jesus did not write the Bible. A signed copy should make the warning lights go on. Careful with electronic signatures: it is unlikely that Jane Austen had access to signtool.exe.

A final caution: Stay away from authors who sign their books XXX, unless they are chimpanzees.    

HOW’S THE WEATHER?

Nice if you happen to be in California. Freezing if you happen to be in Ontario. Here are some remedies for those who are still out in the cold.

Denial. Repeat after me: THERE IS NO WINTER. It’s hysteria to insist that there is a winter! It’s phony science! It’s the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the people of Canada!  

Visit local schools and spread the gospel: SAY NO TO WINTER!

Alternatively: Stay indoors until spring is well established. Put plywood over your windows to minimize the shock of seeing bundled up people and salt encrusted cars.

Fantasy escape. Cover your living room floor with a foot of sand, decorate with potted palms and beach chairs, turn up heat, play Aloha music. Or:

Put in a jungle landscape. Bonus tip: reserve a corner of your living room for cultivating cannabis. It flourishes under moist and warm conditions and will help offset your electricity bill.

Strategic placement of friends and relatives. Urge your nearest and dearest to move to places like Hawaii, California, or Florida. Visit them frequently. Here I must confess to a total failure of parental authority. Ignoring my preferences, my children insist on working in places where Google mappers fear to tread, places that make Toronto winters look benign by comparison. But wait, that gives me an idea! Maybe I could use

Comparative thinking. Visit James Bay or northern Alberta and on my return enjoy balmy 0C (32 F). Additional joys: Feel fingers and toes that are not frost bitten. Take bathroom breaks that do not involve unwrapping multiple layers of clothes. Breathe invisibly. Celebrate return with bonfire of snowshoes.

Strategic numbers. For those who use Celsius, there is an even easier solution. Think of your weather in Fahrenheit. 32 F looks a hell of a lot better than 0 C, right?

Make the best of it. Suppress memories of days when schools were closed due to inclement weather, and your kids were home driving you crazy. Think positive.

Slipping on the ice and putting out your back may lead to early retirement and a life of ease. Bonus tip: sue the city for neglecting to clear the road and collect a tidy sum to make riding your wheelchair more fun.

On a more modest scale: add to your vacation days by pretending to be snowed in at the cottage. Bonus tip: no doctor’s certificate needed.

DO YOUR OWN THING.

Meaning: be authentic? Nah, meaning: get cracking! No one else is going to do it for you.

Remember bank tellers doing your banking? Now YOU punch the numbers into the ATM, and manage your account online. Cashiers? Soon to be history. YOU scan and bag your stuff at the self-checkout. Will that be cash or credit? Deal with the automatic lady. And make it chop-chop when she tells you to move on and let others play cashier.

Looking to distribute your music or get your script turned into a film? Start hustling. The studios aren’t going to finance your gig. Go to Kickstarter and get money from schlubs who don’t mind paying for nothing. Maybe you can sell them a sinkhole in Florida while you’re at it.

The DO YOUR OWN THING trend isn’t new of course. It all started with IKEA sending you home with a mystery box containing several boards, a bag of screws, a little gadget to turn them, and a leaflet with sign language.  What can I say? The Swedish hands in the pictures are definitely better at assembling furniture than my klutzy North American fingers.

What’s up next?

When you buy shoes in 2015, you’ll get a box containing soles and uppers, a little gadget to cobble them together, and pictures of Chinese hands.

Universities are already experimenting with the trend. You want education? Get it yourself, online. Not sure if online courses include pictures, but don’t worry. By 2020 at the latest, you get to mark your own papers.

And I’m sure we can talk politicians into doing their own electing. In the last LA mayoral race, the voter turnout was 16% -- a clear indication that people want politicians to do their own x-ing on the ballots.

Medicare too expensive? DO YOUR OWN THING. Take a cab to the hospital. Bring plastic sheeting so as not to drip blood on the car seat or the hospital floor. Also, bring you own IV tree, latex gloves, scalpel, batteries for the laser, and whatever else is indicated on the doctor’s leaflet (with pictures of international hands).

Have you bought a laptop lately? I have. I wanted Windows 7, but all the machines at BEST BUY had Windows 8, which I hate. Could they install Windows 7 for me? Nope. But DELL offers online instructions on how to DO YOU OWN THING and downgrade 8 to 7.  Unfortunately I couldn’t follow the instructions, so I had to pay someone with DELL hands to do the job.

I see a great future for do-it-yourself books: How to talk back to automatic ladies. How to grow hands like those in the instruction leaflets. But why stop there? How to build your own nuclear power station would be a blast. You don’t think you are up to it? Look, everybody makes mistakes, even the Mitsubishi people who screwed up at California’s San Onofre nuclear station.  – I’m sure you can do better.

Of course some institutions are bucking the trend and have actually started doing the job for you. For example, Mercedes and BMW are working on cars that drive themselves.  But Toyota is way ahead of the curve. They came out with self-accelerating cars two years ago. Unfortunately their autonomous cars became unruly and developed a killer instinct. It cost Toyota a lot to settle all the lawsuits.

I hope autonomous airplanes will do better and refrain from self-accelerating into airport structures. My fondest hope, however, is reserved for drones, which will greatly improve the war experience. No more grunt jobs for military personnel. From here on it’s strictly “Travel the world and enjoy free transportation and accommodation.”  So do enlist even if you don’t have killing hands. Drones will do the work for you.

Rummel’s Good Advice Column cont. PROJECTING THE RIGHT IMAGE.

Dear Rummel: The other day I heard a rapper sing “Nigga, Nigga, Nigga”. I used the same term to explain to a job applicant why I couldn’t hire him, and guess what: he charged me with discrimination. How come I’m being sued when those guys on YouTube get away with it? Honest Employer.

Dear Honest: They are legally exempt because “African-American” is hard to fit into rap lyrics. Also, you are permitted to diss your own ethnic group or class. For example, if you had signed yourself “Idiot”, no one would have been offended. Also, some groups make for easier targets than others. Forget hitting on Muslims. They can be really touchy. Feel an ugly mood coming on? Vent your snark on Christians. They are supposed to turn the other cheek. There are always “in” targets you can insult with impunity: used-car salesmen, for example, are an easy mark. So are corrupt politicians, serial murderers (make sure they are behind bars), and immigrants (in selected states). Just go with the flow.

Dear Rummel: I read somewhere that Facebook’s data mining people can peg your IQ by looking at what you “like”. I want to make an intelligent impression. Also, I want to come across as a real man (I haven’t come out to my parents yet). What should I “like”? Closet Intellectual.

Dear Closet: Go for curly fries. No, I’m serious. According to the LA Times (12 March), algorithms prove that curly fry lovers are cerebral. Now if you also want to appear macho, DO NOT “like” the Facebook page “Sometimes I just lay in bed and think about life”. That’s for women or worse.  And do not comment that “lay in bed” is grammatically incorrect. That doesn’t prove you are intelligent. It just shows that you are a pompous ass and a nitpicker. Also, stay away from “liking” tiered wedding cakes with two men on top. The algorithms (and your parents) will pick up on that.

Dear Rummel: I am a warlord with a gang of dedicated boys ready to maim, rape, or blow up anything that gets in our way, but I’m told I have to improve my image if I want to advance and become a dictator. Any advice? Also, how do I obtain foreign aid and military shipments? Everyone else seems to get them. Joe (not my real name).

Dear Unreal: Work on your language. To begin with, don’t call the USA the “Great Satan.” Refer to America respectfully as “No Country For Old Men” and watch the movie for useful pointers on maiming and killing. And do not call your boys a “gang”. That word sends out the wrong message. Go with “insurrectionists” or “freedom fighters” or be creative and call them “democratists”. The West loves all derivatives of demo. Also: stop raping women. You are wasting a valuable resource. Western powers want to see women in top positions (and I’m not talking about the pro and cons of the Missionary position). Don’t even think of dressing one of your child soldiers in a burka and presenting him as your spokeswoman. That’s been done, and it didn’t work. Check www.fox.com. In any case, do not call your followers “boys” – they are orphans or refugees. Women, raped or not, should always be referred to as victims of violence. Remember: Better management of language is the first step to foreign aid.

To all you foreign aid seekers out there: the spokesmen of the Greek military are your go-to guys. They are genius. I quote from the LA Times, 13 March:

Only poverty keeps the Greek military from starting a war with Turkey. They are so poor, they have to be content with DINGHIES DOGGING FRIGATES --beautiful alliteration, no? Now for an inspired heaping up of metaphors: Their army ISN’T JUST BLEEDING, it is BOILING. There was no REAL FLEXING OF THE MUSCLE. The financial constraints are STRANGLING Greek military capability.

Is that eloquent, or what? I bet you military aid is on its way as we speak.