Gone But Not Forgotten

Today is still Lincoln's Birthday, whether or not anybody still celebrates it.

Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln.

Easy New Years Resolutions

I often wondered why Earthlings liked to make New Years resolutions when they rarely stuck to them. It reminds me of when I was a boy and a practicing Roman Catholic and we were pressed to give up something for Lent, like candy or soda pop or swearing. Nobody could give up those things, so why did we pretend that we could?

American grownups were the only role models I had for making New Years resolutions and they didn't help me much as a kid. Men would often pretend to give up drinking as a New Years resolution, which meant not drinking whiskey and beer, and sometimes they'd say they were going to quit smoking. Of course, I never knew any grown up man who made good on promises like these. They were just as unrealistic as a teenager giving up potato chips for Lent. Get real.

Now that I'm a grown up man myself and well past my prime, I've gotten hip to the secret behind New Years resolutions. Not being Catholic anymore, I won't have to worry about Lent later this winter. But, if I did, the same secret would work for that as well. And here it is: simply vow to do something you'd naturally and easily do anyway or, if it involves not doing, then simply vow to not do something you would not do anyway.

I made a list of 10 Easy New Years Resolutions that will definitely work for me and maybe some of them will work for you as well.

1. Start balancing your checkbook
2. Start holding the door open for others, especially women and children.
3. Start coming to a complete stop at Stop signs.
4. Start treating others the way you'd like them to treat you.
5. Start wrapping your used gum in its own foil instead of spitting it out in the parking lot.
6. Stop saying "vis á vis".
7. Stop using the "f" word in every single sentence.
8. Stop tailgating the poor bastard in front of you because he obeys the speed limit and you don't.
9. Stop getting drunk and running naked through the back yard.
10. Stop getting drunk and running naked through the front yard.

Why make the new year hard on yourself if you don't have to?

Holiday Greetings from a Former Martian

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Running Hot and Cold

As a former Martian with a dwindling memory of a previous life on Mars (the planet Mars before Nibiru sucked our seas dry and left us with a cold, red desert instead) I still find it hard to adjust to living in one of the temperate zones on planet Earth. Temperate. According to the dictionary, that means "not extreme or excessive". Apparently, Daniel Webster never spent much time in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

These are the highlands between Pittsburgh, Erie and Scranton. Here, temperate means "hotter than the hub of hell" in the summertime and "colder than a witch's you-know-what" the rest of the year. Except, of course, for three or four days of actual, dictionary "temperate" climate conditions. These anomalies usually occur in June or October when you can actually walk around without six layers of protective clothing on or without the fear of heat stroke, despite the cargo shorts and T-shirt.

The rest of the time you're either hot or cold and there's not much you can do about it except get cozy on the couch, drink coffee, eat pastries and watch TV when it's cold or sit in front of a fan with a cold beer and do nothing at all when it's hot. I'm always reminded that I'm on Earth and not on Mars every time I do either of these two things. Why is that, you might ask?

Well, on Mars, doing the logical thing was almost always expected and even encouraged. But, on Earth, keeping warm and cooling off somehow tells everybody that you're not willing to freeze or roast to death like everybody else and that, somehow, unimaginably, constitutes laziness. At least they understand part of the Martian concept in Mexico. But look where it's gotten them.

"Tapper"

Little Green Man presents a typical Appalachian Baby Boomer who claims to have been abducted by aliens in the 1950s and 60s. Maybe he's lying and maybe he's telling the truth. Maybe nobody cares, either.

This is an uploaded video to Blogger, not an embedded video from YouTube. Please ignore the "More Info" arrows. This is a YouTube glitch because Google owns YouTube and Blogger.

Click here for "Tapper 2", the sequel.

TC

Major American National Holidays Through a Former Martian's Eyes

New Year's Day — American men celebrate the new year by overeating snack food and watching football on TV while the few American women who don't care for football try to figure out how to disguise the leftover pork and sauerkraut so it looks like football couch potato snack food.

Memorial Day — Having gone without a major national holiday for nearly five months and chomping at the bit because of this, Americans honor their fallen servicemen and servicewomen with twenty-one-gun salutes and then barbecue meat in their back yards.

Fourth of July — Americans celebrate their independence from England by barbecuing meat in their back yards and then exploding bombs and setting off rockets after they overeat at carnivals and get sick on torture devices that masquerade as amusement rides.

Labor Day — Americans celebrate labor and laborers by not working and then barbecuing meat in their back yards.

Veterans Day — Americans once again honor their fallen servicemen and servicewomen with twenty-one-gun salutes and then drive to patriotic clubs where they play cards, throw darts, drink beer, talk sports and fight.

Thanksgiving — Americans give thanks for their food by watching parades on TV, overeating turkey with all the trimmings and then watching football on TV.

Christmas — Christian Americans celebrate the birth of the son of God by giving each other presents that no one needs, watching parades on TV and then overeating ham and poultry with all the trimmings .

New Year's Eve — Americans who can't wait until the actual New Year's Day eat pork and sauerkraut at home and then get drunk and wear lampshades on their heads at parties while watching TV where drunks in Times Square push and shove each other while waiting for the next available portable toilet.

20 Things About Living on Earth

Former Martians like me don't really have a propensity for sharing things about themselves, unlike Earthlings, who unburden themselves at the drop of a hat. But, as I've said before (and will probably say again as time goes by), living as an Earthling the second time around is an addictive experience. And the biggest Earthling addiction of all is giving your opinion, whether it's asked for or not. Therefore, I humbly offer up for your consideration twenty things about living on Earth. Ten things I don't like about it and ten things I do like about it. After all, no planet is or ever was or ever will be a Paradise. Not even Mars.

10 things I don't like about living on Earth

1. Having to do certain things at a certain time

2. The fact that a lot of people don't have enough food

3. Junk mail, spam and those annoying phone call surveys that pretend not to be telemarketing calls

4. Being around people who say "Ta-da!" when they enter a room

5. Receiving an unplanned laxative whenever the Emergency Broadcast System interrupts a wee-hour show with that nasty, loud buzzer that might just as well be a Klaxon horn at that ungodly hour and, 5b, The fact that someone, somewhere in history invented the Klaxon horn

6. Drive-Thrus. They hog all the service while the rest of us stand in line and wait and wait and wait...

7. Carnivorous animals that roam the planet, many of them "dogs at large" in residential areas of Appalachia

8. Watching NASA pretend to explore space

9. Waiters and waitresses who think they own you

10. Seeing way too many road signs where you don't need them and none where you do

10 things I do like about living on Earth

1. Having enough to eat whether I deserve it or not

2. Animals that sing in the morning

3. People who are quiet most of the day

4. Carnival food

5. Skyscrapers (they can't build them too high for me)

6. Hawaii, Tahiti, Bora Bora and other places resembling my idea of Paradise

7. Little kids who smile at you when you walk past them

8. Old people who need and enjoy your company

9. Nations that watch over and protect other nations

10. Seeing a Harvest Moon just when you'd forgotten all about them

Secret Scribes

Being a former Martian with an intact but dwindling memory of that previous life on Mars is the reason I look at things a little differently than regular Earth people who began life's big journey on Earth. For example, if I asked the average man or woman from just about anywhere on this big blue marble if they thought writing on anything but paper was weird they'd probably look at me as if I was the proverbial "little green man from Mars". Or else they'd just walk away and go write something about me on a wall somewhere. Something I'd never do, being the former Martian that I am.

You can probably guess where this blog post is going. Yep. I'm still not used to the fact that a lot of Earthlings — and nearly all American Earthlings — love to write on walls and on just about every other forbidden surface, for that matter. I find that rather curious since no one seems to want to write on paper anymore, which is what paper was invented for. OK, there was sand and clay before the Egyptians invented papyrus and before somebody in Greece turned that into paper, but the real history of writing took place on paper. Not on bathroom walls, sidewalks and cafeteria table tops.

I still ask myself why people who have no interest in putting a pen or a pencil to paper anymore pull them out to write on surfaces that they're not supposed to write on. I mean, sometimes Earthlings will even resort to carving their initials or even graphic messages or symbols onto a wooden surface in a state park or playground with a knife. Instead of writing it on paper. But I think I've answered my own question here. It's not so much the desire to spontaneously express themselves through writing as it is to give in to the unavoidable urge to do something forbidden. And to leave their mark on a world that forbids writing on anything but paper.

Earthlings even gave that kind of forbidden writing a name. Graffiti. And then, adding insult to injury, the Earthlings who wrote most of the graffiti began using cans of spray paint instead of pens and pencils and crayons and Magic Markers to write their messages with. And to mark their territory with. In fact, they wrote so much graffiti that large portions of American cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are virtually covered in forbidden writing and graphic symbols, some of them grotesque images of private body parts. The people who don't write on walls and bridges and subway trains finally realized that they couldn't stop the people who do so they just gave the graffiti another name. Graffiti Art.

And now that most of the world writes on CRT and LCD and liquid plasma screens, you'd think that the urge to write on bathroom and subway walls, sidewalks, the inside of city buses and just about anywhere else that is forbidden territory would have lost its appeal. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I guess Earthlings were just born to mark their territory wherever they go. Except me, of course. I was born first on Mars, where there was no territory. And I guess that's what made me so indifferent about writing on public surfaces and so keen on writing where people are supposed to write.

Still, every now and then, I find myself fighting the urge to put a piece of coal in my pocket and roam the downtown and residential areas of strange towns looking for a fresh, unmarked section of concrete sidewalk. Which goes to show you that living on Earth is an addictive experience that might take many lifetimes to overcome.

"Pennsylvania Power Walk"

Science fiction author Michael Casher was a Martian in his previous life. But now the real "Little Green Man from Mars" is alive and well and living in Appalachia. And, after all these years on Earth, he still has trouble controlling those human legs. Maybe it's the Pennsylvania climate or maybe it's his age. Or maybe it's just those damn dollar-store sneakers.

Author's Note 09-17-13: I just re-uploaded this video for the third or fourth time since I posted it here because it wouldn't play on any browser this evening. Google periodically removes my uploaded videos for their perverse pleasure (why else would they do it?) and I have to re-upload them, whenever I happen to notice that they're not playing. Then they work again. Then Google (who owns and misuses Blogger and everything and everyone at Blogger) does it again on another blog. Just for fun. Then I chase my tail again. Then they get their rocks off again. Then we play a waiting game again. It's no way to run a planet.

TC

In And Out

Being a former Martian made me sensitive, and even a little touchy, about certain things. Like space. Not outer space but the kind of space between a person and his or her environment. Contemporary Americans like to call it "personal space". I call it what older Americans used to call it. Breathing space.

Nothing in my life experience as an Earthling echoed my sentiments about having enough breathing space like the old Cole Porter tune, "Don't Fence Me In". Fences weren't only objectionable barriers for cowboys in Montana. They bothered me, too. But, still, a fence could be climbed over or slipped through or crawled under and then the other side was suddenly your side. If someone called the coppers on you or took a pot shot at you, then you just found yourself another fence to breach. But the case was certainly different with walls. Walls need doors in order to see what's on the other side. And, if the door is locked, then you either have to have the key or you stay on the other side. And when you are forced to stay on the other side, that side is always the outside. Even if it's the inside.

During my one and only lifetime on the Red Planet, walls were not an issue because we all lived outside. And that's because the weather was always perfect, night and day, year in and year out. The only walls were in Cydonia and that's because rulers build walls to keep commoners out, not to keep themselves in. But all that changed after Nibiru (commonly referred to as Planet X on Earth) found Mars in its predictable path eons ago and used its gravity to suck our fresh-water seas dry and siphon off most of our atmosphere. What Nibiru left us was dust, memories and some ancient salt.

But not seeing the other side of a fence or a wall is not the biggest problem I have with such structures on Earth. The biggest problem I have is with walls and the fact that they often contain breathing space that is far too small for my requirements. And the biggest example of that is the Earthling bathroom, clearly the smallest room in any American household, despite the fact that most of a person's waking hours at home are spent there than in any other room. So, naturally, the people in charge of making bathrooms on this backward planet made them the smallest breathing space available to anyone.

It's bad enough to be confined in an airless cubicle several times a day, but it's even worse when the only air available is from a window that was placed right beside the toilet. Apparently, Earthlings don't require much privacy. I guess no one imagined that a window could be put at eye level, for bathroom users to look out instead of for neighbors and passers-by to look in. To correct this oversight Earthlings invented window blinds that always roll up with a loud snap when you aren't looking and curtains that always blow in or out and expose parts of you that are better left unexposed. To compensate for that, Earthlings installed exhaust fans that let air out. The only air they let in is through the crack in the bottom of the bathroom door that invariably chills your feet while you sit and read the National Geographics or stand and towel off. And the fans make so much noise that you can't hear the ball game on the radio.

Being a former Martian who absorbed all his nourishment through the skin, I never needed a bathroom before. Not until I found myself wandering Earth in the afterlife. Stupid Earth bathrooms with their claustrophobic walls and their peeping-tom windows. I guess my biggest problem with walls is not so much with Earthling bathrooms as it is with Earthlings. But when in Rome you do as the Romans do or they feed you to the lions.

I hope my next time around is on Jupiter. I hear their bathrooms are as big as barns.

My Epitaph

The Biggest and The Best

When my partial recall about my previous life on Mars is in working order I can remember that we Martians rarely obsessed about having the biggest or the best of anything. Martians who constantly worried about their homes being the biggest in town, or that the clothes on their backs were the best that money could buy, usually had previous lives on Earth.

Martians like me, who began the timeless odyssey of life on Mars and not on Earth, paid little or no attention to them.

On Mars, where everything had a unique value of its own, the monetary cost of things and the imaginary worth of people who possessed costly things meant very little to us. And that was because Martians, unlike Earthlings, didn't care all that much about the ownership of things anyway. Having or being the biggest or being and having the best was like winning to us. Winning, like losing, is secondary to the pure, simple joy of participating.

And, once you've been a Martian, you never forget that participating in life is a such a privilege that anything supposedly bigger and better than that pales by comparison.

Winners and Losers

Now that the belated Super Bowl XLIII is over, I'm wondering all over again about what makes Earthlings, and especially American Earthlings, actually tick. Being a former Martian with almost total recall of a better world that made a lot more sense, I need to be indulged here. Yeah, I know, I said I had total recall in earlier postings, but I've finally caught the Earthling disease that causes memories to become selective to the point where only the good stuff gets remembered. What a nice racket for all the racketeers who will capitalize on our memory losses.

First of all, it would be a hell of a lot easier if Super Bowls were numbered with regular numbers. Then yesterday's match-up between Pittsburgh and Arizona would have been Super Bowl 43. Nice and neat and easy to understand. It has a nice Martian ring to it. And while we're at it, Hollywood could stop dating movies with roman numerals as well. Trying to figure out the year of a Jimmy Cagney gangster movie I recorded earlier wouldn't take up so much time and I could give the rewind and pause button on my VCR a rest. But I'm getting off the track, as usual.

The thing that bothered me the most about the Super Bowl wasn't the stupid Roman numerals or the fact that the Steelers won. I like the Steelers. But I don't dislike the Cardinals, either. I mean, I do wonder at times just where in the hell they came from but then I'm still wondering what the hell happened to the Baltimore Colts, too. As you can tell, I'm not much of a spectator-sports fan. Watching people play with balls on TV is about as exciting to me as watching them cook food on TV. Something is missing, here, and I think it's having the five senses downsized to just seeing and hearing. Watching TV is basically enjoying only two-fifths of real life and that's not saying a whole lot for the couch potato.

But, no, these aren't the big reasons I didn't even watch the Super Bowl. The biggest reason has to do with winners and losers. OK, so the Pittsburgh Steelers are the winners of Super Bowl XLIII and the Arizona Cardinals are the losers. Hmmm. Then that means that all the other great football teams in the NFL are losers, too. Apparently, bigger losers than the Arizona Cardinals who, in the opinion of any former Martian, is now the second-best football team in the NFL.

The World Series is the same deal. The winning team takes home the national baseball title and the second-best pro-baseball team in the world is now nothing but a loser. No matter how many games this World Series loser won in order to get to the World Series, or to even win their league's pennant, they're now losers.

But this isn't the first time I've been totally bewildered and disenchanted by the winners and losers tradition on planet Earth. When I was a young man I used to watch the Miss America Pageant each year with red-blooded, American-boy fervor. And then it started dawning on me that when they crowned Miss America, she was the one and only winner while 49 other beautiful young women suddenly became losers.

Wow. Only on Earth.

Walk, Don't Run

I'm not talking about the guitar song The Ventures did back in the 1960s. But, come to think of it, I actually own a vinyl recording of Golden Greats by The Ventures, which includes that song. Earthlings, by the way, didn't want vinyl records anymore after audio cassettes were invented. And then when compact discs were invented they lovingly called them CDs and then they tried their best to obliterate every audio cassette on the planet for violating some unwritten code of coolness, or some such damn thing. The only vinyl recording Earthlings wanted after CDs firmly ruled the recorded music world was the Beatles' White Album and then just to own it or to covet it, not to actually play it. It's the same deal with a hundred-year-old bottle of wine. Really old vintage wine on Earth isn't to drink but to stare at and brag about. Go figure.

Anyway, the Ventures' song Walk, Don't Run really isn't the point of this blog posting. I'm talking about the way American Earthlings go out of their way to make sure that people, and especially children, never run in public. Earth kids are supposed to be seen and not heard. But, above all, they're supposed to walk and not run on most surfaces of the planet. Especially in America.

I never understood why children were supposed to be "seen and not heard". Parents in the 20th Century had little tolerance for gabby kids. I never knew why. I think it was because the children were hogging all the attention from the gabby adults who, in turn, thought they held some kind of patent or something on speech. Also, Earth parents don't like to learn anything from their children. That must seem counter-evolutionary to them or something, I don't know. So, in keeping with Earth tradition, American kids in the 20th Century were pretty quiet around adults.

But they still liked to run.

Running was fun. Wherever you were going, you got there faster. If there was something to be had at the end of your run, like the last piece of cake or the last cookie or a chance to buy an ice cream cone before the ice cream shop closed, then the rewards of running were obvious. But the penalty for running in places where running was frowned upon, or just plain outlawed, grew and grew as you got older. Suddenly, running in most places was a crime.

Running inside the house was forbidden in most American homes. A kid running inside the house was a kid in trouble, running away from something he or she had coming to them. Or a kid just too damn happy to be tolerated by adults who never seemed to have the time to be happy because of all the work and responsibilities that had somehow kept them from running. So, the inside of the house was definitely off limits for running from day one. Walking in the house was still OK, though.

Kids all over America were not permitted to run on sidewalks in downtown areas ever since the Colonies told King George to stuff it. While it was perfectly all right to run down the street in any residential neighborhood, doing the hundred yard dash in front of a store or a restaurant meant that you had stolen something and were high-tailing it for cover. If you were downtown with your parents and you took off running that meant that your parents had no control over you and that made them mad. Parents were supposed to be concerned that their children would fall and hurt themselves but the real reason is that children weren't supposed to bump into old people and knock them down. Both things seemed to happen all the time but grown ups were still hesitant to post signs downtown about not running. Kids: 1, Parents: 0. But the game continued.

Grown-up Americans fought back by posting "No Running" signs everywhere else to make up for their inability to post these kind of signs on downtown sidewalks. So they posted them in airports, train stations, bus stations, shopping malls, stores, churches, church parking lots, school corridors, you name it. Parents began steering their small children by their heads while shopping, not because the kids didn't know their way around but because they might break into a gallop at any moment. Head steering worked. It was very difficult even for the strongest, most agile boy or girl to start running when their little feet were firmly pressed to the floor by big grown-up hands applied to the top of their heads. Kids: 1, Parents: 101. Game over.

American parents, and the grown-up Americans who seemed to hate children and animals more than W. C. Fields himself, had won a resounding victory against the high crime of running in public. Their victory was so overwhelming that grown ups, themselves, were forbidden to run in public. But only kids got into trouble over it. By 1960, running in public had become the second biggest kid crime in America. The biggest kid crime in America was giving your opinion out loud about anything while grown ups were giving theirs.

Memories of Mirth

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!