1. change
   
2. learn from their mistakes
   
3. apologize

Sometime I'm so blind it hurts.

The hemorrhoidal story in question is "English as The Global Language." That's either got to be a good thing or a bad thing, right? Wrong. It's both, or maybe neither.

It turns out English is becoming the de facto language of Earth. (You're not reading thing in Navajo, are you?) That should be good for me, since English is all I speak except for a smattering of Russian. (And anyway, the Russian proved useless fifteen yeas ago when I was captured by Russian soldiers in Siberia, who were of course at that time Union of Soviet Socialist Republics soldiers in Siberia. I sang the national anthem and said "I want to drink vodka" and they just laughed at me. Not with me, at me.)

So, speaking English should make me a king of the global hill, no? No. It turns out that a lot of people who pick up English as a second (or third or fourth or fifth or sixth or seventh) language use it much more well than do I. I may once have had an advantage, but I slept while the window of opportunity opened then closed. (Again.)

The park groundskeeper told me I was wrong. He said the monument was build in the age of atomic weapons, so they left just enough room for one year in the assumption that a nuclear war wouldn't last all that long.

And so I'm off to the library to plagiarize some ideas from dead geniuses. Or is that genii? All I know is that I'm neither.

On closer inspection, I discovered that the grey lines at the bottom of the photograph were actually a caption set in four point italic type. It is a photograph of a man and his granddaughter, "London's most talked about new model." And the ad's official message is this: the old guy says "We both love English handmade shirts."

I wonder how many older men with failing eyesight see "trophy wife!" I suppose one day I'll know.

Maybe.

Why is there always a maybe? The maybe makes this information useless, perhaps even worse than useless. If life as we know it is going to end when I'm seventy-two I'd like to know so I can plan accordingly.

Hold it; why am I even thinking about this? I'm not planning on being alive then, anyway: my father died a few months short of his seventy-second birthday; why should I hope to do otherwise? I've always found resonance in the phrase, "like father like son."

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand--a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods--or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

After a long frustrating search I came up with a dozen sites I thought were pretty well executed, with reasonably interesting writing and work. I haven't been back to one of them since. This Internet stuff is overrated; I prefer cabbages.

It's the end of April 1945, it's the end of World War II, and some American soldiers are cruising the Bavarian Alps looking for a place to set up a command post. They find a great place in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which turns out to be the home of an eighty-year-old man. The old guy announces (in English, of course) that "I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome."

Now here's the part of the story that sounds improbable. The soldiers have heard of Strauss, and they treat him with respect. Everything's going OK, but the soldiers keep pointing to a bust of Beethoven and asking who it is. This is all a bit too much for Strauss, who whispers to a family member--here's the punch line--"If they ask me one more time I'll tell them it's Hitler's father."

Roll over Ludwig!

It took a long time, but finally some marketing genius at EMI records guessed that the same sex that sells cars can also sell so-called classical music. And so we were told that an attractive Eurasian teenager in a wet shirt is a fine violinist. Beethoven babe! Said teenager's sold jillions of recordings.

If one cute woman can move "classical" music, three might work even better, so EMI has thoughtfully brought us the Eroica Trio. I only know two things about the word Eroica: it's the name of Beethoven's third symphony, and it's a misspelling of erotica. I suspect the marketing people at EMI favor the latter interpretation; their ad copy wouldn't take much rewriting to be used for a porn film: "three striking young women ... exhibit a vibrancy ... sheer exuberance in performance that has enchanted audiences ... one of the most exciting chamber ensembles on the scene today!"

A friend likes the idea of cute women providing aural entertainment. "There hasn't been a popular female musician since Janis Joplin that wasn't obviously physically attractive." (Or, I might add, one who could sing so well.) "Since my ears aren't that good, if I have a choice between a recording with a picture of cute women in a black cocktail dresses or a recording with a fat balding old sweaty guy with flabby jowls, which one do you think I'm going to buy?"

"And what makes you think that the recording with a picture of cute women in a black cocktail dresses on the sleeve wasn't performed by a fat balding old sweaty guy with flabby jowls?" I asked. He didn't answer. (That was a cheap shot, but I couldn't resist the sophistry.)

I actually feel a bit sorry for the Eroica women. I'm sure they are talented committed musicians; I'm equally sure that they'll never be taken seriously until they're closer to menopause than puberty. I'm so fortunate I was never cursed by being handsome.