Dr. Metablog

"Foody" Talk on the Airplane

Stewardess:  "Chicken or pasta?"

Dr. M.:  "Which do you recommend, Madam?"

Stewardess:  "It's airline food.  They both taste exactly the same."

Dr. M.:  "I'll try the chicken."

Contra Tattoos

Here are some reasons, young' 'uns, why you should steer clear of tattoos.

a) because tattoos are permanent and because taste, your taste, is impermanent and will inevitably change. There's a poster on the wall of your bedroom that you love. Five years later, you're indifferent to it, and ten years later, you've trashed it. "How could I ever have thought that thing was beautiful?"  Same with your taste in all the visual arts. So with the tattoo. You may think t's beautiful now, perhaps, but ten or twenty years on it has become the permanent insignia of your callow taste. Without remedy or the possibility of amelioration. You're stuck with it.

b) because ink fades and bodies sag. That crisp tattoo is going to bend, distort and twist as your body ages. Face facts:  that tattoo is going to become uglier and uglier. Have you caught sight of someone of my age who's tattooed?  If you have, you know what I'm talking about;  if you haven't, don't look. It ain't pretty.

c) . Tattoos are expensive if they're done by someone with talent. The cheap ones are horrid. What a waste of money! You could donate the same amount to a useful cause and feel good about yourself. 

d)   Tattoos hurt in the application; sometimes they become infected.

e)   because tattoos limit your romantic options. For many a potential partner, that pseudo clever tattoo will be a deal breaker. "You have a tattoo?  There?  Right there?  Ugh?"  And also, don't tattoo yourself with the name of your beloved. Consider the divorce rate.

f)   If the tattoo is in plain sight, it will lower your earning power.  No problem getting a job as a dishwasher, but perhaps that upscale employer is going to think twice before hiring someone who made such a bad choice. Because the employer doesn't want to offend potential customers.

g)   because the Bible tells you so. "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD” (Leviticus 9:28). Your body is a temple; do not mutilate or desecrate it.  And for god sake don't tattoo yourself with religious symbols. To do so is like throwing sand in the face of the Almighty. The injunction against tattoos is one of the few biblical proscriptions that I can sincerely embrace.  

h) because tattoos are an expression of vanity, like wearing show-off jewelry or expensive designer clothes. Let us take pride in our achievements and not in our shallow foppery.  

j ) because you don't want to cause me, ME, to look askance or into the air and wrinkle up my nose whenever I meet you.

Amnesia on Film: Crossroads

What a strange little movie, odd even by amnesia-on-film standards!  Film amnesia is the most malleable and flexible of illnesses, as fact free (and fact-averse) as the EPA under Trump.. 

In this modest 1942  adventure, David Talbot, played by William Powell affecting a slight now-you-hear-it-now-you-don't French accent, is either an amnesia victim or an amnesia scammer. He either was or wasn't a criminal before the accident in which he apparently lost his memory.

An extortionist-grifter Henri Sarrou, played by Basil Rathbone, who looks like "two profiles glued together," is trying to squeeze him for a million francs in exchange for not turning him over to the police for a murder that he might or might not have committed in his former life, if he had one.

I don't think I'm giving away any secrets to say that all turns out for the best. But what is interesting, amnesia-wise, is that there is no recovery of memory.  Talbot's amnesia never resolves, and he comes to the end of the film with no knowledge of three-quarter of his life, and that this painful situation doesn't seem to compromise or concern him the least little bit. Off he goes, at the end, blithely, with his luminous bride Hedy Lamarr, at his side.

There are holes within holes in the plot, but what is most striking, I think, is how casually amnesia is deployed,  as if losing one's memory is no more a challenge to selfhood and identity than a case of sniffles.