Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people’s stuff.

Baseball bats are now the preferred weapon for many drug gangs and others who have a business need to administer behavioral reminders. They’re cheap, lethal, legal, untraceable, and hey! It’s the national pastime.

Dying must have survival value. Or it wouldn’t be part of the biological process.

Why is it that, when making reference to something in the past, people often think they have to say, “I hope I’m not dating myself”? Listen, if you’re so embarrassed by your age there’s a simple solution: open a vein.

I don’t have hobbies, I have interests. Hobbies cost money. Interests are free.

With all the presidential administrations we’ve had, I’m sure that by now there must have been at least one person who, besides being in the cabinet, was also in the closet.

I don’t like it when I’m in an audience and the emcee tells us to give someone a welcome specific to that city: “Let’s all get together and give this little lady a nice Toledo welcome.” I’ve often thought if I were from Toledo it would be fun now and then to give someone a Baltimore welcome, just to break the emcee’s balls. Or maybe slip in an exotic Budapest welcome when no one is expecting it. One thing I would never do is give someone a Dallas welcome. That’s what JFK got. Dallas welcomes don’t last too long.

You rarely see an elderly midget. Apparently their life spans are shorter too.

A PEAR IS A FAILED APPLE

You keep hearing that society’s greatest tasks are educating people and getting them jobs. That’s great. Two things people hate to do: go to school and go to work.

We busy ourselves with meaningless gestures such as Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which applies primarily to white, middle-class daughters. More help for the wrong people.

People seem to think that if there’s some problem that makes them unhappy in this country, all they have to do is stage a big march and everything will change. When will they learn?

Complaint: Where did this dumb-ass Sammy Sosa thumping-your-chest, kissing-your-fingers, flashing-the-peace-sign nonsense come from? What’s that stupid shit all about? Geraldo does a variation on it. It strikes me as pretentious, meaningless, pseudoreligious bullshit.

I don’t know about you, but I really have no problem with atrocities. What’s the big deal? Lighten up.

Can placebos cause side effects? If so, are the side effects real?

When hundreds of people are killed in an airplane crash I always wonder if maybe there wasn’t one guy, a little behind schedule that day, who ran down the last few hundred yards of the airport concourse to make the plane on time. And when he finally sat down in his seat, out of breath, he was really glad he made it. And then an hour later the plane goes down. What goes through his mind? Do you think maybe in those last few moments, as he plunges to the Earth he wishes he’d had a heart attack while running through the airport?

Why do they bother with a suicide watch when someone is on death row? “Keep an eye on this guy. We’re gonna kill him, and we don’t want him to hurt himself.”

I notice at Jewish weddings they break a glass. You ever been to an Irish wedding? Glasses, bottles, mirrors, tables, chairs, arms, legs, the band instruments, and the groom’s neck. We don’t fuck around. Mazel tov!

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I recently attended an avant-garde play. Here’s what it said in the program:

An Anteater, a Tire Iron and a Blue Hat?by Zal Fenchley

Act One

SCENE 1 Laura’s living room, several weeks later.

SCENE 2 Easter, aboard a Turkish woman’s thigh.

SCENE 3 Deep within the colon of a woolly mammoth. 16,376 B.C.

SCENE 4 Inside a sailor’s shorts during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Act Two

SCENE 1 On a French sidewalk, six feet from escargot vomit.

SCENE 2 Inside a condom in Haifa. Jewish New Year.

Napalm and Silly Putty

SCENE 3 At your aunt’s house. Soon.

Act Three

Napalm and Silly Putty

SCENE 1 In a Shriner’s hatband following oral sex.

Napalm and Silly Putty

SCENE 2 Down where Arturo used to live. Not that long ago.

Act Four

John Lennon two songs. (not tonight)

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You know what bothers me? People who want to know the time. The ones who come up and ask me, “What time is it?” as if I, personally, were responsible for keeping track of such things.

Sometimes they phrase it a little differently. They’ll say, “Do you have the time?” And I say, “No. I don’t believe I do. I certainly didn’t have it this morning when I left the house. Could you possibly have left it somewhere? You know, now that you mention it, I believe the navy has the time. In Washington. They keep it in an observatory or something, and they let a little of it out each day. Not too much, of course. Just enough. They wouldn’t want to give us too much time; we might not use it wisely.” Sometimes, in a playful mood, when asked if I have the time, I’ll say, “Yes,” and simply walk away.

When Is It, Anyway?

I do that because I hate to disappoint people. You see, there is no time. There’s just no time. I don’t mean, “We’re late, there’s no time.” I mean, there is no time.

After all, when is it? Do you know? No one really knows when it is. We made the whole thing up. It’s a human invention. There are no numbers in the sky. Believe me, I’ve looked; they’re not there. We made the whole thing up.

So, when are we? Sometimes we think we know where we are, but we really don’t know when we are. For all we know, it could be the middle of last week.

And the time zones are no help; they’re all different. In fact, in parts of India the time zones actually operate on the half hour instead of the hour. What is that all about? Does anybody really know what time it is?

What Year Do You Have?

And never mind a piddly little half-hour difference in India, how about thousands of years? The major calendars disagree by thousands of years. To the Chinese, this is 4699; the Hebrews think it’s 5762; the Muslims swear it’s 1422. No telling what the Mayans and Aztecs would say if they were still around. I guess their time ran out.

Remember, folks, these are calendars we’re talking about, instruments specifically designed to keep track of time. And they’re all different. And they’re not just off by a couple of weeks, this is thousands of goddamn years we’re talking about. How did that happen?

Our current (Gregorian) calendar is such an amateur show that every four years we have to cram in an extra day just to make the whole thing work. We call it February 29. Personally, I don’t believe it. Deep down, I know it’s really March 1. I mean, it just feels like March 1, doesn’t it?

But even that simple quadrennial adjustment doesn’t fix things, so every 100 years we suspend that rule and dispense with the extra day. Unless, of course, the year is divisible by 400, in which case we suspend the suspension and add the extra day. But that’s still not quite enough, so every 4,000 years we suspend that rule too, and back comes February 29!

Here’s how we got to this sorry state: The Julian calendar was introduced in 46 B.C., the Roman year 709, but it was off by eleven minutes a year, so by 1582 there was an accumulated error of ten days. Accordingly, that year Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the day following October 4 would be called October 15. They just skipped ten days. Threw them out. Officially, in 1582, no one was born in France, Italy, Spain or Portugal during the period October 5 through October 14. Weird, huh?