Alan Horn's diary

April 3, 2008

You read a lot about prices going up and the climate getting warmer, but you never hear much about people getting uglier.

I realize it's depressing, but ignoring the problem isn't going to make it go away. Is everybody afraid of hurting everyone else's feelings, or what?

March 26, 2008

Old people are basically tourists. They're here, you see, but they're not from here.

The language here is the same as where they're from, but it's spoken differently and can be hard to understand. Things cost more here, which is hard for them to get used to, too. Customs are different, and the way people dress, and the things on TV, for the most part. Although sometimes they will catch a program that reminds them of home, like when we flip the channels in a hotel room in Lima and find Lost.

They speak to us sometimes like Ugly Americans in a third-world country--loudly, over-distinctly, slightly contemptuously, trying their best to make us understand. And sometimes, being old, they get confused and start thinking we're the ones from somewhere else and that we're taking over the place, like summer people during the season.

But they're the transients. They never go back to where they're from, however much they miss it, but neither are they stopping here for good.

March 14, 2008

Never fold when you can hang.
Never hang when you can drape.

Never wash when you can rinse.
Never rinse when you can lick.

Never untie when you can slip off.

March 12, 2008

What’s more fun than bathtime?

Answer: bathtime on ecstasy.

March 2, 2008

Few remember today, but back in 1993 the New York Zoological Society tried to rename the city’s zoos “wildlife conservation parks.” The decision was made after the society’s director noticed that the word zoo had the secondary definition of “a situation or place marked by confusion or disorder.”

They quietly went back to the old name a few months later when it became clear that signs pointing to the Bronx Wildlife Conservation Park meant nothing to people looking for the Bronx Zoo. “I want people to know what they are visiting,” the director of marketing helplessly explained.

I feel we should not have let this sad concession to common sense discourage us. The rampant use of terms with undesirable pejorative secondary meanings remains one of the most critical issues facing us.

For instance, the animal currently known as the pig is not in fact a “filthy, disgusting creature,” as the word is secondarily defined. We should find another term. “Porkchop source”? “Dumpling-filling animal”? These sound more like crossword clues. It may be harder to come up with such expressions than I thought, especially just before lunch. Perhaps readers of this entry will have some suggestions of their own.

In the meantime, ferrets, which unlike pigs actually are filthy and disgusting, should be renamed “police officers.”

February 28, 2008

Many people will recognize a threat and get all worked up over it without bothering to take a few simple measures to minimize their risk. Yes, there will always be much that is beyond our control, but there is also a great deal we can do to improve our chances if we are only willing to expend the effort.

For instance, like most people I am concerned about the possibility of being buried alive. But how many take the trouble to carry a crowbar and garden spade on them at all times, as I do? How many will even go so far as to keep a simple note pinned inconspicuously to their clothing listing the tests they desire to be performed on themselves before they are declared dead?

February 25, 2008

Attempts are sometimes made to dismiss Marxism as a “secular religion”--oddly, often by people who (unlike Marxists) have no problem with actual religion. And what exactly is a secular religion? Something that’s a religion, one is left to suppose, only without the religious part.

The haziness of this concept had always put me off until a few years ago I happened to come upon this elaboration in the Economist, which I found hard to answer:

Anti-globalism has been aptly described as a secular religion. So is Marxism: a creed complete with prophet, sacred texts and the promise of a heaven shrouded in mystery. Marx was not a scientist, as he claimed. He founded a faith. The economic and political systems he inspired are dead or dying. But his religion is a broad church, and lives on.

If a new religion comes along now, for example, its adherents may try to differentiate themselves from both Christianity and Islam by adopting some new dogma and some new method of anointing themselves as the Chosen Ones.

This is precisely what Marxists did: they rejected God, which of course differentiates them rather dramatically. They didn't proscribe images, and they also copied everything else that Christianity has. Their church, their schism, their protestants, their pope, their holy book, their prophets, their martyrs, their satan, their missionaries--namely, the Soviet Communist Party, the Soviet-Chinese split, the Chinese Communist Party, Mao, Das Capital [sic], Marx and Engels, Che Guevara, America, the CPI(M). The comparisons are striking.

I bring this up only because I have lately made an important discovery along these same lines: modern medicine is secular shamanism. You go see a priest (doctor) who performs a ritual (examination), consults some sacred texts (medical books), divines omens (reads tests), and prescribes healing herbs and potions (pharmaceuticals).

The comparisons are striking.

February 16, 2008

Ever wonder what the pictures on your hard drive do in there together when you’re not looking?

This thought has enlivened many a barren hour for me.

February 1, 2008

What would it be like to make love to a woman who was totally numb? A woman, that is to say, unable to receive any tactile sensations, due perhaps to some neurological mishap? One who responded to your touch like any woman, but whom you happened to know was just acting and felt nothing?

I don’t know the answer to this question. But I would like to find out.