21 mg Transdermal

Dear Friends,

It takes an astute doctor to distinguish a touch of the winter doldrums from a case of the winter blahs. Both cause mopeyness, that draggy feeling, and episodes of down-in-the-dumps. Whichever you have, the treatment of choice is the latest Hard Taco song, “Surfing Instructor from the 1960s.” This drop of concentrated sunshine will alleviate all but the most intractable eruptions of the winter ho hums.


Biographies of Vice, Part A:Trysts with Tobacco

A recent study suggested that the human nose can distinguish one trillion odors. If we took a moment to arrange these smells from most pleasant to least pleasant, cigarette smoke would fall towards the bottom of the list.

• (998 billion smells....)
• Primordial cesspools
• Infected glands
• What it would smell like if an egg farted
• Cigarette smoke
• Cigar smoke
• Cat poo that makes you run outside and scream because you smelled it
• When you find a hiker who has been dead for a month and light her hair on fire

Context is important, though, because olfaction is tied to the emotional centers in our brains. If there was a large cash prize for finding burning hiker corpses, you may begin to enjoy the smell. This partially explains the fact that I once had a Pavlovian attraction to clothes that reeked of cigarette smoke. My first three high school girlfriends were smokers.


Okay, fine, Memoir Police. Maybe I didn’t have three girlfriends in high school. The person I’m counting as number two portrayed my girlfriend in a play. She smoked, and I’m counting it.
Anyway, Smoker GF#1 enjoyed the fact that I was the last tobacco-naive person in our friend group. Before high school graduation, she hatched the following plan: She would spread a rumor that I was planning to smoke my very first cigarette at a friend’s graduation party. Then, the day before, she would teach me how to smoke, first with a twig, and then with a genuine secret practice cigarette. I would show up at the party, casually burn through my alleged first cigarette without coughing, everyone would be amused and impressed, the girlfriend and I would never fight, and we would go to college together and/or elope.

And what a plan it was! Seamlessly it worked, up to and including the “without coughing” part.

Smoker GF#3 was the real deal. Not as a girlfriend, but as a smoker. Her brand was Marlboro Reds.

We were both summer camp counselors. Most Friday nights, after the kids were asleep, we would go down to the storage area with one her friends. The three of us would sit on an overturned rowboat, and I would watch the two of them smoke. Sometimes (but no more than once a week), I would take a single slow drag and tell them how high I was. I was being funny, and they appreciated that, but this is one of those things that was funny because it was true. To someone accustomed to nicotine-celibacy, a Marlboro Red might as well be speed.

“They’re funded by the KKK, you know,” she told me one night, pointing to the red chevrons on the Marlboro box. Sure enough, they looked like the letter K, and if you rotated the box, there were three of them.

"It's true," said the friend.

I was skeptical. I didn’t know much about the Klan or their 501c3 status, but I suspected that they were primarily donor-funded. It just didn’t seem fiscally responsible to funnel their limited assets into subliminal advertising on cigarette boxes. Plus, smokers were not really the KKK’s target demographic... the masks didn’t even have mouth holes.

“And check this out,” she said, “If you turn the Marlboro logo upside-down, see what it says?”

I didn’t.

“It spells out OROBLJeW. It’s HORRIBLE JEW without the H.”

"It's true," said the friend.

Holy cow, they were right. Orrobl Jew! There’s absolutely no way that could be a coincidence. “Then why do you still smoke them?”

Both of them just rolled her eyes at me. “I’m addicted, you idiot.”

Oh, my poor summer fling. I knew I would be out of the picture during her (yet inevitable) battle with lung disease, but it was still sad. What made it worse was that the CEO of Philip-Morris was apparently some kind of cockney bigot, who took pleasure in the infirmity of my people. He probably had a giant projection TV in his office that would cycle through a morbid slideshow of my cancer-stricken ex-girlfriend and her co-counselor. I imagined him prancing back and forth in front of the screen, pointing and howling with delight.


‘Orrible Jew! ‘Orrible Jew!

A few years later, I had my last memorable cigarette-related incident, and it didn’t involve tobacco. I was a first year medical student, and we had a lecture about how to discuss smoking cessation with patients. The speaker brought a sample box of nicotine patches, and passed them out for us to look at. I decided to try on a 21 mg patch, the highest available dose.

Real smokers know that 21 milligrams of transdermal nicotine confers absolutely no benefit. I have since seen patients with a patch on each limb running out of the hospital, dragging iv lines behind them, so they could get back to their smokes.

That was not my experience. By the 1-minute mark, I was frankly lightheaded. By 5 minutes, I felt like there was a wind tunnel running between my eyes and my throat. I started pacing. I started grabbing my classmates' wrists and telling them that they were my best friends and that I really meant it. When I would turn my head, the their faces had vapor trails. By 7 minutes I was kneeling in front of the toilet.

That was my last nicotine high, and I haven't missed it at all. By then, I was dating the love of my life, and coffee breath had replaced smoky sweatshirts as my olfactory turn-on.

With warmest regards,
Zach

Roll Out the Pork Barrel

Dear Friends,

Look, we've talked about this before, but if you're determined to have a baby in the 2010s, there are only two acceptable methods for choosing a name.

1. Your child may one day stumble upon an enchanted time shaft and wake up in 19th century England. Studies show that if he is named after one of the contemporary professions, it will be easier for him to find meaningful work. With that eventuality in mind, you should name him Cooper, Thatcher, Hunter, Mason, Tanner, or Wayne (which is short for Waynewright.)

2. Most traditional names evoke a specific gender, but what if your child is born with ambiguous genitalia? Or what if it's completely unambiguous, but you're too embarrassed to look? No probs! Keep its pants on, paint the nursery yellow, and give it a name that celebrates its androgyny.

• Consonant or consonant sound
• A or AY
• L or D
• EN

Examples include Jaden, Jaylen, Dalen, Bayden, Calen, Graylen, Braden, Bralen, Galen, Hayden, or Baleen.

Now that you know what to type on the birth certificate, it's time to select a pet name for your child.  This month's Hard Taco song, "Big Guy," is about finding the perfect moniker for your cutie wittle babykins.

The London House Rules
Not to toot my own kazoo but (TooOOT! TooOOT!) Lauren and I are better parents than you will ever be. Our kids have survived in this horrible world for an aggregate of 15 person-years, and neither of them tortures worms or screams "I hate you!" at the mirror while dying their eyebrows.

The secret to raising prosperous, natural-browed children is to be very strict about a limited number of rules. Too many rules will drive children away, only to be found five years later in the Sudanese Sacred Army of Brainwashed Child Machine Gun Holders. If they have too few rules, they will grow up and become King Joffrey.

We maintain a happy medium with the London House Rules. We printed this eloquent list of tenets in an austere font and taped it to the kitchen wall at the children's eye level.

1. Be kind. Always.
2. No screen time until you've finished your homework.
3. No chanting (i.e. "Ice cream! Ice cream! Ice cream!") because that's f**ing annoying.

Strictly speaking, there are 11 other London House Rules, but we don't even attempt to enforce the other eight. They are just Styrofoam peanuts to cushion the Big Three. That may seem like a low ratio of wheat to chaff, but it's better than the 10 Commandments. How many of those do we actually enforce? Two... no killing and no stealing. What about no coveting your neighbor's crap? Styrofoam peanuts.

There's actually a cute story there. When Moses first presented the two tablets, he talked them up as "all killer, no filler," but nobody bought it. A bunch of the Commandments were last minute riders, an ingenious tactic to pass controversial provisions by the Hebrews. This was a political masterstroke on God's part. He predicted that nobody would ratify "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" unless it was tied to the popular clause prohibiting murder.

And since he was all-knowing and all-powerful, God was well aware that the line item veto wouldn't be invented for nearly 4000 years.

Biblical scholars have deduced that some of the Hebrews were kvetchy about having to bend to special interests. The High Priest, Aaron, publicly blasted The Almighty for enacting pork-barrel legislation, leading newspapers to run the headline: High Priest Denounces Pork.

So that's how that happened, probably.

With warmest regards,
Zach

Auld Ang Syne

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for January is called, "Attack Ads." I hope listeners know me enough to recognize that this is not simply a send-up of our political system.  Nor is it a style-parody of songs that mimic political farces. Rather, it is a lyrical pasquinade that deconstructs the recipe for lampooning pastiches that impersonate parodies of political spoofs. In other words, it is a Gobstopper of satire, with so many layers that no one is cultured enough to appreciate it on the level it was intended.

Conversely, the most popular songs in the English language have only one layer. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, and they are:

1. Happy Birthday To You
2. For He's a Jolly Good Fellow
3. Auld Ang Syne

One cannot mention these three songs without, in the same breath, discussing their discrepancies in copyright status. Warner Communications claims that it holds all rights to "Happy Birthday To You" until 2030. As a result, a live performance of this song costs $700 in royalties, and inclusion of the song in a movie costs $10,000. Thus, birthday parties in film often culminate with a sing-along of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," a song that is so asinine that no one has confessed to any part of its authorship.

"Auld Ang Syne" is also in the public domain, and thus free. It notable for being the third most popular English language song, despite the fact that it clearly is not in English. The lyrics were written by the Scottish military leader, William Wallace, of "Braveheart" fame. In 1305, King Edward found Wallace guilty of violating a number of intellectual property laws and sentenced him to public disembowelment. Witnesses to the execution transcribed the nonsensical Scottish interjections that Wallace mumbled during his disembowelment, and later cobbled them together to make the lyrics to "Auld Ang Syne."

According to legend, as his final intestine was removed, Wallace shouted, "I immediately revoke all personal or corporate rights to this song or any derivative thereof, pronounce it to be forthwith in the intellectual commons, will seek neither injunctions nor monetary damages, and without duress grant freedom to all parties for its reproduction for any purpose in perpetuity!!!"

This, of course, is the remarkable quote for which William Wallace is best remembered. It is carved into the cornerstone of Edinburgh City Chambers. Scottish children recite it each morning before class, and again whenever someone sneezes. In the filming of "Braveheart," Mel Gibson screamed the whole line with Oscar-winning intensity during the disembowelment scene. Unfortunately, the theatrical release was already pushing three hours, so the editors trimmed it down to, "Freedom!"

That Mr. Wallace sacrificed his viscera to promote the free use of "Auld Ang Syne" only throws into sharp relief the greed of a music industry that would do anything to enforce their dubious rights to the birthday song. Marilyn Monroe famously sang "Happy Birthday to You" to John F. Kennedy, and refused to pay the $700 to Warner Communications. Where was she three months later? Dead of mysterious causes! (Quite possibly public disembowelment.)

That is why my wife and I have come to regret choosing the song, "Happy Birthday to You" as our safe word. Yes, it's sixteen words, and it's not always easy to carry a tune when someone is firing a squirt gun full of hot wax at your forehead. But the main reason I rarely use it is that I'm too much of a cheapskate. Who wants to forfeit $700 in royalties just to avoid a few stiletto marks on the lower back?

Or, um, $10,000 for that one time?

With warmest regards,
Zach

Prost Traumatic Stress Disorder

Dear Friends,

One of the best things about living in Ann Arbor is that we have signs, and one of the best things about signs is that some of them list our Sister Cities.  

In the past, we have taken you on a whirlwind tour of Hikone and a whirlpool tour of Dakar. This month, we will embrace both inter-cultural discourse and distant cultural interccourse as we cyber-jaunt through our oldest urban playmate, Tübingen, Germany. 

People of Tübingen, I offer you this month's Hard Taco song, "Ubble-a Dup Dup," which was so-named to give you a healthy American portion of the letter U the way we believe God intended it... without an umlaut. 

Tübingen is a small college town in Southwest Germany, just a few miles from the German Alps. The first recorded mention of the city was in 1191, when it was besieged by Henry IV, King of Germany. He noted that the gentle Neckar River that runs through the city center was "ideal for kayaking and tubing," and called the town Kayakingenundtübingen. This was shortened to Tübingen in 1540 when Martin Luther exposed kayaking as a Papist pastime. 

The University of Tübingen has a world-class reputation for cultivating innovative thought. Well-know graduates include Friedrich Holderlin, the hypochondriac poet, and Alois Alzheimer, who invented dementia. The most popular major among current students is German, although graduates find careers in everything from engineering to lederhosen engineering.

Tübingen, Germany - Quick Facts/Speculations
Population: 89,000
Old world values: Austerity, order
Liberal college town values: Frugality, tidiness
Emblem: David Hasselhoff carefully arranging Gummy Bears 
Tree: The family tree of the Hapsburgs
Flower, and what one says to it: Edelweiss, every morning you greet me.  
Statue in Town Square: A giant beer stein depicting images of scholars discovering that lunch is the most important meal of the day
Motto: Mut und Glauben, Aber Kein Augenkontakt, Bitte. ("Courage and faith, but no eye contact, please.")
Nickname: A Small Cog In Our Great National Cuckoo Clock
Exports: Train parts, curt nods, Popes who think it's okay to retire, BMV luxury cars (they can't pronounce W.)
Favorite Grimm Fairy Tale: A woodsman sells his children to an evil dwarf and lives happily ever after.
Second Favorite Grimm Fair Tale: A queen prays for a child, and a benevolent angel brings her one... in her soup. She immediately recognizes what it is, so she cries while eating it. 
Most Popular Baby Clothing Store: Snugglers of Catan
Traditional angles for viewing Zungenwurst: From the front and in partial profile

Zungenwurst from the front

Zungenwurst in partial profile

With warmest regards,
Zach

Another Ick in the Wall

Dear Friends,

"There's a pit where bad guys have to dig up crystals all day instead of going to jail."

That is my son Malcolm's vision for the new Hard Taco song, "Chisels 'n Dust," which he co-authored. I enjoyed this collaboration, and hope it is the first of many. I look forward to breaking up over aesthetic differences and grudgingly reuniting after a decade of unsuccessful solo endeavors.

I always feel a bit embarrassed about posting a link to my songs on Facebook, but I do it anyway, just in case one or two people are curious. Other than that, I'm a pretty reserved Facebook poster.

We all know people that exist at the other end of the spectrum. One of my friends furnishes her timeline with new material five or more times a day. Most of the posts are just three letter interjections, such as Yay or Ick, but within minutes, each of these garners hundreds of Likes and Comments.

So what is her secret? Am I an unpopular person or am I just providing unpopular content? To find out, I took 24 hours and posted the same kind of stuff as everybody else. The results will shock you.

With warmest regards,
Zach

The Word Limit

Dear Friends,

If you believe in the old adage about the relative value of pictures and words, this month's wordy Hard Taco song, "Pick Two," is worth over 0.8 pictures. The chorus of this song is a reference to a metaphor I read about in a David Sedaris essay. To paraphrase, your life is spent cooking at a symbolic stovetop. The four burners represent your family, friends, health, and work.  To provide enough heat to two of them (and thus, to be successful at them), you have to turn the other burners off.

Most of us find other places to waste time besides the big four. I'm sure you've got your own auxiliary heat sources, but for me there's the music recording burner, the fort-building burner, and the stupid digest-writing burner (the one I would most like to turn off.) With all of these going, there is certainly no gas for the reading anything other than one book of David Sedaris essays burner. 

In a parallel universe, I bet I'm a great reader. In this one, I make it through one or two novels in a good year. Aside from a fluky Kurt Vonnegut phase in 1999, I haven't really been an avid reader since 9th grade, when I finally outgrew the only favorite author I ever had. Any guesses who it was?

Piers Anthony.

Anyone? No smoldering Piers Anthony fans out there? Not anymore, but in the 80s, he was the reigning colossus of fantasy cheese. For years, it seemed like every time I stepped into Waldenbooks, there was a new Piers Anthony novel on the shelves. All 100 or so of his books were about people who unintentionally traveled between magic and non-magic worlds, a trope which has since been adapted more successfully in countless books and movies.  One factor that was crucial to his limited success was that Anthony was also a pervert, but not so much that they couldn't stock his books in middle school libraries.

From 4th grade on, I carried a Piers Anthony paperback with me at all times. My Grandpa Arnold would see me reading and mumble, "Pierce Rabinowitz." I never knew why changing the last name from Anthony to Rabinowitz was funny. The only similarity between the two names was the long o sound, but it's hard to argue that was enough to qualify as wordplay.

One day, we were running some errands in my grandpa's truck, and he noticed that I was holding a copy of, "On a Pale Horse."

"Pierce Rabinowitz," he mumbled. Whatever joy he got from this clever pun melted away quickly, because I took this as an invitation to summarize the plot of the book. This guy Zane is about to kill himself because he's really sad, but then he sees Death, the actual guy-version of Death, the grim reaper guy with the scythe. So Zane flips out and shoots Death instead of himself! And then here's the cool part...  he has to take over Death's job! He has to drive around the world in a limo, which can turn into a boat sometimes, and collect people's souls.

After about fifteen minutes, I paused to take a breath, and my grandfather said, "Every person is born with a word limit. Once you say all of your allotted words, you die."

So I stopped talking. Not because I understood his point (that I should shut up), but because I thought he was commenting on the book (he wasn't.)

But then I started thinking about what he had said. What if he was right? Could I achieve immortality by taking a Benedictine vow of silence? Were the world's orphanages filled with the children of auctioneers?

It didn't end up holding true for my grandfather. He didn't talk much, but he also didn't live to be particularly old. Still, I think his theory may hold water if we were to examine populations instead of individuals. The average life expectancy in the United States is 78.1 years. In Germany, it's 79.8 years. Why the discrepancy? Contrasting health care systems? Perhaps, but I would argue that they main difference is that Germans can say almost anything in one word. Examples:

Sitzpinkler = A man who sits to pee.
Shmutzfangmattenserive = The act of cleaning doormats
Torschlusspanik = The fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages
Fussbodenschleifmaschinenverleih = Floor sander rentals
Schwartzwalderkirschtortenlieferantenhut = The hat of the black forest cake delivery person

Spanish, on the other hand, uses extra words to express simple concepts. If you want to fundraise, for example, you have to say, "estamos tratando de recaudar fondos." And guess what? The average Guatemalan only makes it to 71.5 years. (And most of them go to their graves without ever understanding what Girl Scouts are doing with all those cookies, because no one has time to explain it to them.)

All of this comes back around to my original point, which is that this month's Hard Taco song, "Pick Two," is extraordinarily wordy. That means I'm going to end up on the wrong end of the actuarial bell curve if I don't make up some ground. So please, if you see me this month, please shut me up when I try to give you a summary of the first 37 Xanth novels.

With warmest regards,
Zach

A Fleshy Chablis for Steam Engine Steve

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for September, "What Has He Done, The Bear," is the most important song you will listen to all day. You won't BELIEVE the third and twelfth lines. One quarter of the way through the song, you'll start to question everything you've ever thought about anything. By the time you're halfway through, you'll start to believe in the jaw-dropping power of the human spirit. And once you rank the 300 signs that you're a Hard Taco Digest reader from most to least unbelievable, what happens next will break your heart.

A Lesson in Wino Pairing
Lauren and I recently attended a destination wedding in Northern California.  Sonoma County is known for breathtaking views of rolling hills, pinstriped with sweeping vineyards. Not surprisingly, the combination of picturesque beauty and unlimited free wine tastings has attracted droves of hoboes to the region for over a century. I'm not talking about the sedentary street bums found in other cities, but actual steam rail-riding, bindle-carrying hoboes.  Thousands of them. They call the region Napa Valley, which is the Wappo Indian term for "Nappy Vagabond."

The old stereotype that hoboes love wine holds true in roughly 100% of cases. I always assumed that the wine a hobo chooses to drink is just a matter of personal preference, but the Sonoma sommeliers know better. Gabriel, who pours at the Lancaster Estates tasting room in Healdsburg, gave us a free primer on how to pair a fine wine with the right breed of hobo. Here are the basics:

Cabernet Sauvignon - A powerful, tannic red grape.  Goes well with a toothless hobo wearing a stovetop pipe hat and coveralls that are missing a button.

Chardonnay - A wider-bodied white grape that is often seen with late harvest tramps, such as Tarnose Nabob or Hobo Huxtable the XII. Also pairs nicely with white-bearded sidetrack hoboes like Mr. Ben "Nickel Note" Pantaloons.

Malbec - A sophisticated mid-season ripener, and a good match for a stocky, snake oil-selling charlatan in tattered coattails. A supple wine that creates delightful stains on burlap pants held up by a piece of rope.

Merlot - A lauded middle-palate grape with a round finish. A bottle of this varietal is often found in the brown paper bag of a tall, stubbly bindle-stiff with a mutt limping a few paces behind him.

Pinot Noir - Delicate and fresh, with softer aromatics. Perfect for inebriating medium-bearded vagabonds like Creaky Rags Lupino or Milo "Extra Chum" Spare-biscuits.

Riesling - A drier white that goes well with chicken, fish, a can of beans, and any urine-soaked bum lying stuporous in a boxcar.

Sangiovese - A silky red wine native to Tuscany, often consumed by a hoboes who begin stories with, "Let me sit down a minute, a stone got in my shoe."

Sauvignon Blanc - A versatile, smoky varietal typically found in the hand of a Westbound hobo sleeping under liberal-leaning newspapers. Popular pairings include Seasick Admiral Mulligan, Steam-for-legs Sal, or Lushy McBedsore. Also pairs well with any hobo wearing a bent fork tied to a string around the neck.

Syrah - A hearty, spicy red, often with toffee notes. Pairs well with harmonica-wielding itinerants like Snaky Bunyan or Earl "Redundant Skinfold" Hardwhiskers.

Zinfandel - Found only in California, Zinfandel grapes are crushed by inserting them between the two plates of the San Andreas Fault and waiting for an earthquake. This creates a zesty and versatile wine that can intoxicate a wide range of hoboes, from dumpster-diving handcar pumpers to your high-end jungle buzzards with corncob pipes.

White zinfandel - Sweet, syrupy, and trashy, white Zin is terrible and no hobo would ever drink it.

With warmest regards,
Zach