The Columns

Last week I started to tell you about the time I decided to join the Few, the Proud, the Phone Book Deliverers. I had passed the initial rigorous screening (I could prove that I had a pulse) and I had clawed my way through nearly forty-five minutes of arduous training. Now I was ready to take to the streets.

I have always been ambitious, and I was more than a little bit broke, so I had signed up for ten routes. At two hundred addresses per route and eleven cents per successfully delivered book, this meant that after just ringing some door bells and saying, "Madam, I hold in my hands a brand new phone book, yours to enjoy with my compliments," I stood to bring home a cool $220!

My new phone book arrived the other day, delivered directly into the bushes by the front door. It was in a plastic bag, but it was jammed in crooked and the twist tie was not properly attached.

I was appalled! As a trained professional, it was almost painful to witness such shoddy work.

You see, at one (brief) point in my (not so brief) working life I was myself a phone book delivery guy. Of course, it's been something like thirty-five years since I served on the front lines of the Battle For Handy And Reliable Home And Business Directory Information, and maybe the standards have fallen since then.

Last week I wrote about my new-found fondness for the popular social networking site Facebook. This is an online resource originally designed for college students, a place where the young scholar could go to post photographs of her best friend, passed out in a bathtub with a picture of a penis drawn in lipstick on her forehead.

Unfortunately, those halcyon days of artistic expression may now be threatened by a group of Net denizens who are gradually infiltrating  every corner of Facebook. I am, of course, referring to myself and all my friends.

Hi. I'm Mike, and I'm a Facebookaholic.

I discovered Facebook not too long ago, at the suggestion of some of my creative writing students. "It's great," they would tell me, "you can do all kinds of stuff."

"And what kind of 'stuff' might we be talking about here?" I would ask, in my very best imitation of Mrs. Gadomski, the severe and ancient (probably ten years younger than I am now) high school Latin teacher who inspired me to strive for greatness as an educator, and who triggered many hours of speculation among a few of us students as to what kind of man would be up to the challenge of being "Mr. Gadomski."

My gang of young Shakespeares are every bit as persistent they are creative, so they eventually convinced me to give Facebook a try.

There has been a lot of talk about chimps in the news lately, what with the tragedy involving a wild chimpanzee kept as a "pet," the suggestion by the New York Post that the President of the United States is really a chimp who should be assassinated in the interest of improving the financial stimulus package, and the birthday of Charles Darwin, whose theories explain pretty much where the missing links involved in both of the above stories rank on the evolutionary scale.

 

Here is a vaguely related piece I originally published in 2002, just in case you missed it.

 

I just finished reading about a study that concluded that humans and chimps have less in common genetically than anyone had previously thought. It seems that a biologist named Roy Britten at the California Institute of Technology has used his computer and whole bunches of numbers to demonstrate that the genes of humans, once believed to be about 98.5% identical those of chimps, are in fact only about 95% the same.

What a relief!