"Sniggerlings"(Petard or not Petard)

Sniggerlings(Petard or not Petard)

      Last Sniggerlings post I explained my dilemma. I am like Jack Cole, the Thomas Haden Church character in Sideways, whose dilemma was that he couldn’t stop chasing sexual adventures even though he knew they were going to get him into trouble. They used to call this satyriasis. I call my affliction satire-iasis: I can’t stop seeing the silliness of creation. I don’t resist writing down funny lines when I hear them or avoid shoving dissimilar things at each other to see the fun pop out. I am an addicted iconoclast: I have an irresistible urge to let the air out of windbags and martyrs, and me.

      I think I inherited this from Woody Allen or at least Woody Allen movies. It’s hard to see how a New York Jew could pass down this terrible gene to a California hillbilly. But you never know…. My mother was in show business.

      As it happens, sometimes the fruit of my affliction is a long essay, sometimes a short paragraph. The short ones I’m going to call “Sniggerlings”, and I’m going to run a blog page with several of these until I am satisfied(about 800 words in all.) And then move on. Not every funny idea becomes Babbitt or Please Don’t eat the Daisies or Lysistrata. I’ll append a new one on the old page until it’s time to go. Here’s an example of a Sniggerling I can’t let go of:


      On my Tollteller blog page(tollteller.blogspot.com), I recently wrote a post titled “The Strange Case of Thomas Beatie”, about a transgender wo/man who had some of the operations to achieve her/his gender change goal but not all, then married a woman in Hawaii (where same sex marriage is legal) who couldn’t have children, even with artificial insemination.

      Thomas Beatie(now known as The First Man to Give Birth) then gave birth her/himself to three kids, moved his family to dusty Arizona(where same sex marriage is illegal and divorce cannot be granted to two people who aren‘t legally married), obtained a new girlfriend, and applied for a divorce. S/he was refused, and now her/his biggest worry is that her/his children in Arizona with her/his estranged wife will think that perhaps s/he is not really their “father”. Yes, yes, it’s sad. But at some point I also want to giggle. Does “hoist on Her/his own petard” seem relevant somehow?(I wonder if s/he had a petard-ectomy)  And Beatie seems to think it’s all Arizona’s fault.

      My degradation over chuckling at this incredible situation recently increased when I opened my copy of The Beginnings of Western Science(which I am reading) by Professor David C. Lindbergh, Hilldale Professor of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin(University of Chicago Press 1992). There I saw on page 142 an illustration from Pliny’s Natural History (circa 60 A.D.) entitled “Pliny’s Monstrous Races”. Therein are creatures that Pliny the Elder(a Roman science writer) supposed to have existed at that time, with headless torsos bearing faces, one-legged figures, and people with heads of animals and hooves for feet.   One or two looked like my addled imagination conceives poor Mr/s. Beatie must look. Miserable wretch that I am.

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