This Day in Goofery
May 13
1883: Birth of Γεώργιος Παπανικολάου

If you’re a woman, you’ve probably had an intimate procedure performed upon your person thanks to today’s birthday boy “Gorgeous Georgios” Papanikolaou. Shouldn’t his Pap smear be pronounced “Pop” smear? I guess a “Papa” smear would not be a savory sort of name for a gynecological probe.

Papanikolaou was studying cellular changes in vaginal fluid over the course of the menstrual cycle and discovered that cancer cells could be identified under a microscope, leading him to write, “The first observation of cancer cells in the smear of the uterine cervix gave me one of the greatest thrills I ever experienced during my scientific career.”

Somebody really said that. And we’ll be forever grateful as a result. Happy birthday to you, Gorgeous George.

A kindly avuncular gent whose work has saved millions of lives

Source: Tesla Society

By the way, if anyone ever offers you a bagel with Pap shmear, give it a pass.

Five steps to goofery, as presented by “The Face” (aka “The Alabama Face”), Jack Blankenship.

Source: NBC/Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Remember, goofery is always as close as your face.

Let’s start the year out goofy!

Perhaps some of you are here for the first time, testing out the goofy waters. If you’re ready for baptism by goofery, let’s start easy with physical comedy, known commonly in Goof City as dancing. All you really gotta do is get up and flail.

Source: Roncagliolo

When can one say, indeed, but “sweet fancy Moses!”

As you can see, it’s no more complicated than moving your body with no rhyme, reason, or even, heck, rhythm. Your Mayor had the pleasure of sharing a moment with Dr. Simi in Cancun this past spring, who added a goofy feature to his dance: dress like a pharmacist.

That’s a safe, easy way to be even goofier than just randomly goofing about--dress as conspicuously inappropriately as you dare, while doing so.

Here are lessons from The Grand Goof himself, Goofy.

“There are those who are have become so inhibited,” our narrator tells us, “they no longer have the ability or instinct to dance away their cares.” It is for just such folks that goofery saves the day.

We can dance if we want to! Leave your boring friends behind. Because your friends don't dance and if they don't dance well they're no goofs of mine.

This Day in Goofery
The Mayor’s been on vacation. Not from goofing, from the Internet. She will catch up with the daily goof just as fast as her lazy ass permits.

May 12
1812: Birth of Edward Lear

A Goof City holiday! Any compendium of goofiness must pay tribute to Sir Edward Lear (he wasn’t a sir in England, but is here in Goof City). Our goofosophy relies on goofery and nonsense to mitigate the mayhem and suffering of life as we know it, which may also be ameliorated by dancing by the light of the moon, the moon…

Source: ozjthomas
Oh lovely pussy, oh pussy my love
what a beautiful pussy you are, you are, you are…
what a beautiful pussy you are

And here is my own homage to Sir Lear.

In the contest between the owl and the cat
As to which of the two is wiser
Well, I can certainly tell you that
If you’re looking for an advisor

There is no contest
It’s a total tie
Their secret is
They live, then they die

'Stop making sense!'
-the man in the big suit

This Day in Goofery

May 11
1912: BIrth of Foster Brooks

It was a different age, the age of Dean Martin and Ed McMahon, who glorified and glamorized drinking, and our birthday boy, Foster Brooks, the only person ever who couldn’t be fired for coming to work drunk. He made a career of it.

Witness one of the most bizarre pairings of celebrities ever:

Source: LaffTherapy

I’ve been that drunk (for real) but certainly without being funny.

Don't be surprised, if in your alcohol-fueled goofiness, no one else finds you remotely goofy.

This Day in Goofery
The Mayor’s been on vacation. Not from goofing, from the Internet. She will catch up with the daily goof just as fast as her lazy ass permits.

May 10
1893: The Supreme Court ruled in Nix v. Hedden that under the Tariff Act of 1883, a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit--even though they knew that botanically the tomato is a fruit.

Before that, there was a lot of “It’s a fruit!” “It’s a vegetable!” “It’s a fruit!” “It’s a vegetable!” back-and-forth going on, and everyone was just plain sick of it. There arose a chorus of “Let’s just settle this once and for all!”

You can call it a fruit, you can call it a vegetable, but I just calls it “Bob.”
Source: thekingpoo

How can such a thing happen, for “the highest court in the land” to rule contrary to established fact?

You see, under the Tariff Act, tax had to be paid on vegetables but not fruit (and how is that fair?), and Messrs. Nix, Nix, Nix and Nix (John, John W., George W. and Frank W.) took the Collector of the Port of New York, Edward L. Hedden, “all the way” to the Supreme Court (no one simply takes things to the Supreme Court) to recover back duties they had paid under protest.

But even though Justice Horace Gray knew the tomato to be a fruit, in his opinion he bowed to the “public perception” of the tomato as a vegetable because it is commonly used as a main course, not a dessert.

During the course of this case, the defendant’s counsel read into the record the Webster’s dictionary definitions of pea, eggplant, cucumber, squash and pepper. In turn the plaintiff’s counsel read those of potato, turnip, parsnip, cauliflower, cabbage, carrot and bean. Shortly after the case was closed, the judges adjourned for lunch, where tomatoes were featured as a vegetable.

In Robertson v. Salomon, the Supreme Court decided that it is just fine to regard the bean as a vegetable, though it's really a seed. I've heard people proclaim 'The tomato is really a fruit, you know,' but have you ever heard tell of a three-seed salad?

This Day in Goofery

May 9
1950: L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health is released, a book that Scientologists consider “a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arch.”

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1911 – 1986), separated at birth from comedian Jon Lovitz,
Source: ron and jon

got it into his head that 75 million years ago give or take a few, a bloke named Xenu, dictator of the Galactic Confederacy,

…brought billions of his people to Earth in a DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology dogma holds that the essences of these many people remained, and that they form around people in modern times, causing them spiritual harm.

These events are known within Scientology as “Incident II”, and the traumatic memories associated with them as The Wall of Fire or the R6 implant. The narrative of Xenu is part of Scientologist teachings about extraterrestrial civilizations and alien interventions in earthly events, collectively described as space opera by Hubbard. Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan level III (OT III) in 1967, warning that the R6 “implant” (past trauma) was “calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) [sic] anyone who attempts to solve it”.

Within the Church of Scientology, the Xenu story is part of the church’s secret “Advanced Technology”, considered a sacred and esoteric teaching, and normally only revealed to members who have already contributed large amounts of money.

Thank you, fellow goofs, that’s all the goofery we have need of today.

L. Ron Hubbard, sat by his cupboard, eating his curds and whey, when along came Xenu and before even he knew, blew the damn world away. That's the breaks!

This Day in Goofery

May 8
1937: It may have been the birth of Thomas Pynchon

Author Thomas Pynchon has been called “an enigma shrouded in a mystery veiled in anonymity.” But his belief is that “recluse is a code word generated by journalists…meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters.’” He simply prefers not to be interviewed or photographed. So what? Big deal. It’s his own business. Someone described him in his high school yearbook photo as a “buck-toothed kid with a goofy grin and a pompadour.” Perhaps, like me, he’s grotesquely unphotogenic.

He too has been called “the only contemporary author whose novels can be compared to James Joyce’s with a straight face” (I was laughing when I typed that), a “literary heavyweight,” and, by The Nation, “the most intelligent, most audacious and most accomplished American novelist….” His style has been described as “Complex. Convoluted. Post-modern. Surreal. Tangential.”

He has his detractors, natch. Library Thing has a discussion thread called “Is Pynchon Worth the Trouble?” The Pulitzer Board vetoed the Fiction Jury’s selection of Gravity’s Rainbow for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, calling his prose “unreadable,” “turgid,” “overwritten,” and in parts “obscene.”

We should all be so unreadable. Some random samplings of Pynchon’s prose stylings:

From V:

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, canceling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered throughout the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart’s ticking (metronome’s music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp’s dance under the century’s own chandeliers…

From The Crying of Lot 49:

A number of frail girls…prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.

From Gravity’s Rainbow:

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror’s secret by which—though it is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down twenty generations… so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail.

From Vineland:

Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed.

From Against the Day:

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

If you or I could write like that, we wouldn’t be pimping ourselves on Twitter and Facebook now would we? But I would, as did Pynchon, portray myself on The Simpsons. Some wondered why such a private individual would choose such a venue to make a rare public “appearance” (as a cartoon with a bag over his head). One word: goofy!

image from http://www.themodernword.com

Erik Ketzan sees Pynchon’s “refusal to be ‘observed by the Public Eye’” as a “repudiation of American celebrity and the corporate forces behind it. In contemporary America, where most Americans would sell their souls to star on reality television, Pynchon stands almost alone, rejecting the attention, fame, and money which he could attain, metaphorically pissing on the corporate boardroom table, like his character, Roger Mexico, near the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. But each of Pynchon’s books blends gravity with levity, and the master seems to have spoken to us to deliver one simple commandment: never take The Simpsons, or Thomas Pynchon, too seriously. Q.E.D.”

I see it like this: say what you will of Thomas Pynchon, first and foremost, he is one great big goof.

Somewhere over Levity's Rainbow, I'm gonna goof with that guy.

This Day in Goofery

May 7
1927: Birth of Totie Fields, who grew up to say, “Would you like to wake up every day with a smile on your face? Go to sleep every night with a clothes hanger in your mouth.” Can’t argue with that.

Someone get this gal another chair!

Totie continued to perform after losing a leg to a blood clot and a breast to cancer. She was a one classy goofer trooper.

This Day in Goofery

May 6
1988: New Jersey Devils coach Jim Schoenfeld suggested that referee Don Koharski have another doughnut.

Schoenfeld was not happy with Koharski’s performance during a playoff game with the Boston Bruins, and waited for him near his dressing room. Koharski fell, and thinking Schoenfeld had pushed him, yelled , “You’re done!” implying that he would be suspended.

“Good, because you fell, you fat pig!” responded the coach. “Have another doughnut! Have another doughnut!”

Source: hockeybooks

The NHL did suspend Schoenfeld, but the Devils were granted a court order staying the suspension. According to Wikipedia, ‘The National Hockey League Officials’ Association stood by Koharski; its members said they would not take the ice in the next game between the Devils and the Bruins if Schoenfeld was allowed to coach. This resulted in the NHL being forced to use low-level replacement officials for the game, with the two linesmen wearing Devils-coloured Cooperall long pants (at the time, green pants with red-and-white stripes), along with white helmets and yellow practice jerseys over their street clothes.”

People often involve innocently-bystanding doughnuts in their angry rants, witness Garth in “Wayne’s World.”

Source: nasake123

I don’t know why anyone would pick on a sugary fluffy comfort food to express their wrath, but I would suggest they simmer. down. now. and get goofy.

You know if you stab a doughnut in the dead of winter, shame on you!