Passwords II

A completely inaccurate merging of several conversations between Ben and me:

“Amy and I had dinner last weekend with Brad and a couple of other guys. One of them was a Buddhist who was also Elvis Costello fan and we spent some time swapping concert stories. He’d been to Madam Wong’s and had seen the Naughty Sweeties during their heyday. On the other hand, he hates Jackson Pollack.”

“It’s always a little surprising when someone who likes the same things doesn’t like all the same things.”

“Yeah, it makes the idea of ‘shared experience’ a little dicey as a way of separating ‘us’ from ‘them.’”

“Then there’s the flip side, when people seem to like the same things, but for such completely different reasons that they might as well be from Mars.”

“Ah, sure. Welcome to my world. Except I’m the Martian.”

“Where’s the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth Shattering Kaboom!”

“The Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator! That creature has stolen the space modulator!”

“Speaking of Martians, what do you think of Tom Delay’s asking The Colbert Report for the clip of Colbert asking Robert Greenwald, ‘Who hates America more, you or Michael Moore.”

“I think Delay and some of his people may be brain-damaged. There are certain sorts of deficits that make people unable to comprehend irony. It’s like aphasia; they just don’t hear it.”

“Well, that’s charitable.”

“Yeah, I’m a philanthropist. But maybe that’s another way to run the password thing. Remember when we were doing IQ guessing?”

“Yeah, you were pretty good at it.”

“It’s not that hard. Most IQ tests load primarily onto verbal acuity. You can get that by just talking to someone for a few minutes. I do remember that a friend of mine in college asked me what I thought the IQ of his fiancé was. I thought about it a moment and realized that she was smarter than I’d have first thought, IQ around 135, which turned out to be an exact hit. But she’d laughed at the right places in our jokes, not a beat behind, like someone does who is following someone else’s laughter.”

“You think it would work for the sentry?”

“I don’t see why not. Guy comes up to the checkpoint and the guard says, ‘Halt, friend or foe?’ and the other guy says, ‘Friend.’ So the sentry says, 'A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar…'”

Screed

Oh lord, do I dislike the word “meme.” Let me quote from the Wikipedia:

One important criticism of meme theory hinges on the following question: "If memes are the solution, what is the problem?"

“Meme” comes from that troublemaker Richard Dawkins, of course, as an analogy to "gene" in molecular biology. I usually don’t mind a bit of trouble, but really now, enough is too much. Meme, according to Dawkins refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Dawkins said, “Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.”

So what exactly is wrong with using the words “tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” when you want to refer to them? Or, if you’re moving up the abstraction chain, what’s wrong with “idea, concept, notion, belief, ideology, etc. etc. etc. I mean, it’s not as if we have a dearth of words for these things.

Worse, gene actually means something; most genes code for a particular kind of protein formation, and those that don’t are modifiers of other gene expression (or they are “silent,” but what good is a “silent meme?”). What’s the analogy to a protein in the abstract universe of the “meme?” Behavior? Emotion? Doing the funky chicken? (Which may be considered both behavior and emotion if you’re doing it correctly). Moreover, genes are communicated primarily from parent to offspring, while “memes” are mostly just communicable. So memes are more like viruses and other diseases. If you want to look at the spread of ideas, its better to look at disease vector models than it is to look at heritability.

And, crap, here I am treating this as if it actually meant something. But “meme” has more meanings than “paradigm” another fad word that caused more trouble than it was worth. And a word with too many meanings winds up having no meaning at all. These are words that make you stupid, or at least words that interfere with clear thinking.

No, I’m thinking that “meme” is more akin to the secret password (see message 106, May 29, 2006). It’s a word that is overwhelmingly used by the left/progressive side of the intellectual aisle, expressing solidarity with Dawkins, Darwin, and in-your-face you creationist, Christian conservative scum!

Well, dang, your goal is admirable; it’s your methods I question. At least that’s my “story,” (or idea, notion, plan of action) and I’m sticking with it.

I don’t much like mimes, either.

Rainmaker on the Flood Plain

Sometimes he's hitching a ride in a freezer or appears as a mist
He's also been known to introduce himself as a scientist
He could be the retarded son of an old woman with
Seven fingers on each hand
'cos I know I reckon, he will come when he's beckoned for

Rainmaker's coming
Rainmaker's coming
Rainmaker's coming to soak us with water
To soak us with water
--Rainmaker, Sparklehorse

Rainmakers were big after the Civil War. The “Great American Desert,” east of the Rockies was renamed the “Great Plains” and the states of Kansas, Okalahoma, Nebraska, etc. were filling rapidly. The slogan “rain follows the plow” seems to have originated amongst climatologists, but it was rapidly employed by the railroads, who owned vast tracts of land on the Plains and who also stood to benefit from any trade generated by farm communities that were established.

Of course rains doesn’t follow the plow, and the Plains region is subject to periodic droughts. Eventually farmers tapped into the Ogallala Aquifer, and that’ll do them for another few decades, until a geological age’s worth of water is used up. Then we’ll be back to the situation those first farmers found themselves in, though presumably with a lot more tech.

The late 19th Century rainmakers tended to use cannons a lot. That fed into the lingering belief that cannons caused rain; it certainly must have seemed like that to Union soldiers who’d never seen Deep South weather before. And if the rainmaker got lucky, some rain did come during his brief tenure in whatever small town had hired him. Then he looked like a hero, or maybe even a god.

But I started this dance and a storm kicked up
The sky went black from coast to coast
It was too late to stop - it was too late to pray
I had summoned down the Holy Ghost
Oh the searing wind and the clouds of dust
And hell came raining down
What came out of me and the powers that be
Was the last of that one horse town
--Rainmaker, Kansas

There were, of course, stories of rainmakers who’d been too successful, and sometimes floods do occur out on the Great Plains. But the term “Rainmaker” has come to mean the Guy With the Mojo, the one who brings business into the consultancy, the law firm, or the accountancy. In other words, the guy who does the Marketing.

The story goes that Orville Redenbacher’s first attempts to sell his new hybrid popcorn were not successful. It was called RedBow, after Redenbacher and his partner, Charlie Bowman, and it was more expensive than regular popcorn. An advertising/marketing consulting firm suggested that Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popcorn was a much better name, and the rest is history.

Redenbacher supposedly once said, “My mother gave me the name 50 years ago, and she didn’t charge me $13,000 for it.” Yeah, but neither did she give him the wit to use it, either, though he apparently knew a good idea when he heard it. Or maybe Charlie Bowman did.

Rainmaker, rainmaker
The sky is gray just by the touch of your hand
Rainmaker, rainmaker
Make me some rain, make all my crops grow tall
--Rainmaker, Traffic (Winwood/Capaldi)

It does occur to me to wonder, though, what good is a rainmaker without farmers and a drought? In California, an unseasonable rain can ruin some crops. A rainmaker in the upper Amazon is just silly, worse than useless really.

There is that tendency to focus on the Star and not the surrounding planetary nebula. Well, sure, the Star is singular and there are so many lesser bodies surrounding it. But what happens if the town has two or three rainmakers? How about a dozen? At some point you hit diminishing returns. At some later point, it becomes actively dangerous.

When we listen to the Rainmaker story
Then we listen to a song that never ends
When we listen to the Rainmaker story
We're in the end only points on a scale for the Rainmaker
--Rainmaker, Vanden Plas, (Lill/Kuntz)

There’s a river named Stones River that runs near Donelson, where I grew up. Farther upstream, near Murfreesboro, it was site to one of the great battles of the Civil War (though I sometimes wonder if there were any minor battles to that war, at least to hear the locals hear about it). Between Stones River National Battlefield and Donelson sits Percy Priest Lake, created by Percy Priest Dam. The dam was one of the last hurrahs of the Army Corps of Engineers and the TVA, with an awful lot of the “benefit” in the cost/benefit ratio being “recreation.” Well, I do know guys who take their boats out on it a lot.

The flood plain for Stones River in Donelson is very obvious when you’re driving out Lebanon Rd. (Pike on the maps, but we always said “road”) toward Hermitage. A few years after the dam went up, construction began on a lot of houses, condos, and a country club in the flood plain. I imagine it’s safe enough; modern dams rarely break or overflow. Right?

I wonder what it's like to be the Rainmaker
I wonder what it's like to know that I make the rain
I'd store it in boxes with little yellow tags on everyone
And you can come see them when I'm... done, when I'm done
--Rainmaker, Matchbox 20

As I said, these days the Rainmaker is the marketing guy, or the star with the reputation that brings in the business. I’ve seen that up close and personal in the consulting biz, and it’s rarely the Rainmaker who winds up doing the work. Usually, that falls to the new-kids-just-out-of-school, because they’re cheap, so you load the contract up with their hours in order to be low bid. So the Rainmaker turns into just the Front, the public face of the firm, while the twenty and early thirty-somethings put in the all-nighters. Sometimes it works, and you get some real talent just out of school. Sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time it doesn’t matter, because the study is going to get buried anyway. Sometimes the study is meant to fail; and boy, do they get pissed if it comes out with some real results.

More generally, what does it say about an economy that depends on marketing, the way agriculture depends on rain? I never believed John Kenneth Galbraith when he claimed that “demand” in the American economy was mostly artifice, with advertising and marketing being able to create consumption where none would naturally exist. I mean, you know, New Coke.

But a few examples of spectacular failures don’t invalidate the hypothesis as such. When all the social pressures are to live in the right place, drive an impressive vehicle, give the gifts, buy the toys, chase after that inevitable brass ring, it’s worth re-examining the question every now and then. It’s always worth wondering when the aquifer is going to run dry.

Me, I seem to have a talent for cool titles; whether or not what follows lives up to the advance billing is always in doubt.

You tell me we can start the rain. You tell me that we all can change
You tell me we can find something to wash the tears away. You tell me we can start the rain
You tell me that we all can change. You tell me we can find something to wash the tears.
--Rainmaker, Iron Maiden

The Lucy Factor

I Love Lucy is one of the revered shows of classic television and rightly so. It broke ground in so many ways that I can’t even begin to list them. On the other hand, the style of comedy it represented was profoundly conservative.

I never had any problem with “Lucy as clown;” Lucille Ball was a gifted comedienne, and a joy to watch when she was doing physical comedy. But that’s not what the situation comedy is all about. No, the sitcom generally works in the realm that begins with farce and ends in the comedy of humiliation and embarrassment.

I’ve seen some analyses of the Lucy show from the deconstructionist, sociological standpoint, and I think there’s merit to those views. Post-WWII America was busily trying to put a genie back into the bottle; some of those women who’d worked in the manufacturing plants, and most of everything else, when all the men folk were off a’fightin’, had decided that they rather liked doing something other than just changing diapers, cleaning house, and sending the kids off to school. They’d discovered ambition, in other words, and the very worst sort: personal ambition, ambition for their own selves, and not the sort that lives through other people.

I’m certainly not going to say that there was some sort of memo from the patriarchy. No one said, “The women are getting uppity, time to take them down a notch or two.” But a zeitgeist is a zeitgeist, and the creators of popular culture ride whatever waves are coming through. If they don’t, the series gets cancelled.

So Lucy Ricardo expended enormous effort and imagination in various attempts to crash into show business, or get a job, or even meet someone famous, and inevitably her efforts go agley, and she winds up embarrassed and humiliated. She has met her comeuppance. Back to the home fires for her.

Feminist theory aside, I seldom took much enjoyment from I Love Lucy, for the simple reason that I didn’t, and don’t, enjoy watching other people’s embarrassment. This comes up frequently in comedy generally, of course, and I’ve adopted the simple shorthand for it, as the Lucy Factor. You may find the movie/joke/sitcom uproariously funny, but I’m leaving the room because I find it too uncomfortable. If asked, I’ll just say, “It’s the Lucy Factor.” It is, in many ways, the obverse of The Zero Effect.

It’s no better in real life. I find all sorts of things difficult to watch because I just find them embarrassing. That includes Presidential speeches and press conferences by the way.

Both embarrassment and humiliation are social phenomena; it’s hard to feel embarrassed or humiliated when alone, for example. Shame is another word for some things in that whole complex. Shame depends on other people being aware of what shamed you, while guilt is something that can be accomplished in the privacy of your own mind.

Humiliation is a demeaning and a diminishment. It’s all about what position someone occupies in the status hierarchy, and it’s about lowering that position in an aggressive fashion. I believe that it’s a lot more important in politics and ideology than is usually acknowledged, and, just as an example, I will suggest that, whatever else they had in common, the 9/11 hijackers all regularly partook of what they considered humiliation, prior to their deciding to sign on for the Big Flight.

Given that we all operate in various social hierarchies and very, very, few of us are at the acknowledged pinnacle of success, how do we all deal with our daily rations of humiliation? The old method was resignation, to “keep to one’s place.” That, however, only works when aspirations are set aside. Lucy would never have had a problem if she’d just stayed at home and kept house (she wouldn’t have had a TV show, either). But when social hierarchies are in flux, even the unambitious and unimaginative are hard pressed to find a place.

Some professions have inevitably large amounts of humiliation. Consider the jargon of the standup. To fail is “to die out there.” To succeed is “to kill.” “Die,” in this context is to be humiliated. “Kill” is the alternative. Good thing it's all metaphorical.

Every performing profession has its humiliation ration, from actor to politician to porn star. How do they deal with it?

I suspect that compartmentalization is the greatest tonic against the rot. It’s a lot easier to play the part, say the words, withstand the sneers, if you can say to yourself, “This isn’t really me. It’s not my whole life. I’m just here for a little while, and then I can go be myself.” Call it life portfolio diversification. We have a lot of social hierarchies in America, and you can usually find at least one or two where you’re not a total loser.

For the true performer, the false face can be the greatest asset. Here “this isn’t really me,” can be writ large. In fact, there is some joy in it. Actors in sitcoms get to go through all the actions that humiliate, but it really isn’t them. Furthermore, they have control over the situation, in ways that we poor hypersensitive viewers do not.

I do find that my own reactions to the comedy of embarrassment does take a cue from how believable the characters are. For comfort, the more cartoon-like the better. Lucy was hard to take, but Night Court never hit home, so I could enjoy it more easily. Dan Fielding getting humiliated was no more real than Bull Shannon getting hit by lighting.

It’s also possible that ritualizing the humiliation gives the feeling of freedom, or maybe even the real thing, actual freedom. Perhaps some porn stars really do enjoy the sense of breaking the chains of repression by donning the chains of ritual subservience and acting it out as a public performance. Perhaps some politicians really do relish the risks of getting caught, and perhaps even enjoy the being caught, if forgiveness is in the offing. At least that’s my take on the 42nd President of the United States, and now, the Governor of New York.

I Have Officially Scared Myself

The folks at The World's Fair call it a meme, but it's really just a game:

...the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.

To make it easier, we'll let you use a search statement enclosed in quotations - this is just to increase your chances of turning up as number one, but if you happen to have a website with the awesome traffic to command the same statement without quotations, then flaunt it baby! Of course, once you find your 5 statements, pass the meme on to others.

Okay, this blog I have here is not a high traffic site; I'm pretty sure I have yet to hit triple digits for a single day. But...

Killus gives my sff.net web page. But the following single words bring you here:

• trademarksism
• semi-karma
• vertkrieg
• vuutle

But wait! There's more! The following search strings, sans quotes, also come up #1 on Google:

• brittle strategies
• John Galt is a slan
• fox hollow cafe lena
• nonrepresentational art pollack
• nonrepresentational art richard powers
• creepy little smile
• death rays and disintegrators
• playing the rent
• dead catfish under the drivers seat
• rocket boys meet radioactive boy scout
• max headroom stirner
• magic market fairy dust
• phony tough crazy brave alsop
• privation morality
• tihs not typo
• dorothy slave girl of oz
• knurdly lasers
• slan a critique

These need quotes:

• "black swan bashing"
• "son of on the road"
• "moral equivalent of socialism"
• "why barry goldwater lost tennessee"

I'm giving up now. And maybe going upstairs to pull the covers over my head.

Phony Tough and Crazy Brave

Many years ago, I read a column by Stewart Alsop, in which appeared the classic phrase “The Phony Tough and the Crazy Brave.” I’ve googled and found that most people remember the phrase being from Full Metal Jacket, but Alsop’s column was about Watergate.

Most of the Watergate conspirators were Phony Tough, given to pronouncements like “I would walk over my grandmother if necessary to assure the President's reelection.” They liked to curse (expletive deleted), and strut around, and tell each other how manly they were.

Alsop had seen their like in the military, where such behavior is fairly common. Much rarer were the “Crazy Brave,” the men who really would walk over their grandmothers, punch out their enemies, hold their hands over flames, or do whatever else the phony toughs would brag about – and more. Such men flourish during wartime, because war is the dissolution of the rules of civilized behavior, and is the natural habitat of the lawless and the sociopathic. So the idea of war appeals to the phony tough, but the actuality of war gratifies the crazy brave.

Alsop wrote about the hoodoo that the crazy brave have over the phony tough, because the latter have few defenses against the man who dares them to follow through on their braggadocio. When G. Gordon Liddy proposes to break into DNC headquarters, how can John Mitchell say no, without being seen as weak? When Oliver North decides to sell arms illegally to Iran in order to fund his crazy brave brethren in Nicaragua, what is John Poindexter other than a rubber stamp?

As a friend of mine says, the Militia Movement is primarily about going out in the woods on weekends, getting barking drunk, and telling the other guys how manly you are. The crazy brave Tim McVeigh must have come as quite a shock. Now they're talking tough about policing the border, because illegal immigrants are easy prey. I'd say it would be interesting to see what happens if one of the Minutemen encounters actual drug smugglers sometime, but that's just me projecting my own violent fantasies on someone else, which is only one step away from the phony toughness trap. So I think I'll just say, "Drink up, guys! And stay off the highways."

Phony toughness is the essence of a certain kind of bully and we live in a time of national bullydom. I can’t pinpoint the crazy braves who could crystallize the disaster. Ted Nugent is a draft-dodging gas bag, for example, good at killing small animals and blasting away at trees, but you've got to wonder how he'd fare in a real firefight. My guess: badly.

But I do so hope my country comes to its senses before the right seductive sociopath appears, ready, willing, and able to lead his countrymen straight over the cliff. All for toughness, you understand. It’s always important to be tough.

A Bit of Fast/Slow Sculpture

[Crossposted to We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party]

Several years ago, I was walking up Folger Avenue towards San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. The University of California owns a building that sits between Folger and 67 St. on San Pablo Avenue, or at least they did. They’ve been trying to sell it recently, and I’m not current on its status, but they still occupy a lot of it. The building itself is huge, and, as I understand it, actually straddles the boundaries of not just Berkeley and Oakland, but also Emeryville.

I was headed toward the offices of a non-profit that I was involved with at the time (that backstory is ‘way too complicated), but my path took me by the U.C. Berkeley surplus and overstock sales area, at 1000 Folger St., where they have auctions every Tuesday and Thursday. So there are often people loading stuff into trucks, vans, and whatever, starting at about 9 A.M. on those two days each week. There’s a lot of old surplus computer stuff that gets sold that way.

I was carrying a briefcase, which isn’t important to the story, but it’s part of the “sense memory.” I was passing by a guy who was loading a lot of surplus computer stuff into a panel truck, just as the pile of stuff he’d loaded shifted and began to topple towards him.

The wall of electronics included a lot of monitors. Imploding CRTs and glass everywhere: not so good. I stepped in and put my shoulder in an appropriate spot and halted the avalanche. I looked at the guy, who had an interesting combination of gratitude and terror on his face. I realized that he had no idea what to do next, as we were both holding up a wall of computer monitors that was trying to fall.

Okay, here’s where I get to brag a little. There’s a cluster of mental aptitudes that gets called things like “3-D visualization” and “geometrical intuition” and like that. I am nearly off the charts in this particular cluster of aptitudes. I can pack a car trunk or a suitcase like you wouldn’t believe, and I would have made a very good mechanical engineer.

So I shifted my body to where I was doing almost all of the job of keeping the stuff from falling, and I began giving him directions. Move that one over there. Now take that one down and put it one the ground. Now that one, no not that one, the other one. And so forth. We deconstructed the unstable pile in fairly short order, then I began helping him put the stuff back into a better arrangement, one that wouldn’t shift when the drove the truck to wherever he was going.The whole adventure only took maybe ten minutes.

At the end of it, the guy thanked me profusely, I smiled and said, “You’re welcome. It was actually kinda fun,” and I headed up Folger once more. Spring in my step? Probably.

The idea of altruism is considered to be problematic in evolutionary biology, economics, psychology, and moral philosophy. It obviously exists, yet these disciplines don’t feel that they adequately explain it. It may be noted that each of them also has its own special definition of what “altruism” is, one that excludes a lot of behavior that is normally called altruistic.

Part of this nomenclature problem stems from trying to exclude actions that benefit both others and one’s own self, with the notion of what constitutes “one’s own self” being the real slippery one here. Take my little adventure described above. Let me describe the ways I benefited from it.

There are many things that can ruin a morning, bad traffic, being awakened by a wrong number half an hour before it’s time to get up, seeing a dead dog in the road, or watching a tower of computer monitors come crashing down. That would have been quite unpleasant, even if no one wound up injured, and there was a real possibility of that happening.

Moreover, I got to show off a competency, not only at the time, but in the later telling of the tale.

There is also a very abstract pleasure that comes from making sculpture, and that was what I was doing, taking apart a defective sculpture and replacing it with one that was both aesthetically pleasing (to me, anyway) and utilitarian as well. And the sculpture, taken in the larger sense, was kinetic, deconstruction, reconfiguration, then the later driving and final disassembly. I didn’t get to witness the last part, but I’m pretty sure it turned out all right.

Also, the guy thanked me, which is a form of applause, validation, and better than a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.

Birth of a Catchphrase

In 1978, I bought a new car, the only dealer-new car I’ve ever bought. I drove it for the next twenty years.

It was a Honda Civic, two doors, with a luggage rack on top that I used a number of times. I didn’t carry a weight equivalent to the car, but it sometimes felt like it. It got 35-40 miles per gallon, doubtless assisted by the fact that for much of the time, 55 was the speed limit, and I didn’t drive much above the speed limit, because I got the 4 speed model.

I got the Honda in part because I was impressed with the engineering of the CVCC engine. I’d just recently done a survey on nitrogen oxide emissions into the atmosphere, and part of that involved reading a lot of Society of Automotive Engineers publications on IC engines and emissions. The CVCC stratified-charge engine was one of the most intrinsically clean designs ever, low in hydrocarbons because it was “lean burn” but also low in NOx because of a very clever “slowly moving flame front” technique they’d developed, that kept the NOx from being “frozen out” by a sudden quench in combustion temperature that usually went along with the IC cycle.

Of course, the low emissions thing kinda stopped when I finally blew one of the valves and began running the thing on three cylinders for the last 18 months of its life.

Anyway, my own personal auto has been a Honda since that first one; Amy drives a minivan, because here show has a lot of stuff in it, and besides, minivans are handy for cross country trips. Still, I drove more times across the country in my ’78 Honda than I’ll probably ever do again.

I got my most recent Honda Civic about five years ago, and I didn’t drive it much for a couple of weeks, because I still hadn’t gotten rid of the previous one. When I finally did make the changeover, I noticed an odd smell in it, something that hadn’t been obvious when I originally test drove it. It took me a day or two to investigate, and when I did, I found a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.

I surmised that the last trip by the previous owners had been to go fishing, and one of them had “gotten away,” just not into the water. So it lay under the seat, probably buried in whatever freshener they’d used as part of the “clean the car so we can sell it,” endeavor. But the time I touched it, the catfish had gone slimy and, well, pretty disgusting, really. I got some paper towels to pick it up, then tossed it into some bushes behind where I worked. I looked for it the next day, but it was gone, I assume to some animal, domestic or otherwise. My workplace bordered a Bay Area Nature Area.

It took no small amount of effort to clean up the residue. I used soap, ammonia, vinegar, and bleach in sequence (not together, I’m quite aware of the hazards of ammonia and bleach), as well as substantial amounts of rinse water. The smell still lingered for a week or so, but then faded.

Some people say about some minor boon, “Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” I sometimes say, “Better than a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.” If you ever hear anyone else say that, they got it from me.