Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Just received a copy of an e-mail which is apparently making the rounds. Taken at face value, it's funny in a kind of shared-misery, rolling-of-the-eyes, what-a-world-this-is way. But it has a little more than face value (emphasis mine):

Thanks to all my friends who sent me such important emails in 2004! It's so wonderful that you included me in your quest to inform!

Because of all of you I stopped drinking Coca-Cola after I found out from you that it's good for removing toilet stains.

I stopped going to the movies for fear of sitting on a needle infected with a disease.

I smell awful, but thank goodness I stopped using deodorant because you said it causes cancer.

I don't leave my car in any parking lot even though I sometimes have to walk about seven blocks, because you said that someone might drug me with a perfume sample and then try to rob me.

I also stopped answering the phone because you said that they will ask me to dial a stupid number and then I get a high phone bill with calls to Uganda, Singapore, Tokyo and maybe the Mars Rover.

I stopped eating chicken and hamburgers because you told me they are nothing more than horrible mutant freaks with no eyes or feathers that are bred in a lab so that places like McDonalds can sell their Big Macs.

I also stopped drinking anything out of a can - you said that I will get sick from the rat faeces and urine.

When I go to parties, I now don't mix with anybody - you said that someone will take my kidneys and leave me taking a nap in a bathtub full of ice.

However, the police are also after me at present because you said not to pull over as they could be fake policemen trying to kidnap me.

I went bankrupt from bounced checks that I wrote, in anticipation of the $15,000 that Microsoft and AOL were supposed to send me when I participated in their special e-mail program.

It's weird, though, that my new free cell phone never arrived, and neither did the passes for my paid vacation to Disneyland.

But I am positive that all this is because of the chain I broke or forgot to follow and I got a curse.

OOPS I ALMOST FORGOT, IMPORTANT NOTE: If you don't send this e-mail to at least 1200 people in the next ten seconds, a bird will crap on you tonight at 7:00 PM.

Here's to an even better informed 2005!

The poor-man's dipthongal "faeces" is a nice touch (and how many times have you wished you could start a sentence that way?), although it makes us suspect that the e-mail originated in some delicate European setting where people are disinclined to call a turd a turd. More telling, though, is the piece's nearer point of distribution: it came to me from a friend who in turn received it from a fellow -- let's call him Royce -- who used to work with us.

Now, Royce is also a friend of mine, in a way; for a while, I worked for people who worked for him. In fact, I'm apparently enough of a friend that throughout 2004 I received sometimes weekly and, yes, forwarded e-mails directly from him -- e-mails to which he'd occasionally prepend his own brief comments. Can you guess the nature of those forwards?

Maybe the best way to summarize the answer to that question would be to append my own bulleted list of things I learned in 2004, thanks to Royce's input:

• Tony Blair believes the USA and its president are "on the right track" because "A simple way to take the measure of a country is to look at how many want in and how many want out."
• Bill Gates continues to impersonate Charles J. Sykes, author of the book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add, by -- yet again! -- speaking on "The Work Ethic" at commencement exercises for Mt. Whitney High School in Visalia, California. This address("about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world" ) still consists of the same old pithy advice: Life is not fair; the world won't care about your self-esteem; you will NOT make $60,000 right out of high school; etc. Interestingly, though, in this election year someone thought to add: "If you agree, pass it on. If you can read this - Thank a teacher! If you are reading it in English-Thank a soldier!!"
• Andy Rooney, all evidence and his own denials to the contrary, offered a number of his own pithy observations on the state of the country, continuing to impersonate George Carlin, Ted Nugent, and various other people who, in turn, claim that they are not impersonating and in fact have no relationship at all to (are you following this?) some guy on the popular wingnut Free Republic site.
• Dan Rather's bungling of the Killian story means that all complaints and questions about W's National Guard "service" are without merit.
• John Kerry (as reported by the Boston Herald, Fox News, the Washington Times, and other non-partisan sources) has no right to speak about the poor and other unfortunates because he is rich and his wife is richer. When he or she does speak about them, it always comes out condescendingly. George Bush is also rich but you don't hear him going on about society's obligations to those living on the margin.
  
• US Senators and Representatives live the high life well into retirement, thanks to a little-known twist in legislation which excepts them from Social Security but provides them with their own secret retirement benefits. For example, "former Senator Byrd and Congressman White and their wives may expect to draw $7,800,000.00 (that's Seven Million, Eight-Hundred Thousand Dollars), with their wives drawing $275,000.00 during the last years of their lives." Further, "Their cost for this excellent plan is $0.00. NADA... ZILCH."
• A 34-year-old photograph showing the young John Kerry seated three or four rows behind -- but nonetheless undeniably with -- Jane Fonda understandably enraged many veterans who said that the association, if not actual relationship, between JK and JF was a "slap in the face" to Vietnam veterans.
• Kerry -- again, Kerry! -- demonstrated his mendacity (which is much worse than president Bush's) by personally and single-handedly voting into law during the Clinton years -- the Clinton years! -- a 17% Medicare premium increase, and then falsely tried to pin some of the responsibility for it on the president. The president!
• The top seven issues in helping us to choose a president in 2004, in decreasing order of importance, should be: Gay Marriage; Partial-Birth Abortion; Restoring voluntary prayer in the public schools; Mel Gibson & the making of a film about Christ; Boy Scouts' belief in God and not allowing Homosexual Scout Leaders; Asking for God's blessing on America; [and] Judges [Ed.: by which we mean the people who sit at the front of the courtroom, not the Old Testament book] ("President bush says 'We need common-sense judges who believe our rights are derived from God.' John Kerry insists on judges who support the ACLU's radical anti-Christian, anti-God, anti-family agenda").

I could go on, but I won't. I do think a great deal of Royce, who is now well into his 70s and maybe deserves to cherish and hold onto whatever truths, so to speak, he can find in life. But sometimes the irony just becomes too overwhelming to let slide, y'know?