And a Happy Huchmus to You

<span>I'm Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain'a? So listen, this newspaper is celebrating its 30th-anniversary year; and me, myself, is toasting his own 25 years of whipping out these essays like a fry cook at your favorite greasy spoon. Yeah, big focking deal.</span><span><br /><br />I was watching a TV show the other night, and if you want to talk longevity, consistency, then you got to take a gander at North Korea, where scientists say space-satellite photos show the country to be dark no-light at night, every night. Not even the faintest ember from an inhaled Lucky Strike, no sir. Black as Dick Cheney's heart. Black as non-taxpaying GE's yearly profit statement, yes sir. The northern half of the Korean Peninsula appears at night from space exactly as it would 1,000 years ago. <em>One-thousand focking years ago</em></span><span>, Jack. A millennium. And that makes a guy like me start to wonder.</span><span><br /><br />Yeah yeah, every Tom, Dick and Dickless keeps yakking about all these swell improvements we got going compared to the olden days of a thousand years agolike being able to sit in a plane with no food on an airport runway for five-six hours 'cause a focking computer somewheres went <em>ferchacta</em></span><span>. Or, we got indoor plumbing nowadays, which means when your snot-nose kid flushes the Elmo puppet down the crapper and it backs up all over the floor and every plumber you call is booked solid for a couple, three weeks, you can't just run outdoors and take a goddamn leak wherever you good and goddamn well choose like you used to be able before the PVC pipe was discovered.</span><span><br /><br />I'm betting a buck two-eighty that there's more things haven't changed in a thousand years than there are these cosmetic changes that are supposed to make everything all the time a piece of focking cake. And the first no-change that comes to my mind is that every time a guy turns around, you still run into a whole bunch of abso-focking-lutely clueless stupid people like you did 1,000 years ago and will continue to do so in a thousand years to come, ain'a?</span><span><br /><br />Yes sir, put me down for a big B.F.D. when it comes to all the so-called advancement progress we've made in a millennium. It's all a lot of huchmus, if you ask me. <em>Huchmus</em></span><span>, by the bye, is a Yiddish word for “baloney” I had to spell phonetically 'cause after a thousand years you still can't rub two knuckleheads together and come up with the same spelling for a Yiddish word, for christ sakes.</span><span><br /><br />In fact, I'm thinking that future historians will be of the belief that the Homo sapien, as a group, has been actually pretty gosh darn lazy and ill-attentive during these last thousand years, achieving little progress and meriting no better than a D+ or C- for effort. They will note, as I will now, that by the year 2000not to mention 2012everything should've been black and silver and your average Joe Schmo was a'supposed to be able to run to the grocery store in his own little spaceship by now. And what about the deal where people can still get certain strains of puking-sick-to-croak-from and the professionals don't know from what-the-fock? You got to be jerking my beefaroni. That's a big, red F all the way, baby.</span><span><br /><br />Over the course of 1,000 years, our experts on matters of sickness have progressed from thinking that Satan is responsible for your incurable disease or disability to thinking it's in your genes from the hereditary. And I'm thinking, well, for crying out loud then, Mendel opened the book on heredity over a hundred years ago, so what's the holdup with being able to close it, ain'a?</span><span><br /><br />Focking swell. So a dead relative from 1,000 years ago can just as easily have passed to me some kind of focked-up gene that'll come to blossom and make me drop dead tomorrow as can a holiday-inebriated live brother-in-law deliver me a shotgun blast to the breadbasket on account of having forgotten to help him dry-dock his goddamn rusty pontoon boat up by his crappy cottage last fall?</span><span><br /><br />Oh yeah, happy focking New Year, 'cause I'm Art Kumbalek and I told you so.</span>