Archive | March, 2011

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit in the wind, and you don’t sue if you get hit by a train.

11 Mar

March 11, 2011

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
You don’t walk on train tracks
And you don’t mess around with Jim, da do da do…
                -Jim Croce, with additional lyrics by the Bar Association

OK, that isn’t quite the song but it probably should be.

I’ve covered stupid lawsuits before. They’ve been around since the dawn of time.

Take the Judgment of Paris. Paris, (a Trojan citizen, not the city) was chosen by Zeus to pick the most beautiful goddess. Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite each claimed to be the fairest. This was not Athena’s finest moment. Aphrodite was the goddess of love and thus generally accounted the most beautiful goddess. As Zeus’ wife, Hera was the Queen of the Gods of Olympus and also Athena’s step-mother. As the goddess of wisdom you have to wonder what Athena was thinking. It seems like a pretty bone-headed idea to get in that contest. And for what? A golden apple. It was probably just gold-plated anyway.

Paris wasn’t too swift either. The safe pick was probably Hera. However, he let himself be swayed by Aphrodite. That’s not hard to believe when you consider that she bribed him by offering him the love of the world’s most beautiful woman. Don’t judge either of them too harshly as cheating was to the Greek Pantheon as chubby teenage girls are to Justin Bieber. Hera offered to make him king of most of the known world and Athena offered him unbeatable wisdom in warfare. Again, what was Athena thinking? If he was King of the world and had Hera on his side, he wouldn’t need help from Athena. And again, Paris was not very quick on the upswing. As king of the world I bet he could have easily gotten the love of the world’s most beautiful woman. I’m not saying Helen of Troy was a gold digger but you never saw her with a broke… you know what I mean.

And if you consider how this was all orchestrated behind the scenes by Eris the goddess of discord as revenge for a party snub then they all look like stooges.

This led to the Trojan War.

The moral of the story? Like lawsuits, common sense has been lacking since the dawn of time. And a lack of common sense and stupid lawsuits go hand in hand.

For example, the article above suggests a pressing need for signs like this:

Of course, that is hardly original. For example, this warning sign was found just inside the walls of Troy attached to some wooden ship beams that had been made into the shape of a horse:

That Odysseus was one clever fellow. When he wasn’t dressing as a woman and pretending to farm on the beach to dodge the draft he was a pretty shrewd fellow. He knew the one thing those warning signs do: Absolutely nothing. But it did keep him indemnified from all the lawsuits brought by the families of all the Trojans he slaughtered.

But shrewd as he was, Odysseus could never have been licensed as a barber in California:

Want more fun with Jim Croce? Check out this video:

By the way, doesn’t “Jim Croce and the Bar Association” sound like a good name for band?

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Picture Postcard Thursday

10 Mar

March 10, 2011

Our last picture this week (unless I find a good picture) is once again from Forgotten NY. It isn’t a masterpiece of the photographic art by any stretch but it is interesting to me as I have driven right past it hundreds of times and wondered it if was the last of its kind. Turns out it is. Forgotten NY is a great site to poke around in if you like all things old and historically interesting with a New York Focus.

The Forgotten NY page about this lamp can be found here.

 

From the site:

I have just one photo today. It’s the last dodo, passenger pigeon, aepyornis, mammoth, tyrannosaur, brachiothere, trilobite, and someday, the last human. It’s the last of its type. Once, thousands of these wooden posts lined the parkways of New York and Long Island, built when they were literally parkways, running through wooded enclaves with tiny houses and green lawns. I call them the Woodies. They lit the great parkways constructed by Robert Moses beginning in the 1930s: the Belt (or Shore) Parkway; the Cross Island; the Laurelton; the Bronx River; and many others. Occasionally they found their way to regular city streets (I have seen pictures of them on 37th Street along GreenWood Cemetery and on Euclid Avenue in East New York) but mainly they were there to impart a rustic look.

Bucolicism left NYC in the 1950s and urbanism accelerated, and gradually, the Woodies disappeared. Their last bastion was the Belt and Shore Parkways in Brooklyn and Queens, where they hung on into the 1980s, though they were gradually supplanted by Deskeys. Finally the mixed bag of Woodies and Deskeys were sent packing and the Belt was lined with shiny, cylindrical poles (which you see in the background here).

The last Woody can be found on a service road connecting the Laurelton Parkway with the westbound Belt. Catch it while you can. While the odd decommissioned Woody can still be seen in the odd parking lot or pedestrian bridge, this is the last working example, and when it goes…they’re all gone.

Next week Picture Postcard will feature pictures taken by me, your obedient servant, primarily during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when I was but a mere slip of a lad.

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