Ask Alex - April 6th, 2018

Mom Alex

Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers.  Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.

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I’ve been gone for two weeks, which is inexscusable and for which I apologize deeply. I’d like to pretend that I am coming back with a particularly great column to make up for it, but that would be a lie...this one is pretty ordinary. Daryl wants to know about lighthouses, Lady Catherine needs to talk about caramel, however, you say it, and Dave needs some self-assessment. After that, Lady Jess has two questions...one of which is actually about Dave, and one of which is about mermaids.

So, let’s get right to it!

Submitted by: Daryl
One of my favorite lighthouses is the Cape May lighthouse. Where was America’s first lighthouse Alex?

Well, Daryl, funny you should ask, because t turns out that the first lighthouse in America was built in...wait for it...Boston, MA in 1716. The light, on Little Brewster Island in Boston Harbor, was destroyed during the Revolutionary War, but rebuilt in 1783 and still stands today.

This brings up a question, though...how were there no lighthouses in America for 100 years before that? It’s not like the lighthouse was a new invention, they date back to antiquity as both signposts for harbors and ports, and warnings of reefs and rocky formations. Themistocles built a lighthouse in Piraeus in the fifth century BC. The legendary Pharos of Alexandria was built in the third century BC and was renowned enough that we still talk about it today.

Like a lot of things developed in Rome and Greece, lighthouses did kind of fall out of use somewhat during the dark ages as European humanity more or less regressed for a millennium or so. {Thought exercise...watch Gladiator, and then watch Braveheart. Ask yourself which armies seem to be technologically more advanced and well-trained and then remember that Gladiator takes place over one thousand years earlier}. But, even with that, by the 12th and 13th centuries, new lighthouses were being built in England, Ireland and Spain to shepherd ocean-going ships.

But, for some inexplicable reason, the British colonies, despite being built entirely on the ocean and heavily reliant on Atlantic shipping, never felt the need to build lighthouses at any point in the 17th century. Nor did the Dutch, German or French settlements. Shit, the Spanish showed up in St. Augustine, FL in 1565!!! For over 100 years, the Europeans flocked to port cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk and Charleston, built a thriving Trans-Atlantic trade and somehow never worried about building things to, you know, help boats find those cities at night. Without sinking.

And it’s not like ships weren’t sinking, either. The Nottingham sunk after hitting rocks near Boon Island, ME in 1710. The HMS Culloden, HMS Zebra, HMS Hussar, Queen Anne’s Revenge, Adventure and El Salvador are among a long list of ships that ran aground further south before lighthouses were widely built in the U.S. It seems like a hundred or so ships sank off the coasts of just Massachusetts and North Carolina during this time...and still, no one thought that maybe a lighthouse made sense? It’s a wonder the Republic ever formed…

Anyway, on the subject of lighthouses, I would highly recommend The Light Between Oceans. It is, in some senses, kind of a tough book to get through. It is hard to decide, at a high level, how to feel about the lead characters. There are a couple of people who are indisputably victims, but it is difficult to not feel sympathy for the perpetrators...and very, very easy to understand how they reached the decisions they did. It’s just a really well written book (I have not seen the movie).

Submitted by: Lady Catherine
CARE-a-mel or car-MEL?

As most of you know, I am a Midwesterner by birth, and a Northeasterner by choice. For the most part, this life change has little impact on me (worth noting: I am from the biggest place in the Midwest, which is ironically the least Midwestern part of it), but there occasionally come moments when my soul appears to be torn in two distinct directions. Like, when the Red Sox play the Cubs, or people argue over whether Bill Russell was better than Michael Jordan, or The Bob Newhart Show vs. Cheers, or terrible eponymous bands (they are both awful).

Or, of course, when we need to discuss the most underrated ice cream topping, candy extraordinaire and all-around culinary masterpiece of cooked sugar known as caramel. Linguists will tell you that about 60% of Americans pronounce it as a three syllable word starting with “care”, and that 40% pronounce it as a two-syllable word starting with “car”. And I can tell you that, geographically, most of the former live in the Northeast and most of the latter live in the Midwest (for the purposes of this exercise, those of your who live in Florida, Texas or Oregon simply don’t exist).

Which means that, for the first 18 years of my life, I heard it mostly as “car-mel” (which more or less continued when I was in Phoenix) only to have the pronunciation changed on me when I moved to Boston. Now, thirteen-ish years later, I think I am most of the way through a transformation in pronunciation where I kind of use a hybrid “care-uh-mull” that doesn’t quite focus on the “mel” in the final syllable like a real New Englander would. Give me another couple of years, though, and I will be fully transitioned.

I am also going to stop to appreciate caramel, which is really incredibly good. With the exception of Reese’s Peanut Butter, it is chocolate’s best companion, whether accompanied by peanuts or crisped rice or nougat or anything else. I mean, think of how great Rollo’s are, and that is nothing but chocolate and caramel? Or 100 Grands, which add a little texture (and, incidentally, are the sixth best candy). Caramel Bulls-Eyes are delicious on their own, and hot caramel sauce is every bit the ice cream topping that hot fudge is. It tastes better, but it isn’t quite as versatile, so I am going to call it a draw...both slot in right behind the king of ice cream sauces, melted peanut butter.

Oh...you mean you have never melted peanut butter in the microwave and then poured it on top of your ice cream? Well, you’re welcome, because I just dramatically improved your life, you Philistine (Luddite works here as well).

Submitted by: Dave
Can you do an entire Ask Alex addressing all my problems? Asking for myself.

I try to keep these columns to fewer than 33,000 words, so this would be kind of a challenge. Cuz, let’s be honest, anyone who has ever perused the media tab on your Twitter feed can see that there is some serious shit going on there, and it is NOT good.

I’d list the horrible corners of the Internet that I know about only because of you, but this is a children’s program, so I can’t in good conscience encourage anyone to seek out tubgirl, or goatse or 2 girls, one cup. Wait...I think I just did...shit…

Anyway, since Dave is one of my oldest Twitter friends, I am going to take this excuse to tell you all one of my favorite Twitter stories. I’d link to the tweets, but one of the participants has left Twitter and one is a private account, so you can’t really follow the history.

The date was April 8, 2015, three years ago yesterday, and it all started innocuously enough, with a tweet from Huffington Post “Don McLean finally explains the meaning of "American Pie" http://huff.to/1N9ulqS”. Dave found this story to be pretty stupid (it was) and said as much.

From there, an emotionally fragile respondent took issue with Dave’s criticism and disagreed with his commentary. For simplicity’s sake, I am going to call her “Blue”.  From here, a couple of other participants joined the fray, all of whom have a long and decorated history of poking people who are being insane. This is very much why all three of them are among my favorite Twitter friends: @brunuscutis, @marcannem96 and @rrobertschwartz.

At about this time, Brownskin Dave announced that Don McClean sucks, and GoSellCrazy responded, in pretty normal Twitter fashion “So does your mom.” Well, that did it, because Blue is, it turns out, incredibly sensitive about Mom jokes because her Mom had a cold that week. And, of course, all 500 Million Twitter users are expected to be aware of this. Subsequently, all hell broke loose. Poor @sohlersarah (who, I think we can all agree, is about the nicest person on Twitter) committed the egregious crime of responding to the mom joke with a flushed face emoji. I am 99% certain that I never tweeted Blue directly, and only replied to the rest of the crowd “This really spiraled!”

So, of course, Sarah and I ended up blocked and Blue and several of her friends (who felt the need to jump in to defend her) spent three or four days talking about us. They never blocked any of the guys with whom they were actually arguing  (GoSellCrazy might have been blocked, not sure), but it was super important to block the two girls...cuz, girl power, I guess.

The real key to the story, though, is that Dave whipped everyone into a frenzy, unleashed the mocking best from Marc, Brownskin and GoSell, and then took it upon himself to tweet Blue directly with a sappy “I apologize for their behavior, it is really uncalled for and I am sorry about your mother’s illness” tweet!

Et tu, Nochiefs?!?! I think I still have the stab wound on my back!

The story has a happy ending, though, as I believe that Blue’s mother successfully recovered from her hangnail. It was touch and go, but you are all free to tell mother jokes again! I am no longer blocked, although I don’t know when that happened (and her account is now private). BUT...I absolutely remember a couple of you that jumped in being all pissy, and I don’t intend to let that go. Ain’t nobody hold a grudge like me!

Submitted by: Jess
How is Dave’s baby so adorable?

I have three theories:

1. Magic - or, I guess, just the randomness of DNA.
2. Dave’s wife is abnormally attractive.
3. It’s the mailman’s.
   

I am sure now that you have all realized what a pickle I have put you in...here, Jess has noted that Dave has an adorable baby, and you are thinking “Wow, I wanna see this baby, because I love adorable baby pictures!” And you are thinking about scrolling up to where I linked to Dave’s Twitter profile so you can look for pictures of this baby.

But there, right above is, is a terrible, terrible warning about the other things you will see if you click on the Media tab on Dave’s profile. This is a really high stakes game of Russian roulette...If I click, and just look at the last couple of pictures, am I going to get a cute little baby? Or am I going to get a Japanese girl firing an automatic rifle that is somehow sticking out of her ass?

And, for the record, both of those pictures are inside of the ten more recent pictures that Dave has posted.

A nicer person would just link to the baby pictures here and save you the risk of seeing some of the, um, saltier things in Dave’s TL...but what is the fun in that? Live a little! Roll the dice!!!

Serious, baby-related note, I’ve had a little bit of (for me at least) baby fever lately. I think it is a combination of a lot of things...my original child is more and more of an adult every day (she is condo shopping!), my kids are turning 8 this week and getting more and more out of their “little kid” mode and into their “big kid” mode. Also worth noting that I am approach “a certain age” where it starts to get a lot less feasible, for reasons biologic and other, to have any more kids. In other words, my clock is very much ticking.

All of which meant that, for a couple of minutes or so, I was seriously considering having another baby. For anyone who has been paying attention, you know what a big deal that is...I love my children, but I have no special love for “being a Mom”. Mom Alex is a pretty good Alex, but she isn’t, on her own, the best Alex, or at least the happiest Alex. I’d have been perfectly happy without having my own children, and would have almost certainly never have decided to have a second if the two I have didn’t both come at the same time!

And yet, there I was, thinking that maybe the time was right to have one more baby while I could still be reasonably sure that I could (I’ll be 36 in July, so time is certainly getting shorter). There is a dearth of little boys in my extended pretend family, and wouldn’t it be especially neat to add one to the brood? I mean, we just added a whole bunch of living space and a couple of bedrooms...shouldn’t we fill them? For a hot minute there, it all seemed like a compelling idea. I never got to the point of telling my husband, but he’d have been enthusiastic...he’s from a big family and always wanted more kids than I did.

Alas, none of you have any reason to fear. I came to my senses and dismissed that idea pretty quickly...my kids spent a couple of days being absolute terrorists, and work has been an annoyingly needy bitch lately, too. I’ve still never had my kids go past some milestone that I rued their reaching...I am always ready to move on and leave stages behind as they move out of them. So, let’s close the book on this and never speak of it again and just look forward to the day in 10-ish years when I can be Auntie Alex:-)

Do Mermaids lay eggs or have live births?

The question, really, is whether Mermaids are fish or mammals. Fish live underwater, breathe oxygen dissolved in water and lay eggs. Mammals live on land or underwater, breathe oxygen from the air and give birth to live young.

Well, except for spiny anteaters and duck-billed platypodes, which lay eggs.  And yes, the plural of platypus is platypodes, despite the colloquial usage of “platypuses”. Platypi is just wrong.

Where do mermaids fit into this?

I am going to be perfectly honest...in writing this column, I do a lot of very superficial Internet research. Wikipedia is very much my go-to source on most subjects. I’d like things to be accurate, but not so much so that I am going to devote a ton of time to finding the answers. This stuff gets written fast, and I don’t bog myself down with strict research requirements. Generally, in the spirit of the Declaration in Independence, I hold most truths to be self-evident, and therefore require only minimal fact-checking.

So, in writing this, I went to the always-reliable Internet to ask if mermaids were mammals or fish and HOLY SHIT THERE HAVE BEEN SOME THINGS WRITTEN. Lots of things. Lots of very detailed, very wordy, very intricately explained things. And the feelings are far from unanimous.

There are people who claim that mermaids are both fish and mammal, and use gills while underwater and lungs while above water. You know, like Kevin Costner in Waterworld. Spoiler alert! Or, less fictitiously, like some salamanders and lungfish that can breathe both above and below water. This seems like kind of a cop-out to me...I like my mythical creatures to have reasonably plausible biological systems.

Still others think mermaids are just plain fish and that they lay eggs and breathe only underwater like all other fish. Except lungfish, and anabantoids (like bettas, gouramis and paradise fish). Those people claim that mermaids can not be above water...they will die when out of the water, and that argues for fish and therefore laying eggs.

I am going to take a break here for a second and ask you some serious questions, though. Like most adults, you probably think that mermaids are entirely fictional, right? I mean, obviously, no one has ever seen one and it seems really unlikely that they would exist without humans having seen them. And, they seem kinda ridiculous...why would they have human mouths and teeth if they live underwater and therefore can’t form words like humans or eat fruits and vegetables that require human-like teeth? And hair...why would a sea creature have hair?

But then, of course, there are dogs and there are seals, and seals are nothing if not mermaid dogs. So, can we really, really be sure that there are no mermaid people? Same basic train of thought goes for horses and unicorns. Sure, unicorns seem silly...but we already know there are unicorn whales, so why not horses?

Anyway, back to the discussion at hand. Most of the voluminous internet discussion misses an obvious point, though. Mermaids have boobs. They tend to be super attractive, very womanly and very well endowed. Which, I guess, makes some sense...with diminished gravity, boobs are going to function a whole lot better than they do above water.

But here’s the thing: despite their many other uses, boobs are primarily a means of delivering milk to our newborn offspring. And only mammals have boobs! Ergo, mermaids are mammals (unless the boobs are non-functional, which I guess is no more weird than a mermaid having luxurious mane of red hair) and mermaids give birth to live young.

I mean, unless you are suggesting that they are related to platypodes, which is just silly...

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Alex’s random old song of the week

I finally won HQ trivia on Saturday night...which would be more impressive if it wasn’t one of the easiest episodes ever. My massive winnings amounted to…$.57!!! Pretty sure that is the smallest pot ever, or close to it (on Sunday night, winners got about $900 each…)

The final question, though, was about the Beatles, and I didn’t even have to guess. So, in honor of that, you get A Day in the Life, which just so happens to be the best Beatles song. And stop all of your garbage takes about mediocre bands who are really better than the Beatles. You’re wrong and you are also just plain dumb for suggesting it.