COLUMN: Another Dog and Pony Show

By Tobin Barnes
People send questions to the Internet portal, Yahoo! (The exclamation mark is part of their trademark, not necessarily my sentence.) The portal people then tell the curious and everyone else (perhaps the vast majority) how to find the answers using the Internet.

I, on the other hand, don't need to be told. I know the answers to Yahoolish questions like the following:

“Some of my friends have a fear of clowns. Why is this?”

Early on they got some bad advice, as in, “Some clown told me to invest in Enron.”

"Did Darwin coin the phrase, 'survival of the fittest'?"

No. That’s an urban legend.

Darwin, an astute observer of his environment, had seen the results of prior U.S. presidential elections and wasn’t yet ready to go that far. Later, it took an unbridled optimist to have the courage to start using that phrase.

“Who invented the remote control?”

My old man.

Whenever he wanted to see what was on one of the other two channels, he’d tell me to get up and change it.

“How do clowns do their tricks?”

Generally, in a humorous sort of way.

“I’ve heard there are only seven basic story plots. What are they?”

Well, actually, to simplify it even further, there’s only one basic story: boy meets girl.

From there, variations of tragedy, comedy, and irony arise—once in a while, satire. Sometimes, you get a happy ending, but it takes years to fill out that plot and most people lose interest well before then.

“What can you tell me about Rube Goldberg?”

He was a cartoonist who designed absurdly complex contraptions that would go through ridiculous contortions to accomplish simple, everyday tasks any child could manage—much the way many employees are forced to function in their work places.

“Who invented Sudoku?”

A fiend.

What does it mean when a product is ‘organic’?”

It’s going to cost you more.

But...

It’s a small price to pay for better health, which, when you think out it, is priceless. (Boy, that’s heavy, as we used to say back about the time Earth Day popped up.)

“Are dogs’ mouths really cleaner than humans’?”

No doubt. Obscenity-wise.

“How many people are running for president in 2008?”

A virtual manna from heaven, especially if there is a grain or two among the chaff.

The number of candidates is quite amazing, considering what we put them through.

If only this enormously expensive dog-and-pony show actually worked. The evidence lately has not substantiated the process, which becomes more convoluted each go around.

“What exactly is tapioca?”

Fish eyes.

Or anyway, that’s what some kid told me when I was little.