Enough With The Negative Advertising: 10 Things That Take The Perfect Amount Of Time

Holy George McGovern! It's not even Labor Day and we've all had enough of the negative advertising, haven't we? It's bad enough that people running for high office engage in the kind of nasty, distorted mudslinging of one another that directly goes against all their platitudes about a "better America," but now it seems that the negativity is infectious. I ran across this de facto ad on Buzzfeed, one of my favorite sites for finding out all the stupid, must-read crap floating around the internet. Samsung, in an effort to tout the speed of its latest computer, has concocted a list of ten things that "we" wish took less than ten seconds. I flatter Samsung with the word "concoct"; all they did was round up the usual suspects--do we really need somebody else telling us the DMV is a time-killer? It took me about seventeen seconds to scroll through the list; seventeen seconds I'll never get back. So let's get iconoclastically positive here and make a different, more ebullient list.

Ten Things That Take The Perfect Amount Of Time

1. Eating a banana: From the sensuous peeling, to the not-at-all-challenging biting and practically-melts-in-your-mouth chewing, is there a more satisfying (and salubrious) mutli-dimensional experience that takes less time than re-booting a frozen Samsung computer than this?
2. Watching a perfect tee shot: Granted, this one comes with qualification. It might take you, as it does me, several frustrating (i.e. sliced, hooked, topped, popped, whiffed, etc.) attempts, but when all the wrong things about your swing somehow harmonically converge to offset one another and you hit the sweet spot and that pale, dimpled nemesis flies high and long and straight and takes a good bounce down the fairway, you feel a little bit like Him/Herself sitting back on that grand Seventh Day and taking in the view, and saying, "Hmmm, not bad." Any longer would border on hubris, any shorter would be not enough.
3. Writing a "back in 5 minutes" post-it: Given the short duration of your absence and the need to inform your audience/customers of your absence, this is perfect. If you're going to be away less time, it's a waste of time to write the post-it; if you're going to be away longer, you got some 'splaining to do.
4. A sneeze: Not the allergen-induced onslaught of rapid ah-choos, nor the three-day phlegm fest of the common cold, but the out of nowhere, here and gone one-off bone-rattling sneeze. When executed to perfection--the instant brain-alert that makes you instantly realize, oh no, everything in life's on hold for the next few seconds, to that glorious intake of breath before lift-off ("ah") to that cathartic, ultimate experience of living in the moment expulsion ("choo") and the quick recovery time of receiving God's blessing--the sneeze is about as close to perfect timing as possible.
5. Napping: Be it a five minute power nod off or a luxurious two-hour asylum snooze, any nap is perfect.
6. Watching a Road Runner cartoon: How long are these things, five, six minutes? An hour? Who knows, but they're perfect. Any longer and your nerves would start to fray and you'd be cursing Road Runner's smugness and Wile E.'s stupidity. Your suspension of disbelief that allows you to believe the rock Wile E. just painted black could grant passage to Road Runner but stop Wile E. dead in his tracks would disintegrate. Your annoyance at the shoddy craftsmanship of the Acme Co. would have you flinging various catalogs at Wile E. You might end up hearing Beep Beep in your head for eternity. But any shorter, and you'd miss the complete arc of the existential story. The transformation of your emotions from glee at Road Runner's insouciance to sympathy for Wile E.'s tortured existence. You'd miss the musing upon the anvil's place in human history that always occurs. You'd stop identifying with Wile E.'s amazing recovery from certain death to attempt another scheme. Come to think of it, the exact duration of a Road Runner cartoon might be the perfect time frame for just about anything in life: X will only take as long as a Road Runner cartoon? I'll endure.
7. "ABC" by the Jackson 5: Pop perfection.
8. Cooking spaghetti: I am certainly no culinary master; food is merely functional, tasty at best. If it takes more time to make it than consume it, I'm skeptical. Spaghetti, given this credo, is perfect (sauce out of a jar, naturally; no simmering, stirring, pinching things into it for hours).
9. Proclaiming, "Ah, go to Hell!": Conversations, dialogues, debates, arguments--all of them can go on much too long, with a whole array of negative consequences. But with one simple--and quick--"Ah, go to Hell" (the "Ah" is essential, and can be accompanied with a rather limp-wristed, dismissive wave of the hand), the stake is decisively driven. The long-time assumed aphorism that the first one to raise his or her voice in an argument loses begs for revision in these crasser, more combative times. I say, the first one to proclaim AGTH wins, no questions asked. (Now's not the time to wax philosophic about the contrasting perfect words Heaven and Hell --Hell with its one-syllable stab, its bombastic and culminating double L; Heaven with its two-syllable elongation, its mighty V; the same Heh- beginning.) In fact, I say whichever candidate is the first to ditch all those despicable negative ads and resorts to a short (and cheap, austere), eight second ad showing five seconds of the opponent's highfalutin' gibberish followed by a quick cut to the candidate simply proclaiming, "Ah go to Hell!" would win in a landslide.
10. Reading my blog posts: What the hell, like Wile E. Coyote, a man can keep on concocting and hoping.

Got A Good Hour To Contemplate A New York Minute?

Time was, I could easily be impressed by a simple bathroom sink that suddenly transformed itself into a shower stall. But there'll be a time for that story later on. First and foremost, how weird is the phrase, "time was"? Time only is, is it not? Time was seems to imply that time is no more, it is dead, a thing of the past. But I neither have the time nor the inclination, nor really, the scientific/metaphysical chops, to get all philosophical about time (though isn't about 62% of one's lifespan, i.e. one's time alive--before one isn't anymore though time certainly continues its is-ness--spent in the throes of some kind of time/inclination conundrum, unless one is the protagonist of Harry Chapin's [time was he--Harry--was is, but no more, Mr. Chapin, he dead, though the protagonist of said song, which, time permitting, I will get to, lives on forever thanks to the magic of recording devices and oldies radio] uber-hit "Cat's In The Cradle" in which case one will spend eternity [time is-ness to the nth degree, which begs the question, what is the nth degree in Celsius? The fth degree?] trapped in a Sisyphean time/inclination conundrum hell).

Anyway, all of this started with me musing all day long for some reason on the phrase "New York minute." I think I heard it on the radio this morning in between startled jabbings of my snooze alarm (time was I lived carefree, without the need for alarm clocks; then, just as my inclination to sleep more began to increase, so did the demands on my morning time, hence the need for an alarm clock, until, in due time and thanks to Darwin's hot-wiring my body to adapt to dog-eat-dog conditions, time became and still is, the time to employ a back-up time/wake up device to effectively do the job to disconnect me, if not disincline me, from sleep and into a somewhat conscious state in time for me to get to where I have to be at this particular time: ergo, a clock radio that comes on a good hour before the time I need to arise, and a secondary, nuisance-clock, i.e. snooze alarm variety, that bleats starting a good half-hour ['good' idiomatically speaking only, an hour or a half hour spent half-awake to news radio and every five minutes cardiac arresting myself to arrest the little clock's mocking little bleats--such an hour or half hour cannot possibly ever--time is or time was--be actually 'good'].

So all day long I've been thinking about the phrase New York minute, and beyond my admittedly provincial bias that big deal, time can fly pretty rapidly during the time of one's day, but why should New York get all the credit (I mean New York already claims a great strip steak, which I ain't no gustatory aficionado, but I'll bet my rump steak that that steak didn't originate in New York, and what, any fastest, biggest, best thing ever has to be a New York thing? So a sneeze that would really blow your eyes out if you kept them open is a "New York Sneeze"? Or after having to hold it in a long time, you take a "New York Leak"? For some reason, a "Chicago Leak" seems more appropriate in that case), I started thinking about what other "_________ Minutes" would feel like.

Would a Tuscaloosa Minute be the time it would take for a bead of sweat to roll rapidly down your forehead into your eye and causing you to cuss madly until you can rub the sting out? Would a Detroit Minute be the time it would take for a mob of octopi-wielding drunks to set your car on fire? Would a Dallas Minute be the time it would take you to realize, while soaking in a hot shower, that everything that seemed to happen in your life the last year was all just a dream? Would an Atlanta Minute be the time it would take you to get hopelessly lost on the freeway and find yourself in the exit only lane to the Highway to Hell? Would a Paris Minute be the time it would take you to nibble cheese and a baguette while sipping cheap red wine, fall hopelessly and painfully in and out of love, buy a stick of butter, and end up spending the rest of your life dressing in black and muttering c'est la vie through Gauloises smoke rings? Would a Cleveland Minute be the time it would take for your favorite sports team to crush your heart while you hit a massive pothole trying to avoid an orange barrel and the temperature plummets from a sticky 89 (degrees Fahrenheit) to a frigid minus 17 (wind chill) and another county politician's office gets raided by the FBI?

Anyway, time is I tell you the story that time was I started writing to tell you about (diagram that New York Syntax of a sentence, class). In a Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, bed and breakfast bedroom once, while I and my traveling partner lay sprawled on beds exhausted from four weeks of UK bus and train and foot trekking, a Limey Martha Stewart on Benzedrine displayed her family jewels--a new-fangled device that with a press of this wee button here transformed an innocuous though very appealing bathroom sink into, Bloody Hell Did You See That!, a full-size shower stall, complete with flowery curtain and for the first time in four weeks some good old New York Water Pressure. Well Jane Jetson my Cleveland Ass, I said, suddenly more awake than any time was or time is Poughkeepsie Snooze Alarm could would or better ever wake me, it's time to hit the showers.

Minutemen-Times

Cato Salsa Experience-Time To Freak Out!