HaVe A cRAzY WEek,
SUNFUN presents a short course on life among the zanies.
But first, we should say Thank You to all of our 'mostly sane'
friends who have helped to make this 200th SUNFUN possible. This
week, we'd especially like the thank: Kaori Itako, Jerry Taff,
Carol Becwar, Alison Becwar, Caterina Sukup, Keiko Amakawa,
Timothy McChain, Bruce Gonzo, Jan Michalski, Beth Butler, Kenn
Venitt, Kathleen Beckmann, Joshua Brink and Anna Macareno.
It always seems that, when trouble arises and things look
really bad, there is one individual who perceives a solution and
is willing to take command. As often as not, that individual is
a complete wacko.
Some of these folks are actually unbalanced, if you accept
that there is some concrete definition of sanity. After all,
hundreds of books, plays and screwball comedy movies have turned
on the idea of who is nuts and who isn't. Certainly, there are
people who are a danger to themselves and others, who should be
locked away until time or serious head work can cure them of
their delusions. But enough about Congress.
The zanies we will discuss here are not the dangerous or
self-destructive types; there is a definite class of nutballs who
may see the world very differently, but still live and love and
care about others, and generally make life more bearable and less
oppressive for the rest of us. Philosophers have long wondered
about the connection between creativity and craziness. You can
say that the crazies are the people who don't care enough about
convention to be stopped by it, and that they are often the ones
who generate the real progress in society. Their examples can
light the way for the rest of us, even if they really screw up.
After all, a sign that tells us the wrong way to go is often just
as valuable as a sign that points to the correct path.
We meet them every day: folks we might kindly call
"eccentric." Unkindly - or, behind their backs - we say they are
nuts, or cracked, or air heads, or... Well, there are hundreds
more ways of saying that a particular person is marching to the
beat of a different saxophone player. Most of us would like to
avoid that label, since it carries with it the fear of being
found legally loony. But, as we will see, sometimes the folks
who don't seem very connected to the "real" world can make a
great contribution to the rest of our poor species. And they
seem to have lots more fun doing it.
Greetings, Folks!
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ALMOST LIKE HOME...
----------------
Nothing unusual ever happens to Jako Vrancic, a pensioner
living near the coastal town of Sibenik, Croatia. Nothing, that
is, unless you count the four extra-terrestrials who landed in
his field as he tended his cattle. According to Vrancic, the
four aliens landed quietly near where he was working one evening.
"I felt no fear, as I had previously seen things like this
on TV," said the elderly farmer. He also said that the aliens
were quite short, almost like children. But he had no trouble
speaking to them.
"We had no problem communicating as they spoke a broken form
of Croatian," said Vrancic, adding that he had offered them ham
and dried figs, but they refused and said they were not hungry.
[ Of course they weren't hungry... They had
an apple on the train. ]
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GOING POSTAL...
------------
I suppose it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
In Morgantown, West Virgina, a woman opening mail at the
local animal control shelter got the shock of her life when she
opened a box the had arrived in the mail and found that it
contained two 10-foot pythons.
Two live pythons.
The package had been mailed from the downtown post office in
Morgantown, only a short distance from the shelter. But the
return address turned out to be a fake.
"All they had to do was bring them to the pound, and we
would've found a home for them," an animal control officer said.
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HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT...
--------------------------
You can hit Jun Sato any time you want, but it will cost
you. About 1,000 yen for three minutes, actually.
The 25-year-old Sato rents himself out as a punching bag on
the streets of Tokyo's fashionable Ginza district. Not a
complete fool, he does wear protective face and stomach
equipment.
"I enjoy being used as a punching bag. It's good business
and also another way to experience life. I want to continue as
long as my body holds up," he told the Mainichi Daily News.
Sato said that he has finally overcome his fear of being hit
after being picked on in junior high school and quitting high
school due to a fear of bullies. His favorite part is chatting
with people just after they've beaten him up. (Reuters)
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Not one shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea
that life is serious.
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NOT WHERE YOU EXPECTED...
----------------------
Police in Oakland, California surrounded a house and spent
two hours trying to coax a wanted gunman out of the house where
he'd barricaded himself. After firing ten tear gas canisters,
police discovered that the man was standing to them, shouting
pleas at the house to come out peacefully and give himself up.
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DO THAT VOODOO THAT YOU DO SO WELL...
----------------------------------
Wade Boggs was one of the most successful hitters ever to
play the game of baseball, seeming to have a new swing for every
sneaky throw a pitcher could devise. That's how he got 3,000
hits.
But one thing was constant: before every game, Boggs ate
chicken and cheesecake. And afterwards, he always ate two hot
dogs, a bag of barbecue potato chips and an iced tea.
And that's not all. Boggs had a veritable catalog of
superstitions about every aspect the game. He always left home
for a 7:05 p.m. game at exactly 1:47 p.m. and would run sprints
before the game at exactly 6:47. He always took exactly 100
ground balls in warmup. He had dozens of batting gloves and
would try them on one after another until he found one that "felt
right" for the game.
Other parts of the ritual included drawing a personal good
luck symbol on the dirt before every time at bat. If he didn't
get a hit, he changed the gum he was chewing. Boggs would never
step on the foul line when sprinting onto the field and he always
made sure to touch it sprinting off.
"Whatever he's done, it's worked for 23 years. So I figure
I'm not messing with superstitions," said his wife, Debbie.
Whether his 80 or more special rituals played a part, in
late August of 1999, Boggs became the 22nd player in history to
get a career 3,000 hits. In a story that would make a perfect
movie script, he did it in front of a hometown crowd with a
perfect home run. (AP)
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Having an out of body experience. Back in five
minutes.
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ACTING OUT...
----------
Some people really get into character when acting, and
Shakespearian actor Giuliano Mar is one fellow famous for his
total immersion in the part.
Which may explain why his fellow actors walked out in
protest. The Haifa Municipal Theater cancelled the remaining
performances of the run of Othello, because Mar couldn't bring
himself to just act.
Having lost himself in his part so much that he actually
became Othello, he broke his hand in a fencing match and slapped
his leading lady so hard that she fled the stage. Earlier he had
cracked her head on a bedstead when pushing her, as required for
the part.
"I slapped her as part of my role and she left the stage in
the middle," Mar told the daily Maariv newspaper. "I was left
alone on stage for 10 minutes, like an idiot." (AP)
[ Now play back those last three words... ]
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"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind
overtasked."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING...
-------------------------
There is a tombstone in the Woodlawn cemetery in San
Francisco that reads:
Norton I
Emperor of the United States,
Protector of Mexico
Joshua A. Norton
1819 - 1880
Many people are surprised to hear that the U.S. ever had an
emperor. After all, the only time we did have a monarch - as a
colony of England - we rebelled against it. Not that Norton I
ever inherited or conquered anything. Like most emperors, Norton
found that there was no one around to give him the title, so he
crowned himself.
Young Joshua Norton was an ambitious English businessman
looking for an opportunity to make big money. He found it on the
frontier of California in a tiny settlement that was about to
become the city of San Francisco. Noting the good port and river
system, Norton saw this as a fine place to set up shop. And that
he did, becoming quite wealthy in the import-export business as
the city grew.
It was rice that brought about his troubles. In 1853,
taking advantage of a temporary shortage, he tried to corner the
rice market, but was ruined when a large shipment showed up
unexpectedly, depressing the price. At nearly the same time, a
fire destroyed his warehouses. He lost his money, his business
and his mind, in about that order.
Shortly after, he began wearing a military-style uniform
complete with sword and a feather in his hat and sending strange
royal edicts to the newspapers. These the newspapers eagerly
published; fortunately for Norton, his timing was perfect. The
U.S. was just edging into the mass insanity of the Civil War, and
people were looking for simple solutions to impossible problems.
The idea of a crank Emperor sounded like great fun. While it was
clear to everyone that Norton was a few pickles short of a jar,
he was always entertaining. And some of the newspapermen picked
up on the idea of using bogus 'royal edicts' to put forward their
own harebrained schemes.
Many of the real edicts were pretty loony, such as when
Norton fired President Lincoln and abolished Congress. Other
official communications from the Emperor were almost as cracked,
but there was something special about him, odd as he was. His
plan for a bridge linking San Francisco to Oakland sounded crazy
to the folks of that time, but the San Francisco Bay Bridge
stands today almost exactly where Norton proposed. There was an
undeniable intelligence and humanity about him that caused people
to pay attention, even though he was clearly 'sanity challenged.'
In the economic downturn after the Civil War, mob violence
broke out against 'foreigners,' particularly against Asians. At
one meeting, a fiery speaker roused a crowd to a near riot
against the Chinese. Norton, a constant presence at any public
meeting, demanded to speak. The leaders allowed this, assuming
that it would be great fun to hear the ravings of this absurd-
looking man in his bizarre uniform. Norton mounted a box,
hammered the crowd to silence with his cane, and, with great
dignity, quietly led the entire group in reciting the Lord's
prayer. He followed with a few remarks of his own on tolerance,
ending with the declaration that "we are all God's children," and
requested the crowd to disperse. Brought to their senses by a
madman, the crowd filed quietly from the hall.
When an authentic monarch, Dom Pedro II of Brazil, visited
San Francisco in 1876, the city officials of San Francisco took
pride in introducing the Brazilian monarch to their own, home-
grown king. Quietly informed of Norton's true identity, Dom
Pedro treated the San Francisco Emperor as an equal, making it
one of Norton's proudest days.
While very popular in San Francisco, Norton never had a very
regal life. He wore a uniform assembled mostly from cast-off
military clothing and lived in the cheapest flophouses of
Chinatown. He ordered the Grand Hotel to grant him better
accommodations, but was ignored. He was viewed mostly as being
an entertainment - something for the tourists to gawk at.
Norton made a small living this way, and most of the bankers and
businessmen, who had known him before his madness, felt sorry for
him and gave him small sums as "imperial taxes." And they saw to
it that the saloons fed him and the railroads gave him free
rides, too. When Norton sent wires to foreign kings and queens,
kindly telegraph operators composed suitable replies to give to
the emperor. Everyone in San Francisco was in on the joke,
except Norton.
But Norton lived a poor man, and died a poor man's death.
On January 8, 1880 at age 62, Norton dropped dead in the street
while walking from his rooming house to another public meeting.
"LE ROI EST MORT" (The King is Dead) was the headline in
newspapers the next day, the 'Morning Call' saying: "He is dead
and no citizen of San Francisco could be taken away who would be
more generally missed." More than 30,000 people paid their
respects to the late emperor before he was buried with honors in
a fancy new uniform provided by wealthy San Franciscans. Still,
most people never really knew him and only remembered him from
the cartoons in the paper.
Mark Twain, then working as a newspaperman in San Francisco,
felt that there was more to the story. He had known Norton and
saw the humanity and complexity of Norton's character, where most
others dismissed him as just a nut and vagrant. Twain was at a
low point in his career after the Civil War, living alone and
depressed and suffering from writer's block. For a time, Twain
had lived near the rooming house the emperor called home, and
passed him nearly every day. On hearing of the Emperor's death,
Twain wrote to his editor William Howells and suggested that
Norton would make a fine subject for a book. The 'Duke and
Dauphin' sequence in 'Huckleberry Finn,' where a crazy fraud is
still a valuable asset, if only as entertainment, was clearly
inspired by Joshua Norton.
In eulogizing Emperor Norton I, one of the San Francisco
newspapers pointed out that, in his long reign, he had never gone
to war, overtaxed his subjects, condemned anyone to death or
banished anyone. His reign was always peaceful and benevolent.
That was, the paper declared, a unique accomplishment for fellows
in that particular line of work.
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"There is a very fine line between 'hobby' and 'mental
illness.'"
- Dave Barry
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© 2000 by Bill Becwar. All Rights Reserved.
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