Who among us can sing the song, name the pets, deconstruct the car, the kitchen gadgets, the feet? Do the vitamins and cereal remain for sale? I don’t know.
The Flintstones, derived from Ralph Kramden and his cohorts, began as a cartoon for adults but persisted as a show for children, which is how I knew them. A zillion episodes were made, each traversing the same general plot. Fred and Barney are working stiffs with ordinary lives in the modern stone-age town of Bedrock. But quickly, something happens, something to thrust Fred into a life beyond home and quarry. Fred joins the circus. A rich uncle visits. Fred becomes a spy. Fred becomes a king. Wilma enters a baking contest. Barney stands on his head. The Weirdly Gruesomes move in next door. Conflict rises, is humorously resolved, the status quo is restored.
Politics was never a theme of the show, in my memory, but class issues were common. The heroes regularly encounter the bourgeois and wealthy, generally depicted as old balding men in tuxedos, with lumpy but well-dressed wives who spoke like Groucho’s foil, Margaret Dumont. The unspoken message was that the Flintstones belonged where they were.
It’s easy to imagine that Fred Flintstone and his family and friends all voted for the stone-age equivalent of Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and other 60’s Democrats. Fred may not have been dedicated to any cause or ideology, but he likely was organized by the local party precinct captain, some Joe Rockhead (an actual character on the show), who pushed him to the polls every election, maybe even put up a yard sign or wear a button.
Equally easy to image is that if Fred Flintstone were fast-forwarded to today, he’d be voting for Donald Trump. I hate to write that, but it feels hard to deny. We’d have an episode where the cartoon version of Trump shows up at Fred’s front door, offering a bright red MAGA hat and lots of happy encouragement for himself and his cause, and a joke or two for the laugh track, and poor Fred and Barney would be swept along for the ride, just like that. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that Wilma and Betty would not be so enraptured, and they’d cast their votes for Kamalarock Harristone. But I wouldn’t bet money.
By the way, just how would the Flintstones’ script writers “stone-ageify” the Trump name? These people gave us Stony Curtis, Ann Margrock, and in the live action movie, the BC-52’s. But what could they do with Donald Trump? Yet another quality the man seems impervious to.
As I type this little essay of mine, I’m listening to Tom Petty songs on YouTube. “You’re so bad. Best thing I ever had. In a world gone mad. You’re so bad.”
Three cheers for Tom Petty. I’m sorry he’s gone.
Tom Petty is an artist I never truly appreciated until after he died. Another is comedienne Judy Tenuta.
So who’s out there, alive and kicking and performing, that I should pay attention to now?
My late brother Danny, for a while at least, was a big fan of Groucho Marx. I can see why. Groucho was the alien Jew in a sea of starchy Christians, and with guile and wits and endless prattling he commanded the attention of everyone around him, plus the audience. Whether or not the jokes were funny was beside the point. Groucho stole the show. Groucho was everything Danny could not be.
Three cheers for Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop who gave an earful to Mr. Trump. Her sermon spoke to the heretical, blasphemous idea that all humans have inherent rights and dignity, that immigrants to our country—here legally or otherwise—deserve to be treated with mercy. Trump wants an apology. I trust she won’t be delivering one.
To top it off, Bishop Budde spent time in Minneapolis, my home town, where she is remembered fondly.
Have you ever wondered why carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases, while oxygen and nitrogen are not? The answer is that molecules of greenhouse gases have more than two atoms, which means that two or more bonds are holding the atoms together. The multiple bonds are able to absorb long-wavelength radiation, while a lone molecular bond can’t. How about that?!
Have you ever wondered why methane shows up in flatulence? The methane is a byproduct of gut bacteria. Why the bacteria should be releasing methane, I have no idea. Methane can be burned for energy, and is done so by any appliance that runs on natural gas, which is mostly methane.
Part of the reason I struggled in medical school was the vocabulary. I fought with words like encephalomyeloradiculitis, which I valiantly tried to deconstruct but never with great success. These days I am a science editor for K to 12, and a lot of the work is at the young grade levels. I can speak with expertise about “steam” and “plankton” and a lot of other useful and/or useless words that someone decided to teach the kiddos. No one asks me to parse those miserable names for those miserable diseases. I was reading and not completely understanding an article about encephalomyeloradiculitis just now, and believe me it’s a condition to be avoided, if at all possible. It can be acquired in conjunction with both COVID-19 and Lyme diseases, which also are to be avoided.
Wishing all of you well. Yabba-dabba-do.
