Long ago — after baseball but before MMA — there were the halcyon days of professional football (known in other countries as “do what now?”) This grand game, which rarely involves a foot or anything traditionally shaped like a ball, is played between two separate but equal units. The flashy, money-grubbing Offense and the flashy, money-grubbing Defense. But lurking in the shadows is nebulous third team, veiled in secrecy, neither flashy, nor money grubbing. The compete on the fringe, a squad of unique talents, a coherent group with the wildly inappropriate name of “The Special Team.”
The Special Team, if you are not aware, is the group of players who exist solely to give the ball back to the other team. In a sense, they are professional quitters.If these guys are so special, why not play the whole game with just the special team? Surely the special team is up to the task. Although it occurs to me that maybe they did not mean special in a good way. No, no, not Jackson. He’s on the “special” team.
The one exception is field goals. This is the rare chance for special team glory. Alas, even this is a bit insulting. Quarterbacks are always on the run, trying to throw a football to a pinpoint spot on the field, with crazy-fast defensive backs draped all over the receiver, who may or may not have good hands. The running back is always knifing through the gaps between 300-pound defensive linemen. But the kicker? Just go out there and see if you can manage to fit the ball through a 19-foot by 30-foot wide-open window. I guess we’ll give you three points if you can do it.
Although it's still only three pages long. The expanded edition does feature the woefully overused new play: Fake-field-goal-to-see-if-they'll bite-before-we-chicken-out-call-time-out-and-just-punt play.
I have no problem celebrating Birthdays, Holidays, Anniversaries, Graduations, Engagements, Weddings, and Births. And with the sheer volume of cake we’re consuming at each party, we should probably throw Funerals into the mix as well. But I really must insist that we do away with the tradition of greeting cards.
It is very thoughtful of you to spend time and money selecting the right card for the moment, but I think we’d be doing ourselves a big favor if we simply dropped the charade. These things are greeting nobody, and card companies apparently do not grasp the concept. I don’t walk into work wearing cat ears and say “I thought of the purrrrfect word for your special day,” in spite of how much easier that would be, especially on a Monday morning. Card writers think everything must involve a picture of some sad chipmunk in a party hat, accompanied by the world’s lamest pun. “To the world’s nuttiest nephew.”
Lately, more and more cards have been including a special sound chip. The card will make a farting sound effect, or trumpet out Ride of the Valkyries, or likely both at once. They are especially deceptive about this, usually waiting until a nun walks by you in the card aisle, looking for a special message for her nephew. Most greeting cards have fewer words than a haiku anyway, so when we start creating audio book versions, I think we have reached the height of human laziness.
And don’t sign your name. I can usually tell from the return address who it comes from. The only time I might not know is if I receive a big bundle of cards at a party. And do you really want me knowing this was the best you could do? A picture of Yoda with a beer can? The only reason to sign a card is if it accompanies a gift. I think a fun prank would be to enclose a few bucks with your card. The receiver will be obligated to send you a Thank You card in return, which possibly costs more than what you gave them.
I’m sure it’s in bad taste to immediately toss the cards in the trash, but what’s the statue of limitations on these things? By the end of every birthday, my refrigerator has started to look like a dating site for one-liners, and I am out of magnets. Note for Idea File: Start Greeting Card company where the card is itself a magnet. There’s a fortune in there somewhere.
For those of you that simply must give me a piece of paper in honor of me not dying for a whole year, I ask that you please take a look at the back of the card where it lists the price, count off an equivalent number of $1 bills, and hand them over. Feel free to also tell me “Hello” or “Happy Birthday” at the same time. I will be much more appreciative, and much more likely to reciprocate when your birthday rolls around.
The desert island: Perhaps the quintessential adventure setting. Used to it’s most famous effect in Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which we discussed earlier, but only slightly less well known is William Shakespeare’s Magnum Opus The Tempest, featuring the evil Caliban, The mysterious Prospero and many more of the bard’s most inscrutable names. However The Tempest is not the adventure we wish to discuss either. No instead we are talking about probably the third most well-known desert island adventure and number 60 on our countdown. William Golding’s required sixth grade reading classic, The Lord of the Flies.
This is William Golding. How he manages to build and distribute from his sleigh millions of toys to kids around the globe in just one night and still have time to be a prize winning novelist is a complete mystery.
William Golding’s first novel, The Lord of the Flies, is what the critics call a “tour de force” which roughly translates to “a tour of force” and is probably more than an idiom than an actual description of anything. In this case the force is a group of private school students who wash up on shore after their plane has crashed. They make vague references to an unspecified nuclear war that had caused them to flee England to begin with so in that sense, and if you want to grasp completely at straws, you could say that The Lord of the Flies is Science Fiction.
Fortunately that’s where the science ends and the fiction really takes off. The boys slowly begin to revert to animal paganism. When they first are deciding on who should be in charge, the two candidates are Ralph and Jack. Both are excellent leaders, but whereas one has a conscious, the other one completely spirals out of control and literally sets the island ablaze, probably because he was in the choir.
This is right before Jack and his band of hunters go after Ralph Macchio dressed as a shower.
I don’t want to spoil all the reversals so it’s best if you read it for yourself. Lord of the flies is often said by any number of English teachers to be an “allegory” for something. Also it was said that if you do not know what this allegory was, you would obtain a D minus in their class. Sigh. Such is the case with many assigned books. Teachers are often ruining them by handing out grades for reading them. However to placate my sixth grade English teacher, here is a quick run down of the various metaphors and their meanings:
The character of Piggy: Clearly a metaphor for intellectualism. Like most intellectuals, Piggy is later robbed and murdered.
Simon: a metaphor for spiritualism. Like many spiritual people Simon goes off by himself for days at a time and then comes back in the middle of the night just as your war dance is hitting it’s stride.
The Conch Shell: a metaphor for authority. Like all authority it is immediately abused and then smashed.
And finally, The Lord of the Flies himself: It’s actually a pig’s head on a stick but is meant by Golding to symbolize “the beast,” the evil within all of us. Fittingly Simon, the most spiritual one on the island, is also the only one who understands his own author’s metaphors and promptly tries to warn everyone of their impending D minus if they do not listen to him. Simon sees the pig head swarming with flies and thus we have the title of the book: The Lord of the Flies.
Despite all that, The Lord of the Flies, as depicted here, is actually kinda cute.
Interestingly the name Lord of the Flies comes from the bible. It is the literal translation of the name Beelzebub, but Lord of the Flies is not without it’s Christ imagery either. William Golding was knighted and actually won the Nobel Prize for a later novel that nobody has heard of. Though in all likelihood it was to make up for missing him on this, his first go round. Among other things The Lord of the Flies is also the inspiration for Stephen King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Castle Rock being the place on the island that the hunter kids called their headquarters.
