Two recent journal pages of mine refer to the two unpleasant subjects Rage and Spit. When I woke up this morning, “Shave and a Haircut/Two Bits” was looped in my head, I think to clue me in that I ought to base today’s blog post on the two pages.

RAGE is known to all except (perhaps) the freakishly evolved. I wonder if the Dalai Lama has ever experienced rage. Rage usually makes us do regrettable things. This to me is exemplified not only by mass shootings but by the Lynch Mob. About forty years ago I read The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilberg Clark, and the author managed to imagine the dynamics of a Lynch Mob utterly convincingly. I commend this fine book to your attention.

Is Rage ever a good thing? Does it ever drive positive behavior? Ought we to genetically engineer Rage out of our genome, if we could? I wish we knew.

The Spit-Take is an unignorable part of American physical comedy. Actor A is drinking something; Actor B says something unexpected and/or outrageous; Actor A diffuses the contents of Actor A’s mouth into the local atmosphere. In cinema, the Spit-Take has been around since 1906. That’s more than a hundred and six years ago! In television, the Spit-Take has been around for at least fifty years, having been popularized by Danny Thomas of “Make Room for Daddy” fame. On YouTube, there is a video by my friends, Phoenix-area poets Kevin Patterson and Bill Campana, containing no fewer than half a dozen Spit-Takes of what purports to be Champagne. The interested reader may use the phrase “Bill Campana 1957” to find the video (I could provide a link, but you have to REALLY WANT to see it, so I’m not making it easy). If you drink coffee while watching the video, point your mouth away from your computer screen, for you may well end up doing a Spit-Take yourself.

Cheers!