Best invention EVER: Nail Polish Strips by Sally Hansen.

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“I need a syringe, a cotton swab and a cuticle stick–STAT!”

The groans of the sick and the dying were too awful to bear, made more horrible by the relentless heat of the equatorial sun, but who was I to complain?  I was just a lowly orderly, while Dr. Walter Reed was the brains of the operation, working night and day to develop a vaccine that would rid the world of yellow fever, the wasting disease that had brought progress on the Panama Canal to a grinding halt, thereby strangling the U.S. cruise ship industry in its cradle.

“Sure he’s suffering.  You would be too with nails like that!”

I dragged myself from bed to bed, applying cold compresses to the foreheads of the dying ditch diggers, hoping to give them a few moments’ surcease of suffering before they left this world for a better one.  I had just wrung out my cloth and was about to lay it upon the furrowed brow of a young man whose eyes had rolled back under his lids when I heard a shout from Dr. Reed’s makeshift laboratory.

“Eureka!” I heard him exclaim.  “I have succeeded–finally–and stand ready to have a hospital in the greater Washington, D.C. area named after me!” he cried out with joy.

“A vaccine?  You’ve found a cure for the disease that will thrill young readers of Landmark Books for generations to come?”

“No, you goombah!” Reed said with excitement.  “Nail polish strips!  At first I thought they were press-on nails, but they’re definitely not!”

……………………………………………….

As a mechanic at the Ford Motor Works in Dearborn, Michigan, I often felt as if I was a witness to history.  I know, I know–I should have said “were,” but the subjunctive mood would have been inconsistent with my character as a humble grease monkey on the first prototype of an automobile manufacturing plant.

The problem that our wacky anti-Semitic boss Henry Ford was struggling to solve was how to produce a car that could be afforded by the great mass of men who would build it.  He had tried stacking auto bodies on top of each other, putting them into a gigantic restaurant-style blender, arranging them in crop circles in the hope that alien life forms in flying saucers would build them as a hobby, the way young boys like the author tried without success to make miniature hot rods out of plastic and glue.  Nothing seemed to work.

 
Bitchin’ cool!

Ford had been holed up in his “skunk works,” the drawing room where the tables were covered with blue prints of various designs, for days now.  They guys on the shop floor were growing restive, juggling chrome bumpers, trying to scratch their armpits with their hobnail boots.  And then, like a bolt of lightning, Ford emerged from seclusion with an enormous smile on his face and let out a shout that could be heard all the way to Detroit.

“Gadzooks, the answer was hiding in plain sight right before me!” he cried to the junior engineers who crowded around him.

“So you think my idea of assembling the ‘cars’ on a moving assembly line will work, Mr. Ford?” one of them asked hesitantly.

“Who said anything about cars?” Ford snapped in a peremptory manner.  “My best friend Emily that lives in Indianapolis called and told me I HAD to try Sally Hansen Nail Polish strips!”

……………………………………………….

Boston’s Bowdoin Square was covered in snow, and Alexander Graham Bell shivered in our unheated quarters.  He had used up nearly all of the money he had raised from friends and family to construct his “phonautograph,” a machine that would someday enable suburban mothers to maintain constant contact with each other while they drove “automobiles,” if Henry Ford would ever get off his duff and mass produce the oversize SUVs that an impatient nation yearned for.  At the moment, however, he faced almost certain business and personal failure, and I withdrew from his laboratory, pained as I was by the site of the man in his sore distress.

Blow man, blow!

When I reached the adjoining room, however, I heard the culmination of all of our hard work, as clear as a bell.  “Mr. Watson,” I heard Dr. Bell say.  “Come here — I want to see you.”

“Yes, Dr. Bell!  I’ll be right there!”  I could hardly contain my sense of relief and happiness as I skidded around the corner and saw him sitting in his chair, smiling, holding up his handiwork for me to see.

“Look, Watson,” he said, his fingernails lit up as if by Thomas Alva Edison’s light bulb.  “You won’t believe how easy Sally Hansen Nail Polish Strips are to apply–and there is no drying time!”

Summer’s just around the corner–time to head to the beach!  But if, like many people, you’re flabby from a winter spent indoors slurping down beer and eating fondue, here are some tips on getting into “swimsuit” shape by the world’s second-most glam occupational group (after supermodels), those masters of all shapes, physicists!

 
“We are so not ready for the beach!”

Black vs. White:  Over the years, a great deal of energy has been spent debating the merits of black vs. white swimsuits.  Yes, everyone knows that black suits make you appear slimmer.  But did you also know that black clothing absorbs sunlight and the heat radiating from your body, causing you to sweat like a fattened hog at a barbecue contest? (Walsberg, Campbell, & King, Journal of Comparative Physiology, 126B: 211-222, 1978).  So you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

“Wanda Jean?  Can you c’mere for a second?  I want to look skinnier.”

Relativity:  Everybody’s heard of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but very few people understand it.  Basically, the way relativity works is that if you live in one of the low-starch states such as California, and you have relatives from a high-starch state such as Iowa, going to the beach in California with your relatives from Iowa will make you appear slimmer by comparison.

Isaac Newton:  You would never catch him in a thong.

Follow the law!  Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, that is.  “Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.”  What does this have to do with summer fun?  Simple–If you just sit in an inner tube no one will notice your body!

Conservation of mass:  In the 18th century, two men–Antoine Lavoisier and Mikhail Lomonsov–discovered that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, but only altered in form.  The upshot for sun-worshippers?  You can squeeze as hard as you want, but it won’t make the fat go away.

Be careful–sharks dig plus-size chicks!

The Uncertainty Principle:  Werner Heisenberg, a top-flite physicist who managed to stay in swimsuit shape until late in his life, discovered what is now referred to as “The Uncertainty Principle.”  Basically, this rule says you can’t measure anything without changing it.

Heisenberg:  I’m fairly certain he discovered the Uncertainty Principle.

So next time you go into the store and ask to try on a size 8 bathing suit, and the sales girls says “Good Lord, honey–you’ve got to be at least a size 14″ and offers to measure you–stand firm.

Just say–”No sirree.  Don’t you know Werner Heisenberg proved that if you measure me beforehand you’ll completely change my size?”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Take My Advice–I Wasn’t Using it Anyway.”

Memorial Day weekend marks the traditional start of summer, and with it beach reading.  An unexpected by-product of summer’s lower intellectual standards is that one’s literary risk-reward ratio expands exponentially, the way pole vaulting records were shattered by quantum leaps when athletes abandoned aluminum poles for fiberglass.  Pick a mildewed paperback off a bookshelf in a vacation house–one that you’d be ashamed to check out of your local library for fear it would be cited in a future Senate confirmation hearing–and you can be transported to realms of schlock that previously lay beyond your poor powers of comprehension.

Thus it is with Ken Follett’s “Eye of the Needle”.  Originally published as “Storm Island,” “Eye of the Needle” is a counterfactual tale, a story that asks the question “what if” about a historical event, imagining what might have happened if the proximate link in the chain leading up to it were altered.  Here’s how Follett himself describes the thesis on which he built the plot of “Eye of the Needle”: 

German U Boat

     It is 1944 and weeks before D-Day. The Allies are disguising their invasion plans with a phoney (sic) armada of ships and planes. Their plan would be scuppered if an enemy agent found out… and then, Hitler’s prize agent, “The Needle,” does just that.  Hunted by MI5, he leads a murderous trail across Britain to a waiting U-Boat.  But he hasn’t planned for a storm-battered island, and the remarkable young woman who lives there.

It’s enough to set you off and running, like a starter’s pistol at the beginning of a footrace.  But the important thing to note is that it’s based largely on fact; the Allies did indeed disguise the D-Day invasion by sending legions of British vacationers to Normandy Beach, outfitting their children with inflatable squeaky frog inner-tubes.  Surely, thought the Nazis, the Allies won’t attack here, now that the mothers have unwrapped the tinned meat sandwiches and the fathers have lost their car keys.

Allied decoy

Follett’s masterwork is marbled with a number of other historically-correct elements that lend it an air of verisimilitude, and which leave the reader, as he finally puts the book down late at night, shaking his head at what might have been.  “My God,” you say to yourself, “but for a simple twist of fate, the women of America would have been in hopeless thrall to legions of Nazi cunnilinguists.”

President and Treasurer of your local Parent-Teacher Organization?

It’s right there on page 226, the infamous Gestapo muff-diving scene, as famous in its genre of mindless beach-reading as Gatsby at the end of the dock, the madeleines in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Hawthorne’s scarlet letter.  Again, I quote at length, or as much length as I am permitted by this site’s Terms of Service and my ability to control my involuntary aesthetic gag reflex:

     He slipped down the bed, between her thighs.  (. . .)  Surely he doesn’t want to kiss me there.  He did.  And he did more than kiss.

Suffice it to say that Follett’s “remarkable young woman” is ”paralyzed by shock” at the hitherto-unknown worlds of pleasure that her German tonguemeister introduces her to.

Elite Nazi Blitzentonguen Corps

Which raises the question:  Suppose the Nazis had won World War II.  Yes, the bright light of democracy would have been snuffed out, millions of “undesirables”–-Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Masons (!) and Poles–would have been consigned to certain death in concentration camps, and single men across America would have been subject to humiliation in scenes such as this:

“Pass the Pepperidge Farms Weiner Schnitzel-Flavored Goldfish!”

SINGLE MAN:  Hi–can I buy you a drink?

SINGLE WOMAN:  Are you a member in good standing of the National Socialist German Workers Party, better known as the Nazis?

SINGLE MAN:  Well, uh, no, but . . .

SINGLE WOMAN:  (To “wingwoman” friend)  Look–isn’t that Josef Goebbels, Jr. over there?

The possibility is one with more than a passing interest to me, since I live on the East Coast, and German U-boats were believed to have patrolled the waters of the Atlantic until V-E Day.  Say the Nazis had won World War II in 1945; I was born in 1951, and moved to Massachusetts two decades later.  Had the Allies gone down to defeat, by the time I got here Nazi subjugation of American women would have been complete.  The upshot for me?  No dates, no mate, no heirs to carry on my name or DNA.

One imagines the final steps to Nazi dominance with horror, aboard a German submarine, V or C class, as it patrols the beaches between Cape Cod and the North Shore of Boston:

Aboard the Marlene Dietrich:

VICE ADMIRAL HEINRICH VON TIECHLER:  What’s shakin’?

FIRST MATE:  The Yankee women seem to have sacrificed greatly to the Allies’ cause.  There is not a healthy set of gams to be seen on the beach!

VICE ADMIRAL:  We are north of Boston, where the women lose their muscle tone playing bridge, making stupid jokes about how they like to go into Boston to get “scrod.”  Let us turn to the south.

(. . .)

FIRST MATE:  We are off Revere Beach.

VICE ADMIRAL:  Keep going–Mussolini has dibs on the Italians.

(. . .)

FIRST MATE:  We approach Cape Cod.

VICE ADMIRAL:  Check the Infidelity Meter.

FIRST MATE:  Conditions are favorable–I’m showing high concentrations of discarded limes with traces of gin in the water.

VICE ADMIRAL:  Dive, man, dive!