Cool Beans, sir

A sound travels across a wet, chilly spring morning. It is the sound of an Australian tenor opera singer gargling garlic juice while ripping haute couture petticoats into bandages for the victims of a sudden and bloody European civil war. However, the scene is America and there are no vocalists of any nationality within range. The sound emitted from The Answer Phone's curious beverage maker. The insulated reservoir, which was apparently under a great deal of pressure, has split open. A shredded complex of bamboo lattice work once contained in the mysterious device has been blown across the counter, a set for a miniature production of Les Miserable's barricade scene.


An idea man ("an idea man, see? I deal in ideas, see?") with a bamboo cane, smelling of freshly paved highways and duck feathers, asks:
How did "cool beans" enter and establish itself in the American vernacular?


The Answer Phone is glad to answer your question. However, I am currently on hold with an important supplier's technical support line.

The irony of the situation is not lost on me, I assure you all.

I can fully dedicate myself to this question while I am listening to the droning asian hold music that is apparently the preferred choice for corporate image of this sort of business. I would not know, having never found it necessary to call them. The situation, however, is quite dire and so I am here, a phone on the phone. Tapping my fingers, drinking water. Plain old water. Nice pure clear water. The Universal Solvent. Just fine.

I will address as much of your question as I can until someone comes on the line to help me out with this situation in which I find myself bound up. Should I be interrupted before coming to a stopping place, it may be up to The Answer Phone Cloud to chime in and complete this answer. Please, if you are qualified, feel free to chime in.

And so: Cool Beans and the American Vernacular:

Upon landing on the Amerigan (as he preferred to call it until his dying day) mainland, Amerigo Vespucci came upon a large rodent grasping in its cute but clawed hands a small shell. He recorded in his letter to his Medici patron that the rodent then wandered off into the forest. Amerigo thought little about the incident until

Oh, hi there Komiko. Thank you for taking my call. I am calling from America... yes yes America. I understand. I I I understand Komiko. Yes, well, it is a special situation and I need your understanding. I am certain we can find a way. That treaty has not, as I understand it, yet been fully ratified by all parties...

(I am going to have to leave it at that for now. Once again, I call on The Answer Phone community to fill in the rest of this response.)

The News Conversation

I wonder if the text scrolling by on Fox News and CNN are having a conversation. Now it is my turn to ask the question. How would that dialog go?

Economics of the Idle

A boxy but good gentleman with a barely discernable foreign accent -- perhaps European, perhaps Japanese -- asks:

Hello Mr. Phone,
Driving into work today I got hopelessly stuck in traffic while listening to an NPR piece about the dire state of our economy. The story continued about how unemployment is through the roof and, basically, no one is working anymore. So my question is: if no one is working (except for me, of course) then why am I stuck in traffic on the way to work? Where are all these people going? Have they been conditioned, through years of work, to just get in their cars and drive between 7 and 9am every weekday morning?
Thanks for listening! PS- are you a rotary phone or a conference room-worthy, multi-lined digital jobby?

I would be a well built phone of classic lines and time-proven features, were I a phone. I am a man, all in all.

The economy functions on the collective random acts of a community. Looked at as a whole, these random acts tend to form patterns over time. Thus, it is possible to add "-ics" to the end of economy and write about it on chalkboards and poorly laid out periodicals. At the root economics is a collective prayer for logical predictable activity from people. Like drug prohibitions and speed limits, we can see that this prayer has not yet yielded compliance by the population. Perhaps it is time to give up.

Give up, my friend, give up on dire computations that may or may not correlate your traffic experience to employment rates.

• As I squat on the sidewalk and rattle a few sparse coins in a tin cup I ask not what the larger patterns are and how they have affected me.
  
• As I pace an empty board room idly wondering if my new tailored suits have come in from Hong Kong, I do not consider the correlation between unemployment trends and my ability to dress myself.
• And when it comes time for me to pick up that severance check and head out the door of the shuttered factory one last time, it is not for me to compute the relationship between my situation and the trends that are tugged along by the persistent scroll of text at the bottom CNN and Fox News screens.

I call on you to stop driving yourself mad with economics and adopt Economology. With Economology we can think of ourselves as separate from the economy, just as when we study herpetology we are separate from newts. My morning tea is ruined if it is always a self-conscious act that proves or disproves an economic theorem. I would rather that I am a newt in someone else's study and they are a newt in mine.

While this is not the best discipline to work from to derive actionable scientific results, let's be frank. The result we desire is happiness. Let's choose a school of thought based on what can create more individual happiness. On that criteria, the dismal science certainly falls down.

I apologize. I try to only create one new science every six months and I have just surpassed my quota.

He wants to want.

A dark room containing a desk, ordered piles of paper, a coat rack with two broken prongs, and an electronic kitchen contraption labeled with Japanese characters. The windows, rapped by excessive wind and rain, click and rattle in the spirit of a happily employed union worker toiling in a Soviet propaganda film.

The door opens. A figure, backlit by the storm-ridden gloaming, enters along with a rush of wind. He strides into the room, removes his hat and coat, then shakes the loose water from them. After hanging them on the coat rack, he sighs and approaches the kitchen contraption. It beeps a short tune when he presses three buttons and turns a dial. A murky, steaming liquid pours out of a spout into a ceramic mug with the name "Betsy" printed on it.

The Answer Phone puts the steaming mug on the desk, twirls a fountain pen open, and begins to write.

Dear Answer Phone: Why do we have to start with "I want to..." when, say, we're thanking the committee that planned the meeting that is finally ending?

When I am called upon for public speaking engagements (please feel free to contact my agent with inquiries) I prepare myself through a rigorous series of trials of the soul. The first act is to don a frilly bustier and a pair of denim work pants. After panhandling for three hours, I take my earnings to a fine Greek small plate restaurant where I am well known. I spend all of my begged money on feta and octopus skewers.

For the next phase, I have had a walk in cooler installed at my office. I strip myself naked and lay down on the floor of the cooler for a night. In lieu of a blanket, I unroll a spool of thread across my body.

Upon waking, I make a gruel from boiled sandstone and Kobe beef which I eat with chopsticks.

At this point I am ready to either speak in front of people or participate in a reality TV show. Without anything but circumstantial evidence, I am convinced that successful public speakers who have any degree of self awareness participate in similar acts. I have heard accounts that Barack Obama's breath is often earthy and I have seen Michelle pluck a bit of thread from his hair just before he went before the cameras.

Even after this carefully designed regimen my mind swims as I approach a dais, podium, rostrum, or armored car. As I open my mouth for the first time, I feel the vast possibility of the moment and the likelihood that it will all go wrong.

In my mind is a pool of concepts, things like "Bride and groom good mostly but don't mention their lost loves from youth," or "Policy of truffle subsidy really the best we can do right now until the southern contingent gets shut out of the convention or gets bought off with concessions on cotton protectionism." Between that reservoir and the minds of the audience is my mouth. It is a poor tool. I could come across as so much gibberish or be misinterpreted entirely.

There in that moment, moistening my lips and taking in a preliminary breath, I am filled with a desire to get it right. And so, when I start, I start with "I want."

The Answer Phone will rise.

Like good bread, you must have patience and timing. The Answer Phone has been working on professional development these last few days, so he has not been able to brew the magic tea and give the questions what they deserve. He will return.

Changing Math

The Answer Phone has been branching out into areas of knowledge that he was not particularly strong on previously. After taking some post doctoral seminars in Heady Math, he was very glad to encounter...
A white lab coat, its pockets containing ancient nautical navigation tools and a pair of plastic harachi sandals, who asks:

Why does good change take so long, whereas bad change happens overnight?

This question gives me an opportunity to exercise a new discipline that I have created. I have found that many, like this apparent Renaissance gent, desire to apply modern quantitative analytics to ancient qualitative questions. A lesser answering device would simply turn this question over to the ghost of Aristophanes -- good friend of mine, though he still has ghostly lower GI problems that make his company difficult to stomach.

However, I have developed a new manner of math that is uniquely suited for this purpose. Malgebra leverages the capabilities of ninth grade algebra to resolve pressing social and personal issues. With malgebra, we can explore topics that have no answer suitable for our post-Newtonian minds and achieve the reassurance we feel when we find something to the left of the equal sign.

Let us start out by stating the problem in an equation:


That is, Good Change, over time is less than Bad Change over time when Change equals the union of Good and Bad.

Now, using simple algebra, we can reduce the question to a less daunting line by getting rid of those pesky fractions and that weird set theory crap:

Now, apply a made up algorithm to test the equation:

If Gc = Ghandi then Bc = Subway Five Dollar Footlong Television Ads.

Thus, Change = Leader of massive social change + Advertisements that allude to penis length.

As a result, we can be assured that for every skull-drilling advertisement for affordable but undelicious food, there will be a man with an undeniable smile who refuses to eat until his people are free.

Are you following me?

At this point malgebra allows us to step free of the chalkboard and think for ourselves. We can see that the proponents of unappetizing food, due to the values that allow them to feel comfortable in their contribution to the world, have no problem foisting noise and visual pollution onto their customers in an effort to leak more money from them. We can see that their lack of respect for aesthetics and the quality of life of their fellow humans drive them to unconscionably push brain-ripping narrative and poisonous jingles onto the public.

As a result, a single man refuses to eat anything -- no matter how low in calories and affordable it is -- until those in power realize the sensibility of the obvious outcome.

And so:

Subway sandwiches --> One good man who can change the course of history.

To further refine our computations, I cracked in to the Subway information services department. Between the advent of the FDFL campaign and November fourth, Subway has sold 423,000 sandwiches.

With this we can determine the proportion of bad change required for good change to occur.