Point and Shoot

I was born in February and I’m a little concerned that the symbol for my birthday month is a fat, naked stalker baby with underdeveloped wings and a bow and arrow. I don’t know about you, but I go some places a baby should be afraid to follow, even armed with projectiles.

Somehow the thought of an undiapered toddler, especially one packing a weapon designed to shoot warm fuzzies, accompanying me to the mall clearance sales and auto-flushers seems horribly inappropriate. I still bear a French manicure-shaped scar from reaching for a cunning pair of Capri pants on the red dot clearance rack. If that naked baby grabs the last pair of Prada pumps on the sale table, he’s likely to lose something more important than a finger.

I can see why he’s armed. Anybody named Cupid who goes parading around in his birthday suit is likely to suffer grievous knuckle prints from guys named Pork Chop or Tiny here in the red mud section of South Carolina. And if he ventures out to watch the Nascar drivers go fast and turn left, he just may get tire marks someplace where parking is prohibited.

So just to be sure we’re on the same track, I checked with Cupid to see how he felt about his job.

Me: So, Cupid, how does it feel to go to work naked every day?

Cupid, the God of Love: Well, I save a lot on dry cleaning and there’s no dress code, so it’s kind of empowering. I use an awful lot of Chap-Stick, though. I’m trying for a corporate sponsorship. My endorsement deals keep me living in the life style of my dreams.

Me: You dream of flying naked for the rest of eternity?

Cupid: Don’t knock it. Even in the weather that frosts my feathers, it beats a business suit and 80-hour work weeks. And I don't have any place to carry a cell phone, so the boss can't ever call me on my lunch hour.

Me: But do you think it’s safe for a baby to fly around by himself?

Cupid: It’s not like I’m unarmed. (He tested the point on a heart-tipped arrow.) Hey, I’m the one that made Kanye apologize to Taylor Swift. It didn’t matter where I hit him. I just grazed him to let all the hot air out.

Me: If you’re such a sure shot, why are there so many divorces? You know, I’ve been married before and I’d rather shave my legs with a potato peeler than go through that again.

Cupid: Hey, everybody makes mistakes. Actually I was aiming for someone else, but, when you bent over it was like a heat seeking missile and a barn fire.

Me: So you’re saying the whole fiasco was my fault?

Cupid: Well every action has an opposite and equal unexpected consequence. That’s math you know. Or science. Whatever. I was a Liberal Arts major.

Me: I can identify with that. I graduated with honors, but they don’t take GPA in the Express Lane at the Piggly Wiggly.

Cupid: Well, don’t be eyeing my job. I had to knock off a guy with winged feet to get this gig.

Me: So once Valentine’s Day is past, it’s the off season for you. What keeps you busy the rest of the year?

Cupid: Oh, there’s lots to do. I like to spend part of the summer posing as a sculpture in a wishing well fountain. All that loose change comes in handy for the bathroom vending machines.

Me: Is that all you do? Make people think their wishes will come true, then steal their money?

Cupid: Of course not. Somebody’s got to keep up with the Kardashian sisters. Those gals make Snooki look like Hannah Montana. I think I’m gonna need a bigger box of arrows.

The Other End of the Telescope

I have it on good authority (Wikipedia or The Smoking Gun, I can’t remember which) that sometimes when people make discoveries or craft clever inventions that could change the face of the world, they irresponsibly share their findings with other people instead of keeping the whole thing to themselves to pass off to huge conglomerates later for outstanding sums of money.

That’s what a man named Galileo did all those dusty years ago and is the reason I am now sorting through headlines that shout peculiar things about the public display of various bits of Galileo’s anatomy, which somehow became separated from the whole of Galileo in general. If you’re interested at all in the science of mathematics, you’ll be excited to hear that these random pieces are known as fractions, and therefore Galileo is still teaching us things long after he was buried, which is when he did the most traveling.

It seems that Galileo Galilei, which would be a smashing name for a romance novelist, came to be known by the Church as a Very Bad Boy. Back then Church was spoken with a capital C and in charge of the way people thought about things. Today Kanye West and Taylor Swift take care of all that.

The Church was mad because after Galileo invented a nifty tool called the telescope, he found out that the earth spun circles around the sun instead of the other way around, which caused me to fail Physical Science and send my Grade Point Average, which is essential for getting allowance, into the dumpster.

The Church put Galileo under arrest in his house where he whiled away the last years of his life playing video games in the basement instead of inventing more stuff like You Tube or Google or things like that which would make life easier for those of us who were grounded for making bad grades in science.

The Church wouldn’t let Galileo, whose name begins to look funny after you write it a lot, be buried any place good like under the Hollywood sign or on Broadway. So a long time after he died, people who secretly liked the telescope because they could use it to spy on their neighbors who should keep the curtains closed anyway, dug up Galileo’s bones and took him to be buried near his best friend Michelangelo. During this important scientific process, known as migration, a person described in local stone tablets as an admirer, lopped off some of Galileo's spare body parts in case there was a market for them on e-Bay. In case it comes up, I’d rather my admirers just send a nice card.

However, since Galileo died before inventing e-Bay, which is really more like something another old guy named Da Vinci would come up with anyway, the random body bits got tucked away in the junk drawer in the kitchen or the box of Christmas decorations in the attic or in a spare teenager’s room, where they wouldn’t be found for many years.

Luckily for us, we live in a generation where we’ve discovered things of our own, like how bad it is to use water bottles more than once and that the decomposed body bits of our friend Galileo were hidden secretly in a box with a big statue of him on the top. Unfortunately this discovery came along too late for me to write a report and save my science grade, but maybe they’ll do somebody some good.

I don’t think Galileo will be using them any time soon.