By Tim Sanders

Not long ago I watched an old episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus which included the famous sketch about Ken Clean-Air Systems, the British boxer. The somber narrator announced, "For breakfast every day, Ken places a plate of liver and bacon under his chair, and locks himself in the cupboard."

The boxer’s manager explained this odd behavior: "Well, he’s been having a lot of mental difficulties with his breakfasts, but this is temperament, caused by a small particle of brain in his skull, and once we’ve removed that he’ll be perfectly all right."

That phrase, "small particle of brain" has remained stuck in my own skull for several days. Because I am a diligent columnist, always alert, always on the lookout for novel phrases, I’ve decided to steal it.

A small particle of brain in the skull invariably causes trouble. It allows the skull’s owner to absorb information, but that particle is never quite large enough to let him process the information in a useful way.

Take our dachshund, Maggie. She can do several impressive doggie tricks. She will throw a tennis ball over her head, catch scraps of food in mid-air, and will spin around in circles as many as four times when food is placed in her bowl. She has a receptive vocabulary which runs the gamut from "hungry," "biscuit," and "chicken," all the way through her tiny digestive tract to "poop." But all of these endearing traits cannot compensate for the fact that she has a small particle of brain in her skull which seriously impairs her temperament.

When something new is introduced into Maggie’s environment, that particle of brain in her skull immediately recognizes it. She will bark maniacally at a new shirt draped over a chair, alerting the family to the threat of a violent shirt attack. Of course, if she only had two or three more brain particles, she would be able to logically determine that this shirt would never consider chasing her down the hall unless it were coordinated with a new pair of khaki trousers.

Maggie’s tiny brain particle also causes her to bark at strange purses, unfamiliar shoes, and dark-colored garbage bags. I believe that her brain particle has concluded that most domestic crimes involve women wearing unfamiliar shoes, ready to slap unsuspecting dachshunds with their purses and stuff them into black, 15-gallon Hefty bags.

When actual live people enter the house, Maggie senses that merely barking is not enough. The only things worse than unfamiliar shoes and shirts are unfamiliar shoes and shirts filled up with unfamiliar people. She is very protective of her family, and her little particle of brain always puts her in a fiercely defensive mode in which she will coil her powerful dachshund muscles, crouch, and like a bolt of brown lightning, poop on the floor.

If Maggie had a few more brain particles, or at least one rather large particle, she would probably recognize some of these visitors as the very same people she has seen come in and out of the house on a regular basis for the past year or two. But no, even if there is a spark of recognition there, the best her tiny brain particle can do is signal "IT’S A TRICK! POOP!" to her itty-bitty dachshund sphincter.

As to humans, of course there are humans who get all hysterical over shirts and purses, and poop when confronted by strangers–but they are French, and that is as it should be. When it comes to other irrational behavior caused by that pesky particle of brain gumming up our craniums, there are three areas that should come immediately to mind: Psychology, Medicine, and one other one, which I forget. Oh yeah, it’s Highways.

PSYCHOBABBLE - We all know individuals with a small particle of brain in their skulls who take a couple of junior college psychology courses and decide they have suffered from every emotionally devastating trauma known to man, and could even invent some new ones if they only had the time and a good thesaurus. These are the people who love telling you that they have problems with "self esteem," or "needs fulfillment," or "closure." No, they don’t love "telling you," they are determined to "share" it with you, sort of the way somebody would share a moldy ham sandwich. That tiny brain particle allows them to spout psychobabble at you until your own brain particle begins to throb, but it never allows them to figure out that psychobabble doesn’t really mean anything. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychobabble, spent eleven days in the Spring of 1896 locked in an oak cupboard, wearing a silk Freudian slip and clutching a can of Vienna sausages. There is a message there, somewhere.

STUPID MEDICINE - Everybody has at least one relative, with an overactive brain particle, who does extensive medical research–sort of–and learns how to mispronounce several impressive medical terms to describe their own physical disorders. Oddly enough, these particle-brained sufferers never apply the term "hypochondria," to themselves, only to others. (I did have an in-law, once, who was actually convinced she suffered from severe hypochondria, and was proud of it until she discovered what the term meant. Obviously she’d only thought she was a hypochondriac.)

DUMB SIGNS - As to driving and highways, how about the green highway sign which contains only a large, white question mark, and an arrow pointing down a nearby street. I’ve seen a number of these signs at various intersections over the years, and have always imagined a state-funded Goofy Highway Sign Committee pondering long and hard, and finally deciding "Hey, we need us a sign to tell people that there’s something down there, we just ain’t sure what!"

Sadly, when you take a gaggle of people, each of whom has only a small, bothersome particle of brain, and make a committee out of them, the resulting brain power is not cumulative. No, with ten people on a committee, each with a single particle of brain, you do not get a ten-particle result. You get a one-tenth-particle result. That is how committees work. That is also how you get hundreds of thousands of dollars spent each and every year on big green signs with question marks on them.

REALLY DUMB DRIVERS - And there is always the guy you’ll encounter on a quiet, two-lane road, waiting for you in a driveway or at a stop sign. As you draw near to the spot where this goober is waiting, his brain particle tells him to stomp on his accelerator and fly out into the road in front of you as though Satan himself were massaging his butt with jalapeno peppers. Anyone with the IQ of boiled okra would simply wait for you to pass, but not this guy. And once he’s proven that he doesn’t know the meaning of the word "fear," and probably several other words, this nitwit with the big ears and the baseball cap creeps along at the astonishing rate of 3 mph for a few hundred yards (his brain particle has probably signaled his foot that he is in a motor vehicle that he doesn’t know how to operate) and THEN he slowly pulls into another side road or driveway.

I could go on, but I won’t. My wife has a new purse sitting on the kitchen table, and it’s my turn to go bark at it for awhile. Maggie needs a break.