A Word for Our Times: Funitude

by Meg Sonata

A Word for Our Times: Funitude

That word actually exists in the Urban Dictionary. I thought I made it up this morning after reading the news until I couldn't endure further enlightenment on America's current obsessions. In an act of intellectual rebellion, I checked out the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and found this marvelous column by Garrison Keillor, which I recommend if your funny bone is aching for humor, too: "Welcome to the Abyss."  

https://www.wvgazettemail.com/opinion/gazette_opinion/columnists/garrison-keillor-welcome-to-the-abyss-gazette/article_d8b367a8-7fee-5c73-a8a4-4601f58c38be.html

Must we act grim and nearly apocalyptic to prove our brains are functioning? Garrison Keillor says, No! It's comic relief that we need to demonstrate our frontal lobes haven't cut out completely. It's that little poke in the ribs from a friend who suggests that maybe the world won't end today--at least not until we've finished a decent meal and shared a joke--or not until we've gone for a walk where the Grim Reaper never spends his time--like a Mad Tea Party perhaps, or a song from childhood like "Mersey Dotes and Dozy Doats," which spins us round and gets us off this news cycle of bedlam and hell and unfunitude.

So, here's to a decent weekend: That means we seek that little surprise from a forgotten source like Garrison Keillor, who keeps right on diagnosing modern life as a cup short of sanity. He reminds us that we don't prove our brilliance by acting all snarly and constantly finding fault with the human race. That behavior takes no talent at all. No! It's the capacity to see the big picture which demonstrates even the most basic aptitude for health and happiness. In that big picture of life, there ain't no yin without a yang. So, go for the bright light of morning, even if carrying one's own flashlight comes with the territory. 

Calling Agatha Christie to Las Vegas

With all the hubbub over guns, Congress, terrorists, and gambling addicts, the Las Vegas shooting has created a new variation on the one puzzle sure to rivet mystery readers from here to Australia and back. Even the shooting victims--in a most painful kind of extortion of the dead--have been hijacked to distract attention from one key fact in the Las Vegas atrocity. This hideous crime creates a locked room mystery. 

From the first reports to the most recent accounts of the awful tale, versions accumulate of the final 70 minutes of waiting before the SWAT team breached the gunman's door--and discovered his body. Perhaps video recordings will resolve discrepancies, but so far, readers have heard that HE shot through the door at the SWAT team; he killed himself after killing 58 victims and injuring 520 strangers below his windows; and his body, along with 23 weapons, lay on the other side of that door, waiting to be discovered by police.  

The police have explained that they were under orders to wait for the SWAT team to arrive before breaching the door. Meanwhile, no information has so far been released indicating the state of that body which awaited discovery. Was it warm or cold? Had rigor mortis set in, turning the flesh rigid? Analysts have observed that a single individual could not fire 23 weapons and accomplish a massacre of those proportions in the eleven minutes of recorded firing. So, who besides Agatha Christie could solve a crime this complex and baffling?