We're rapidly coming up on Jester's first anniversary with us (Oct. 27) and he remains as sweet and cuddly a cat as we have ever known.  What's more, he remains virtually odor-free despite not having had a single bath in any of those last 50 weeks.
     I wish I could say the same thing about myself.  Try as I might to will myself to be springtime fresh and radiantly sweet-smelling, I've found that I must bathe at least once a day in the summer to keep the neighbors from moving, and about once every 36 hours in the winter to keep the FAA from bitching to me about having to divert planes.
     To say that I'm jealous of Jess is an understatement.  He already has the tail thing going that I wish I had, he's already cuter and furrier than I'll ever be - must he also be able to get away without having to spend countless hours keeping the soap and shampoo people in business?
     Harumph.
     Although efficiency experts and those who read time-motion studies for entertainment might think otherwise, I've personally found that having to bathe once every 36 hours in the winter is worse than having to bathe once a day in the summer.  I prefer to bathe at night so that I may enter Dreamland at my cleanest.  That's no problem in the summer since "night" and "once a day" coincide almost perfectly (just one of the advantages of living in a modern First World place like America).  In the winter, however, I have to choose between continuing to bathe every night (which is too often because it dries out my baby-soft skin during that low-humidty season) or bathing every other night (which is not often enough to prevent my spending the last 12 hours of every 48 hour period wondering why it feels like things are burrowing into my flesh).
     As Matt Groening has gotten rich saying, "Life is hell."

     I read an article once which attempted to explain the rapidity with which non-bathing humans begin to stink as a defense mechanism.  We can't run fast, and we can't climb very well, and our teeth and nails are hardly any help at all when it comes to fending off insurance salesmen let alone wild boar attacks, BUT... even a starving saber-toothed tiger would think twice before sinking its saber-tooth into a creature resembling Charles Schulz's Pigpen.
     Which just might be why you won't find Pigpen among the entrees on a French menu which doesn't think twice about listing snails....

     My high school health teacher actually advocated bathing four times a day, every day.  Once in the morning, once after golf (he was an incorrigible all-season player), once before dinner, and once before bed.  I suspect this is why he was so poorly prepared to teach us anything else, as well as why the exams we took in his class just before Christmas, 1973, have yet to be handed back.

     Donald Trump, as you may have read, has taken things a step further.  He tries never to get dirty in the first place.  One way he has of doing this is by never shaking hands.  He's toying with the idea of running for president now (with Oprah as his running mate) and really, I think I'd vote for him just to see the expressions on the faces of all those Congress people, world leaders, and Popes when they come all the way to the White House just to end up being photographed with their fingers dangling in mid-air.
     Of course I suppose it won't be all that different from Clinton, who has testified that while he has touched many a hand in his life, he's always refrained from actually shaking any of them....

      All of which reminds me for some reason of this little story from a recent issue of the Boston Globe:

Dr. Koichiro Fujita, aka Dr. Dirt, says that Japanese society is obsessed with cleanliness to the point of eradicating even beneficial bacteria. Nearly every item in Japan is laced with anti-bacterial agents, even fishing bait, says Fujita, who has sold 30,000 copies of his book "Cleanliness Is Sickness." The good doctor recently swallowed a tapeworm and kept it in his body for a year.

     This in turn reminds me that Cleopatra allegedly killed herself by holding an asp to her breast while she was taking a bath.  That's why the government now requires "Do Not Use While Bathing!" warning tags on all poisonous snakes to this day.
     Of course if Cleopatra had been in a jacuzzi or a hot tub, or had even had a cheap whirlpool contraption slung over the rim of her bath, it's quite possible that she would have been too relaxed to clutch anything poisonous to her breast and consequently would have lived long enough to be captured by Octavius and paraded through the streets of Rome in a cage.  I don't know how this might have affected the course of human history, but it sure would have made that 1963 20th Century Fox movie starring Elizabeth Taylor a bit more interesting, eh?

     The Bible tells us that King David first saw Bathsheba while she was bathing and that he was so overcome with desire that he sent her husband off into battle on a suicide mission just so he might have her for himself.  This is why I always bathe with my mini-blinds shut tight tight TIGHT as I would hate to stir such desire in any general or leader that he or she felt they had to send my wife into battle after she's already had to face a classroom full of freshman every school day for  the last 13 years.
     Just one of the things I do for my sweetie that she doesn't even know about....

     Had I only been born in medieval times, I wouldn't have to worry about this.  Not only didn't they have mini-blinds then, they didn't bathe.  People were expected to mortify the body, not clean it, and walking around without ever touching a bar of Dial was declared one of the most mortifying things a person could do according to a papal encyclical issued one otherwise slow May 16.  Bathing, then as now, often required one to get naked as well, and this was simply far too likely to lead to sin for the Christians back then to even think about, especially since sin just might have distracted them from the hard work of killing all the Jews, Muslims, and witches they could possibly get their hands on.
     Despite the demands this hard work placed on every good Christian between the fall of Rome and the debut of "Dallas", Chaucer found time to write up his famous Wife of Bath's Tale.  Bath was then a famous city in England, so named because it had once been the site of baths built by the Romans.  The Romans were notoriously bath-crazy people.  The Romans also washed all their clothes in urine.  Coincidence?  I'm not sure, and since Proctor and Gamble refuses to answer my many letters on the subject I can only guess that Rome would have fallen long before it actually did so had the stench arising from their togas not kept it suspended above the earth in mid-topple for many, many years....

     Note: It has been said of Marie Antoinette that she had two baths in her life - once when she was born, and another when she was dead.  Compulsive gamblers to this day are still laying bets on which bath went faster.  On the one hand, infants tend to be small and tended to be rapidly bathed even back in the days before the invention of the dishwasher.  On the other hand, the dead Marie Antoinette didn't have a head in need of shampooing, rinsing, and shampooing and rinsing again per the instructions on the bottle, saving a lot of time (as the husband of any bald woman getting ready to go out to dinner will gladly attest to).  If I were a gambling man, I'm not sure exactly where I'd put the money embezzled from my wife's purse.  On second thought, I'd probably go out and buy chocolate, since it's doubtful that anyone will ever be able to decide the issue at this late date.
     When the betting begins on the hygiene habits of Barbara Bush, let me know.

     Which reminds me...  President William Howard Taft allegedly got his 325 pound bulk stuck in the White House bathtub once.  Although the Constitution makes clear that presidents can only be removed by impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, it turns out that three firemen, two winches and a barrel of lard can work almost as well in a pinch.

     And BTW: Although many reference sources say that Millard Fillmore was the first president to have a bathtub installed in the White House, that's not true.  It's just a legend that sprung up after H.L. Mencken wrote a ludicrous article on the subject in 1917 which he eventually admitted was a hoax designed to test the gullibility of the human animal.  (Click here for details.)
     If you're a student doing research for a paper, don't be fooled!  Historians now know that it was actually Abigail Adams who installed the first bathtub in the White House just to keep John from having to run through the lawn sprinklers every night.

     And finally, not that it matters much, but there was a thin coating of ice this morning on my back yard birdbath.  That's the first time that's happened since early last spring and a sure sign that winter is indeed coming.
     Guess I need to go cart the thing into the garage for the season, since there's virtually no chance now that some modern day Bathsheba will show up and give me the chance to prove just how superior I am to King David in some ways.
     Then I suppose I'll finally be unable to put off bathing myself a minute longer.
     Oh, life is hell...  life is hell....

     If only I had one of those temperature dials on my shower faucet so it wouldn't take me half an hour every time to get the water just right before I can even think about letting it touch my body...!