‘Diver Attacked by Mermaids’ and other headlines--now thereby hangs a tale

A woman who evidently spends a lot more time in supermarket lines than I do has sent me a list of headlines from recent supermarket tabloids.

It is a fine list of wonders, and justifies her vigilance.

“So fascinated have I become by those headlines,” writes Katharine M. Cashman of La Canada, “that I now choose the longest line in the supermarket rather than the shortest, thus gaining more time not only to read them, but also to copy them into a small notebook.”

Evidently, Mrs. Cashman doesn’t buy any of those newspapers, but is content merely to titillate her mind by reading the headlines. That way she avoids the risk of reading the stories and being disenchanted.

It is better, I suppose, just to go on wondering than to look deeper into such phenomena, for example, as this one: MOM PREGNANT FOR SIXTY-ONE YEARS.

Does that mean that this mom was pregnant for 60 years with just one child; if so, was it born normal? Or was it old? Or does it mean that she was pregnant every year for 60 years, which means that she would have had at least 60 children. (A Russian woman had 69 children but only 27 pregnancies.)

CABBAGE PATCH DOLL STRANGLES MOM

That sounds like one of those horror movies, with Sissy Spacek. You know it can’t be true; and yet, those Cabbage Patch dolls do seem almost human sometimes, and malevolent, too. I don’t know that I’d care to sleep with one in my bed.

MOM GIVES SELF CAESARIAN

I suppose that’s possible, but I have an idea that it took place in a small town in Bulgaria, and would be hard to track down.

HUMAN HEAD TRANSPLANT

I’m not yet ready to believe that.

GHOST DOG--SPIRIT OF BELOVED PET

RETURNS TO SAVE FAMILY FROM BLAZE

That’s the kind that people love to believe. But there aren’t any ghost dogs any more than there are ghost people.

BABY TALKS AND SINGS AT BIRTH

That’s nothing. How about the baby that sang arias from opera in the womb?

FATHER OF 807 ALMOST WEDS

HIS OWN DAUGHTER

I wouldn’t be surprised. With 400 or 500 daughters around it might be hard to keep track. I wouldn’t be too surprised if that guy wound up marrying one of his own granddaughters .

MARILYN MONROE SEDUCED J.F.K.

AND BOBBY FOR REDS

That’s the kind that everybody loves. A sex scandal that has the nation’s No. 1 sex symbol making love with the President of the United States and his brother for the Russians.

Well, maybe Marilyn did seduce them. But I don’t think she would have done it for the Russians. She would have done it out of patriotism.

DIVERS ATTACKED BY MERMAIDS

Evidently we never will give up our belief in mermaids. The other night I saw a movie called “Splash” in which a man falls in love with a mermaid and, when she is pursued and exploited as an object of scientific research, he goes to live with her in the sea.

The problem with mermaids, of course, is that anyone over the age of 6 has to wonder how they mate. In the movie this problem is easily handled by having the mermaid’s tail turn into a pair of legs when she’s on shore. But as soon as she gets wet--it’s back to that finny tail. At the conclusion, when the young man dives into New York Harbor with her, to live happily ever after, I was not only worried about their sex life--I wondered how he was going to breathe without gills.

APE GIVES BIRTH TO HUMAN BABY

There’s that one again. Last time, remember, it was a woman who had given birth to a half-chimpanzee, having been impregnated accidently with chimpanzee semen from a zoo bank.

There is nothing that people won’t believe.

Steve Rossi sends me a copy of a piece by Isaac Asimov in Fantasy and Science Fiction called “Asimov’s Corollary,” which throws some light on the nature of human belief.

Asimov’s corollary is inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s law that “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Asimov is an elderly and distinguished scientist, and has quite openly denounced numerous beliefs of the day (astrology, flying saucers, ancient astronauts, the Bermuda triangle) as “sheer idiocy,” “nonsense,” “stupid folly” and “hogwash.”

“I have no worries about myself,” he says. “I am very selective about the scientific heresies I denounce, for I am guided by what I call Asimov’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law. Here it is:

“When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists, and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion--the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.”

The reason for that, Asimov says, is that people, being human, believe in that which comforts them. For instance, there are a great many inconveniences and disadvantages in the universe as it exists. Consider death. Tell people that death does not exist and they will believe you and sob with gratitude. . . .

“Yet as far as I know there is not one piece of evidence ever advanced that would offer any hope that death is anything other than the permanent dissolution of the personality and that beyond it, as far as individual consciousness is concerned, there is nothing. . . .

“Then why do people believe? . . . Because they want to.”

C’est la vie.