I went to sleep last night wondering about the wonders of Steve Jobs. And what’s bigshot hotshot Bill Gates got that I don’t. Or Spielberg. Or those rich rich Koch brothers. Even Mark Zuckerberg — except now that Mark zucks and is losing his assets I’m wondering less about him.
I asked myself, what makes a super-genius. Jonas Salk. I.M. Pei. Hoover. Not the president, the vacuum cleaner dude.
Like Benjamin Franklin. Busy organizing a country, immortalizing tiny silver-rimmed eyeglasses, what happened? He pestered his mom one day for more chicken wings, and she told him to go fly a kite? What??
Elias Howe’s sewing machine. Mazel tov. But how . . . why . . . no thimble? I could thread a needle, hem a skirt 37 hours straight, stick my finger, draw blood and never conceive such an idea. My time would’ve been spent hunting for a Band-Aid.
Whatsisname discovered the steam engine. How? Why? He was in such a hurry? Had a late date? Where was he going? And those Wright brothers. Orville and Wilbur. So busy making planes, they had no time to change those names? Today they could’ve been Chad and Rock.
Despite physical ravages, these divinely blessed human beings did it. Helen Keller. The scientist Hawking. Beethoven didn’t hear. Stevie Wonder doesn’t see. King George III could hardly speak.
Marie Curie. Not busy making pot roast for her husband? Nothing to do but lay around and discover radium?
Specialness wasn’t always recognized early on. Like when her school chum was asked, “So what’s Betsy Ross doing?” she answered: “I don’t know. She’s home basting something.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Knocked off little ditties such as “The Requiem Mass in D Minor.” I mean, what is that — nothing? Beats anything MC Hammer might’ve come up with. Like when his kindergarten pal was asked, “So what’s Wolfie doing?” answered: “Who knows? He’s home humming something.”
Take Newton. If an apple fell on most of us, we’d have eaten it instead of those lousy stale left-over week-old stiff sardines I personally have in the fridge. End up with gravity? I’d end up with gastritis.
Ford and his car. Adam and his hat. Even before Canal Street, back when two shopping bags from the same store was considered matching luggage, Vuitton and his suitcases? Marconi and whatever he did.
Father of modern medicine. Who knew Hippocrates’ in-laws gave him a headache, which is why Hippo came up with aspirin.
Marco Polo discovered spaghetti before Ragout sauce. As a kid, Rembrandt had crayons. That Morse code fellow never had a bad word to say about anyone. Maybe because he never talked to anyone. I also heard he had bad penmanship. Alexander Graham Bell, he had a need to yak with some yenta?
How about Einstein? Robert Oppenheimer. Thomas Alva Edison. Mr. Rubik, whose cockamamie cube nobody can work. Inventor Philo Farnsworth, first to transmit a television picture, and today would probably turn over in his lab if he watched “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.”
Let us not leave out that Dutchman who bought Manhattan from the Indians for a lousy 20-something dollars. Today the subway costs more than that.
To transcribe a whole Sigmund Freud lecture, just thank Sir Isaac Pitman — circa 1813 to 1897 — or John Robert Gregg — 1867 to 1948 — for coming up with shorthand.
People who think they know everything are very irritating to those of us who do. But then there’s Eli Whitney, who beat Irving Polyester to the cotton gin.
Houdini. Galileo. Wernher Von Braun, whose mother told him to stop playing with that stupid rocket. The limbo? Invented by some cheapo sneaking into a pay toilet?
In Albert Schweitzer’s day fellow doctors didn’t cut out Wednesdays for golf. Louis Pasteur. So smart he had his X-rays retouched. Gillette. Once shaved in diluted ice because hot water steamed up his mirror. OK, so forget Jimmy Carter.
In the 1400s lived a mathematician. Being before Social Security, MetroCards, the IRS and CEOs going to the can, Copernicus had nothing to think about so he came up with astronomy. And the sun being stationary. They treated him like Leno. They laughed at him.
Matisse. van Gogh. Plato. Michelangelo. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe trio who dredged up railroad travel. That know-it-all Nostradamus. Andrew Carnegie. Audubon, who discovered the difference between a sparrow and a hawk.
I mean, we are not talking Pedro Espada here. We are talking the planet’s great minds. Geniuses.
Like whoever figured out hair spray. Invented Kleenex. Contact lenses. Lasers. Air conditioning. Came up with peanut butter — Skippy. The smooth, not the chunky.
They were driven. Not for material reward. For the sake of doing it. The Natural History Museum once tested my DNA and that of my Yorky. We were only five points apart. What that means, who knows? I know he can’t write and I rarely bark. So what is this divine gift some have and others not?
All I’m saying is some day I’d like to meet Irving Microwave. Or the most important genius of modern day civilization — whoever invented the tweezer. It sure as hell beats those pliers.