by Justice William W. Bedsworth

My wife and I subscribe to six newspapers, including both the Los Angeles Times¹ and the Orange County Register. The Register has taken to killing 100 redwoods a week to publish stories about amusement parks, especially Disneyland. If a ride closes down in Disneyland for an hour, it’s front page news. Above the fold.

I am obviously not the target audience for this information,² so I don’t judge it—I’m trying to wean myself away from the judging thing—but it has given me an idea for occasional future columns: stories about my new amusement park.

Greetings from Retirementland, the amusement park option to Dyingonthejobland!

This is my first column since retirement. I just retired a week ago and, as many of you will attest, it takes me awhile to figure things out. So while I can’t really tell you much about my life here yet, I can see already that it’s going to be an adventure.

Today I had time to peruse a national news magazine and learned that the twenty-first century is a lot stranger than I had previously realized. And that’s saying a lot. If the twentieth century was a duck, the twenty-first century is a duck-billed platypus. With bat wings and an AK-47.

I know I judge this century with something of a jaundiced eye. I was over fifty when it showed up, and I have long recognized the fact that I am a carburetor man in a fuel injection universe.

But I don’t know that I fully appreciated that metaphor until I read today that during a Taylor Swift concert in Edinburgh, seismologists four miles away picked up earthquake readings. Earthquake readings! And from these they were able to extrapolate the fact “the crowd transmitted roughly 6,000 car batteries’ worth of power.”

Car batteries? As a measuring device? Seismologists . . . scientists . . . are now expressing energy readings in terms of car battery power?

Whose car? Are we talking about a large pickup truck fresh off the showroom floor, or mine when I forgot to close the trunk overnight?

And what battery? The one I actually buy when a replacement is called for or the one the dealership wants to sell me that must have platinum terminals and laboratory quality acid?

I don’t understand how this works, but then again, I never understood “horsepower” either. I mean, if we remove the engine from my car and harness it to 400 horses, we are never going to get above 55mph. That’s as fast as a horse can go. Individually or as a team.

And that’s only for quarter-horse distances, 450 yards or so, after which we’re going to—what, harness up another 400? Wait for the first battalion to rest up for the next dash? At that rate, a trip to the market will require days. We’ll have to pack more groceries than we’re going to buy.

And as long as we’re on the topic of Retirementland transportation,³ let’s talk about the WNBR. This is not an east coast radio station. It’s the World Naked Bike Ride, something that has gone on in Toronto for most of the twenty-first century without anybody telling me.

The WNBR (slogan: Less Gas, More Ass) celebrated its twentieth anniversary this summer. If you’re so inclined, you can YouTube the race.⁴ Honest.

But it turns out a coupla hundred nude cyclists pedaling through downtown Toronto does present some problematic aspects.⁵ Bike Share Toronto, an organization that posts 9,000 bicycles throughout Toronto, to be borrowed (for a fee) by anyone who chooses, has asked WNBR participants to please “wipe down the seats and handlebars after their ride so they are sanitized for the next rider.”⁶

But I applaud Bike Share Toronto for both its business model and its concern for its clientele—a quality I think may have been taken a little far in Great Britain. There, I’m informed, the Royal Shakespeare Company warned prospective attendees of its new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor that the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, is “subjected to body-shaming” in the 1602 play and that, if that is something they don’t want to see, there’s always Nightmare on Elm Street or The Human Centipede 2.⁷

Then there’s the school board in Florida that has “banned from school libraries a book about school boards banning books from school libraries.” If you’re desperately looking for something to do before you have to return to that MSJ, you can probably kill a few hours trying to diagram that sentence.

Turns out the Indian River County board did just that. The book is a 2017 novel called Ban This Book. The school board admits the book has no sexual or otherwise objectionable content but says, “The title itself and the theme challenges our authority.”

I can only assume their defense to a charge of aggravated—not to say just plain stupid–lunacy would be entrapment, based on the book’s inviting title.

But, because Retirementland is all about having a good time,⁸ I close with some good news from the world of intellectual property.⁹ Crayola has been granted a trademark on the SMELL of crayons.

Not the crayons, themselves, mind you. Those were patented in 1890. But protecting their smell is now a fait accompli. The United States Patent Office has closed a decade-long battle by granting the Crayola folks a trademark for “a slightly earthy soap with a pungent, leather-like clay undertones.” No idea how many five-year-olds they had to survey to come up with that description.

Although I always thought crayons just smelled like wax—and carnauba wax was in fact the key to their patent—it is a smell we’re all familiar with, and I think I agree with the Patent Office on this one. It’s highly distinctive, easily identifiable . . . I can see it getting trademark protection.

But I gotta admit, Crayola’s reaction to the mark’s approval gives me pause. Their CEO envisions piping the smell into stores to trigger shoppers’ nostalgic buying instincts.

Forget smart phones, we’re gonna have smart crayons. “Honey, I’m back from the store. Hmmm, I seem to have bought six boxes of crayons. Why in the world did I do that?”

Retirementland. The adventure begins.

BEDS NOTES

1. I grew up with the Times and greatly admire it, but it has now gone to day-old sports coverage, so I’ve changed bakeries. I have no idea whether it decided it is too cool or too impoverished for traditional sports coverage but it’s a deal-breaker for me. Besides, I live in Orange County, and the Times’ coverage of the City Council in Thousand Oaks and potholes in West Covina is more than my limited bandwidth can handle. So I start my day with the Register (sans opinion pages) and then read what my wife suggests is interesting in the Times.
2. One of the more disconcerting aspects of being an aging boomer is that I’m no longer the target audience for anything. My generation has gone from handsome leading man to quirky character actor. It takes some getting used to.
3. Now that I no longer have that pesky day job, now that I’m a full-time writer, you can expect a lot more of these clever segues.
4. The mind boggles.
5. Really? What could possibly go wrong?
6. Can you imagine the board meeting at which this request was approved? “Eeuww, we don’t want to remind prospective customers that the last person to ride the bike might have been nude.” “What are they gonna wipe them down with, it’s a NAKED bike ride.” “Why isn’t anyone eating the doughnuts this morning?”
7. All right, I made the last part up, but not the first part. That is, hard as it is for me to imagine, completely true.
8. Frank Firmat always reminds me the Spanish word for retirement is jubilación. And I am planning on a ton of jubilation.
9. I’ll pause here so you can make up your own joke about my lack of same.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.