The Primal Instincts of Dog and Man

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We love our kids unconditionally. We would love to love our dogs condition-free, except for one nagging issue, the poop thing. “Why does he eat it? How do I get her to stop?” It’s so gross that it’s tough to watch, tough to stomach, and tough to get over when we look at our beloved pets. The answers are so wide-ranging that it’s safe to say no expert has a definitive answer for why they do it, nor is there a definitive answer to how we can stop it. The best answer I’ve heard is that their wild ancestors ate their puppy’s poo to prevent predators from knowing where they were. It’s an answer, but no one is saying it is the answer. 

Even if we had one definitive answer everyone agreed on, and we knew how to train them to stop doing it, it wouldn’t change the fact that it’s just gross. Long-time dog handlers, who have had their boundaries tested numerous times, say that poop-eating still grosses them out. 

The dog is attracted to the most disgusting matter. If they spot a hard, mostly white and crumbly piece of excrement in the grass, they might give it a whiff and move on, but a fresh steaming pile flips an ignition switch in the need-to-know aisle of their brain. Their desire to learn every little nugget of information possible about that turd can require a muscular tug on the leash to get them away from it. Depending on the size of our dog, it might alter our preferred ninety-degree angle with the earth when they find a rotting, maggot infested opossum corpse nearby. Our beloved little beasts can’t help it, it’s the way they were wired, but our hard wiring leads us to find the act of sniffing, sometimes licking, and even eating excrement so repulsive that it can temporarily alter our perception of them.

Most of us won’t sniff, lick, or eat the steaming carcass of the victim of a car accident we see in the other lane of the interstate, but we will slow our roll to see everything we can. Coming to a complete stop is beyond the pale for most of us, but how slow do we roll by, hoping to catch a little glimpse of something awful?

To curb our enthusiasm, first responders assign some of their personnel to traffic control. They do this to prevent oblivious drivers from hitting the personnel on the scene, but they also know that our desire to see something awful will cause traffic jams and accidents.

“I could put together a book of some of the dumbest things I’ve seen drivers do,” a friend of mine, often assigned to traffic control, said. “I’m not talking about a top ten list either. I’m talking about a multi-layered, illustrative, instructional, and sad-but-true list.”

I realize that 20-30 minutes is a relatively minor traffic jam, compared to most cities, but the reason some of us live in big towns and small cities is to avoid the perils of over population. So, when we finally involuntarily creep up on the accident, and we see no other obstructions in our lane, or the other three to our right, it is frustrating. 

We get so frustrated with all the drivers driving so slow that it’s obvious that they hope we misconstrue their slow roll with a respectfully cautious approach to an accident. They just want to see something, and they hope they time it just right to see the first responders pull the bloody and screaming from the wreckage. 

As with the quick sniff in passing that dogs give a hard, mostly white and crumbly piece of excrement in the grass, we might give a “Nothing to see here folks, everyone’s fine” fender bender a glance, but we might not even slow to survey for carnage. We won’t because in our drive up to the accident, we saw no evidence of twisted metal, plastic shrapnel on the street, and no spider glass. We pass by without slowing, knowing that it’s not worth our time.  

When we see evidence of a catastrophic accident, we become what my great-aunt used to call lookie-loos. Lookie-loos feed this morbid curiosity so often, that we’ve developed a term for it, rubbernecking. Rubbernecking, the term, was developed in America, and the strictest definition of the term involves the straining of the neck to feed a compulsive need to see more of the aftermath of an incident.

A 2003 study in the U.S., suggested that rubbernecking was the cause of 16% of distraction-related traffic accidents. If you’ve ever been involved in a major accident, you know the scene attracts a wide variety of lookie-loos. Some of them do everything they can to assist, but most pull to the side of the road just to look, just to see. They, in their own strange way, want to be a part of the worst day of somebody else’s life. If you’ve ever witnessed this, you’ve seen the similarities between them and the information-gathering dog sniffing poo on a neighbor’s lawn.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say almost no one wakes up in the morning, hoping to see something awful, and we don’t purposely put ourselves in position to block emergency vehicles, or get so close to the incident that we run the risk of being a part of the carnage if the fire hits a gas line. We just sort of drift into a position for the best view of tragedies. These moments help us feel fortunate that this isn’t happening to us, and we feel grateful that we still have everything we did yesterday, and how many opportunities do we have to feel grateful and fortunate? 

On a much lower scale is the “Did you hear what Jane did to Jim last night?” intra-office drama. I must confess that I was a conduit of such salacious information. I heard it, I lifted an eyebrow, and I passed it along. It’s embarrassing to admit now, but we’re all tempted by the siren of salacious information that someone doesn’t know, and we strive to have others view us as as a font of fun and interesting info. We have all heard people say, “I’m not one for the drama.” Yet, they’re often the first ones to pass it along. I love it, you love, we all love a little drama in our lives. It’s sort of like our own little reality show in which we intimately know all of the players involved.

Then it hits us. We have to work with these people, and the drama we so enjoyed can make the eight hours a day, forty hours a week, five days a week long and a little painful. They can’t look us in the eye, and we have to live with the fact that we played a role in damaging their reputation. We realize that we’ve diminished our workplace environment to feed into this need to know too much information about our peers.      

There’s also the “need to see” videos of humans doing awful things to other humans. As with the dog that is innately attracted to the steaming pile, we want the most disgusting videos we can find, and even the most respected journalists with broadcasts and podcasts know they need to feed our need, but they dress it up with “a need to see it.” Why do we need to see it? “We’ve deemed it important to keep you informed,” they say. I read the article, I get the gist of it, someone did something awful to someone. I get it. “But it’s news, and it’s important.” This is a complete crock, I say as a person who has never worked in a news room. My guess is that they go behind closed doors to discuss the video of an atrocity. They weigh the business need to feed our desire to sniff the steaming pile of humanity against the journalistic code to not stoop so low as to air something just to get clicks or ratings, and they decide to dress it up as a “need to see.” Nobody is saying we need to try to put the genie back in the bottle on this unfortunate side of humanity, but how about the broadcasters and podcasters be a little more honest. “Tonight, in our Feed the Need segment, we have the latest stranger doing awful things to people video.”

Those of us who enjoy being happy, content, and feeling some semblance of safety don’t understand the “need” we all have to sniff the steaming pile of humanity. We understand that some of the times ignorance is bliss, but most of the time we don’t need to whiff of the worst of humanity to know it exists. Yet, I concede that there are some who need to see it because they believe “It didn’t happen the way. Not the way they say it did.”

The dog can be a surprisingly complex animal, both intellectually and emotionally, we’ve all witnessed some inspiring feats in this regard, but they still have those primal wiring and structuring that define their needs. The human might be the most complex and intelligent animal in the animal kingdom, but we’re still animals. We have complex needs, desires, and thoughts, but no matter how much we’ve evolved, modernized, and advanced, we still have some primal needs and wants that we’ll never be able to rid ourselves of no matter how advanced we become. Some humans have achieved some incredible things over the course of human history, but one has to imagine that if a genius the likes of Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, he would be a lookie-loo if he saw a visually appealing car accident, and he would probably rubberneck the scene to the point that he delayed all of the drivers behind him. We can be the greatest species ever created, but in some other ways, we’re no better than the chimpanzee, the dolphin, or the dog.  

A Brief Study of 19th Century Medicine: Be Grateful

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“When it comes to modern medicine, do you ever feel a sense of gratitude?”

“I mean, yeah, but that’s like being grateful that Jupiter doesn’t fall off its axis. We know the catastrophe that would happen if it wasn’t there, but it’s always been there, so it’s tough to remain grateful for it.”

“Are you grateful for your good health?”

“Yeah, of course, but again, that’s like being grateful for good weather. You don’t notice it until the bad weather hits. You always need to have your perspective adjusted to appreciate health, wealth, or weather.”

“Because after reading Thomas Morris’ The Mystery of The Exploding Teeth, I went real grateful that I didn’t end up in a different time. I know what you’re saying about it’s always been there, but damn, you read what those 19th Century doctors were doing to their patients back then, and it seems like they were just guessing most of the time.”

“Look, our moms took us to the doctor, and he fixed it. It’s what they do. I never considered myself ungrateful, or taking it for granted, but it’s their jobs.”

“Fair enough, but did you ever have something your doctor couldn’t fix? That’s some scary stuff, let me tell you. They put us through an array of tests, they prescribe stuff, just to see what works, “Take two of these and call me in the morning.” What if nothing your doctor tries, works? Who do you blame? We don’t blame the researchers for failing to develop that perfect pharmaceutical to cure what ails us, we don’t blame innovators for failing to develop technological advancements necessary to find out what’s wrong with us, and we don’t blame modern medicine for being as yet ill-equipped or ill-informed to deal with our mysterious ailment. We blame the doctor. Our doctor is our hero or our zero, because they are our face of modern medicine. They’re who we see when we think of medicine. If you’re the one they can’t cure, it would be difficult for you to be grateful for the advancements of modern medicine, but the rest of should remember that for everything we can’t cure yet, the list of what we now can should earn our gratitude. If it’s such a nebulous idea to be grateful for good health, or life in general, reading through a brief history of 19th Century should remind us all that we should be grateful that we are not living in constant pain, and that our species managed to survive.”  

Previous generations tried to remind us to remain grateful, “always be grateful for the times you live in, because I’ve seen worse, and my parents saw far worse.” They tried to remind us to avoid taking modern conveniences, technology, and modern medicine for granted, but author Thomas Morris provides a better perspective on why we should be grateful, by “gently mocking” the medical practitioners of the 19th Century for their practices and procedures. Before gently mocking them, however, Morris adds two qualifiers every writer who compiles such material for a book should add before gently mocking prior eras for their lack of scientific knowledge:

“The methods they used were consistent with their understanding of how the body worked, and it is not their fault that medical knowledge has advanced considerably since then.”

It’s not their fault, I would add, and it’s wasn’t their doing. The doctors, family practitioners, or ear, nose, and throat specialists of the era were handcuffed by the constraints of their overall knowledge, and as Morris adds, they performed admirably under such constraints.  

“One thing that these case histories demonstrate is the admirably tenacious, even bloody-minded, determination of doctors to help their patients, in an age when their art left much to be desired.”

We could use the hindsight of modern medicine to call early 19th century medicine something of a guessing game, but will 23rd Century medical professionals think the same thing of 21st Century medicine? Western medicine has come a long way, and Morris’ book emphasizes that, but professionals in various medical fields will admit Thomas Morris could write a second book called The 21st Century: What We Still Don’t Know. Modern authors probably won’t be able to write such a book, because they don’t know what they don’t know, but a Mental Floss article details some of basic, fundamentals we don’t understand yet, including, why we cry, why we laugh, why we sleep, why we dream, why we itch, and how we age. These matters might seem insignificant in terms of greater physical health, but when we unlock those mysteries, what answers might follow? As with modern medicine, The 19th Century medical professionals had precedent, studies, and literature to study and guide their decisions, but the precedents they followed, like ours, were as flawed as they were.

Thomas Morris, prefaces a quote from an article James Young Simpson, the pioneer of chloroform anesthesia, writing, “[Simpson] cautioned that it was unwise to be too hard on the “extravagance and oddity” of their methods, adding presciently:

“Perhaps, some century or two hence, our successors … will look back upon our present massive and clumsy doses of vegetable powders, bulky salts, nauseous decoctions, etc., with as much wonderment and surprise as we now look back upon the therapeutic means of our ancestors.” 

Morris’ qualifiers illustrate how annoying it should be for us to read modern authors assume a level of authority, even intellectual superiority, over the most brilliant minds of another era without qualifiers. These modern authors critique past knowledge and technology from a pedestal of modern research, acquired knowledge, and technology as if they had something to do with any of it. Few of these authors acknowledge that they, like the rest of us, are the beneficiaries of modern advancements, even though they have not personally contributed anything to the difference between the eras.  

That being said, we all know that “those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” There’s nothing wrong with mocking and ridiculing the past, because it makes the art of teaching history more entertaining, and we find mockery entertaining, but the author of it should provide some sort of context.  

Thomas Morris pursuit of this is also admirable in another way, as it displays a takeaway, we can’t help but reach by the time we finish his book, gratitude. How many minor ailments (and there’s no such thing as minor ailments when we’re suffering from them) can we magically resolve with two aspirin, ibuprofen, or a series of prescribed doses of antibiotics? How many procedures, currently considered routine cure what harms us? How grateful are we to the technological innovators, doctors, and all of those who played roles (be they unwitting or otherwise) in the trial-and-error processes involved in research that have contributed to the progress medicine has made in such a relatively short time. It’s relatively difficult to be grateful for life, but as Morris’ book alludes, we should be grateful that our ancestors survived at all. We wouldn’t have the luxury of regarding our modern medicine as commonplace if they hadn’t, because as incredible as the human body is, it’s possible, and even probable, that we shouldn’t be here. 

An overwhelming majority of us have done nothing to advance medicine, and we should all take a second to recognize that we’re nothing more than beneficiaries of all the man hours others have put into the multiple layers of medical knowledge and advancement we receive on the other end of our ailments. How many man hours have gone into research since the 19th Century? How many medical discoveries inform the modern health professional? How much knowledge and advancement will occur in the 23rd century, and how much laughter, and gentle mockery, will 21st Century practitioners receive for their lack of knowledge and technology?   

We can laugh at the fools who believed, as Morris writes, that blowing smoke in someone’s rectum might revive them after a drowning, because our laughter might cement the fact that no one ever tries to pass such foolish nonsense along again. While we’re laughing, however, let’s keep in mind how much information, innovation and technology benefits our definition of modern medicine. We could go through that list, but even if we bullet-pointed it, it would be so lengthy that our eyes might glaze over, and we might accidentally dismiss the vital discovery, such as the germ theory.

The scientific discovery of the idea that microorganisms, pathogens, or germs have something to do with the cause of disease appears pedantic now, but it rocked the scientific community at the time. Although the records show that the idea that microorganisms might be the cause for the spread of disease dates back to ancient civilizations, the scientifically-backed idea was credited to Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch between 1860 to 1880, and that was probably so late in the 19th century that we can guess that it wasn’t fully implemented by family doctors (AKA Ear, Nose, and Throat doctors, or ENT) until the early 20th century. Think about how many lives have been saved by the idea that stagnant water, spoiled food, and fermentation of wine could cause diseases. This first officially documented scientific discovery also paved the way for the first official, scientific discovery of the first, widely used antibiotic penicillin by an Alexander Fleming.   

The ENT doctor is our face of modern medicine, much like the police are the face of law in our experience. They are the people we know, but if we think about it, the ENT doctor sits at the bottom of the medical pyramid, or the top, depending on how we view it. They have nothing to do with the research that helps them make determinations on courses to follow or prescriptions to write. They follow the research and innovations others create, so while we could say they are beneficiaries of modern medicine, future experts might say they were captive to the limits of 21st century medical knowledge at the time.    

Do we expect our ENT doctor to perform research in a lab before they diagnose us? Do we expect them to trial and error the medicine they prescribe? No, they have to act on the knowledge of those who specialize in those areas, and the 19th century ENT doctors and surgeons were no different. 

I’m not mocking anyone, gently or otherwise, but how much do we still not know? How many patients enter a general practitioners’ office, see a specialist, and undergo the array of tests we currently have at our disposal, and we still don’t know what’s wrong with them? We hear it all the time, patient A entered the office with a condition that mystified the brilliant team of medical minds who examined her, and she died before anyone could properly source her ailment. Her parents blamed the doctors for not recognizing the uniqueness of the ailment sooner, the doctors blamed the specialists who quietly threw their hands up in the air in frustration. Who was at fault, or is anyone? Our advances in modern medicine, since the 19th Century have been so remarkable that they lead us to believe that we’re at the final frontier. If those parents could’ve found the most brilliant mind of medicine, with all of latest technology available to them, and all of the information research has provided, we think she could’ve been cured.  

Books like Thomas Morris’ The Mystery of The Exploding Teeth, illustrate how far we’ve come, but it’s impossible for us to know how far we have yet to go. We’ve unlocked some fundamental keys to understanding the human body and brain, and the symbiotic relationships, but even the most brilliant specialists would say that we still have a long way to go.

If we were able to interrogate a family doctor, a surgeon, or someone else in the medical profession of 19th Century, I imagine a confident professional of that era might say, “Mock away, we deserve it on some level for our lack of knowledge, but you cannot say it was for a lack of trying. We had everyone from little old ladies to small boys in our offices seeking our knowledge and medical assistance to relieve them of horrific illnesses and injuries, and we did our best, with our eras best technological advancements and research, to help them. It’s not what you have today, so mock us all you want, but you cannot say we weren’t trying.”

Anytime I read such a compendium, one of the first things I think about are time machines. We all love the speculative concept of going back in time, as we all love to fantasize about one day talking to long-dead relatives, historical figures, and experiencing the romanticized notion of living, if only for a moment, in a different time. The implicit warning books like The Mystery of The Exploding Teeth leave is, if some brilliant mind develops the technology to travel back in time, that pioneer taking one giant leap for mankind should check, recheck, and triple check to make sure they get one key component of their technology perfect before they go: the technology to get back to the present. That’s the part speculative fiction devotes little-to-no time on, because that’s not the sexy part. Reading though books like this one, leaves the cautionary note that the brilliant pioneer who travels back to the might enjoy worldwide, historic fame for the technology of their contraption, but if they’re not able to get back, they might not get to enjoy that fame.

Seinfeld’s Unfrosted was … Not Bad

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Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted was … not bad. Screech! Spit coffee! Swear word! Screams! Car Crash! It is shocking, I know, to hear that coming from a Jerry Seinfeld fanatic. If you’ve read any of the articles on this site, you know how often I source him as one of the greatest comedic minds alive today. I consider him one of the best standup comedians of his generation, and his observations on what makes us weird have had a huge influence on this site. The show Seinfeld was my favorite sitcom of all time, I loved Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and I even enjoyed his Bee Movie. I didn’t love it, but I really liked it for what it was. Oh, and I laughed so hard during one of his standup shows that Jerry Seinfeld looked over at me with a look that suggested he was comedically concerned about my health. If the difference between fanatic and fan is excessive and intense, uncritical devotion, I am a fanatic. I never wrote to him, collected dolls, scripts, or took tours, but if there’s a hip term I don’t know for a passive fanatic, that’s me. I’m probably his idea of the perfect fan, a guy who quietly buys and watches anything to which he attaches his name. Which is why it pains me to write these five words: “Unfrosted is not as funny as I thought it would be.”

Watching the movie reminded me how we all want more of everything we love. We want more from our favorite artists, athletes, politicians, and plumbers, until they give us so much that we realize it probably would’ve been better if they left us in a state of wanting more. That’s the advice seasoned entertainers often leave young upstarts, “Always leave them wanting more.”  

And Seinfeld warned us, numerous times, that more is not always better. He’s said it in relation to why he decided to prematurely end his show Seinfeld, but he’s applied that principle to his career too. He’s informed us on so many days, and in so many ways, in the numerous interviews he’s done throughout his career, that he’s learned that he’s best when he stays in his lane, his lane being standup. He’s learned what he’s good at, and what he’s not, and he has proven to be the opposite of what makes some comedians so great, in the sense that he’s not daring, risky, or experimental.

If I were to pitch him a project, I would say he and Larry David should develop a sketch comedy in the Mr. Show vein, but we can only guess that he’s had hundreds of similar pitches from friends, fellow writers, and corporate execs, and he’s turned them all down. Some of those projects may have proved embarrassing, some may have been so far out of his lane that he didn’t even consider them, but we have to guess that some projects that were so close that he had a tough time turning them down. He did it all, because he knows who he is, what he’s good at and what he’s not, and he’s learned how to stay in his own lane.   

On the greatest sitcom of all time, Jerry Seinfeld surprisingly (to me anyway) credited the three actors (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander) for making the show so brilliant. He does not shy away from the idea that the writing on the show, of which he played a huge role, was great, but he admits that the actors brought that writing to the next level.  

“I did get caught in a beautiful, cyclonic weather event,” he said in an interview. “The actors, Larry David, the thirteen phenomenal comedy writers, and everyone on both sides of the camera was a killer. You know when you’re a part of it, but you know it’s not you. You’re a part of it, but if you’re smart, you know it’s not you. It’s not all you.”   

On Seinfeld, Jerry played the Alex Rieger of Taxi, the Sam Malone of Cheers, the center of the storm. He’s always been great at adding that final comment, lifting that eyebrow to exaggerated levels, and saying, “ALL RIGHT!” at the end of another character’s hilarious rant. He knows how to put a cherry atop the pie in other words. As long as that pie, or the acting required to nuance it, was filled in by someone else. He can write funny, he can deliver a short, crisp line deliver as well as anyone, but the nuances in the acting craft required to build to Seinfeld’s punctuation were always best left to others. I heard him say this so many times that I saw it, until I accepted it, but I always thought there was a bit of humility attached to it. Some of us were so blinded by enthusiasm that we never learned how to curb it completely.

When he decided to end Seinfeld after the ninth season, it felt similar to an athlete retiring at the downside of their peak, not the prolonged, sad tail end, just the other side of the peak. There were hints in seasons eight and nine, after Larry David left, that the show was on the downside of its peak, but it was still the best show on TV. Why would an athlete, or a successful showrunner, quit prematurely? I understand not wanting to outstay your welcome, or allowing us to see glaring levels of diminishment and not wanting to go out like that, but if you’re lucky, you might still have forty years on this planet. What are you going to do in the rest of your life to top that? Some of them, I think, are too worried about what we think. They don’t want us to see their downside, or because they love the game so much that they can’t bear playing at anything less than their peak. They can’t bear someone saying, “If you just called it quits after season nine, it would’ve been a great show beginning to end. Season ten was probably one season too many.” They, some of them, don’t want us to remember them as someone who stayed around too long.

When we were kids, we ached for another Star Wars movie, then we got one later, much later, and it ruined the legacy of Star Wars. After the second trilogy was complete, the almost unanimous opinion among those I know is they probably should’ve left us wanting. As Led Zeppelin did. Zeppelin broke up after the untimely death of their drummer John Bonham, in 1980. We spent our teens and early twenties talking about the possibility of a reunion and another Zep album. I understand they said it wouldn’t feel the same without Bonham, but the remaining band members were still in their early-to-mid thirties when they broke up. How do you leave a juggernaut like Led Zeppelin in your early thirties? The Beatles were in their twenties when they broke up. As Theodore Roosevelt said of being president so young, “The worst thing about being president of the United States so young, is that there’s nothing you can do to top that for the rest of your life.” Led Zeppelin left us wanting, and it was probably for the best. What could they have done to top those first six albums? They most likely, and in all probability, would’ve only disappointed.

In a career studded with comedy gold, Gold Jerry! Gold! Unfrosted has the feel of a sequel. It’s not a sequel, but how many of us walked out of a killer comedy, talking about how that movie just screams out for a sequel. We didn’t talk about how great that comedy was, we instantly wanted more. Then, when the sequel came out, it was, “That wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good as the first one.” That was the impression Unfrosted left on me. It felt like all the players were trying to recapture something that used to be really funny, and we were all prepared with our preparatory smiles on our faces, until the smiles slowly faded away.  

The characters have this feel of trying to repeat something that worked before, but it just doesn’t for all the mysterious reasons that some movies work and some just don’t. The jokes have a feel about them that suggests to us that they’re brilliant, but they’ve been done so many times before that we no longer need to figure them out. As someone who doesn’t know one-one hundredths of the knowledge Jerry Seinfeld has about comedy, I think the figuring out part is the reward of comedy. 

Unfrosted seeks the opposite tact. It goes for familiarity, and we all love familiarity. Familiarity with actors, themes, concepts, and all that. Unfrosted displays this level of familiarity in the beginning, to establish a through line to the audience, but it never branches out into that unique spin that kind of shocks us into laughter. The setting of the movie is the 60s, and what a foolish time that was, and even though this has been a million times before, we still think it could be great in the minds of geniuses.

It’s a mystery to us why some movies don’t work, because we don’t make movies, but you’ll often hear moviemakers, actors, and all the other players say, in interviews, that they don’t know why either. “We thought it was funny, but we had no idea how huge it would get.” We don’t often hear the players involved say, “We thought it would be huge, but we had no idea people would consider it a little boring.” What works and what doesn’t is a mystery to us, and it’s a mystery to them. Generally speaking, dramas and action movies are probably a lot easier to predict for those involved, especially when the star actor signs on to the vehicle. Comedies and horror have a super secret formula that even those involved in the finer details of the production involved don’t know whether it will hit or not.  

Unfrosted gave us all a be-careful-what-you-wish-for feel, because you just might get it. As much as we cried out for a movie, or any project, from Jerry Seinfeld, we walked away from it thinking that Unfrosted, unfortunately, should never have been made. What could they have done to make you feel better about it? “I don’t know, I don’t make movies, but they probably should’ve left me wanting more instead of giving it to me.”

Watching Unfrosted, reminds us of that elite athlete who retired on the downside of a peak, not the bottom, just the downside, and we clamored for his return. How can he retire at 37? He still had what two-to-three years left? If he lives to eighty, he’ll spend the next 43 years reminiscing and thinking he should’ve played two-to-three more years at least. Then he comes back, and we see how much his skills have declined. He didn’t do it for the money, I can tell you that much. He did it, because he loves the game, and what’s wrong with that?

The point some people make on various websites is that athletes and entertainers run the risk of ruining their legacy by staying too long. This line right here makes me almost fighting mad. So, you’re telling me that the athlete who made so much money for the league, the city, and the franchise shouldn’t be able to sell his wares to anyone who will take them? He shouldn’t try to get another paycheck for the punishment he put his body through for your entertainment, because you want to remember him the way you want to remember him? Isn’t that a bit myopic, even selfish? He wanted to get paid for his efforts, of course, but he didn’t necessarily do it for the money? Seinfeld, and most modern athletes, have so much money that that’s not why they’re doing it. They’re doing it for the love the game so much that they want to play at least two more years? What’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with you for wanting to deny him that?

Did Seinfeld ruin his legacy by doing Unfrosted? No, first of all, it wasn’t that bad, but, then again, I never expected to say that a Seinfeld project “wasn’t that bad”. I don’t remember any of the elite athletes who “stayed one year too long” for those latter years, and I don’t begrudge them for taking as many paychecks as they could before they called it a career. I also don’t begrudge them the idea that they loved the game so much that they couldn’t walk away, until it was obvious to them that they truly couldn’t play the game anymore. I actually respect it, as I say it was for the love of the game. I respect the fact that Seinfeld’s friend pitched him on the idea of Unfrosted, and not only did he like the idea, but he didn’t think he was done yet. He thought he had one more big project in him, because he loves doing the things he does so much that he wanted to try it at least one more time. Good for you, Mr. Seinfeld, I say, and if he feels like doing another project, or projects, I’ll be there on the first day it’s released.  

Jerry Seinfeld has admitted that he doesn’t expect to be remembered after he’s gone, and he’s even gone so far as to say he doesn’t care, or that’s not his driving force. I’ll remember Jerry Seinfeld as a great, almost perfect standup comedian, the cocreator of one of the greatest sitcoms in TV history, and as a gifted natural when it comes to observational humor, but Unfrosted doesn’t do much to either lift or damage his legacy. It was just a marginally entertaining movie that they probably won’t list in his very lengthy resume when that final wave off arrives.