The Book of Jims

The Book of Jims By J.I. Miller
Contents
1. On the Naming of Jims
2. Biblical Jims
3. Royal Jim
4. Guinea Pig Jimmy
5. Geographical Jims
6. Four Edibles and a Potable
8. Shameful James
9. Exploratory Jims
10. Jimericks and Jingles
11. Jim Class
12. Sprechen Sie Jim?
13. Birthday Boys
14. For Doubting Toms and Curious Georges

ONE


On the Naming of Jims




Everybody knows a Jim and some of them are damned annoying. But some are quite decent chaps. If you are holding a copy of this book or even an electronic simulation of it, chances are good that you might be a Jim yourself. Either that or you know one who is having a birthday or a graduation or a Bar Mitzvah. Maybe he’s just had his first “procedure” —a nose job or an appendectomy. Perhaps a recent vasectomy. Maybe it’s Christmas and you cannot think of anything better for a gift.
The thing about Jims is that they come in infinite variations, but, like biological specimens, they fall quite naturally into distinguishable categories. In the highest tier, call it the Phylum level, are the Jameses. Sometimes they call themselves James because their parents addressed them as James from early childhood on and the name just stuck with them into adulthood. Some probably choose to be James because it sounds more important, more sophisticated, than being a Jim, just as it sounds more respectable to be a Robert than a Bob, to be a William instead of a Bill, or to be a Richard for no reason other than he doesn’t want everybody calling him a Dick. Others are James, they simply have to be, because they are British.
The next level, the Class level and the most important one, is the Jims. Everybody knows several Jims. These are the guys next door, the ones with few pretenses, the approachable ones, good folks to have a cold beer with. Unless, of course, you live in England where there aren’t any Jims and the beer is warm.
Eliza Doolittle, musical comedy’s perennially favorite Covent Garden flower seller, understood the class distinction implied by the names when she claimed that if she were ever to become a fair lady she would know Saint James well enough to call him Saint Jim. Eliza, however, was not specifically referring to the saint himself, but to a London neighborhood instead. The area near Buckingham Palace, called Saint James, is a classy upscale neighborhood. It is not far in distance from the alleys of Covent Garden but is a world away in social status.
To your doctor, especially if you have a problem like appendicitis or a twisted duodenum, the term JIM might mean something you yourself probably never even thought of. Because that is the abbreviation and, hence, the nickname for the Journal of Internal Medicine. So if he tells you he is going to look at something in JIM you can rest assured that he is not about to perform unnecessary explorative surgery on anybody you might know.
If you know anybody who is Flemish (that means they live in Belgium) JIM is a television network. The name comes from its targeted viewers, people who are “Jong, Interactief en Meer” (Young, like fifteen to twenty-four, Interactive, and More.) JIMtv primarily airs music videos and is roughly the equivalent of America’s MTV, the network that gave us a jillion episodes of Jersey Shore before people stopped watching it when the characters became too irritating and also when they figured out it had no plot. Or point. To give you a sense of what kind of programming you might view on JIMtv you should know that its slogan is the Dutch equivalent of “Hell, yeah!”.
When we get down to the Genus level there are the Jimmys. It is okay to be a Jimmy until you are maybe twelve years old, but after that these guys really need to take themselves more seriously if they ever expect anyone else to. Jimmy Hoffa was an exception. So is Jimmy Carter.

There are even some Jimmies that are not even people:
You have just reached your destination and slammed the car door shut. Then you realize what you have done. Damn! You have locked the keys inside the car. Damn! So you call 1-800-AAA-HELP. The voice at the other end assures you that someone will arrive to assist you within one hour. Damn! Fifty-nine minutes later a tow truck arrives and your AAA helper pulls out a jimmy stick. There is not much to it. It is nothing more than a thin slat of metal, like a piece from a Venetian blind, with a hook cut in one end. The Triple-A guy slips it down between the door and the driver’s side window, catches a rod on the door-locking system down in there somewhere, jimmys the door open, takes your keys out of the ignition and holds his hand out just in case you want to leave a tip in it. The whole jimmying process is so easy and so fast that you wonder why you ever bother to lock your car in the first place. Any respectable burglar, regardless of his name, would own such a jimmy stick and could jimmy it open just as easily.
If your car itself, now that you are back in it, is a Jimmy then it is an old one, because Chevrolet doesn’t make the Jimmy anymore. It was an early entrant in the developing market that spawned the SUV craze. They started making it in 1970 but stopped it twenty-two years later in 1992. Well, not really, for gradual changes in features brought gradual name changes as well. The original name Jimmy was a cutesy derivation of the parental company name GM ( just say “GM” three times and you’ll see), but it gradually morphed into the Blazer, which subsequently morphed further into the Trailblazer. But once in a while you still see a Jimmy in a parking lot. Especially in places like Boulder, Colorado, or Laredo, Texas, or any place with a residual population of what were in the Jimmy era called hippies.