Occasionally Keen

Taking Another Trek around the Sun

2012-01-06T15:06:00.000-08:00

Well, it happened again. The Earth has made a complete revolution around the Sun. “Wahoo, the Earth did not come free of its orbit and fly into a great gaseous nuclear mass obliterating everything we understand!” After all, even Bruce Willis and a crack team of rugged scientists couldn’t stop that from happening, at least not without a lot of help from J.J. Abrams.

The upcoming year is so momentous and full of unremitting action the powers that be decided it needs to be 366 days long (long enough for Kim Kardashian to get married and file for divorce 5.1 times), one full day longer than each of the previous three years.

A quick scan of Wikipedia shows the United Nations has designated 2012 as the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All which proves how important this year is. Just think, the UN is going to send every man, woman and child on the planet a wind turbine. How cool is that? I’m going to put mine on my car so I don’t have to buy gas anymore. (I live in western Kansas. The likelihood of getting stranded on some lonely dirt road in the middle of nowhere because I ran out of wind is infinitesimal.)

2012 is the year for the Summer Olympics. Also known as the only time anyone can be bothered to care about events like the 400 meter hurdles. This time around the Olympics will be hosted by England. I know nothing brings to mind high athletic achievement like the pasty, rain-soaked, dentally challenged British. If there was an event requiring people to carry umbrellas while eating crumpets and reciting Shakespeare the gold medal is in the bag. Alright, before I get any hate mail from the Anti-Defamation League of Queen Loving Tea Drinkers I would like to say I am a card carrying Anglophile and fully realize at least three of the Spice Girls are very fit.

2012 is the anniversary of two very important happenings in the world of international espionage. One hundred years ago Alan Turing was born. Turing was an Englishman (see I do like the British) who is often credited with being the father of modern computing and artificial intelligence. He played a major role in breaking Nazi codes during World War II (which, oddly enough, was the most useful time to break Nazi codes). He did a lot of work with something called the Enigma machine which truly sounds like something a bald man living in a hidden lair deep inside a dormant volcano would be using. This leads us to the other major event in global intelligence. It was fifty years ago that Sean Connery first played James Bond.

Perhaps the most important event scheduled to occur during 2012 is yet another triumph in the process of mankind carefully, intelligently, and nonviolently setting in place a government designed to best serve the needs and wants of its people. I am of course talking about the election of Burkina Faso’s Parliament. The election season in the United States is not remotely careful or intelligent and the violence against reason, logic and grammar in an American political debate is a veritable bloodbath.

It is more than a little depressing to think the actual election is more than 300 days away. We have months and months of sitting through political discussion, political arguing, political advertisements, political fear-mongering, political name-calling, political sleight-of-hand, and political dog-grooming (Huh? I think I went one too far.) Especially, when you take into account the Republicans have been doing a Presidential shell game for the past few months already.

It seems to change every time I turn around. Bachmann wins the straw poll and is the front runner and now Bachmann has dropped out of the race. Herman Cain is the front runner and now he is back to being a guy who used to run a pizza chain. Rick Santorum is a guy with severe issues just because of some quirk with Google (I have yet to google his name because everyone seems to think it takes you places you’d rather not go) and now he is considered a viable candidate again. Next thing you know Ronald Reagan’s ghost will appear and endorse Anthony Weiner for President and every news organization from Fox to MSNBC will vibrate with excitement, realize the massive cognitive disconnect inherent in such an event then simply explode. The resultant silence will make it possible for the American people to make a much better decision.

The Word of the In-Crowd

2011-12-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

I like words. I like knowing odd words. This knowledge can come in handy. Just the other day my wife was reading a magazine and asked, “What is a monotreme?” I spouted off an answer and as she read further my answer was proven correct. I had filed that word away years and years ago. I got it from the zoology class I took as a junior in high school (thanks Mr. Harris). Just because it only came in handy once during the 31 years I knew the word doesn’t mean it was a waste of time. It proves patience is a virtue because running around telling people the definition of monotreme in the aisles of Dillon’s or on street corners leads to ridicule and possibly even restraining orders.

Sometimes using an unusual word in a usual setting can work as a shibboleth amongst collectors of arcane terminology. What is that? You do not know what shibboleth means? Well, pull up a chair and welcome to the first in our continuing series “Learn an Only Slightly Useful Word.”

The origin of the word comes from a Biblical story. A group of people were being kept from crossing a certain river and since the people being kept out spoke a native language which did not include the “sh” sound anyone trying to cross was asked to say “shibboleth”. If the person said “sibboleth” it was clear they were not the right kind of person and would be killed. The word has much less of an impact nowadays. The first definition listed at Dictionary.com reads as follows: a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., which distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.

Think about it for a minute and you can probably come with half a dozen shibboleths. Every job has its own special terminology which folks outside the loop would be pretty clueless about if it was thrown into other venues. My real job is in the world of education and we don’t even use words. This could be an actual sentence spoken by a highly educated professional: My PLC designed some RtI to be delivered during MTSS time in hopes of meeting AYP, EIEIO.

Move out of professions and you still have opportunities to test others to see if they share your background or interests (just please don’t feel the need to kill them if they mispronounce your word they might just have a speech impediment).

Some of the bigger pop culture worlds have a canon bigger and more complex than actual civilizations of the past. You can find out a person’s level of devotion by getting more and more arcane as you test them. Harry Potter has more lore than you can shake a stick at, even a stick eleven inches long made of holly with a phoenix feather core. Some people just got a huge laugh out of that joke and others are even more bewildered than usual at my obtuse description. That, my friends, is a five star shibboleth.

The world of Star Wars has just as many testing points. Do you know who Luke Skywalker’s best friend on Tatooine was before he went off to fight for the rebellion? Do you know what job Phil Tippet did for ILM in the filming of The Empire Strikes Back? Do you know the name of the newsletter sent to charter members of the Star Wars Club? Do you know how long it was before Chris Pyle could get a date after dedicating himself to knowing all the answers to the previous three questions?

Another distinction point is there are the people who liked the prequel trilogy more than the original trilogy and then there are those who are not patently wrong.
Music can also be a great way to see if someone is “our kind” of person. If you mention the Bee Gees and someone else in the room has heard of them you know they are probably from your same generation. If someone else in the room starts flawlessly singing one of their greatest hits you know they are a big fan (and can sing really high). If someone else in the room rushes out only to return moments later wearing a white suit and a black shirt unbuttoned to the navel and begins dancing wildly you know psychiatric intervention might be required.

My final shibboleth: if at any point in your life you wanted to be Rob Petrie we are kindred spirits.

Some Things are Less Equal than Others

2011-12-08T18:40:00.000-08:00

There really ought to be double standards. Not everything and everybody merit the same treatment. I am not saying people do not deserve equal opportunities under the law or anything that draconian. If you think the cheese slid off my cracker I have the perfect example. ESPN broadcasting Pop Warner football.

ESPN broadcasts sporting events via the internet which is something I really appreciate as a huge college basketball fan with no television. So this past Saturday I was checking out the schedule for the day when I saw they were, at that very moment, showing a Pop Warner football game. For those of you who do not know, Pop Warner is to football what Little League is to baseball. In the case of the game I “tuned” in to it was boys 9, 10 and 11 years old playing.

I only watched for a few minutes but in that time I got to see little football players who looked more like Violet Beauregard from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory after she turned into a blueberry than anyone from the Green Bay Packers. Truly, a ninety pound boy wearing all those pads has a certain weebles wobble but they don’t get sacked quality to them. Even with that quirky imagery the weirdest aspect of the whole experience was the broadcast was exactly like an NFL play-off game. The play-by-play guy and the color analyst (yes, they had both) were just as urgently talking about the clock management as the final few seconds of the first half were running down as they would if it had been Joe Montana and Bill Walsh making the decisions. (It wasn’t.)

Here is my main problem. When Eli Manning and Ben Rothleis… Rothleesbi… Rothelbee… , uh, Tony Romo are playing there is a multimillion dollar industry hinging on who wins and who loses. When Little Timmy and his best friend Not So Little Jimmy are playing the only thing hanging in the balance should be which set of kids feel happier when they go get ice cream after the game. Unfortunately that is not the case and I happen to believe one of the reasons this is a problem is the big wigs at a huge media entity like ESPN think it is a good idea to show prepubescent kids play a game in the same manner they broadcast grown men (albeit many of whom are rather stuck in barely post pubescent maturity levels) pursue their career.

Sport should be fun and a way to teach children teamwork, engender camaraderie, and create healthier bodies. Sport can be an excellent way to show kids that the effort you put in directly relates to the ability to do something well. This is not the case as often as it ought to be. Sport is too often a way to prove we are better than you, strength is power, and losers are unworthy of respect. I am sure I am overstating things to a degree and that there are still places where competition is healthy and kids have fun but the more often we broadcast ten-year-olds playing tackle football the more often we increase the number of children in the grasp of those who believe winning is everything.

There was one person involved in the ESPN presentation who seemed to realize it was a little ridiculous, the sideline reporter. Yes, they had a pretty girl sideline reporter just like they do for their big money making broadcasts. She was interviewing one of the coaches as the teams left the field for halftime. She asked the normal hard hitting journalistic questions that all the hairdos with a microphone ask of Rex Ryan and Bill Belic…Bellish… Beelich…, John Fox on NFL sidelines. The difference here was the look on her face as the coach answered the question. She was obviously not at all interested in the answer and was much more concerned with the inexplicable turn her career had taken. (A degree in broadcast journalism from Northwestern and here I stand asking a systems analyst who played Div II football but could have gone pro if only he hadn’t had chronic turf toe his senior year how he is going to maintain his lead in a game with a bunch of athletes who would rather be playing Super Smash Brothers or watching Spongebob.) Out loud she says, “Do you think your team can continue to dominate on both sides of the ball in the second half?” Interior monologue, “Somebody shoot me, please.”

It may shock the reader to find out Christopher Pyle never played organized sports beyond his summer playing t-ball. He can be openly mocked at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Pry My Priorities from Me

2011-10-14T07:43:00.000-07:00

Frequently in today’s media we hear complaining about how so many people just don’t have their priorities straight. Sometimes the people doing the complaining are doing it so vehemently they show just how out of whack their own priorities are. I’m going to chime in on the subject. Hopefully, I won’t expose personal deficits.

As an educator I am frequently trying to impress upon young minds what is important and more significantly, what is not important. First, let me say I do not take advantage of this opportunity to teach them Bugs Bunny is genuinely funny and the Three Stooges are not which I personally think is a very important distinction that all younger generations should have firmly placed in their aesthetic sensibilities. What I do try to impress upon students is that doing the right thing, including following the concept of treating others as you would like to be treated, caring for those less fortunate and choosing to open presents Christmas morning instead of Christmas Eve (okay, maybe I shouldn’t include that last one) is done simply because it is the right thing to do. I ask. I cajole. I plead. I lower myself to abject begging. I do all this with a level of success similar to the winning percentage of Kansas City Royals over the past decade. Then in walks the counselor with her stickers and everybody shapes up immediately.

Even though I appreciate the counselor helping this is a perfect example of priorities not being what they ought to be. A student is willing to sit in the cafeteria flicking bits of tater tot at his neighbor even after being chastised the previous day for throwing pieces of his pig-in-a-blanket. However, if the counselor offers a sticker to everyone sitting politely eating their lunch they all become the Stepford children, angelic examples of behavior. This says to me a child is not willing to behave in a positive manner because it is the right thing to do, but they are willing to do so for a brightly colored picture of a cartoon dog with glue on the back which will be in somebody’s trash can within next three hours.

I understand where they are coming from. People crave reward and often they would prefer tangible ones. I doubt I would show up for work each day if there was not a paycheck attached but I also realize that being kind to people and working hard to make their lives more pleasant or even easier is not part of my job description so it is not what I am paid to do. There have been times recently I was bothered that the people who are my superiors seem indifferent to the “soft” people skills I work very hard upon as long as I get the paperwork turned in on time. Even with those feelings, unfounded or not, I will continue to work towards kindness even if my reward is personal and not cool stuff. I will do this because my family instilled the ideas that kindness is what you do, that everyone is fighting some sort of battle and if you add to their load you are not behaving in a positive fashion.

Actually, I think my biggest concern is not that people cannot see what is important. It has more to do with people placing high value on things which are not important in the grand scheme of things. The other day there was a news story about a man who dropped his child in order to reach for a baseball hit into the stands. Let’s examine this decision for a moment. A man is holding his child, a person, a person who shares a great amount of his DNA, a person who depends upon the man for safety and protection, a person who will one day be selecting the man’s long term care facility. Into the equation we insert a baseball, ten dollars worth of cork, yarn and cowhide. Which should demand the man’s attention? If we believe the gentleman in Taiwan the cowhide wins. Now, if it was a ball Barry Bonds hit breaking one of the most revered records in baseball history which means catching the ball might make it possible to earn enough money to pay for the child’s college as well as buying yourself a contract for a really great long term care facility thus taking that decision out of the child’s hands maybe it would have been the right choice. After all, the kid didn’t break any bones or anything.
Christopher Pyle doesn’t think everyone should have the same priorities but the more people who agree with him the better. You can agree or disagree with him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Typhoid Mary and Me

2011-09-28T18:55:00.001-07:00

The other day I was walking into the grocery store. As I was entering a lady was exiting pushing a cart with a toddler riding in the odd little seat thingee next to the handle bar. I did a hop and a skip out of the way in a decidedly goofy manner, smiled big at the certifiably cute passenger and then did the closest thing to a Fred Astaire move my less than agile feet could approximate. All this was accomplished while wearing a hat some would call urbane (probably just me) and others (most everybody else) would call nerdier than a t-shirt which reads “Who stole the wookie from the wookie jar?” and glasses which truly are the cherry on the banana split of affectations I choose to wear each day. I should also mention for those readers who do not know me (I still think people other than my mother and wife read this) that I am very close to 50 years old and some 20 pounds overweight (I am guessing the fact checkers at this paper do not concern themselves with my stuff).

All of the previous paragraph was used to paint the verbal picture in order to explain what happened next. A person I work with witnessed the entire event. Her comment was very nice. “Are you always this happy?” My answer was a simple, “no”.

After a little bit more small talk I walked on into the store still thinking about her question. A much better answer came to mind. “Actually, I am just a carrier. I do not suffer from the condition myself.” I realize my more thought out response is at once egotistical and pathetic. It takes a special kind of rhetorical talent to pull off that duality.

First let’s look at the egotistical side. Saying I am a carrier of happiness makes it sound like I think of myself as some sort of purveyor of mirth making people feel better wherever I go, a man whose very presence makes moods lighter, a man whose voice sounds like banjos and laughter, a man whose breath smells of baby giggles and YouTube kitten videos. (OK, that last one was a stretch.) I wouldn’t go that far but I have found if I truly put my mind to it I can make pretty much anybody smile and most of them laugh.

I have done this in front of well over a thousand people as the mascot of the Dodge City Legend basketball team. I have done this in front of few hundred people doing an introduction at an all staff meeting with my school district. I have done it in front of over a hundred people at productions at the Depot Theater. I have done it one-on-one with angry and/or sad children who have been sent to the principal’s office. The only place I truly stiffed was in front of a small audience at an open mic night in a Kansas City comedy club September 1988. (When you tell a joke and the audience does not react in any manner whatsoever they actually do look like an oil painting. How different would my life be if I had killed that night?) All of this proves to me I can be a carrier of happiness, maybe not long lasting life changing happiness but a good solid laugh can do a lot for your day.

Now let’s examine the pathetic side of the statement. I need to state right up front I am happy about a great deal of my life. My family is a blessing beyond what I deserve. I have a job which allows me to pay for all the things we need and most the things we just want. I am reasonably healthy (remember that 20 pounds overweight statement). My upbringing was as close to idyllic as one can get outside of 1950’s television programs. My wife shields me from a great deal of the grown up junk parents and homeowners have to deal with and does so without complaint.

It is at the odd crossroads of the carrier/sufferer of happiness that the rub truly lies. If I could spend a greater portion of my life being that carrier of happiness I would be a much happier person myself on a daily, no hourly, basis. Dealing with unhappy, cranky, unwilling to bend, individuals who put little to no effort into being happiness carriers themselves has worn me down. This world needs more carriers and givers of the happy. I highly recommend it. You’d be surprised just how much better it makes you feel.

Find the Funny

2011-09-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

Long time readers of this column (hi, Mom) know that one of my chief contacts with the world beyond the somewhat narrow swathe of life I inhabit out here in Dodge City is the wonderful world of podcasts. Podcasts are proof that the more technology changes the more it simple does the same stuff in niftier ways. Podcasts are radio, but radio that you have more control over and radio with a much bigger breadth of content than any station out here in western Kansas (which isn’t all that hard).
Truthfully, I very seldom turn on the radio, even in my car. The musical selections are sometimes what I like but invariably the happy blast from the past (that Styx song you were embarrassed to acknowledge as a favorite even when you were young and your taste in music was allowed to stink, but always secretly rocked out to) is followed by an epically horrific song (even Casey Kasem had to hold his nose whenever he played Alone Again, Naturally).

I spend a lot of time listening to people who get to be funny for a living talk about becoming funny, being funny, and getting paid to be funny. People who can find the funny are people I admire. Ever since I was young and watched Tim Conway unabashedly pummel Harvey Korman with improvised goofiness until poor Harvey was a mass of quivering straight man I have valued humor and worked in my own meager ways to get others to laugh.

The podcasts I am sure not to miss belong to two very different comedians. Marc Maron has a lot of, uh, issues and if you are easily offended you should steer away from his work, but I find him very funny and he interviews comedians in a way nobody else can. He and I are a similar age and if my parents had been the polar opposites of who they were I could have ended up more like him. Larry Miller is a happily married man with kids (very like me) and his podcast is just him telling stories. He has been a stand-up comedian since the 80’s and still is. Their work is just more proof that funny can come in very different packages yet still be funny.

My most recent podcast discovery is a series of panel discussions with television writers (Nerdist Writer’s Panel). As interesting as I find the discussion of how people went from would-be to actual writers (a combination of talent and blind dumb luck, emphasis on the blind dumb luck part), the insights into what makes a successful show (nobody really knows), and the different processes people use as they write (most writers use a mixture of procrastination and self-loathing), the biggest thing I took from the podcasts is that these people value kindness and teamwork quite nearly as much as talent. You have to bring something to the table but if you come to the table as a card carrying jerk, “Thanks for your time. We will just do this ourselves”.

This concept was first brought to my attention when I read a book written by Phil Rosenthal (co-creator of Everybody Loves Raymond) in which he said when he selected the writers for the show he placed a premium on kindness and he also made sure that the workplace was welcoming and built to make people feel comfortable. This did not mean people never had to work unfathomably long hours or they never got out of sorts (or downright peeved). It meant that when those things happened it didn’t fester and poison the whole place.

Especially as I get older, I find I value humor and kindness above all else which may be the reason I so frequently fantasize about working in a writers’ room for a television comedy. A place where funny is highly prized. A place where everyone present truly wants to spend time. A place where people work together (not just in word, but in deed as well) for a common goal. A place where if you drop the ball somebody else is willing, no eager, to pick it up. A place where the more laughter you hear the more proof you have the work is getting accomplished. I know it isn’t all fun and games and there is genuine stress but all jobs have stress but few offer the laughter and the joy of creation.

This may be another indication I am getting old, my fantasies revolve around a really swell workplace and have nothing to do with swimsuit models.

Christopher Pyle is about to disappear into another podcast induced reverie. Maybe this time the really swell workplace will have cake, oooo, cake. You can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

The College Experience

2011-09-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

Not long ago we took our oldest daughter to start her college career at the University of Kansas. It was karmically correct. I matriculated and (eventually) graduated from the same institution. Both of my parents received their college degrees from KU. Emilyjane was officially a third generation Jayhawk and her mother and I were officially not emotionally ready for her to actually leave.

She had been considering KU for quite a while. We would visit Lawrence at first just so her father could wax nostalgic about his salad days and later because we just liked it. Emilyjane liked the vibe of the place. She is a closet boheme. When it became time to truly choose a college she intelligently chose KU because it offered a degree program she was suited for and liked. (Truth be told she might have preferred K-State because the boyfriend goes there.)

Then we started the orientation process. Thus began the never ending stream of “they didn’t do this when I was here” comments from her old man. Admittedly, I was not a very involved and engaged college student. I went to class (frequently) got good grades (surprisingly at times, but consistently) but I was a bit of a loner. Okay, I made Howard Hughes look like somebody from the cast of Jersey Shore. So some of the things they described might have actually existed long ago when I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman, or more accurately, a rather lethargic, socially inept freshman, I just didn’t know it.

The first I-didn’t-do-that process was two full days of orientation meetings in the early summer. My older brother brought me up to Lawrence (actually he had filled out the application paperwork too, have I mentioned I wasn’t terribly motivated) for an afternoon of enrolling in classes and getting a few tidbits of information. That was it. Emilyjane’s college experience was obviously going to be more varied and chock full of so much more than learnin’ stuff.

Actually, this brings me to my first complaint. Why does everything have to be a production? I can’t help but think the huge bill might be mitigated if colleges didn’t feel it was necessary to create gigantic divisions such as “Student Success”. Support is good and kids leaving home for the first time will obviously benefit from an institution which employs people for this purpose, but does it have to be to this extravagant?

When choosing an institution of higher learning does it really matter if it possesses a recreation center the size of two football fields boasting 268 cardio and resistance machines (I am not totally sure what those are but it sounds awesome when they mention them on their website promo), six basketball courts, two swimming pools and a three story tall rock climbing wall? A three story tall rock climbing wall? This belongs as a selling point for a university if at the top of that rock wall sits a wizened old man dispensing enlightenment to those who bravely pursue truth in spite of great personal risk.

I blame the Walt Disney Corporation. They were the first people to say that everything needs to be an experience. They had imagineers creating bigger, better all-encompassing everythings. Now everything needs to be bigger, better all-encompassing. You can’t just have a college with able professors, well outfitted classrooms and libraries, comfortable and safe housing, plus a few nifty clubs and chances for exploring the arts. Nope. We need a community dedicated to the “whole person”, a place with 6,749 clubs and organizations from Aikido to Zoo keeping, plus a staff of hundreds whose raison d’être is to support and nurture the epic journey of discovery that is your college experience. (That last bit was pretty nifty, maybe I should apply to write college brochures.)

One last note about our orientation experience at the ol’ U of K. There were a number of tables and small rooms strewn throughout the Student Union all labeled with what service they offered. There were the easy to decipher ones like Financial Aid (that was easy to find because of all the fathers sitting motionless with stunned expressions) and Textbooks (stunned and even some tears). But my favorite was a room labeled “Major Changes”. I am sure they simple meant switching from English Lit to Business because you suddenly realized eating was a life goal worth pursuing. What I envisioned was a bit more philosophical. I wanted a cadre of psychologists with sofas and tissues counseling parents on dealing with sending their babies off into the world (at least it is a world with a three story tall rock climbing wall – I feel way better.)

Word Smart and Smart Words

2011-08-06T19:28:00.000-07:00

It was June 29, 2007 when my first column showed up in the pages of The Hutchinson News. I didn’t miss a deadline for the next year and a half. Since then I have failed to hand in a column 8 times. This means I have a batting average of .926 and I would like to point out this was accomplished with absolutely no performance enhancing drugs of any kind.

The column you are reading right now is my 100th for this newspaper and the 235th of my newspaper “career”. That adds up to more than 183,000 words (which is less impressive when you take into account I used some of the words more than once). Obviously this is something I enjoy doing otherwise why would I do it so much. Wait a minute, that logic is flawed. I do things I absolutely abhor much more frequently.

The chief motivation behind this endeavor is to make people smile. If I can make someone laugh out loud that is a huge bonus. Since I cannot be in the room when most people read my work (after the first two restraining orders it loses its allure) I don’t know if there is any auditory laughing. I like to imagine it happens and pathetically I often sit in my office and do just that.

There have been times I wanted to get a message out there. Humor is a great way to stealthily guide people to truth without bludgeoning the audience. If you spend your time yelling and ranting to deliver your message it is not all that likely someone who does not agree with you in the first place will come over to your way of thinking. However, it seems yelling and ranting at people who already believe exactly the same as you do can get you a whole lot of television exposure and enough money to make it even more likely you’d hate the idea of taxing the rich.

As I get older I thought I was supposed to get more mellow. Not so much. All this recent stuff with Congress has made me so angry I have to find something to laugh at in order not to scream bad words into the wind, drop kick the cat into the next county or do something truly nuts like run for office. Even if reading this column has never been remotely cathartic for you writing it has frequently been so for me.

I firmly believe that genuinely funny people are genuinely smart people (this postulate is likely proven by watching C-SPAN broadcast from the floor of Congress, not exactly a laughter machine). The process of “finding the funny” is one of my favorite things to do and those exercises have helped me hone many other skills that enhance my intellectual powers. Please don’t think I am placing myself in some sort of Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Mr. Peabody echelon of intelligence. I don’t even want that kind of brain.

I believe that words are the building blocks of every idea. Be the ideas brilliant, humorous, or even weapons grade stupid, words are how we convey the grand majority of these ideas and funny people usually have the greatest facility with the language. Or is it the other way around? People with the greatest facility with the language are funny. (That is a circular question similar to who crossed the road first the chicken or the egg.) Therefore, the better I get at finding the funny the better I get with words and making connections with other words and the not necessarily intended by-product of all that is becoming smarter. I think…

Just the other day in one of my a-whole-bunch-of-educators-get-together-to-talk-about-education meetings (how’s that for a facility with the language?) the following were listed as 21st century skills: critical thinking, communication skills and collaboration. In my own mind I thought, whoa, those have been some of the most useful skills since people started doing things other than sitting in caves worrying about mastodons. Those were skills very much in the forefront of the late 18th century when the powdered wig guys wrote such things as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. So, the next thing I thought was maybe we stopped teaching those things in the 20th century and that is why way too many people (especially the elected ones) cannot use them when deciding how best to take care of the people who live in our country today, and I mean all of the people who live here.

Or is it just me

2011-07-23T19:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, I give. Uncle! You win. I surrender. I willingly yield to the stronger opponent. Capitulation is what I am doing. Can somebody call off the heat hounds and cool this joint down? I’ve lived in Kansas the majority of my life so I have experienced high temperatures before, but this is ridiculous.

I worked at the Airport Drive-In Theater the summers of my high school years (give yourself thirty bonus points if you remember going there to see a movie – but deduct fifty points if you went to any of the four show marathons featuring movies with women in scarcely any clothing and storylines with scarcely any plot). One of the tasks given to me and one or two of my lucky co-workers was painting the poles the speakers rested upon. There is not much in the world more pleasurable than using a wire brush to scrap the old paint off of and add a couple new coats of paint to several dozen three and a half foot tall metal posts. Then add the fact we did this in the dead of summer and you have found an existence approaching unremitting nirvana, or was that just because of the hallucinations. Still that was more pleasant than the last several days.

There are lots of things we have lived through in summers past that were uncomfortable. All of us have put our hands on a steering wheel in August only to remove our hands from the steering wheel faster than Charlie Sheen can think of something else stupid to say. We do that because if we don’t let go all ten of our fingers will spot weld in place and the only destination we’ll be driving to is the nearest hospital. Those of us in too much of a hurry to wait for the air conditioner to cool the car sufficiently in order to genuinely take hold of the wheel have been known to steer using a combination of alternating index fingers and thumbs in conjunction with our knees.

Here is an advantage of driving a crummy 1989 two door Ford Escort with nothing of value inside it. I can leave the windows open no matter where I park it (goodness knows the interior isn’t going to get wet when it rains because rain in the foreseeable future is as likely as Michele Bachmann inviting that Kurt kid from Glee to perform at her next campaign event). As hot as it has been my eldest daughter, who drives a black car with a black interior and who rolls up the windows whenever it is parked, characterizes getting into her car as getting into an oven full of soup. Not a tepid chicken broth but rather a piping hot serving of full bodied cream of mushroom cloud soup because it is nuclear explosion hot in here.

This heat wave has been epic. When I get up in the morning it is already warm. I walked to work the other day. It was before eight o’clock so I thought I’d be safe. By the time I got there my face looked like the bad guy from Captain America and my deodorant had mailed in its letter of resignation. It also stays downright hot well into the night. When the temperature at ten o’clock at night is equal to the latitude of the Geographic North Pole it is too darned hot.

Some people covet money. Some people covet power. Some people covet the ability to be invisible and sneak into places to overhear what other people say about them. (Some “covets” are more realistic than others.) This kind of weather just makes it crystal clear to me that I covet comfort. I am addicted to Freon. If I had been born 200 years ago and a summer day rolled around with a temperature above 93 degrees you wouldn’t find me showing great stamina and perseverance working in the field. I’d be hiding under a shade tree in nothing but my skivvies valiantly holding on to the feet of an owl as he furiously flapped his wings thus functioning as an improvised high powered fan. He would even kind of oscillate….nifty.

I have been trying all sorts of tricks to beat the heat. My internet radio is tuned to Christmas songs. I covered my office with pictures of Samuel L. Jackson and Dean Martin. My doctor even gave me a prescription for an intravenous drip of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey.

The Downside is Just Easier

2011-07-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

I think I’ve found a basic flaw in human nature. It seems to me the natural default setting for the grand majority of people is negative and this is mostly just because negative is easier than positive.

While I am not egotistical enough to believe I am the first person to postulate such a theory, I have never seen it discussed anywhere else. This may mean it is original to me but it is more likely due to the fact my reading history revolved around Robert B. Parker, John D. MacDonald and Jerry Siegel’s Superman and not Bertrand Russell, Soren Kierkegaard and Frederich Nietzsche’s Ubermensch.

Think about it. Being negative is just easier.

“Hey, John. You want to go water skiing?”

“Why would I want to do something which turns water from the comfortable consistency it has as it comes out of the bathtub spigot to the hardness of concrete as my body slams into it going thirty miles an hour. I’m staying home and watching television.”
See, unadventurous, and negative, but also infinitely easier to do.

Look at the world of politics. (I realize this is annoying so I will make it as brief as possible.) When one side puts forth an idea the other side immediately disagrees with the idea, then states the idea was stupid, then states the idea was un-American, then states the idea will cause the downfall of our nation as we know it, then states pursuing the idea means we will face an apocalypse of Biblical proportion, then states the person on the other side who first introduced the idea has a mother who wears combat boots. This is so much easier than actually listening to the idea, considering the true facts and possible merits inherent in the idea, sitting down with the other side to alter and enhance the idea to better fit the needs of a larger number of people, admitting that someone from the other side may not be a blithering idiot, then going out to dinner together instead of just talking to another exact same point of view ideologue on television in order to make sure your constituents are convinced you are doing their will even if doing the opposite might have made a positive impact on the grand majority of humans. Fomenting anger and fear mongering requires a lot less effort and sophistication than implementing the sometimes complex processes required to actually make government function in a manner conducive to bettering our quality of life. (Sheeesh, that may not have been as brief as I first intended it to be.)

While I do not think it is the best way to be, it is very possible this negative tendency may be hard-wired into us. Early man had to assume there was a man eating something or other around every corner if he wanted to see next Tuesday. Caveman Shecky sitting on the ground laughing at the absurdity of a glyptodont (an armadillo the size of a Chevy Malibu) becomes Hors-d’oeuvre Shecky in a Paleolithic minute.
To better prove my point let’s look at the most basic, least sophisticated or educated example of a human being, anybody on Jersey Shore. No, let’s look at a newborn. Ticked off and sad is what they do best (come to think of it that is true of the Jersey Shore people too). It takes weeks of existence and great effort on the part of the adults in the baby’s life to elicit that first smile. There was even an early culture that believed the first person to cause a child to laugh was to be a special person for that kid for the rest of his life.

If we are to fight this predisposition for negativity we need to start early. Think about when a baby is born. The medical staff wants to get the kid to breath. Do we show the kid Bugs Bunny and the Marx Brothers to make him laugh? Laughter is really just happy breathing. Nope. Somebody slaps the kid on the backside to make him cry. Crying is really just unhappy breathing. I understand the expediency of the slap but I have to think if the first thing we did as a human being no longer attached to another human being was fun we might be more inclined to be happy. We go from the optimum of comfort, it is warm, it is soft, it is dark so napping is simple, and the food arrives without any fuss or bother. We are ripped from this and smacked by a stranger. No wonder grumpy is our natural state.

Christopher Pyle believes delivery room staff should at least try funny faces. You can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Time to work...ooh, look ...shiny

2011-06-24T20:23:00.001-07:00

School is out. We already had several days in which the temperature climbed into the hundreds. The solstice occurred on Tuesday. The Royals are in last place. It’s official. Welcome to summer.

Summertime is often equated with laziness. I fully agree that summer should be used for revitalization, but without anything too vital because it’s hot outside. I made a new year’s resolution against sweating.

I’m an elementary school principal by day so the summer brings a dramatic change in tempo. If I can sit at my desk for thirty minutes to concentrate on one task and one task alone during the regular school year it must be after 4 o’clock or a weekend. I have been known to whine about the frequency of interruptions at work. Well, this week I have been able to spend extended periods of time focused on Common Core Curriculum and reading books about building better background knowledge for students so they can be more academically successful. Somebody, anybody, interrupt me, please. Is it possible for your brain to get nauseous? I think I intellectually threw up the last half of that chapter about data analysis for continuous school improvement. (With apologies to Mr. Coleridge – Data, data, everywhere and boy I need a drink.)

Don’t get me wrong (especially if you are a member of the Dodge City Public Schools Board of Education), I want to enlarge my knowledge base. I want to get better at my job. I genuinely enjoy learning new things about how the brain works and how educators can better serve the students in our charge. However, the sheer volume of stuff I don’t know gets a tad overwhelming at times and summertime affords me the time to more fully examine my dearth of knowledge. It’s depressing, worse than sweating.

It is possible my difficulty climbing the mountain of ignorance is made more problematic by the trend in society for short bursts of superficial information. It is very hard to describe a process designed to enhance direct instruction of vocabulary for elementary students in 140 characters or less, but that is more and more what I am used to. My bosses did not assign me to “follow” any educational gurus on Twitter or “friend” them on Facebook. They gave me a stack of books about a foot tall to read. My attention span is going to be stretched to levels I haven’t attempted in a while.

Truthfully, I had a healthier attention span when I was a kid. So often in the media you hear folks complain that kids today don’t have an attention span longer than your typical Hangover II preview. I say nay. My 13-year-old son can play a game on his Nintendo for a timeframe longer than it takes bread to get moldy. He can also get lost in a book for hours on end. I can’t do that anymore even if I am reading a spy novel for mindless entertainment.

There is tons of research out there about multi-tasking, the pros, the cons, who does it well, who doesn’t. My problem is not that I have deficiencies in the multi-tasking department. My problem is I have epic, downright Herculean, skills when it comes to multi-procrasti-tasking.

Multi-procrasti-tasking is my own word for one’s ability to do two or three OTHER things at a time rather than what one really ought to be doing. When I was a college student my apartment was spotless only when I had a deadline for a big paper. (Go to the library or clean the grout? Hello, scrubbing bubbles.)

A major contributor to this phenomenon is the fact that so many of the tools we use for productivity are built to do many different things. If a phone only made phone calls it would be easier to carry on a conversation. If I really wanted to stay on task while writing I should use a typewriter. This computer makes it too easy to wander, a lot.

Why, just in the time between writing this sentence and the one before it I have checked e-mail, read a few tweets, went to ESPN.com to see how the Royals are doing (they’re behind), googled three different tidbits of information of zero importance and watched a video clip from last night’s Colbert Report. I did all this instead of writing the next sentence and writing this column is of one of my favorite things to do. Just think how I can multi-procrasti-task when I don’t want to do something.

Twitter-Tweet and Twitter-Dumb

2011-06-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

The other day my daughter Alice said something I found very astute. “If there is so much technology why are there still so many stupid people?” Granted, her choice of words may sound harsh but when you think about it she’s right on target.

With the continuous growth of the internet and the tools available to anybody with a computer we have access to more information than ever before in history. If you are missing some tidbit in the personal encyclopedia residing in your brain it only takes a modicum of perseverance and know-how to fill the gap. Why, just now, in a matter of seconds, I was able to find out the rainiest month of the year for Bora Bora is January when they average 18.6 inches of rain. Will I ever truly need to know that? Probably not, but if it is that easy to obtain a fact so obscure there really shouldn’t be any excuse for being ignorant about things of most any kind.

At least that is the way it should be. There is still the problem that not only can anyone with a modem find information on the World Wide Web but anyone with a modem can also put information on the World Wide Web.

(Short digression: Have you ever noticed it takes longer to say the abbreviation of World Wide Web, www, than it does to say World Wide Web? Saying the initials requires nine syllables while saying the actual words requires just three. My personal best saying “World Wide Web” is 0.8 seconds while my best for “www” is 1.2 seconds. Yes, I timed myself.)

I was once told there are more distinct pieces of information being created each week than would have existed in a decade at other times in human history. The thing to remember is many of today’s distinct pieces of information pertain to Kardashians.

I was once given advice by someone in the entertainment industry saying I just needed to get my stuff on YouTube to get discovered. My response was they make filters to keep adult material off your screen but not to shield you from sheer junk. Being on YouTube does not guarantee being discovered when the discoverers have to wade through thousands of hours of cats being painfully cute and skateboard dudes being painfully pained.

I guess the answer to my daughter’s question lies in the fact that no matter how advanced and amazing technology gets it is still used by human beings and we are very flawed creatures.

As a person who refers to himself as a humor columnist I would be drummed out of the corps if I didn’t spill a little more ink in the matter of Anthony Weiner. Here is a man who had gained the respect of many caring, intelligent people. I didn’t always agree with him but I really liked his passionate fighting for what he believed in. How does he use one of the most immediate and pithy ways to communicate? Does he re-state the battle cry of his political raison d’etre? Nope. Does he call to task the others in the legislature for their short-sightedness? Not so much. He uses Twitter as a purveyor of puerile pornography.

While I am not in Mr. Weiner’s league, my use of technology isn’t all that venerable. I do not use the vast amount of technology at my fingertips for high aesthetics and/or contributing to the greater good. Mostly I just want to be entertained. All the favorites on my internet browser are either sports or humor sites. I have a Twitter account, but the only things I have “tweeted” are musings and whinings. The people I “follow” with interest are Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, and Alec Sulkin (a writer for Family Guy) who use their 140 characters to be funny and not much else.

One of my very favorite technological tools is really one of the most basic, e-mail. E-mail is perfect for the timid. It is a way to communicate with or ask questions of others without being face-to-face or even very insistent. If I call you some contraption on your desk or in your pocket makes an interrupting noise and requires your attention right now. E-mail allows the recipient to respond at his own convenience. This also means I am at his mercy. One person I e-mail with some regularity answers in one of three timeframes, either within the hour, at the end of the week when catching up on all correspondence or never.

Christopher Pyle loves the self checkout technology at grocery stores because it removes one more human interaction from his life. You can e-mail him (he’ll probably answer) at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

This or That? Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda

2011-05-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

Choices seem to be constant. Do I wear the blue shirt or the white shirt? Do I have eggs or cereal for breakfast? Do I ignore the guy who dangerously cut in front of me or do I chase him down and ram his expensive I’m-having-a-mid-life-crisis sports car with my completely unremarkable I’d-love-to-have-a-mid-life-crisis-but-I-don’t-have-the-time minivan? Some choices are more typical than others.

When you’re young decisions are made willy-nilly, indifferent to their ramifications. Do I wear the blue shirt from the top of the pile or the white-ish shirt from the bottom which is irretrievably wrinkled but smells better? Do I have Oreos or Twinkies for breakfast? Do I ignore the beautiful redhead moving down the hall towards algebra class or do I just let her ignore me because she does it astonishingly well? Some choices are more emotionally painful than others.

There are, of course, some decisions which have longer term consequences. Say you are an eighteen year old person who has always loved television and movies so when heading off to college you select film studies as your major. That decision made perfect sense at the time and it was arrived upon with deliberation and following all proper goal setting protocols. Then upon graduating, six and half years later, (some other choices were made which will not be gotten into at this time) you find you are qualified for working retail sales jobs. This leads to more choices some of which you made with the same uncanny ability to perfectly predict what would lead to nearly the right thing.

My own children have gotten to the point they are actual people, not just shorter facsimiles thereof, and they are making decisions which will create rewards or penalties on down the line. This means I have another choice. Do I step in and try to convince them to do the things I think they should do? Not so much because I made stellar decision after stellar decision but rather so they can learn from the bone-hea..uh, less than stellar decisions I’ve lived through.

Most every parent faces this conundrum. Do I simply encourage my children to follow their bliss or should I hammer home they must be responsible and able to support themselves with gainful employment? At this particular juncture in my life I am really leaning towards the follow your bliss side of the debate.

When it comes right down to it the lack of success in my field was due to my lack of gumption. I shied away from making the leap and putting myself in uncomfortable situations and simply stuck with selling books to people. Hey, I was really good at it.

Each of my children is talented and very interested in the artistic aspects of the world. Emilyjane is a singer and has shown great skill in musical theater. Alice loves playing her clarinet and dedicates herself to music. George has worked hard on his violin skills and spends his free time exploring literature and history. The likelihood of any of my children making tons of money and buying my way into a really swanky retirement village is slim to none. Which is just fine with me. (Hey, I can always fall back on my mad cash register skills.) I hope beyond hope they are able to follow their passions and also pay the bills for their own modest, yet safe, lifestyles. Poor and happy is possible while middle class and grumpy is much more prevalent.

Over the last few years I have communicated with a guy who is truly successful in Hollywood. He is not a star and does not pull in huge salaries. If I were to tell you his name I doubt any of you would recognize it. He is a comedy writer. He has worked on shows like The Drew Carey Show and The Simpsons (those are shows many people would recognize). He makes a living.

If a doppelganger is a replica of an individual this gentleman is my wishicouldaganger. He was inspired to become a comedy writer by watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and Johnny Carson, me too. He worked crummy retail jobs in his early years, me too. He wants to be funny, me too. He wants to work with funny people, me too. He wants to have a happy healthy family, me too. He showed the grit and sacrifice to get there, me…

Hey, kids, (not just the ones who live in my house) follow your bliss with determination.

Christopher Pyle feels the bliss when he is with his family and when he comes up with a solid joke. You can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

This Isn't the Way I Thought it Worked

2011-05-13T14:59:00.000-07:00

I have frequently complained about how the world works but truthfully I have a very good life. My whining is warranted in my mind but when compared with people who are living genuinely crummy lives I should just shut up. Will I? Nope.
This is my current rant: The people who do everything “right” do not get the occasional leg up that living right is supposed to afford them.

Here is my personal case in point. My daughter is getting ready to go to college so we have been jumping through more hoops than a trained poodle working for Barnum and Bailey. The main goal is to figure out a way she can go to school without setting up a standing weekly appointment for the whole family to sell our plasma. Higher education is expensive. I’m starting to think it might be cheaper to build a college and hire a bunch of professors.

This is what I thought I was supposed to do. Go to college. (Check) Get a job. (Check) Get married. (Check) Return to college to improve our lives together. (Check) Get a better job. (Check) Have children. (Check) Raise them to be individuals who value kindness, posses a strong work ethic, spread humor and stuff like that. (Check) Get a graduate level degree in order to improve all of our lives. (Check) Not get divorced. (Check) Avoid going into irretrievable levels of debt (Check, but that was a close one) Send my children to college so they can start their own adventure through the circle of life. (Not so fast my friend)

Because I swallowed the American dream hook, line and sinker my kids (and I) will now borrow something equivalent to the budget deficit of Texas to facilitate getting my children the college education which was always peddled to me as an integral component of success. This is proof that my own education was not complete. I never learned to use my own personal empirical evidence to the contrary as a method of contradicting the aforementioned reverie of the United States. I did learn to use big words and stuff.

Here is my empirical evidence. My first college degree was in Film Studies. This meant I was eminently qualified to work at a video rental store, which I did for the first few years out of college which was also what I did while I was in college. See the degree made all the difference in the world. I made more money after college because I had more time to devote to my minimum wage job. My second degree was in elementary education. This meant I no longer worked for an hourly wage. It also meant I got to re-live my college years because every other meal consisted of Ramen Noodles and my furniture came from stores which also sold tires, milk and shaving cream. My graduate degree was in Education Administration. I was now able to earn the money which made it possible to buy a house and go to an honest to goodness couch store but not to properly maintain college funds for the kiddos.

So even though all that book learning did not lead to financial gains and the posh life I still value the education I received because I firmly believe it made me a more fully rounded, intelligent, caring human being which is really what I was after. I hope my children can get that out of their schooling as well.

Now back to the point of my rant. So my wife and I both went to college and then proceeded to get advanced degrees. We worked hard, not coal miner hard or Afghanistan soldier hard or Goldman Sachs CEO hard (it takes a lot of effort to beat down basic human compassion to that level) but our noses have grindstone scars. We made sacrifices in order to give our children what we thought was most important for them (love, attention, solid nutrition, frequent hugs, giggles and belly laughs, bedtime stories and all that Ozzie and Harriet stuff). But now when we look for scholarships and the like we find the grand majority of those are designed for very distinct demographics described by characteristics we do not possess.

It turns out I should have dropped out of high school, divorced their mother, possibly even arranged to have my permanent mailing address be 25-2-Life Penitentiary Avenue if I wanted my 3.98 GPA oldest daughter to receive some federal aid to go to university.

The Unnatural Selection of Manners

2011-04-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

There have been times I have used the space afforded to me by this illustrious publication to bemoan the fact that civility is careening down the same path previously traveled by the ill-fated Dodo bird and the, less celebrated, more fabulously named, but just as dead, Big-Eared Hopping Mouse. I know I sound like everybody’s curmudgeonly Uncle Charlie ranting about how the world is going to Hades in a handcart and when he was young people knew what manners were, chivalry was not dead and it was not nearly so difficult to find a really good hamburger with French fries that weren’t too crispy and also weren’t so limp they couldn’t even support a healthy dollop of ketchup from the plate to your mouth without dropping its tomato-y load on your favorite tie with all the pictures of tiny golf clubs. Really, is that too much to ask? Sorry, I sort of jumped the rails there.

Anyway, I genuinely fear that civility is endangered and will soon be extinct in the wild. We will only be able to experience it under contrived circumstances. Like people can only see the Wyoming Toad in zoos (or in pictures of the Vice President of the United States between 2001 and 2009 – that is an arcane and impolite joke, sorry) we will only be able to see manners in movies starring Cary Grant. I am going to continue the analogy comparing human behavior to animal species because I think there is one chief contributing factor in the demise of both: effectiveness.
Some animals became extinct because the skills and physical attributes they possessed were no longer effective at keeping them alive and procreating. (The Big-Eared Hopping Mouse was no match for the Gigantic-Incisored Sprinting Cat.) That is the problem with civility. Practitioners are not given the kind of evolutionary leg up those who practice greedy selfishness and rudeness receive.

Clinical Study Number One: (Okay, it is not a real study and it was not done in a clinic and it would not stand up to any sort of scrutiny by honest-to-goodness scientists but it is what I believe…so there.) The younger males of the human species go out into the jungle, in this case high school, in search of females of the species. One subset was raised in households in which kindness and courtesy were valued attributes. The other subset gives significance to roughness and disdain for the feelings of others (as well as a disdain for words like disdain which gives you a big hint which subset I belonged to). The first male subset listened empathetically to the feelings, hopes and dreams of the females of the species and couldn’t get to first base. The second male subset forced the females of the species to come running out to their Trans Ams when they honked their horns which were barely audible above the AC/DC blaring from their car stereos possessing enough wattage to power Poughkeepsie and, shall we say, the third base coach was pretty much continuously windmilling his right arm indicating it wouldn’t even be necessary to slide. (By now there are no doubts which subset I belonged to.)

Clinical Study Number One proves the evolutionary advantage of being selfish and if you need more evidence proving the advantages of the me-first-and-everyone-else-can-eat-me-dust attitude simply look at the legislative body of your choice. (We can kill medical coverage for anyone born post 1957 but we are guaranteed free medical services for life because we are members of congress.)

Clinical Study Number Two: (see parenthetical from Clinical Study Number One.) This study shows another aspect of how rude is more effective. Scientists monitored polite soft-spoken people dealing with insurance companies, any sort of phone sales, and guys who just cut in front on line at Dillons. They were as successful in getting their way as the control group of life-sized cardboard representations of Mister Rogers.

I have to say Clinical Study Number Two makes total sense to me. I am often calm, polite and ignored. However, if I become a mash up of Howard Beale and Sam Kinison the outcome is more likely to go my way. I want to go on record saying I do not allow my inner screamer to come out very often at all, unless I am dealing with a certain cell phone company. Suffice it to say they could sure as heck hear me now.

Useless Bits of Information (yes, again)

2011-04-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I learned about a rather odd animal, a fainting goat. These animals are perfectly named. When they become startled their muscles freeze for about ten seconds. Typically this means they stiffen and fall over on their sides. Older fainting goats have learned to position themselves against something so when they are startled they lean rather than fall. Another piece of information which indicates with age comes wisdom and a desire not to do anything uncomfortable.

These goats are domesticated. This cannot be a shock, because animals that stiffen and fall over at the first sign of danger aren’t exactly perfectly designed for flourishing in the wild. Their peculiarity explains the chief purpose for owning fainting goats. They hang out with your flock of sheep. A coyote comes by and starts stalking your investment. There is no sheep dog like the one in the old Chuck Jones cartoons clocking in to make sure the coyote (who also punched in on the time clock affixed to a random tree) does not eat the sheep.

Boo! The coyote jumps out from behind a tree. The sheep shriek and the goats faint. The coyote is then faced with choosing between sprinting after an adrenaline charged ovine or strolling up to the hors d’oeuvres table full of very still goats. Mr. Darwin did not discuss “Survival of the Stiffest” so evolution is not a fainting goat’s friend.

Even if you don’t own flocks of sheep, fainting goats might be fun to have around. You could set a couple dozen of them side by side in the back yard. Then you go up to the one at the end of the line and whisper in his ear, “I just saw a wolf.” He falls over. When he falls over he bumps the next one in line who is startled by his neighbor suddenly falling into him. This continues through the whole line of goats. You have now created bovid dominoes, great for children’s birthday parties and Fourth of July Barbecues.

This brings us to a strange chapter from the history of the state of Kansas. In 1918 John R. Brinkley first started his medical career. He had not graduated from any medical school, but he didn’t let that little hurdle stop him from opening a practice in Milford. He had previously worked at a meatpacking plant and observed the high level of amorous activity carried on by the goats. So when a patient went to him with a complaint about his own lagging amorous activity, “Dr.” Brinkley decided to surgically implant goat glands into the man.

Brinkley became quite rich and famous performing his operations which had no effect on patients. Well, let’s say the promised results were bogus, but the occasional death was a truly nasty side effect. He started the very first radio station in the state. He used it to advertise his medical miracle cure.

Eventually the proper people realized what was going on and revoked his broadcasting and medical practice rights. So, Brinkley did the only thing a reasonable man would do when faced with the destruction of his livelihood. He mounted a massive write-in campaign for governor. That’s what was so great about the kinder, gentler days of the previous century. The candidates for major political offices were much more open about being megalomaniacal whack jobs. He received 29.5% of the vote. There’s another reason to wax rhapsodic about the good old days. The general populace was more than willing to vote for bald-faced megalomaniacal whack jobs. (Although that seems to be coming back into vogue.)

Just think about how the state of Kansas might have gone down a whole different path if Doc Brinkley had become governor. Instead of huge beef packing plants in Dodge City, we might have gigantic goat feed yards. The state motto could have been changed to “Ad Capra per Aspera”, to the goat through difficulty. Brinkley’s radio station (KFKB) could have become the cornerstone for a media empire like the one Ted Turner started in Atlanta giving us GNN, the Goat News Network with the catch phrase, “We report the news good and baaaad, no ifs, ands, or butts.”

Be sure to tune in next week for the next episode of Wild Kingdom (arcane information about something in the animal world) Meets Your Are There (semi-worthless historical information).

Christopher Pyle had a another joke about Doc Brinkley trying to restore a man’s virility with goat parts combined with the information about fainting goats, we decided to err on the side of good taste. If you want to know what it was, e-mail him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

That's How the Ball Bounces

2011-03-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

One year ago I went to Oklahoma City to attend two rounds of the NCAA tournament. As a lifelong fan of KU basketball it was a fantastic present from my wife to send me. As I was driving down I thought about all the fun I could have and it occurred to me I might be able to get two or three good columns out of the experience. Then Ali Farokhmanesh happened.

The University of Northern Iowa punched their ticket to the Sweet Sixteen, punched the ticket for the Jayhawks to take a trip back to Lawrence to face disappointment and recriminations from fans and media and sent me back to my cheap motel room in the middle of a blizzard.

A year has passed. I am over the March Sadness and can remember the fun.
For the KU versus UNI game last March I was seated in the second to last row from the top (yes, the usher was of Sherpa descent…or should I say Sherpa ascent). The view was not all that different from watching the game on a giant screen television, a giant screen television that was fifty-seven feet away. Everything else was better than watching on TV.

The vast majority of people were rooting for the Jayhawks but there were about 8 guys sitting together a few feet from me who were obviously from Iowa and cheering wildly for their guys. There was no animosity between the two factions. At one point there was one of those calls by a referee which can be easily (and vehemently) argued either way depending on who you want to win. One of the UNI fans stood and yelled at the ref (knowing the laws of physics and sound travel my guess is his epithet hit the floor around 3:30 the next day). The KU fans nearby hooted. The UNI guy laughed, turned to all of us wearing crimson and blue, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Hey, you’re gonna win. I’m just havin’ fun.” It turned out he had a lot more fun than he expected.

Even though I do let losing a basketball game affect me more than I ought to basketball has given me a lot of positive experiences and helped me develop some of my better attributes.

From 2000 to 2006 I worked with the Dodge City Legend, a minor league basketball team which was part of the now defunct United States Basketball League. I started out as the mascot (Marshal Hoops) dressed from the waist up as a cowboy and from the waist down it was more mascot like. I wore the same basketball shorts the players wore and I had a pair of tennis shoe cowboy boots hybrids. Since it is not really politically correct to wear six shooters in a family entertainment venue I had two mini basketball hoops attached to my belt where Wyatt Earp would have holsters. I was a public goofball and I had a blast. Later I worked my way up to being the general manager. That doesn’t happen very often.

My oldest daughter, Emilyjane, was a ball kid most of the time I worked with the team and she got to know the guys better than I did. She developed friendships with some players and they always treated her great. Once a former NBA star joined the team, he was going to be a huge help as we tried to win a championship. His first game with the team something didn’t happen the way he wanted it to and was downright rude to Emilyjane. The other members of the team made him apologize to her. Picture it. A seven foot one inch athlete standing in front of a four foot nothing middle school girl saying he had been out of line. Is that great or what?

Emilyjane probably got the most out of it but my whole family was shown in no uncertain terms that people from very different backgrounds than our own were really great people with more things in common with us than not. A couple of the guys still e-mail her once in a while. Lazarus Sims played with the Legend three different seasons and came to dinner at the house. He played for Syracuse back in the 90s (even beating my beloved Jayhawks in the 1996 NCAA tournament) and now is an assistant coach for them. Whenever the Syracuse Orange are playing on TV we all carefully inspect the screen and whenever he is visible we all jump and scream, “There’s Laz!”

Is all this really necessary?

2011-03-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

I have frequently heard the old axiom that one must suffer for one’s art. The way I always interpreted this was an artist must live through the tough times, the rejection, and the lack of appreciation from the masses in order to get to the point when his art will be accepted and he will be given adulation, respect and possibly even monetary gain. It appears I was wrong.

The more I hear the background stories of great artists of every stripe the more it seems in order to be truly successful as a painter, a musician, a writer, or a ventriloquist (wait a minute, forget that last one) you had to have an upbringing Oliver Twist would find breathtakingly sad. Think about it. How many times have you heard an author’s early life described like this? A life of nightly beatings suffered at the hands of the older boys at the boarding school run by the sadistic headmaster who later married his mother so he couldn’t even escape the malevolence during Christmas break or upon graduation thus ensuring meals consisting of larvae infested bread crusts and a water dish he was forced to share with the dozen or so Rottweilers doted upon by his evil stepfather and total servitude to his craven stepbrother who had the IQ of a dinner roll until one day he was using a stolen spoon to scratch his thoughts and dreams on the back of the rock under the hedge next to the moat to which he was chained every night at bedtime and a passing traveler stopped to ask directions, read the brilliant prose exposing surpassing beauty and a depth of human understanding never before put into words and was thus whisked away to a life of adoration and exultation as a writer of inestimable skill. Believe it or not I just described the adolescence of Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin. Who’d of thought growing up in Scarsdale would have given his family access to a moat?

Okay, I may have overstated things a bit. The thesis is still correct. I have been intentionally writing for over a decade and have not gotten beyond the 620 area code. My problem may not be talent or drive. It probably all has to do with the fact I had a childhood completely devoid of sadistic headmasters (I was scared of the assistant principal at Liberty Junior High but that was mostly due to facts which lived in my head and nowhere else). I was never forced to eat anything worse than peas (actually my mom never really forced me to eat anything). My siblings were all kind-hearted and their IQs dwarfed even the most gifted of baked goods. My upbringing was pleasant…rats…

My next options for proper artistic suffering are crippling substance abuse or unrelenting mental illness. Hmmm, that would be a no. I am not willing to do either of those choices just for a large advance from Simon & Shuster and a three picture deal with Dreamworks. Maybe a preternatural craving for Junior Mints and an irksome feeling that I left the water running would suffice for eight hundred words published in Cigar Aficionado (which is an actual, honest-to-goodness magazine).

Like so many afflictions it appears my suffering (which oddly enough is the massive lack of suffering) is a cycle which is being handed down to my children. I’m sure they have their moments when they believe their lives are terribly hard but that usually revolves around the fact that the internet went down as they were watching Glee reruns on hulu.com. All three of my kids love to read and enjoy music. They have all had opportunities to show some skills in the performing arts but unfortunately they will never be giant successes unless some changes are made.

It may be too late for the oldest one. She is 18 and getting ready to scamper off to college. Kid number two might benefit from some emotional cruelty but whenever I try it we both just start laughing at the lack of conviction in my performance. Kid number three has the greatest amount of time left living with me. Maybe I can turn his life into a Dickensian morass of despair. Naah, that will never work. His mother likes him too much.

It appears all of us will just have to settle for being mostly happy and reasonably well-adjusted instead of being world famous artists of talent and deep melancholy.

Christopher Pyle still holds out hope Aaron Sorkin has a google alert set for his name which causes him to read this column and hire Chris to write for his next television show. Mr. Sorkin, your people can contact Chris’s people at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Being a Person or a Commodity

2011-02-18T16:35:00.000-08:00

The bottom line seems to have fully migrated to the top of the page. How are we going to get our money? How much money are we making? How can we get even more money? This mindset seems to have overtaken, grabbed by the throat and stomped to the consistency of a fine paste the old adage – money isn’t everything.

I have frequently spent my column inches bemoaning the fact that too much of our modern world only gives value to the utilitarian and cares not one whit for the aesthetic. Just ask most anybody in charge of government budgets. (Better yet ask our esteemed lawmakers the definition of “aesthetics” or even “whit” and see what you get.) We can dissolve the Kansas Arts Commission. We can stop giving money to NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But if we ask the Koch brothers to pony up a bit more tax money to help float one of the few countries in the world which would even allow people to get that stinking rich we are being un-American.

The thing that I have noticed recently which bothers me about this belief system is not just the overt desire for money (heck I want money too) but that skills which directly lead to earning money are the only skills worthwhile. My real job is in the world of education. Over the last several years there has been a shift to what is called outcomes based education. This means we decide what students should be able to do and engineer our schools backwards, from the “outcomes” to the “how-to-get-theres”. We can’t be surprised that almost all the outcomes are skills tested with multiple choice questions. Just to show that multiple choice tests do not necessarily show great intelligence try this one. The winner of this year’s Grammy for Best New Artist was: A. Justin Bieber B. Esperanza Spalding C. the Square Root of 12 D. Milli Vanilli. I recently read a quote from some renowned smart guy (I forgot his name because I didn’t know there was going to be a quiz) stating all we learn from a person’s results on the SAT is how well he can do the SAT.

My daughter is a senior in high school and has been looking closely at the University of Kansas, my alma mater (that’s Latin, a dead language which will not lead to a high paying job). I was not a stellar student. I went to class (most the time). I did all the work (usually late at night just hours before the deadline). I took some hard courses (not just Popular Culture of the 1930s – Busby Berkely made some far out movies). The thing about my curriculum was I took classes just to learn stuff which no longer seems to be the goal of higher education. I took Western Civilization I and II (those are Roman numerals, something else which does not lead to a high paying job) which had me reading the thoughts and philosophies of great minds from long ago. I took a course all about the Civil War which helped me understand many aspects of human nature, both the darker and brighter aspects of men’s souls. I took logic to become better equipped to make decisions about everything from which peanut butter to buy to who to vote for for President. None of these things led to marketable skills sets which jump off the page of a resume but I firmly believe they made me a better human being. My goal was not “employee of the month”. My goal was “caring thinking growing person”. My goal may not have been achieved but I did a fine job avoiding the marketable skills trap. My degree from KU was in Theater and Media Arts. This meant I was eminently qualified to work at Blockbuster and now they are simply Blockbusted.

So, my kid is looking at the list of classes put before her in order to get a degree in music therapy, a degree, I might add, I think is a pretty good fit for her skills and ALL the classes have to do with music and therapy. There is no Western Civilization, no forays into history and no room for Popular Culture of the 1930s which was quite fun. They are creating a resume and an employee. I really wanted her to go to college and become a multi-faceted person. Oh well, maybe she can support me in my old age because my skills never contributed to a viable retirement fund.

Christopher Pyle can quote Shakespeare but he can’t describe a hedge fund beyond the money one saves to buy shrubbery. He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Look Who's a Year Older

2011-01-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

Somebody’s birthday is right around the corner. This somebody is right around the corner, every corner. At least around every corner in Hutchinson. This somebody is in quite a state. This somebody is quite a state. This somebody is adding another candle to the cake. If this someone put that many candles on anything the fire marshal would have an aneurysm. I am sure all of you have figured out (that is all of you who haven’t turned to see what Beetle Bailey is up to today) I am talking about our own home sweet home, the great state of Kansas.

I have lived in Kansas the grand majority of my life, some of it even on purpose. Kansas does not have the best image throughout the rest of the country. When I lived in Los Angeles and told someone I was from Kansas first they would make some inane joke about either Marshal Dillon or Dorothy but when they turned away from movies and television the only thing they believed about Kansas was that it was flat.

(DIGRESSION) I went to Los Angeles to take Hollywood by storm and couldn’t work up a drizzle (one of my favorite jokes from an old episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle). I found when I worked on any kind of production (I was a production assistant on a few commercials and a television show nobody has ever heard of, even when it was on the air) everyone I talked to was not from Los Angeles. However, when I worked at the bookstore in Santa Monica all of my co-workers were from Los Angeles. I guess one thing we can learn from that is nobody moves to sunny southern California to work at Waldenbooks. Fancy that.

(RETURN TO THE COLUMN) Let’s examine the prevailing image that Kansas is entirely pool table flat. Not the case my fine deluded coastal friend. Just ask anyone who has tried to drive in Dodge City after an ice storm. I will go well out of my way to avoid certain hills and inclines making my path to the store look like a drunk mosquito trying to find his way home. And then there is Lawrence, Kansas.

The University of Kansas rests at the top of Mt. Oread. Granted, calling it a “Mt.” is a little like calling Zac Efron the greatest actor of his generation, but it is on a fairly steep grade. My four-cylinder Chevette required a running start and was frequently passed by tortoises as I drove to campus. You’d be surprised how many wild tortoises there are running around KU. But my favorite Lawrence is steep story revolves around my best friend, Rob. He and I were walking (I forget where, I bet it was to the library to study, yeah, it had to be the library) on a particularly icy evening. We were crossing a street which had a rather sharp downward grade. Rob slipped and fell and then proceeded to slide about a block and half down the hill. He was not hurt but as he slide his hat fell off, he lost a glove, his scarf was left behind and even his glasses hit the ground. Since I am a tender and kind-hearted person I stood at the top of the hill pointing and laughing. That is until my feet went out from under me. The cool part was as I was involuntarily sledding downwards I was able to grab the various articles of clothing and accoutrements Rob had deposited on his travels seconds before. We picked ourselves up, had a laugh and then to thank me for retrieving his stuff he bought the first round at the library.

OK, so Kansas is having a birthday. Not just any birthday this is the big one five-O. Even though she doesn’t look a day over 135 on January 29th she will turn 150 years old. Yes, boys and girls, Kansas is celebrating its sesquicentennial. Is that a great word or what? “Sesqui” is Latin for one and half so a sesquicentennial is one and a half of a centennial. I think we should add “sesqui” to other words just to make life more fun. Let’s say someone sees Bigfoot walking through the woods but this Bigfoot is half again as big as your run of the mill Bigfoot he would be a sesquisasquatch. Or if there is a man with three legs walking down the street he would be a sesquipedestrian. Or if there was a gigantic test to be taken in your math class it would be a sesquiassessment. Wouldn’t that be cool?

You Know What I Mean

2011-01-07T15:12:00.001-08:00

The key to communication is commonality. Doesn’t that sound like an intelligent distillation of the most important requirement for successfully conveying information from one person to another? I did not make that up I read it somewhere and wrote it down in the notebook I always carry in order to record tidbits which interest me about a myriad of subjects (and yes, I am as surprised as you are that I ever got a girl to kiss me). But it makes sense. In order to send a message from your head to someone else’s head the heads involved have to have something in common. Sometimes that just means a passing knowledge of a particular language (or articularpay anguagelay, for aficionados of ancient tongues) and sometimes it can be a shared deep, abiding love for sitcoms starring Alan Young meaning a single elongated utterance of the name “Wilbur” communicates a multitude of soft, warm feelings. (Give yourself 80 bonus points if that made sense.)

If we are talking about people who have things in common we need look no further than those who share a house and a large amount of DNA, a family. Every household has words and phrases which have meanings known only to them. The Pyle family is no exception. Some of the words aren’t really words. For reasons passing understanding our first child (or as my wife and I often refer to her, the experimental child because we really had no idea what we were doing) created some words of her own. They were words in the sense that they were recognizable phonemes strung together and they obviously represented a very specific concept in her developing brain.

One of the oddest things about these unique “words” is there were perfectly good words already in place for the concepts she was trying to get across – words that we are sure she heard spoken by her loving, if rather clueless, parents. The first one was “dachese”. Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Stephen Pinker would have been able to figure out what she meant by this word without spending time with her, specifically spending time with her at the dinner table while she ate French fries. She would pick up a French fry and with her free hand point dramatically to the tray of her high chair and announce dachese. We would look at each other as if she had just proclaimed she was from the planet Yaboo. After holding up various household objects and asking more questions than John Dean answered in 1973 we finally figured out she wanted ketchup. Occasionally someone at the dinner table (more than fifteen years later) will ask for the dachese.

Sometimes people share the meaning of their words even if the receiver hears something different than what is said. I try very hard to be a polite person and I am very deferential in dealings with most folks. This reputation seemed to overpower the nonsensical words a person thought she heard. A teacher in a school where I was an assistant principal was leading a discussion. The class was trying to think of polite ways to express their confusion other than just uttering “huh?” Suggestions included “excuse me” and “can you repeat that?” When one girl offered this response: “You can say what Mr. Pyle always says --- a big apartment.” After the less than polite, but appropriate, “HUH?” went through the teacher’s mind she realized what the girl meant. I would often lean down to students when they had said something to me that my much older ears had not picked up and say “I beg your pardon.” The girl obviously understood the message of a courteous request for forgiveness and the need for a repetition of the missed dialogue even if what she heard me say simply described a particularly sizable dwelling for humans.

One of the inside terms developed in my family as I was growing up was used to describe the somewhat nebulous concept of time to a very young concrete thinker. When we would take long car trips and I would politely ask (remember in the previous paragraph I said I am always polite…I am sure I did not ask in an annoyingly whiny voice) how much longer my parents struck upon something I could wrap my brain around. They did not say it would take two hours. Hours meant nothing to me. They said it would be four Batmans. I was devoted to the Adam West “Batman” television show which was a half an hour long. Four Batmans made perfect sense as units of measurement.

Thinking is a Good Thing, Usually

2010-12-09T19:25:00.000-08:00

There are times things just do not make sense to me. I was blithely wandering through my usual World Wide Web stops when off to the side an advertisement caught my eye (actually both eyes). Since we are officially in the Christmas shopping season there are lots of ads with a Kris Kringle theme to them. This was no exception. There was a rather wide-eyed Santa looking out at me and he had a hand extended offering a festively wrapped package. Was this an ad for a toy company aimed at parents of those most excited sugar plum visionaries? Nope. Was it an ad for a jewelry store aimed at those mostly clueless men in need of gift ideas for the lovely ladies in their lives? Sorry, wrong again. The words next to the Father Christmas image read: U.S. Weapons Collectors, Big Gun and Knife Show and Sale. Yeah, of course it did.

Nothing says peace on earth and good will towards men like packing the kind of firepower making it impossible for anyone short of an entire platoon of Navy Seals to show you anything remotely different than good will, safely. I should look on the bright side. At least the picture of Santa had him holding a colorful box and not Rambo’s belt-loading machine gun as he happily used his eight tiny reindeer as his eight tiny reinskeet.

If the previous paragraphs indicated I am a pacifist you would be right, but more than that I am a scaredy cat. Some people stand at the top of a giant hill covered with snow holding a sled imagining the wind in their hair and the exhilaration associated with picking up speed as they hurtle down the slope. I use my rather prodigious prediction powers to envision the compound fracture of my tibia when I strike the lone oak tree at the bottom of this track of death.

I was even like that as a child (just ask Rob, my best friend, it made him crazy). This character trait actually comes in handy in my grown up job, principal at an elementary school. It helps to jump to worst case scenarios to head off possible injury and mayhem and three hundred kids under the age of 11 are rife with injury and mayhem potential.
A couple of days ago it was downright cold as kids were arriving at school. There was easily twenty yards of sidewalk between the bus drop off point and the front doors. Within that space there were two patches of ice about four inches by four inches. As soon as one person spotted these tiny areas of danger dozens of them headed straight for them. Not to worry gentle reader, Worst Case Scenario Principal Guy was on the job. I had already positioned myself to block the students from the sure pain and suffering if they had been allowed to do their less than able Brian Boitano impressions on these insidious frozen spots.

It seems to me more people are like the kids who sought out the ice than are like me and imagine lacerations and ER visits. Really, I think if I had strategically placed multiple razor sharp machetes in the hallway a number of kids would have immediately started juggling them.

On the other hand, it is quite possible I over think things and not just about danger. This was shown to me the other day in a conversation I had with a kindergarten student. She flagged me down in the cafeteria and beckoned me to lean closer. Often this means I will be listening to either a long explanation of what her cat did last night or an equally long description of how another student in her class was guilty of some minor transgression that she felt merited retribution from the big mean principal. Not this time.

She asked a simple question. “Why do we put up Christmas trees?” Then I responded in my own inimitable manner with a long-winded response designed to give her the full edifying experience available to her. “The full origin of the Christmas tree is not really known but it probably started in Germany from a story about St. Boniface. It really became a Christmas tradition starting in the 18th century.”

After she blinked away the glaze from her eyes she responded to my lecture. “You put up Christmas trees because it’s almost Christmas.” The next words were left unspoken but her expression made them awfully clear: “you silly old man.”

Christopher Pyle finds his imagination is a double edged sword and both sides are really really sharp and he is afraid to touch it because he is sure he will lose a finger. He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Some Holidays are More Powerful than Others

2010-11-25T17:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a day many people spent time evaluating their lives and looking at what they were thankful for. I realize I will be far from the first person to say this but I’ll say it anyway. People ought to spend more time being grateful for the smaller things in life. I remember back to a performance on David Letterman’s show by a comedy writer, Andy Breckman. He sang a song in which he told us he had a pretty good day because he didn’t throw up. Think about his thesis. You get up in the morning and you take your shower and then you don’t throw up. Life is pretty good. You have your breakfast and you drive to work and then you don’t throw up. Things are still looking good.

I can relate to this more strongly because last week I was rather sick. I do not get sick often and I am not a big whiner when I have regular aches and pains but last week was rough. On Wednesday I woke up, for the third day in a row, with a headache measurable on the Fujita scale. I threw in the towel, called in sick to work and made an appointment with the doctor. Typically it takes a concerted effort by my wife (or an arterial laceration) to get me to go to the doctor but I was not going to live with this level of discomfort if I could help it.

It turned out I was going to live with this level of discomfort. The doctor visit resulted in him telling me I was sick (I knew this already), I should push fluids (I was already doing this), I should take ibuprofen for the pain (I was already doing this), I should get plenty of rest (that was my plan all along) and I should take this paper to the front desk and write them a check for the great service he had done for me.

So this Thanksgiving I was thankful I did not have a splitting headache and the office visit co-pay was nestled securely in my wallet, at least until the pre-dawn foray into the world of blatant retail.

It is possible people forego being thankful for things because Thanksgiving has been almost completely swallowed by the commerce of Christmas. Before the last trick-or-treater rings your doorbell asking for a handout the different retail establishments have started playing reindeer songs over their loudspeakers and plastic evergreen trees pop up faster than paparazzi at the Betty Ford Clinic. So instead of spending a portion of November contemplating the joys of seeing your children laugh at the dinner table or gratefully sinking into a comfy chair to talk to your spouse about the hilarious thing which happened at work people start their elaborate, something MacArthur would have envied during WWII, plans for Black Friday reconnaissance in order to procure that HD television the size of Paul Bunyan’s underpants with the surround sound stereo so they can immerse themselves in the happy-go-lucky world of Call of Duty: Black Ops as opposed to the dour existence of a regular guy taking care of his family.

Personally, I do not want much for Christmas. I enjoy being surprised. I really like it when it is obvious someone put some real thought into the selection of my present. Also, there is enough of the eight-year-old still living in this 48 year old body that I really like having something to play with on the morning of December 25th. For this I am thankful.

My children are not asking for bank account breaking things for Christmas either. We are truly lucky in that we have most everything we need and many things we simply want are also at our disposal. The kids are grateful for what they receive and they get a lot of pleasure out of the giving process as well. For this I am thankful.

Don’t get the wrong impression. I am not some fully evolved mystic sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop. I complain about things which are not that horrible in the grand scheme of things. I let things bother me which should just roll off my back. I also get really exasperated when I do complain and my wife offers the “it-could-be-worse” defense. Of course it could be worse. I could have a family of voles living in my sinuses but that doesn’t mean I have to like the fact that somebody at work showed the cognitive ability of a spoon and blew up my day.

Let Your Computer Be Your Guide

2010-11-13T17:15:00.000-08:00

In all sorts of science fiction movies the machines are the bad guys. In 2001: A Space Odyssey the HAL 9000 computer caused one astronaut to spin off into the ultimate void (Really has anyone found Gary Lockwood’s career since then? Guest shots on T.J. Hooker and Scarecrow and Mrs. King don’t count.) and totally butchered the 1892 classic song by Harry Dacre, Daisy Bell. In The Terminator robot Arnold Schwarzenegger kills dozens of people and eventually ruins the California economy. In Short Circuit another robot, Number 5, is so intensely cute he helped extend Ally Sheedy’s career which resulted in a true pox upon humanity, St. Elmo’s Fire.

Personally, I don’t think the future will play out that way. Machines will not be evil doers enslaving mankind for their own emotionless goals. Instead they will become our keepers, our babysitters. They will not be despotic rulers of the human race but rather despotic Jiminy Crickets.

Think about it. We have Net Nanny programs to make sure people do not visit inappropriate websites which show images of a more objectionable nature than Ward would allow Wally to see. Our various handheld devices politely suggest what word we intend to type even before we finish spelling it out and they never suggest any word which would move the movie rating from a G to a PG. I have been told when a person attempts to type a word (and I do mean almost any word) from a Quentin Tarantino film the auto-correct tries valiantly to substitute something more palatable for more delicate readers. (This begs the joke for all fans of the film A Christmas Story… “only I didn’t text fudge.”) The next natural step for computers and communication devices is to have software which at least attempts to keep its owner from doing or saying stupid things.

For example, you are really steamed at your boss. You write a fiery e-mail outlining every professional mistake he has made in the five years he has been boss from giving the copy machine service contract to his cousin who never actually graduated from junior high but did get a very high B in metal shop to substituting the company’s sexual harassment policy video with a copy of Porky’s. Then you describe as many character flaws as you can fit on the screen even with a size 6 font including how sick and tired everyone is that he insists on showing off his one and only party trick at each and every staff meeting. That trick being his ability to recite all the dialogue from the “Trouble with Tribbles” episode of Star Trek, in Klingon. The computer takes care of you and when you hit send it simple puts it in the You-Might-Really-Want-To-Think-About-This-Before-You-Proceed File. It is displayed between the Sent and the Spam files on your e-mail program and disappears and re-appears like Brigadoon so the bile and adrenaline can subside keeping you from getting fired and beaten to a pulp by a mass of Trekkies calling you every name in the English – Romulan translation dictionary.

If I had the time and the computer savvy (both of which are about as likely as President Obama and John Boehner hanging out together to watch Jay Leno on Conan’s new show) I would love to create a program for people of the male gender to use to translate their lunk-headed inarticulate thoughts into lyrically romantic prose to woo the women in their lives. One reason would be there just plain is not enough wooing going on in the world and another reason is it is just plain to fun to say, and even type, the word woo as often as one can. This is one of those endeavors which won’t even require a business plan to make me stinking rich. The teenage boy market alone would keep me in courtside Celtics tickets and Lear jets to take me there for an entire epoch.

How many gangly adolescents have tried to gain the favor of their object of affection by misquoting some song they heard on the radio last week or by re-writing the Roses are red poem with a special personal touch: Roses are red, some bears are black, I like your hair and you’ve got a great rack.

Christopher Pyle would be glad to talk to the guys at Microsoft or Google about his plans for the “Cyrano” program to turn every Neanderthal knuckle dragger who thinks grabbing a girl by her hair and dragging her back to his cave is romantic into a totally in touch with his feelings Shakespearian Sonnet wielder of love. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Rally to Restore

2010-11-03T18:44:00.001-07:00

Well, I did something crazy and went to the Rally to Restore Sanity. How's that for irony?

When it was first announced my reaction was "I really want to go!" Then I tempered that thought with all the responsibilities I have and that spending the money was not a reasonable thing to do. Then my sister contacted me and said she really wanted to go but none of her family could go. Okay, that is fate. I have to go.

The day offered perfect weather. We got the the National Mall before 8:00 AM with the official start slated for noon. This was a very good idea because we were amongst the first few hundred to get there and before all was said and done there would be over 200,000 people in attendance.

I heard no harsh words. I saw no aggressive acts. I witnessed no attempts to hijack the day and make it into a true political food fight. (I did see one guy run very quickly which made me think he was getting away from something so it may not have all been unicorns and rainbows.)

The event was what I expected and also more than I expected. The funny was excellent. Messrs. Stewart and Colbert are two of the most adept comedians working today and they did not fail. I laughed often. The musicians were fun (sometimes I forget just how much fun live music is since I live in a place with a dearth of it and a rock sousaphone player is just cool). The surprise was just how often I choked up. Now I am a card carrying wuss and I will get teary-eyed during Hallmark commercials but this was different. I was moved because I re-attached myself to the feelings of patriotism. It is VERY easy to see only the less than positive aspects of this country, there are many. On the other hand this country when it is at its best is pretty damn amazing. The great variety of people in attendance (all colors, all age groups, very likely all religions - major and minor - and every possible mix of gender) all sharing in an afternoon of entertainment with more than just a nod towards a message as well. A message meant to show not the people standing on the nation's front lawn, but rather the people who truly wield power and influence, the people who live in the nation's house that we are Americans and we love our country and we would really like it if they would stop acting like the nation's pissed off retired man who constantly yells at us to get the hell off his lawn. Just because you love America and we are different than you doesn't mean whe don't love it as much as you do.

Thank you to all who made it happen.

Not Mad about all the Anger

2010-10-15T14:45:00.000-07:00

I don’t have the anger which seems to be rampant in the world. Maybe I am not paying close enough attention. Maybe I am not smart enough to recognize so many different forces in the world wish to squash me like a bug. Maybe I am just too tired to work into the frenzy of Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” mentality which seems to be typical of many, if not most, media figures today. If Paddy Chayefsky were alive he could sue all sorts of people for copyright infringement. (If you haven’t seen the movie Network I highly recommend it.) That doesn’t mean I think life is all rainbows and unicorns. How about this for a catch phrase? I’m mildly miffed and would really prefer if many things were different.

I am not a social scientist with years of experience studying the human condition so my ideas are nothing but my ideas, but I think one of the reasons so many people are ticked off is there are fewer and fewer times people who do the right thing get rewarded. Here is a tiny example of what I mean.

Every day at the school where I work students are dropped off by their parents. We have a system in place to make this safe and somewhat efficient. The cars are supposed to pull up to the curb in front of the building all going the same direction and as the front few cars release their kids they move on and the next few cars move up and do the same. Those are the people doing the right thing who should get rewarded with being able to move on smoothly with their lives. Not so much. Not when the person who doesn’t feel the need to do the polite, thinking about the concerns of others sort of thing comes swinging into the picture. This person, driving a vehicle larger than many two bedroom homes, pulls up and double parks at the front of the line. He has now blocked the car flow like the biggest blob of cholesterol in Henry Heartattack’s thoracic cavity and like the arterial plaque he is, he doesn’t care a fig for the stress put on the body as a whole. This yutz gets to go on with his “do as I please” day while the “do the right thing” guy at the end of the line reaches for his blood pressure medicine.

I realize there was public uproar when communities added fluoride to the water supply and I am not a big advocate for a “nanny” state which has the government taking care of us when we can’t do it for ourselves. (They have already reached into the snack machine at work and required granola bars take the place of a certain percentage of real snacks – mini-doughnuts and chocolate covered anythings.) That being said, I would be in favor of certain mood altering chemicals being introduced into different environments.

The main thing which would help us is if television news organizations of every stripe had a very low concentration of valium pumped in to help them bring it down a couple of notches. I mean do we really need well-dressed men and woman reading off teleprompters such fear-mongering copy as “Your very own cat may be trying to kill you in your sleep. Tune in tonight at ten.” Not to mention those proselytizing hosts of shows making it appear that we are on the path to some sort of Caligula-esque debacle of debauchery if the guys who do not believe what we believe get to be in charge of anything, and I do mean anything, even the panel of judges on Dancing with the Stars.

Truly, I think one of the first things which can get rid of the aforementioned ubiquitous anger is just looking around and realizing people are not out to get us. Whatever happened to thinking the other guy was simply wrong in his political views, not a fascist megalomaniac bent on turning the United States of America into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where there is government run healthcare, privatized Social Security and all kittens are outlawed. I would prefer the political arguments from the people sent to the various seats of government were simply between opponents with different paths to the same end (the betterment of the lives of their constituents) not enemies locked in a mortal struggle for the soul of the nation. I want Adlai Stevenson versus Dwight Eisenhower not He-Man versus Skeletor.

Christopher Pyle advocates for calmness and if you don’t agree he hopes your cat kills you in your sleep. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Books ARE Judged by Their Covers

2010-10-02T17:47:00.000-07:00

When a person is running for President of the United States the press always says the first decision he makes that is truly presidential is choosing his vice presidential running mate. It is used to show what he sees as important and how well he can play the political game. Not many people run for president and even fewer of them get to select a running mate but there is one decision made by thousands and thousands of people which can be used as a yardstick for judging how they will do at a job they are embarking upon. I am referring to judging parents by what they name their child.

Just this past week I came across two different news clips about how names can affect the way people are viewed and therefore have significant impact on their quality of life. The first one talked about how people with surnames carrying negative connotations can be adversely affected. Names like Short, Little, Bent, Worthless-Twerp (okay, I made up that last one) can lead to feelings of inferiority. This was reported by psychology Professor Richard Wiseman (I did not make up that last bit).

The second one described a study which showed resumes, identical in every facet save the name of the applicant, did not receive the same responses. If the name was “usual” the number of call backs was significantly higher than if the name was odd – not crazy, just different. As a person who has done some hiring in my day I can say the name can make a difference. One applicant listed his name as Brain. I did not call this person for an interview. It was not because I was intimidated by a person with a name implying great cerebral power or bothered that the person may have been named after a cartoon mouse set on world domination. It was simpler than that. He had misspelled Brian. Someone who will not proofread his application well enough to see that his name is correct may not be the person to take care of sensitive work related activities like, oh, say, unlocking the door before trying to walk inside the building.

There is tons of information out there to help select your child’s name. Bookstores have entire shelves of “baby name” books, which I always found odd. They are not just baby names. The cute little blobs of protoplasm are the first to have the monikers attached to their wrists but the name stays with them beyond diapers and diets of puréed peas. Maybe it would be better if names had shelf lives like milk. An adorable toddler should have a name like Mitzi or Lulu or Bambi but none of those stand the smell test when applied to many grown up endeavors. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Bambi Rabinowitz.” The converse is also true. A four year old boy scurrying across the playground chasing a puppy should not be called to by his parent with a handle like Bertrand. A Nobel Prize for physics might be in his future, but so are multitudes of football player administered wedgies.

I used to think the pressure to select a name for your child was over the top. Every friend, relation, and co-worker asks what names you’re considering and every one of them has an opinion which they are quite happy to share, bidden or not. I have adjusted my attitude and think there isn’t enough oversight of this choice. As a person working in the world of education I am exposed to a large roll call of names and I have to say there are instances the government should have intervened. There are other times it steps in for children in need of care. Children ought to have some protection from names created by random arrangements of letters or being named after a parent’s favorite car or city or Stephen King novel. (“Little Cujo just learned how to crawl and foam at the mouth, it is so cute.”)

One hint I have for expecting parents is to go to one of those racks that have pencils or mini license plates with names printed on them. Then make sure you chose a name not represented on any of the merchandise. This serves two purposes. One, your child will not have an overly common name and two, you save a bundle when you take your offspring to these shops because they will have no desire for any of the over-priced plastic junk.

Your Brain as Ventriloquist Means You're the Dummy

2010-09-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

I recently heard a story about a woman who suffered a stroke and, for a time, lost all ability to deal with language. Not just the power of speech but language as a whole. She said the voice in her head went silent. She also reported she liked it more than just a little bit.

We all have that voice in our heads. I’m not just talking about the Jiminy Cricket voice reminding us to listen to our parents and tell the truth. Or the voice in our heads which consistently remarks how wonderful it would be to pull up stakes, move to some remote part of a Canadian forest so you can finally completely focus and write the definitive work on the genius found within the collected works of Gallagher. Or is that just me?

I am referring to the voice in our heads which is simply the way we think. Most of our thought processes are simply interior monologues. As in the three o’clock in the morning voice which says, “Did I finish that report I have to hand in to the boss first thing in the morning? Uhh, that would be no.” As well as the three o’clock in the afternoon voice which says, “I really wish I had chosen a different major in college because it might have led to true fulfillment and a sense of completion in my life. Then again, how would a philosophy major have led to that? I couldn’t just open up an ethics repair shop, even though there is a screaming need for one in as many locations as Starbucks.”

Thinking is just talking. Some of the easy thoughts occur with very little discussion or words of any kind. Thoughts like “doughnuts good” require no polysyllabic treatises to get the crux of the issue across to all portions of the brain making it possible to coordinate the motor center to walk to the car, drive to the store and reach into the display case and the number sense center of the brain to calculate that the amount of money in your wallet will allow no more than five doughnuts and the spatial relationship portion of your brain to figure out that the doughnuts with the greatest surface area give the greatest enjoyment and all the while not only shouting down the super ego trying valiantly to remind the rest of the brain that the excess weight already being carried by the body is not healthy and the addition of five doughnuts to the spare tire residing just above the belt is not a choice recommended by the surgeon general but also pushing the super ego’s head into the toilet and giving it the king of all swirlies.

Other thoughts and concepts require additional methods beyond a mere string of words to enable the brain to process them to the point of successful understanding. Theories of English composition are often beyond the realm of most people and simply having one of the aforementioned interior monologues will not get a thinker to the desired outcome. For that we must step beyond mere words and add a catchy tune.

“Conjunction junction, what’s your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.” I rest my case.

Really, when was the last time you went about looking up something in a phone book and didn’t sing the alphabet song? Admitting it is the first step to acceptance.

Of course, I have absolutely no desire for a stroke, but being able to turn off the voice in my head from time to time would really be a good thing. Can you imagine how much easier it would be to sleep? How much easier it would be to watch an entire episode of “The World According to Jim” without the continual interruption from your brain voice saying “Can you believe someone actually sat down at a keyboard and wrote this, for money?!” How much easier it would be to endure that committee meeting without your brain voice repeating over and over “kill me now, kill me now, kill me now”.

If we were able to develop a switch to turn off the interior dialogue the health of many a person would be improved. But until then mankind will just have to rely on artificial ways to mute the voice. Ways which are very unhealthy like alcohol. Ways which are more benign like watching three hour long baseball games thus deadening many parts of the brain. As well as my personal favorite – playing songs from the hit television series “Glee” at a volume which can be heard in neighboring states.

Shhh, Christopher Pyle’s inner voice is finally asleep. You can contact him later at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Secret to Success...Speedy Internet

2010-09-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

I finally found out how to make all my dreams come true. I just need a cell phone which loads the internet really really fast.

There is a commercial for some cell phone company which has a split screen showing the different ways a young woman’s life would go depending on just how quickly her phone loads. On the everything-is hunky-dory left side of the screen the internet page loads three seconds faster than on the stuck-in-a dead-end-life right side of the screen (I actually counted). Because her phone is faster on the left side she happens to meet a person who has great influence in her world of endeavor (believe it or not, ballet dancing) and because she happens to meet this person she is wined and dined and given the lead in a fabulous production of Swan Lake wearing distinctly scary make-up. The poor right-side woman is stuck rehearsing her talent all alone, waiting tables while other people wine and dine and simply sitting in the audience of Swan Lake, but at least she is wearing decidedly less scary make-up.

So, if I want to have my novel published and get on bestseller lists throughout the world I need to get this particular cell phone service and constantly load pages quickly so I can be standing in front of my big city brownstone apartment building and, through sheer happenstance, meet J.K. Rowling who absolutely falls in love with my wit and way with words and she introduces me to her publisher who immediately sees my brilliance and offers me a lifetime contract and a seven figure advance on my first book for which I don’t even have an outline. The fact that I currently live in a single story ranch style home in a small town in western Kansas won’t stop this from happening if I just shell out the money and sign on the bottom line for the two year contract with the cell phone guys who are all sweetness and light when I sign on but when I want out of the contract it turns out they subscribe to the Shylock school of debt and I will have to give them a pound of flesh to become free to cell phone elsewhere. Even though I have a few extra lbs I do not wish to have any of them forcibly removed by AT&T.

Another way to interpret the aforementioned commercial is to say if you cannot wait three seconds for the internet page to show up on your handheld phone device you may actually need to seek professional help. I mean really, we are talking about three seconds here people. Think about it. It was less than the gestation period of your average African Elephant ago that it was not possible for a person to use a five ounce bit of electronic circuitry to connect to a magical ether full of reference materials, breaking news and videos of really cute kitties playing the piano. Now that we have access to all this stuff we need to have it happen faster and faster for it to be truly worthwhile.

Have you noticed whenever you google something on Google (the lowercase google means the process of casting a question into the internet like a net into shrimp rich seas and the uppercase Google means the actually uber-search engine created by uber-rich people who live on a compound in California like a cult without the matching sweat suits or fascination with comets) they not only tell you how many results they offer but the time it took to offer them?

I just googled “meaning of life” and was gratified to get the answer in 0.29 seconds. The problem was there were about 81,900,000 results.

If a cell phone company really wants to have the world beat a path to its door they need to invent something other than a phone which downloads internet information quickly. The next tool all consumers truly need is a junk filter. Just think how much more useful and enjoyable so many aspects of the internet would be if you had something like that. You go to YouTube and type in “funny videos” and engage the junk filter thus making all the videos by teenagers who think Carrot Top is too sophisticated for their tastes disappear. Think about all the benefits of such an internet surfing tool. If you searched “brilliant plans by government officials” or “reasons to see the most recent Jim Carrey movie” the screen would simply go blank.

Christopher Pyle is proud that if you google “occasionally keen” his blog is the top result of over three million results in 0.14 seconds. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

All Dressed Up with No Time to Go

2010-08-18T19:57:00.000-07:00

You remember those old-fashioned family vacations? Each family member had their pre-determined location in the station wagon, a station wagon with fake wood paneling on it sides making it look like it belonged in Robert Young’s den. In my family growing up Dad drove, I sat next to him and the oldest brother sat next to me on the front seat. Mom sat behind my father in order to reach each family member to hand them supplies: cups of water from the thermos, snack foods – including Space Food Sticks (I did not make those up, they were, and I quote from Wikipeida, a “non-frozen balance energy snack in rod form containing nutritionally balanced amounts of carbohydrate, fat and protein) and the occasional comic book. My kid sister sat in the back seat with Mom and the second oldest son had the run of the back of the station wagon. This was before car seats and seat belt laws so he lived back there with pillows and the luggage.

The biggest versions of these trips meant you were on the road visiting tourist traps, museums, malls, crummy roadside restaurants featuring gift shops with more things made in China than Beijing itself and, if your little sister was like mine, every gas station restroom between here and Galveston. The smaller ones had you visiting family members and bunking on a sleeper sofa with a mattress actually harder than the petrified sandwich crusts found when it was pulled open for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.

You remember those? So do I. That is exactly why my family did nothing like that this past summer.

I exaggerate. The main reason we did not go anywhere was finding free time was impossible. I’m not talking about the 47 year-old chief breadwinner for the family. I had vacation days aplenty. Everybody else was too busy. Between the orchestra camp at KU (kid #3), the drum major camp in Illinois (kid #2), the summer community theater production (kid #1), the lifeguard job (kid #2), the babysitting jobs (kid #1), the petsitting jobs (kid #3), and the summer part-time job (wife #1 and only) we couldn’t figure out three days in a row when everyone was available.

Fortunately, my family is easy to please. Even though there was no Grand Canyon adventure or Hawaiian escapades (look no further than the Brady Bunch to see those aren’t all they are cracked up to be) there was no complaining. While they are open to greater adventures they are content with simpler pleasures.

You hear the term “destination” used to describe places tourists desire to visit. The marketing people like to use it. “Make Disney Land your destination vacation!” Truthfully, I find it a little odd to use such a generic word for something which is supposed to be special. Wherever you’re headed is technically a destination. “Make Kwik Shop your 1:00 AM insatiable craving for microwave burritos destination!”
Everyone in my family is perfectly happy if our “destination vacation” is simply a big book store. We can spend the better part of a long weekend in Barnes and Noble. I say that both because it is true and because I hold out hope a Barnes and Noble executive will stumble across this column and feel I have earned a sizable gift certificate for the shameless plug I just handed to his company.

We all like books. Even the youngsters like the feel, the smell and the sensation of holding the book and turning the pages. Technology is working on making that a thing of the past. The aforementioned Barnes and Noble is for sale (which may mean the gift certificate proposition is more time sensitive than originally thought). Bookstores are inching their way onto the endangered species list. With the ease of shopping on-line brick and mortar locations are not truly necessary and more and more people don’t bother to use them. Also, e-books have made a huge jump in the market.

E-books are downloads of the text of an entire book onto your computer or some such device. All the words are there with none of the pages, covers or dust jackets. Storage is in bytes not linear inches of bookshelves. I have a few on my laptop but I have to say I like pages better than pixels.

I will probably migrate over to e-books eventually, but if the bookstores disappear my family may be relegated to the microwave burritos for our vacation destinations.

Not All Reality is Exciting

2010-08-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

I have probably mentioned this before. We do not have television at our house. I do not mean that as some sort of mating call for the pseudo-intellectual. We are not sitting around the living room reading aloud to each other from Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu in the original French. I spend more time than I ought watching Hulu.com internet “broadcasts” of Chuck, Psych, and The Human Target so I am not above watching TV. I simply tell you we have no television at our house to show I do not have all the conduits of information many people have. Yet, somehow I have lots of information.

Not long ago President Obama was on The View and when asked about Snooki, he didn’t know who she was. That was very reassuring to me. He has much more important things to pay attention to than a personage known throughout much of the free world for, umm, shall we say, somewhat hedonistic behaviors. He should be spending his time on things like the economy, oil spills and who will replace Ellen DeGeneres on American Idol. (Maybe Elena Kagan if the Supreme Court gig doesn't work out.)

I have never seen an episode of Jersey Shore or American Idol yet I know many things about both of them. I do not know them purposefully. The information seems to be in the air supply. Just another example of why the EPA needs to be more vigilant.
In the case of American Idol people who I enjoy have spent loads of time telling me what is happening on the show. Tony Kornheiser’s radio show dedicated so much time to it I stopped listening and a blog I read written by long-time television comedy writer Ken Levine does blow-by-blow accounts of each episode. I skip those entries. But still, I know a person named Crystal Bowersox was the runner-up last year. Crystal Bowersox…sounds like a special additive for laundry detergent to combat stains and unpleasant odor. (Tide - now with crystal bowersox for improved cleaning!)

Television people categorize these shows as unscripted. What? It really doesn’t take a group of erudite practiced crafters of the English language hours of intense effort to come up with such riveting storytelling as the account of Danielle from The Real Housewives of New Jersey as she tries to recapture the romance of dating by enrolling in a pole-dancing class? Are you sure Shakespeare didn’t come up with that first? There was a little known hand-written note in the first folio of Romeo and Juliet indicating the Bard considered a scene with Juliet and Lady Capulet discussing breast augmentation surgery to attract a husband. (This could have led to a very famous line: Two Bs or double Ds that is the question.)

The people in many of these shows get very rich and incredibly famous. Many things I do I do in hopes of becoming richer and a little famous. Maybe the path to getting my work as a writer known to the world is to have a reality show revolving around my life. The biggest hurdle to this is the fact my life would be considered truly boring by most of, who am I kidding, all of the viewing public.

It is often a topic of conversation in my house just how boring we are. My wife and I love each other and have had maybe two disagreements in almost 20 years of marriage and neither incident had us throwing living room décor or even epithets at each other. Our children don’t seem to dislike us and we think they are pretty cool. We don’t even have to yell at them to turn their music down. When the oldest kid is in the living room with her internet radio turned up you hear Julie Andrews or Rosemary Clooney, not rap artists or pop divas spouting unapproved by old people lyrics. When the youngest one is closeted in his room roaming the internet it turns out he is watching YouTube, not videos on how to make basement explosives but old episodes of The Addams Family.

The final nail in the excitement coffin has to be what happened the other night. I have two, count ‘em, two teenage daughters. They got together with a bunch of their peers and went over to a house with no adults in sight. They went into the basement theater. They fired up the projector and the DVD player and proceeded to watch… wait for it… Lion King One and Half. A cartoon! A direct-to-video Disney cartoon!

Things don't HAVE to be so complicated

2010-07-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

It is a common theme in many conversations and media reports that the world is getting too complicated and the sheer volume of discrete bits of information is so huge it is impossible to keep up. I agree, to an extent. The issue is a lot of this confusion and blitzkrieg of factoids could be simplified but we choose to make it more complex.

Just because there is information available doesn’t mean it is important. For example, I just spent five minutes of my life watching a portion of Lindsey Lohan’s probation hearing. I don’t know. I have also spent an amount of time I do not want to add up and state for the public record (the Lohan thing was embarrassing enough) reading and listening to people trying to guess where LeBron James is going to play basketball next season. The media can’t just report what has happened. It must also spend great amounts of time talking about what might happen. Maybe we should just have Paul the Prognosticating Cephalopod tell us if Mr. James will be a Cavalier, a Knick, a Bull or a Heat (I still think teams should have nicknames which can be parsed into individual units – maybe Miami should have called themselves the BTUs). Why do I know there is an octopus in Oberhausen, Germany who has predicted the winner of several soccer matches? I don’t know. I didn’t want or need to know. I just do. Now you do, too (sneaky of me, wasn’t it?).

Part of this self-inflicted over-complication of life was made obvious to me when I went to the grocery store one summer evening. I was simply going to run in and get some ice cream. I wanted something simple. I was going to get vanilla or maybe chocolate. I couldn’t find either one. Oh, there was Double Vanilla, Homemade Vanilla (but it was in a mass produced carton meaning the “truth in advertising” police should be notified), Vividly Vanilla, and Artisan Vanilla Bean. Chocolate was even more confusing. Classic Chocolate may have been what I wanted, but I remember the whole New Coke/Classic Coke fiasco so maybe that wasn’t the best choice. There was German Chocolate Cake ice cream. If I wanted cake I’d have gone to the bakery section. There was Chocolate Almond Indulgence but I wasn’t in that hedonistic of a mood. There was Double Chocolate Cookie Crumble which didn’t sound like it was actually ice cream. Also, the ultimate, and I mean ultimate in the sense of final, end of the line, all she wrote, the ultimate flavor – Death by Chocolate. What is the advertising catch line for that flavor? “The last thing you’ll ever taste, but soooo worth it.”

The myriad of ice cream flavors brought to mind the fact that paint is never just a color. The last couple of times my wife selected paint for rooms in our house she would tell me the name of the paint and I would still have to ask what color it was. So I went to the Sherwin-Williams website to investigate. Just call me Bob Woodward.

On the first page of color palettes I found “Nomadic Desert”, “Foothills”, “Summer Day”, and “Enigma”. Is there even an indication what your bedroom would look like if you painted it any of those colors? My personal favorites had to be “Knitting Needles” and “Wool Skein”. Truthfully, I do not remember what those two looked like, but they had to be complementary colors.

Okay, what is the most non-descript color out there? How about gray? On that same website there are 61 different hues with the word gray in their name. 61 different grays! 63 if you throw in the color squares labeled with the term Greige, which I am guessing is some unnatural hybrid of gray and beige, the ultimate in boring. I do not have enough space in this column to list all the different grays, but here are some of my favorites: “Agreeable Gray”, for the décor of union negotiation conference rooms, “Escape Gray” would be a truly mean color for prison cells, and “Dorian Gray” for painting portraits of ageless beauty.

There were 1,479 different colors represented on the Sherwin-Williams website and naming each and every one of them would be a gargantuan task, but “Stolen Kiss” and “Notable Hue”. Really? There was a color titled “Loren’s Surprise”. That had to be an incredibly cheap birthday present.

“Honey, I didn’t get you that diamond necklace you wanted, but I did get the fellows over in the nomenclature department to name a color after you.”

Christopher Pyle’s favorite color is red, just red, not “Showstopper” or “Heartthrob”, just red. You can contact him at occasionllykeen@yahoo.com.

A Kinder, Gentler Space Man

2010-06-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

It was brought to my attention Tom Leahy, Jr. died recently. I am sure a lot of people reading that sentence are not sure who Mr. Leahy was, but if you were a child living in central or western Kansas (or southwestern Nebraska) during the 1960s you would recognize his face immediately. Tom Leahy, Jr. was Major Astro.

Major Astro hosted an afterschool cartoon show on what was at the time KARD television. He introduced Yakky Doodle Duck, Snagglepuss and Astro Boy (no relation) from a set designed to look like a space station. Astronauts were the ultimate in cool during the Major’s heyday, the sixties into the early seventies. My memory isn’t what it used to be but I really think he also showed that truly odd marionette adventure series Thunderbirds. Now there was a meeting I wish I could have attended.

“Hello, Mr. Producer, we would like to have you bankroll a new show we are developing. It features a family, a former astronaut and his five sons, who are super smart scientists and adventurers. These guys have space ships and submarines to fight evil all over the planet and even beyond our atmosphere.”

“That sounds marvelous, but it also sounds very expensive. I mean six adventurous male leads and all the hardware you describe would require a lot of money.”

“Ahhh, but there is the brilliance of our plan. We don’t use people.”

“What do you use?”

“Marionettes!”

“I get it! James Bond meets Pinocchio.”

I loved watching Major Astro’s show. I remember one of the few times I got in big trouble and was sent to my room I was OK with the punishment until I realized Major Astro was going to be on. I used every stealth tactic I knew (which at the age of seven probably was comprised entirely of being quiet and crawling on the floor) to position myself just outside of my room behind a living room chair so I had a mostly unobstructed view of the television. This is a testament to my love for cheesy cartoon TV anthologies and to the truly uncontentious childhood I led as this was probably the biggest act of rebellion I ever displayed toward my parents.

My family had a brush with Astro greatness. My dad was the city manager in McCook, Nebraska before moving to Hutchinson. We got Major Astro from the Oberlin, Kansas station. Well, the Major was coming to McCook as part of a promotion for the opening of a department store or some such festivity and for some reason passing understanding my dad was the guy picking him up at the airport. I was not very old so I have no memory of this, but my oldest brother was allowed to accompany my dad and even got to hold Major Astro’s space helmet, an unparalleled thrill for a pre-teenager during the height of the Space Age.

Really, think about it. A kid from a small town in Nebraska gets not only to meet a guy who is on television five days a week, making him a star of greater magnitude than even Adam West who only managed to be on two nights a week, but also gets to share a car ride and HOLD HIS SPACE HELMET! Talk about everything being “All systems go”! That had to totally rock.

Here is the real kicker to this whole story. While McCook was getting all stirred up because Major Astro was visiting, all its children abuzz with excitement and all sorts of pomp and circumstance planned for the day somebody else was arriving in that sleepy Nebraska town. Somebody who would go virtually unnoticed. Somebody who was just there to go pheasant hunting. Somebody whose name would go unrecognized by nearly the entire 4 to 12 year old demographic being catered to with the visit from the 40-something-year-old announcer turned kiddie show host.

Who was this stranger you ask? Only a real freaking astronaut. Only the first American to go into space. Only one of the original Mecury 7 astronauts. Only a man who would soon walk on the moon, actually walk on the moon, and return to Earth. Alan Shepard was in McCook and nobody paid any attention to him. We were all too busy with Major Astro.

I do not tell that story to denigrate Major Astro. He really was more important in the lives of thousands of children. His show was something we don’t see anymore. He was calm, polite and fatherly. Kids programming today seldom values such attributes. Thanks, Mr. Leahy.

Maybe not what, but rather who

2010-06-09T18:50:00.000-07:00

There are days I am not terribly happy with all the circumstances of my existence. It’s human nature to look out into the world and think others have it better than I do. The conundrum is just who would l want to be.

People think being stinking rich would make life as good as it gets. If that’s the case I guess I want to be Bill Gates. It would mean I would never have to worry about anything, and I do mean anything, breaking ever again. You can accuse me of an epic lack of imagination but really that is all I wish for in regards to monetary wealth. I want everything I own to work and if it breaks I just want to be able to call “the guy” to fix it. Better yet, I could buy a new what ever it was without having to worry about getting to the end of the month and realizing fixing the air conditioner meant having Ramen noodles for breakfast and lunch and dinner. I make a decent living but I also have three children so poverty at a moment’s notice is not out of the question. Tapping into Mr. Gates’ savings account means if the power steering goes out I buy a new car. The computer the kids use goes belly up I buy them each iPads (which is rather sacrilegious if I am using Microsoft money to buy them). My refrigerator goes on the fritz I fly ice in from Finnish glaciers. Both legs break I just hire guys to carry me places.

I don’t think I want to be Bill Gates. Too much pressure having all that money. You’re always expected to do things with it…finance the solution to global warming…finance the re-design of the American education system…finance a series of plastic surgery improvements for our 45-year-old third cousin, Myrtle, who is convinced she could be a movie star if she looked a little more like Sandra Bullock as opposed to the movie star she is more frequently mistaken for, Ernest Borgnine.

Maybe I should take my cue from good old Myrtle. I’ll trade places with a big time movie star. Who? I could go young and heartthrob-like and be Ashton Kutcher. He is popular across multiple generations and that is just in his own bedroom. I am about the same age as George Clooney. He seems smart and comfortable in his own skin. I don’t think I’d be as comfortable. I’d spend all day looking in the mirror thinking, “dang, I’m good looking.” Why not make a much bigger leap and be a famous actress? I could be Julia Roberts. That wouldn’t work (see the statement about Mr. Clooney and multiple a hundred fold). How about Charlie Sheen? Excuse me, I think I need to go take about seven showers..ugh..icky.

I am not flamboyant enough to be an above-the-title movie star, but making a living working in the creative arts is attractive. Rather than aim into the Brad Pitt stratosphere I think I’ll trade places with Kevin Pollak.

I am sure there are many of you out there thinking, “Who is Kevin Pollak?” Mr. Pollak started his career as a stand-up comic which has always been a profession I admired. (I tried it once and since I stopped there you can make an assumption how it went.) He became an actor and was in some pretty big movies (Willow, A Few Good Men, The Usual Suspects). I recently rediscovered him on the internet. He hosts an interview show which is streamed live on the web and later available on iTunes. He interviews creative, funny people and he does so for well over an hour. These interviews are interesting and cause more than their fair share of giggles and laughs, but best of all they are not the four and half minutes of fluff we see on most every talk show. They are opportunities to understand how talented people became talented people and how talented people got others to see they had talent and get into the show biz world.

So, if I were am asked what I want to be when I grow up the answer would change from when I was nine-years-old (starting running back for the Kansas City Chiefs) to a mid-level actor, extremely able comedian, with his own talk show on the interweb (his phrase) who seems to be playing as much as working.

Christopher Pyle would like to say to Mr. Pollak if he happens to see this: If I cannot be you I am willing to work with you. Maybe if your legs break I can help carry you places. Kevin can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Kids to Adults...Lost in Translation

2010-05-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

A very random and somewhat classless thought occurred to me when I got home from work today. I was the first person home, well that’s not true, my oldest daughter had been home a great part of the day so let’s just say I was the first person home who thought the dogs would need to go outside since they hadn’t been out for several hours. I took them outside and the older, larger, smarter (but only because the younger, smaller, dumber dog has the IQ of a jar of paste) dog took about three steps to get all four legs in the grass and then proceeded to undertake the task for which I brought him outside in the first place. That is when two thoughts went through my mind. The first thought was I had been correct in my assumption that the eldest child had not taken the dogs out for quite a while as the number one undertaking (pun intended) proved a certain amount of canine leg crossing and dancing about had been taking place prior to my return home. The second thought and this is the not-so-classy bit I referred to earlier, is I should have been a tad more selfish and made absolutely sure I did not have to go myself before heading out into the back yard with the dogs as witnessing this process suddenly added a certain amount of urgency to my own world. Lesson learned.

Now on to our regularly scheduled column…

Last weekend I was an audience member for a dance recital. This featured dozens of children ranging from seventeen-years-old on down to learned-to-walk-about-twenty-minutes-before-curtain. Even though the older kids were much more adept at the actual dancing the tiny kids were my favorite. Most of them made it appear finding the beat of the songs to which they were dancing was harder to find than a shred of decency in a Goldman Sachs executive. They stood there watching the teacher go through the choreography. Some of them realized their task was to ape the movements of the bigger person, others randomly moved various body parts in an asynchronous manner and still others stood there transfixed, like a Precious Moments doll in headlights. It didn’t really matter though. Each and every one of them exuded a preternatural level of cuteness.

The auditorium had to have over three hundred people in it for what had been billed as a three hour dance recital. I am sure there were many people who remembered Gilligan’s group was just going on a three hour tour and ended up stuck for 98 episodes. I have to admit I snuck in my iPod in case the afternoon drug on just a bit too much because my own personal kid was part of the very first dance and then would not be on stage again until the second to last routine. I never resorted to my contraband entertainment because the kids had obviously worked very hard in preparation and they were truly fun to watch.

We are often told our most precious natural resource is our children and afternoons like this one bring that idea home to me. I like children, most days. The wonder the younger ones possess is so much fun to observe. They think things are cool. Why else would they constantly demand you look at each and everything they notice or do? “Daddy, look at me riding my tricycle!” “Daddy, look at that rainbow!” “Daddy, look at me smearing peanut butter all over the computer keyboard!” “Mommy, look at Daddy crying in the corner!”

Let’s look at other natural resources. Water is the very life of the planet and if you mix it with a certain granulated powder you have Surfin’ Berry Punch Kool-Aid. Gold is a shiny rock that by itself is somewhat pleasing to the eye but mine it, melt it and shape it and it becomes jewelry which has ruined many a young man’s bank account.

This ruining of natural resources is what I fear we do entirely too often with children. We have such a large supply of them in their raw state but then we don’t seem to know how to process them properly. Like oil there is great potential for usefulness in the world but then instead of carefully collecting and refining them we willy-nilly go about the process and then we’re surprised when there are suddenly hundreds of thousands of adults spewing all over the planet making a frightful mess of things.

That's Gonna Sting for A While

2010-05-13T19:23:00.000-07:00

A Cleveland man complaining of tightness in his chest was found to have an elephant standing on him. The man said he had experienced some discomfort, but had no idea there was a pachyderm perched on his pectoral muscles. Okay, I made that up. It is pretty preposterous, but is it any more outlandish than the man who had to go to the dentist to find out he had shot a four inch nail into his jaw? It was there for six days before he sought help. Not only should this guy never be handed a nail gun again but the most dangerous object he should ever be in control of is one of those Kentucky Fried Chicken sporks.

Most everyone has had an accident which resulted in an embarrassing injury. I broke my collarbone when I was in fifth grade. I told everyone I broke it high jumping, which was true. What I failed to tell them was the bar had been set about 15 inches above the ground when my Fosbury truly flopped and resulted in a clavicular fracture. At least I didn’t wait six days to seek medical attention. Actually, my mom made me go. Even at the age of eleven I had the male predisposition to “tough it out.”

Men don’t like going to the doctor. Many psychologists think it stems from a deep seated dislike for giving up control by admitting one needs help. Others think it grows out of a sense one is not a real man if he admits to pain. All men know it isn’t either of those reasons. It actually boils down to one thing – doctors are creepy. They use small metal implements which remind us all of that scene in Marathon Man when Laurence Olivier is asking Dustin Hoffman, “Is it safe?” (man, that still causes ever sphincter muscle in my body to squeeze tighter than then skin on Joan Rivers’ face). It is not unreasonable for men to do all they can to avoid medical attention. If a person told you he was going to make you wear a big paper towel, sit in a tiny cubicle for forty minutes with nothing to do but skim seven year old copies of Brides magazine, then tell you you’re overweight and to stop doing and eating everything you truly enjoy doing and eating, all for the low, low price of 100 dollars you’d tell him there was no way you would do that. The real miracle of modern medicine is not the advancement in technology or pharmaceuticals. It is the fact that whole cubicle scenario is something people do, frequently.

Early man survived without modern medicine. The fact the life expectancy of early man was just slightly longer than the number of weeks the Kansas City Royals can even pretend they are contenders in the division shouldn’t worry us. Can you blame men for having the somewhat Cro-Magnon mentality to just rub some dirt in it and walk it off? It is much simpler. Men like simple. Women like complicated. Whereas men look for the most direct solution to any problem, which is often ignoring the existence of a problem, women enjoy the twelve step programs. If admitting it is the first step, than men are definitely using the elevator.

The life expectancy of a man born in 1960 is just over 66 years, and the life expectancy of a woman born in 1960 is nearly 73 years. That seven year discrepancy might just be attributable to a woman’s willingness to go to the doctor and actually try to take care of herself. I suppose it might also have something to do with the fact that many men enjoy doing things like lighting fireworks with the cigar they have clamped between their teeth after having sucked down enough beer to founder Secretariat. Self-preservation is not the top characteristic for the average American male. Guys do not tend to think, “If I get the speedometer up to 110 M.P.H. and try to jump over that train blocking the street I might just die.” More likely they think things like: “It would be soooo cool if I could get my Festiva over the top of that Burlington Northern.”

I suppose it will take quite a bit to make men change their attitudes towards healthy living habits. Until then, guys, remember, “turn your head and cough” is better to hear than “it will cost $55,000 to remove that rearview mirror from your forehead.”

Is "Paternal" Latin for Clueless

2010-05-02T07:36:00.000-07:00

This weekend my youngest child will turn twelve years old. I will not annoy everyone by typing in the full lyrics for the song “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof, but holy Tevye, Batman! Where did the time go?

Even though the term father could be used to describe me for 17 years now I make no claims that I know how to do this job. There have been fathers for generations. Actually, there have been fathers for as long as there have been generations. Even though people have been practicing the art and science of parenthood for ages nobody has all the answers. Oh, sure, Dr. Spock tried to write the owner’s manual for the little beggars but after a while even that book is more useful as a device to measure if the bars on the crib are close enough together to avoid injury than anything else. (Warning long-winded non sequitur may be closer than it appears: It is amazing I lived through my childhood. I had a crib with bars I could fit my head between. There where wall sockets in my house without little plastic prong thingees shoved into them. I played with an Erector Set which was totally comprised of sharp-edged metal bars. My Major Matt Mason action figures had accessories sold separately which could just as easily have been labeled choking hazards sold separately. And my favorite breakfast cereal was Lead Paint Flakes with its lovable cartoon mascot Brain Damaged Idiot depicted in bright colors on every box.)

I have been forced to look for guidance where the majority of people seek their role models for everything in life: television. I tried to be Ward Cleaver but the cardigan sweaters were too itchy. I thought about emulating Cliff Huxtable but those sweaters were itchy and ugly. Charles Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie seemed to be capable and had really great hair. That and the fact that he was light years more intelligent than the Pa in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (“There’s a blizzard a comin’ I guess I better go to town and leave my young children and wife to deal with it on their own.”) made him a good candidate until I found out I was going to have to follow that up with being in Highway to Heaven.
This was going to be harder than I thought. Full House Dad? Too wimpy. Family Ties Dad? Too in-touch-with-your-feelings-y? Eight is Enough Dad? Too oblivious of the real world? My Two Dads Dads? Too many of them in one house.

That’s the thing about being a parent; you can’t really use anyone else’s experiences to guide you. This is probably due to the fact no two children, fathers, or situations (even similar situations hours apart) are ever truly the same. That fact is really starting to tick me off.

I have to adjust to the fact that my children are starting to leave the truly childish existence I am used to, not good at, just used to, behind. This is just one of the myriad of things my wife is better at than I am. A while back I had between 7 and 249 teenagers in my basement. Okay, it was twelve, but that’s within the range I mentioned. (Hyperbole, a perfectly acceptable writer’s tool.) Anyway, my wife came into the room I was hiding, uh, working in. She was excited our house was the “go to” house for my daughters and their friends. She was focused on the facts that our kids were in our house, they had friends who were good kids, their friends saw our house as an acceptable place to be, and we knew they were all safe. I was focused on the facts that there were several hairy legged boys near my girls, I was paying for the snacks and soda pop they were drinking, and since I am an old man with a job I would be trying to sleep as they were raucously laughing below me.

I need to stop worrying and enjoy the ride. I am very lucky because I genuinely like my children. The more time I spend out in the world the more often I find there is a smaller and smaller percentage of people I really want to spend time with. Maybe that is why people have children. It is not some primordial urge to keep the species from extinction but rather a selfish desire to create people we don’t immediately want to smack across the cheek with a sock full of lard.

Does He Play Well with Others?

2010-04-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

The longest gestation period for a land mammal is 22 months. That is how long it takes before Mama Elephant finally gets to met little Dumbo. (Little Know Fact #1: It isn’t until the 21st month that a pregnant elephant will say, “Do these ears make me look fat?”) That is in the world of natural sciences. In the world of artistic creation the gestation periods are often much longer.

It was April 17th, 2008 when I typed the first sentence of a stage play. Two years and one week later that play will make its debut on the stage of the Depot Theater in Dodge City, Kansas. (Little Known Fact #2: I also gained weight through this gestation process. It wasn’t from the retention of water but more from the soda pop and junk food which is a required part of a writer’s regimen.)

The actual writing is a lonely pursuit. You sit in a room all by yourself doing the work. In my case this usually consists of short bursts of typing punctuating longer periods of staring at the computer screen, reaching for snacks (see Little Known Fact #2), reaching for the keyboard and then not typing anything having though better of it, allowing myself one quick internet surf to see the score of the ballgame, bringing up iTunes and selecting a different playlist which might very well prove to be just the creative stimulus needed to start writing again and the occasional giggle when I actually think of something I think is funny. Hard to believe it took two whole years to finish the play isn’t it?

I used the word lonely to describe the writing process. That word has a negative connotation which doesn’t fit how I feel about it. I truly like being alone. I like being alone for prolonged periods of time. I spent a great deal of my young adulthood alone. Not in a pathetic lonely guy way or a creepy Ted Kaczynski treatise writing bomb construction way but mostly because there were not a great many people I wanted to spend time with. In the interest of full disclosure there was no line forming at my door of people wanting to spend time with me either.
This is a conundrum I would think many writers face. They like being alone and anonymous but they want their work to be out amongst large numbers of people. I do not want to be famous but I would love the stuff I write to be well known, and I would even hope that it would be admired. There is no pipeline I can tap into to make that happen. I have to engage in interpersonal activity to get what I write beyond the “documents” file of my computer.

The positive side of trying to work in a creative, or some might even say, artistic world is you often deal with people possessing a great generosity of spirit. The play being mounted at the Depot has given me an opportunity to get together a talented, giving, creative and guaranteed not to cause any nasty side effects group of people. The early rehearsals ran beyond the expected end time, not because we weren’t working on our common goal or because there was contention and argument but rather because we found ourselves giggling so much.

As much as I like to work alone when an endeavor so completely dependent upon effective collaboration is populated by people willing to pull their own weight, people who are dedicated to fully employing all their skills, people who value the other people they are working with, and people who can quote Young Frankenstein as easily as they can recite their own address the very oxygen in the room is enriched and all the positive endorphins go screaming through my bloodstream as if they are powered by rocket engines revving up to escape velocity. To put it in simpler terms: It is so cool!

At the end of the run I will return to my cave and hunker down with my computer, root beer and vanilla sandwich cookies to arrange and re-arrange words in hopes of making myself laugh. If I am truly lucky I will be allowed to share those words with others and give them a smile or a giggle and if the creative gods wish to bless me beyond what I deserve I will get another chance to experience a project like this with the caliber of people I am sharing my evenings with right now.

Not all scales stand for justice

2010-03-16T17:15:00.000-07:00

I think I might have made a fatal error. Now that I am well on the “closer to fifty than to forty” side of the demographic charts there are things I am supposed to do in order to be sure I stay in good health. The fatal error I refer to is I have started to do those things. I now hurt.

I’m getting ahead of myself. It all started soon after the New Year. No, I did not make a resolution to be healthier but it seemed like everyone one around me at work had. They were all discussing diets and exercise plans and a bunch of people threw some money into a pot to see who could lose the most weight over a period of time. I stayed strictly on the periphery of these activities. Until one day, out of a curiosity born of hearing all the healthy talk, I decided to actually get on a scale.

Now, I am sure I am not alone when I say I prefer my weight to be some sort of theoretical number like something Fibonacci would work with or Euclidean algorithms or the number of fully rational, well-read individuals sitting ringside at a professional wrestling event. I harken back to a time when I was getting a new driver’s license. The DMV lady asked for my weight and when I paused, not so much out of embarrassment but more from genuine ignorance, she smiled and said the blank on the form did not, in fact, say actual weight. So I made up a semi-reasonable amount and that is the number on my license to this day. It was closer to being “actual” at that time, but today, not so much.

Anyway, I got on the scale and was surprised. I mean this was a number I won’t even represent in print using Roman numerals. It was a number larger than I had ever seen before in these circumstances. Don’t get me wrong. Richard Simmons was not going to show up on my doorstep with a work crew dedicated to cutting a hole in the wall big enough to winch me out of in order to get me to a clinic.

The charts for a person my height indicate my weight put me into the overweight category, not the “obese” category nor the “apply for your own zip code” category. However, when I looked at the optimum weight category for a man of my age and height it made me downright nostalgic. I remember being that weight. I was that weight when Bush was President. OK, it was the first George Bush. OK, it was when he was Vice President, but I can still remember it. So back off Jack Lalanne.

While I realize it is quite likely true that a much higher proportion of the general population of the United States is overweight there seems to be too much of an obsession with it. There is a blitzkrieg of marketing aimed at losing weight. There are exercise gurus, diet foods, diet programs, diet supplements, healthy foods, pharmaceuticals, and even a reality television show all revolving around going from bigger to smaller. Doctors have also gotten into the mix. Personally I am convinced they all got together a few years back and added a new sentence to the Hippocratic Oath. After all the “I swears” and “I wills” they stuck in the following: “and, oh, by the way, tell them they’re fat.”

After I saw my weight I decided I needed to just be smarter about things. I drink way too much soda pop. Yes, I know it is bad for you. Both of my daughters have done the science fair project where you put nails in dishes of pop and watch them get eaten away by the corrosive materials. Usually, I just told my kids I wasn’t held together with nine penny nails so I was fine. So the first step was to cut down on consuming the fizzy drinks.

Next I decided to get some purposeful exercise. I am bored with exercise machines and walking miles a day is not easy in Kansas weather so I started playing basketball. I do it by myself but since I am such a crummy shot it is very aerobic because I spend the majority of time running, chasing the ball after it caroms off the backboard at odd angles.

Now that I am so healthy can someone explain why my legs hurt and why I am always hungry. It might just be easier to be fat.

Self-Centered Doesn't Mean Properly Balanced

2010-03-03T16:56:00.000-08:00

There are times when a person has to face harsh realities. This is one of those times. I did some soul searching recently and came to a conclusion which does not put me in a good light. I’m selfish. Truly, there are times I am a real clam and just last Wednesday I was a full-fledged mollusk. Wait a minute. I think I got that mixed up. Those things wouldn’t make me a selfish person. Those things would make me a shellfish person. Anyway, I realized I have stronger selfish impulses than I thought. The issue is not that these impulses exist or that I too frequently follow through with them. The friction in my emotional life is I hardly ever allow myself to act on them.

There are the selfish impulses that no member of a civilized society should act upon. Like the ones which occur when the person talking to you is blathering on about some molehill they have morphed into something of Everestian proportions. You know the selfish impulse I mean. The one which plays out in your mind like this: you take a sock full of lime Jell-O and give the person a solid clout across the chops. I would never behave in such a violent manner. (Well, other than that one time I socked a man in Reno just to watch him cry.)

The problem is I am a fully grown responsible upstanding member of society and we all know how much that stinks. There is just enough of the old puritanical work ethic existing in me to cause me to deny myself the base pleasures of life. This means I can’t buy the latest sports car to satisfy my desire to be genuinely cool (people who know me just giggled because the sports car wouldn’t do it). Instead I have to make sure my children have food, shelter and proper medical care. What a bummer.

All whining aside, I have to say I will never be in the major leagues of selfish behavior. I would have to go a long way to rival such top tier selfish people as the stars of reality television shows, your average toddler and what now seems to be the most myopic group of ego-centric folks moving amongst us, politicians.

(There will now be a slight pause as I climb onto my soapbox.)

My father had a way of describing certain folks. “They know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” This describes the Kansas legislature. They are consistently all excited about cutting taxes so they can appear heroic to the people who will vote them back into office. However they fail to realize government needs money in order to do the things which are of genuine value for the greater good of the state.

Case in point: education. The state has cut funding to education. Let me rephrase that. They have cut funding to children. The amount promised to each Kansas student was cut almost 13% and this was after districts made their budgets. (I don’t know about you but if my paycheck was cut 13% I’d have to re-do my budget quite a bit and we’re not just talking about eating out less often.)

The Kansas 2010 Commission was created a few years back, when the Supreme Court called the legislature on the carpet for shirking its Constitutional requirement of adequately funding schools. Its job was to investigate education in Kansas and describe its needs. The legislature authorized the commission and then promptly ignored everything it said. They ignored it because it stated in no uncertain terms that the legislature was derelict in its mandate to properly fund students in this state.

This brings me back to the selfish theme. The people we elect to do the unpleasant things and be the grownups are not squashing their selfish impulses. They want the sports car. They have created over a billion dollars in tax breaks over the last few years (according to the 2010 commission) which would have paid for much of the education budget promised but then reneged upon. I venture to bet that they did so to get re-elected not because it was the responsible thing to do.

My suggestion is if the people in Topeka decide to cut funding to children yet again (which is quite probable) we all get our Jell-O socks and knock some sense into them. I know this is a humor column but this time I’m not kidding.

Scare up some ideas

2010-02-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking recently about combining the works of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Navin R. Johnson.

I have probably confused some of my readers with an unfamiliar name. One man is known as a brilliant speaker, a man of conviction dedicated to enhancing of the lives of millions of people, a man ahead of his time who brought the rest of the world forward with his sheer force of will and the other is Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Joke writing 101: the unexpected turnaround.)

For those of you who spent too much time in movie theaters in the late seventies you will recognize the name Navin R. Johnson as the character played by Steve Martin in “The Jerk”. There were dozens of fabulous quotes from that movie: “The new phone books are here!” and “He hates these cans. Stay away from the cans.” But my personal favorite soliloquy of silliness has to be when his life goes to pot and as he leaves his mansion he claims he doesn’t need anything from his former life and then proceeds to pick an odd variety of things that he really does need. It goes something like this:

Well I'm gonna go then. And I don't need any of this. I don't need this stuff, and I don't need you. I don't need anything except this. [picks up an ashtray] And that's it and that's the only thing I need, is this. I don't need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need. And that's all I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that's all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.

This brings me to my idea of combining the philosophical musings of Navin and one of the most famous quotes from the 32nd President of the United States: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

If President Roosevelt were a practicing politician today he would have pulled a Navin and kept talking. I am guessing it would have gone something like this.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, and we should also be more than a little worried about global warming. Oh, and the health care system is in a right awful state. There are terrorists all over the place with dynamite sewn into their Fruit of the Looms. The stimulus package is full of pork barrel spending and none of it came to our state. We are inexorably changing into a socialist, communist, fascist, alarmist, anesthesiologist, chauvinist, contortionist, cubist, elitist, empiricist, escapist, existentialist, exorcist, hedonist, ichthyologist, imperialist, misogynist, narcissist, neoclassicist, nephrologist, nihilist, nonconformist, nudist, opportunist, orthodontist, pessimist, philatelist, plagiarist, pointillist, projectionist, propagandist, pugilist, recidivist, repudiationist, sadomasochist, secessionist, solipsist, surrealist, ventriloquist, nation. The government is out to take all your money with unreasonable taxes and then they are going to spend it all on ashtrays and remote controls and paddle games.

That was only slightly exaggerating things. It seems fear is the most important thing to invoke when talking to groups of more than six people. In the old days people subscribed to the “hope for the best expect the worst” methodology of planning ahead. We have now removed the “hope for the best” part and added to the “expect the worst” part with a side order of “and it probably causes cancer”. On top of that we feel compelled to make a seven step plan of action to deal with the inevitable doom coming our way complete with designing a staging area to coordinate all emergency first responders (firemen, paramedics, police officers, CNN reporters and psychologists to help us cope), drawing up escape routes to Canada and assembling public relations departments charged with spinning the apocalypse in a more positive light (each and every child can have his or her own pet frog since they are raining from the sky).

Wheeere's Johnny?

2010-01-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

Jeff Zucker has been getting the stuffing beaten out of him by dozens and dozens of people in the press. “Who is Jeff Zucker?” you ask. Mr. Zucker is the president and chief executive officer of NBC, and he is the person who created quite a storm in the world of television.

Remember a few months ago when it was decided Jay Leno would host a Tonight Show-esque program five nights a week at 10/9 central on NBC? Remember a few months ago when 94% of the rational beings in the United States (which included most toddlers and a few really alert gerbils) decided Jay Leno hosting a Tonight Show-esque program five nights a week at 10/9 central on NBC was an idea so bone-headed it must have been created by a not so alert gerbil? Well, that not so alert gerbil was Harvard graduate Jeff Zucker.

Now there is another painful divide in a nation already torn asunder by liberal versus conservative, Chevy versus Ford, PC versus Mac, alive Elvis versus dead Elvis, and tastes great versus less filling. Are you a Jay supporter or a Conan man?

I don’t have an opinion. I liked Jay in his stand-up comic days but never watched his version of The Tonight Show. Conan is really unknown to me for anything other than his hair.

As of the writing of this column it looks like Jay will get the Tonight Show back and Conan will get 40 million smackers to stay home and perform for his wife and kids at the dinner table. I don’t care who hosts the Tonight Show for two reasons. The first reason is as I get older my bedtime keeps creeping farther and farther from midnight and closer and closer to dinner time. The second reason is I miss Johnny Carson.

I always felt a certain connection to Johnny Carson. He was from Nebraska. I am from Nebraska. He started on the Tonight Show in 1962. I started on this planet in 1962. Every anniversary show for Johnny had the same number as the number of candles on my birthday cake. He was funny. I always wanted to be funny. He seemed to have a kind soul. I strive for kindness. Humor for him was never mean-spirited. I find it difficult to make jokes that might be hurtful to anyone (even thought there are times I fight through that). He was a private man. I am naturally shy.

Holy cow! That’s it! I have the solution to Mr. Zucker’s predicament. Fire both Leno and O’Brien and hire me to host The Tonight Show. I always wanted to be Johnny Carson, I can have clever conversation with Hollywood stars and, if you hire enough writers, I can be funny five nights a week. And the best part for the embattled NBC CEO and all the shareholders of NBC stock (those who have not already sold it because it has become as attractive as dirigible stock after the Hindenburg), I will do all of that for one fortieth of what you are paying Mr. O’Brien to go away.

How’s this for my first monologue:

Well, Massachusetts has a Republican taking Ted Kennedy’s senate seat and the number of people in Hades looking for their mukluks just went through the roof. Really, the odds against that just a few months ago had to be longer than the New York Jets playing in the AFC championship game. What’s that? The Jets are what? I guess that means the snowball fight at Beelzebub’s house is definitely on for tonight.

James Cameron has another gigantic hit movie on his hands. First he makes a movie where everyone knows the ship sinks but we all go anyway. Now he has a movie which has everyone from the Vatican to the People’s Republic of China complaining about the subversive message he is trying to foist upon us. The only message I took from it was it takes $280 million of technological wizardry to make skinny smurfs.

I know NBC was in deep trouble. I mean they were getting beat in the ratings by cable networks that specialized in reality shows showing paint dry but did they really have to go for such a gimmick and hire some 47 year old nobody to host their flagship show? What could they have been thinking when they decided to put this overweight, gray-haired, talentless…uh, who wrote this joke?

Getting the cold shoulder...and everyplace else...

2010-01-14T15:48:00.000-08:00

As I write this I am in my home office, sitting in my recliner, wearing a sweatshirt, sweatpants and my slippers all toasty warm while outside the mercury in my thermometer is doing some sort of Cirque du Soleil contortionist version of the Limbo. How low can you go?

I have always said I prefer cold weather to hot weather. One reason being when it gets cold I can simply put on another layer of something to warm up, but when it is hot there is a finite number of things I can take off before anyone in the vicinity starts shrieking and running like citizens of 1950’s Tokyo escaping Godzilla. (I suppose you could say the poor people of Japan being menaced by the giant lizard were suffering from reptile dysfunction.)

I do still prefer cold weather to hot, but this is ridiculous. When the high temperature for the day equals Billy Barty’s inseam and the overnight low is a darn good golf score there is something horribly wrong. (For those readers too young to get the reference, replace the name Billy Barty with Mini Me. It will make more sense.)

Weather like this requires new terminology. I’m sorry but “wind chill” just doesn’t cut it. A chill is something you get when the air conditioner kicks on and you’re standing over the vent. When the anemometer starts spinning in Kansas and the air temperature is already a pre-adolescent number calling it a “wind chill” is like calling Sean Hannity a little conservative or saying Tiger Woods plays a little golf. (I’m not going to make another joke here about other ways to describe Tiger Woods, but feel free to do so yourself before reading on. I’ll wait.)

What should television meteorologists call it? Tonight the “wind blast” will reach seven below. Or how about, with near record lows the “wind brrrrrrrr” will drop well below zero. Let’s make it rhyme. The “wind kill” may reach dangerous levels. Actually, when it is so cold that just peering out the window and contemplating going outside causes frostbite we should simply call it the “wind forget about it”.
Due to some quirk of thermodynamics my daughter Alice’s bedroom is not affected in the slightest no matter how hard the furnace works. I am not kidding when I say we could make a few extra bucks in the winter renting out her closet as a meat locker. Needless to say this winter she has been sleeping in her sister’s room quite regularly. Who knew the secret to getting teenage sisters to get along is making one of them live in a room which makes Lambeau Field in January look like Waikiki Beach in August.

“Hey, Alice, does your bedroom have wood floors or carpet?”
“Neither, it has tundra.”

Kindergarten teachers already have many tricky and time consuming aspects to their job but weather like this means there is just enough time after the morning bell to help the munchkins out of their various coats, boots, mittens, scarves and hats to send them to lunch and then the process of getting all the stuff back on must commence in order to assure nobody misses the bus.

On a side note: There is nothing quite like the experience of spending time in a room containing 60 kindergarteners because it is too cold to go out for recess. The fire marshal would re-think his maximum occupancy rules if he had to be in a room with 60 six-year-olds. There may not be a room big enough for a high concentration of these creatures of pure impulse and action.

“OK, kids, we’re going to all go in to room 196 and sit down. Then I’ll give you the instructions on what to do next. Wait, David, don’t climb on the table…no, Tina, I didn’t know your brother’s dog could open the refrigerator door all by himself…please let go of my tie…but we just took a bathroom break…Susie, give Joe his book back…no, no, no, just hand it to…Joe, go see the nurse…”

I guess I really should look on the bright side. At least when it is this cold outside I don’t have to worry about the ice cream melting while I’m driving home from the store, even if I take a route which includes a quick stop at Bismarck, North Dakota between Dillon’s and my house.

An Aught Time in the Old Town Tonight

2010-01-06T16:11:00.002-08:00

The days of 2009 are dwindling down to a precious few. At first glance moving into 2010 means at least one truly excellent thing. Those novelty eyeglasses sold each New Year’s Eve with the double zeros acting as the lenses will no longer be around. Another good thing is there was no Prince (or The Artist Formerly Known as Relevant to the Pop Music Scene) song asking us to party like it was 2009.

Remember back ten years ago when we were waiting for all the computers to go haywire, the phone systems to stop working, the internet to stop in its tracks, and nuclear power plants to meltdown. Then as the clock ticked past midnight we all held our collective breath as absolutely nothing remarkable happened. That is pretty much how I see New Year’s Eve every year. Millions of people gather for parties and hoopla whether it be in homes throughout the world, hotels and nightclubs with music and dancing, or in Times Square with public drunkenness and the ensuing public “becoming unwell” on other people’s shoes in order to watch the clock go from 11:59 to 12:00. Since my clocks do that a lot I fail to see the reason for all that effort. I will most likely be in bed before the clock goes from 9:59 to 10:00.

I am not entirely unsentimental about the ending of the calendar year. I don’t mind waxing a bit nostalgic and taking a look back at the year that was 2009.

January saw the United States of America make history on inauguration day. No it wasn’t the obvious thing – having the first African-American sworn in as President. We officially started a new political era. One in which the Republicans and the Democrats behave in such a manner they make the Hatfields and the McCoys appear circumspect and reasonable, the Montagues and the Capulets seem positively chummy, and Red Sox and Yankee fans give the impression of being blood brothers to the very end. The two political parties have never seen eye-to-eye on all things, but they now seem to base their decisions on what would annoy the other side more than what makes sense for the electorate. Why don’t we just have Pelosi & Reid and Boehner & McConnell suit up for a rousing match of Rollerball to determine health care plans for the nation? (Admit it. You’d love to see old, rich, white people strap on roller skates and leather gloves adorned with flesh ripping spikes duke it out for political supremacy.) The ticket of Jett Li and Ray Lewis would win in a landslide if Rollerball became the way disputes were settled politically.

Stepping away from the world of politics (mainly because it is too depressing to keep thinking about) we look back on the year in pop culture. A forty-eight year old nobody from Scotland captured the world’s heart and became an internet sensation. Susan Boyle is now world famous and probably quite rich. It just goes to show you you don’t have to have the looks of a Britney Spears to become a recording star. It also shows you that Simon Cowell has more power than any one man should have, especially a grumpy man who seems to be devoid of talent himself.

The top grossing movies of 2009 show commerce and art can go hand in hand. The commerce of teenage boys buying movies tickets and the art of keeping just enough clothing on Megan Fox to avoid getting a rating which would keep teenage boys from getting into the theater worked very well this year. It was also proven once again the movie going public wants films which ennoble mankind and show the high moral ground people of the 21st century so frequently aim towards. This was shown by the high income for a film portraying how men bonding together in ritualistic manners are men to be revered, men to emulated, and men to be signed for a sequel because The Hangover made boatloads of money and that really is all they care about in Hollywood after all.

In 2009 the Pittsburgh Steelers won their sixth Super Bowl and the New York Yankees won their twenty-seventh World Series. In the year 2009 fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals surprised many in the sporting world by admitting they were fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals…in public…without shame.

What's So Special About Christmas?

2009-12-09T19:01:00.000-08:00

Growing up I watched a lot of television. Frequently various Ph.D. types are trotted out to explain that prolonged viewing of television can have detrimental effects on children. For one thing it can cause damage to a person’s ability to focus attention on just one thing for extended periods of time. I disagree. I am perfectly capable of staying on task for protracted…oh, look, a squirrel! (OK, so that joke was telegraphed from the home office in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t mean I…oooo, shiny)

Anyway, this time of year for a child of 60’s and 70’s television was rife with “specials”. We had Andy Williams, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Perry Como and later Glenn Campbell, John Denver and The Carpenters. These were happy little hours of singing and jokes, no bitterness, no anger, no duplicitous actions in order to advance selfish goals. In other words they wouldn’t make it past the first executive meeting at television networks today.

I really liked those shows, because they were special – meaning different. It was a Christmas television special which brought Bing Crosby and David Bowie together to sing a duet. Bing Crosby, a crooner from the days of big bands, and David Bowie, a slightly androgynous glam rocker, standing side by side singing about peace on Earth and a little drummer boy (and they weren’t talking about Ringo).

There were also the great animated kids programs. We were very careful to know when they were going to be broadcast. It was a real bummer (that word was appropriate then) if Charlie Brown was going to be on when you had to be gone doing the school program. We all remember those elementary school extravaganzas complete with a ten-year-old Santa Claus who wasn’t allowed to wear the beard because it might muffle the voice which was yet to be affected by puberty so he really just looked and sounded like an overgrown elf. (This is true. I was that overgrown elf at Roosevelt Elementary School, December 1972.) There was no VCR, DVR, or TiVo so if you missed it you missed it until next year.

That was another thing which made them special. They were only available one night, once a year. Now my children have on demand entertainment. They can watch the Grinch any month of the year, any time, day or night. The sheer availability of it makes it less special.

As a disclaimer I have to say I watched Chuck Jones’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” recently on one of them new fangled DVD contraptions and it is still really good. When the Grinch is bothered by his dog Max’s behavior and he looks straight out of the television at us it is funnier than anything Jim Carrey has done or ever will do. In addition, not only does Thurl Ravenscroft have one of the all-time great names, he also has one of the all-time great performances when he sings “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”. (“Your heart is full of unwashed socks. Your soul is full of gunk.” Now those are lyrics.)

Some of the classics don’t hold up as well. Every Christmas season my family, which has three girls in it, watches the Rankin/Bass “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”. While we do enjoy Burl Ives and I personally love Yukon Cornelius’s way of checking for silver and gold there is one point which has started a new holiday tradition in our household. When the big blizzard hits towards the end there is a line about how it was important to “get the women folk back to Christmastown.” This always gets a boisterous Bronx cheer from the Pyle women folk. Not only does the show give a message that anyone who is different from the group should be shunned and ridiculed, at least until the powers that be find a way to exploit that abnormality for personal gain, it’s sexist to boot.

For those us who grew up in this part of Kansas Christmas also meant “Santa’s Workshop” with Santa and KAKEman (or Toy Boy when they jumped networks). This was free form, stream of consciousness conversation done by a guy and a puppet with a budget of about seven dollars and fifty cents, but I loved it. Actually, my sister gave me a DVD featuring snippets from the show a while back and I still get a huge kick out of it. I can’t wait to go zooming around the big wide world, zooming and zooming…

Speed of Light vs. Speed of Lint

2009-11-30T15:44:00.000-08:00

Black Friday! The day people look to celebrate peace on Earth and good will towards men by elbowing their way past grandmothers and nuns in order to get their mitts on a big screen television. Actually, the last few years I was one of those people rousting myself out of bed at a time roosters scorn to witness in order to get my hands on something one of my children didn’t really need at a price I believed I couldn’t pass up. I was a lemming running towards the consumer cliff with credit card abandon.

This year I am going to sleep until the sale junkies have already cleared the aisles and maxed out their Mastercards. The foremost reason for this is last year wasn’t any fun. The previous years there was a sense of camaraderie. People laughed. People poked fun at themselves for standing in a discount store at five in the morning. People gave each other directions on where the various cool things were stashed in the store. Last year there was blood in the water and the sharks thought Robert Shaw was somewhere nearby singing about ladies of Spain. (That is a reach as an analogy but if Richard Dreyfuss happens across my blog he’ll enjoy it.)

Another reason for my non-participation in the feeding frenzy of electronics and Cabbage Patch Kids (okay, I am that old) is I no longer feel the need to hurry up. I’ll be more leisurely in my approach to shopping. As I get more mature (mature = gray hair, expanding waistline and attention to things having to do with IRAs and prostates) I find I value calmness more and more. Multi-tasking and speed seem much less necessary. I am perfectly willing to be the tortoise except even though slow and steady wins the race I don’t even care about winning. I just want to finish well and avoid the need for ace bandages and Ben Gay.

Recently I was reading a book called “In Praise of Slowness.” In this book there is discussion of the term time-sickness, the obsessive belief that time is getting away and we must go faster and faster to use it all. The author mentions in other cultures they see time as always coming as well as going. Time goes away, but it also keeps showing up. Time waits for no man is the modern day way of thinking about it, but it might be healthier if we all realized that just like the manufacturers of Doritos chips, they’ll make more.

This demand for fully utilizing every minute causes people to the believe time is so precious it is deemed horribly imprudent to waste it. This leads to road rage (the bozo in front of me allowed a full three seconds to elapse after the light turned green before he hit the gas), shopping rage (the bozo in front of me has 12 items in the 10 items or less express lane), airport rage (the bozo in front of me is taking forever to remove his shoes and now he has walked through the metal detector with his stupid car keys still in his pocket), drive-thru rage (the bozo in front of me has ordered enough food to sate the appetite of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir after a week long fast), and newspaper columnist rage (this bozo has written 117 words already and he still hasn’t finished this stupid sentence). There may be a dearth of time in our lives but there is an abundance of bozos.

There was a reference in this book about a novel written in the 19th century (when the industrial revolution was first starting to make time the master and man the servant) in which a civilization develops where time is the currency of the realm. Think about that. We pay each other for things with time. You fix my car and I owe you a couple hours. The problem for the guy who fixed my car is my list of skill sets doesn’t lend itself to a fair exchange. I could write 800 words about why machines are turning into people and people are turning into machines or I could answer any question he had about “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. On the other hand this could be the only way he ever gets anyone to watch his home movies of the family trip to Niagara Falls.

A Stranger in a Strange Land

2009-11-30T15:42:00.000-08:00

It has often been described that people of my generation are immigrants to the world of technology and members of my children’s generation are the natives. This makes sense because their world has always had technologies which we, as children, only saw in science fiction movies shown on one of the three fuzzy television channels the black and white Magnavox could tune in after the sun went down.

Like many people my age it was not the Statue of Liberty welcoming me to the new land but rather the VCR. Instead of a blazing torch held high in the sky lighting my way to freedom and prosperity the video player had a digital clock bravely blinking “12:00” into the darkness of technological ignorance. The problem was getting the darn clock to stop that.

I soon mastered the VCR. I was able to command it do irrational, possibly even unnatural, acts. Such as taping one show while I watched another. I could also be a timeshifter. This meant I could watch “Miami Vice” at eleven in the morning on a Sunday instead of all those poor folks in my technologically backward homeland who had no choice but to watch it at nine on Friday nights. I was no longer a slave to the whims of network programmers. I could watch “Cosby” AND “Magnum P.I.” even though they were opposite each other. Talk about your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to watch “Misfits of Science” any time we darn well pleased, this was the promised land.

Next I became a guide for the newcomers. I worked at a video store (known at the time as Popingo, later as Popinwent). There were many, many times I fielded a phone call from a techno immigrant who was struggling to program his VCR to do its magic for him as well. If I was unable to talk him through the process the last resort was to ask a single question. “Is there a twelve year old kid in the house? Put him on the phone.”

In the ensuing years I learned about DVD players, universal remotes, cordless phones, video games (beyond Atari), and the ultimate benchmark of a true techno devotee, the home computer. I mastered e-mail, surfing the internet and googling – a verb that sounds at once childish yet vaguely dirty. I have graduated to a point that I write blogs, watch YouTube, listen to podcasts and have even been known to occasionally wiki.

Having achieved something akin to resident alien status there are two basic phrases I use when dealing with my new homeland. The first one is used when I come across something really amazing to me, like when I got my first iPod. Even though it resembled a piece of Juicy Fruit and had no moving parts it was able to store and play, with crystal clear sound, dozens and dozens of songs. This prompted me to say, “This shouldn’t work.”

The other phrase is used when struggling to get the infernal computer to function correctly. Often I have been called to fix a problem and as the tension and blood pressure mounts the phrase my family hears shouted from the deepest recesses of the basement as I stare determinedly at the completely unsympathetic, nay, tauntingly brazen cathode ray tube is “Do what you are designed to do!” This is sometimes followed by terms best not published in a respectable newspaper.

My latest evolution as a citizen of Technovania was the purchase of an iPod Touch. This is something about the size of cassette tape (for the technology natives you’ll have to ask one of your elders what that was) which does a myriad of impossible things. I can connect to the internet via WiFi. I can download apps. It may even have Bluetooth capabilities.

Okay, I have to admit I am still an immigrant because I just used a bunch of words from a foreign tongue. I have an idea what I was saying but I could be totally wrong. Kind of like that guy who goes to France and using his high school French class from fifteen years ago as his template attempts to order roast chicken with rice and actually boasts to the waiter that his aunt’s pen in on his uncle’s chest of drawers.

I am learning how to use it even if I do not understand how it could possibly work. Of course the chief thing I use it for at the moment is playing solitaire which I could do with technology from the 9th century, playing cards.

A Child's Garden of Worses

2009-10-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

I usually don’t write about things connected to my real job because I do not want to run the risk of it becoming my former real job. However, if I approach it in a purely Jane Goodall scientific mode maybe I won’t annoy my superiors. Since the topic of my column is an animal unlike any other this objective point of view makes sense. I am talking about that unique aspect of humanity known to the layman as “Kindergartener” or to the pure scientist as Absoluteeous Impulseeous.

When I first ventured into the natural habitat of the Kindergartener I became acutely aware of one thing. I am a creature of language and logic and kindergarteners are not. This became patently obvious as I tried to explain to a five-year-old why it is a good idea to use both hands while carrying a breakfast tray containing pancakes and syrup. Obviously the person who decided syrup was a good thing to give to 64 individuals who have only been adept at walking upright for the most recent third of their lives is now giggling uncontrollably miles away from the school cafeteria which now resembles the La Brea Tar Pits but instead of an exhausted wooly mammoth sinking into the muck and mire it is an exasperated principal prying shoe leather from the linoleum. If I try to explain why it is a good idea to use two hands the child’s eyes glaze over after the third word if none of those three words include candy, recess or candy.

It has taken me a long time and it goes against my natural default settings which require me to tell people why something is important, but I am getting better at just telling kindergarteners things. Kindergarteners have neither the patience nor the attention span for all the explaining. If I explain to a six year old that kicking a fellow student on the playground because you were mad at him is not an appropriate expression of anger, even though anger is a natural emotion and it is okay to be angry but not okay to follow through with that anger by inflicting pain on another human being, I’ve lost him. If I tell the kicker that he wouldn’t like it if somebody kicked him so he shouldn’t kick other people, he has started looking over my shoulder at the cool clock on the wall. If I just lean down close to the Jackie Chan of the jungle gym and say, “don’t kick or you’re in trouble” I have a chance of saving other children’s shins from minor bruising.

It became obvious after only a short time amongst them that a kindergarten student will not respond if the adult does not use the magic word. I am not talking about the magic words of manners: please and thank you. I am referring to the specific name of the child you wish to address. Let’s say a kindergartener is running down the hall, an unsafe act for most humans made even more dangerous by the fact these particular runners are as aware of their surroundings as a deaf bat, a deaf bat which has been dead for a week, a deaf bat which has been dead for a week and buried in the Mariana Trench.

If a grown up does not know the particular child’s name he will be ignored. I’ve tried. It usually goes something like this: “Uh, excuse me, hey, uh, kid, umm, little boy, uh, dude, kid in the red shirt, hey…” By now the Usain Bolt of the hallway has already startled two custodians, frightened three fourth graders and blown several crayon renditions of Wilbur and Charlotte right off the wall. However, if I know the kid’s name and call it out he’ll hit the brakes like Claudette Colbert just exposed her ankle and calf to a passing motorist. (Give yourself 65 bonus points if you followed that allusion.)

Just like Ms. Goodall I have also discovered many fabulous things. Most kindergarteners still have wonder and awe. They are excited by so many things that the rest of us take for granted. They also wish to share with you their excitement. This is why they are always trying to show you things and tell you about their lives. The only downside to this is: if a kindergartener beckons for you to lean down so they can talk to you and the first words out of his mouth are “there was this one time” you need to clear your calendar for approximately the next four hours.

A Fully Functioning Family - The Downside

2009-10-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

My upbringing scarred me for life. I won’t write a lurid biography which will land me on Oprah, or even worse, Jerry Springer. Nonetheless my youth has made many parts of my adult life unmanageable.

What horrors have I lived through? None. That’s the problem. My formative years were spent almost completely in a state of contentment and well-being. Ergo my thresholds for putting up with mean spirited people, dealing with anger and aggression, and my ability to fly off the handle and fully engage all my organs of suspicion are severely diminished. Yet, more and more, it seems those are the skill sets which would best serve me in the world we inhabit today.
I remember my father commenting when a person accuses you of having a certain trait it is often a trait that person himself has in spades. If someone thinks you are a liar it often means they are good at lying themselves. They assume others are doing it just as often as they do, thus they accuse people, truthful or otherwise, of also possessing that tendency.

The opposite is also the case. It doesn’t occur to me to lie. I am not saying that in some sort of “aren’t I pure as the driven snow” egotistical manner. It just doesn’t occur to me to lie. There are times I did lie because I screwed up so monumentally lying seemed the only recourse available to me, but it is not the default setting for my software. Because of all that, it is also not my default setting for interpreting what others are telling me. It does not occur to me that people are lying to me even when most other people, including the majority of toddlers and people who actually look up when told the word gullible is written on the ceiling, can tell Pinocchio’s nose just grew longer than Durante and de Bergerac combined. I am easier to fleece than a flock of sheep in May. (I probably shouldn’t have said that in such a public venue. My voicemail will be chock full of wonderful opportunities for aluminum siding and credit cards with the low, low interest rate of a pound of flesh compounded annually.)

My family liked each other. We chose to spend time together, on purpose. Don’t get the wrong idea. We weren’t the Waltons. Oh, we were that supportive and we had the strong highly principled father and the stalwart caring mother it is just we didn’t have wacky strangers show up on our doorstep every week in order to teach us meaningful lessons about life. (Although having a traveling band of circus performers live in our garage for a while would have totally rocked.)

Come to think of it maybe we were the Walton’s. My oldest brother was named after my father so we could have called him George Boy, and that was well before there was such a thing as a Boy George. Just like John Boy, George Boy wanted to be a writer when he grew up. He didn’t sit at a tiny window in an attic bedroom scribbling stories into a big chief notebook, but he did sit at a desk in his room with a circa 1950s typewriter creating the Great American Novel, yet to be published.

Like so many damaged adults living out the residual after effects of a youth gone horribly, horribly right, I fear I may be passing on the traumas to my own children. Just the other day I witnessed my eldest daughter walk right up to her younger sister and give her a hug. Right there in broad daylight, like it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of both girls showed sisterly affection for each other without being blackmailed into it with promises of iPods and cell phone upgrades if they would just get along with each other for ten minutes.

My fear is it may be too late. My three children may grow up thinking the best of others. They may believe marriage is a supportive partnership between two people based on respect and love as opposed to a sentence of punishment to be endured until the kids are out of the house and then the lawyers divide up the assets and the mental health of the two exhausted combatants of the matrimonial skirmishes. They may have an over-developed sense of fairness and become addicted to the rush one gets from injecting a hit of unadulterated altruism.

All I have to do to save them from a doomed life of contentment with an appreciable lack of angst is expose them to the most effective antidote: talk radio.

The Truth Fairy May Be Dead

2009-10-04T18:36:00.001-07:00

I have been studying the media for a while and decided that if I am going to make the leap from newspaper columnist to nationally known commentator I will need to change my ways. Instead of simply talking about the world in which I live and relaying the facts in my life I will need to hone different skills so I can convince people to believe things which are patently false and even detrimental to their own well-being. I will do all this in the name of making a buck and fighting with people for the mere sake of being contrary. If you will allow me to use this column for practice I will be forever in your debt.

Can you believe the impudence!?! (I’ll need to use lots of exclamation points) Not only does the government tax us to the point that we can’t afford a supersize Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino with extra Chocolate Whipped Cream a day so they can pay for aspects of something as trivial as public education! Not only does the government expect me to get a license, which is like asking for permission, to drive a car – a car I paid for out of my own pocket with the help of a 15 year loan from a bank who didn’t care I couldn’t afford the payments! Now the government has gone too far! The jack-booted fascists are pumping directly into my house…water! They built an elaborate system of pipes throughout the entire city, proving there was a conspiracy of gigantic proportions, for the sole purpose of injecting into my home the very essence of life itself. How dare they?! Then they have the temerity to send me a bill each and every month to defray the cost of this communistic fluid. Sure I need it to cook and drink and bathe and wash my clothes and flush away waste, but the despotic government still has no right to force it on me like some bush league Kim Jong-il imposing its will and its colorless odorless liquid on me as if I was some sort of faceless proletariat to be exploited.

I say it is time to stand up to this socialist Big Brother (the Big Brother from the Orwell novel, not the Big Brother from that crummy reality show hosted by erstwhile journalist Julie Chen)! Refuse to turn on your taps! Dig your own well! Collect rain water! Drink only the grain alcohol you can create in your garage with no help from government hand-outs! So what if you lose your job because co-workers refuse to let you into the building due to the stench which follows you around like paparazzi following George Clooney! So what if you’re down to three healthy teeth in your head and you don’t need to cut your hair because you can snap it off at the length you want due to its stiffness. At least we will be free!

Oh, boy…that was exhausting. Thirteen exclamation points can really take it out of a guy. On the other hand it was kind of fun. It is freeing to make an argument which does not have to rely on logic or even facts. It sounds like a genuine argument but all it is really is a great big “You mother wears army boots.”

Maybe I don’t need to be so bombastic. That would be less exhausting. Maybe I can become a more subtle spinmaster.

The other day it came to my attention that many people are unemployed. The people discussing it on the television seemed to think it was a bad thing. What’s the big deal? Having lots of people looking for a job has many benefits.

One of the only laws of economics most people have even the slightest grasp of is supply and demand. If the supply is low and the demand is high the price goes up. That must mean if there are fewer jobs and a high demand for them then wages the workers earn must go up raising the standard of living for us all.

Also, if there are more people looking for work then the pool of possible employees must have a greater variety. This could mean fast food workers who have master’s degrees in Romantic Poetry. So, instead of hearing “Do you want fries with that?” the guy behind the counter might say “water, water, everywhere you wanna supersize that drink.”

Christopher Pyle wishes to apologize to Samuel Taylor Coleridge for messing with his poem. Also, he realizes he implied many wild things in this column. The craziest thing may be that people who majored in Romantic poetry aren’t already working at McDonald’s. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Two Score and Seven Years Ago Sounds Way Old

2009-09-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

When I turned the page on my calendar it showed we had entered September. That means my birthday is coming up. I will turn forty-seven years old. The number forty-seven holds no magical properties and that particular age does not signal any great change is my status as person. I have long since passed the magical ages: 16 years old (I can drive without benefit of having a grown up in the car), 18 years old (I can vote, often a disheartening proposition at best), 21 years old (I can buy booze, something I stopped caring about not too long after turning 21), and 30 years old (I can no longer be trusted by the younger generation). The only thing turning 47 years old really means is I am now in shouting distance of 50.

When I say shouting distance I truly mean shouting distance because I am making very loud remonstrations “Whoa there, Sea Biscuit! What’s your hurry? We don’t need to make that turn to the final furlongs with such intensity.”

Even approaching a half a century I don’t really feel all the way grown up. However, there are many times I feel old. When I have been sitting for a prolonged period of time standing up requires making a noise. When I look at my children and realize they are smarter than me. When I tell people I do not have television in my house and they look at me like I just told them I cook over an open hearth and believe the world is flat. When I listen to top forty radio stations the words are unintelligible and the singing sounds like the noise I make when I stand up after sitting for a prolonged period of time.

Inside I still think of myself pretty much the same way I did when I turned 21. Just this past weekend I was in Wichita and I was taking a stroll across a college campus. Very little in the world makes me feel like I feel when I am on a college campus. I truly value learning. I truly value teaching. I adore the bohemian attitude of being a college student. Stepping into the student union there was a very large young man fast asleep on an even larger sofa with his backpack between his knees. Two other guys were playing ping-pong. A boy and a girl were sitting at a table deep in discussion. I prefer to think they were discussing the merits of empiricism versus rationalism because that completes the circuit of a college experience and if they were discussing who would be next to leave the Big Brother house it cheapens the whole thing. All this enhanced my inner concept that I am still a young person exploring the world with wide eyes.

Then I left the union and walked towards some of the other buildings. As I crossed one street a girl-next-door-beauty walked by me, smiled and said hello. That is when I realized I might feel young on the inside but it wasn’t the case on the outside. When I was a young man walking on a college campus, as a fully matriculated student, girl-next-door-beauties did not look at me, smile and say hello. As an overweight, gray-haired middle-aged man the comely co-ed said hello, not because I was even remotely attractive but rather because I was…cute. Not cute in the Jonas Brother way, but cute in the “isn’t it cute how this old guy is walking around campus remembering his salad days” way. Deep sigh.

I simply have to reconcile my inner image of myself (eager explorer of the intellectual world) with the real-world me (middle-aged curmudgeon in training) in order to truly follow the advice of ancient Greece and “know thyself”.

Eager explorer = reader of blogs and internet news services for the latest information

Middle-aged curmudgeon = reading blogs and internet news services and having my blood pressure rise because there are so many idiots out there

Eager explorer = believer that spending time alone allows one to understand oneself on a much deeper level

Middle-aged curmudgeon = believer that spending time alone allows one to get away from all the idiots out there

Eager explorer = gets excited by new ideas and when the creative process is allowed to flourish

Middle-aged curmudgeon = thinks new ideas are just old ideas wearing a bad mustache and sees how the creative process is thwarted at every turn…and something about all the idiots out there

Christopher Pyle clings to the eager explorer but feels the curmudgeon is more cunning and will eventually win out. He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Lower Expectations for Higher Education

2009-08-22T09:39:00.001-07:00

My oldest daughter is starting her junior year of high school. This means she has homework which may as well be a nuclear physics textbook translated into ancient Greek for all the help I can be. It means any would-be suitors are now able to beat me up removing any threat capacity I might have had. It means she has a calendar of events which would make Gloria Vanderbilt’s schedule look like Ted Kaczynski’s. It also means she gets anywhere between five to twenty-five pieces of mail a week from various colleges and universities trying to entice her to attend their esteemed institutions. This makes me feel old and gives me a sense of impending poverty, but it also makes me more than a little bit wistful.

It was twenty-eight years ago this month that I first packed up the ol’ Chevette hatchback with my most important possessions (record player, black-and-white portable television, twenty pairs of white socks, and my single setting of flatware) and drove off to begin my scholarly career as I matriculated at the University of Kansas. I was only slightly excited and more than just a little bit scared. This was because I was unusual compared to most recent high school graduates. I really liked my family. I had no problem envisioning myself living with them for the rest of my life without it seeming Norman Bates pathetic/psychotic.

Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to go to college. I just wasn’t gung ho about the whole thing. My older brother filled out the majority of my application paperwork and took me to orientation helping me do all the registration stuff and even found the apartment I was going to occupy. So, if it wasn’t for him it truly is possible I would still be sleeping in my single bunk bed while my mother does my laundry fixes my supper and pays all my bills. Hmmm…curses.

I was not a social college student. There was no desire to join a fraternity. I didn’t even live in a dorm. My freshman year I lived in an apartment slightly smaller than the backseat of your average SUV. It was in the thick of what we called the student slums, an older house chopped up into single sleeping rooms with a shared bathroom and miniscule kitchen. It was close enough I could roll out of bed, put on a semi-less dirty shirt and pair of jeans, jam a hat on my head and be in class after a ten minute walk. Here’s the kicker, it cost ninety bucks a month. Nowadays ninety bucks a month wouldn’t buy a college student a place to park his car, much less a place to park his carcass.

As hermit-like as the description of that apartment sounds it was not the most socially removed place I lived during my college career. There was the basement apartment at the bottom of a hill on a dead end street. Really, by that time I should have had a better eye for the stark symbolism of my living arrangement. I was a film studies major at a university in one of the least Hollywood-esque states in the country. Such a degree just screamed career prospects akin to a basement apartment at the bottom of a hill on a dead end street or at least a life spent trying to convince the customer at the video store (at which I am the assistant manager working for an hourly wage only slightly more impressive than the chief French fry salter at McDonald’s) out of renting the Sylvester Stallone movie in his hand and convince him he really ought to rent Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion because of its brilliant humanistic portrayal of men held prisoner in a World War I prison camp used as a lens through which to examine the rising tide of fascism in Germany in 1937. It never worked, but I tried.

Looking at my daughter’s mail many colleges today advertise themselves as offering a personal touch, a place where you are a full-fledged person and not just a faceless number at an institution of thousands of faceless numbers. This would not have been an inducement for me to rush to enroll. I wanted to be a faceless number amongst thousands of faceless numbers. Life is easier if you are camouflaged. Just ask the nudibranch (a sea slug very adept at hiding itself within sea plants and a very fun thing to say).

Dogs and Cats and Guinea Pigs, Oh, My

2009-08-07T20:02:00.001-07:00

Many of you out there have probably heard of Dave Ramsey. He’s the guy who helps people become more independent, financially. When people successfully crawl out from under their burdens they call his radio show and gleefully scream, “I’m debt free!”
I have a different goal in mind. One day I hope to call a talk radio show and announce to the world in a voice indicative of my overwhelming joy and sense of liberation the following paraphrase of Mr. Ramsey’s sentence: “I’m pet free!”

Now, before I am inundated by angry readers labeling me an evil person and calling for my firing or public lynching or death by hamster nibbling, I want to make it very clear I am not an animal hater. Animals significantly enhance the value of life for all mankind. Animals add beauty, wonder, humor, affection, and can be delicious as well (sorry, that took an ugly turn). I would have you know I cried like a menopausal woman watching a marathon of Lifetime network Delta Burke movies when we had to put down the family dog. I truly believe cruelty to animals is in many ways much worse than meanness to human beings. Think about it. Would you be more bothered by watching somebody tease a koala bear or by watching someone poke Adam Sandler with a stick? Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind being the guy with the stick.
Disclaimer now in place, I can safely proceed. My household currently contains two dogs, two cats and an immortal guinea pig. Due to the sheer number of pets some of you will understand my desire, but others need more convincing.

First let me address the cats. I am not a cat person. Some of my favorite people are cat people, not in the Malcolm McDowell, Nastassja Kinski kind of way (give yourself 35 bonus points, and my condolences, if you actually saw that movie), but in the way that they really adore cats. I do not get this. Cats are aloof. Cats obviously feel they should be the species given opposable thumbs. Cats feel the only reason humans were given opposable thumbs was to make it possible for them to operate the can opener necessary to access the food cats require.
Currently our primary cat has decided to shed fur at a rate which makes visitors think there may be an alpaca living in our basement who frequently visits our couch. The secondary cat seems to always require the door she is next to should be opened to allow her inside or outside the house whichever place she currently is not, and this exercise must be repeated at an interval approximating the number of times your average middle-aged man pushes a button on his remote control.

Now, I do admit I am a little bit of a dog person. Dogs do not look upon you like cats do, as staff. Dogs seem to freely give you unremitting affection based on a minimum amount of effort on your part. As pleasant as that may seem it is really just another indication they have the intellect of a spatula.

Our younger, smaller dog is very endearing. She does many cute and amusing things. Her favorite maneuver is to pretend she is invisible when we find her lying on our bed, because she does not want to be moved. She is not successful, but she is adorable as she lies there stock still except for her eyes which follow you with predatory intensity. Her biggest drawback is her prodigious talent at creating (insert your own personal euphemism for digestive by-product here). Who would ever have guessed a twelve pound dog could produce enough (repeat euphemism here) requiring a constant policing of the basement floor, her favorite place to (euphemism).

The older dog seems to believe he has never been fed and may never be fed again. Anything remotely suggesting the presence of food demands his undivided and immediate attention. This includes, but is not exclusive to, bags which at one time contained food, napkins which at one time touched a mouth which ingested food, anytime anybody enters or leaves the kitchen, the sound of cellophane crinkling, and the sound of cabinets opening, even the cabinet in the hallway which only contains light bulbs and the ironing board. Whenever any of these are perceived he rapidly appears and jumps about trying to look cute and adorable (which is really the other dog’s job) so you will feed him, even if he just finished consuming something unspeakable from the trash can.

Skirmish of the Sexes

2009-07-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

Ever since Adam gave up a rib there have been disagreements between the genders. I wish to address the some of the more subtle salvos pitched at men over the years.

First there is the dust ruffle. This had to be a woman’s idea. A man can’t feel masculine saying the words “dust ruffle” much less selecting one to match the color scheme. Women claim it hides what is stored under the bed, but we know this is just a way to misdirect men from the real purpose: to declare the bedroom woman’s turf. The hiding things explanation just doesn’t fly. Women don’t put things under the bed which need to be hidden. Actually, men do not purposefully place things under the bed at all. The problem arises organically in a single man’s bedroom. It simply never occurs to us to clean under the bed which is why men often have dust bunnies with actual teeth because they survive on the French fries kicked under there during the Clinton administration. Anyway, if a man wanted to design something to cover up the gap between the bed and the floor there would be no pastel flowers and lace. It would involve duct tape, two-by-fours and some barbed wire thrown in for that touch of whimsy.

A woman also had to create those fuzzy covers that slip over toilet lids. The official story is one of décor and beauty. When in reality it had to be in response to the eternal battle of seat up versus seat down. I will admit it took some time for me to get into the habit, but now I share a house with three women so the seat is down. This probably delayed the manly development of my son, but his two sisters and mother are happier, ergo, we are safer.

A while back our bathroom was spruced up. A throw rug in front of the sink and another rug at the base of the toilet was added. This was fine with me, tile floors can be cold. The offending addition was the shag carpet slip cover on the toilet lid. Whereas women want the seat down at all times, there are times men prefer to have it up. The shag cover on the lid makes keeping the seat up a balancing act requiring more than a little skill. The guy who spun thirty plates on sticks for “The Ed Sullivan Show” would have a devil of a time getting the seat to stay perpendicular.

The chief casualty of this skirmish is hygiene. A man believes he has the seat securely resting in an upright position and haltingly takes his hand away from it. Invariably it wavers and he instinctively lunges to stop it from slamming down. Aim is compromised.

Pantyhose is where the debate gets a little murky. Women say a man invented it because they are a pain to put on and uncomfortable to wear. I beg to differ. A woman invented pantyhose because it facilitates sending men on errands they would rather not do. Really, they’d rather watch every Sandra Bullock every made than run out to buy pantyhose.

Hose is the most temporary form of clothing ever created. It seems every time we are going to get dressed up for any occasion my wife doesn’t have a hole-free pair in the house. (If I needed to buy a new pair of pants every single time I wanted to go out I’d just stop going out.) Of course, when these emergency replacement hose are required I am dispatched to get them.
On the embarrassment scale this product is higher than a bottle of Midol but a darned sight lower than many other items in the vast range of feminine accoutrements. The problem is there are just too many size variables. If you read the height and weight chart on the display and make the wrong (or even the medically accurate) choice it might be best just to open the bedroom door, toss the package in, and head right back to the car to wait. If she doesn’t show up in twenty minutes you can just sneak back into the house, make up your bed on the couch, and turn on Sportscenter.

There is also the story about when I went to buy my wife some panty hose while I still had make-up on from a theatrical production in which I was acting. I venture to guess the young lady who waited on me never truly believed I wasn’t buying them for myself.

The Good, The Bad, and the Simply Nice

2009-07-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

“Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative” are words to live by offered up by Mr. Johnny Mercer from his 1944 song (actually titled “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” but we'll let him get away with that - it was well before spell check) recorded by such luminaries as Bing Crosby, Perry Como, and even Aretha Franklin.

This sentiment is something I often strive for but can fall very short of achieving. It really is easier to dwell on the negative; partially because the grand majority of the media spends most of its time behaving like the world is nothing but a vast collection of bitter medicine spread on a large bowl of cauliflower and then covered with a thin layer of chocolate just to entice you to take a gigantic bite out of it before you have a chance to truly see what it is you are getting yourself in for.
All the news outlets discuss financial wreck and ruin, horrible human rights violations by despotic leaders, and unthinkable crimes committed in seemingly safe locations and that is just the arts and leisure section describing an episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey.

People always seem to assume the worst of others, especially others who are different in even the most superficial ways. Remember that episode of Star Trek, the first Star Trek, not one of the seventy-five spin-offs like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Now Caffeine Free, but I digress. Remember that episode of Star Trek where two guys are dead set on killing each other and even Spock isn’t smart enough to figure out why they hate each other so much. It turns out Frank Gorshin, who is white on the left side and black on the right side, really hates Lou Antonio because he is white on the right side and black on the left side. No wonder everyone thought Gene Roddenberry was such a genius at subtly pointing out the weaknesses of mankind.

Actually, upon further investigation it turned out Frank Gorshin hated Lou Antonio because Frank Gorshin’s career would only consist of guest shots on Hawaii Five-O, Get Christy Love, and doing the voice of the Reverend Jack Cheese on an episode of Ren and Stimpy and Mr. Antonio would go on to be the director of episodes of The Rockford Files, The West Wing, and Boston Legal. If I were Mr. Gorshin I’d be pretty ticked off too. But I digress even farther.

This assuming the worst of everyone does not accentuate the positive. A great example of this can be found in the bitter partisanship of today’s politics. There was a time a Republican and a Democrat would argue loudly in the Senate chamber about whether a bill was worthy to become law and then they’d go to dinner together and tell each other jokes and have a grand time while agreeing to disagree but still valuing each other as men working for the betterment of the nation. Now a Republican and a Democrat will argue loudly in the Senate chamber about the worthiness of a bill and then go to their individual offices to do phone interviews with talk radio hosts in order to portray the opposition as mother hating, flag desecrating, apple pie burning, communist loving doodoo heads. How’s that for raising the bar of political discourse in the country?

Strangely enough the best place to go in order to wash away the negativity of the news media and politicians is my refrigerator. Not because it contains ice cream, even though that would help, but because it is currently covered with positive stuff.

Alice (middle Pyle child) and one of her friends (Lydia, who I understand is quite fly) spent a couple of hours writing list after list and taping them to the front of the fridge under the heading “Things Which Make You Go Yea!” Alice reported it was quite fun and downright therapeutic so everyone else started contributing lists for the Happy Frigidaire, and darned if it wasn’t a source of fun and lingering good feelings.

Here are some of my favorites chosen at random: good hair days, play-doh, breakfast for lunch, food, hitting every green light, anything shiny, penguins, food, duct tape, Orlando Bloom, anything cow shaped, laughter, snorting when you laugh, laughing until you start to cry, food, Samoa Girl Scout cookies, doughnuts, Dean Martin, lightsabers, the first cup of coffee in the morning, sleep, food, the Indiana Jones Guy, non-smelly markers, prom hair, air conditioning, memory foam, wearing new outfits, blowing bubbles, food, toast, ninjas, and stick figures.

Now grab a pad of post it notes and cover your own refrigerator with things that make you go YEA! It is totally worth it.

Christopher Pyle is happy to have made his wife’s list. Feel free to share your lists with him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Not Quite What We Had in Mind

2009-07-07T15:06:00.001-07:00

Last Friday the United States of America celebrated the 233rd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This document and the Constitution of the United States which followed were the crowning achievements of a group of brilliant men created from a remarkable confluence of events and utilizing the collective intellectual resources of the time. These men, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and company, even after many personal foibles have been unearthed by historians, are looked upon with reverence as the Founding Fathers of this great nation. I can’t help but think if these men of intellect and innovation were to be fetched from the late 18th century and brought to the early 21st century they would be re-named the Dumbfounded Fathers.

You know they really didn’t mean that “all men are created equal” stuff when they wrote it. There’s no way Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the lightning rod, bifocals, a carriage odometer (you need to rotate horses every ten thousand leagues) and the glass armonica, thought the guy who wrote the Treaty of Worms (1743) was his equal. I mean really, the Treaty of Worms? They couldn’t come up with a snappier title than that?

The Dumbfounded Fathers would shake their heads in confusion whenever hearing people rattle on about all men are equal. Even if they had just gotten to Philadelphia, 2009, from Philadelphia, 1787, it would only take them ten minutes of channel surfing in their hotel rooms to illustrate the mistake of equality by pointing to Bill Moyers Journal and then to I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Hmmm, Dr. Cornel West discussing the concept of social justice or Lou Diamond Phillips eating bugs, you decide.

Watching television might also make them re-think this freedom of speech idea. Back in their day giving everyone the freedom to speak their minds was less problematic. The village zealot standing in the corner of the town square telling everyone that Beelzebub had been seen licking all the licorice whips in Johnson’s Store meaning all the children were now possessed was easy to ignore. Also, the town know-it-all could bloviate all he wanted and everyone in the vicinity knew he was a dolt and just let his words fly off into the, what was then a much healthier, ozone layer never to be taken seriously.

In today’s high tech world the village zealots can blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and use cell phones equipped with cameras (both still and video) in order to get out the irrefutable proof that Beelzebub and Ben Bernanke are the same person and all money printed since 2006 is cursed and the bail-out is a massive plot by old Scratch himself to pull us all into the clay pits of Hades. Because this information is now rampant on the internet and millions of people all over the world are just gullible enough to think “if it’s on the internet it must be true” there will be an immense hit taken on the stock market and the grocery stores will all run out of garlic because these people are always confusing how to ward off vampires and how to avoid being dragged into the underworld.

Also, in today’s world of 150 television channels and 24-hour a day talk radio the guy who was ignored by the locals because he was a known thickheaded blowhard is given four hours of radio airtime in 75 major markets and a prime time television show five nights a week where he can successfully agitate and energize others of his ilk who believe they are the true knowers of what is right and true and everyone else in the world are pansy, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, socialistic, pacifists who should either be shot or sent to go live in New Zealand with all the other Hobbit lovers.

I am sure the Dumbfounded Fathers would not think that just because someone can distribute their ideas to a vast audience doesn’t mean his or her thoughts are wise, useful, or even remotely coherent. The idea that some people’s thoughts have more weight and greater value should not be lost in the freedom of speech maelstrom in which we now live.

I am sure it is very likely many readers are currently thinking I should apply these notions to myself. I know full well my ideas are not necessarily any more important or meaningful than some of the people I am currently mocking and the column inches dedicated to my words could easily be dedicated to better and more cogent thought. To those of you thinking that…nyaaah, nyaaah, nyaaah, I got here first.

Two Years and Counting

2009-06-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

I don’t how many of you realize this but we are celebrating an anniversary. I hope the time has gone by pleasantly and this will be looked upon as passing a milestone and not like passing a kidney stone. I am referring to the fact that my stint as a community columnist for the venerable Hutchinson News has now made it to its second birthday. My first column was published in June, 2007 and some 40,000 words later (I’m sure I used some of them more than once) our relationship is still stronger than Jon and Kate’s or Governor Sanford’s (at least with his wife) or the relationship between Amy Winehouse and reality.

I was not sure how to celebrate this occasion. I thought about asking for gifts, but realized that would be tacky. Maybe I could throw a party for my biggest fan, but my mother doesn’t really like parties. Then I remembered how Johnny Carson celebrated an anniversary on the Tonight Show. He would display vignettes from previous shows which were particularly entertaining.

I went through all my old columns and couldn’t find anything as interesting as Ed Ames performing a tomahawk vasectomy on a plywood cowboy or having a marmoset nest in my hair. Asking Joan Rivers to do a guest column was not an option worth considering and Jay Leno only works at ten, nine central, from now on so that wouldn’t work either. So, rather than recycle old material I thought I’d just throw out some material which I was not able to work into any of the previous columns but might be diverting none the less.

A couple of months ago there was a headline on the CNN website which read (I am not making this up, as soon as I saw it I wrote it down) “Beauty Queen Stumped by Confucius.” There’s a stop the presses newsflash if I ever saw one. A contestant in a beauty pageant has to confess she doesn’t understand the deep thoughts of an Asian philosopher from five hundred years before Christ. Truthfully, it would have been more of a paradigm shift if there had been an article describing how Miss Virgin Islands published her doctoral thesis on Cartesian dualism and how it is definitively shown in the collected works of obscure Japanese author Yukio Yamaha-Kawasaki.

At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, did you ever notice how some words just aren’t used except in particular phrases. “Disgruntled” is a perfectly good word to describe someone who is irritated but you never see it except in conjunction with a former employee who decides the severance package wasn’t good enough and returns to his cubicle with a Rambo-esque outfit including a headband using fabric ripped from the interior of his boss’s Lexus to get an extended COBRA plan. This reminds me that the word “spree” is only used with killing or shopping. You never hear of anyone going on an eating one’s vegetables spree or a working for the release of political prisoners spree or a preserving the ozone layer spree.

Not long ago I learned there is version of Supernanny on German television. This is how I imagine a commercial for this show would sound (except it would be in German). On this week’s episode of Der Uber Nanny we see Frau Bestrafen put little Heinrich and his sister Brunhilda in the naughty corner for trying, yet again, to invade Poland without permission.

A couple of years ago I was driving across town on the first truly cold day of the winter. I was stopped at a red light when a pick-up truck drove in front of me on the cross street. In the bed of the truck, standing upright, was large refrigerator. The freezer door was open and waving in the breeze as the truck headed down the road. It truly looked like this guy was out distributing the cold with his freezer-on-the-go like those trucks the city uses in the summer to drive around spraying for mosquitoes. I have no joke. I just really like that image.

Finally, I may have found my new favorite TV commercial. There is firm offering to pay you for your old jewelry. Do they simply offer top dollar or describe how this is a good way to get easy money during an economic downturn? Nope. This business is called Outofyourlife.com. They are serving the gold-digger with cash flow problems demographic. “You broke up with him. It’s time to break up with his jewelry, too.”

T-ball or not T-ball, that is the question

2009-06-17T18:56:00.000-07:00

The other day I was heading home from work and I passed a park. I noticed there were several adults sitting on lawn chairs and bleachers. It was as American as a Norman Rockwell painting of a mother eating apple pie, a baseball diamond basking in the summer sun. A place for the national pastime to be played by, oh my goodness, who is playing? The coach looked like Godzilla attempting to stomp out Tokyo. He was not a giant, but the people wearing the matching jerseys and hats were tiny. These kids were so young they still had ink on the soles of their feet from getting foot printed at the hospital. These kids were so young if they won the game they’d pour Enfamil over each others’ heads in celebration. These kids were so young Barney is too sophisticated for them.

I do not understand the need to enlist children still eligible to have a lunch comprised of Gerber products in organized sports. They should at least be able to spell T-ball before they play it. I doubt even Albert Pujols showed much talent when he was small enough to take a nap inside a standard issue major league catcher’s mitt.

Kids that little are meant to bounce about in free form. Not exist in some fascist stand here, now run, now stand here, now run paradigm. It’s like taking potato chips which should be free to randomly mix and mingle in their oversized bags and forcing them to follow some Stalin-esque regime and fit together in the goose-stepping conformity of a Pringles can. Did you ever notice the original “crush proof container” for Pringles was red? I bet if you ate too many of them you would suddenly be stricken with a bad case of the Trotsky’s.

I waited until past the toddler stage before I succumbed to the parental pressures and signed my second daughter up for T-ball. She wasn’t terribly excited about it but was willing to join in, at first. Practices were fine because there were usually popsicles at the end. The actual games proved too ridiculous even for her.

The image I will take to my grave of Alice playing T-ball was put on display every time somebody hit the ball out of the infield while her team was on defense. The miniature Manny Ramirez (who not only hasn’t injected synthetic testosterone, but has barely experienced any of his own testosterone moving through his blood stream) puts a real charge into the ball and it rolls between the locked in place infielders who are much more interested in waving at Grandma, who is wearing a hat capable of blotting out the sun causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, than in the trajectory of the ball. It is only when the official coach and the twenty or thirty unofficial coaches start screaming that the entire squad kicks into high gear. Each and every kid spins and looks where all the spectators are pointing and start sprinting after the errant Spalding.

This is when it became obvious my daughter was not a highly competitive or motivated T-ball player. The players had evacuated the infield like it was a European soccer field after the tear gas and high pressure hoses had been turned on the crowd. All of them except Alice. She is standing at second base, where she was assigned to stand, gazing after her teammates with her hands on her hips and an exasperated expression on her face. After the first three players on the scene of the now at rest baseball wrestle each other for possession of the horsehide, the winner turns to throw it into the infield.

There’s Alice standing at second base. The base runner is just now rounding first base because the coach had to remind him to run and then had to remind him which direction to run and then had to remind him he could keep running after he made it to first base and then had to remind him where second base was and then had to remind him to pull up his shorts which had become entangled around his knees. Alice was in perfect position to receive the throw from the outfield and tag the runner out.

The third baseman turned centerfielder uncorks a throw of unimaginable force, for someone shorter than a barefoot Billy Barty. The ball is sent on “frozen rope” deep into the neighboring diamond’s left field and all the next generation Yankees are released again like the bovine residents of Pamplona.

Christopher Pyle simply bought a huge box of popsicles and didn’t make his kid do T-ball anymore. He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

There are, occasionally, silver linings

2009-06-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

I have been looking over many of my old columns. I’ve spent too much time being negative. Sure there is plenty of stuff in the world to be less than happy about. The economy may be as lively as frog in a sophomore biology class. The vitriolic language thrown back and forth between the two major political parties makes one long for the return of the Know-Nothing Party (at least they understood the idea of truth in advertising). For more things in the world which can make one gnash one’s teeth simply look elsewhere in this newspaper. (Please do not gnash your teeth, four out of five dentists surveyed recommend against it.)

In the past I have whined about technology and the ways it can infringe upon the more pastoral ways of living which I prefer. The ubiquitous cell phone with its annoying ring tones, the frequently rude cell phone user carrying on a conversation at such a volume you think the person he’s talking to could hear him without the phone, and the fact that when I carry one it is much harder to hide from people makes me cringe.

On the other hand, I truly love my computer and the internet. Since my chief hobby is writing I cannot imagine getting anything accomplished without my trusty laptop. Shakespeare and Cervantes created amazing works of literary art using crude writing instruments and simple pieces of paper. Not only do I not have the creativity or talent of those gentlemen, I do not have the patience. My quill would be plunged deep into my thigh as I shouted with frustration because I had misspelled fardels, again, and we all know how hard it is to bear fardels misspelled (that may be my most literary joke). Eventually, my legs would look like an Ann-Margaret in Vegas costume because of all the feathers sticking out of them.

With a computer I can write and delete all I want. The little red lines politely suggest I might want to fix something. I just learned spell check doesn’t help with my fardels problem. The red lines show up even when I spell it right. The reason I know I spelled it right is I simply Googled (another word the spell check gremlins dislike) the “to be or not to be” soliloquy and confirmed that fardels is indeed spelled “-el” and not “-le”.

Researchers who lived in the pre-Google world went blind searching and reading book after book in dim musty libraries to find out where Ferdinand Magellan received his basic schooling. I found out in less than a minute the great explorer attended Queen Leonora’s School of Pages in Lisbon. (What a great fight song they must have had.)

It pains me to say this, but I have also become a big fan of YouTube. At first I thought it was just a place to see adolescent boys fall off skateboards in new and creative ways, homemade movies posted by people who have too much free time on their hands and once you see what they think is worthwhile you immediately understand why nobody has hired them for gainful employment, or clips from television shows showing frumpy woman singing startlingly well. I have found it to be treasure trove of stuff.

This stuff is just as nerdy as the stuff I made fun of other people for watching, but it is nerdy in a manner which I appreciate. I have spent many an hour watching Stephen Fry (Q.I.), Hugh Dennis (Mock the Week) and Marcus Brigstoke (I’ve Never Seen Star Wars). These are television shows from England which one can pretend one is being highly intellectual whilst watching but in reality one is simply being highly amused by people who are smarter than one is.

Finally, the top of my list of technologically wonderful stuff is iTunes. Once again before I truly investigated it I thought it would simply be aimed at the younger generation who think music consists of bass guitars pounding out rhythms which register on seismographs in China and lyrics which make K.C. and the Sunshine Band seem like John Keats and Lord Byron rolled into one.

Wrong again. I have found Dean Martin, The Lonesome Strangers and Joey Scarbury (75 bonus points if you know what the one hit was for Mr. Scarbury, my sister is not eligible to win). Just this week I paid my cyber money and got Mozart’s Requiem and the new Steve Martin record of banjo music.

Christopher Pyle hopes to stay in a good mood. It might be attributed to the Steve Martin album. One just cannot be unhappy listening to banjo music. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Happily Ever After? Not Likely...

2009-06-03T18:36:00.000-07:00

As a kid I loved stories and books. My mother read bedtime stories to me for years and when I was too old for such baby-ish things I made sure I strategically placed myself in such a way as to be able to hear my mother read stories to my little sister while still maintaining enough distance to create deniability should anyone wander by and wonder what I was doing. The only problem being a grown-up having exposed to such a large amount of the 20th century canon of children’s literature is: they lied.

OK, I know (and knew) the stories were works of fiction, but so many of them painted life in terms we really liked and hoped to experience when we got older. No such luck.

Example number one: bad guys were easy to identify. Step-mothers who talked to mirrors, pirates with at least one appendage replaced with a metal hook, lupine creatures with big eyes, ears and teeth as well as individuals with severely out of whack pituitary glands hollering catch phrases discussing blood of Englishmen were such giveaways.

In the real world bad guys are seldom so easy to spot. He could look like a high school civics teacher (Mr. Cheney, when is the chapter test? We don’t have tests in this class. We have pop enhanced interrogations.) A bad guy could look like a banker, when in reality he is a short-selling, derivative manipulating, unscrupulous lender of other people’s money. Oh, wait, that is a banker, sorry.

Probably one of the most insidious hoaxes played upon all of us unsuspecting, bright-eyed readers was the concept of romantic love. The chaste and beautiful princess (and, if you are an aficionado of Disney movies, one with a great singing voice) meets the brave and stalwart handsome prince. After about three and half minutes (about the time it takes to sing a duet whilst dancing with woodland creatures and less time than it takes to make microwave popcorn) their love is unrelenting, unwavering and, unfortunately in the non-animated world the rest of us live in, unrealistic.

In the real world such immediate love is usually preceded by one or both of the relationship participants consuming large amounts of cereal malt beverages or fermented by-products from smashed grapes. It never involves singing a duet in the clearing of a forest with sweet smelling skunks, big-eyed bunnies and kind-hearted owls who have taken the oath against skewering big-eyed bunnies with their razor sharp talons, devouring them whole and regurgitating bits of hair and bone after digestion. Even Mr. Disney with a platoon of animators couldn’t make that appealing, gross.

If I remove a little of my jaded pessimism and allow myself to believe love can begin like it does in storybooks it is hard to believe it can stay that unrelentingly warm and fuzzy. It seems more likely after a few years the wife will start referring to her mate as “the husband formerly known as prince” (charming). The husband will long for the days when she was bewitched and slept twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. At least then he could watch Sportscenter in peace and didn’t have to worry about all the gold Rumpelstiltskin was spinning down in the basement going to the Castle Shopping Network for yet another pair of glass slippers. I mean really, how many pairs of glass slippers does one woman need?

When a person goes out into the real world looking for a mate and with good and true intentions hopes to live up to the standard laid down by all the bedtime stories it is hard. Speaking as a man, maintaining a high level of charm wears you out really fast. We just aren’t innately that attentive. Sure when we start dating we will open the doors for you and pretend to like your girl friends, but we just don’t have the stamina to do it after the courtship is over. It is hard enough to put the seat down and pick up the wet towels you truly can’t expect us to be nice to your mother too. Let’s face it frogs stay frogs and princesses become disillusioned and vengeful.

Instead of riding off into the sunset in a carriage drawn by four white steeds trailed by a battalion of twittering bluebirds of happiness my own personal story will probably end with me driving into my sunset years in a twenty-three year old Ford Escort, trailing fast food trash and working at a megastore saying “Welcome to my own personal hell. You want a sticker?”

Be Wary of Happiness

2009-05-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

You know how there are times when your life seems in perfect sync. The traffic lights all turn green in front of you while driving with the windows down and a perfect breeze (both temperature and strength of gust wise) blows through your hair and the sky is a particularly beautiful shade of blue you really don’t think you’ve ever seen before and the radio starts playing your all-time favorite song. The world seems to be a perfect place where only happiness and joy reside so you find yourself grinning so big the corners of your mouth are meeting somewhere on the back of your head. You know those kinds of moments? Be very careful what you do in those kinds of moments.

I had a moment like that once. Then I did it. I made the fatal mistake. I said something out loud. I remember it very well. Things were all top of the morning and the devil doesn’t know you’re dead until you’ve already been in heaven for an hour. I felt like I was in a sugar-coated Norman Rockwell painting when I said, to no one in particular because I was alone in my car, “Life is good.” A quarter of a mile later I was standing next to my car which had just made horrible noises and decided the only way it would ever move again was either with a tow cable or an earthquake whichever came first. True story.

In my family we refer to this phenomenon as the Cosmic Equalizer. If you are a sports fan you’ve heard coaches say things like, “we have to make sure the highs don’t get too high and the lows don’t get too low.” This sounds like hokey cliché number 759 for sports guys to say, but there is some advice we can glean from this which can keep the cosmic equalizer at bay. Don’t get too happy or the powers that be will have no choice but to bring you back to a certain level of dismalness which most people dwell in the majority of the time.

I tell you all of this so I can make a confession. I am currently in a state of panic and terror only rivaled by the fear felt by pretty young girls in movies featuring guys wearing hockey masks wielding weaponry Genghis Khan would think was overkill (pun was unintentional, but keenly accepted). Things are going entirely too well for the cosmic equalizer not to step in and balance my glee with misery.

Through dogged determination and clear attention to the task at hand my wife has guided this Pyle family into a state of financial health not before known. She jumped on the Dave Ramsey bandwagon and after 32 months has rid us of debt. I feel I can say this without the cosmic equalizer getting too vengeful because we timed this right when the rest of the world has gone into the financial garbage disposal so investing the money we no longer have to send to credit card companies in anything other than a mason jar buried in the backyard makes as much sense as hiring Hannibal Lector to plan the menu for the vegan convention. Timing is still everything.

Living in a state akin to financial stability is a contributing factor to my ever growing fear of the cosmic equalizer. Another nail in the coffin is I got a promotion at work, with a raise in pay. Oh, man, what are my bosses trying to do to me, get me killed or something.

Due to the various positive things currently popping up in my life I feel very strongly I have to temper this with less happy things in order to divert the attention of the cosmic equalizer. To that end I have to self-inflict some discomfort or strife in my life. In the olden days people would wear a hairshirt to cause pain for repentance and atonement. Some would even go so far as to whip themselves causing great pain and leaving behind some truly nasty looking marks. Okay, I don’t think I will use Arthur Dimmesdale or any other self-flagellating guilt-monger as my guide on how to avoid karmic backlash (once again, pun not intended but gladly welcomed).

I think I’ll just watch reality television instead. That should be painful enough to dull the happiness without leaving physical scars, just emotional ones. Scars which linger like when Kris beat out Adam on American Idol…oh, the humanity.

A World of Opportunity, or Not

2009-05-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

On May 16th I was witness to the graduation ceremonies for the Dodge City High School class of 2009. For some reason passing understanding I was not invited to give a speech at the commencement exercises. (Hard to believe, huh?) So, I will take this opportunity to hand out my words of wisdom to the youth of Dodge City as they gird their loins for the adventure which we call adulthood. Stop, for the love of everything good and true in the world, stop, turn around and return to where you came from. Adulthood bites.

Okay, I may be overstating things just a bit. Let me put it this way. When you are in high school the requirements are pretty well spelled out. The classes for a diploma are prescribed by the state. The ways to pass the classes are delineated by the administration and faculty of the school. The expectations for levels of success are laid down by one’s family. Sure there are problems, heartaches and traumas, but out here in the real world they change the rules a heck of a lot more often. Expert type people who are paid money to explain to the rest of us how to get ahead in the world can’t make up their minds.

Last summer I was given a book by my bosses entitled “A Whole New Mind” written by Daniel Pink. This book was purported to be the harbinger of what was to come in regards to which skill sets were going to rule the next great age of humanity.

Mr. Pink tells us the “right-brained” skills are going to be what makes individuals successful. These skills include inventiveness, empathy, creating narratives, and play. He also says the right hemisphere of the brain controls one’s ability to see the big picture and function more intuitively. The left brain is logical and sequential. It recognizes and understands the components of something. It is less creative while doing great with details and plodding along with the individual steps of a process.

I enjoyed the message because it said things I wanted to believe were true. It would be nice for me if the world started revolving in a way which valued right-brain people because I tend that way myself.

I distinctly remember when I was in college (the first time around) the general media rabbiting on about how people who had achieved liberal arts degrees were going to be in high demand throughout the employment world. This was because liberal arts majors were well-rounded individuals who had skills beyond the narrow scope of folks who had gotten very specific degrees in business or the sciences.

You will note that I said this information was being touted the first time I was in college. It turned out the first time I went to college wasn’t going to do the trick. I got one of those highly valuable liberal arts degrees and promptly became entrenched in middle management retail sales. Thank you, Mr. University of Kansas Chancellor for the diploma which states that you have conferred upon me a Bachelor of Arts Degree with “all the rights, privileges and responsibilities given under the seal” of your institution of higher learning.

The sad part was the chief “right” was to tell people I owned a degree in theater and media arts. The “privilege” was I was eminently qualified to get a job renting movies to people who had no idea how mis en scene editing was different from montage editing nor who Truffaut, Eisenstein or D.W. Griffith were but really loved it when Jackie Gleason told Burt Reynolds right where he could stick his CB radio or Arnold Schwarzenegger used a hand gun capable of holding six bullets to shoot fifty-seven bad guys in the head. The “responsibility” was to go back to college and get a degree in something which led to a non-hourly wage.

This time it had to be different. Mr. Pink would be right. My skill set was now going to be the gold standard for what a man should be able to do. How did I know it was true this time? The answer is a single word…Oprah. Oprah, the one true arbiter of all that is worthy and valuable in the world said it. It had to be true. Hallelujah!

This week I read in the New York Times there is a new study describing the skills required to be a true success in today’s economy. The traits listed are attention to detail and analytic thoroughness. Blast, those plodding left-brainers, they win again.

Hey, let's put on a show

2009-05-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

It is often said that everyone should have a hobby. I guess the reasoning behind this idea is individuals who only do the things they have to do would not be very happy people. As Jack Nicholson wrote “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Of course he wrote that about nine hundred thousand times before he went stark raving bonkers and started chasing various people around with an ax whilst doing Ed McMahon impressions. (For the more literal among you that all happened in a movie. Mr. Nicholson is not genuinely a menace to society beyond the unfortunate rut he has fallen into of simple parodying himself in every movie he does.)

Some people have calm, thoughtful hobbies with names which are at once intellectual yet have a double entendre air to them. Philately is the collection and study of stamps. Numismatics is the collection and study of currency. Both of these do not require strenuous activity but they do require the highest threshold for boredom I can imagine. Coin collector conundrum: Can the coin in my hand be graded at a level 4 (Good) or does it only rate a 3 (About Good)? Can’t you just feel the tension? This is not to say these hobbyists don’t have a sense of humor. The guaranteed laugh line at a stamp collector convention: If you can’t lick ‘em, collect ‘em.

Here in Dodge City there is an opportunity for a different kind of hobby. The Depot Theater uses strictly local talent to put together big time shows at an impressive facility. Nearly 20 years ago my wife introduced me to this group, back when they still worked and performed at the Boot Hill Museum complex on a stage about the size of a Lincoln Continental. Since then I have done a variety of things with the group as they have evolved into a few different forms.

From that first show I saw, right up to today, I have always been very impressed with the talent level of people who have regular day jobs and give up a month of weeknights rehearsing and month of weekends performing these shows. Many of them do get paid but when you do the math it works out to just under $2.50 an hour and that is not counting the time away from the theater memorizing lines and longing for lost sleep while working the aforementioned day job.

So the inquiring mind is now asking: Why would one want to do that for a hobby? The answer I give is simple: It’s fun.

At least it always has been for me before. I am about to take on the biggest challenge of my theatrical career. I know that sounds pretentious as all get out since I have acted in a whole eleven productions and directed four over the last seventeen years but us theater types are prone to hyperbole. Next fall the Depot Theater Company will be presenting Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical and I am directing.

This is well out of my comfort zone. I do funny. I love working on comedies and getting the instant gratification of hearing the audience laugh. Jekyll and Hyde ain’t funny. I don’t sing. The last time I sang in the shower the “Soap on a Rope” hung itself. Jekyll and Hyde is a musical. When you take those two facts into consideration you have to ask why am I doing this. The answer I give is simple: It’s fun.

Working with a group of talented individuals to create something artistic gives great satisfaction and joy. The rehearsal process has always supplied laughter and I mean laughter which starts at your toes and turns your diaphragm into a trampoline at a Cirque du Soleil performance. I am sure this guffaw-fest will still happen even if Dr. Jekyll and his hedonistic alter ego are not a barrel of monkeys themselves.

Where else can you dress up in 19th century style clothing, sing pretty songs, pretend to be someone else, and maybe even fake your own death ten evenings, and one matinee, in October? At least where else can you do it and not have people call the authorities to report your need for psychiatric intervention.

Auditions for this show are Tuesday, May 12th and Wednesday, May 13th at 7:00 PM in the Depot Theater. Interested parties need only come one of these evenings. So if you want to join Patty Ahern (musical director), Sarah Schaeffer (set designer and co-stage manager), Lee Griffith (co-stage manager), Connie Penick (does more things than I have room to list here) and me having more fun than mere humans should be allowed to have, see you there.

With age comes other stuff

2009-04-30T16:02:00.000-07:00

I knew many things would change as I got older. I do not gasp in shock when I reach the top of a long flight of stairs and find that my knees creak a bit and there is discomfort. It is expected that a person whose dedication to physical well-being is easily over-powered and bludgeoned into submission by his desire for a comfortable chair and a half a dozen cookies. I do, however, gasp when I reach the top of a long flight of stairs because there suddenly seems to be severe lack of oxygen in my lungs.

There are times I am surprised when I look in the mirror. The surprise is not the amount of gray hair on my head. It is the split second of thinking I am looking at my father in the mirror that causes the short-lived sense of astonishment. It does not bother me in the slightest that I look my dad. Truthfully, it is much better to look like my dad when he was pushing fifty than to look like Christopher when he was fifteen, really bad hair (even though none of it was gray), a gawkiness which would make a baby giraffe taking his first steps look like Nureyev dancing in a brand new pair of Keds, and the single persistent zit, approximately the size of the Hope diamond, which established permanent residence on the left side of my nose. It is definitely preferable to look portly and distinguished rather than skinny and geekier than the entire Stephen Hawking fan club.

One thing I particularly like about the middle aged me as opposed to the younger me is the calm demeanor. It would shock most people who know me that a nickname my mother had for me at one stage of my life was Tigger, because I was so rambunctious. Nowadays the word rambunctious is about as likely to be used to describe me as the word contemplative is to be used in reference to Terrell Owens.

I prefer the even keeled life. It bothers my family sometimes. When something really cool happens they get put out I do not skip about the room belting out Irving Berlin tunes and hugging the cat. What they fail to realize is this lifestyle also means when the power bill comes and it is astronomically high because the children still refuse to turn off lights or televisions or computers I do not operatically bust out in Wagner’s Ride of Valkryies as I napalm their bedrooms.

One aspect of being a boring old guy which I am just now getting used to is having a little bit of money at the end of the month instead of the other way around. From the time I was a freshman at the University of Kansas to about eight months ago I, and later my wife and I, and still later my wife and three children and I, lived like freshmen in college. Ramen Noodles, macaroni and cheese, store brand peanut butter (which may not have salmonella but really kind of tastes like it does) and never buying so-called luxury items from a store which does not also sell milk, fertilizer, shoes made from petroleum by-products and gerbil food.

My wife has worked very hard to properly handle our finances so we are out of credit card debt and very soon we will pay off the last of our car debt. Before heretofore unknown relatives start calling for loans, I need to make it perfectly clear we do not have wealth to manage. (Have you noticed most all of the commercials for those firms which promise to help you with volumes of money have been replaced by commercials showing nervous people choosing between a serious and circumspect financial advisor and placing their life savings in a mayonnaise jar and burying it in the backyard which is home to a family of angry Dobermans.) We are simply in a position where it’s possible to imagine our kids going to college without having to sell various vital organs on eBay.

Another benefit to having an income without debt is we can patronize locations which genuinely benefit the people of our area. When you are living paycheck to paycheck you do not have the luxury of choice when it comes to stores to go to. You have to go to the cheapest place in town. I have a friend who calls that single choice “the store which must not be named” so my family now calls it Voldemart.

Passing a test is not just for ten year olds

2009-04-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

My real job is in the field of education. So I know a little something about tests. I know how to grade them. I know how to write them. I know how to prepare students to take them. I know the government requires schools to reach a certain level of success when their students take them. I know how to read and create fancy graphs to show people all the disaggregated data pointing out how each sub-group performed, which curriculum indicators are mastered by which demographic groups and which need remediation in order to have children performing at proper grade level and age-appropriate development. (The previous sentence is meant to prove they do not give out Educational Administration Master’s Degrees in boxes of Cracker Jacks.) I also know the stress they can induce on individuals taking them and schools watching students take the big scary ones. Even though I have that aforementioned Master’s Degree, it only recently dawned on me that we are giving the wrong people all the tests.

I am not saying we should stop giving students tests. We need to assess all the little darlings and see that they are learning the necessary knowledge and skill sets for successful academic careers and so they can be well-rounded human beings when they reach the age to vote and work at the nursing home in which I will one day reside. My newly arrived upon theory is there needs to be more testing for grown ups.

The issue is we stop giving tests after everyone stops going to school. Someone out there is saying we have to take a test to re-new our driver’s licenses. That doesn’t count. It is an open book test. You can look up each answer as you take the thing. If you fail it they should not only deny you a license they should also check to make sure your shoes are properly labeled with a big L and R.

At the risk of being accused of intellectual elitism I have a few suggestions for tests which should be routinely administered to individuals in order for them to be allowed to participate in many different daily activities. They would not be long and they would not require any all night study sessions to get the information crammed into one’s cranium. We know that knowledge only stays put long enough for the next day’s test and then it floats away like an errant feather in a springtime Kansas zephyr (which moves faster than most top fuel drag racers).

Suggestion Number One:
You have a shopping cart filled with enough food to feed the entire 172nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the United States Army headquartered in Grafenwoehr, Germany. You should…
A. Step into the express lane and hope nobody notices you are over the 12 item limit.
B. Go to the self-service check out lane and keep it occupied until Rush Limbaugh applauds a decision made by President Obama or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
C. Bite the bullet and get in line behind the guy with the cart supplying the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment headquartered in Fort Irwin, California and pass the time reading about Brangelina’s latest relationship issues.
D. Reevaluate your needs and pare down your purchase to the things you really need (Dr. Pepper, cookies, and that magazine about Brangelina…I just love those crazy kids).

Suggestion Number Two:
You are sitting in a crowded movie theater watching the latest romantic comedy with Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl or Reese Witherspoon (I can’t really tell one from the other). You should…
A. Have your cell phone fully charged and the ring tone set to a level sure to be heard by all the patrons in the theater because everyone truly loves to listen to “Get Down Tonight” by KC and the Sunshine Band right at the denouement of a love story.
B. Take out a second mortgage on your home so you can buy a tub of popcorn the size of a Ford Festiva, a soft drink served in a cup large enough to house a family of badgers and some candy which could be used to caulk your shower they are so chewy.
C. Sit quietly and watch the movie
D. Question just how sad your life has become that you are going to romantic comedies starring faceless starlets all by yourself as a forty-six year old man (maybe that’s just me).

Veni, Vidi, Volvo

2009-04-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

The other day I saw a commercial for a car which stops itself. I don’t really need a car that can self apply brakes. I have been perfectly capable of stopping my car. Other than the time I ran over a speaker pole at the Airport Drive-In Theater and another time I hit a house (very gently) I have been able to avoid having my automobile come into unintentional contact with other objects. What I need is a car which can clean itself.

It cannot be a surprise that the first company to create a car with this kind of feature is Volvo. No, I am not piling on the American car companies by implying that only a foreign company would have the smarts to do this. I know that is not true. I mean American car companies are more concerned with things which actually sell cars to the general public. Things like voluminous amounts of cup holders strategically placed throughout the vehicle or television screens imbedded in the backs of seats to keep children neurally numb (a fun and alliterative way of saying brain dead) by allowing them to watch the Hannah Montana Battles the Tranformers while My Little Pony Kicks the Living Daylights out of Barney Sing-A-Long Songs DVD as the family motors along.

I guess when you stop to think about it many, many cup holders are a safety feature for the reason that before such things existed many an accident occurred because a man was distracted from watching the road due to the fact the ice cold soft drink he just purchased at the convenience store, the one which is so large it has an undertow and virtually the same volume as your average lobster tank at Trader Vic’s, was placed between his legs, due to the lack of proper cup holder availability, and the frigid temperature of the cup worked its way through the fabric of his jeans and he suddenly was more concerned with the fear of frostbite to a certain zone of his person than about the bicycle rider who really did have the right of way but failed to yield to the Camaro piloted by the distressed man with the frosty…thighs. (Apologies to Ms. Lisman, my high school English teacher, but I am more than a little proud that I was able to create the preceding 153 word sentence, a new personal best. Boo-yah!)

We now return to the Volvo Company. Of course they were the ones to develop such a safety feature. Volvo is the company which decided long ago to pin all their hopes and business plan on the reputation that they are safe. We got the first 3-Point Safety Belt. We got the first padded dashboards. We got the sex appeal of Larry King in a Speedo. They have no trouble cashing in the cool, hipness that is intrinsic to so many car models and going with the unstated motto: You look like a geek driving a Volvo, but you get to become a very old geek.

Actually, in some circles a Volvo is cool. Granted you will never see a rap star pull up to a Grammy after-party with his blinged-out entourage and spill onto the red carpet from the doors of a Volvo Laplander (maybe if they changed the name to a Volvo Lapdancer you might). But, you will see a veritable wagon train of Volvos lining up to pick up blazer wearing eight year olds in front of private schools with names like Westminster Uppingham Prep and croquet teams called the Fighting Monocles.

Upon closer inspection I have found another reason to believe there is a super secret coolness wrapped up in the Volvo brand for people in the ultra-snobby, esoteric intellectually-based culture residing in certain regions of the planet. Latin is a dead language. Right? If you become fluent in Latin you can only use the language to communicate with biologists swapping genus species jokes around the centrifuge in the entomology lab at Cal State – Berkeley (I have no idea if a centrifuge has any place in an entomology lab but it was the only high tech device which came to mind, because I am not a biologist at Cal State – Berkeley) or talking to high brow aesthetes at cocktail parties in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So those are the only demographics who would know that Volvo is the last word in the ultra-cool Latin phrase: Illud est quemadmodum volvo. Which translates for that rap star in the Volvo Lapdancer to say: That is how I roll.

You May Be Write

2009-04-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

Of the 46 years I have been on this planet I have spent 35 of them in school. Before you assume I have the intellect of a push pin I need to point out a little less than half that time I was a paid employee at a school. I did not flunk over and over like that one distant cousin in everyone’s family who is never given sharp implements at the Thanksgiving get-togethers.

Other than being a student and an educator I also have spent large chunks of my time trying to be a writer. This means I have a notebook handy most of the time, one next to my official Dad Chair (the recliner in most homes that by state statute must be relinquished by whomever is sitting in it, be the sitter spouse, child or even hundred and ten pound Rottweiler when the father enters the room), one next to my bed, one in my shirt pocket at school, one in my jacket pocket and two in my backpack. I have them stashed all over the place in case I have a good idea. Note: I do not indicate these notebooks are used with any frequency I simply state they exist for that purpose.

OK, I told you all this as background for this statement: I love writing utensils. I buy pens for fun. I specifically asked for a particular kind of pen for Christmas. I have one pen I use for everyday run of the mill jotting down stuff at work. I have another pen which writes really well that I use for those times I am communicating with colleagues and friends or signing my name on things. I have another pen which is used for writing notes, ideas and short passages on my various writing projects. I can spend more time at the pen and pencil aisle at Office Depot than most men spend at the big screen television aisle at Best Buy. I am a pen/pencil geek. (Many would say I am a geek in a variety of ways, but we won’t go into that at this juncture.)

Just yesterday I learned something new about the history of the pencil. I already knew the word pencil came for the Latin word “pencillus” which means little tail. This really makes you wonder where those ancient Romans carried their pencils. I already knew pencils were made from graphite and the largest deposit of graphite in solid form was first discovered in 1565 at Seathwaite, England. I already knew that Nicholas Conte, an officer in Napoleon’s army, discovered a method of mixing powdered graphite, easier to find than solid graphite, with clay and firing it in a kiln to make a graphite rod suitable for pencil making. The new bit of information I learned is it was 150 years ago this very week (March 30th to be exact) the first ever patent of a pencil which had an eraser attached to it was granted.

Hymen Lipman not only had a name which was guaranteed to be made fun of by adults, kids and particularly verbal parrots but he is also the inventor of the pencil/eraser combo. My source on this is so tenuous that I am embarrassed to site it, but it was stated this outside the box thinker created the first dual use item in the history of human invention. His foresight made it possible for others to follow in his wake and give us clock/radios, keychain/flashlights, and Prince.

I know what you’re thinking. The pencil/eraser combo was not the first dual use thing. Granted Homo habilis used rocks for a variety of purposes, as bludgeons on small animals in order to eat them, as projectiles against larger animals to avoid being eaten by them and as hand puppets for telling simple stories about caveboy meets cavegirl, caveboy drags cavegirl by her hair to his cave and therefore gets dumped by cavegirl and caveboy gets cavegirl back by saving her from a rampaging mastodon. How do I know about this last use? There is a little known cave painting found near the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania showing the oldest known ancestor of Jim Henson doing Bert and Ernie routines with hunks of basalt and feldspar. This does not disprove the special place in history for the pencil/eraser combo. You have to remember rocks were not invented by man. We just perfected them in the mid-70’s when me made them pets.

Seeking Refuge from Economic News

2009-04-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, I’m tired of bailouts. Everywhere you turn people are discussing bailouts, the merits of bailouts, the idiocy of bailouts, the yahoos who don’t deserve bailouts, and the fact you and I aren’t getting bailouts. Commercials are even using the crummy economy as the hook for their products. Direct TV has bumbling cable company execs asking for a bailout, those annoying commercials which are kind of cartoons but not really, have their people gnashing their teeth about their investments (the advantage of being poor: my 401K consists of hoping one my kids likes me enough when I retire to let me live in his or her basement) and the Dominoes Pizza CEO is being so magnanimous and bailing us out of our economic doldrums by offering us three pizzas for only five dollars a piece. Holy heartburn, Batman, I can’t believe he is doing that just for us and he’s even driving one of the delivery cars. What a swell guy.

Maybe I’m just not very bright but I’m surprised by the depth of the obsession the world has with the fact that, shock, gasp, people are greedy. If Mother Teresa had been offered a $1.7 million bonus (on top of a seven figure salary) to take a job which included such perks as being flown to exotic vacation spots on a private jet fully stocked with gourmet food, the best booze, and hunky flight attendants, driven to her mansion in a car large enough to qualify for its own zip code, and sleep in a bed with mink sheets and pillows stuffed with the clippings from a million babies’ first haircuts and the only expectation was she would turn the company into an empty shell of itself worth roughly the equivalent of a cup of sand offered to a man standing in the middle of the Sahara she would’ve told all her leper buddies, “Catch you on the flip side. I am outta here.”

In an effort to get away from the myopic media’s fixation with AIG bonuses and congressional posturing I went looking for other news.

The first one to catch my eye: French Workers Hold Bosses at Caterpillar Plant. Well, I always heard the French were lovers and not fighters but what a touching moment it must have been when the regular everyday Joe Assembly Line (or in this case Jean Assemblier Linez) stepped up and gave his boss a big old hug. Then I read the first paragraph. The workers were trying to hold the bosses hostage while they demanded further negotiations on their contracts. There went that Sally Field “you really like me” vibe the headline had set up.

The next headline which made me stop was: Pakistan Court Lifts Ban on Politician. My thought was Pakistan had had the right idea to begin with but they just hadn’t taken it far enough. It has nothing to do with the particular story of the Supreme Court in Pakistan allowing the chief minister of Punjab to return to his position. I was thinking Pakistan had simply messed up by making the ban singular instead of plural.

Think about it. Just how much would the world improve if the highest court in every country on the planet were to ban politicians, with an “s”, meaning plural, meaning all of them. There will now be a slight pause as we imagine a world with no partisan bickering, no pandering to lobbyists and rich donors, no worrying more about polling numbers and getting re-elected than about what will actually benefit the people represented, and no more need for Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olberman, Anne Coulter, and Arianna Huffington to tell us how we should feel about things. Deep sigh as we return from Big Rock Candy Mountain to the real world.

This brings us to headlines which made me wonder why someone was paid to type them, much less go out into the world to research and write them. How about this one: Charles Manson Spends Most of His Time Alone. Well, I wonder why. Or this one: Rain, Snow Moisten Soil. It would have been news if the rain and snow hadn’t moistened the soil. (Scientists baffled by soil impervious to rain and snow.)

This headline really got my hopes up only to dash them again. KU Wins National Championship – In Debate. I have to admit my debate bracket didn’t have the Bricker - Johnson Team cutting down the nets, or in the world of debate, cutting off the ties of their opponents? Lost the office pool, again.

Me or Not Me? That is the Question

2009-03-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

The word “doppelganger” is a German term which has become part of the common vernacular. It is used to describe an exact duplicate or at least a look alike of someone. In most stories about “doppelgangers” the sighting of one portends bad luck or even death.

I’m not sure how I would react if I saw a replica of me walking down the street. Part of me would think, cool maybe I can talk him into going to work for me next week and I can sleep late and watch movies all day. The rest of me would be thinking, holy carbon copy, Batman, I have an evil twin. This is going to be like that episode of Knightrider, or was it The A-Team, or maybe, wait, it was Bewitched. Remember that mischievous Serena who was always making life harder for Samantha and Darrin, both Darrins– who, oddly enough, looked nothing alike.

I came across a new word the other day. A word related to doppelganger: “Googleganger”. This word refers to someone who has the same name you do who you find by typing your name into the box on the Google website.

Of course I had to do this. I found a few Chris Pyle’s out there in the world. There is a Chris Pyle who is an artist/illustrator from Indianapolis. He is described on one blog as having great style, full of color and whimsy. I have no idea what this Chris Pyle is like, but I know if my art was described as full of whimsy I’d want to slug the guy who said it. Whimsy has the artistic gravitas of cute or sweet. Kittens playing with a ball of yarn are whimsical. A toddler gleefully crawling on the floor with a passel of puppies is whimsical. Four years in art school, thousands of dollars in art supplies and eating ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner in order to put one’s life and soul into one’s art is as whimsical as using a ball peen hammer to carefully break each one of your own toes. Whimsy this, pal.

There is a filmmaker named Chris Pyle. Hey, I once wanted to be a filmmaker named Chris Pyle. This Chris makes documentaries, mostly about nature and wildlife. According to his company’s website he has worked on the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean, the deserts of California and the storm-tossed Sea of Japan. I have no desire to freeze my ear lobes off in the Arctic, sweat like a state’s witness testifying against guys named Vinnie “Ice Pick” Martino, Johnny Shiv, and Benny the Multi-Speed Blender in the California desert or toss my lunch further than a steroid pumped shot putter in the storm-tossed Sea of Japan. Okay, I’ll let him be the filmmaker Chris Pyle.

The guy mentioned most often in the search results is Christopher H. Pyle. This is a very accomplished man. He is a professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts specializing in constitutional law, civil liberties, and American political thought. He has published learned texts about political history and human rights. Books like “The President, Congress, and the Constitution: Power and Legitimacy in American Politics”, “Extradition, Politics and Human Rights” and “Getting Away with Torture: Secret Government, War Crimes and the Rule of Law.” I’m sure at least one of these books is one your nightstand right now. Not because it is a bestselling page-turner you can’t wait to sink you cerebral teeth into, but because seventeen words into it you are snoring faster than a bear in January on heavy doses of Nyquil.
“Extradition, Politics and Human Rights” is currently ranked 1,686,988 on the Amazon Books bestsellers list and you better get your order in soon because they say they only have two copies in stock. I shouldn’t make fun of Christopher H. Pyle. His books are for sale on Amazon.com and my writing is available if you steal my laptop and open the documents file.

I am mentioned seven times in the first five pages listed when you search my name on Google which seems to me pretty impressive. I decided to try the “googleganger” thing with the name of a friend. This friend lives in Dodge and works for the school district so there are similarities, but he is eleven years younger so surely he is less accomplished than I. I won’t rub it in when I find he is not as well represented in the cyber search engine world. So, I type his name in and on the first five pages he is mentioned, well, uh, forty-four times…darn.

Brackets and Hoops and Dunks, Oh My

2009-03-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

Brackets throughout the land pit Louisville against North Carolina. Personally, I would love to see a championship game between Stephen F. Austin and Robert Morris, which sounds more like a couple of retired accountants in a gin rummy tournament at Boca Raton.

Explain this to me. Stephen F. Austin University is named after the man called the Father of Texas and the university is in Texas. That all makes sense. The sports teams there are nicknamed the Lumberjacks. Huh? I looked up Mr. Austin on the internet and couldn’t find a single picture of him holding one of those really long saws with a handle on each end. Was Texas once covered with vast forests requiring hordes of dedicated ax wielding arborists to come in and clear the land in order to create the vast nothingness which is now west Texas? Did the rag tag group of independent thinkers struggle for freedom against Santa Anna or spruce and elms? I’m confused.

As a diploma carrying graduate of the University of Kansas (actually I do not carry my diploma around with me, that would be pathetic, especially since my degree was in Film Studies which means I am qualified to work at any Blockbuster Video in the land) I had a wonderful time watching last year’s NCAA Tournament. For the first time in twenty years my bracket looked decent on the last weekend.

Each year I do my own version of the Dick Vitale/Nostradamus thing by filling out a bracket laying out who will win each and every game of the tournament. There was a time in my life when I spent a lot of time watching college basketball games and watched hour after hour of ESPN talking heads dissecting every team. Telling me statistically which team had the best point guard in regards to assists to turnover ratio, three point shooting percentage and grade point average in one of those useless degree programs many athletes pursue in college (like Film Studies). My home is now a cable free environment so I do not have access to all this information. Ergo my bracket predicts games at the exact same level of success. Go figure.
Growing up in Hutchinson also meant tournament time was happening right down the road. My dad took me to many,many NJCAA games. Looking at the bracket for this year I do not see the usual suspects from my years of going to games. There is no Mercer (didn’t they when like eight championships in a row with a coach named Howie), no Vincennes (they were always here), no Southern Idaho (I seem to remember them having some sharp-shooter kid who shut his hand in a car door and still lit up the joint). I remember Independence winning back-to-back. I remember Spud Webb.

For the uninitiated in the lore of Spud, he was a five feet six inches tall guard. You know how they adjust for inflation and say fifty bucks in 1924 is worth a couple of grand in today’s dollars, well, if you adjust Spud’s height into basketball player inches he is roughly the height of a fire hydrant. He was a hero of the common man. He looked like one of the mere mortals sitting in the stands. That was until he got ahead of the pack and had a breakaway lay-up opportunity. Little dude could dunk.

Every regular guy sports fan on the planet has a dream that he can turn on a Nolan Ryan fastball, do a Barry Sanders spin move juking a linebacker out of his cleats, or rise up off the floor like a pogo stick powered with nitrous oxide and jam a basketball through a hoop. Spud Webb gave us regular guy sports fans hope.

That hope was ludicrous. Sure he was shorter than every basketball player we’d seen. Sure he was shorter than the average guy on the street. Sure he had a 42 inch vertical leap. (Sound of tires squealing as the brakes are applied with force) This is where the regular guy sports fan’s hope comes crashing down, like a Darryl Dawkins influenced backboard. A 42 inch vertical leap! That is jumping three and half feet into the air. Sure, I can jump three and half feet into the air, but only under certain circumstances. Circumstance One: You allow me to jump eleven times and add up the inches jumped each time. Circumstance Two: You suddenly reveal a large snake directly below me.

Christopher Pyle hopes you enjoy whatever tournament you watch and would like to start a petition to have Cape Fear Community College change their nickname from the Sea Devils to the Fightin’ DeNiros. You can sign the petition by contacting Chris at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Easy for you to say, for now

2009-03-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

Language is a living thing. It grows and changes. It interacts with its surroundings. It ingests material for sustenance and, uh, leaves behind material it can’t use. It is also predatory. The biggest and baddest languages are stalking, pouncing upon and devouring the lesser ones.
I heard about a linguist adventurer who goes around the world studying languages in their death throes. He’s sort of Noam Chomsky crossed with Frank Buck (there’s two references to send many a reader to Wikipedia). He goes to exotic places finding the last speakers of these disappearing tongues.
In an interview I listened to via an iTunes podcast this Indiana Jones language guy, Dr. David Harrison, states there are approximately seven thousand languages in the world today and something like half of them are endangered. These languages are another causality of the globalization of society as a whole. Because technology has made it possible to talk to people all over the world in an instantaneous manner we have to have words the guy in Dongguan, China can understand to send through the fiber-optic doohickey connecting us. To that end, the big languages are killing off the local ones. Like a verbose Wal-Mart destroying locally owned grocery stores.
Dr. Harrison believes a language becomes extinct every two weeks when the last speaker dies, se muere, muore, dobbelstenen, or iesda. The reason these languages die with the last fluent speaker is the majority of languages do not have written versions.
The reasons scientists care about learning about lingo on life support is we can learn how languages work and how people interact with each other. These dying languages also show us how language must have been in the beginning for even our bully language beating up these 98 pound weakling languages.
Learning about these indigenous tongues can also give useful insight into the region and what is important to the people in it. You’ve probably heard the old story that some Eskimo languages have dozens upon dozens of words for snow. Each word is created to describe a different kind of snow because to a person who lives constantly surrounded by the stuff the nuances differentiating the various kinds of snow are much more noticeable and important. For instance we just say, “My car is stuck in the snow” because we don’t see the need for describing it in any more detail. On the other hand a person living in the arctic needs to be more specific, i.e. “My sled is stuck in a fine powdery snow which means I can dig it out with a plastic spoon I got with my bucket of extra crispy antlers from Saskatoon Fried Reindeer in about three minutes” or “My sled is stuck in a snow so compacted each flake is fused together at a molecular level which would require a laser beam and a team of ninjas to separate a single flake from its no-two-are-just-alike brethren.”
Something I found interesting about these very regional languages is they tend to be more poetic than our behemoth tongue (behemoth tongue…that sounds like a good nickname for Rush Limbaugh). For instance Dr. Harrison spoke a phrase from one of these arcane languages (which of course I can’t put on paper because there are no letters to represent it) and said it was what they used in order to transmit the same image we create in our head when we hear the word “sun”. If you took the phrase apart it was saying “eye of the sky.” Now that is just cooler and more musical than just saying sun. We could say the eye of the sky is hot today, but unfortunately the “eye in the sky” phrase brings to our modernistic technological minds the spy satellites which are at this moment peering into your living room and watching you scratch a rather private area while singing your favorite ABBA song and consuming mass quantities of a cheese food substance directly from its aerosol can dispenser. Maybe that’s just me?
I look at the early stages of language represented by these disappearing ones and I see the growth cycle English probably went through. It started as an infant spoken-only language. It then grew into a teenager as a written language. The language matured to real adulthood when grammar and spelling rules gave it consistent form. Now it is deteriorating into senility as texters destroy spelling and grammar and many speakers have the same breadth of vocabulary as a twelve year old found in a forest who was raised by wolves and an FM radio.

What's new to you?

2009-03-05T16:54:00.000-08:00

The typical signs a person has lived a while are gray hair, wrinkles, an ever-expanding waist size and the increasingly frequent occasions when you can’t remember where you put your car keys, or even where you put the entire car. If you’ve reached a certain age you have to admit there are times you walk out of the store and have no idea where you parked. So you sally forth hoping nobody is watching as you wander the asphalt wasteland surrounding Wal-mart like a Bedouin riding a drunken camel.
The best indicator of years on the planet is not the change to one’s physical appearance or the cognitive decline but rather the number of technological advances one can enumerate to the younger generation, and there is nothing kids like better than listening to you describe the changes you’ve witnessed because it segues so neatly into the reasons why they are ungrateful slackers who just don’t appreciate how easy they have it.
Why, back when I was kid I had to get up off the couch, stand all the way up mind you, walk multiple steps and actually put my hand on the television to change the channel. But do you appreciate the remote control? No, you let it slid between the couch cushions like it’s just another lint covered breath mint falling out of your pocket rather than treat it like the miracle of science it truly is.
My generation did not make the same kind of leap as a previous generation who started out with horse and buggies and then watched a man walk on the moon. People of my age have witnessed massive changes in things like… the phone.
The first calls I made were probably to my best friend Rob (whose boyhood number I still remember even though he has not lived at that house since Ronald Reagan was President and T.J. Hooker was on television). I made those calls on a phone the size of a Toyota Prius. This phone was tethered to the wall, coal black, squarish, possessed a rotary dial, and the part you held in your hand was substantial enough to bludgeon marauding Cossacks into submission. The kicker to whole deal is the phone I used only made phone calls.
The phone my daughter uses to call her best friend is about the size of a deck of cards, completely wireless, makes phone calls, sends texts messages, takes pictures, reminds you of your appointments, wakes you up in the morning, figures your taxes and translates the works of Charles Dickens into Aramaic, but if you are confronted by marauding Cossacks you are out of luck.
I don’t really know why they’re called cell phones. There is one theory I am willing to float for public inspection. These devices so insidiously infiltrate the psyche of young people that they actually bond with their host at a cellular level not unlike nicotine, cocaine and caramel Girl Scout cookies.
A more recent invention is the Kindle. This doohickey downloads (downloads, there’s a word nobody used when I was a kid) entire books making it possible to read everything from the latest Stephen King novel to “Troilus and Cressida” with nothing more than a 10.2 ounce contraption in your hand. Now I am old school. I like the feel of paper and the smell of a brand new book. I love browsing through bookstores. I like the accoutrements of reading, book marks, book lights, bookcases, but I do not like the book hernia I get whenever I have to move. I box of books is heavier than two sumo wrestlers carrying Alex Karras. The lightness and mobility of the Kindle is attractive but on the other hand you can’t use a $359 gizmo to prop up the dining room table.
So my generation has gone from box phones and paper books to cell phone/camera/message sender/datebook/alarm clock/accountant/translators and a sliver of a device holding 1,500 books in one hand. What is my kid’s generation going to go to? Today’s cell phone becomes a device you place in your ear and it will transmit your thoughts and the images your eyes see to a receiver in somebody else’s ear. While being intensely cool you had better be very, very sure it is turned off before you go on a date or discuss your true feelings about your boss. The Kindle will evolve into a device which with a single bright flash implants all 4,178 pages of the Harry Potter books directly into your brain.

The names have been changed to protect the profits

2009-02-21T14:42:00.000-08:00

A phenomenon which is new to me is the concept of rebranding. This is an image facelift in an attempt to change the public’s perception of a company or other entity. Often times it is only attempted after a large amount of bad press or a particularly distressing incident.
The first one I heard of was Phillip Morris. Phillip Morris is a company known far and wide as the manufacturer of cigarettes. The only thing to accumulate more bad press than cigarettes is probably…uh…I’m gonna have to think about this one…well… Nazis.
So after a chain of lawsuits that makes Nuremberg look like an episode of Law and Order Phillip Morris decided it was time for subterfuge, oops, I mean a public relations makeover. To do this they didn’t stop making cigarettes. They didn’t stop trying to sell cigarettes to as many people as they could. They did, however, change their name. Phillip Morris became Altria.
This was brilliant. The name Phillip Morris sounds like a man who sits in a glass and steel corporate skyscraper behind a mahogany desk larger than a Volkswagen dispensing orders to buy and sell stock while chomping on a foot long cigar, stepping on the human rights of any and all underlings, and instigating environmentally insensitive policies with a loud guffaw. While Altria sounds like the Greek goddess of empathy who was known for her kindness to large-eyed orphans and kittens.
Actually, I learned the word Altria is derived from a Latin word meaning “high”. This begs the question, is this company making cigarettes from the usual tobacco or has Michael Phelps found a new endorsement deal?
Their logo makes no sense to me. It is a square made up of a bunch of different colored squares. It looks like that thing you get when you select the “more colors” option on your computer. Is this supposed to indicate the diversity of their product lines? Or is it representative of the wide variety of phlegm colors one can produce after having smoked for a number of years.
Another company who decided to rebrand is Blackwater. Yes, the warriors for hire company who got such a rosy report back in the United States after its endeavors in Iraq. This firm put itself through its own version of witness relocation by changing its name to Xe. Nope, I did not make that up. They chose to adopt a company name which is more like an algebra notation than an actual recognizable word.
In one way it makes sense because people who are trying to hide from their past are often referred to as Mr. X in the journalistic exposes recounting the unfortunate events. This company did not adopt the motto of John Wayne type heroes. The old kicking tail mindset of shoot first and ask questions later. They preferred their own variation on that theme: shoot first and refuse to answer questions later.
There have been discussions amongst some political pundits after the recent presidential election that the Republican Party needs to go through a sort of rebranding. They are not suggesting the party simply change its name (even though I would love the chance to name a whole political party) but rather spend time and effort to re-define what the party stands for so it better reaches the voters. While I am not a political operative in any way, shape or form I am a person who spends a lot of time with the younger generation and I think I might have a good idea about how to grow the party by becoming attractive to kids who could not vote in the last election but will do so in 2012.
The Republican Party needs to become the party of the virtual candidate. They need a nominee who was created via the Spore internet site. One who has an ample presence on Facebook. A candidate able to win battles in the World of Warcraft, rescue Princess Zelda, collect voluminous campaign contributions in Lego studs, and willing to name Steve Jobs as his running mate/programmer. I have the perfect name for this candidate as well: George Wii-shington. His slogan would be: “Now is the time for all good nerds to come to aid of their gaming consoles.” If voting becomes the newest app for the iPod touch the election is in the bag.

Christopher Pyle would like to form the Delightfully Apathetic Dudes (DAD) Party. The chief planks of its platform would be mandatory Saturday afternoon napping, a man’s inalienable right to have chocolate covered doughnuts for breakfast and year round NFL. To register in this party e-mail Chris at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com

Superstitions and Valentines

2009-02-12T20:10:00.000-08:00

Those of you reading the newspaper today probably do not suffer from paraskavedekatriaphobia. If you did you’d probably be hiding under the bed because today is Friday the 13th. That twenty-three letter word is an amalgamation of the Greek words Paraskevi meaning Friday, dekatreis meaning 13, and phobia meaning fear. Those of you still reading do not suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words. No, I did not make up that word, but I really wish I had.
Why would Friday the 13th be considered unlucky? Thursday the 27th may be pretty crummy but nobody talks about it. The number thirteen has long been considered unlucky. One explanation I found for this is because the number twelve is often considered a good number. Numerologists consider twelve to represent completeness. This is because there are twelve months in a year, twelve hours on the clock, twelve inches in a foot, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve apostles of Jesus, twelve gods of Olympus, twelve drummers drumming and twelve ladybugs at the ladybug picnic (I loved that song on Sesame Street). Because twelve is complete, meaning it is well-centered with a firm grasp of its own self-worth, thirteen is horribly jealous and therefore goes around trying to screw things up.
Friday also has a spotty past. In Norse mythology Friday is named after Frigga, that wild and crazy goddess of love and fertility. Well, when the Norse tribes converted to Christianity Frigga was banished to some fjord or something in the frigid north and was none too happy about it. So, every Friday she and a bunch of her closest friends, witches and a guy called the devil, would get together, throw back a few drinks and plan all the crummy stuff they would pull on people over the next week.
I guess this all means today is unlucky because an indignant number and a ticked off love goddess haven’t taken a twelve step program to outgrow their pettiness. Maybe if we made it a thirteen step program they’d be interested.
If we all survive today tomorrow brings a whole new set of issues our way. It’s St. Valentine’s Day. Why we connect February the 14th with romantic love is as convoluted as why we connect Friday the 13th with Ziggy-type ill-fortune and guy wearing a hockey mask.
Hours and hours of exhaustive research, well, okay, three and a half minutes on Wikipedia, showed me the Saint Valentine whose feast was on February 14th has a biography even shorter than the attention span of a ten year old watching Timothy Geithner explain how the Federal Reserve changing the prime interest rate can cause shockwaves in the Nikkei average….zzzzzzz. Sorry, it isn’t just ten year olds who find that stuff anesthetic.
Back on track. Valentine of Rome was a priest in, you guessed it, Rome, who suffered martyrdom in 269 was buried on the Via Flaminia and whose relics are at the Church of Saint Praxed in, there is a theme developing here, Rome. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable if my relics were on display for just anyone to see.
The earliest surviving valentine is a fifteenth-century rondeau, that’s a poem for the non-romantics out there, written by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife. This was along the lines of a Casey Kasem long distance dedication because Chuck was sitting in the Tower of London after coming out on the wrong side of the Battle of Agincourt.
Since that time Valentine’s Day has been taken from romance to commerce. There is an arc of commercials being presented by a chain of jewelry stores which describes a guy who is so in touch with his inner romantic he hand crafts a card with special paper, curlicue lettering on the front, sealing wax on the back and a poem he wrote himself because he couldn’t find a card to express the depth of his emotion. The commercial goes on to say since every other guy is incapable of that we need to get our sorry behinds to Helzberg’s and drop a chunk of last month’s paycheck in order to buy the affection of the lady in our lives. Neither choice is very attractive to me.
A friend of mine had the right idea. He wasn’t a Shakespearian romantic nor was he a diamond purchasing Casanova. He would take his wife to the store, guide her to the rack of cards and show her the one he would have bought for her if he had been inclined to spend any money on such frivolity.

Who do want to be when you grow up?

2009-02-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

What is a hero? When looking at a dictionary we find a description of somebody who is admired because of outstanding qualities or achievements, or we find a description of an impressive sandwich which can also be admired for its qualities and achievements. I think most everyone has someone they wish to emulate. As we go through life the criteria we have for selecting our heroes tends to change.
Looking back I think the first hero I had was Batman. By today’s standards this brings to mind a dark, brooding avenger for justice with a single-minded sense of purpose and an unswerving dedication to serving mankind. I could pretend that is what attracted me to him, but…not so much. I was a devotee of the wham, socko television show with Adam West. This means my hero was prone to walking up the sides of skyscrapers (with cameos from people like Sammy Davis Jr. sticking their heads out the windows), matching wits with grade B has been movies stars playing such villains as Olga, Queen of the Cossacks and Chief Screaming Chicken as well as putting the word “bat” in front of every possible noun in order to make it sound impressive.
“Quick, to the batpole so we can get to the batcave and jump into our batmobile and drive down the bathighway listening to our bat8-track player singing batsongs and have a batpicnic with batsandwiches.”
“Holy get a grip! You’re making me crazy with all this bat…guano.”
I outgrew that.
Like many young boys my next heroes came from the world of sports. I was a big fan of Ed Podolak. He was a running back for the Kansas City Chiefs and he had one of the most impressive games in playoff history. Christmas Day 1971 he racked up 350 yards, running, catching returning punts and kickoffs. He was amazing. The Chiefs lost.
Later I shifted my heroic attentions to the movies. I thought Sean Connery was cool. Why is it Americans think anyone with an accent can play any nationality? Connery, a kilt-wearing Scotsman, has played Englishmen, Arabs, Americans, Russians, an ancient Greek king, and a winged fire-breathing lizard, but the guy was cool with a capital “C” and a capital “OO”, the “l” can remain lower case otherwise it would be ostentatious.
Now that I am a grown man heroes are harder to come by. Comic book characters are no longer viable because the idea of running through alleys in the dark of night pursuing evil doers holds no allure. Actually the idea of running, for any reason, holds no allure. Sports stars are out (see previous sentence). Movie stars are just people pretending to be things they are not. That is not an outstanding quality or achievement because I do that every time I tell my children I’m smarter than they are.
Still we all need people to look up to and pattern our behaviors after as we muddle through our day-to-day life. I have a friend who embodies many of the characteristics I thought I’d like to strengthen in my own personality. He is tireless. He is not only comfortable with all kinds of new technology he is very adept with it. He learns new things, masters them and then moves on to the next thing. He is so capable as a multi-tasker he has lost the ability to do just one thing at a time. I used to say I wanted to be him. Then it dawned on me. I possess neither the energy, the finances nor the mettle to be him. Also, I realized I really don’t want to be all that. It takes up too much time.
Okay, if I am going to figure out who my true hero is I need to get my priorities figured out. What do I truly value?
I value kindness. I value humor. I value intelligence. I value a really good pie. Oh, my goodness! My true hero is the Galloping Gourmet. How embarrassing.
Let’s try that again shall we. I value kindness. I value humor. I value intelligence. I value honesty unless it means you are telling me my weight, how much it costs to send my kids to college or whether I resemble Harrison Ford. Well, that didn’t lead to a hero.
One more go. I value kindness. I value humor. I value intelligence. Oh, my, it was right there all along. My heroes are my father, my mother, my wife and my kids. How boring it that?

Not Everything Has to Have a Point

2009-01-30T15:52:00.000-08:00

As many of you probably know my real job is in the world of education, but I believe I would have this same concern for how things are going even if I made a living trimming poodle fur or running Apple computers. Also, I would like to point out many people in the field of education disagree with me. What am I worried about? Well, I’ll tell you. I am concerned too many people believe everything done by a student in school should be useful.
First I guess I need to define “useful”. To most people useful is something which makes it possible to accomplish a particular task. Useful like being able to balance a checkbook. Useful like being able to change the oil in your car. Useful like being able to identify which kinds of mushrooms you can eat without poisoning yourself which is only slightly more useful than being able to identify which peanut butter has peanuts, dextrose, hydrogenated vegetable oil, salt and salmonella.
Don’t get me wrong I approve of useful. I want my children to know how to balance a checkbook. Unfortunately there have been times in my life I decided it was just easier to open a whole new account than try to figure out the Gordian Knot which until recently had been an orderly list of debits and credits. I would like it if they can change their own oil. I am a car ignoramus but I am not as bad as a co-worker who once told me they added oil to their car because it was squeaking. (I did not make that up.) Also, if I am ever hopelessly lost in a forest I want someone who can say helpful things like, “Don’t eat that mushroom” and “You know what bears do in the woods? You’re standing in it.”
The point I am trying to make is the reason for education should not just be the achievement of utilitarian goals. Schools should not be creating worker drones. Schools should give students useful tools and make it possible for people to do all those useful things, but that is not where it should end.
Too often educators fall into the trap of thinking we are making the next generation of employees. Actually, we are making the next generation of employees and participants in the electoral process and handlers of our environment and choosers of our nursing homes. I like to think being all of that requires an understanding beyond the times tables, the four-step problem solving method and the parts of speech. An understanding of things not testable with multiple choice questions.
I was reading a column in The New York Times by Stanley Fish. He quoted the philosopher Michael Oakeshott saying, “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and the learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.” To me what this is all about is we need to expand our definition of what is useful.
I happen to think the ability to make others laugh is very useful, but you will never see an ad in the yellow pages for a joke repairman. In regards to humor the usefulness is less hammer and chisel useful and more temporal lobe useful.
Sir Jonathan Miller, who graduated from Cambridge, became a medical doctor, directed many productions of Shakespeare’s plays, became a research fellow in neuropsychology at Sussex University and wrote comedy with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore is a genuinely smart fellow. He knows a thing or two about what is useful beyond nuts and bolts. I heard him on a panel discussing how humor makes us human. At this time he said, “One of the rewards which is contained in humor and the reason why we seek it, is because it mobilizes cognitive versatility and the evolutionary advantage of cognitive versatility is self-evident.” I can attest that he really said it because I rewound and played it over and over until I got it all written down properly.
I have to say even though that quote was hard to get right I like it much better than the quote attributed to Richard Teller Crane (a big time rich guy plumbing magnate): No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness…are those who are useful.” Oh, I hope not. I don’t fit that description unless there suddenly becomes a demand for joke repairmen.

The New Guy is on the Job

2009-01-24T07:06:00.000-08:00

Well, the new guy has moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Many people are piling a lot of hopes on this man’s plate. Some of them are realistic and some, not so much. Before he gets too busy I have some requests.
There is a lot of consternation about the economy. While I agree he should look into this issue, first he needs to appoint a blue ribbon, bi-partisan commission in conjunction with a special investigator (has anybody seen Ken Starr lately) in order to explain why Jack Bauer has not been named the Secretary of Homeland Security. He accomplishes more in 24 hours than anyone can possibly imagine. Actually, he does everything in about 17.6 hours when you subtract commercials.
The new Mr. President is a learned man. He went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School and was a professor at the University of Chicago. He has written books and his speeches are hailed by many for raising the general levels of discourse and rhetoric in today’s politics. My hope is he will lead this nation to value the artistry and power of words, to raise beyond the third grade reading level of mass media, and inspire today’s youth to embrace Dickens, Shakespeare, and McCartney. McCartney? Yes, Paul McCartney who wrote those immortal, life affirming words: “Ob-la-di ob-la-da life goes on bra, la-la how the life goes on.” Was there ever a better example of John Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”?
Restoring the United States’ reputation internationally is something the new president looks to accomplish. This may not be an easy task. Even one of our earliest friends has issues with us. I’m talking about France, a country who threw in with the upstart thirteen states in 1778 and helped them gain their independence from the England (even though they did so more because they were still ticked at England for the whole Henry V kicking their butt at Agincourt thing than because they liked us, like that girl in tenth grade who went to the dance with you just because she knew her ex-boyfriend thought you were a complete dweeb).
My suggestion to get France to like us again is a win-win situation for both countries. You know how France thinks one of our own native sons is an artistic genius. I am referring to Jerry Lewis, who the French Minister of Culture called the “French people’s favorite clown” when he bestowed upon him the Legion d’honneur. Well, I say send him to France as a present. Throw in Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller and it makes our country a better place as well.
If I may be allowed to stray from the silliness for a while I would like to say I have placed some of my genuine hopes for the future on President Obama’s plate. While watching the inauguration on television Tuesday I choked up a few times. Granted I can be overly sentimental and have been known to cry at Hallmark commercials, but that which was on display January 20th should make most Americans reach for a tissue.
Whether you voted for Senator McCain or the eventual winner everyone should agree when this country puts on its best and tries to live up to the reputation as the beacon of freedom and opportunity for all it can be impressive. The most jaded and pessimistic of us would say we are just pretending. Well, when you were a kid in the backyard you pretended to be the ultimate example of your dreams – an amazing athlete, a hero with superhuman powers, a princess who was the epitome of charm and grace or a fireman rescuing the helpless. Even if we were pretending and have not attained the level of justice and moral strength described on that podium at least we are pretending to be something valuable, something worth striving for and something I want my children to believe is possible to achieve in their everyday lives even if it is not always on display in our government.
I liked President Obama’s list of American values requisite for the tasks ahead: hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism. I work in a school populated with over five hundred children and I know we try to give them exposure to these values, but it is often an uphill battle to make them stick. If our new leader can do anything to help those children and the ones like them throughout our country grasp those ideals there is no way we won’t make headway against all the obstacles in our path.

Getting Rolled Over as a Role Model

2009-01-17T06:44:00.000-08:00

I am a family man. This means a lot of different things. It means I have been awakened in the wee hours of the morning because a person measuring less than two and half feet tall has managed to usurp nearly the entire surface area of a king size bed and in the process placed a heel directly into my kidney. It means I have an abnormally high amount of concern regarding the number of lights left on in the basement, why there are seven pairs of shoes in the living room when only five people live in the house, and what exactly is allowed to go into the drain of the kitchen sink. It also means I have to set a good example. All things being equal, I would rather have my kidney mauled by a three year old.
Being a role model is truly one of the most important aspects of being a parent. One of the difficulties is you are one whether you are aware of it or not. My parents were much better at this than I am. I never heard my father say a word which could be deemed R-rated and very seldom heard him use any curses beyond what one hears in comic book adventures from the fifties. To this day I have yet to hear my mother say anything mean spirited. But when my first born daughter was out in the back yard and became displeased with something and the word “damn” emitted from those cherubic lips all eyes turned immediately to me. Actually, the only eyes in the vicinity belonged to my wife, but as all married men know those eyes are powerful eyes, laser beam powerful, triple garlic sauce breath powerful, don’t look directly at the eclipse or you’ll go blind powerful. My daughter had, of course, learned this word from me. In my defense I only used it as an adjective when discussing the dog. So I was surprised Emilyjane used it in a sentence not pertaining to the canine. When I tried to point out her usage of the invective in a whole different context was a sign of her advanced intellect it did not help my cause, but it was a creative way to attempt to get out of damn dog house.
Recently my wife and eldest daughter (whose use of blue language has improved) decided it was time to pay more attention to eating in a healthy manner. This means more vegetables, skim milk, cereal not featuring cartoon characters on the box, and snack foods which have the calorie count written in a font larger than the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline from the Chicago Tribune in order to shame you into only eating one serving, which turns out to be not so difficult after you taste them. You’ve heard the phrase “collateral damage” meaning the unintentional injury or damage which occurs around military action. Well, I am a victim of collateral diet.
A product which has infiltrated my home is a “shake” in a can which describes itself as chocolate. This is like Barry Manilow advertising himself as a rock singer. There may be similarities on some very basic level, maybe a molecular level, but that is as close as it gets. This product not only has the temerity to call itself chocolate but it also claims it is “a delicious meal substitute.” Well, I have news for you Mr. Nutritious Chocolaty Liquid in a can. I know another delicious meal substitute: a bag of Fig Newtons.
But, as I said, being a family man means I have to be a role model. Ergo, I eat the vegetables served at dinner, refrain from complaining about skim milk (which should really be called milk tainted water), and hide the real snack foods in my sock drawer.
If I’m being truly honest I think there is one thing missing in today’s society which existed in the kinder gentler days gone by which should be brought back in full force. I’m not talking about such out-dated things as mothers who have no choice but to stay home and cook dinner and do laundry. I do not mean that children should be simply seen and not heard, not even fully valued as people. I mean double standards should not only be allowed but encouraged.
“Mom, how come Dad gets to have seven chocolate doughnuts and Dr. Pepper for breakfast and I have to eat this pebbles and twigs cereal?”
“Because he’s the dad.”
Hey, I guy can dream can’t he?

Words to Live By, or at Least Near

2009-01-08T17:43:00.000-08:00

I like smart people. I like to listen to smart people talk. I like to read what smart people write. I don’t always understand what they are saying but I like to try. In my office I have a long roll of paper tacked to the wall on which I have images of people I admire as well as quotes from smart people.
I know these several syllable prescriptions for a better existence are superficial when removed from the bigger picture from whence they originated, but I get a kick out of them. I frequently fail to use what wisdom they do offer when making the choices which decide my fate, but I still like them and I do endeavor to remember them as I stumble through life.
Smart is important, but I think kindness is the most important personality trait a person can possess. For proof of that I point to a quote on my wall which was attributed to one of the most world renowned smart guys ever, Plato. The quote is: “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.” My less than brilliant Greek philosopher interpretation of that is: “Life can really stink so don’t add to someone else’s stinky life by being mean to them.” My way won’t fit so nicely on a marble tablet or a papyrus scroll which is probably the only reason Plato didn’t say it the way I did.
Another aspect of human nature I have to keep reminding myself about connects with Mr. Plato’s statement. People have a tendency to be more than a little self-centered. I don’t mean thoughtless of other people but rather most folks think of the world only how it relates to themselves. Another quote on my wall points this out. Franklin D. Roosevelt is quoted as saying: “Remember, you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.”
Think about it. As you go through your day you are the star. The story doesn’t start until you wake up. The theme music fires up when you get out of bed. Personally, I imagine the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark even if I cut a less than dashing figure as I trudge towards the shower in my flannel pants adorned with dozens of penguins and prepare for my day of not uncovering riches and defeating Nazis.
The thing President Roosevelt was telling us is as we move through our day as the star of the show we keep bumping into people who are the star of their shows. What we need to remember is not unlike too many cooks spoiling the broth too many stars can spoil the movie. Case in point, the movie Wholly Moses had more A-list movie stars than you can shake a stick at and after watching it you would want to use the stick less for shaking and more for striking, pummeling, and bludgeoning. Anyway, we need to remember everyone thinks they are the most important person in the story and we are the wacky neighbor. I don’t mind being Fred Mertz but I draw the line if someone wants to cast me as Monroe Ficus (the Jim J. Bullock character on Too Close for Comfort).
Another one of the quotes on my wall is attributed to William James. It says: The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. I really like that one because being able to correctly select which things to care about and which things to let fall away truly makes life better.
Admit it you have spent a good deal of time and effort focusing on things which later turned out to be of no real importance. There have also been times you ignored things which should have garnered your full attention. Like that time in college you left undone your term paper comparing and contrasting the basic tenets espoused by Machiavelli and those put forth by Jean Jacques Rousseau because the Twilight Zone marathon was running on television. (Actually, in retrospect I think you made the right choice.)
Finally, the last quote on my wall is not from a great philosopher taught in universities throughout the land but it sums up much of what I feel on a regular basis. It speaks to life being a struggle which cannot always be understood, a struggle which gets the better of us all from time to time. I leave you with these words from Warren Zevon: Sometimes I feel like my shadow’s casting me.

Christopher Pyle also loves a quote once attributed to Socrates: I drank what? You may dispute this by e-mailing him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com

To heck with Guy Lambardo

2008-12-31T22:54:00.000-08:00

The song which has come to be synonymous with ringing in a new year is probably the most performed song in the country to which nobody knows the lyrics. Admit it, after “should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind” you, like nearly everybody else, start to make unintelligible vowel sounds until you get to the “auld lang syne” at the end.
Not only do I have a problem remembering the lyrics I have a problem with the apparent sentiment of the single lyric I can remember. I don’t really want to forget all my old acquaintances and never bring them to mind. I like some of my old acquaintances better than a lot of the people I met recently.
Many people do not believe me when I tell them I am a shy person. I admit it is somewhat counter intuitive when there was a time in my life I would wear short pants and cowboy boots and purposely cavort in goofy ways in front of more than a thousand people at the Dodge City Civic Center (I was Marshal Hoops the mascot for the Legend basketball team). I also performed in several productions for what was then the Boot Hill Repertory Company, often in very silly roles. It is just my shyness manifests itself in that I would rather stand in front of a couple hundred people than a couple people.
Because of this basic shyness I don’t make new friends all that often. My wife is the truly gregarious one. She adds friends to her list more frequently and with greater ease than I do. There have even been times in the past when she tried to fix me up. She’d think I was being too reclusive and would arrange for us to spend time with another couple. She was friends with the wife and would scout out the husband to be sure there were compatibilities.
I would tell her I was perfectly content staying home and she would point out “Fred” (a fictitious name used in order to allow anonymity for these innocent by-standers in my blind, man dates) was a sports fan, had similar tastes in music and agreed with many of my political beliefs.
I have to admit most every time she did this I had a fine time. She has a good eye for people I will be compatible with and with whom I can carry on an interesting and entertaining conversation. If my wife ever decides to leave me just how pathetic would it be for me to ask her to find my dates for me when I’m single again?
Even with the success stories of these fix-up friends I still refuse to practice the “acquaintance Alzheimer’s” suggested by the song. In 2008 I celebrated the fortieth anniversary of my longest friendship. Rob and I met the first day of kindergarten at Wiley Elementary School in Hutchinson, Kansas,1968. Lyndon Johnson was President of the United States, the Green Bay Packers were the reigning champions of the National Football League, nobody had walked on the moon yet, a single computer was the size of those gigantic Easter Island stone heads and phones were heavy enough to cause severe blunt force trauma if thrown at someone and the dials were rotary. That was a long time ago. 1968 was the year Celine Dion, Vanilla Ice, and Molly Ringwald were born. Our friendship is the same age and infinitely more talented and entertaining.
Also, 2008 marked the 18th year of my marriage. If our marriage was a person it could now vote, buy lottery tickets and could have been married itself for the past four years if it lived in Arkansas.
The long term relationships are more important to me. Between Claudia and Rob, they possess the knowledge of every stupid move, irretrievably dumb decision, and patently dim-witted action I have ever undertaken, yet they still treat me well and do things which make my life better. Part of this may be due to the fact I also possess some information they may not wish to be made public, heh, heh, heh.
No matter what Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians tell us I suggest everyone out there take a moment to remember old acquaintances, to value what they have added to our lives and how they have helped form us into the people we have become. Also, to remember the time he walked directly into the pillar in our high school lobby making me laugh until I was in danger of losing proper control of my bladder.

For want of something better

2008-12-24T14:20:00.000-08:00

‘Tis the season to want things. I am not just talking about base greediness. Not to say there isn’t base greediness in the world (a student at my school when asked what he wanted for Christmas said he wanted two Xboxes, one for the living room and one for his room), but there is also altruistic wanting. The wanting to do good deeds for others, the wanting of a better life for all as the calendar turns from 2008 to 2009, and the wanting of a diminishing number of movie opportunities for Ben Stiller are examples of non-greedy wanting, but rather wanting for the greater good.
This begs the question: why do we want what we want? Recently I have explored several different facets of how our brains work and one of those facets revolves around how we make such decisions.
The basic conflict within our minds is between the forces of emotion and the forces of rational thought. Allow me to put it into simplistic imagery in order to clarify the concepts. The emotional forces, not surprisingly, look like one of those Orc things from the Lord of the Rings movies, a hulking creature of great strength and atrocious personal hygiene. It is not easily distracted from its primal goals.
Rational thought shouldn’t even be referred to as a “force”. It looks like a ninth grade civics teacher. This means the rational thoughts part of the brain is pleasant enough, erudite, introspective, conscientious, ergo rather boring and easily turned into a quivering mass of terrified gelatin.
Think about it. For those of you who went to Liberty Junior High the same years I did, would you place your wager on Mr. Zahorsky (ninth grade civics teacher in 1977) or an ax-wielding, knuckle dragging denizen of the Middle Earth underworld in a one-on-one grudge match?
Actually the two forces don’t even have to get into direct conflict for the emotional side to win. One university study illustrated the general weakness of rationality. It had been previously proven that the typical human mind can hold seven, plus or minus two, bits of information in the forefront of its memory, so some smarty pants college professors designed an experiment. The participants would go into a room and were told a list of numbers to remember. They were then asked to go from the first room to another room and recite the numbers to the person there. Some people were given very short lists and others were given a list at the top of the difficulty level of seven digits.
As the participants went from Room A to Room B an accomplice of the professors stopped them and offered a snack as a way of thanking them for helping with the study. They were offered either a piece of chocolate cake or some fruit. This is where the real experiment was taking place.
The great majority of the participants who were only asked to memorize a couple of numbers asked for the fruit and the majority of participants who were laboring to remember seven digits asked for the cake. The professor folks took this to mean the rational mind was so over burdened by trying to remember the seven numbers the emotional mind was able to make the selection. “Me want cake!” slathered the Orc and since the civics teacher was too busy reciting “one, three, seven, six, uh, blast, what’s next?” it wasn’t able to have the mouth ask for the much healthier and ergo more rational choice of fruit.
I use this learned experiment to explain why I sneak to Dillon’s after work and buy doughnuts. My rational mind is so preoccupied with the pursuit of enhancing the educational opportunities for the eager young people, who, after all, are the hope for the future of our nation, nay, our entire planet, I cannot be bothered to use my rational brain power to select a food which can sate my hunger without contributing to the unhealthy state of being well over the surgeon general’s recommended weight. This is a sacrifice I am willing to make for the benefit of today’s youth. You can thank me later.
Another tidbit of decision making is emotions really are necessary to make a choice. A man who suffered from a brain tumor was changed into a person who relied exclusively on logic. This man would spend hours working out the merits of using a pen with blue or black ink, sometimes not arriving at a decision. This shows extreme rationality is wishy-washy. The emotional person knows how to choose the best pen. Oooo, I like the shiny one.

If you decide you wish to comment you may contact Christopher Pyle at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Dear Santa, uh, I'll have to get back to you

2008-12-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

I seem to have crossed over into a new stage of life. I don’t want anything for Christmas. On one hand this could mean I have reached a level of contentment in my life, a sort of serenity in which the base desire for material goods has been supplanted by higher thoughts leading to greater understanding of what is truly important in life. On the other hand it might mean I’m old.
When you’re a little person, with the wonder of Santa Claus fresh in your consciousness, it is easy to make a Christmas list only slightly longer than the collected works of Leo Tolstoy. This is not a sign of greed. This is a sign of the belief that the world is full of possibilities, that there is magic at the North Pole, and that the latest Major Matt Mason action figure will make life complete.
I can personally attest to that last fact. When I tore the paper from the green headed alien, Callisto, adding to my collection of Sgt. Storm, Astronaut Doug Davis, and Lt. Jeff Long there was a sense of joy not rivaled by many things in the life of quiet desperation pursued by most folks who work for a living.
As we get past the enchantment of those early years, Christmas often does get slightly tainted with greed. We want stuff for the sake of stuff. After the days of action figures, slot car race tracks (which worked until New Year’s Day) or for the girls, the Crissy doll (which had a knob on her back to retract her hair back into her head and a button in her stomach which made it possible to pull her hair out to a greater length - that was just weird) teenagers tend to want the latest and coolest gadgets and part of this desire is simply for the boost in status amongst their friends.
My stint in this time of life was before Blu-Ray, before MP3 players, before Nintendo, before DVDs, before CDs, before cell phones, before video tape players, before the wheel, oops, went just a bit too far there. I very distinctly remember getting a cool radio. Yes, I said a radio. It was AM and FM. It was designed so it looked like a bottom heavy circle, but it had a hinge of sorts which meant you could swivel it so it looked like a bloated “S”. With this ooh-neat-cool-wow radio I could listen to Casey Kasem tell me Debby Boone was at the top of the charts for the nine hundred and twenty-seventh week with an intensely insipid love song or Dancin’ Don Hall send out good night kiss dedications on KWHK (never to me, sigh).
Later the Christmas list shows signs of maturity. You start asking for things you can actually use. The ultimate sign a person has grown up is when he wants socks beneath the Tannenbaum. What was once the crummy present you resented wasting the time it took to unwrap goes from representing an unfeeling great aunt with a twisted utilitarian sense of gift giving to something else entirely. As a college student I saw each pair of socks as one more day I could avoid going to the Laundromat.
During the first few years of being an honest to goodness grown up it is still easy to make lists of desired stuff. Much of the stuff was placed on the list because it would make life a bit more interesting, fun, or easy to do. My lists would contain a smattering of things not unlike items from lists I made in other stages of my life. I would ask for toys because I thought it really didn’t count as Christmas if there wasn’t something to play with down there on the floor amongst the tattered paper and bows. I would ask for the latest gadgets partially for the coolness factor and partly because they were the toys of people over ten. I would ask for socks because I still preferred putting off laundry for as long as possible.
This Christmas I really don’t want anything. If I was forced to write what I wanted it would sound sappy. I want my children to be happy and healthy. I want my wife to be well taken care of and never to feel she goofed up by marrying me. I want my friends to be successful in what they pursue. For me, I want to expand my horizons as a writer and continue being with my wife, children and friends. Oh, and a couple of pairs of socks would be nice.

Truth, Justice and the Milky Way

2008-12-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

Philosophers and artists of all kinds have spent centuries looking for just the right thought or image to sum up the human condition. People are complex and there are innumerable points of view but occasionally one of these extraordinary individuals hits upon something which speaks to each and every human being who considers himself a seeker of the truth. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Mozart, and Picasso, have transcended with word, tone or image into the world of truth and the planet is enriched because of it.
I realize I am just some yutz from Kansas who plays with words but I think I have found an image which illustrates the eternal struggle faced by man each day as he forces himself out of bed and forays out into the maelstrom that is life. This image comes from a dispenser. Not a dispenser of wisdom like the collected writings of Socrates. Not a dispenser of insight like the Oracle at Delphi. Not even a dispenser of down home good judgment like Poor Richard’s Almanac. I’m talking about a dispenser of hedonistic gratification: the snack machine in the break room at work.
It has to be a very specific sort of snack machine. It has to be one of those machines which has a glass front and all the tasty treats are visible. Laid before the seeker are all the tantalizing objects of his desire. The goals of life are just hanging there on those curly post thingees waiting for the proper button to be pushed. When that button sends its message to the curly post thingee it slowly begins to rotate, teasing the seeker. Will the object of desire drop into the catcher tray or will something cause it to get hung up just out of reach, taunting the pilgrim?
Today I visited the break room in search of solace, refuge from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, a salve to soothe dealing with people who would rather create problems out of thin air than work to make the world a better place, or more precisely, chocolate. As I gazed into the newly refilled automated giver of joy I saw something which went beyond mere melts in your mouth euphoria. This was a lesson, a piercing insight.
Curly post thingee number 17 had extra large size peppermint patties. A candy which gives the consumer a bracingly clean cool minty taste sensation while in the same bite offering the dark warmth of chocolate, the yin and the yang of sweetness. That in and of itself was a moment of insight, but the lesson did not stop there. When the omniscient manipulator of the snack machine had reached in to replenish the waning choices he had placed the enticing candy treats behind the last remaining lonely bag of CornNuts.
The symbolism was too stark. In order to get to the nirvana of creamy sweetness one must first shell out one’s hard earned money to chew one’s way through the hardest foodstuff ever invented. As I gazed at this eternal truth before me it dawned on me there might be a shortcut. If someone else would throw themselves on the curly dispenser sword and buy the bag of CornNuts it would clear the path to the soft goodness without me having to endure the callous hardness of life.
I went back later in the day. Blast! Nobody had the guts or strength of character, not to mention the proper density strength of teeth, to sacrifice for the good of the rest of us. The CornNuts still lay between me and the peppermint patties.
Since I am trying to adhere to a budget I have only allotted the price of one snack treat per day. So here was my dilemma: I could use today’s money to by a lesser treat giving less fulfillment or I could buy the CornNuts thus surrendering my own daily pleasure for the sake of others or I could not buy anything, save today’s prearranged allocation of coinage so tomorrow I could buy the CornNuts and then immediately drop the next set of quarters into the machine, buying the peppermint soothing the pain of masticating my way through a crunch so loud it can drown out the laughter of children, the twitter of songbirds and all other sounds of elation known to mankind.
That is when it came to me. My wife actually likes CornNuts. I’ll go get her.

Buddy Can Ya Spare a Billion

2008-12-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

It seems the economy is suffering through a bit of a down turn. This down turn is somewhat akin to falling off Mount Everest and landing near the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Look at the newspaper. Oh, I guess you already are. I mean look at the depressing parts of the newspaper. The government is doing more bailing out than a Hell’s Angels lawyer on New Year’s Eve.
Can anyone explain to me why banks need money? Banks are where money lives. Banks are to money as dairies are to milk. Banks are to money as Blockbuster is to DVDs. Banks are to money as the Kansas City Chiefs are to football players…okay, bad example, but you get what I mean.
The government has already committed $700 billion to bailout various financial institutions. If you laid 700 billion one dollar bills end to end the line would reach from Dodge City to the desert planet of Tatooine and continue to the planet Mongo returning to Dodge City with enough left over to get to Jetmore. Okay, I actually started to do the math for a real-life analogy but after figuring 700 billion one dollar bills come to over 4 trillion 200 billion inches of money I gave up.
Now the car companies want $25 billion in what I believe they are calling some sort of loan. So does Congress mail them a coupon book which has sixty little perforated pages asking for monthly payments of four hundred sixteen million, six hundred sixty-six thousand, six hundred sixty-six dollars and sixty-seven cents to be mailed to United States Capitol Building, Independence Avenue, Washington, DC 20001? (Quick digression: When looking for the mailing address of the Capitol Building I found out it is common to use the abbreviation SOB when sending things to United States Senators. At first I thought it was a strange version of truth in advertising until I found out it stood for Senate Office Building.)
One more mathematical juggling act. If the government took the $25 billion the car companies are asking for and divided it into checks of an equal amount they could give 833,333 people enough money to buy a new car, cash on the barrel head. That might boost the economy for a few folks.
Since the government is not likely to offer any of us a couple of billion dollars to get ourselves out of debt we will have to figure it out on our own. One thing used by many different companies and groups is to sell advertising rights.
Remember when sports teams played in venues with names like Memorial Stadium, Soldier Field, or Boston Garden? Now most teams have sold their souls, uh, sorry, now teams have sold the “naming rights” for their home fields. The Pittsburgh Pirates play baseball at PNC (a bank) Park. The Pittsburgh Penguins play hockey at Mellon (another bank) Arena. The Pittsburgh Steelers play football at Heinz (a condiment company) Field. I always thought there should by a 57 yard line at Heinz Field. (I used that joke in a column I wrote in 2004 but I still think it’s funny. I may be alone in that thought, but I do.)
A math teacher at Rancho Bernardo High School in California has latched on to this idea to pay for supplies he needs for his students. He has sold ad space on his quizzes and tests. This makes sense to the kids raised on Sesame Street. They go from toddlers who hear “today’s episode was brought to by the number 4” to high school kids who read “today’s calculus test is brought to you by Fantastic Sam’s Hair Salon.” The ad ought to read: “If you bomb the test you can get your parents off your back by getting that haircut your mom keeps bugging you about.”
If this catches on companies will target the demographic groups at whom to aim their ads. Vo-tech automotive tests will have ads for Pennzoil. Advanced trigonometry classes will have ads for Apple computers. English literature classes will have ads for McDonald’s because that is where liberal arts majors end up working.
I am willing to do this at a high level. I have no problem telling people the Pyles live in Dr. Pepper House. It would be fine with me if Viagra wanted to pay me to paint my car blue and plaster their logo all over it. For the proper price I am even amenable to have the registered trademarks of amazon.com and Google tattooed on my forearms.

Christopher Pyle has made it obvious he can be bought. All that is left is to haggle over the price. To put in your bids e-mail him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Comedy Writers Fantasy Camp

2008-11-26T17:18:00.000-08:00

When we left our intrepid reporter he was preparing to fly off to Los Angeles in pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge pertaining to the arcane arts of story, character and the ever so important punch-line. Okay, so that doesn’t really make me very intrepid. The only genuine danger I faced was leg cramps due to being shoe-horned into an airplane seat for hours.
Traveling is full of interesting moments. Airports contain a diverse collection of people. One of my favorite individuals from this trip was found in the boarding area of my connecting flight in Dallas. This guy was amazing. If he had shown up on the set of The Sopranos they would have sent him back to wardrobe to tone it down. His hair was lacquered into perfect swoops and curves doubling as a helmet in case someone wanted to hit him with a blunt object. His pinkie ring was large enough to conceal a pastrami sandwich. The diamond bracelet on his right arm matched well with the sparkling necklace he wore on the outside of his multi-colored open at the neck untucked shirt. When the attendant called over the intercom for a Mr. Dino Gianetti I am pretty sure mine was not the only pair of eyes to immediately swing in his direction. Yes, it was him. (Author’s note: the name was changed not to protect the innocent, but to protect me in case he was being moved into witness protection and I run the risk of being whacked for having seen him) He paused to shrug into his purple velveteen sport coat and ambled over to the desk to pursue his upgrade to first class. I was sorely tempted to approach him and ask, “Please say it. Just once. Can you please say baa-da-bing?”
Another unusual aspect of my travels actually made me feel safer. Some sort of military or law enforcement dog was on the plane with me. At least if we crashed were carrying our own survivor sniffing dog. I lingered close to the dog for a while before boarding so he cold get a good clean hit off the Classic Club Sandwich I’d eaten for lunch. If the worst came to pass I wanted the highly trained olfactory senses on that animal tuned in but good. I need him tearing around with just one thought in his canine brain… “bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon.”
The design of the weekend was to have us work as if we were really staff on a sitcom. A small group of actors performed a single scene. It was pretty bad. But it was bad on purpose so we had more of a task ahead of us as we re-wrote it. The guy running the seminar wrote it. He is very adept at writing good scenes as he has written for “MASH”, “Cheers”, and “Frasier” among other highly popular shows. He gave us this stink burger in order to hone our own skills.
Each group adjourned to their writer’s room complete with cookies and Diet Coke. My group worked with few breaks from around three in the afternoon to a little after midnight discussing story, character and sprinkling in funny bits. I have to admit it did not feel like nine hours dedicated to one task. If I’d spent that same time frame doing my real job it would have ended in an emergency room visit, either for the victim of my unhinged tirade or my own need for psychotropic meds to avoid attempts at self-immolation.
It was a great experience and since it is the Thanksgiving weekend I wish to thank some people. First, Mom, the original supporter of my odd hobbies and dreams, who helped with the financial burden and a forty-six year old man asking his mommy for money adds an embarrassment price to the monetary one. Next, I thank my wife for being the continuous support system for my inexplicable desire to be a writer which so far contributes $40 a month to our family budget. I thank Ken Levine and Dan O’Day for creating the experience worthy of the cash and self-esteem expenditures. I thank my group of fellow writers for teaching me things and causing frequent fits of laughter. Finally, I thank the staff at the Carl’s Jr. fast food restaurant a couple blocks from my hotel who made it possible for me to eat without having to sell my plasma to afford the hotel restaurant food.

Christopher Pyle was amazed to receive something akin to a fan letter from a genuine comedy writer, a guy who wrote for The Simpsons, after he read my blog post about the weekend. If you wish to deflate Chris’s ego please write to occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

There are different kinds of smart

2008-11-18T15:54:00.000-08:00

Being called an intellectual is often thrown at people as an epithet. Think back to your school days. Was the “smartest” kid in class looked upon with respect and considered to be cool? My guess is “no”. Smart people are often the butt of jokes and the preferred target of bullies. Until they design a new software system and make more money in a three year period than the entire population of western Europe, excluding the Principality of Monaco (Prince Albert II is not only not in a can, the dude is stinking rich).
The definition of intelligence does change as the culture changes. Several years ago Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist who may have been beaten up as a child for being an egghead, put forth a theory he dubbed Multiple Intelligences. Professor Gardner listed seven kinds of intelligence. To boil down an entire career into a single sentence, different people are intelligent in different ways. Man, I did that quite easily and it didn’t take years of research and more money than Prince Albert II spends on yacht wax.
There are times I wish I had a different mode of intelligence than I have. I am about as useful around the house as a guy who likes to write eight hundred word humor columns for a newspaper is around the house. That was a crummy analogy. Maybe I don’t even have the linguistic intelligence I thought I had.
When I have a clogged drain I go down the street and enlist the help of my plumbing Zen Master, Warren, to get the water moving again. When I have computer issues I go to my computer whisperer Seth. Whenever I need help of an artistic nature I go to She of the Pen and Brush, Sarah. I do not feel bad about seeking their help. They have skills and are willing to share. The problem is I have no skill to pay them back.
Really, when will they possibly need to know such marvelous facts like 20% of all species of mammals are bats, the theme to the Batman television show starring Adam West was written by Neal Hefti who also wrote the soundtrack music to the film Lord Love a Duck starring Roddy McDowell, and if trying to traverse a large expanse of ice covered pavement it is best to imitate the way Roddy McDowell walked when performing in the Planet of the Apes movies (it really works, try it). That is the coin of the realm in my world. Pathetic isn’t it?
I was probably destined for this from an early age. When I got home from school in the afternoon I wanted to watch Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas on television. Many kids my age would have been playing in the backyard. Maybe building elaborate roads in the dirt or using a magnifying glass to immolate ants to pass the time. Others would be shooting baskets in the driveway or tossing the pigskin around the vacant lot. Not me.
One particular memory has me watching Merv and Red Skelton is a guest. He does a marvelous physical comedy routine which would not be considered politically correct these days about a guy advertising a brand of Gin and getting properly toasted as he drinks more and more of the product. I immediately went outside, turned on the hose to get a good supply of water, and proceeded to work for an hour or so to perfect the spit take.
This set of priorities stuck with me through my college years. My very first year at the University of Kansas I made sure my class schedule was constructed so I could walk home to my tiny apartment in the student slums in time to see the midday rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show on KSHB, Channel 41. Reading St. Augustine and Machiavelli in my Western Civilization class could wait. I had to get my education on prat falls and bald jokes.
Fast forward to now. I am a 46 year-old school administrator who writes jokes in a notebook he carries most everywhere he goes. But that is not all. I am about to climb on a plane and fly out to Los Angeles to participate in a seminar. Is it a seminar about reaching severely at-risk students? Is it a seminar teaching me the latest methods for improving reading comprehension across the curriculum? Nope. I am spending loads of money to be locked into a hotel ballroom learning how to write sitcoms from one of the guys who wrote for Cheers.