Lack of Generation Gap Backfires

I am lucky in many ways. One way I’m lucky is my children don’t listen to music I hate. Oh, sure, there was a time I was forced to listen to insipid children’s music when we went on car rides to Grandma’s house. There was a Barney tape (remember the purple dinosaur) I would have paid to have ground into barely visible dust by an eighteen wheeler on the turnpike during one trip to Missouri. But since they outgrew that stage it has surprised me what they choose.
A few months ago I saw Emilyjane (the oldest kid) downloading a song from iTunes. As I crept up to look over her shoulder I expected to see a picture of some overly pierced, weird-haired performer who sings about truly depressing things or a large man with his hat on backwards and more jewelry than all the Gabor sisters combined. I was very pleasantly surprised to see a picture of a very wholesome lady in a turtleneck sweater. It was Rosemary Clooney. Yep, the co-star of White Christmas and a hit machine in the 1950’s was going to reside in my 15-year-old daughter’s iPod. I’m sorry, but how cool is that?
Alice (the middle kid) also spends some of her time in the 50’s. She is an Elvis fan. She is not a fanatic with maps of Graceland pasted all over her walls and velvet paintings of the young sexy Elvis in black leather and the older, tubby Elvis in the white leather and sequins adorning her bedroom. She likes his music. She also listens to the Monkees and the Go-Go’s (who were basically the Monkees with estrogen).
George (the youngest) was involved in the high school production last year of “The Music Man” and has developed a liking for musicals. Recently I downloaded Ron Moody singing “Reviewing the Situation” from “Oliver” to share with him.
They all listen to other things which are more hip. I have just shown my un-hip-ness by using the word “hip”. Maybe I should say they listen to musicians who are more “fresh”, “sweet”, “clean”, or whatever other adjective stolen from detergent commercials they are using today to describe modern, popular cra…uh, stuff. Anyway, they do listen to some of today’s music but I don’t think they listen to music I, like so many out of touch generation gap dwellers before me, refer to as devil-worshipping-boom-de-boom music.
As is so often the case for parents, this point of pride has turned to bite me in the wallet. Emilyjane has a wicked crush on Michael Buble. He is a thirtysomething big band, swing singer in the mold of Sinatra or more recently Harry Connick Jr. Well, Buble is going to have a concert in Wichita. This is where the fact she prefers this kind of music backfires on me.
She really wants to go, and I do not have the A #1 arguments to combat her going. I cannot say his music will rot your brain (I do not have any of Buble’s albums but my Frank, Dean and Sammy albums have many of the same songs). Nor can I claim the audience will be full of recidivist sociopaths looking to turn her into just another tattooed wastrel. Ergo, she is going and I am paying.
Since the last concert ticket I purchased was for Billy Joel (in 1978) I had no idea how expensive tickets were. The only feeble counter attack I had to the pretty brown eyes staring up at me asking to go was the cost. I said, thinking this might actually dissuade her, “Those tickets are going to be really expensive. I bet they are as much as $40.” I thought I was exaggerating in order make her realize what a bite it would be. Not only didn’t it work, it made it more depressing for me when I found out how much they really did cost.
That is a story unto itself. The first attempt to buy tickets showed the cheapest ones were $124. At this point I was prepared to tell my daughter that I did not love her enough to sell one of my kidneys in order to afford the ticket and the gas to get to Wichita. After an hour long rant, out loud and via e-mail, about how too many people are just greedy *#&@#^% making it impossible for normal everyday working guys to send their kids to concerts, we found the proper website to buy the tickets. They were just (gulp) $66 dollars a piece.

Going for the Gold...naaahh

The Olympics are starting to wind down. We have all witnessed fast people (runners and swimmers), strong people (shot putters and weightlifters), all-around athletes (basketball players and gymnasts), and people with amazing endurance (marathon runners and those who watch Bob Costas for hours on end). The dedication shown by these athletes as they set aside all else to reach the very pinnacle of their chosen sport is unbelievable. The entire Olympiad is a testament to the over-arching ambition present in the human race. Something I completely do not have.
I realize the Olympics are populated by individuals from all over the world, but I think this drive to be the best at something is taken to the greatest extreme in the United States. I am not just saying this because it was American Michael Phelps who won so much gold it caused him to keep looking over his shoulder in fear of a bowler hat wearing oriental assassin. The preceding sentence was not some racist dig, but rather an overly obtuse reference to the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger. Remember Oddjob trying to knock over Fort Knox? Anyway, everywhere you look in America things are only seen to be truly valuable if they are the best.
At the end of every calendar year newspapers and magazines are awash in Ten Best Lists: the Ten Best Movies, the Ten Best Television Shows, the Ten Best Books, even the Ten Best Weird Band Names (my new favorite is Lady Chatterley’s Hamster). What’s next The Ten Best Entrees Made Mostly out of Vegetables Which Can Grow Larger than Your Head? (Hey, that might be a good name for a band.)
I have no problem if Usain Bolt wants to push himself to run 100 meters like he is being chased by rabid cheetahs on meth. (Digression: The only name better than Usain Bolt for a sprinter might be Usain Spastic Colon.) My concern is this continuing drive to be the best will lead to more people doing things which are dangerous and/or stupid to get there.
The use of steroids is the top example of the perversion of becoming the best. Some guys want to hit a baseball farther than anybody else, which means somebody named Steinbrenner is willing to give them more money than oil company executives spend on campaign contributions. It doesn’t matter that taking steroids not only causes leather wrapped spheroids to fly out of ballparks, but also causes one’s left ventricle to thicken leading to cardiac arrhythmia, one’s liver to malfunction, and even a wicked case of acne, as long as they can whack that ball.
In the kinder gentler days of the fifties if a guy wanted to be the best baseball player he didn’t ingest fake testosterone. He just sold his soul to the devil who looked a lot like My Favorite Martian. The chief side effect of that was Gwen Verdon in silk stockings danced around you. Compare the side effects and it’s no contest. (For the people in the audience who are completely confused put Damn Yankees on your Netflix queue.)
This preoccupation with the idea of the “best” can have other drawbacks. This is most obvious to me in regards to technology. Think about the world before cell phones. In order to have people call you you had to be near a fixed point phone. Now the technology is such a device, not any bigger than a deck of cards, can be strapped to your belt making it possible for your boss to get in touch with you in the car, in the park, in the bathroom to ask you a question about that big presentation which you did not finish because you spent the last three hours at the office playing internet Scrabble.
This land of ours was built on a precept of individual achievement. We are supposed to be the place where anybody can grow up to be president. (Unfortunately, that has been proven true on more than one occasion.) Constantly striving to be the best drove the actions of many famous Americans. What I would like to point out is the Constitution also says the “pursuit of happiness” is important to us. Well, the first synonym of “happy” my computer volunteers is “content”. Content can mean satisfied with things as they are. I think there are times we should pursue leaving things as they are in order to make things the best.
What is my proof? Anne Murray’s recording of The Monkees song Daydream Believer.

My Brain Hurts

I have been having frequent headaches the last month or so. I don’t know what the reason might be. It could be stress from my job. It could be the fact I have cut down my caffeine intake precipitously. It could be I need new glasses. It could be the little man sitting between my ears running all the different communication systems to the rest of my body is pursuing a musical career which has him using my skull as a steel drum playing the entire Jimmy Cliff oeuvre.
I went to the eye doctor to see if my glasses needed to be adjusted. As many people have found after passing a certain age looking at small things becomes more and more difficult. It started with the tiny print on medicine bottles. Then the print in regular books became blurry. Then faces in photographs were hard to identify. Then my youngest child started to appear fuzzy.
Glasses became part of my daily life several years ago. I have upped the power more than once and the previous visit to the optometrist moved me into the wonderful world of trifocals. All of us with trifocals know the most dangerous thing in the world is no longer taunting Dick Cheney, but rather walking quickly down stairs whilst wearing trifocals. Coordinating the distance between your foot and the next step takes more algorithms and geometric theorems than NASA uses figuring the exact launch place and time so its space probe will pass the dejected former planet, Pluto.
Anyway, I decided to go to the eye doctor. I peered into a number of little machines. One of them has little fluttery blobs which indicate how good my peripheral vision is. Peripheral vision is not as important as it used to be. No longer do men have to be able to perceive as wide a field of vision in order to avoid predators. No we just use it to peer at attractive women without making it obvious to our wives we are doing so (or so I’ve heard).
If the eyes truly are the window to a man’s soul those machines have mapped out my soul pretty well. I wonder if the eye doctor sits in his office after hours and giggles at the fact the deepest essence of my being spends a lot of time contemplating whether life is truly better with an afternoon nap or a trip to Dairy Queen.
The outcome of my trip was making each sector of my trifocals more powerful. The good doctor used a poster on the wall showing the interior of a human eye to explain what was happening. He pointed to one particular place and said it was becoming thicker and less flexible as I grew older. If there was one spot I thought might be able to avoid the thickening and becoming less flexible which has struck most every place else on my body, it would be the inside of my eyeball. What’s next? A fat and creaky uvula?
Being healthy for everyone is not as easy as it used to be. When I was a kid people were always encouraged to spend time in the great outdoors. Fresh air and sunshine are just what the doctor ordered. Well, now going out in the sunshine requires SPF 37 (also known as a sweater) and the air in some parts of the world has to be chewed before it can make its way down to the lungs.
Recent reports of a scientific study on diet now calls into question a food which was previously thought to be healthy. The report stated the consumption of tofu could lead to dementia. Here, I always thought it was the other way around.
One of my best friends is a very serious vegetarian. He makes fabulous vegetarian meals. However, there was one time he served tofu hot dogs. In an attempt to be polite I tried to eat it. Then in an attempt to be polite I tried to hide it. The family dog was no help. Even he realized this meat imposter was about as enticing as cauliflower stuffed with lima beans.
Another scientific study shows spinach, even though it is a great source of Riboflavin, can lead to elephantine forearms which may be wonderful for showing off large anchor tattoos, but make it nearly impossible to find shirts which fit.
Okay, that last study about spinach. I made it up. I know it is irresponsible journalism. I hope I didn’t frighten anyone. I apologize but, I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

The alchemy and science of words

Words are magic. I am not just talking about Abracadabra, Open Sesame, or Expelliarmus. Words have magic in them. Creating words by calling out one letter at a time is called s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g, spelling. Which sounds remarkably like what witches of the west, and any other direction, have been doing for years: casting a spell.
Stephen Pinker is a Harvard professor and the author of books about language and how people approach it. In his book “The Stuff of Thought” Mr. Pinker says “… one of the foundations of linguistics is that the pairing between a sound and a meaning is arbitrary, most humans intuitively believe otherwise.” People tend to think words contain some of the essence of what they represent. This idea contributes to the world of dirty words. (And why nobody is supposed to say “Voldemort” in the Harry Potter books.)
When you think of words you shouldn’t say in the presence of your grandmother many of them pertain to…how shall I put this…bodily by-products. It turns out there is a very understandable reason why so many of these words cause discomfort. If a word contains some of the essence of what it represents it follows people want to avoid such terms. The actual “waste” is a likely place for germs and pathogens so people have been hard-wired by evolution to avoid contact with the actual “product”. So, just the words can cause a similar visceral reaction.
There is an organ in the brain which helps with this reaction. The amygdala invests memories with emotion. These little almond shaped do-hickeys light up big time when we peak at people’s brains as they are exposed to emotionally unpleasant images, even words, especially taboo words.
This is part of the brain I, as the father of teenaged girls, need to harness. I would like to make other words push those little amygdala buttons causing a sense of revulsion. Here are a few words I would put on the list: allowance, texting, mini-skirt, backseat, and Victoria’s Secret. I suppose I shouldn’t leave out my ten year old boy. His list of words would include: allowance, Wii, rap music, and more pets.
Mr. Pinker describes how maledicta (fancy Harvard term for curse words) do have a place in our vocabulary. Using them can be cathartic. Walking to the bathroom at two in the morning one invariably finds the missing lego blocks with one’s bare feet. Saying “I do so wish young Ronald would put his toys away properly” does nothing to ease the pain. Whereas, saying words which are easily recognized by stevedores, sailors and stand-up comics truly helps deal with the throbbing.
So, the next time you find an Indonesian mountain weasel has attached himself to your earlobe using only his incisors and your wife chastises you for letting loose with a stream of maledicta in front of the children, you need to elucidate upon the “rage circuit theory”, which explains the emotional release accomplished by utilizing taboo words (loudly) helps deal with sudden unpleasantness.
Here is another new word I learned: dysphemism. I had heard of euphemism, a word used in place of another more offensive word. People do this all the time. An example would be saying “pig fertilizer” instead of the less socially acceptable “works of Corey Feldman.” Anyway, a dysphemism is a word which is less acceptable purposely used to play up the negative aspects.
There are times it makes no sense to sugar coat something. It is important the audience understands the gravity of the situation. An example of this would be when there is an impending happening of cataclysmic proportions. It would not be right to simply tell possible victims there might be an uncomfortable situation in the offing if in fact they are going to be forced to watch a twelve hour marathon of “Three’s Company” episodes, especially if they are from the Mr. Furley years.
Words have power while sounds do not. Your brain is an amazing contraption. It has instant reactions to sounds which are connected to ideas and pretty much ignores sounds that do not. I can shout “purdel” from the roof tops and even though it sounds like a word it will illicit no other reaction than mild puzzlement from people hearing me. But on the other hand, if I go to the roof and yell “melon baller” I will illicit major puzzlement from people wondering why I am teetering on the edge of a building crying out the name of a handy kitchen implement.

Loading up the Family Truckster

For generations families have stepped out of their comfort zones. They’ve taken stock of their finances, packed their belongings and ventured forth into an unknown section of the world and a whole different dynamic of familial relationships. I am, of course, speaking of the Family Vacation.
There have been big evolutionary changes in most aspects of this rite of passage. It is no longer Ma and Pa strapping the water barrels to the side of the Conestoga, wedging sacks of flour between the cradle holding little sister and the small keg of gunpowder, and hoping to get to Grandma’s house before the snow started flying. Modern travel is characterized by each individual in the car being wrapped in a cocoon of personal space aided by the technology of iPods, portable DVD players, specially designed neck pillows filled with heated therapeutic granules and potpourri, and Dad praying they get to Grandma’s house before the power supply for the electric doodads has been drained, requiring actual interaction amongst the occupants of the minivan.
I may just be a typical overly nostalgic middle-aged person, but I think many aspects of the family trips I took as a kid surpass the hyper-technological, safety first travel of the early 21st century. As I have stated before in these pages, I am pro car seat. My children were always wedged into a great tightness, like Pooh in Rabbit’s front door, as we drove anywhere, often to their chagrin. In contrast, in my youth we did not have the rules or even the availability of anything beyond a lap belt in the back seat. The four Pyle siblings would bounce around the interior of the station wagon like free range potato chips in their airy bags before the communistic sameness and compactness of the Pringles can car seats and seat belts were imposed upon us all.
How many of you remember those pre-minivan station wagons, with the inexplicable fake wood paneling on the side (was it supposed to resemble an English professor’s den)? There was a bench seat in front and another one behind it. Beyond that lay an expanse of metal and plastic which was perfect for spreading out an unzipped sleeping bag, a plethora of pillows, a supply of cookies, G.I. Joes, and Danny Dunn, boy scientist, books in order to pass the time. (For girl memories, substitute Barbie and Trixie Belden into the preceding sentence.)
The memories I carry of our family trips have Dad behind the wheel wearing one of those porkpie golf hats, often of a purposefully ugly color, with his elbow crooked out the open window. I was sitting right next to Dad with my oldest brother, George, sitting in the front passenger seat to my right. He wore a military hat which looked like the one Fidel Castro was always seen wearing. (Which was odd, because George may be the least militaristic person I have ever known.) Mom (with no hat) sat behind Dad. Not in some subordinate role, but rather to handle all responsibilities which required more than one hand or taking one’s eyes of the road, i.e. handing out Space Food Sticks and drinks from the thermos of water or tending to the child who was car sick or felt slighted by a barb from another sibling. The baby sister, Mary, would be sitting in the back seat with Mom. The “Back Back” which is what we called the furthermost recesses of the vehicle would be inhabited by number two son, Eric.
There was no technology used. We very seldom even turned on the radio. There was conversation and no fear at all of silence. I believe my dad liked the silence for two reasons. The first reason is the obvious desire for a calm environment in which to drive. The other benefit was if it had been particularly quiet for twenty to thirty miles he would, with no warning, reach out and slap my thigh. He used a cupped hand which did not cause any discomfort, but added optimum volume making sure the surprise was felt throughout the car, not just on my thigh.
This week I will be the guy with the ugly hat, hanging my arm out the window taking my family on a road trip. None of my kids sit close enough to me to slap thighs. I can, however, speed up just enough to cause a kid’s hand to jump as he/she brings a drink to his/her lips putting a dollop or two of water right down the shirt (another trick of the “dad trade” left to me by my father).

A Dad by Any Other Name Would Still be Clueless

I am not the first person to be a dad. That may have been the most patently obvious statement ever. Right up there with phrases like “It can get a little windy in Kansas” and “Dean Martin was cool”.
Even though there have been so many fathers before me there is no master class or even a fully reliable brochure which delineates how to do it well. 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. So, I, like every father before me, just muddle through as best I can.
The family joke is we are not socking money into education funds. We are saving to pay the therapy bills my kids will accrue when they get old enough to realize the sheer volume of stuff I did not understand. There are also the occasional times I do things completely on purpose to cause them grief. One of those things is writing about them in the newspaper (insert diabolical laughter here).
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. Emilyjane, the oldest one, is fifteen. This means she is in high school. This means she is driving. This means she is going to date (ack) boys. This means dad has some adjusting to do.
My wife, Claudia, is adjusting better than I am, but that is to be expected. Just the other night I had between 7 and 249 teenagers in my basement. Okay, it was twelve, but that’s within the range I mentioned. (I’m not lying. It’s hyperbole, a tool writer’s have used for generations.) Anyway, my wife came into the room I was hiding, uh, working in. She was very excited that our house was the “go to” house for my daughter and her friends.
She was focused on the facts that our daughter was in our house, she had friends who were good kids, her 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 daughter, 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 going to bed as they were raucously laughing below me. (Actually, they wouldn’t keep me awake. I can go to sleep lying in the middle of a forest being cut down by thirty or so chainsaws, more hyperbole.)
Alice is child number 2, in birth order, not in my heart. (Each child thinks one of the other kids is my favorite, which plays to my advantage from time to time. Insert more diabolical laughter.) Luckily for me Alice is not to the high school, driving and boys stage…yet. I can still pretend she is a little girl, even though she has grown nine inches in the past year (not much hyperbole), developed a sharp wit (sometimes at the expense of other family members) and started spending inordinate amounts of time fixing her hair and using her cell phone. It happens to all of them sooner or later, like that old movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Both girls were lucky enough to land featured roles in the Depot Theater Company’s production of Seussical. Emilyjane does a great job playing a larger than life character. Her character is a self-absorbed vamp. This role is nothing like her in real life…thank goodness. It shows off her acting chops, her singing talent, her dancing skills and entirely too much leg for the comfort of her old man. Alice plays the kid who “thinks big thinks”. I have to admit I was taken aback by her performance. She showed a professionalism beyond her years which again forces me to face the fact she too is growing up before I have a chance to get used to the idea.
Now for the kid riding drag on this herd, George. He will be going into fourth grade in August. Alice may have played the kid who thinks big thinks, but George lives the role. He can devise elaborate scenarios and characters which would make any Hollywood screenwriter jealous. He does it daily. He loves to describe in minute detail his latest creations. The little dude could talk the bark off a tree, the fur off a sasquatch, and any politician under the table.
I enjoy being a father. I just thought my in charge-ness would last longer. Wrong again, Dad.

Seussical Children

Both the girls have featured roles in the Depot Theater production of Seussical.

Alice is JoJo and Emilyjane is Mayzie LaBird.

Alice was great. She doesn't perform around the house like EJ and George do so it was a bit of surprise to see her really shine up on stage.

Emilyjane had a fun part to play, larger than life and not her personality at all. The role allowed her to show her singing talent, her dancing talent and entirely too much leg for her father's comfort level.

Emilyjane is just out of shot in the balck and white photo shown here and in the newspaper today. Which caused some consternation.

Oil companies can be pretty slick

You may not have heard. The mainstream media isn’t paying a lot of attention to this situation, so I thought I’d point it out as a public service. Gas prices are getting a tad high. According to a Department of Energy website the national average for a gallon of gasoline on July 7th was $4.11.
The line graph on that webpage resembles a mountain range. There have been some real ups and downs over the last two and half years. Unfortunately, the graph point representing the current price is a Mt. Everest, 29,035 feet above sea level, peak, not a Mt. Sunflower, 4,039 feet above sea level, the highest point in Kansas, peak (I can be educational while depressing everyone).
Of course when things like this happen everyone wants to point fingers. The price of gas is going up and up because the oil producing countries are gouging us. If somebody on eBay has a Beanie Baby collection that the United States, most of China, the entire European Union and a great deal of India wants he is not listing it for twenty bucks. Supply and demand is the simplest law of economics. Even the guy left staring at a warehouse full of “Giuliani for President” bumper stickers understands supply and demand, at least he does now.
Maybe it isn’t the fault of the big oil producing nations. Maybe it is the fault of big oil companies. Naaah, it couldn’t be their fault. Those guys are barely making ends meet as they struggle to pay the oil prices and at the same time do all that scientific research into alternative energy resources, renewable ones, which are plentiful right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
I have just been handed this piece of information. Three of the top five companies in the United States, as far as pure income generated, are oil companies. Wait that’s income. It doesn’t mean their making any profit. What? Exxon made a profit of 40.6 billion dollars last year. Which is enough money to purchase 9,878,345,498 gallons of gas at the local pump. That ought to get the family truckster to Disney World and back a few times. Try 68,126,520 times to be exact. This means the entire population of Hutchinson could, individually, drive to Orlando and back once a month for the next 138 years. (As an educator I must point out to all young people reading this that math skills come in handy no matter what your profession, even newspaper columnist. Stay in school.)
Fortune Magazine, the home to all things obscenely rich, lists the top five revenue earning companies, in order, as: Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, General Motors, and Conoco Phillips. Wal-Mart makes its money often trading on the hardship of others, but we are not bashing them at the moment. General Motors brought in a ton of money but they were able to lose much more than they made for a negative profit margin. That leaves the three oil companies.
Exxon made more money in profit than all but fifty-seven of the Fortune 500 made period. Their profit was 11% of their income. Yet we are not supposed to vilify them for making any money off this increase in gas prices. That is like saying the Joker is not to blame for using the money from his bank robberies to buy a mansion, a swimming pool, a private jet, a condo on a remote tropical island, heck, the whole tropical island, like the C.E.O.’s of oil companies do. Rex Tillerson, the C.E.O. of Exxon Mobil has a compensation package (you and I get paychecks, these guys get compensation packages) of $13 million a year. That is (more math girls and boys) $35,616 dollars every day of the year, even Christmas and John D. Rockefeller’s birthday.
T. Boone Pickens announced he wants to put money towards utilizing wind power. He says we ought to exploit the “wind corridor” stretching from the Canadian border to west Texas. Think about it. Instead of dealing with Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad we have to deal with farmer guys from North Dakota. Talk about a no-brainer.
My solution will utilize wind power and find a use for politicians. Place wind turbines around Denver from August 25th through the 28th and Minneapolis from September 1st through the 4th. All the hot air being blown at the political conventions would create enough energy to power electric cars for each citizen of Hutchinson to go to Orlando and back once a month for 139 years.

One nation, under stress, with liberty...

Eleven score and twelve years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. A nation constructed with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. With apologies to Mr. Lincoln, I think I have found the problem. It’s the people.
Our forefathers must be approaching an r.p.m. within their respective tombs which would make a Formula One race car jealous. Formula One engines can reach 19,000 revolutions per minute, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Mr. Jefferson down in Monticello needs an oil change.
Before people start lighting up the Globe Exchange with cries that I am “anti-American” I very much appreciate living in this country and I could only be happier if I had Exxon stock. The precepts this country was founded on are still admirable and worth protecting. This country is still the top dog in many ways and home for the things which are most important – freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of choice in so many aspects of our day-to-day lives. (Do I want to spend my last four bucks on a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk?)
This country is in the middle of its 56th bloodless coup. It is the 56th time we have gone to the polls to decide who will run the joint. Unlike many countries the United States does not rely on strong arm tactics or mindless thuggery to enforce the will of one party. Oh, sure, the advertising and media can be terribly pushy and about as accurate as an inebriated darts player. Also, we’ve had mindless voters, and witless candidates, do great harm. However, a quick glance at Mr. Mugabe and his “run-off” election which actually revolved around “running off” the electorate with guns, clubs, and a level of unpleasantness approaching Stalinesque proportions lets us know things are better here than lots of other spots.
My problem is I have never subscribed to the “it could be worse” line of defense. This brings me back to our spinning founding fathers. They wrote marvelous pieces of work with the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. They set the stage for a nation of freedoms, a nation of choices, and a nation for white men. I’m sorry but that is what they had in mind. Not to fault them. It was the way things were. The true brilliance of the framers of the Constitution is they allowed for change. They knew the world would not remain the same so the rules which governed this great land should be flexible. The impetus for much of the grave spinning has to be so many people ascribe completely wrong interpretations of the documents because they do not see what James Madison and company knew: things change, these rules may not always be just right.
The Constitution took effect march 4th, 1789. Just two years later the Bill of Rights was ratified showing a willingness to fiddle. Over the years we have given more people the freedoms and powers reserved for white guys in the late 1700’s. We have amended the Constitution as well as thought better of it and changed it back. (The 18th Amendment or the 21st Amendment was done while somebody was drunk.) It is a living thing which has occasionally had a pillow placed over its mouth and nose for a prolonged period of time, but has always managed to fight back.
Here are some suggestions for tinkering with the Constitution.
Amendment XXVIII: The rights of citizens to whine and complain about the government shall be abridged if said citizen did not vote in the election pertaining to the matter he/she is kvetching about. (One of the few things normal run of the mill people can do to effect change is vote.)
Amendment XXIX: The citizenry of the United States shall have it strongly re-iterated that earlier in the Constitution it states they have the right to pursue happiness. Happiness is not guaranteed and if you are unhappy you do not have the right to screw things up for others.
Amendment Catch XXII: Any person showing a deep desire to be President of the United States is showing, by said desire, he/she is not qualified to be President because no one in their right mind would want to go through all the junk it takes to get elected unless there were some selfish ulterior motives meaning the good of the nation was not the motivation meaning he/she should not be President. Therefore, officially declaring for the Presidency disqualifies one from running.

The right brain is the right brain

Working in the field of education means frequently I have to learn stuff. Yeah, I know, bummer. This week I was given four books by my bosses which I’m supposed to read over the summer. I guess this means I won’t be reading that private eye thriller as I relax by the pool. Actually, relaxing by the pool is not something I do, which is of benefit to anyone else wishing to relax by the pool. Let’s just say I would never be mistaken for Orlando Bloom.
One book is titled “Building Leadership Capacity in Schools”. I am voting this one most likely to make we consider claiming temporary blindness. The best glimmer of hope is the author’s name: Linda Lambert. That is a classic comic book name. By day she is mild-mannered education expert, Linda Lambert, but at night she becomes Wonder Teacher Lady. Completely unafraid of story problems, able to divide fractions in her head, and armed with only two super sharp No. 2 pencils, she strikes fear into all ill-informed ignorance mongers. Maybe not.
The second one is “The Five Dysfunctions of Team”. At first I thought it was going to be about the Kansas City Royals post-1989, but I found out otherwise. This book presents itself as a leadership fable. The idea is a corporation (let’s say Exxon) is something like that dog carrying a bone who peers into a pond (the outer continental shelf) and sees what he believes to be another dog holding another bone (more oil). The dog is jealous so he jumps into the pond dropping his own bone. The dog is able to find more bones in the pond (offshore oil) but it makes no difference in the price of dog food for at least twelve years. I could be wrong.
The third book is “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. It is a book about how the brain works particularly in regards to the snap decisions people make which are often more accurate than ones made with greater stress and strain. One corollary of Mr. Gladwell’s thesis is these accurate blink decisions are made by people with a large knowledge base in the matter at hand. Snap decisions by Dale Earnhart Jr. about how his engine are highly dependable, but asking him to invest your retirement fund may not be that bright. At the same time I’m not asking Alan Greenspan to diagnose my minivan’s odd noises.
The last book is “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink. This is another book exploring brain science. Mr. Pink spends the first few chapters discussing the difference between the right and left hemispheres of the human brain. The right brain is more holistic and intuitive. It helps people read the context of their surroundings and the communication with others. He explains the skills surrounding inventiveness, empathy, creating narratives, and play come from the right hemisphere.
I get all the science. He then goes on to say all these skills are going to be highly valued in all professions. This is where I have to call baloney. I have very specific memory of the main stream media telling me back in 1982 that liberal arts degrees were going to be in high demand. Liberal arts degrees work the same skills that are right brain skills. Well, I got a liberal arts degree and then worked as an assistant manager at a book store and then as an assistant manager at a video store and then as an assistant manager at a book/video store. Can I sue Newsweek?
Now Mr. Pink is telling me all my right brain skills are in high demand as civilization evolves. People have all of the “got-to-haves” and most of the “want-to-haves” so now they will value things which give them more spiritual fulfillment. Doctors cannot just be good diagnosticians they must have empathy. Products cannot just fill their function they must do it while also giving the consumer an emotional charge. This explains why toothbrushes are redesigned every few months. We could brush our teeth with leaves on a stick. We just want something cooler. There are even racing stripes in some toothpastes.
One thing Mr. Pink pointed out that I grasped on to is the best leaders in organizations are funny. This was a study done by a Ph.D. guy from Harvard. Not some schmoe from some directional school in outer Slobovia. We’re talking Harvard here. Therefore, I will be sending a knee-slapping resume to Microsoft. I’m gonna get me some of that Bill Gates money before it runs out.

The red badge of activity

People are constantly pointing to different happenings, crying out they are signs of the end of the world. The rise in the psychopharmaceuticalization of the general public could be one sign. Spell check just created the longest red line I have ever seen, but I copied the word directly from Amazon.com so I think it is a correct. For those of you who share the opinion of spell check that this is an unfamiliar word it refers to prescriptions which are given to people with psychological issues like depression and anxiety. I don’t think the huge proliferation of these drugs shows the world is going to pot. It just means the world will continue marching towards the precipice in a much calmer manner.
A different, and much less discussed, sign of the changing world was pointed out to me by my wife. This sign is not a marker of anything as apocalyptic as the fall of civilization and the rise of anarchy. It does, however, point out that things really aren’t as they used to be and maybe not even as they ought to be. The most insidious thing about this sign is it effects the most susceptible of the population, our children. “What is this sign?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you. It is the lack of skinned knees.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not wishing pain and bloodshed on the youth of America. It just seems to me that skinned knees can easily be pointed to as indicators of good things. Kids with skinned knees are active children, children who spend time outdoors, children unafraid of rough and tumble behaviors. Kids with skinned knees are living their own lives.
Think about it. It is very difficult to get a skinned knee while shooting dozens of virtual-guns at hundreds of virtual-people, and ripping virtual-spleens from virtual-enemies in virtual-worlds of virtual-conflict. Oh, sure, there is virtual-blood galore for little Malcolm as he sits on his genuine-sofa, manipulating his genuine-controller, as he eats genuine-junk food, creating a genuine-backside large enough to blot out the genuine-sun because he hasn’t worked any genuine-muscles beyond his genuine-thumbs for a genuine-damn-long-time.
In addition kids do not get skinned knees as they sit at the computer surfing the internet, downloading video, illegally sharing music, e-mailing friends, instant messaging predators and generally watching their lives flicker by at 128 kilobits a second.
Another thing to ponder is, when was the last time you saw an ad for Bactine? Remember that spray bottle which was kept handy for those little scrapes and scratches you would get as you went about your daily life. A life which included running, riding your bike (sometimes using a discarded plank and a big rock to construct a ramp with the stability of the Zimbabwean economy), playing football in a vacant lot with stickers and big brothers who thought they were Dick Butkus, and occasionally chasing a friend with the intensity of a lioness looking for dinner for no other reason than you are “it”. The sedentary lifestyle of today’s youth doesn’t require a mixture of Benzalkonium chloride (antiseptic) and lidocaine (anesthetic) for the times when you have all the sata menu items in your bios enabled yet you still cannot get your drive recognized. (I understood none of that. I lifted it from a computer troubleshooting website.)
The dearth of skinned knees is also a sign fewer children are willing to take even minimal risks. I am willing to bet this trend can be attributed to something which started out as reasonable and then just got out of hand. The “world” started pushing safety. I agree we should look out for our children. I make my kids wear a helmet when they ride their bikes. I purchased the knee, elbow, wrist, and self-esteem pads when I got my kids roller blades. I believe in safety.
I fear we had to spin such horrible stories to convince our kids to wear all the protective gear (because it is true you cannot help but look like a Class A Geek wearing it) we created an aversion to taking risks. My wife is excellent at pulling out a “I knew a kid who got all his toes cut off while riding a bike barefoot” story whenever needed.
The concern is the American public may have done too good a job cautioning all of American kiddom about the bad things which can happen if they are not careful. This doesn’t just make them wear proper gear when they ride their bikes. It causes them to look at their bicycle as an imminent danger to be avoided like anthrax powder or Barry Manilow CDs.

Some choices are easier than others

Well, it appears what started with over a dozen choices has now been whittled down to two. The final decision has not been made, but there will be hours of discussion, arguments may get heated, and families will be divided. I am of course referring to: Will “Kung Fu Panda” or “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” earn more money at the box office?
In lesser news it seems we have gotten the two major party candidates set for the 2008 presidential election. The Democrats have been metaphorically bludgeoning each other in a battle like something Tina Turner would have presided over in Mad Max 3. The Republican race was decided so much earlier many people can’t even name three of the former candidates. (Hmmm, let me think…there was Rudy Giuliani…annnd, uh…the guy with the hair, oh, Romney, something, uh, Glove? No that’s not right, uh Mitten, Mitten Romney…and the guy from the Law and Order television show, hmm, Sam Waterston, yeah, that’s him. He played Abraham Lincoln once. He might be good. Wasn’t it Lincoln who said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people into thinking an actor can be president more than once.”)
Unless something unforeseen by any political pundit happens, and it is hard to believe anything can be unforeseen by people who never stop foreseeing, we are left with Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain. What strikes me is the historic aspect. For the first time we can select a person of color or a person almost completely devoid of it. I know it is common nowadays to demand that the machinations of government should be more transparent, but I do not think they meant the guy in charge should be see through. I’m sorry, even dyed in the wool Republicans have to admit John McCain looks like he was constructed out of paste.
I am not really a political humorist (which the previous paragraphs may prove). The chief reason is I’m not angry enough. Oh, there are people in power who do things which really toss my salad, but it is hard to point to any one group as the right group. So often in elections I do not see any candidate who embodies the beliefs, wants, and dreams I harbor in my heart of hearts. Therefore, I am forced to vote for the candidate who seems least likely to come to my house, take money from my wallet, sell my pets for medical experimentation, and set fire to my baseball cap collection. To tell the truth that was really why I didn’t feel comfortable with Dukakis, I feared for my hats.
Settling for the lesser of evils as the criteria for selecting the leader of the free world seems far from optimal. The way the parties revel in pointing out every personal foible or past faux pas makes it impossible to not think of the people running for office as losers of epic proportion or simply evil incarnate. For example, if I ran for office someone would point out the previous sentence contained a split infinitive so what’s to stop me from irresponsibly splitting the atom and erasing life as we know it. The continuous nitpicking by the press, the opposition, and roving bands of school nurses who are trained to pick actual nits would show anyone in a horrible light.
I think the President of the United States should not be perfect. Have you ever met someone who seemed truly perfect? Admit it. You wanted to slug that person right in the chops. It would make world diplomacy even more difficult if every NATO leader was not listening to what the President of the United States was saying but rather imagining him wearing a silly hat and dancing the Merengue because they really hate him.
This peculiar desire the campaigns have to paint their guy as a “Regular Joe” bothers me. I don’t need my president to be able to fix the timing chain on a ’89 Ford Festiva. I need him to fix health care. I don’t need him to know the difference between a Willowleaf and an Indiana spinner fishing lure. I need him to know the difference between progressive and regressive taxes. I don’t need him to know all the words to Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”. I need him to know all the words to the Constitution and I do mean all the words.

Christopher Pyle will never run for high office because he could not resist punching Bill O’Reilly in the face and yelling “There was no spin on that either.” You may contact Chris at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

As if I didn't have enough to do

A few months ago a friend showed me a book entitled “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”. When the creators of the book include the words “must” and “die” there is a certain terminal urgency to the whole thing. So I felt compelled to explore my deficiencies.
The average life expectancy of a man today is around 75, leaving me 30 years to accomplish the task. It would be a bit less daunting if I had gotten a better start. I am going to optimistically give myself about 25 books accomplished from the list, leaving 976 to go.
I’ll have to read 32.5 books a year. That means 2.7 books a month, which means .68 books per week or .097 books per day. Now .097 books a day is fine if I am reading anything featuring talking pigs or such phrases as “the rugged stranger flexed his giant biceps to the ripping point to pull his sweating steed to a stop, just in time to see the raven haired beauty disappear through the convent doorway”. Those books aren’t included.
I started looking over the list, which is arranged chronologically from ancient to recent. The first book listed is “Aesop’s Fables”. Dude, I am on a roll. The second book listed is “Metamorphoses” by Ovid. Screeching halt to the roll takes place. I have heard of it and I probably read bits of it in college but I can’t count it. The third book is “Chaireas and Kallirhoe”…uncle.
One thing I’ve learned is it is not very likely you will run into someone who has actually read many of these books (unless you talk to my mother), so I have gotten good at faking it. I worked at bookstores during my lack of career days. (That is what happens when you have a degree in film studies from the University of Kansas.) I found if I read the blurbs on the back of the book I could actually carry on a short-lived yet intelligent sounding conversation about it.
Since the people in the immediate vicinity hadn’t even read the 257 words on the back cover I was seven or eight pithy comments ahead. I could spout at least one main character name, one plot point and, stealing from the Washington Post book reviewer quote, I could make a value statement pertaining to the author’s status as a giant amongst pre-World War Two existentialist thinkers. Top that! Just because I do not know anything else about the book or even what a pre-World War Two existentialist thinker is, I can then steer the conversation to “How ‘bout that Celtics game last night?” They’ll think I am both a well-read sophisticate (“He used the word ‘existentialist’ in a sentence”) and a man of the common folk (“He used the word ‘game’ in a sentence”).
Looking over the list showed me authors of the 1700s didn’t feel the need to be very creative with titles. Examples are “Robinson Crusoe”, “Joseph Andrews”, “Candide” (read it in high school and remember bits, so I counted it) and “The Monk” (long before anyone heard of OCD or private detectives).
The books on the top of my list as I attack this quest come from this time. The first one sounds like a cartoon from the late sixties: “Roderick Random”. Roderick is able to win because while the bad guys are trying to figure out why he went from reciting the lyrics to Roger Miller’s “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd” to describing the mating rituals of the Philippine Red-vented Cockatoo (which would cause any self-respecting person to shake his head hard enough to create that noise Daffy Duck always made when he had to force his head back into the shape of duck’s head instead of the shape of a frying pan it had turned into when smashed over the head with one) he swoops in and saves the day.
The book which sounds the most intriguing to me has to be Denis Diderot’s “Jacques the Fatalist”. He has to be the literary father of Eeyore.
“Hey, Jacques, did you hear that a guy in England discovered a new planet and named it Uranus,” says a friend of Jacques’s, and it is not easy to be a friend of Jacques’s.
“Swell, not only will its name be a constant source of giggling in third grade science classes, but it will probably spin off of its axis and hurtle into Earth destroying life as we know it,” responds Jacques.
“Yeah…, sooo, how ‘bout that Celtics game last night?”

Christopher Pyle likes to read but has no desire to wade through “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” by Robert Tressel. I did not make that up. It’s on the list.

It is only a movie

The new Indiana Jones movie hit the movie theaters last week. People who knew me in high school know I have a long history of being a movie nerd so it would not shock them I went to the midnight showing. People who have known me only over the last few years would be shocked because sleep is now the most coveted thing in my life.
It was a fun movie and I would recommend it. That is I would recommend it unless you are a card carrying Russian communist. They seem annoyed.
This is yet another example of people have entirely too much time on their hands if they can complain about what the Russian Communist Party is complaining about. They are calling for a nationwide boycott of the movie (in Russia, I’m not in trouble for seeing it in Kansas). According to CNN’s website the group says the film “aims to undermines communist ideology and distort history.”
This is why as a political party the communists are as viable as the Whigs. They actually believe the aim of a Hollywood movie is to do anything other than make more money than can fit into Lenin’s tomb, Stalin’s moustache, Khrushchev’s shoes and blanket the whole of Siberia in stacks of thousand ruble notes.
Accusing an Indiana Jones movie of distorting history is like accusing water of being wet, accusing Yao Ming of being tall, or accusing Immanuel Kant of stating that our understanding of the external world has its foundations in both experience and a priori concepts offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy. Well, duh.
If the communists think the general public is going to movies to get accurate history than all Americans must believe communist women in 1957 had Thelma Brooks 1920’s hairdos, carried rapiers and had accents which were Russian sometimes but not throughout all their dialogue. We must also believe that a man with a bullwhip can defeat a platoon of machine gun toting soldiers and the Ark of the Covenant is sitting in a warehouse in Nevada because if it was on display at the Smithsonian the government’s insurance premiums would go through the roof because so many patrons’ faces melted off when they looked at it.
It’s a movie for goodness sake, not a doctoral thesis. Sit back and enjoy the snappy dialogue, the action sequences, and the computer generated ants.
Hollywood can’t win. It doesn’t matter who the bad guy is there will be some group organizing a boycott or picketing the theaters. I am glad I grew up in a time when people were not as touchy. A time when people had a clue and did not believe everything in the movies was real. A time when people could relax and allow themselves to be entertained without worrying about hurting the feelings of any and every subgroup of the world’s population.
Twenty years ago the movie “A Cry in the Dark” with Meryl Streep and Sam Neill was in theaters. It was based on a true story about a mother put on trial for the murder of her child. She claimed the child had been spirited off by wild dogs during a camping trip in the outback of Australia. Neither the restaurant chain nor any group of Dingo Anti-Defamation lawyers got mad.
In 1978 “Dawn of the Dead” was on screens throughout the country. For those of you unfamiliar with the film it follows a group of not dead people being menaced by undead people. There was one instance in San Francisco of a group of decomposing people from the group Z.O.N.K. (Zombies Only Need Kindness) picketing a theater in the Haight Ashbury district, but since they moved so slowly and their chanting was completely unintelligible no one really cared.
In 1968 “Rosemary’s Baby” came out. I was only six at the time so I did not see it, nor did I pay a lot of attention to news reports, but I am willing to bet there was no petition drive by Satan-worshipping New York apartment dwellers asking Paramount Pictures to soften up their portrayal.
So to those Russian Communists complaining about Mr. Spielberg’s latest film I say chill out. Take a lesson from the League of Bald-Headed Megalomaniacs who resisted the temptation to picket Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Marathon Man, Apocalypse Now, Flash Gordon, Superman (I and II), Austin Powers (I, II, and III) or Iron Man. It would have been exhausting.

Nothing like that summertime feeling

Graduation exercises have been completed. The last day of school for the 2007 – 2008 school year was this week. Can you remember that feeling of release when you were 9 years old and you walked out of the classroom in late May? You knew you had nearly three months free. Free from math homework. Free from book reports. Free from sitting next to that guy who thinks it is brilliant comedy to burp the theme to Gilligan’s Island, frequently.
With the fragmentation of society the school experience is one of the few things shared by most everyone. Not that everyone’s experience is the same. As long as there have been schools, there have been outcasts and cool people, brains and “academically challenged”, as well as athletes and picked-on-by-athletes.
I have this vision of Athens in 400 BC. Socrates is sitting with a bunch of young, Greek, would-be philosophers. He asks the students to work through a logic problem. If all Greeks wear togas and togas are a sign of high intellect then..?
Brain: All Greeks are intelligent.
Academically Challenged: The Aegean Sea…no, wait… twelve!
Cool Guy: Want to come over and see my Grecian urns?
Jock: I hold the Athenian records for discus, javelin and an Oracle of Delphi defying long jump.
Anti-Jock: My toga chafes something awful.
Outcast: Greeks are stupid, togas are stupid, and you’re stupid. I’m moving to Persia and raising cats.
I am willing to bet not only do all readers recognize the types mentioned above, but most can put actual names from his/her school days with each bit of dialogue.
As a student, a teacher, and an administrator I have spent more than thirty-five years in schools and classrooms. (Suddenly, I feel the need to weep, but at least I can diagram that sentence.) Schools in America are truly one of the last places on earth where all different kinds of people mix together. Sure there are cliques of people who gravitate towards each other in school, but when we get out into the world it is much easier to get more and more insulated within certain types and groups. When was the last time you spent quality moments with a person with whom you would have shared, giving or receiving, a wedgie? I’m not talking about the incredibly annoying guy at the convenience store checkout buying eight different varieties of lottery tickets and changing his mind between the cheapest brand of cigarettes and the next to cheapest brand. It would be so very satisfying to reach over and grab a fistful of the Fruit of the Loom waistband easily accessible because the pants he’s wearing are sagging well below the equator exposing the prime meridian. This is not quality time. It’s just a chance encounter slowing you down as you dig a few Kruggerands from your safety deposit box to buy enough gas to get to Cimarron.
Schools are not just places for cliques and stereotypes. They are so much more, but since I write a humor column I am going to talk about things which make me giggle.
As is often the case with school these days we have some big banners in the hallways with words of wisdom for the kids. My personal favorite reads: “Stand up for what is right even if you stand alone.” That by itself is a fine sentiment. The funny bit is instead of being attributed to some philosopher or world leader it is simply attributed to “Anonymous”. It is hard to take the guy seriously about standing alone if he won’t even own up to the quote.
There is another banner which just makes me shake my head and smirk at the irony. It reads: Character is what you do when no one else is watching. It is the only banner in the building which has been vandalized.
I was walking down the hall the other day looking at a bunch of cool posters created by students. They were all showing images and explaining things about American history. One poster also showed the importance of proof-reading. The title emblazoned across the top was: The French and Idian War. This brings to mind a bunch of French soldiers fighting tooth and nail with a group of people in strict Freudian analysis attempting to get a handle on their most instinctual and base urges. The French are left wondering exactly how to combat the Idians who are either stuck to the couch describing Salvador Dali-esque dreams or eating massive quantities of doughnuts looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

The Few vs. The Many

Anyone who has been forced to sit through a committee meeting will agree the decision making process can slow to the pace of a snail, a snail who was just run over by a minivan carrying five sumo wrestlers, when you open the process to multiple people. Recently I learned about some things which seem to contradict this.
Let’s look to the world of nature. The lowly ant can create feats of engineering which make the builders of the New York City subway system look like a three-year-old with a plastic shovel. The problem is the individual ant does not have the intellect of the three-year-old. The ant doesn’t even have the intellect of the shovel. Yet, they “know” what to do and how to do it when you get them all together.
Since people give human qualities to everything under the sun, we think some ant must be the boss. Wrongo! Nobody is the boss. You look at any one individual ant and you see brain power only slightly greater than the twig the insect is carrying. These hexapods are stupid. But, when you go to the big picture you find “intelligence” surpassing what is possible for any other living thing.
As research into how the brain works keeps finding more and more specifics, it is looking like the ant model may be a decent analogy. Each individual neuron has a very limited range of function, a.k.a. the IQ of a plastic shovel. But, when a whole bunch of those little synapse start synapping (not a term recognized by the American Medical Association) amazing things happen.
One little group of neurons has the capacity to recognize color, another group sees shape, another size, another smell and so on and so on. When all these little groups start chirping you have something like an orchestra. Each individual instrument may sound weak or dissonant, but put them all together you have harmonies and melodies and all the stuff which creates Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli.
For example, one set of neurons starts firing because they are programmed to see green, another group reports round, and so on. When all are “playing” at the same time your brain “hears” Rachmaninoff’s Variations on an Apple of Granny Smith.
Now let’s look at groups of people. There was this guy who was a very big elitist. He really thought the only people who should vote, own land or even have children should be educated upper class people. One day in 1906 he is visiting a fair of some sort. There is a man selling guesses at what a large ox weighs. The people who get closest win prizes. No one guesses the exact weight, but lots of people guess. This elitist guy asks the guy running the contest if he can have all the slips of paper with the guesses.
Sir Francis Galton, the snobby British scientist, expects to prove that all these uneducated, common people would make horrendously absurd and wrong guesses. So, he totals them up and then divides by the 700 or so guesses to find the average. The average of all the guesses turns out to be literally one pound less than the actual weight of the ox. They whole group of people had a better “intelligence” than any of the individuals.
Lots of scientists have done similar experiments. Place a jar of jelly beans in front of a large group of people, and ask them to guess how many. The average of all is quite frequently better than any single guess.
The natural extrapolation of all this information leads me to think the collective intelligence of the population is actually smarter than each individual. Then I look at the things which are truly driven by large numbers of people. The internet makes it possible for millions of people to see such intellectually tantalizing material as kittens sitting on computer keyboards and fifteen-year-old boys re-creating wrestling moves requiring immediate medical attention. Television makes it possible to choose which karaoke yokel will become a household name and then join Taylor Hicks in the “where are they now” file. Or the crème de la crème - general elections. Aack!
What all this boils down to is, if we want to select a president, fix health care, improve the environment, or even select ABC’s fall schedule we may want to consider limiting the people involved in deciding. But, if I need to know how many Reese’s Pieces it takes to fill Charles Barkley the general public would come in handy.

Truly Useless Bits of Information

Recently, 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. Obviously, the last thing these older, more sophisticated, fainting goats want is to be featured in one of those annoying, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercials.
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 occasion 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.
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).
Oh, one more thing, I had a joke about Doc Brinkley trying to restore a man’s virility with goat parts combined with the information about fainting goats, but decided to err on the side of good taste. If you want to know what it was, e-mail me at the address given to the left of this column.

Here is the less tasteful joke for my blogging friends:
You may ask why I talked about fainting goats for the first half of the column and Doc Brinkley for the second half. Well, there is a missed by that much connection. Doc Brinkley may have been closer to the truth than even he thought. He had the right animal just the wrong species. If he had used special parts of the myotonia congenita goats and implanted them in men to enhance their amorous abilities he might have truly had the first Viagra. All you have to do is yell Boo!

iPod, therefore I am (sorry Mr. Descartes)

Lately I’ve been going through a phase of listening to a bunch of podcasts. What is a podcast? Those of you in the iPod generation (which I am in simply by proxy, because I am a parent and have to keep up with certain technological upgrades or be mercilessly made fun of by my children) already know. Podcasts are radio. Woohoo technology is amazing, someone re-invented radio. I hope Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy are on next.
Okay, that is not quite the extent of it. Podcasts are MP3 programs (don’t ask me what MP3 means, as I said, I am only allowed into the club by proxy) created by anyone from respected journalists like Bill Moyers to Ignatz and Jughead hanging out in their basement broadcasting their most recent arguments as to who would win a battle between Spiderman and Yoda. This is not a paid advertisement for any Apple product but I must say there is a huge selection on iTunes of podcasts and many of them are educated, erudite, funny and thought-provoking. Just because this is not a paid endorsement of Apple I am not above accepting a gratuity from Mr. Jobs or Mr. Wozniak. I’d love one of those really skinny MacBook Airs. They are so cool…end of shameless begging.
I have on my iPod a variety of things: interviews with writers Michael Chabon, Aaron Sorkin, and Dave Barry (not all at once), a PBS program entitled Taxing the Poor, a short funny story told by Malcom Gladwell, The Bugle – hilarious fake news broadcasts from two British guys, and even old radio shows like The Shadow. My favorite one right now is a series from WNYC, public radio from New York, titled Radio Lab. This show looks at science and explains the inner workings of normal everyday things as well as things which sound like whacked out science fiction.
The one I was listening to as I walked to work recently (I’m walking to work in an effort to do my bit for the environment, to save money, and to improve my health, not because I want to) was discussing the idea of genes and what bioengineers are able to do. The mainstream news spends more time with the scary bits of bioengineering, like cloning human beings which could lead to such horrible things as more than one Oprah (shudder). Remember when a group of Scottish scientists cloned a sheep? Nobody talked about the most shocking aspect of that event. There are Scottish scientists?! Other than Montgomery Scott the chief engineer on the Starship Enterprise always ranting about not having enough power, I had no idea Scotland was a treasure trove of scientific minds.
Not all bioengineering is Frankenstinian horror of scientists tinkering with things best left to higher powers (powers like Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak, I’d still like that MacBook if you’re not too busy). A group of undergraduates at M.I.T. had to work with e. coli bacteria in their lab. E. coli smells awful. So they took a gene from a petunia and spliced it with the e. coli genes and made e. coli that smelled like wintergreen mints. I did not make that up.
The marketing people should get to work trying to take the fear factor out of bioengineering with ads touting “Bioengineers – Making the World Smell Better, One Highly Deadly Bacteria at a Time.” Maybe these brainiacs should get to work on things which will make day-to-day life easier. It would be simpler for every day folks to see the benefits of grass which stays green and only grows to one and half inches so you never have to cut it, than to try to explain the concept of splicing genes so we no longer have terrible issues with disease and people who seem compelled to buy non-Apple computer products (ahem, remember that MacBook, ‘kay?)
Here are some other suggestions to make people more forgiving of tinkering with DNA. I’d like a shih tzu with genes from an electric eel – a burglar laughs at the little lap dog patrolling the grounds until he gets 500 volts shot into his ankle by little Bitsy-Poo. How about someone makes cauliflower which doesn’t taste like paper-mache paste? Or maybe just a simple herb that gives me the power of twenty atom bombs for twenty seconds (250 bonus points if you can tell me what cartoon that came from).

News of the World or Fashion Statement?

A new line has been crossed blurring what is supposed to be a source of news and unbiased reporting and the ever present and truly all-powerful commerce. Back in the day Edward R. Murrow and his kind balked at blending the news with anything else. There was a sense that democracy was built upon an informed populous making it at least difficult for the powers that be to get away with things which were for the good of the few and the powerful and not the many and the deserving.
There is a great line from the play “Inherit the Wind”. A cynical newspaper reporter says the job of good journalism is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”. It is more difficult to do this if you are worried about the bottom line. So, in the grand tradition of journalistic integrity the Cable News Network, better known as CNN, now makes it possible, with a few clicks of your mouse, to buy t-shirts printed up with the headlines from their website. The r.p.m.’s recorded as Mr. Murrow spins in his grave if harnessed on a turbine could light up the eastern seaboard as well as recharge my iPod for as long as I live. (Okay, so I threw a little something in just for me. Is that so bad?) This may not be a sign of the apocalypse or even an indication that we can no longer trust all news organizations. But, it’s darn close.
The next question I have to ask is: Who wants these t-shirts? Here are a few of the headlines available as I look at the website: “Pacing man stuck 41 hours in elevator”, “Synchronized swimmers faint in unison”, “Blind man grabs, pummels intruder” and “Rep calls workers ‘illiterate peasants’”. I’ll admit, the one about the synchronized swimmers is a bit of a giggle, but that doesn’t mean I want it emblazoned across my chest as I walk around the supermarket.
Whatever happened to the good old days? Remember when the smiley face populated many a t-shirt? This was long before it became an icon for the shameless greed of a certain retail establishment, which reported a profit of $12,731,000,000. No, my finger did not get stuck on the zero key on my computer. That is what Fortune magazine reported. It is not just what they brought in. It is the PROFIT even after they paid their C.E.O. an obscene amount of money which he and the six generations to follow him could not spend on anything but vile excess.
Back to CNN’s t-shirts. If we are going to trivialize the news, which often trivializes people’s pain and suffering, why not go whole hog? The Time-Warner Corporation (which is a distant 48 places behind the smiley face behemoth on the Fortune 500 list, making a measly profit of 4,387,000,000) could use a profit booster. They could use the headlines to make a comedy show with the headlines as the inspiration for the humor. For example: Pacing man stuck 41 hours in elevator suddenly realizes he was in his closet all along and feels most embarrassed for all the 911 calls he made. Synchronized swimmers faint in unison is a four second sight gag. Blind man grabs, pummels intruder and when police arrive they find a bruised, disheveled and disoriented UPS guy and a red faced blind man. Rep, meaning a state representative duly elected to the state house of Colorado, calls workers ‘illiterate peasants’ recants statement when he realizes just because he can’t read the language they use doesn’t make them illiterate, but rather, it just makes him an idiot.
The frequently asked questions page on the CNN website pertaining to the t-shirts proudly states, “With CNN Shirts you can wear the news.” They fail to say it would be much cheaper to fold this very issue of the Daily Globe into one of those Admiral Lord Nelson hats and wear that, than to spend fifteen bucks on a “high quality American Apparel t-shirt” sporting the words “Baby falls twenty feet onto postal worker.”
Here is, hands down, the most pathetic frequently asked questions I have read on any computer screen: “I took my CNN shirt on vacation and I have great pictures. Where can I send them?” I swear that is word for word off the website. You can look for yourself (http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/faq/). As for where he can send it I would have to suggest the level of purgatory in which people are forced to watch vacation slide shows for eternity.

Baby, that's expensive...

If I listen to the experts (and more particularly the marketing people) it is amazing I grew up without being unhappy, stupid or dead. Do not get the wrong idea. My family was an excellent group to grow up with and learn from. The issue is there wasn’t any of the stuff available then which is so intensely necessary to create happy, smart, and safe babies.
I slept in a crib which had gaps between the bars daring me to wedge my head through them and sustain an injury. My mother did not place musical speakers on her belly and play Mozart piano concertos to me prenatally thus increasing my intellectual powers exponentially. (I must be somewhat smart, because I use words like “exponentially” in a sentence, but I am not sure if the plural of concerto is “concertos” or “concerti”.) Many of the toys I played with were not academically designed but simply appealed to my imagination, gasp. I had wooden blocks (maybe even with lead paint) metal toy trucks and later in life an erector set with metal edges more efficient than a Ginsu knife.
Okay, I will admit moving away from choking hazards and other health and injury risks is a step in the right direction, but the baby product industry has gone well beyond that. I found a crib on Amazon.com which sells for $1,780. For that price is should not only double as a changing table, but it should actually change diapers. Speaking of changing tables, there was a very basic one made of teak for a mere $358. Considering that many baby experts (meaning experts about babies, not experts who are babies) say changing a diaper with the kid lying on the floor is the safest way to do it. Unless you are changing little Timmy at the top of a flight of stairs there is nowhere for him to fall if he is already on the floor.
Car seats are necessary. As a parent I always had my kids in car seats. Getting a car seat properly secured in the back of a two door Ford Escort requires Cirque du Soleil contortionist skills and the strength of a very unhappy Bruce Banner. (For those of you who grew up only reading educationally sound material, Bruce Banner is the mild mannered alter ego of the Hulk. See what you missed listening to Baby Einstein tapes and reading Charles Dickens for the Little Dickens.) A benefit is the occasional output of warm moisture spreads over the lining of the car seat rather than the pants of the parent. A drawback is the ability to soothe an annoyed baby tied like a teeny-Houdini into the car seat on a nine hour car ride to southeastern Missouri required listening to music tapes which would make Barney wish he was with his extinct brethren at the bottom of the La Brea Tar Pits.
My wife and I took our babies for an outing in one of those lightweight umbrella strollers. You know the ones with wheels stolen from old shopping carts meaning one goes hard left at all times. It folded up for easy storage in the hallway so you tripped over it nightly. Now there are strollers made by a company named Bugaboo which cost $900 and come in a range of colors including sand. Here is another stroller listed on Amazon: Peg Perego Uno Convertible Carriage to Stroller System in Moka. It sounds more like a complex order at Starbucks.
There is even a heading at Amazon for the “Green” baby. This does not mean a baby who has eaten way too many jars of Gerber’s green beans. (Actually, one of my children was so fond of Gerber sweet potatoes and carrots she turned a bit orange.) It is referring to a little baby Al Gore who wants to be a good steward of the environment. One “green” product is Seventh Generation Chlorine Free Diapers. I think the marketing guys need to head back to the drawing board. A diaper is definitely one thing which should not be handed down for seven generations.
Here is the final product I found which made me go, oy. There is a kit you can buy to check the alcohol level in breast milk. In a mere two minutes a new mommy can see if her night on the town alters her output from “Got Milk?” to “Always smooth never bitter”.

It Never Seems to be Enough

There always seems to be something to want. I bet Bill Gates, who has more money than there are reasons to hate Bill Gates, wishes for something. I would like to have the skill set possessed by LeBron James, but I bet he still wishes for something (probably a good point guard). Tom Hanks has won two Oscars, seems happily married, and is financially set for life, but he might still want a writer to come up with the perfect big screen version of his sitcom Bosom Buddies. Okay, maybe not. True contentedness probably doesn’t exist.
When you think about it there are so many things to want it just makes sense to always feel like you are missing something. A person can want material goods, like a fancy car, the newest electronic doo-dad, or the complete library of Rocky and Bullwinkle on DVD. A person can want deeper understanding of the world around them, like answers to the eternal questions. What is the meaning of life? Are there intelligent beings beyond this planet? Why does Ben Affleck keep getting cast in movies? A person can want intangibles, the ability to paint fabulous works of art, an insight into human beings creating a talent to help people face the demons of their psyches, or the power to cloud men’s minds and show all that the weed of crime bears bitter fruit. (A fifty point bonus for the readers who know what hero did that.)
Just this week, I found myself wanting something which really would make no genuine difference in my life. I wanted the Kansas basketball team to win the game. There is no reward coming my way. T. Boone Pickens is not going to offer me millions of dollars to start rooting for the Oklahoma State Cowboys. Mark Cuban is not going to draft me and pay me a huge salary to be a fan of the Dallas Mavericks. I won’t even get a free hat touting the ‘Hawks as the 2008 National Champions. I knew all that going into the game. I sat next to my daughter on the couch appearing to be a very calm person when suddenly I reached over, grabbed her shoulder with one hand and her knee with the other. I shook her hard enough to rattle her teeth and said, “I really want to win this game.”
Why? Why, would watching young tall people run up and down a wooden floor tossing a leather spheroid through an iron hoop more adeptly than another group of young tall people make my life better? I don’t know. But, you know what? I think it did. It was great fun. I yelled when Mario hit the three like I had just been named supreme ruler of Dodge City (meaning I get to decide where the special events center goes). I was keyed up for a long time after the game so I couldn’t sleep. I have to admit I was pretty smart. I had arranged for a vacation day for Tuesday well in advance…hmmm, maybe I should be the one to decide where the special events center goes.
I do understand why some people just don’t get fired up about sports, but I think they are missing something. Sports can be a unifying thing. The Friday before the Final Four was to be played a whole lot of people where I work wore KU shirts. This included people who are far more inclined to wear purple cats than crimson and blue birds. There was a bond. We are not talking about suddenly having Serbs and Croats sharing straws in a malted milkshake at the drug store, but there was camaraderie.
I can remember sitting in my family’s living room and watching the Jayhawks win back in 1988. I can see my father sitting in his recliner as we cheered Danny and his friends over the hated Billy Tubbs and the Sooners. My father and I had a good relationship so it is not like the only thing we shared was sports, but it was something we shared when I was in the room with him or hundreds of miles away pretending to be an adult. I am lucky enough that I watched Monday night’s game with my daughter. We too have a good relationship, but since she is a teenage girl she is therefore as foreign to me as, well, as a teenage girl. They were foreign to me when I was a teenage boy and matters have not improved with age.
I got the victory I wanted, but I still want more stuff.

Christopher Pyle would like to be discovered by a literary agent and given a huge advance on his first novel. All of the agents out there can reach him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Doing the right thing ain't always easy

Morality: a code of conduct held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong, whether by society, philosophy, religion, or individual conscience. As a father and an educator I spend a lot of time trying to instill the idea of right over wrong.
Recently I listened to a documentary broadcast from a New York public radio station (WNYC’s Radio Lab) all about the concepts of morality. Here is a morality conundrum discussed on this show, which is frequently used by scientists working with how people decide right and wrong.
There are five workers toiling away on some railroad tracks. There is a train headed their way. They are oblivious to the danger. You cannot get their attention. You have two choices. You can do nothing and allow the five workers to die or you can pull a lever which causes the train to go onto a side track where there is only one worker. Saving five, yet sacrificing one. The great majority of people asked this question say they would pull the lever.
Then there is a twist to the next question. There are still five workers facing impending doom. The new wrinkle is you are now standing on a bridge over the tracks. There is no lever, but there is a rather large man standing next to you. If you push him off the bridge he will land on the tracks which will cause the train to stop, saving the five workers. The great majority of people asked this question would not push the man.
The math is the same. Sacrifice one for the sake of the five. The difference seems to be how comfortable people are with the degree of “hands on” the sacrificing of the one is. What the scientists asking the question failed to do was go into more depth. If the rather large man standing next to me on the bridge is loudly singing “It’s a Small World” I would be much more likely to push him.
Let’s step away from the scientific, ivory tower version of morality and go more real life. What I am always trying to get across to children is that people should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, not because you get paid off. Unfortunately, the “what’s in it for me” mentality seems to permeate the culture.
I remember reading in some educational journal about a teacher of first grade kids. She was proudly describing how she would distribute Skittles (bite sized and, if I might say so in a blatant hope that someone from the Mars candy corporation will read this and send me a couple of free cases for giving them a plug in my column, a very delicious candy) to her class for behaving correctly. The problem for me arose when she just as proudly stated that when her class started acting up all she had to do was lift up her jar of mouth-wateringly delicious (maybe three free cases?) Skittles and shake it. The noise would cause the kids to get back on task.
Does anyone else out there find this frightening? Seven year old children are doing what they are supposed to do because, like seals in a circus, the “trainer” will throw them treats. This teaches them the only reason to be good is because you’ll get paid off. No concern about kindness, ethics, or even that selling your soul for bits of sugar, corn syrup, and hydrogenated palm kernel oil is actually pretty cheap.
I also have visions of this poor teacher forgetting to go to the store one Monday morning and her candy supply is gone. Her students progress from slightly unruly to focusing the sun through one kid’s glasses to start a fire using the math books as kindling while the poor teacher, who is tied to a stake, keeps violently shaking an empty jar. Lord of the Flies, all for want of a two dollar and ninety-nine cent bag of candy.
One quote from the radio documentary was, “If you remove empathy from the morality equation it all falls apart. It’s just a bunch of rules.” This seems pretty obvious to me. If I cannot understand what it feels like to have a hive of angry bees duct taped to my thigh what is to stop me from doing it to someone else. If it was just an e-mail from my boss saying I should not duct tape a hive of angry bees to another person’s thigh I might still do it.

A Cry for Laughter

The only thing I really want anyone to think as they read my column is that something in it is funny. It doesn’t need to be “chuckle drolly to oneself” funny or even “obvious smile on the face” funny. I just want people to find the things I say amusing.
I have to admit I’d love to know I made someone spit their morning coffee across the breakfast table because they laughed so hard at something I wrote, which is the grown up equivalent of having milk come out your nose at the third grade table in the cafeteria because Tommy Belcher timed the hand-in-the-armpit noise perfectly with the P.E. teacher walking by.
I think I have always gravitated towards funny. Growing up my family laughed a lot. We would watch television together and when Tim Conway really got going on the Carol Burnett Show we would all laugh. When there were off-color jokes - which when I was a kid simply revolved around a subtle double entendre as opposed to now when the jokes are often only slightly less “adult” than a Lenny Bruce after midnight set, - anyway, when there was a grown up joke that I didn’t get I knew something about it was funny because my father’s stomach would make little up and down motions as he suppressed his laughter in front of the kids.
In my life there was no Bar Mitzvah to mark my passing into adulthood, nor any aboriginal ritual scarification to claim I was no longer a child. Which is good because if ritualistic scarification was what showed I had reached the age of independence I would still be living at home having my mother wash my socks because I am so not doing that. For me the validation for passing beyond childhood simply revolved around making adults laugh. I’m not talking about the laugh you get when you’re four and you mangle a knock knock joke beyond all recognition and everyone laughs because of the Salvador Dali surrealism of “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Boo.” “Boo Who?” “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana!” I’m talking about a snappy turn of phrase which occurred in my own little brain at the opportune moment and everyone at the table genuinely laughed. That was my version of Rabbi Leibowitz saying “Now you are a man.”
This may explain a few things about my psyche. The first is probably the fact that I haven’t completely grown up. I wear Chuck Taylor high tops to work, I have Batman action figures on my desk, and I’d rather stick a pencil in my eye than fill out insurance forms. If I did stick a Ticonderoga #2 in my pupil I’d be filling out insurance forms all day for weeks, so I just grit my teeth and try to remember if my grandmother on my father’s side ever had high blood pressure or scurvy.
The other insight into my personality has to do with the fact I think I write what I write to make people like me (Pathetic? Maybe). Just like when I was little and getting my mom and dad to laugh validated me in my mind, making people laugh today helps me feel valuable. This is probably why the humor I prefer is not mean spirited. I would never be able to write material for Don Rickles.
I think the Mark Brothers are funny, but the Three Stooges aren’t. I think Bugs Bunny is funny, but Woody Woodpecker isn’t. I think making fun of powerful politicians is downright hysterical, but making fun of people who cannot fight back is reprehensible. To me humor should create, not tear down.
Laughter itself creates good things. It has been proven to have medicinally beneficial properties. The irrefutable source of Wikipedia (okay it is sorta refutable) says laughter has been shown to boost the body’s production of infection fighting antibodies. That is good. So if you laugh at my column you can send me five bucks and write it off as a medical expense. Two people happier, that’s positive.
On a final note, funny things are everywhere. Here is great example from a week ago. My oldest daughter and I were driving on a country road. There was a dead possum on the dirt shoulder. That is not intrinsically funny, but we made some comment about it might not be dead but just playing possum. That was slightly amusing. The real joke happened a couple days later. My daughter and I were driving down the same road and saw the same dead possum. My daughter said, “That possum has amazing work ethic.” Now that’s comedy.

Beware the Ides of March Madness

“To invest absolutely everything in something that means absolutely nothing,” was a phrase I heard on ESPN Radio a while back. That is an accurate way to describe sports. Sports fans understand that it really doesn’t matter who wins the Super Bowl, the World Series, or the NCAA tournament. At least intellectually they do. This does not stop them from painting their bodies and wearing shorts to a Packers game in January. I don’t care how much cheese you eat, brass monkeys are putting on long johns in Wisconsin during the playoffs, Well Diggers Local #327 has special posterior polar fleece allowances in their contracts for this time of year, and Witches have…well, you get the idea…
A general sports fan watches the games for the competition and the athleticism. The fanatics make a particular team their most important emotional investment. When their team is playing they ignore spouses, kids, chores, nuclear threats, and half-naked swimsuit models, unless it is during a commercial. It reaches religious proportions. The gospel according to Vince Lombardi is quoted. The commandments of Coach K are espoused. The Curse of the Red Sox was exorcised with more prayer than Max von Sydow threw at Linda Blair. The trials and tribulations of a Chicago Cubs fan make Job look like a slacker. Okay, I overstate a bit, but that is what sports fans are: over the top.
There is a single question I can ask to see if you are a true sports fan. Do you own a small radio with a single earphone that you can inconspicuously wear on your body? If the answer is yes I am willing to bet that at some time you used this ingenious device to listen to the game at a family event. Most of us can get away with this for a while. The problem arises when it is a close game. Screaming “Alright, baby!” and leaping into the aisle to do a happy dance when your guy buries a three-pointer at the buzzer is frowned upon by most folks at the wedding. Except the father of the bride, who cannot believe his daughter scheduled her wedding in March, dancing there beside you.
The NCAA Tournament has started up and it is a huge thing these days. Car companies design sales around them. The words “March Madness” are used more often than the words “That is not what we meant when we said stay in touch with your constituents, Governor Spitzer” were said in New York recently. There are scientific studies proving the overall productivity of offices drops dramatically the Monday after the brackets are announced because the office pools take precedence over selling stocks, designing software, and even staying in touch with your constituents (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
I have to admit I truly love this event. Where else can a person hear names like Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, Nikita Mescheriakov, Alexis Wangmene, and Longar Longar without having a United Nations security clearance? Where else will perfect strangers hug each other like reunited brothers returning from battle just because a guy with an overactive pituitary gland was able to shove a rubber spheroid through an iron ring (with authority). Where else can you hear professional broadcasters say things like: “He has been absolutely dominant at both ends.” or “The tip is controlled by the Trojans.”?
I am a Kansas Jayhawk fan and have been for quite a while. This means I have experienced the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I know exactly where I was sitting as I watched Danny Manning get his 18th rebound as the clock went to triple zeros against the Oklahoma Sooners and win the championship in 1988. Also, I couldn’t sleep when Jacque, Jerod, Paul, Scot, and Raef got beat by Arizona in 1997. My wife and I still gauge the level of disappointment for anything which happens in our lives against that night.

Me: Well, honey, I didn’t get that promotion at work.
My Wife: Gee, I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted that job.
Me: I feel really horrible. I don’t know what I’m gonna do now.
My Wife: We may have to sell the car with gas prices being what they are.
Me: I know. That raise would have made a huge difference in our lives.
My Wife: Does this feel worse than when KU lost in ’97?
Me: Oh, no…no, no, no…heck no!

Christopher Pyle considers Bucknell a dirty word, and will not wear, or allow his wife to wear, any clothing bearing a Jayhawk image during gameday because of his belief that it jinxes the team. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com, but not until Monday.