FIve Percent of the Recommended Daily Allowance of Riboflavin

Being a healthy person is more difficult than it should be. I am over forty years old, so I am supposed to be aware of what my body is saying. The problem is when my body is telling me to put down the candy bar and have a mess of broccoli; it is speaking in some arcane dialect of an indigenous tribe from the darkest recesses of the Amazon rain forest. Okay, I lied. I can understand what my body is telling me. I just don’t like what it is saying.
To accurately characterize the way my body talks to me I would have to say it is more like peeved grumbling than whimsical extemporizing. This happens most often after I have been doing physical labor for an extended amount of time (extended for me is anything which is longer than the attention span of your typical three year old watching C-Span, heck anyone watching C-Span). Shoveling snow a few weeks ago caused my body to not only grumble but to use words I cannot print in a newspaper which is not edited by Lenny Bruce.
One of the big problems with staying healthy as you get older is there is a ton of false advertising when you are younger. A double cheeseburger with onion rings and French fries followed by a chocolate shake was normal for me in college. It didn’t cause any change to my waistline and heartburn was a myth akin to Bigfoot, heard of but never experienced firsthand. No one ever told me that those things accumulated over time and when I turned 30 I’d wake up to find the size 32’s I had worn since high school were less likely to button up than Rosie O’Donnell’s mouth at a Donald Trump awards dinner. Also, the income I threw into fast food would have been much better utilized acquiring stock in the Tums Corporation because I now consume more of them than the number of Tic Tacs consumed at the 29th Annual Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California. (There is such a thing. I looked it up.)
The other day I decided I needed to look into what foods were best for enhancing mood. If I am not totally healthy maybe I can at least be happy as I slowly damage various parts of my body. So I went to “The Google” (as President Bush would say) and did some research. I found an article on WebMD which described nutritional ways to manage mood. I hoped it would say Dr. Pepper and cherry Danishes were the secret to creating a happy individual. Unfortunately, the advice was stuff which would make me healthy, no hot fudge or mass quantities of Fritos.
Point one was to maintain stable blood sugar. Sugar, cool, I like sugar. The doctor-type people went on to explain their idea of sugar was fruit and whole grains. Where did these guys go to medical school? Sugar is Twinkies. Sugar is Ding Dongs. Sugar is Ho Hos. Sugar has happy names with a certain sense of onomatopoeiatic (I think I just made that word up) flights of imagination.
The experts also said to exercise 20 minutes a day to enhance mood. That is counter-intuitive. “Sir, we would like you to run on a treadmill for twenty minutes so you end up at the same place you started out, causing sweat to pour from various parts of your body, which will offend the olfactory senses of anyone within fifteen feet of you, after which you may very well think your legs are made of molten lead because they burn like crazy and you are not able to lift them without using your hand and arm muscles to help, and we will only charge you fifty bucks a month for the privilege.” Sure, that would cheer anybody up.
There was a brief glimmer of hope. The article said not to follow an extremely low-fat diet. This is because fat is needed for anti-depression. Eureka! In order to fight depression I need doughnuts! My glee was brought to an abrupt halt. They said I needed healthy omega-3 fats which were found in flaxseeds.
This called for another quick spin on the internet. Wikipedia describes Flaxseed as follows: It is an erect annual plant growing to 120 cm tall, with slender stems. The leaves are glaucous green, slender lanceolate, 2-4 cm long and 3 mm broad. The flowers are pure pale blue, 1.5-2.5 cm diameter, with five petals. The fruit is a round, dry capsule 5-9 mm diameter, containing several glossy brown seeds shaped like an apple pip, 4-7 mm long. Mmmmm, mmmm, don’t that sound like somethin’ straight from Aunt Bea’s kitchen.

Warning: This Blog May Be Hazardous to Your Health (I don't know how, but it might)

I am arriving late for many of my appointments. Why? Every time I get into my car I have too many things to do. There is a sign on the visor which says, “IMPORTANT Before driving, read the label on the other side of the visor.” For some reason I am compelled to do as I’m told. Then on the other side of the visor it says, “IMPORTANT FOR YOUR SAFETY Following these instructions will greatly improve your chances of avoiding severe injury in case of an accident.” Since avoiding severe injury is right towards the top of my “To Do List” each and every day, I read it most carefully.
That alone would not make me late. The problem is at the bottom of the visor it instructs the driver to consult a section in the owner’s guide. By the time I read all that too, I might as well go back into the house because I am now horribly late for whatever compelled me to get into the car in the first place.
I know it is a dangerous world we live in. If you look around there are warnings everywhere. Coffee cups at fast food restaurants point out the contents are hot. Two liter bottles of soda point out the contents are under pressure and they should be opened with caution. I suppose the next thing will be warning labels on warning labels, after all you can get a wicked paper cut off of some of those things.
A cursory inspection of my house revealed so many imminent dangers it is a wonder I haven’t met my insurance deductible five times over. I found a hand held air pump. I purchased it to pump up a basketball. There on the side in bold red letters it reads, “Warning: designed and intended for inflating purposes only.” This is where the warning label truly needs a warning label. It would read, “Warning after reading this warning label you run the risk of wasting the next hour and half of your life trying to think of things you could use this pump for other than inflating things and what would be the intrinsic danger involved with such unauthorized activity.”
My personal favorite warning labels feature the stick figure icon of a person dealing with the worst case scenario. A while back I was helping a friend paint her house. We were using scaffolding to get to the very topmost parts. Now I am not one of the bravest folks in the land so there was no need to warn me about the danger of falling off a platform forty feet off the ground. I was so aware of the danger of falling off a platform forty feet off the ground I was often seen simply sitting on the plank and griping the iron bars so tightly my wedding ring spot welded in place. It was as I sat there, immobile due to the fear of gravity driving my head into the flower bed below, that I noticed the warning label. It not only had words describing the precautions which should be taken but it also had that poor little cartoon stick figure guy falling backwards off the little cartoon stick figure scaffolding to his little cartoon stick figure death. I am surprised there were not little cartoon stick figure pallbearers carrying a little cartoon stick figure casket past a little cartoon stick figure weeping widow as well.
Since this poor guy goes through so much in his selfless quest to help the rest of us stay safe, I decided he needed more of an identity in order to create some empathy. He is obviously bald. This may be because nobody draws hair on stick figures or it may be because he has set himself on fire so many times by not following all warning labels on cans of aerosol furniture polish. Anyway, I have named him Yul after one of the most famous bald guys ever, Yul Brenner.
Not only does the name Yul reflect his lack of hair, but it also helps him get his point across to the public. If you do not heed the warning labels Yul suffer severe injury, Yul be visited by ambulance drivers, and Yul never win the lawsuit because the insurance company lawyers will make sure Yul appear to be an imbecile of epic proportion in the eyes of the jury because you can’t even read the label telling you that using the hand held air pump to give a constipated kinkajou an enema is an unauthorized activity, etc. etc. etc….

I don't want it all...just the good stuff

“Greed is good,” was a battle cry of the late 1980’s made famous by Michael Douglas’s uber-rich and powerful Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street. For some reason Mr. Douglas chose to play the role sporting a hairdo he received when he took a wrong turn at the strip mall and ended up at Jiffy Lube instead of Super Cuts. It has been twenty years since that film hit the multiplexes of the land and it is no longer cool to wear your hair like that (note to Pat Riley) nor to overtly claim one of the seven deadly sins is actually a virtue. It is, however, still ingrained in most every American to want more than he or she has at the moment.
This is proven on a nightly basis on every “reality” television show on every network. It must be greed driving the people on American Idol who have the same chance of having a song played on the radio as my son’s guinea pig has of winning the Kentucky Derby (she has a tendency to drift too wide of the rail on the last furlong). It surely can’t be any reasonable semblance of an awareness of one’s own talent. When these people sing in the shower the soap on a rope hangs itself.
Greed must be the motivating factor behind anyone signing up to compete on Survivor. There would have to be a GUARANTEE I would be given a million dollars (not a CHANCE amongst 15 other pathetic graspers at fame…sorry, competitors) if they wanted me to wade through leech infested stagnant ponds, eat rats on a stick, or go without a shower for 48 hours. I have a very sensitive scalp and I need to maintain my proper shampooing regimen.
People who want to improve their lot in life through hard work are not greedy. People who utilize special talents to earn large amounts of money are not necessarily greedy. People who refuse to split the last slice of pizza are. I do not think of myself as greedy, heck you can have the entire Canadian bacon and pineapple if you want it, but I sure wouldn’t mind having more money. I would even settle for more free time and less stress, which can sometimes be a by-product of more money.
Being Bill Gates rich or even Paul McCartney rich is not what I want. It doesn’t bother me to drive a used minivan. However, last week when the minivan had a flat tire I wished I was rich enough to call “the guy,” have it taken care of and just write the check. When you have something akin to surplus money you can always call “the guy.” I do not know who “the guy” is but he can fix the flat tire, unclog the sink, remove the viruses from your computer, and if the price is right, “the guy” has a cousin in New Jersey who can “Jimmy Hoffa” the person of your choice.
Many people would tell me I need to be grateful for what I have. When I grumble and grouse about things which really are rather unimportant my wife often says, “It could be worse.” I prefer not to subscribe to the “It could be worse” school of optimism. Of course it could be worse. It could always be worse. One of Job’s buddies from the Bible could have said “It could be worse” and it could have been. I mean with all those boils it would have been worse if he had been married to Lot’s wife. Can you imagine coming home from a hard day of questioning God’s existence with open sores all over your body and hugging a pillar of salt? Ouch.
Just because “it could be worse” is no reason to be content with the way things are at the moment. As the old words of wisdom say: Some people look at the world as it is and ask “Why?” Others look at the world as it could be and ask “Why not?” Yet others look at the world around them and ask “Why can’t I have the same chances other people have, really, I have as much talent as Jason Alexander, for goodness sake, and not only will he receive money from the never ending reruns of Seinfeld, but just because he’s kind of famous he gets a children’s book published even though there is no reason to believe he has any talent as a writer of children’s books or even deserves to have a publisher look at his manuscript, but because he was a whiny self-centered nebbish on a hit sitcom he gets to do what ever he wants.” Or maybe that’s just me.

Some are more equal than others

At the risk of sounding un-American I have to admit I am finding it harder and harder to buy into the “All men are created equal” precept Mr. Jefferson threw into the Declaration eleven score and ten years ago. Well, when I think about “created” equal it might be viable. As an example let’s take Alan Greenspan and Jimmy Kimmel’s Uncle Frank, they may have started out equal but on down the line some things went a bit haywire. I do not intend to devalue either person, but you cannot say they are equal in many comparable traits.
This great land of ours has always valued the individual. The idea that anyone can grow up to be President is a wonderful thing to tell children. Even though it may have the same merit as telling them “if you keep making that face it will freeze that way” or talking them into doing things they really hate by telling them it builds character. Also, if you spend twenty minutes at any grocery store and you will be able to point out at least a dozen kids you hope will never become president of the local chapter of the Frodo Baggins Fan Club much less of the United States. You know the kind of kid I’m talking about. (Gimme some cookies? Gimme a candy bar? Gimme some gum? Buy me something, buy me something, buy me something.) Actually, if you spend twenty minutes at the national conventions for either party and you will be able to point out at least a dozen candidates you hope will never become president of anything more powerful than the local chapter of the Dan Quayle Fan Club. Once again, you know the type. (Gimme your attention? Gimme your trust? Gimme access to your wallet? Vote for me, vote for me, vote for me.) The problem is the idea of equality has been twisted a bit.
I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but we are not all equal. Think of it this way. If you require heart surgery it would make much more sense for the person wearing the rubber gloves to be someone who spent more time in med school than playing Super Mario Brothers. This brings to mind a conversation I overheard as I was walking across campus in my undergrad days. One twenty year old hung over guy stops staring at the coed jogging by and says to the other twenty year old hung over guy: “I was going to go with a pre-med major, but I decided to go for business because you can party more.” Now if I became a patient of this man in later years I would not want the last few words I heard as the anesthetic took hold to be: “I was going to us the scalpel but the DeWalt 6.5 Amp Heavy-Duty Variable-Speed Top-Handle Jigsaw sounded much more fun.” Come to think of it if this guy did graduate with a business degree I wouldn’t want my vice president in charge of the long range planning saying to his buddy as they stroll down Wall Street: “I was going to invest the company’s retirement funds in FedEx and Exxon stock but I decided betting the whole thing on Chicago Cubs to win the World Series was more fun.”
Technology has made it possible for anyone to get his or her ideas out to the general public, and I do mean anyone. The world of “blogs” and YouTube means people with the journalistic acumen of Walter Cronkite’s left shoe can tell the world what is happening, whether it actually happened or not. I’m sorry, but I still prefer the information being spread around the countryside be gathered and distributed by people with ethics, intellect, and a conscience. Not by people with a laptop, a modem, and the spelling ability of Walter Cronkite’s right shoe.
It has gotten to the point that even Time Magazine named the nameless “You” as its Person of the Year for 2006. To explain this choice Time editor Lev Grossman wrote, “It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.” However, the previous sentence could be pure bunk because I read it on Wikipedia, a website written by the normal guy on the virtual street, not by stodgy men in horribly out of date clothing who spend hour upon hour researching the accuracy of things before they put them into print for hundreds of thousands of people to read.
Just because Time Magazine named the common man Person of the Year doesn’t mean it’s a positive thing. Josef Stalin was also named Person of the Year, twice!

Auld Lang Syne of the Apocalypse

May old acquaintance be forgot. Out with the old and in with the new. New and improved. Better tasting plus more cleaning power! Humans always seem to think new, in and of itself, proves better. Well, here we are at the beginning of a “new” year, so following this logic things will be better or at least have increased cleaning power.
Personally, many things went quite well last year. I do not feel the need to throw it aside like a sock with a hole in the toe. Actually, I don’t throw away socks with a hole in the toe. I still hold to my theory stating each pair of socks you own is one more day without having to do laundry. There needs to be two holes in the toe and one in the heel before I think about tossing aside an old sock. Something my wife does not understand, but is willing to tolerate. Which brings me to one of the reasons 2006 was a good year.
I didn’t get divorced. Now those of you who know me need to realize there was never any danger of this happening. The reason I take the time to mark I didn’t get divorced is because my marriage is the best thing in my life and if 2006 was a good year, which it was, my wife is a major contributor to that success. Getting sappy is not in my job description for this column so I will now digress.
One big reason I do not have any problems in my marriage is I am too tired to create any. Infidelity is often cited by couples ending a relationship. If Cheryl Tiegs, (this proves I am out of the “lusting in my heart” stage of life because I had to reach all the way back to when I was thirteen to think of a “hot babe” to use as an example), if Ms. Tiegs offered to make my deepest fantasy come true she would remain fully clothed as she wrote the check getting me out of debt so I could quit my job and sleep until 9 o’clock every morning. Okay, to prove I’m still a red-blooded American man she could write the check while wearing that white mesh swimsuit she wore in Sports Illustrated.
Another example of why 2006 was a good year is 364 days of the year I did not throw up. Everyone can agree that a day without throwing up is always better than a day in which one does throw up. The day I had some sort of virus which caused extreme discomfort was horrible, but it was not self-inflicted. There were times in my youth I ingested a few too many containers of cereal malt beverage and became unwell because of it. That was long ago, just a few years after Cheryl Tiegs lived in my daydreams.
Nowadays the things which threaten my day-to-day health are a result of spending my work days in what amounts to a petrie dish of bacteria and viruses, a school. I have decided there are only two ways to avoid catching any illness when working in a building with six hundred germ incubators (a.k.a children). The first is to arrive each day wearing one of those suits the NASA guys wore when they invaded Elliot’s house looking for ET. This makes it very hard to sit at my desk and the gloves make it impossible to type discipline referrals into the computer. The other way is to bar students from the building. This greatly reduces the risk of being exposed to germs and it eliminates the need to write discipline referrals as well, two for the price of one, cool.
Looking forward to 2007 I have to admit I have my worries. Even though the Chiefs got into the playoffs which required Kansas City winning, Tennessee losing, Cincinnati losing, Denver losing, the moon moving into the seventh house, Jupiter aligning with Mars, causing peace to guide the planets, and love to steer the stars. There are other indications the world may be headed for disaster. Not the least of which is “Armed and Famous.”
Ad after ad for this “reality” show was displayed as I watched the game. If handing an ex-professional wrestler (Trish Stratus), a has-been television heartthrob (Erik Estrada), the son of a whacked out rock star (Jack Osbourne), a little person who made his living being publicly humiliated by someone named Johnny Knoxville (Jason Acuna a.k.a. Wee Man), and a member of the most famously dysfunctional family of all time (LaToya Jackson) real guns and badges is not a sign of the apocalypse I suggest someone study the Book of Revelations a bit more closely.

Deck the Halls with Boughs of Hollywood

I finally accomplished writing a column two weeks in row. This should appear in the Globe December 13th.

Driving down the street the other night I saw one of those inflatable snowmen in someone’s yard. These things are all over the country this time of year. However, the image in front of me was one which made it clear I was in southwestern Kansas. The snowman was bent so low to the ground he looked like he was tossing his icicles all over the grass. Inflatable snowmen are not tougher than the December Kansas wind. It’s good to be home.
As a young man I spent one Christmas season living in Santa Monica, California. Even with the name Santa in my mailing address the Christmas spirit was hard to muster. I worked in a mall, the repository of all that is tacky and sentimental for any holiday season, yet I still didn’t feel like the geese were getting fat. (It didn’t help that instead of hearing Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole’s mellifluous tones for some reason a pair of street performers were constantly dancing to Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time” in front of the bookstore which employed me.) Living six blocks from the beach is great in June and July, but after Thanksgiving the only tide I want to be concerned with is one of the Yule variety.
The Midwesterner out of Kansas feeling was brought home with stark realism one afternoon in mid-December. I had driven into Hollywood to do some Christmas shopping. (Tacky touristy items have an allure as stocking stuffers.) I came out of a store and looked to my left and saw Santa Claus ringing a bell standing next to a black pot. That’s not odd. The problem was he was wearing short pants! They were red with white fur trim, but Santa was wearing short pants! That is like Perry Como singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That’s like Currier and Ives painting a picture of the Arabian Desert complete with camels and Bedouins. That’s like Rudolph having rhinoplasty which rivals Michael Jackson’s. That is like Santa Claus wearing short pants! Oh, sorry that’s what started this whole thing. I lost track. See how completely wrong it is?
Bermuda Santa wasn’t all. Soon after that shock I heard the convivial ringing of sleigh bells. Ahh, this is more like it. I looked onto Hollywood Boulevard and saw a pair of exhausted donkeys with bits of wood tied to their heads as antlers. While pathetic, I could live with it. You’d think in the very heart of make-believe and special effects someone could have come up something better than chair legs haphazardly attached to hooved critters to create fake reindeer. What made me want to hop the next sleigh to Kansas happened next. The donkeys were pulling a wagon with a dozen or so little kids sitting in it, southern California’s version of a hayrack ride, I guess. These little ones were not all bundled up singing Jingle Bells at the top of their lungs. Nope, they were riding along in silence. I noticed one little boy with a glint in his eyes. Maybe this guy had visions of sugar plums dancing in his head. Maybe he was dreaming of the Red Ryder BB gun he hoped Santa would deliver. Maybe a Lionel train set was steaming around the Christmas tree in his imagination. Then again, maybe not. I looked behind me to see what had his attention. He was staring at a window display, not a Macy’s window display from “Miracle on 34th Street.” Nope, it was a window display from “Sleazy on Hollywood and Vine.” It was the Frederick’s of Hollywood holiday panorama of unmentionables. I don’t remember anything else about the wagon. I was distracted for a while.
Growing up in a part of the world where Christmas is cold and even occasionally white allows me to buy into the images used in most all media versions of the holiday. What if I had grown up in southern California? All my memories would be of Santa in short pants and underwear mannequins. That would be sad. A kid I knew out there was eighteen years old and had never seen snow fall from the sky. She had seen it in movies and on television, but she had to take other people’s word for it. Snow falling from the sky is as mythical to a Santa Monica High School student as intellectual lyrics in a rap song is to anyone over forty. A southern California kid dreaming of a white Christmas is as likely as Snoop Dogg alluding to Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal work “Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology” in his most recent release, “Kickin’ it with Kierkegaard.”

Christopher Pyle wishes everyone a wonderful holiday season, and points out the Grinch is pure existential myth. One Christmas he pushes the huge sack of Whoville Christmas trappings up the mountain only to find the next Christmas he must push it up the mountain again.

Sometimes we just need the Snickers to work

“Make the Snickers work” was scrawled on a piece of paper posted next to the candy machine in the lounge at work. The pain and suffering expressed by those four simple words was palpable. Novelists spend years of their lives trying to convey such emotion. They use thousands of words crafted, edited, and re-written with painstaking care in order to give the reader a sense of human longing, desire for the unattainable, striving for perfection. Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, even Danielle Steele, come up short compared to this anonymous author’s reaching out to powers greater than himself to make life worth living. Maybe I am overstating things just a bit. Dante was successful a couple of times.
When the candy machine keeps your sixty cents and does not dispense the chocolate confection there is a sense of loss and frustration, and you see the struggle against the powers that be as something fruitless, or at least candy bar-less. Your will to continue is called into question. You are a poorer individual, at least sixty cents poorer. The reason you forced yourself out of your chair, trudged up two flights of stairs and poked through a fistful of loose change is taken from you. The goal is now unreachable because all you have left is pennies. The coin return of life just springs back into place without the friendly clink of coins dropping into the tray for retrieval.
The metaphor illustrated by this experience is downright stark. The act of rising up from your chair represents the energy exerted to pull yourself up from the simple and mundane and move towards something greater than oneself, something of nougat sweetness. Trudging up the stairs is emblematic of man’s continual climb towards perfection, something akin to the Eight-Fold Path described by the Enlightened One, also known as Buddha. (Have you seen pictures of Buddha? It appears that dude had access to a whole bunch of candy machines.) The loose change symbolizes the cultural and economic tokens of achievement which are tools to an end, but should not be the goal in and of themselves. Picking through the coins is like pulling the greater achievements out from amongst the lesser ones, the quarters from the pennies, so to speak. Then our “Everyman” takes those great achievements (the coins) and uses them in trade (deposits them into the slot and pushes button 22) in order to reach his ultimate goal (the Snickers bar). He stands there waiting for the corkscrew shaped holder of his heart’s desire to rotate and gently drop it a mere six inches. Then all he needs is the energy to push aside the door and grasp what he has been working for his entire life. But no, the mechanism is still, the Snickers bar does not move. The goal is visible through the Plexiglas. It hangs there, mocking him, so close yet unattainable.
Now some people would not do what our friend did. A person of lesser character would grab hold of the machine and shake it in a craven attempt to aggressively take what was being kept from him. Others might pound on the glass protesting loudly the unfair and heartless treatment he was receiving like those earliest humans calling out to the moon as if it was a caring deity. The basest among us might have taken the nearest blunt object and burst through the boundary of glass and greedily grabbed not only the Snickers bar but also the mini chocolate donuts, the spicy barbeque chips…all the treasures in the machine without a single thought towards others. Others who, at this very moment, might be sitting in their office chairs dreaming of the time when their break will come and they can use their coins to purchase a little slice of heaven simply known as Funyuns.
Our hero did not care about his own achievements and dreams. He performed a selfless act. The call to powers greater than himself (the Candy Machine Guy) was not demanding repayment of his own lost coins. Nay, he used his energy to make a plea that the unsympathetic machine of life be repaired so others following in his footsteps would not suffer the ignoble pain of such horrible loss. This person did not place himself above others. He did not let his loss scar him and cause him to behave is a way which was beneath him. He simply and artfully wrote the words “Make the Snickers work” and left them for others to see. A sign of the danger one must face whenever one places too much worth upon a single goal.
Then again maybe he just hit button number eleven, got a bag of Skittles, and went back to work.

The quickest route from joke to joke is a straight line

A man is walking down a crowded hallway in a public building. He is talking loudly and enthusiastically. He is moving both of his hands in gestures which give added emotion and emphasis to what he is saying. There is no one near enough to be an obvious receiver of his very important monologue. All of this used to mean the guy was not the most emotionally balanced individual in the vicinity. It was also quite likely he would be wearing an elaborate hat made with voluminous amounts of tin foil and a rusty spaghetti strainer in order to block the brain infiltration rays being beamed from the alien mother ship in geosynchronous orbit over these particular longitudinal coordinates. In today’s airports this behavior is seen every few minutes. However, the man doing it is not wearing any Reynolds’s Wrap. He is wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and a Rolex watch. He drives a luxury vehicle and works for a Fortune 500 company. The conversation he is so generously sharing with the general public is being transmitted hundreds of miles through the stratosphere using technology Gene Roddenberry never thought of. The man has a small blinking electronic contraption clipped over his right ear allowing him to have this discussion using something called Bluetooth technology through his cellular phone. This device not only lets him talk to his executive assistant back in San Francisco about the intricate merger financing which needs to be completed by close of business today but it also makes the beaming of brain infiltration rays from the alien mother ship in geosynchronous orbit over the particular longitudinal coordinates of Dulles International Airport much more effective.
Recently I took a trip to the Washington D.C. area because of my real job. (Believe it or not I am not able to support my family writing a semi-weekly column for the local newspaper.) It had been a while since I had traveled any way other than in a car with my kids in the back and my wife riding shotgun. (She actually has a shotgun encouraging the children to refrain from bickering as we roll through the Kansas terrain.) The businessmen carrying on wireless conversations oblivious to the dozens of people around them was just one of the things I found odd upon my return to travel.
Since I taught literature to middle school age students I always thought I had lived the role of the “Least-paid-attention-to-speaker” in the world. Have you ever tried to point out the humor of the verbal repartee between Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing to seventh graders? Every pair of eyes in the room goes into screen saver mode. Well, I found someone who is ignored even more: the flight attendant as s/he explains the safety information before take-off. As valuable as I think Shakespeare is the information given by the flight attendant may be more important. Granted it is only important if things go horribly wrong, but it is stuff you will want to know under particular circumstances.
If there was an emergency landing on water and the bozo in seat 22B, fumbling for the safety instructions card in the seat back pocket, called out to ask: “What am I supposed to use for a floatation device again?” I wouldn’t blame the flight attendant if s/he replied: “You, sir, will just have to use the carry on bag which you did not properly stow in the overhead compartment. By the way that plastic bag and yellow cup which just dropped from the ceiling is just to keep the little bag of peanuts you stole from the guy sleeping in seat 22A nice and fresh.”
One of the biggest things I noticed on this trip had to do with the difference between fancy hotels and cheap, but not sleazy, hotels. Most of my previous travels involved staying at hotels with a number as a part of their name. This time I was put up at a spot with a much higher standard of living. It is better to stay at the cheaper ones.
Each little service had some sort of fee. I was surprised the shampoo wasn’t included in the minibar fridge amongst the five dollar cans of pop. I had the distinct idea that if I asked the desk clerk where the free continental breakfast was served she would have had an attack of vertigo looking down her nose at me. The Aryan beauty at the desk spoke with some sort of impossible to identify European accent. This helped her maintain superiority over the hick wearing his University of Kansas hoodie asking directions to the nearest McDonald’s. I bet if you ran into her away from work she’d sound like Ellie Mae Clampett.

A Greatest Hit

This was on my blog in January of 2005. I just seemed to be fitting to re-post it with the elections happening where this stuff just keeps popping up.

It is a letter to the editor:

Dear Sir,
I want to express my displeasure about an issue in the Kansas State Legislature. I can't believe these people are spending so much time talking about s-e-x. They should be ashamed of the themselves. I don't think s-e-x should be talked about in public places. However, I am going to have to make an exemption.The people in Topeka want to outlaw same sex marriage. This is awful! I only know one way to have sex. I have the same sex all the time. If they make this illegal I don't think I can handle it. I can't come up with a new way to do it each time my wife and I want to have relations. Granted it only happens whenever we change the clocks (and the batteries in the smoke detectors) but after we spring forward I will not be able to figure out a new way to fall back. Those yahoos in Topeka had better come up with some kind of manual if they expect everyone in the state to stop having the same sex. I for one would allow my tax dollars to make some sort of Kansas Sutra to help the less imaginative of us.
Sincerely,

Parenthood and boot camp not as different as you’d think

At 1500 hours rendezvous with Offspring Bravo at the coordinates of 1st and Comanche. Transport “package” to home base in order to coordinate combination of forces with Offspring Charlie. If watches are properly synchronized Offspring Alpha will require support at precisely 1700 hours for basketball drills. At 1830 all units will report to the mess hall for nourishment of the battalion. Offspring Charlie will have “domestic assignments” completed and will properly apply an approved dentifrice in preparations for lights out at 2100 hours. Offspring Alpha and Bravo will follow the same regimen for lights out at 2130.
The preceding paragraph does not describe a little known offensive during World War II. Parents will recognize the actions as a regular day in the life of any family with children. The sheer volume of things enumerated on the average family of five’s “To Do List” would make the social secretary for Laura Bush consider applying for a transfer to Undersecretary of Defense in Charge of Making Rumsfeld Appear Less Like a Dyspeptic Cactus.
I do not remember life being so packed with activity when I was a kid. During my grade school years I walked home after school and had a snack while I watched a guy standing on a cheap spaceship set wearing a goldfish bowl on his head in an attempt to look like John Glenn introduce cartoons starring Yakky Doodle Duck or Snagglepuss. I did not have ceramics class followed by Cub Scouts followed by thirty minutes of homework followed by twenty minutes of answering e-mail. Of course e-mail in the middle seventies was as likely as the video watches Dick Tracy and the culturally insensitive Joe Jitsu wore on some of those Major Astro cartoons. (Anybody else remember “Hold everything please.”?) Actually, if you remove the ads I get for shrinking the size of my debt and increasing the size of something else I do not, as an adult, get the volume of e-mail the majority of kids get.
My kids have more going on in their lives than I do. I go to work. Towards the end of the day I call my wife to find out what is required of me in order to make sure each child is properly transported and no one is left unsupervised for an extended period of time. I take care of my assignments with the children and then I go to sleep. That is what my days have become. We have referred to it as “Tag Team Parenting” ever since we first had children. It used to be one parent would hand off to the other parent as we pursued our own jobs, hobbies, and activities. Now our jobs, hobbies and activities are pretty much eaten up with chasing children. To be fair my wife does the vast majority of the transportation and the entire calendar keeping work. I prefer to come home after work, have a snack and watch cartoons.
Earlier I likened family activities to military endeavors. When one enlists in the armed forces one never really knows what it will be like. Oh, they have an idea. They have seen it in the movies. They have talked to other people who have experienced it. They may have even spent some time in quasi-military organizations like R.O.T.C. However, they do not KNOW what it will be until they get there.
It is the same for starting a family. I had seen it in the movies. I had talked to many people who had kids. Heck, I was a kid in a family with three other kids. I even babysat for the neighbors with frequency as a youth. In every one of those instances I was only briefly in charge of a child or I was able to hand it off when things got truly unpleasant.
Talking to other young adults with children about children is not going to give any kind of accurate picture. These people talk about how the unconditional love which emanates from the baby and child gives such a sense of fulfillment they truly do not know how they ever felt like fully rounded people before they had their children. What they fail to tell you is lack of sleep and inhaling the fumes of Desitin ointment causes this Pollyanna outlook on parenthood. Once the person gets a full night’s sleep and a breath of clean air this impression leaves. Unfortunately, that doesn’t occur until the children are about to leave for college and it is way too late.
Running a family of five is quite like a large military exercise. It costs an exorbitant amount of money and there is no viable exit strategy.

Christopher Pyle may not have been as busy as his kids, but at least his after school cartoons featured mice and cats hitting each other with frying pans and not an oceanic invertebrate wearing short pants.

Signs of Intelligent Life

The other day I was driving into the city of Great Bend. There was a sign at the side of the road which read: “Jack Kilby Nobel Prize Winner 2000 Physics”. Now, I assume the sign was there because Great Bend was claiming one of its own. The brainy Mr. Kilby must have been born in town or at least spent some of his formative years there. There was no explanation whatsoever, so this is all conjecture on my part. As it stands it could simply be a wonderful little tidbit of information kindly placed on a sign as a public service to individuals who are traveling the highways and byways of the great state of Kansas.
This may be something the Commissioner of Education should discuss with the Highway Commissioner. (They both work in Topeka. It shouldn’t be that hard to find each other. I’m sure the education guy has the alphabetizing skills to look up the highway guy in the directory and the highway guy ought to have the map skills necessary to navigate to the education guy’s office.) The government could place signs all over the state which would offer a vehicular curriculum.
Many people think driving through Kansas ranks on the exciting meter somewhere between watching paint dry and watching paint dry on the Regis and That-Girl-Who-Isn’t-Kathie-Lee television show. Placing thought provoking and intellectually stimulating material every few yards would fight that stereotype, as well as some other preconceived notions about the intelligence level of your run of the mill Kansan. Face it; Kansas hasn’t exactly gotten the best press over the past few…decades. I was watching a television show the other day and one character made reference to something which he considered obscure news. The response by the hip young executive woman was, “People in Kansas know about it.” This is verbal shorthand for even people who are horribly backward and out of touch know about it. Ouch! I do not subscribe to this school of thought. If I did I would have to contemplate going into the nearest biker bar and calling the largest and hairiest person available a showtune loving nancy boy. (At least it is a creative suicide.)
Pardon the digression please; I will get back to the idea of a “Road to Enlightenment.” Every other state in the country will continue to use the same old numbering system for their highways. You know, “Take 40 for about fifty miles then jump on 25 going south.” Boring! Kansas will have all these great educational signs on our roads and we can name them after the subjects they teach. So if a person wants to go to Salina from Dodge City the directions would sound more like this: “Head east on highway Introduction to Psychology, then you can turn left onto state highway English Literature…” Doesn’t that sound interesting as well as educational?
The highways that go the length of the state could have an entire course of study. The American History highway starting at the Colorado border would begin with the Asian migration to Northern America via the Bering Straits land bridge. At about Colby Leif Erickson and his Viking buddies are discussed on those green and white reflective textbooks. At Hays we start colonization and by the time we get to Missouri we have completed the Civil War. If people want to get up to present day they need to make a u-turn and go back to Colorado. This helps with economic development as well. People who need that sense of completion, or the college credit, have to keep eating at our restaurants and staying in our hotels.
Experts often say the best way to learn a new language is to immerse yourself in it by going to another country. The idea is there is greater motivation to speak the unfamiliar tongue. If Kansas makes the highway system surrounding Wichita all in French learning it would become a priority. If the only way to get out of the construction zones on Kellog was to translate the following phrase: “L'allée gauche est le seul moyen pour échapper ce purgatoire de baril orange” people would parler le français.
Some subjects could be tailored to fit in specific locations in the state. Existential archetypes found in the collected works of the Harlequin Romance series would just about fit between Hutchinson and South Hutchinson. Hugoton to Elkhart is a stretch of road people might actually be willing to do algebra as they traveled it. This idea just might work.

P.S. I love the fact the internet can be used to quickly find the French words for: The left lane is the only way to escape this orange barrel purgatory. Cool huh?

The loss of one Buck has made us poor

I know this is supposed to be a humor column, but I am going to ask everyone to bear with me for a while.

Buck O’Neil died Friday October 6, 2006. He was a ninety-four year old man so the fact he passed away cannot be a big shock. Ninety-four year old men die on a daily basis. It is what Buck O’Neil did on a daily basis during his life that makes it necessary to mark his passing. Everyday of his life he spread joy, knowledge and compassion. Everyday of his life he embraced not only his own life, but every life he came in contact with, and he made it a point to come in contact with as many lives as he could. Buck O’Neil was something which is not talked about nearly enough in today’s news media and even our culture. He was a good man.

If you do not know who Buck was I suggest you spend some time finding out. Let me give a brief historical look.

John “Buck” O’Neil was born in 1911 in Florida. This of course meant his life was restricted. He was a black man long before Martin Luther King Jr. and people of his sort caused great change in our country. Martin Luther King Jr. actually followed the trail blazed by Buck and others of his courage.

Buck loved baseball. He hung out around the spring training parks in Florida and saw the greats of that generation. He played baseball in the Negro Leagues. He managed baseball in the Negro Leagues. He saw all the greats of that generation, black and white. He was the first black man hired by a major league team as a coach. He scouted for teams for decades. He saw all the greats of a few more generations. He loved what he did.

In 1994, Ken Burns made a long form documentary about the history of baseball. Buck O’Neil became a star. His easy-going story-telling made him a joy to watch. Even when he told of the horrible treatment of black players in his athletic heyday he did so without malice and with an air of humanity which showed his strength of character.

Now for a funny story:

Buck was friends with Satchel Paige. Paige is considered by many people to be the greatest pitcher ever. Satchel was a character and lived a full life. Satchel called Buck by the name of Nancy. Here is my attempt to tell the story of how Buck O’Neil was christened Nancy.

Satchel Paige was a bit of a ladies man, actually more than a bit. On one road trip Satchel struck up an acquaintance with a lovely young lady named Nancy. Unfortunately Satchel’s fiancée showed up in town. So Satchel has his fiancée in his hotel room and his new friend is in another hotel room quite nearby. Buck is also staying on the same floor. Once Satchel believes his fiancée is asleep he sneaks out of his room to find Nancy. Since he is being sneaky he is quietly knocking on her door and whispering “Nancy, Nancy.” That is when Buck hears Satchel’s fiancée get up and come to her door. Being the quick-thinking good friend that he is Buck rushed out his door and says to Satchel, “Here I am, Satchel.” Satchel, being no dummy himself simply responds, “Oh, Nancy, there you are. I’ve been looking for you.” Satchel and Buck stuck to their story for years. Satchel Paige called Buck “Nancy” for the rest of his life.

I did have the pleasure of being in the same room with him once years ago. They were having a big fundraiser party for his pet project the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City. For some completely unknown reason I got an invitation. I couldn’t afford to go, but I did it anyway. There were hundreds of people there, many of them very famous individuals. I was able to step up to the man at his table and hand him a baseball. He signed the ball and handed it back to me. I said to him something he had heard thousands of times before, “It is an honor to meet you, sir.” He simply gave me a big grin and said, “Thank you.” There were a couple dozen people standing behind me to get his autograph so I moved on. The smile was genuine. The thank you was genuine. The man was genuine.

Buck O’Neil lived life with a smile. He didn't complained, and heaven knows he had valid reasons to. He sang whenever he had the chance. He had a policy of never walking by a woman who was wearing a red dress without stopping to talk to her. Just think about the improvement to our lives if what this “Buck” exemplified was the actually currency of the land.

Being taller and older doesn't mean you are grown-up

I turned 44 years old last week. If there is a more unremarkable age to turn I can’t think of it.
At 16 a person can drive a car. Well, a person can legally operate a vehicle if he or she passed the proper tests and received a license. There are people you run across on a regular basis who seem not to have actually mastered such things as turn signals.
When you turn 18 a person is allowed to vote. This means P. Diddy, or whatever name he is going by now, advocates you pay attention to politics and vote your mind. Some generation’s voices of political conscience are people like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. This generation has a hip hop music mogul. We may be in deep trouble.
When a person turns 21 he is allowed to buy alcoholic beverages. In a way this makes sense. It is three years after the person has been allowed to vote and he has lived with the choices he made for three years and could use a stiff drink.
At thirty years old a person has made the final crossover to being an adult. Remember a person over thirty is not to be trusted. That is what the folks at Woodstock believed. Now all those people are well over thirty and have probably even voted Republican.
However, when you turn 44 there is no rite of passage. It isn’t even an age which people would understand if you were depressed. Guy #1: “What’s the matter, Tom? You look a little down in the dumps.” Guy #2: “Well, Jim I’ll tell you. I turned 44 yesterday and I’m feeling a little bummed out.” Guy #1: “Gee, Tom I didn’t realize. Boy, 44, that’s pretty tough.” Guy #2: “I didn’t think it would hit me so hard.” Guy #1: “I see where you’re coming from. I mean, wow, 44. This means you’re…you’re…oh, get over yourself! 44 is nothing. Ooooo, it’s 23 years until I retire. I still have my health. My kids are old enough to take care of themselves. Some of my hair is gray. Waaahhhh.” Guy #1 walks away in disgust after lambasting Guy #2 with sarcasm and disdain.
Guy #1 is right. There really isn’t anything to be concerned about; except for the possibility that you may have gotten so unremarkable you may cease to be interesting. There is an old Monty Python sketch in which a man is asked a question and he responds, “I am an accountant and consequently too boring to be of interest.” That is probably my fear. (I do not fear becoming an accountant. I have friends who are accountants and they are not completely uninteresting.) I fear becoming boring.
This fear is not unfounded. Recently I have found myself discussing, at some length, our household budget. If we pay off this bill and then roll that monthly payment into that bill we can…arrgghhh. It is important and it can make a huge difference in my children’s lives if I am able to get out of debt and pay for their college educations, but that doesn’t mean it is fun.
I have said for years, “I hate doing grown-up junk.” This usually meant bills, car maintenance, insurance policies and anything involving the word prostate. The issue here is obviously proof I haven’t grown up. A true grown-up doesn’t whine about doing the day-to-day business of taking care of himself and his family. A true grown-up identifies the important things in life and deals with them in a mature manner. A true grown-up doesn’t shirk the unpleasant tasks. A true grown-up wakes up each morning and dutifully goes to work, pays the bills, cleans the house, does the dishes, and then sneaks into his bedroom, fires up the PlayStation and plays four and half solid hours of Madden NFL ’07.
Being a grown-up means I stand in the stiff Kansas wind on a Saturday morning and watch my son play soccer, or more accurately, run wildly from one end of the field to the other with several other eight-year-olds doing the same partially organized endeavor. Being a grown-up means being amazed when my eleven-year-old daughter comes up with the perfect witty retort which makes the entire room break-up laughing. Being a grown-up means watching my oldest daughter make caring and positive decisions which show she is much brighter than her old man. Being a grown-up means sitting down exhausted after a crummy day at work and having my wife give me a look and smile which lets me know I’m not doing it for nothing. Being a grown-up can mean you have a darned fine life…I still refuse to do anything involving the word prostate.

Is something wrong?

I went to check my blog today and things seemed awry. I am publishing this little note in an attempt to get things right again.

Things aren't always what you expectorate

I always thought imagination was one of the best parts of being a human being. I suppose it is possible cats daydream about having opposable thumbs and taking their rightful place at the top of the food chain. Maybe penguins have fantasies about Bermuda or gerbils imagine themselves in some sort of rodent NASCAR event as they run in those pointless wheel thingies. However, until I am shown some sort of compelling evidence to the contrary I will believe people are the only critters on the planet with the ability to make stuff up.
Evidence that mankind is the only species with brains designed for such an activity can be the sublime (Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel), the ridiculous (every script for Charlie’s Angels), and even the frightening (the Houston Astros uniforms of 1975). Most things created by imagination are intended to inform, entertain, and even enlighten. Those are the positive aspects of imagination. Imagination is not always positive though (see the reference to the Astros above).
The ability of people to imagine is often used to predict. “How will things be in the future?” is the most common use of imagination. Some people’s imaginations work differently than others. If I go to the top of this very steep mountain, which is covered with hard packed snow, making it somewhat akin to a sheet of glass covered with Wesson oil, and place my feet into two very long, very slick planks of wood and then, intentionally, throw all my weight downwards towards dozens and dozens of boulders and trees with a molecular density much greater than my own this will be: A. Fun B. Invigorating C. Slightly Risky or D. Suicide. My imagination tends towards the “D” answer. Luckily for the entire skiing industry not everyone shares my particular style of predicting.
Recently I was reading a book which discussed how this can lead to unhappiness or even depression. The author posits that people are very adept at making up what they believe the world will be in the future. They are equally adept at being disappointed when it doesn’t turn out that way. The more serious disappointment comes when things do happen as predicted, but their lives still stink.
Many of us have pinned all our hopes on a particular happening. “If I get this new job I am after everything will be great.” Then the person gets the job and learns carrying the lights for the top Playboy photographer is back-breaking work and the models are not only not very pretty in person, they shoot you down when you hit on them just like every other girl you ever approached since junior high. Another problem which revolves around predicting the future is people often think they have more control over what will happen than they really do. Sports are the best examples of this misapprehension. Has anyone you know (yourself included) ever recorded a sporting event? He will then spend the time between the game actually being played and the time he can watch it doing everything humanly possible to avoid learning anything about the outcome. This will include putting a finger in each ear and singing “It’s a Small World” at the top of his lungs to drown out family and friends. Is this because he will not be able to enjoy the athletic abilities of the players? Nope. Is it because the sense of suspense is what makes the event enjoyable? Nope. Is it because this poor misguided soul actually believes wearing his lucky hat, eating his special cheese dip, and turning around three times and spitting over his left shoulder whenever his quarterback is sacked will cause his team to win? You betcha!
I admit to suffering from this malady. I refuse to wear anything with the mascot of my favorite team on game days. I adopted this belief (it is not a superstition if scientifically proven) several years ago. It was proven to be the absolute truth one seemingly normal day. I got dressed in a hurry and without thinking I put on my Kansas Jayhawk tie. I realized some time in the afternoon the Jayhawks were scheduled to play the Colorado team in basketball that very evening. I thought about taking the tie off then and there. I decided not to. After all the Jayhawks had beaten the Buffaloes like ten or twelve times in a row so it probably wasn’t a big deal. That night the Jayhawks lost. I felt awful. Those poor guys had worked so hard and I had made it impossible for them to win with one thoughtless act of wardrobe.

Pluto we hardly knew ya

Okay, what else are they going to change their minds about? It appears the International Astronomical Union (I bet the hotel doesn’t have to hire extra security when this convention comes to town) has decided to strip Pluto of its status as a planet. I wouldn’t worry about the little fella getting his feelings hurt. It is 2.66 billion miles from the Earth to Pluto. The scientists aren’t willing to pay the extra postage for next day delivery, so by the time he finds out we will all have been reincarnated so many times it won’t matter.
It seems this group of telescope nerds has decided Pluto does not fit into the new definition of what a planet is. The definition, as quoted by CNN on their website, goes like this: “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." This can either be a planet or that overweight bully you had to contend with in sixth grade.
I bet these scientists had no idea how far reaching the ramifications of this decision would be. First of all people of all ages will have to expunge from their minds that handy little mnemonic device: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizza pies. This taught us the order of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto). Now all of us who learned this so many years ago will be left hanging. My very educated mother just served us nine…nine…nine what?!? The sentence doesn’t end! My wife suggested a new sentence: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles. I guess this will work. It puts the planets in the right order and it is also much easier to fit into the household budget. Nine pizzas would cost around fifty dollars, even with a coupon. But you can feed the entire population of Roswell, New Mexico (little green men included) Ramen noodles for about six dollars and fifty-seven cents.
Someone else who will have extra work is the highway department of Kansas. There are signs placed outside Burdett touting itself as the boyhood home of Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto. The state is now going to have to remove those signs. They could update them but having a sign which says “Burdett, Kansas – The boyhood home of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of a great big rock which used to be called a planet but isn’t any more” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Plus it would cost too much to make a sign big enough to say all that. The conspiracy theorists in Kansas will probably say if the guy who discovered the planet came from California or New York they would have left it a planet. But, since it was puny Kansas they just don’t care. I guess we don’t have a strong enough Famous Kansan Lobby in the ol’ International Astronomical Union.
Come to think it of these space guys keep changing their minds on things. A few years back we had to change how we pronounced the names of things. Halley’s Comet went from a “long a” sound to “short a” sound. The seventh planet from the Sun was pronounced “your anus” and now we are supposed to say “urine us.” Both pronunciations invoke large amounts of tittering in fifth grade classrooms, but then again so does the word “tittering.”
I’m not sure this is a precedent we should be happy about. The names of the planets were things we learned early in our educational lives. There was even a “School House Rock” song. Kids will now question so many other things. Maybe conjunctions don’t function to link words and phrases. Maybe laws are not made from cute little scrolls of paper laboriously climbing the steps of Congress.
What we all need to learn from Pluto’s demotion is nothing is beyond question. Will the medical profession figure out sitting in a tiny room for an hour wearing only a paper robe is not a good idea? Will politicians realize they are in office to make life better for others, not just themselves? Will the people of France finally realize Jerry Lewis isn’t funny? I don’t think we will suddenly find out the world is flat or Pamela Anderson is a better novelist than William Faulkner (it would be more of a shock to find out Pamela Anderson is flat), but we may be surprised one day to learn when a tree falls in the woods and there is no one around to listen it makes the sound of one hand clapping.

Portent of Doom or Tasty Treat

The other day I came across something which I thought was a completely unnecessary product. It was a box of miniature Tootsie Rolls. I like Tootsie Rolls so I didn’t see the reason for them to be made in a very small form. Maybe it was to make people feel less guilty for eating seventy-five of them at one sitting. Actually, the size was not what made me see them as odd. These miniature Tootsie Rolls were chocolate covered! (Covering Tootsie Rolls in chocolate is like getting a big pot of cheese fondue and dipping hunks of Velveeta into it.) Needless to say I bought a box. Just because it seems pointless doesn’t mean it won’t be good.
America is known for its conspicuous consumption. Back in the old days of the Cold War the “Communists” referred to us as decadent. Decadent means excessive self-indulgence, which chocolate covered Tootsie Rolls are good examples of, to the point of moral decay. Now, I do not want to be an alarmist but we are spending so much time pointing to the unrest in the Middle East and the mess in Mesopotamia as signs of the apocalypse it may just be less belligerent than that.
It could be Nostradamus and other prognosticators only pointed out the signs of doom they felt everyone could easily see. You have to admit if you live in the 16th century and want to make a name for yourself as a seer of the distant future predicting violence in a portion of the world where there has been violence as long as there have been people capable of throwing sticks at each other makes for better copy than predicting a sign of moral decay consisting of small hunks of chewy chocolate covered by a thin layer of milk chocolate. Also, I do not believe Nostradamus’s predictions ever revolved around anything that can in any way be construed as pleasant. His best work revolved around famines, floods, droughts, invasions, and the occasional individual murder.
Here is an example of a Nostradamus quatrain:

The two armies will be unable to unite at the walls,In that instant Milan and Pavia to tremble:Hunger, thirst, doubt will come to plague them very stronglyThey will not have a single morsel of meat, bread or victuals.

This guy had to be a kick at parties. You have to wonder if he ever wanted to go off his usual material and try a little more light-hearted stuff. Maybe deep down he wasn’t all doom and gloom. He probably had a fun side. Let’s try a quatrain of a more upbeat nature:

The two poultry will be unable to meet at the street,
In that instant Colonel Sanders and Popeye’s to tremble:
Uncertainty, confusion, bewilderment will come to plague them
They will not have a clue why the chicken crossed the road.

Okay, so overly chocolatized candy is probably not a sign the culture is dropping into an irretrievable abyss of moral decay. It is a sign that shows people have a tendency to see the world as a pretty bitter place. When there is so much in the world that is pretty awful, people need everything candy coated, even candy.
This disguising of the crummy-ness of the world explains something which is soon to happen. Katie Couric is going to anchor the six o’clock news on CBS. If Edward R. Murrow hadn’t smoked and drank himself to death already he would be starting his car in a closed garage at the thought of the Queen of Perky being chosen to illuminate the world on the important occurrences of the time. Really, imagine it.
Murrow was the voice, the man who brought the palpable fear of the London blitz into homes throughout the world over the radio. Radio had no imagery other than words. Yet he did it. He said things like: “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” Now flash forward to present day. Katie is more famous for saying things like: “So how can a girl tell if he’s just not that into you?” or “What’s the weather going to be like at the Annual Rutabaga Festival in Cumberland, Wisconsin, Al.” Not the same is it?
I say even if the world has things in it which cause distress we do not have to candy coat everything. The “Mary Poppins” attitude advocating a spoonful of sugar for every dose of medicine is not always correct for fully grown men and women who need to see the world for what it is. We need to save it for the big things. Things like Paris Hilton’s new album.

Christopher Pyle makes no claim of clairvoyance, but he did have a very strong feeling Kansas would go Republican in the last presidential election. Spooky, huh?

Returning to School

It is just a week away. A date that every kid and parent knows is coming. The kids and parents have very different reasons to anticipate this date. We all remember similar times in our childhoods. Of course I am talking about Fess Parker’s birthday. It is hard to believe that ‘Daniel Boone’ is 82 years old. (Remember how the only person on that show who spoke proper English grammar was a guy named Mingo.)
Okay, so Fess Parker’s birthday is not what every one is thinking about. It’s really Kathie Lee Gifford’s birthday. Sorry, I’ll get back on task. It is the beginning of a new school year.
The sense of anticipation has been mounting. Kids looking at the slow, inexorable lessening of summer days like a honey covered man watching the march of fire ants towards his feet. While, on the other hand, the parents countdown the days like a solitary confinement prisoner counting the days until his new issue of Redbook arrives in the mail. Maybe that’s a bad example, but you get the idea.
Thinking back to my own experiences as a kid it seemed there was less lead-in time. Nowadays, as soon as the Fourth of July has passed the stores start putting up their back-to-school advertisements. Since everything is now bottom line driven I guess it makes sense. The retail world limps from one minor annual event to the next hoping to make it to Christmas, the ultimate everyone-max-out-your-credit-card-making-Sam-Walton’s-family-just-that-much-richer occurrence. As a parent of three school age children I am pretty sure this is the second most check book exhaustive time of year.
School supplies have gotten much more complicated over the years. From the days of a Big Chief notebook (which consisted of seventy-five cents worth of newsprint bound together and topped off with cover art depicting a racially insensitive portrait of a Native American wearing a many feathered headdress) to a notebook personal computer (which consists of a thousand dollars of technology making it possible to surf the internet and find racially insensitive material that would make Archie Bunker cringe).
At the risk of sounding older than I wish to, when I was a kid I carried my books home, loose. I just made a stack with the three ring binder at the bottom, tucked them under my arm and carried them. Now kids need an ergonomically designed backpack made from a space age polymer equipped with special compartments for a cell phone, an I-pod, and with a built-in GPS device making it possible for parents to track them as they go to the mall instead of the library which is where they told their mother they were going in order to finish their report entitled “How Bovine Flatulence Effects Global Warming.” But, I was the guy who through the majority of his high school career carried his lunch to school in a black Ralph Kramden-like metal lunchbox, complete with a thermos in the lid, which my wife gleefully points out marked me as a nerd extraordinaire. So, I guess I am not the person to go to when it comes to figuring out the “right way” to outfit a student.
There are pleasant memories attached to the return to school. There is nothing quite so aesthetically pleasing as a brand new box of crayons. The pointy, but not sharp, pigment sticks standing in their perfect rows in the box with that distinctive smell. The smell which takes most everyone back to the time in their lives when art was best appreciated hung with magnets on a refrigerator and the birds and horses looked remarkably similar. I’m not talking about the boxes numbering into the hundreds, but just the ones whose color names are understood by anyone. Colors like: red and green and blue. Not colors with names too arcane for a five year old. How many kindergarteners remark they really wish their box had a periwinkle in order to capture the proper shade of their cat’s eyes? (There is “raw sienna” and “burnt sienna”. Is there “properly cooked so it reaches its optimum level of doneness” sienna?) As wonderful as a new crayon is the truly remarkable thing about crayons is you can break them cleanly in two and they still do their intended use as well as when they were pristine, just out of the box. What else can make such a claim? Try it with that multi-function calculator capable of figuring the square root of pi as well as the statistical likelihood Suri Cruise actually exists, or at least what chance she has to grow up without needing years of intensive psychotherapy. It won’t work.

I'm Mad

I yelled at people this past week. Yelling is not my usual style. My kids might disagree, but I do not really yell at them. It is just there are times I need to be loudly emphatic to get my point driven into their less than receptive heads. I mean, no one would blame me for getting a little loud when for the nine millionth time I have to ask the kids to turn off at least a couple of lights in the basement. Great Cesar’s Ghost, does it really cause too much strain in one’s life to get his or her lazy behind off the couch just long enough to flip a switch? Is it truly that difficult to think about the little things that make Dad happy and do them once in a while?!? (Huff, puff, pant, pant….sorry)
Most people would probably characterize me as a calm person and I have always prided myself on possessing a good amount of self-control. Self-control is what differentiates the outward manifestations of people who are angry. Everyone has their point of no return, their straw that broke the camel’s back, their line in the sand, their threshold when they become so annoyed that they finally blow their top, lose their cool, blow a gasket, or flip their lid. It may be caused by something as minor as a person using too many clichés to make a point. Others have to be pushed quite hard to elicit a display of out of control anger.
It is all a matter of priorities. Some value the image they project as one of calm control. They maintain this level of decorum even in the face of frustration and if they do lose control they feel bad about it afterwards. There are others who do not. The examples I think of come from my experience with the United States Basketball League. The head coach for the Dodge City Legend is Dale Osbourne. He is very calm and doesn’t even curse very often. When he gets mad he stomps a foot or claps his hands together. There was the time he slapped the water cooler at the Salina Bicentennial Center like it was a West Nile carrying mosquito, but he apologized for that over and over again. The other side of the coin is Bryan Gates, the head coach of the Oklahoma Storm. He has two assistant coaches. Does he have two assistant coaches to work more complicated offenses and more stifling defenses? Nope. Does he have two assistant coaches to work with the big guys and the smaller guys? Nope. He has two assistant coaches because then he has an assistant coach for each arm, so then can grab him and stop him from getting not only ejected from the game but also to avoid the assault charges as he “takes exception” to a call made by a referee.
Some people are quite entertaining when they get mad. When Bobby Knight has an anger fit it is shown on every sports network nearly as often as the Zapruder film was screened by Oliver Stone. Every one of us had a teacher in school we liked to torture to the point of entertaining anger displays. I’m not talking about the ones who got all quiet like they were about to cry. That wasn’t any fun. I’m talking about the guy who got the veins in his forehead throbbing so fast he was actually spelling out curse words in Morse code. Or the lady who would threaten with outlandish impractical punishments, like: “If you students do not settle down right this instant you will stay in your seats until the Moon spins off of its axis and plummets to Earth destroying all human life, allowing the cockroach to become the highest life form on the planet.”
Actually, there are times I wish I could really cut loose and get out of control angry. It has to feel good on some primordial level. Look at a two year old. When he gets mad about something he can really let loose. He yells. He stomps his feet. He drops to the floor and pounds his fists on the ground. All of this is because the pudding is butterscotch and not chocolate. Then three minutes later his is totally gleeful as he finger paints with the butterscotch pudding on the dog. Transfer that behavior to the adult world. Admit it; you would love to yell, stomp your feet, drop to the floor and pound the ground with your fists when the boss comes in and tells you the report you thought was due next Thursday was actually due last Thursday. It won’t make the report any less overdue, but you might get some pudding.

Christopher Pyle has promised himself that the next time he feels like yelling at someone he will stop, count to ten, and then poke them in the eyes like Shemp and Curly.

To TV or not to TV, That is the Question

My television is dying. There was a time in my life going without a television would have been akin to going without food. Okay, that may be overstating things just a bit, but I craved TV just like people crave sweets. As a young unmarried adult I watched a lot of television. I was even one of those individuals who set his VCR to tape shows I would miss if I had to work or was out on a date. (The work thing happened a whole lot more than the date thing.) As much as it pains me to admit it I even watched thirtysomething every week. I have changed a lot over the years. The desire to save the expense of replacing the television may actually out weigh the desire to have a television. (If my children read this there will be a groan of displeasure similar to the one uttered by the John Wayne fan when he figured out what kind of western Brokeback Mountain actually was.)
Shopping for a television sounds like a rather daunting task nowadays. I have had my TV for quite a while. When I bought it the choices were color or black and white, cable ready or not, what kind of remote (a remote is as necessary as food, especially for the male of the species) and how big the screen was to be. Now there are more choices than the early bird buffet at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. There are flat screen TVs which you can hang on the wall like a painting. The problem is for the price you might as well buy a Van Gogh. Granted there is less variety of images but the re-sale value is much greater. There are high definition televisions. These high tech marvels make it possible for the viewer to see the individual trails of sweat as they travel down Shaquille O’Neal’s forehead as he clanks yet another free throw. That is actually kind of gross. Then there are plasma screen televisions. What the heck is a plasma screen? Plasma is something you donate to the Red Cross not something used to watch reruns of The Love Boat.
Since I am officially a cheapskate and also somewhat overwhelmed by the choices involved in shopping for a TV, buying a replacement may not happen. I inadvertently have already gone through a sort of twelve step program to overcome my unhealthy addiction to television. It started with the birth of my children. They became more and more in charge of the channels the TV would be tuned to. Before kids, if I had the choice of watching Jeopardy or reading a book I would watch Jeopardy. I could at least rationalize to myself I was doing something of an intellectual nature as I tried to beat the contestants to the proper response. Where else can my fabulous knowledge of comic books of the late seventies come into play? Then we had children. Now the choice became do I want to watch Teletubbies or have a ten penny nail forced through my ear lobe. I choose the nail.
The next step was getting rid of cable. We have been without cable or satellite channel options for over five years. With only three or four channels to choose from television loses some of its allure. Channel surfing is a misnomer. There is no “cowabunga” as I use the remote to flip up and down three channels. It takes about thirteen seconds to see each station five times and decide watching NASCAR, golf or golf does not interest me on a Sunday afternoon.
The final step actually happened quite recently. I was given the opportunity to watch television all afternoon on a set which did have cable. This seemed like a great idea to me at the time. What I found out was there are about twenty-seven different shows with fake judges telling people completely devoid of common sense how to solve their problems and eleven or twelve talk shows hosted be mid-range used-to-be stars like Tyra Banks or Tony Danza. Next there will be an entire network of talk shows hosted by the likes of former stars of the Facts of Life and, from the minimum security prisons of southern California, the stars of Different Strokes. I then decided I would go to the safe home land for men all over the country – the all sports network. What did I find there? Championship dominoes. Actual commentary from the guys covering this: Play-by-play guy “Oh! He cut the trey. Why did he cut the trey?” Expert color commentator, “Sometimes Brown’s out to lunch.”
I rest my case.