To the stars through a cool ad campaign

This is my first column to appear in the Hutchinson News.


“Ad Astra Per Aspera?”
“Too high falutin’ nobody goes around speaking Latin. It sounds more like we are selling cars. Test drive the new Chevy Astra Per Aspera, today!”
“The Sunflower State?”
“Too cutesy, people will think we wear flowers in our hair like Haight Ashbury hippies.”
“The Jayhawk State?”
“That just ticks off the K-State grads. Maybe we should stay with Kansas, As Big as You Think?”
“I still don’t know exactly what that means, besides if someone thinks we’re Rhode Island small it does nothing to show them the error of their ways.”
The preceding conversation was made up, which I suppose is pretty obvious because no one actually says things like “the error of their ways” in real life. Otherwise the conversation does seem plausible because Kansas is forever trying to re-define its image.
I am a life-long Kansan. Sorry, this is a newspaper, so I suppose I need to come clean with full disclosure. I was born in Nebraska, but I moved to Hutchinson when I was five and have not claimed any allegiance to the Cornhuskers since Tom Osborne retired. I lived in Los Angeles for fourteen months. Then I came to my senses. For about two years I lived on the Missouri side of Kansas City, but I could throw a rock into Kansas from my apartment. Well, Roger Clemens could, but only after sitting out half the season and getting a contract paying him more than the entire day shift at Wal-Mart, not a particular Wal-Mart, all of Wal-Mart. My nearly-life-long Kansan status should allow me to give some suggestions for making Kansas more appealing to outsiders.
First, I think we need to let go of the stereotypes. Even though I currently reside in Dodge City and therefore could be bludgeoned by the butts of replica six-shooters for saying this, I think it may be time to stop trading off of the Gunsmoke television show. It went off the air 32 years ago. Don’t get me wrong it was a great show and Marshal Dillon was a true hero to more than one generation. However, we have to face facts. Most people under 40 do not remember the show. If you walk up to people in any bustling metropolitan area and ask, “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘Festus’?” most of them will back away slowly hoping you don’t follow them as they scurry into the nearest Starbucks for refuge.
It is also time to distance ourselves from Dorothy. Every time I told people out in L.A. I was from Kansas they felt it was required to make an inane Toto joke. The first few months I didn’t mind and I even laughed occasionally. Towards the end of my time in tinsel town my response got a little harsher. I asked them to check out my ruby slippers. The person bent down to look and before he could remark how I was simply wearing Chuck Taylors I smacked him on the back of the head with my limited edition hardback copy of L. Frank Baum’s Rinkitink In Oz. The outstanding warrant for assault with a blunt literary instrument may have contributed to my return to Kansas.
The most egregious misconception about Kansas is that the entire state is pool table flat. Dodge City has hills. This can be attested to by my fourteen year old daughter who has been spending great portions of June peddling her bike around town as part of a summer physical education class. Not only can my daughter attest to it but the pharmacy bill for Ben Gay and ibuprofen does as well. Besides, the gentle rolling of the high plains is much more interesting than those ostentatious mountains over in Colorado. Any yutz with an instamatic camera can claim oceans and mountains are impressive. The beauty and grace of the grassland requires a more restful and intellectual appreciation. I’ve got it, let’s start advertising in the Mensa newsletter.
Maybe I should re-evaluate the whole thing. We can just cave into the big city snootiness and start a whole new ad campaign.
The following should be read by an actor with a commanding, authoritative voice: “Tired of the hustle and bustle of big city life. Tired of never getting the rest your body and soul requires. Want to get away from it all? Go where there isn’t anything…Kansas.”
Wait a minute; I’m not sure that came out right…

Fun and Games at the Games

Everybody’s heard of Wrigley Field. Even people who are not big baseball fans know about the ivy walls, the bleacher bums, and the fans who sit on the rooftops of nearby buildings to watch the games. There is also a history of broken hearts for the fans of the Cubs who play their home games in this historic venue. This heartache may be one of the reasons so much beer is consumed at the park. Frequently the aforementioned bleacher bums are pretty well lubricated by the time the seventh inning stretch rolls around. This brings me to something I find inexplicable.
But first, a digression: you know how sports teams often have free giveaways at the gate for the first so many fans who attend? T-shirts, hats, key chains, or the ever popular bobblehead dolls. I went to Royals stadium on the night they were giving away Denny Matthews bobbleheads. When you pushed a button it played sound bites of Denny calling unforgettable moments in Royals history. The sad part is these moments occurred twenty some years ago. End of digression.
The inexplicable thing happening at Wrigley Field was one of those giveaways. On June 17th the first 10,000 fans were given a Cubs Sharpie. Yep, pens which write with permanent ink. This ink resists a variety of cleaning fluids and possibly even napalm. The brain trust in the Cubs promotions department willingly handed 10,000 fans (adults, children, and drunkards) 10,000 pens enabling the greatest single day event of “For a good time call…,” “Cubs Rule,” “Cubs Stink,” and “I’ve had Rubella, Shigella, and Salmonella. Now I’ve got a bad case of Piniella,” graffiti and vandalism in sports history. From 2000 to 2006 I worked for the Dodge City Legend. Running the game night festivities was a major portion of my job description. I can just imagine the looks on John’s, Tom’s and Jimmy’s faces (the guys who worked at the Civic Center) if I told them I was going to hand out super-indelible, never-come-off-unless-a-nuclear-device-is-detonated-nearby, markers to the fans. What’s next, they say, “Rustoleum Spray Paint Night”? Or how about “The Legend, in conjunction with Smith & Wesson, present Small Hand Gun Night (BYOB – bring your own bullets)”?
All the extra showmanship around a sporting event, or game operations, (game ops as it’s said in the biz) is an industry unto itself. It takes a certain kind of genius to put a college-educated grown man into a suit designed to resemble something from a Timothy Leary hallucination (i.e. Stuff the mascot for the Orlando Magic) then place him on a large four wheeled scooter. Take the guy on the scooter and stick him in the pocket of a gigantic sling shot device. Stretch the sling shot device to its fullest, releasing the mascot guy making him a projectile rolling across the court running into giant foam rubber bowling pins which causes a crowd of 23,000 people to cheer loudly when he makes a strike or groan if one pin stays standing. Sheer poetry in motion and well worth the $2,250 (price includes shipping) it takes to buy the ten five foot tall foam rubber bowling pins. The “price includes shipping” statement begs one question. How angry is the UPS guy going to be when that box shows up on his route?
Another question may have occurred to some readers. How did he know how much ten five foot tall foam rubber bowling pins would cost? Easy, I went to Gameops.com. Where else would one find such wonderful stuff? Some of these things would be great just around the house. What rumpus room would be complete without 2 foot wide, 2 foot tall Jumbo Inflatable Dice? Just $250 for a pair. This bit of information was included on the description: No air pump is included, but is recommended for inflation. Darn, I wanted to spend a week and half light-headed as I blow 16 cubic feet of air from my own personal lungs into these vinyl shapes. For you Yahtzee fans out there you have a price break. A set of five 2 foot inflatable dice only costs $600, a savings of twenty-five dollars. Honey, where’s the checkbook?!
Now for my favorite item in the Gameops.com catalog. Everyone knows you can pick up 7-foot inflatable spheres known as Human Hamster Balls at every discount and convenience store in any town in the state, but only at Gameops.com can you find the Human Hamster Ball Repair Kit. For a measly $48 you get a piece of poly vinyl, industrial strength ultra vinyl glue and a bottle of Zippy Cool. What’s Zippy Cool? Zippy Cool is a lubricant for the Hamster Ball zippers, because everyone knows what a pain it is when your Hamster Ball zippers stick.

The sweet smell of success, or is that pie?

Everyone wants to be a success. The issue seems to be what qualifies as a success. If I were to score a single basket in an NBA playoff game I would consider that a success of epic proportion, and I do mean epic. Mel Gibson would be chosen to direct the movie version. I don’t know how he will explain having the whole thing subtitled because the characters are speaking the ancient Polynesian language of the Maori tribes in New Zealand, but I guess it just makes it more epic. On the other hand, LeBron James is deemed a failure if he scores less than 20 points. Success is relative.
Shooting for success can cause a lot of angst. The key is to keep the goals realistic for the person and situation at hand. I have worked in schools for a lot of years and some kids are adept at some things and not at others (Warning: making a statement of such insight and acuity of perception comes from years of intensive training and should not be attempted by an amateur.). Let’s say a student is asked to solve for X using the following number sentence: X + 17 = 18. Now a kid in middle school can have success with such a task and therefore feel good. Another example could be like this: A train leaves Sacramento at 2:00 AM on a Thursday. A second train departs from Chicago at 6:00 AM on the same day. If both trains travel at an average speed of eighty miles per hour, each stopping once for forty-seven minutes apiece (the first train stops at Winnemucca, Nevada and the second train stops at Ottumwa, Iowa), using only an abacus and a sharp stick in the dirt explain why the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union was unable to maintain political control after 1923. Trying to answer such a question would cause great anxiety or even a sense of abject failure in many folks. While we all knew one guy in our high school class who could actually answer the preceding question, we also knew the chance he would get a date for the prom was as likely as a Shakespeare in the Park production of “King Lear” starring Ashton Kutcher. Which kind of success would you prefer? A scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study how quarks are affected when one reverses the polarity or getting to second base with Heidi Harris on a sultry April night. Personally, I received no scholarship and spent the night of my senior prom in my parents’ living room watching “Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters” on TV, that Irlene was a cutie.
A favorite movie line of mine was in “Heaven Can Wait.” Buck Henry is talking to Warren Beatty and he asks him to not so much lower as broaden his standards. That is probably good advice when one is deciding how to measure success in life. When I moved to Los Angeles my goal was to become the next Richard Donner (the director of “The Three Musketeers”, “The Omen” and “Superman: The Movie.”). I then broadened my idea of success. Instead of emulating Mr. Donner (director of multi-million dollar movies) my goal was NOT to emulate the Donner Party by getting stranded in the mountains and resorting to cannibalism to stay alive. I did get stuck in St. Johns, Kansas during a blizzard, but my mom had sent a bag of groceries with my family so once we borrowed a can opener from the nice lady in the motel office starvation was no longer a concern.
In America success is most often measured by the money and power one has accumulated. Since I am a married man with three children I do not have much of either. So I did a little research on what makes rich and powerful people. Malcolm Gladwell, a best-selling author and consultant to big companies was interviewed about what are the traits of highly successful businessmen. He pointed to two characteristics which are shared by most. The first is something he called “explanatory style.” This refers to how an individual explains failure to himself. Truly successful people do not immediately dismantle their egos when the have a set-back. There is not a lot of wallowing in self-recrimination which leads to a “what’s the use I’ll just fail again” mentality. The truly rich and powerful simply blame their staff, fire a few folks, and move on to the next triumph. The other characteristic is stamina, but I’m kind of tired now so I don’t think I will continue writing…

Being part of something bigger, which is part of something bigger...

From time to time I feel the urge to be intellectual. The most common way for me to do this is by reading a science or philosophy book. Now, I know some people think any adult reading a book which does not revolve around a detective or a raven-haired beauty suffering from amnesia, has to be a guy who ate paste in grade school and only kissed one female in his entire life, his mom. I beg to differ. I never ate paste, maybe a couple of tastes of Elmer’s glue, but I didn’t like it. (Quick note to my wife: I have only kissed one female over the last eighteen years.)
Before any readers of this column start accusing me of being an intellectual snob let me say I seldom finish any of these books. After a couple or three chapters my brain starts swelling like a tick which has accidentally hooked on to the femoral artery of the most recent Belmont Stakes winner. Really, I was fifty pages into my most recent book before I realized the author was not talking about Ray Nitschke, the middle linebacker for the Green Bay Packers, but rather Friedrich Nietzsche, the middle linebacker for the Prussian Existentialists (their cheerleaders’ favorite cheer is: “What does it matter. We’re all going to die eventually.”). Uh, sorry, I am now told he was a German philosopher of the late 1800’s. This heavy thinker said, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” In my life I have to admit what doesn’t kill me usually makes me whine and complain like a debutante whose father took away her credit card. I can’t understand the paradoxical nature of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, nor can I drop a 230 pound running back behind the line of scrimmage. I’m afraid neither Mr. Nietzsche nor Mr. Nitschke would be very proud of me.
The work I am wading through now is a book by Ken Wilber called A Brief History of Everything. First of all I have to wonder about Mr. Wilber’s grasp of the English language. In my dictionary “brief” means something of short duration. His book is 548 pages. That ain’t brief. Brief is the attention span of my children as I explain why they…well, why they should do anything. Brief is Billy Donavan’s tenure as the head coach of the Orlando Magic. Brief is the amount of time I spend contemplating whether I should have that second doughnut at breakfast. (The answer is always an emphatic “Yes”.) Brief is not 548 pages.
Okay, here is what I think I learned within the first fifty pages. Everything, and I do mean everything, is a holon. (There will now be a slight pause while everyone looks up at the ceiling as if the answer for each confusing question in life is written up there.) What is a holon?” You ask (as you notice a water stain which looks remarkably like a hedgehog riding a unicycle). I just told you. It is everything. Try to keep up, will you?
Anyway, Mr. Wilber explains the word holon was coined to denote something which is at once a whole unto itself and a part of something else. Since Mr. Wilber is one of the most widely read and influential American philosophers of our time (not my idea – it was written on the back cover of the book) he explains the term by talking about the atom is a whole by itself yet part of a molecule. A molecule is a whole by itself yet is a part of cell. A cell is a whole by itself yet…well you get the idea.
Allow me to try to put the concept into terms of the more common man. A hamburger patty is a whole unto itself. A special sauce is a whole unto itself. Lettuce is a whole unto itself. Cheese is a whole unto itself. A pickle is a whole unto itself. An onion is a whole unto itself. A sesame seed bun is a whole unto itself. Yet they are all components of a Big Mac. A Big Mac is a whole unto itself, yet it can become a part of an enlarged waistline requiring elastic pants. Elastic pants are a whole unto themselves, but they are also part of my wardrobe because I keep saying yes to the second doughnut at breakfast. Which is a part of my crummy diet, which is part of the reason my wife keeps telling me I need to exercise more, which is part of…well, you get the idea.

Some words say more than others

Remember back to grade school when one of the subjects was language arts. I liked that term. Using the language properly is an art. It quite possibly is a dying art like the art of composing heart-wrenching ballads for accordion or painting unique card playing dogs on velvet. (I have a suggestion for spicing up the works of velveteen canine Texas hold ‘em, add Elvis as the dealer.) Anyway, the English language can be very frustrating, but it can also be used to say just the right thing in just the right way, or at least say something interesting.
Following in a long line of people over forty I say the popular culture of today’s youth can be pointed to as one of the main culprits in messing up the language. What with e-mail and instant message language trying to say things with the least amount of typing possible. I don’t understand why it is so important to get the information to the receiver so quickly. We are not talking about getting Admiral Nimitz the latest intelligence regarding Japanese troop movement near the Solomon Islands. We’re simply trying to let Tiffanii (with hearts dotting all three i’s) know that Greg and Jimmy are going to be at the mall and they are so hot I could just die.
Wait a minute I might be on to something here. Remember how the United States military used soldiers who spoke the Navajo language as a code the enemy could not break. The CIA and Home Land Security ought to look into arming teenage girls with Motorola Razors and injecting steroids directly into their thumbs to heighten their text messaging powers. Even if al-Qaeda intercepts something the messages would be as intelligible to them as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the plight of artists under Soviet control would be to the writing staff of Two and Half Men.
Not long ago I spent a big chunk of a Sunday afternoon on the internet. An afternoon I should have spent at the office catching up on paperwork or mowing the foot long grass in the backyard or playing catch with my son so he doesn’t empathize with that heart-wrenching Harry Chapin song. (How would that song sound on the accordion?) The internet trail I was wandering down was full of linguists. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Theoretical linguistics looks at grammar, semantics, morphology, syntax, phonology, and phonetics. Was I studying the morphology of letters as they evolved from ancient Sanskrit to modern romance languages? Nope. I was reading an intellectual food fight about how many words are in the English language.
A San Diego based high tech wizard claims to have created a mathematical equation with which he can plot the growth of words in the English language. According to his website, www.languagemonitor.com, Paul Payack explains his algorithm tracks words and phrases in relation to their frequency of use and contextual usage and it is weighted, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, and citations in the major media. (Can you say “too much time on your hands”?) As of Monday May 28th Mr. Payack’s website says there are 993,412 in the English language.
Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who is contributor to National Public Radio, which means he is more intellectual than someone on ESPN and reads more books than someone on Fox, but isn’t going to win a Noble Prize anytime soon. Mr. Nunberg says Mr. Payack is full of beans. He said it in a more erudite way than I just did; after all, he is a linguist. The language gets new words added with some frequency. Some due to new discoveries in science (a new word coined which means something that was a planet and then a bunch of astronomy nerds got together and said it wasn’t anymore – Plutoed). Other words grow out of popular culture. (Truthiness, from Stephan Colbert, means something a person knows from the gut, not based on evidence, logic, intellectual examination or actual facts.) However, Mr. Nunberg doesn’t think someone can count the words and also many of the words counted are not words people really use.
All science and intellectual arguing aside words can say interesting things very simply. Poetry is supposed to give the most succinct descriptions of life. I get lost in serious poetry but the common man poetry of song lyrics do speak to me. Here are some of my favorites. I am not sure I understand exactly what they are saying but I like how they feel.
“Sometimes I feel like my shadow’s casting me.” – Warren Zevon
“I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.” – Elvis Costello
“Standin’ in a bucket of bad news, havin’ a ball.” – The Lonesome Strangers.

Medical Science: From Hippocrates to Prozac

Some sciences are exact. It can be proven and repeated over and over that certain materials are combustible when they reach a certain temperature Fahrenheit. The temperature paper must reach before it will burn is 451 degrees. The temperature gasoline must reach before it will burn is 495 degrees. I do not know what the temperature has to be before a person’s hand will burn. However, I do know if you leave your car windows up on an August afternoon the steering wheel gets to that Fahrenheit level in the time it takes to run into the store and buy milk.
Unfortunately medicine is not one of those exact sciences. Over the last few months entirely too many members of my family have visited doctors for entirely too many reasons. I am not denigrating the doctors we have seen. I just wish these medical professionals had a magic book which allowed them to listen to the symptoms, diagnose the problem, and dispense a cure. While I’m wishing, why not have the cure be something simple like burying a potato in the backyard during a full moon to get rid of a sinus infection instead of paying $47 for a prescription which cures you nearly as fast as burying a potato in the backyard during a full moon would.
As I was wandering around the waiting room of one doctor’s office I picked up a pamphlet describing the symptoms of depression. I don’t think I’m depressed. What is there to be depressed about? The world is a safe and caring place full of sympathetic people who all wish to help one another lead a meaningful and productive life. Well, maybe that’s an overstatement. But, the country we live in is a shining beacon of truth and justice with a government devoid of greed and corruption led by men and women of unquestionable integrity. Oh, my. My house no longer has a basement which leaks whenever there is a rain shower of more than seven one hundredths of inch. Bingo! That one is true. Oh, I give up. Pass the Prozac.
That same pamphlet said depression is caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain. Here we are in the early 21st century and they trot this out. Hippocrates, one of those Greek guys from like 400 BC, said human behaviors were caused by bodily fluids called humors. These fluids were blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Other then being somewhat gross (anything which talks about phlegm falls into the somewhat gross category) this was wrong. It was disproved by doctor type scientists, which was good because the idea led to doctor type barbers opening veins left and right to “balance the humors.” So here is this pamphlet in a reputable doctor’s office saying the chemicals might be out of balance in my head. Maybe Theodoric of York from the old Saturday Night Live sketch was right when he said: “You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.” I need an MRI to check for toads and dwarves.
Recently my wife and I took our oldest daughter to see a couple of different doctors in one day. This by itself is not a bother. The issue is the amount of paperwork and bureaucratic-like red tape one must wade through. I realize with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (aka HIPAA) the government intended to protect the public from people prying into our personal medical business. However, I suspect the medical establishment is taking it too seriously. Every receptionist, nurse, and doctor asked us the same questions. I know they are supposed to treat the information as a secret but I really don’t mind if they tell each other. That just makes sense.
As I get older the doctors get younger. This makes it harder to take them seriously. A doctor should be balding with gray hair around his temples and a sympathetic face made more caring by the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Two of the doctors we dealt with this day looked more like refugees from the Disney Channel. When they came into the examination room I expected them to give us the test results using pom-poms and high kicks.
“Ready? Hit it. Your EKG was A-OK and we think you’re just swell.
We promise that in 30 days you’ll get the bill from H-E-A-R-T.
Goooo, heart!”

Christopher Pyle’s daughter is just fine, but he does still have the concern there is a toad in his stomach eating his Prozac. This knocks his humors out of whack. He may be a quart or two low on phlegm.

Remote locations on the TV dial

For many years of my life I watched a lot of television. As a kid Saturday mornings was the jackpot. Does anybody else remember Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp or “Up at at ‘em Atom Ant!”? As a youth I was always looking for laughs. Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carol Burnett offered humor which was not hurtful or hedonistic. When cable came into my life I spent more and more time with movies. I will watch Gunga Din no matter what time of day it comes on and Michael Caine was in some really awful movies. Sports have been the constant ingredient in my television viewing recipe. I know where I was when Ed Podolak had 350 all-purpose yards against the Dolphins in ’71, when Danny Manning squeezed the final rebound in ’88, and when Bill Buckner watched a five ounce white sphere roll between his feet changing his life forever and giving hero status to a man with the less than epic name of Mookie.
Over the last few years I have dropped television from my days. There are some good programs on, but there is entirely too much stuff being sent into our homes through that box. Some of the programs remind me of the old nature shows. Marlon Perkins would venture out in the wilds of Africa and show us the behavior of animals whose only concerns were fulfilling the basest of needs and following self-serving instincts. Now Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom is replaced by MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 which goes to deepest, darkest Beverly Hills and shows us the same thing only with designer dresses and out of control egos replacing dying gazelles and angry alpha males.
A little while back I spent more time in front of a television than I’m used to. The NCAA basketball tournament still draws me to the flickering blue light like a moth to one of those bug zappers. Fortunately, I do not get so close I experience a jolt of voltage making it so my wings will never caress the wind again. OK, I know I don’t have wings and “caress the wind” is an awfully girly phrase, but I found myself in the middle of a metaphor and I didn’t have another way out…gimme a break.
In my younger days I had the fastest mute button in the west, so I seldom heard commercials (and I was able to get Billy Packer to shut up once in a while). This was not possible for this tournament. No, I haven’t passed my prime. My trigger finger is just as spry as ever. The issue is the mute button itself. Ever since I started living in a house with three walking and talking children it has become much harder to keep track of things. People who do not have children believe the remote control is “remote” because it is used to control something from a distance. People with children know it is “remote” because it is inexplicably transported to remote locations. Locations like the crisper drawer of the refrigerator, under the sofa of the house three and half blocks south of your house, or the backpack of a scientist traipsing along the Amazon River studying Pink River Dolphins. That name is confusing. Is the river it lives in pink or the dolphin itself?
Watching and listening to the commercials brought to mind some questions. First is the color yellow some sort of visual signal for stupid? Remember those two guys who discussed cell phone service throughout the tournament? The dumb one always wore yellow. A German line of cars has an incredibly British guy describing how great they are. Is this just because Americans think all foreigners are the same? I mean we bought Sean Connery (a guy from Scotland) as Mulay Achmed Mohammed in one movie and as Khalil Abdul-Muhsen in another.
The thing I truly do not understand is big time stars doing the voice-overs for commercials. I get why products would want George Clooney to appear in their ad, but if you can’t see him how many people recognize his voice. It is his voice talking about beer. Is there some sort of subliminal message forcing the nameless rabble to follow the voice of a star? Gene Hackman tells us we can build things together with Lowe’s. Somehow I do not expect to see him with a crescent wrench fixing the dripping faucet in my bathroom anytime soon. But the absolute best has to be that Latin sex symbol Antonio Banderas, the heartthrob from Desperado and The Mask of Zorro. He is making house payments by supplying the voice of a sexy bumblebee in an allergy medicine ad. I know when I think of relief from nasal congestion the first thing that comes to mind is a Bombus distinguendus with an Andalusian accent.

There is too much to learn. I can't keep up.

A conversation amongst second graders at recess:
“Okay, today I’m going to be Apollo and you are Artemis, right? Who are you going to be?”
“I think I’m going to be Demeter.”
“Cool.”
This is not what most people expect when imagining the imaginative play of eight year olds. One would expect Power Rangers, not the twelve tasks of Hercules. However, it is one of the games my son and his friends are playing at Northwest School. This makes my brother very happy.
My brother, Eric, believes there are things a person needs to know in order to be considered educated and Greek myths are on that list. He is one of those guys who actually did all the reading in college, not just the Cliff Notes or renting the movie. (My problem was I went to get The Grapes of Wrath and ended up with The Wrath of Khan, “Wherever there’s a Klingon crushing a tribble, I’ll be there.”) Eric reads more books in a month than the average person reads in, well, in…okay, ever. When he found out my son had an interest in Greek myths Eric sent him a book entitled: Flammarion Iconographic Guide: Gods and Heroes of Classical Antiquity. When I was eight years old my reading material did not revolve around Hephaestus and Tartarus, but rather, Archie and Jughead.
The pop culture version of smart people is on display every weekday afternoon on the quiz show Jeopardy. I competed on that show a few years back. I lost. I was smart when it came to the category titled “S”- oterica, which meant every answer would start with the letter “S”. So I got things like “southpaw,” “Seattle Seahawks,” and “Scared Straight”. The guy who went on to win ran the category titled Vietnam. Which is more indicative of intelligence? At one point in the game he correctly identified a yurt. A yurt is a circular tent of felt or skins on a collapsible framework, used by nomads in Mongolia, something I had not heard of before, or for that matter, since. Which one of us was smarter? I do not know. I do know which one of us ended up richer, and it wasn’t me.
The other day I saw a short video talking about just how much information is being generated these days. Here is one statement from the video: It is estimated 1.5 exabytes (1.5 times 10 to the eighteenth power) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. One of those unique and new pieces of information must have been the word “exabyte” because my computer doesn’t recognize it. What the video failed to say was probably eight-tenths of that unique new information will revolve around Britney Spears going in and out of rehab, hairstyles on American Idol, and indispensable information for guys who play fantasy baseball like Zach Greinke’s earned run average with runners in scoring position and less than two outs, on odd numbered Wednesday afternoons.
Another factoid from the video said: It is estimated a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th Century. Average citizens of the 18th Century were still required to focus more on things that kept them alive (those Frenchmen hiding behind that hill would like to shoot any Englishman coming this way) as opposed to information about Edward “Lumpy” Stevens the first great bowler in the history of English Cricket. (I did not make that up. It is an actual unique piece of new information generated sometime during the 18th Century.) I wonder what his earned run average with runners in scoring position and less than two outs, on odd numbered Wednesdays was.
What information people really ought to know is the crux of the matter. (I am showing off what I think is important by using words like crux.) The phrase thrown around education circles is essential information. What do people truly have to know? Who gets to decide what people have to know? With the legislation of No Child Left Behind the government gets to decide what kids have to know.
Does this frighten anyone else? The arbiter of intellect is the same group of people who decided Kansas needed not just an Official State Bird and an Official State Song but also an Official State Soil.

Virtual Grief for a Cyber-Buddy

Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. The previous was a phonetic representation of a funeral dirge, not adjectives describing a line of eleven people waiting overnight to buy tickets for “Dukes of Hazzard – The Musical.” The funeral dirge was played in honor of my trusty laptop computer which went to cyber heaven this week at the oh so young age of five years old. It surprised me how hard I took the news. Technology has always been a fun thing, but I thought I could take it or leave it.
I am content with four channels on my television. I am usually patient enough to cook without a microwave. We went without an answering machine on our phone for months until a friend became frustrated and bought us one. The best example of my technological indifference has to be my cell phone. The one I have at the moment has been mine for eight months. I have received sixty phone calls. The phone keeps track. I don’t. That works out to seven and a half calls a month. My most technologically advanced friend relies on his cell phone like a philodendron relies on photosynthesis. Seven and a half calls an hour would be slow, like glacier moving across Norway slow, for him.
There are some things I know how to do to “clean-up” the computer a little bit. I clicked the proper icons to start the defrag process (see I know some computer jargon). I then parked myself at my desk, staring at the little bar with the label stating 2% complete. I remained motionless as it stayed at 2% complete for about nine minutes. This would be followed by a short rock back in my chair and a glance at the heavens in gratitude when it jumped to 3% complete. To my family walking by and checking on me (over the next few hours) it appeared I was sitting shiva for a deceased family member. It looked like any second I would break into a Hebrew chant imploring some sort of mitzvah from the Moses of Microsoft. This, in truth, was as likely as any of my computer skills making a difference.
I think I was taking it hard because my computer is one of the only things in our house which I can call mine. As any husband and father can understand sharing is a matter of everyday life. From sharing a sip or three from my bottle of pop to a favorite t-shirt being turned into a nightgown for a little girl, dads share most things. I don’t mind sharing, but it didn’t seem to go the other direction very often. Think about it. If my wife pilfers from my closet no one at the store will bat an eye. On the other hand, if I wear her new culottes and wedgies I will find myself embarrassing my family all the way back to colonial days on the Maury Povich Show. I have already embarrassed my wife because I just implied she has culottes and wedgies in her closet, which are about thirty years out of date (she does not).
After I tried the few things I knew how to do as my computer choked and gasped, I called my sister, who works on computers for a living, and got a prognosis from her. Then Seth, my technologically advanced friend, took a crack at it and declared it most likely a goner. My next step was something like organ donation. I took the computer (or in its present state, the very heavy rectangular Frisbee) to a computer whisperer to get some files and things removed like a liver and a kidney for the organ bank.
Alan, the computer psychic, was most encouraging. He went right to work dissecting and re-connecting the hard drive. As is the case with most guys good with computers he was an adept multi-tasker. He answered the phone as he was working with my computer cadaver and began to help another customer. At least I assume he was helping someone, because all the information he was spouting was as coherent to me as a group of sailors leaving a Shanghai waterfront bar at four in the morning. This is what was said: “Your IP address and your sonic wall may not be interfacing this could cause the little pixies who run the printer to declare war with the tiny hamsters in control of the power supply which usually means the Grand High Vizier of the Operating System gets ticked off and moves to the Bahamas,” or words to that effect. I could be wrong. My mind started to wander.

Driving through the generation gap

I am fully aware that I am on one side of the generation gap and my children are on the other. This past weekend that gap was illustrated over and over again causing me to think of it as less of a gap and more of a chasm, an abyss, a disparity larger than the difference between the number of people who have been informed all about Anna Nicole Smith’s life and death and the number of people who wanted to be informed about Anna Nicole Smith’s life and death.
As a birthday present my oldest daughter, Emilyjane, wanted to take a trip. So 8:00 AM Friday we packed the minivan. My first observation wasn’t so much a generation gap but rather a gap between the genders. The plan was to return home less than 48 hours after departure. I had one bag which was about the size of an overweight dachshund. Each of the three girls had bags and extras which made the minivan necessary for cargo, not just for comfort.
The first leg of the trip was a little on the short side. We went three blocks to get yet something else from one of the girl’s houses. I do not know what we needed, but I didn’t feel the need to ask, discretion being the better part of parenthood. We had been on the road a total of eighty-five seconds so when we stopped it only made sense that all three girls piled out of the van to go to the bathroom.
This trio of girls is a group any parent would be proud of, but I still don’t understand their behaviors. The first thing I noticed was symptomatic of the birth order theory of personality. One girl is an only child and proceeded to fall asleep as soon as we started rolling. It was obvious being an only child she thought it was natural to sleep on top of whatever, or in this case, whoever, was handy. My daughter is the oldest of three, so she thought it was only natural that she not be slept upon. The last girl is the baby of three children so she thought it was par for the course to have someone sleep on her. I guess it all worked out in the end.
As a father I have become very adept (or as the kids would say, I have mad skills) at closing my senses to what is going on in the back of the minivan while driving long distances. This was put to the test when it came to the radio stations the girls preferred. I had to resort to my i-Pod to keep from pulling my rapidly graying hair out of my head.
Let me give you examples of the different tastes in music and see which side you are on. My earphones were playing Sammy Davis Jr. singing “Begin the Beguine.” Here is a snippet of the lyrics: “What moments divine, what rapture serene, Till clouds came along to disperse the joys we had tasted, And now when I hear people curse the chance that was wasted, I know but too well what they mean.” Here are words that tell of love lost, words which paint pictures, words which require having scored above a 6 on your SAT’s to understand. Now a short description of what the girls were tuned to. I do not know the artist (and I use that term loosely), but it sounded like the defensive linemen from the entire NFC North were calling out the words, rather than melodiously interpreting them. These men were saying “Walk it out.” They proceeded to say it multiple times. How many times? Take the number of times any reasonable person would repeat any one phrase and then multiply by seven. You’d be close.
I was traveling with three teenage girls so of course part of our time was spent in a mall the size of a third world country. We had been inside the building, maybe three minutes, when a fully uniformed member of the Tulsa police force approached the girls. I was about five paces behind which was preferred by both them and me. The police officer asked the girls where a particular store was located. This made sense to me. If you want to know where something is in the outer reaches of the universe you ask Stephan Hawking. If you want to know the lay out of a mall you ask a teenage girl. I was about to step up and say we were from out of town so we couldn’t help, when all three girls turned and pointed to exactly where the police officer wanted to go.
It was downright eerie.

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.