Lower Expectations for Higher Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dogs and Cats and Guinea Pigs, Oh, My

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skirmish of the Sexes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good, The Bad, and the Simply Nice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Quite What We Had in Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Years and Counting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are, occasionally, silver linings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happily Ever After? Not Likely...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Wary of Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A World of Opportunity, or Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, let's put on a show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With age comes other stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passing a test is not just for ten year olds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veni, Vidi, Volvo

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

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

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

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

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

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

You May Be Write

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking Refuge from Economic News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me or Not Me? That is the Question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brackets and Hoops and Dunks, Oh My

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easy for you to say, for now

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